Ghost Spin (41 page)

Dolniak was like a kid in a candy store.

“I think this technically qualifies as bribery,” he said, smelling an apple that struck Li’s Ring-conditioned tastes as being completely unremarkable. “But at the moment I can’t bring myself to give a hoot. My God, I’d forgotten what real live fruit smelled like.”

An hour later they were cooking together in Dolniak’s small but surprisingly well-equipped kitchen. Li felt a vague sense of disloyalty during the whole business. She hadn’t known how to cook before she’d
met Cohen. She hadn’t known anything about food—or even really been aware that non-vat-grown food still existed. It seemed wrong to be sharing it with someone else.

Dolniak, on the other hand, was in heaven; clearly she had a frustrated foodie on her hands.

“I can’t always get real food,” he said, reverently unwrapping a golden brick of butter that he had stored in the freezer behind the usual vat-grown stuff. “But I do remember what it tastes like.”

They talked, both over the cooking and over the dinner that followed it. Dolniak was easy to talk to, just as she’d known he would be. He didn’t flirt with her—or if he did, it was a flirtation so mild that it was impossible to tell it apart from the first early overtures of simple friendship. That didn’t surprise Li, either; she’d known early on that he wasn’t the pushy type. Whatever else might be going on under the surface with Dolniak, it would always be friendship first and friendship foremost.

“So what’s it like to be wired?” he asked when they’d finished eating and he’d pushed his plate back and stretched his massive legs out beside a kitchen table that his bulk reduced to doll furniture.

Li shrugged.

“No, really, I’m fascinated. Maybe it’s just a novelty thing. You’re definitely the first woman I’ve ever met who could beat the crap out of me.”

“So why not get wired if you’re so curious?” She waved his answer away. “Yeah, I know, the boxing. But most professional athletes get implants once they retire. Why not you?”

“I really did leave it too late.” He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t really want to admit the boxing was over. And by the time I did … well … what was the point, really? There weren’t any wire jobs on New Allegheny until the Drift prospectors and mercenaries started shipping in. And other than wire jobs … well, seriously, would you want to meet
me
in a dark alley?”

“So you’re top predator in a low-tech ecosystem?”

“Well … yeah. I mean, isn’t that why most guys become cops?”

“No nifty speeches about defending the peace and serving the public?”

“Yeah, I guess that stuff’s fun, too.”

Li snorted. “You can’t fool me, Dolniak. You’re a Boy Scout. It’s branded across your face like a scarlet letter.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse. But don’t worry, I’ve always had a soft spot for Boy Scouts. Which is why I try to discourage them from playing with me.”

He gave her one of his long, level, placid looks. “Are you speaking professionally or personally?”

That caught her off guard. “Both,” she admitted after a moment. And she was surprised that it caused her a little tinge of regret to say it. “What do you know about Emergent AIs?”

“What they say on the news spins. Nothing more.”

Li frowned at him, eyes narrowing. “You watched the spins about Cohen.”

“Of course I did.”

“And?”

“Sounds like he killed some people.”

“He couldn’t help that!” Li snapped.

“They seemed to think he could.”

“They’re full of crap, Dolniak!”

“So fine. Then you tell me how it is.”

“I’ve never met an AI that would kill a human on purpose. They’re big and fast and highly focused and one hundred percent results-oriented. But accidents do happen. And humans always end up taking the brunt of them.”

Dolniak smiled and settled back into the sofa. “You sound like my first trainer warning me that I’d get my head kicked in if I tried to take on a real heavyweight.”

“And what happened?”

“I KO’d the guy in three rounds.”

“Yeah. Well. What do the bankers always say? Past performance does not predict future results. Don’t get cocky.”

On the way back to the hotel they were stopped on the street by the curfew patrol. There were five men, and they ranged around Li and
Dolniak on the sidewalk in a tense parallelogram that came straight out of the counterinsurgency training manuals. Their leader accepted Li’s papers without comment and returned them to her. The trouble started when he took a look at Dolniak’s papers.

“So you’re a cop,” he said in a flat, impersonal voice.

“Yes.”

“You out on official business?”

Li started to answer but Dolniak cut her off.

“No.”

“So you just figure your detective’s badge gives you a get-out-of-curfew free card? Is that it?”

Dolniak didn’t answer. And when Li glanced in his direction she saw him standing with his hands at his sides and his eyes fixed politely somewhere around the squad leader’s left elbow.

“Are you gonna answer me?”

“I’m sorry. I misunderstood the curfew law. We were told departmentally that it didn’t apply to us.”

“In the performance of official duties.”

“I understand now,” Dolniak said quietly, his eyes still fixed on the man’s elbow. “I’ll make sure to remember that in future.”

Li expected the squad leader to back off then, but instead he stepped toe to toe with Dolniak and started talking right into the larger man’s face. “I’d really fucking like to bring you in. I wonder what I’d find out if I did. I would have cashed out the entire local police force the day we arrived. But no, that was too confrontational. We didn’t want to create a Dead Ender Syndrome. And now you guys are always out late and up early. And the last five guys I’ve sent home in body bags took the trip courtesy of official police-issue thirty-eights.”

Li stirred restlessly beside Dolniak. The squad leader’s eyes flashed toward her, white-rimmed with anger and fear. In that instant she knew that Dolniak had read the situation right. Nothing she did could help. And any move at all from either of them would merely add fuel to an already explosive situation.

For the next several minutes, she watched Dolniak stand, head bowed, patiently enduring one intrusive question after another. He reminded
her of a draft horse standing for the farrier. But she saw the anger in the set of his broad shoulders—something different than she’d seen before. It was the dangerous anger of a quiet man. And there was something else, simmering beneath the anger, that had nothing at all to do with the careful, controlled, cautious cop she knew him to be. She’d seen that look before. And seeing it in Dolniak’s calm, steady face started a slow burn of foreboding in her belly that told her things on New Allegheny were going to get as ugly as they possibly could get.

He was still keyed up when they got back to her hotel room—enough so that she invited him in for coffee. She had planned to see him politely off in the lobby, for many reasons, personal as well as professional. But there was a dangerous, simmering look about him, and she didn’t like the idea of sending a man that angry back onto the streets to run into more trouble.

Dolniak had barely spared a glance at her hotel room the last time he’d been there, but this time he gave it a narrow-eyed inspection. Watching his glance tick from the plush carpets and furniture to the high ceilings and the glistening windows, she felt suddenly guilty at the sheer off-world luxury of the place. He made no comment, however. Just walked to the door and stepped out onto the balcony to look at the nighttime view of the Crucible.

“Those fires never go out, you know.”

She stepped out onto the narrow balcony with him, peering through the haze at the orange glow of the blast furnaces.

“They can’t go out. They heat the furnaces to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. If you let the fires go out, the walls crack. No steel. No mill. Nothing. There was one strike, when I was a kid, where the mill owners threatened to shut down the furnaces and move operations off-planet. The steelmen broke into the mill, took it over, and kept the furnaces running in the face of hired guns, police.”

Dolniak laughed softly. It was an odd laugh, nothing she’d heard out of him before. She looked sideways at him and saw his usually
placid face lit by the glow of the blast furnaces—and by some emotion that ran deeper and fiercer even than his anger at the mercenaries.

“The owners couldn’t understand it,” he told her. “They thought they were fighting about money. So what were these guys doing, risking their lives in order to do a dangerous, shitty job that no sane person would want and with no hope of a paycheck anywhere in sight? But it’s never really about money for steelmen. It’s never about anything but the steel.”

What was that about?
Router/​Decomposer asked when Dolniak was gone.

“Oh, nothing. We got stopped by a patrol in the street. He was angry about it. Who wouldn’t be?”

That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.

Li muted her internals, walked into the bathroom, and started getting ready for bed.

“Go ahead and ignore me,” the AI said, his voice shifting seamlessly to the bathroom’s livewall.

“Can you not talk to me in here, please? Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t need company in the crapper.”

“Then don’t run into the bathroom when I try to ask you a personal question.”

“Personal? What’s personal?”

“That cop, that’s what. And don’t try to tell me there’s nothing going on there. He wasn’t just here for the view. If I can see it, a brain-damaged mynah bird could see it.”

“I don’t even know what a mynah bird is. Where the hell do you come up with these things?”

“From my boundless store of biophilic trivia. And don’t change the subject. Are you getting
involved
?”

“I’m just doing my job.”

“Well, he’s not!”

Li set her jaw and stared at the floor between her toes. “That’s not my problem.”

Router/​Decomposer sounded more disgusted than she would have thought an AI talking through a low-grade hotel bathroom intercom could sound. “That’s the most disingenuous thing I’ve ever heard you say. I’m disappointed in you!”

“That’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard you say. And, at the moment, I’m bored by you.”

Both of them paused to regroup, caught in the intricate web of memory that tied them to the years when they had both been part of Cohen’s larger personality architecture. Li had never been fully immersed in the Emergent’s complex and shifting web of associations; even a wire job as thorough as hers was wouldn’t allow a human that deep into AI territory. But she had gone deep enough. She knew things about Router/​Decomposer that no other human would ever know—that no human would understand even if they did know about them. And he knew things about her that … well, best not to think about that.

She thumbed open the toothpaste, spread it on the brush, began brushing her teeth with savage energy.

You can tell me about it, Caitlyn. I understand. I understand more than you think I do …

Why? Because you’ve been spying on me again?

Once, long ago, she’d caught him following her. He’d told her that she was worth keeping an eye on—that he was
interested in what she was turning into
. It had sounded like a compliment at the time, albeit an unnerving one. But now she wondered.

Are you just playing him along?

Would it be better if I was?

He didn’t answer.

She washed out her mouth and slammed the toothbrush back onto the counter. “Yeah, well, I guess neither of us is living up to our Best Selves at the moment, are we?”

THE DRIFT

Within an hour of jumping into Point Boomerang, Li knew that the news coming in over the comm was bad. That much she could see just in the faces of the officers coming off bridge duty. But she didn’t realize quite how bad it was until she overheard Okoro telling a midshipman that they weren’t going to be putting in at Boomerang because fucking Avery had gotten there before them.

Unfortunately, how close fucking Avery was to catching them was turning into a serious personal safety issue for Li in a way that went well beyond the overall risks of the game for the rest of the crew. By the time she had been on board for a week, she was starting to notice the simmering resentment, the whispered conversations that ground to an awkward halt when she appeared, the eyes that were quickly turned elsewhere when she turned around and caught their owners staring at her. At first she thought it had to do with Cohen. But then she realized that it wasn’t Cohen that people were connecting her to at all, but Avery. And that every time Avery hit an entry point ahead of them or jumped into a Drift node too close behind them, the whispers got louder.

Still, when she managed to ignore the unspoken threat that her crew mates might decide to airlock her if they couldn’t shake Avery any other way, it was amazing how much being on the
Christina
felt like being on a perfectly normal Navy ship. There was the same endless round of mind-numbing, body-depleting labor—even more than usual, since the pirates were running the
Christina
with what amounted to a skeleton
crew by Navy standards. There was the same buttoned-down, no-nonsense discipline. The same familiar Navy routines. The same familiar Navy jargon. The same self-satisfied Navy attitude. The same familiar infantryman’s feeling of being at best a fifth wheel and at worst a prisoner.

No access to shipboard security or operational systems. No access to realtime news about the unfolding and potentially hostile situation beyond the tin-can-thin walls of the hab ring. Nothing but low-level civvy access—and the knowledge that while you were twiddling your thumbs, your fate was being decided by a bunch of space jockeys who thought war was something you did from nine to five and before you cleaned up and put on your whites to report to the officers’ mess.

Li hated it.

And she didn’t just hate it theoretically. She hated it as a career soldier who’d spent endless months chewing her nails on board Navy transports while invasion fleets assembled with glacial slowness and then idled their engines in the dark reaches of space while the admirals and generals
knifed
one another in the back in order to be first in line for a promotion if things went right, and out of the line of fire if they didn’t.