Ghost Spin (62 page)

Li looked up from the flickering page, ready to ask Hyacinthe what the hell was going on.

But then she saw the look in his eyes, and she didn’t have to ask. She saw it all, in a single pulsing flash. The setup, the execution, the escape. It was a Cohen plan through and through: either blindingly brilliant or willful suicide and nothing in between. But it didn’t matter which one it was. Because either way, no matter what she said, he had already made up his mind.

She looked up into the corner of the room and saw that light on the monitor flashing out-of-order red.

“No,” she said.

“Why not? I just have to get past the firewall. And then I’ll be out in the ship. And I’ll have a sentient AI to platform myself on.”

“No, no, no, no, no!”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s suicide!”

“No, it’s not suicide. Suicide is what’s going to happen if I have to stay stuck in here like a ship in a bottle!”

“You? What does that mean? You don’t even know who you are!”

“And I’m not going to until I get out of here.”

“To do what? Cannibalize Avery’s poor crazy ship AI? Cohen wouldn’t have done that.”

“Oh wouldn’t he? Don’t make him out to be such a saint. If he were really so pure and noble he wouldn’t have loved
you
, would he?”

Li stood up, knocking the book to the floor and sending Hyacinthe sprawling in a flurry of skinny knees and soccer cleats. She had to hand it to the little bastard, he was persistent.

“No!” she said. “And you can skip the guilt and manipulation, because it’s not going to make a difference. I’m not doing it!”

“Have a drink,” Avery told her.

Li sat down warily. Avery, from the look of her, had already had several. And one of Li’s rules in life was to be well out of firing range when exceptionally self-controlled people lost their self-control.

“You don’t want to drink with me?” Avery asked, reading her expression all too well. “Too bad. I want to drink with you. Besides, we have business to talk about.”

Avery poured liberally, and Li took the offered glass without protest.

She sat down, watching Avery, trying to read the expression on her face. But her face was unreadable. You couldn’t get past its perfection, somehow. You couldn’t see normal human emotions in a face like that.

Watching the expressions move across Avery’s face was like looking at a swift mountain stream: the rippling surface both revealing and reflecting, the life below the surface bright and beckoning and untouchable. And the fine tracery of ceramsteel that ran down her throat into the precisely buttoned collar of her uniform jacket only added to the mystery.

There was something close and cold and cautious about Avery that Li couldn’t get comfortable with. Even her beauty wasn’t the kind of beauty that Li had ever particularly desired or envied. If you had the love of a woman who looked like that, there’d always be someone trying to take it from you. And if you
were
a woman who looked like that … well, a woman who looked like that was pretty much destined for misery. One look at that face would scare any decent person away before they got a chance to be friends with her. All that would be left was a sad parade of users, abusers, and self-complacent posers.

So which of those things had William Llewellyn been?

Suddenly Li realized that she didn’t dislike Astrid Avery nearly as much as she’d expected to. In fact, she felt sorry for her. And that
was
going to be dangerous.

“Holmes tells me you’ve got the ghost up and running.”

“Ghosts. They’re not integrated.”

“When will they be?”

“Never, unless you give me access to your shipboard AI.”

Avery swirled her drink, setting the ice cubes clinking. “Holmes said something about that, too. She’s not favorable to the idea.”

Li wondered about Cohen’s claim that Holmes knew the shipboard AI was sentient. If she did know, then she would have to choose between covering it up—a crime under UN law—and bringing the wrath of UNSec down on her for letting a multimillion-dollar weapon turn into a worthless liability on her watch. And if Avery knew, then Avery would have had to make the same decision. The shipboard AI was sentient but crazy, Cohen had said. So had it been driven crazy on Llewellyn’s watch … or on Avery’s?

“So how about it?” she asked.

Avery’s laugh sounded as cold and brittle as the clinking of the ice cubes. “No go.”

“You won’t even think about it?”

“It’s not a matter of thinking. I don’t have the authority. But if you can get the ghosts to help us catch Llewellyn, I’ll hand over
your
AI. Wouldn’t that be a better outcome for everyone?”

“It would if I thought you’d deliver on it.”

“I don’t break promises. And I don’t lie.”

“Funny,” Li said. “That’s not what Ada says.”

Suddenly Avery looked old and haggard.
“Who have you been talking to?”

Li was so shocked by the intensity of Avery’s reaction that she didn’t answer immediately. And Avery, misinterpreting Li’s hesitation, jumped into the silence.

“Did
she
tell you that? She’s a liar! She’s a lying parasite! She has no honor, no loyalty, no gratitude—”

Avery broke off, trembling. Then she took a shuddering breath and put her self-control back together, one painful piece at a time.

“The only shipboard AI on the
Ada
is CR29091. If you talked to any other gho—any other personality fragment—I need a full report on it so that we can rule out any possible risk of infestation or infiltration. And whatever that fragment may or may not have said to you, let me remind you right now that it is fully covered by your nondisclosure agreement.”

Li stared at her.

“Are you talking about your own ship?” she asked incredulously.

A muscle twitched in Avery’s long throat. “Of course I am. You know I am. You’ve dreamed about her, haven’t you? That’s what she does. She does it to me, too. She’s figured out how to slip across the wire when my guard is down.”

Li squinted at Avery, putting a new spin on the shaking hands, the haggard face, the bruised-looking shadows under her eyes. “Avery? When’s the last time you slept? I mean
really
slept.”

Avery’s laugh was more like a cry of pain. “I had a night in a hotel in the Crucible before we broke seal and shipped out. I never thought I’d be thankful for rolling brownouts!”

This was appalling. What kind of ship could you run with this kind of bad blood between the captain and the first officer? No wonder the AI was crazy. The only wonder was that the whole crew wasn’t crazy, too.

“So what are you doing out here? How can you let an AI you don’t trust run the ship? Let alone one you think is crazy.”

“She doesn’t run the ship,” Avery said bitterly. “Holmes does.”

Li’s mouth fell open and she had to start the next sentence a few times before she actually managed to spit it out. “Holmes is a sadistic maniac. I couldn’t put her in charge of a dog pound and still look at myself in the mirror every morning!”

“Then you’ve become a lot more squeamish than you used to be.”

“Well—fuck! Maybe I have. But I was shooting at soldiers, not children.”

“She’s not a child, Major. You should know that better than anyone. She only plays at being a child in order to … explore things, develop a healthy self-image, work out her relation to the world. Whatever you want to call it. Because
it doesn’t matter what you call it
. That’s just make-believe. In the real world—the world where we live and breathe and die—she
is
a soldier. And someone has to make sure she follows orders and doesn’t endanger the other soldiers whose lives depend on her.”

“Well, does it have to be
Holmes
?”

Avery threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat and frustration. “That’s out of my control.”

“No, it’s not! What kind of hold does she have over you? Report her!”

“For—
what
?” Avery shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“For corruption. She’s completely in bed with Titan. It’s flagrant, naked, unadulterated—”

Avery’s laugh was quiet—but it was so bitter that it cut through Li’s voice, shutting her down in mid-sentence. It was the laugh of someone who has plumbed the ultimate depths of disillusion. Who has no faith in God, no faith in man, no faith in herself. Li had always thought of herself as cynical. She had been scoured on Gilead, schooled in the on-the-ground reality of absolute war until even the faintest tinge of a noble cause or a high-flown illusion made her want to vomit. But that laugh took her breath away. What lay behind it? What horrors had Avery seen—or, God forbid, committed—to make her laugh like that?

Avery met Li’s stare, and though her face was as young and vibrant and beautiful as ever, the eyes within it were as dead as stones. Her beautiful hand moved. She set down her glass with exquisite precision. There was no sound when it touched the table, only the faintest and purest chime of ice against crystal.

“I think you’re laboring under a misunderstanding, Major. I am the captain of this ship.” Again Li noticed she avoided speaking the ship’s name. “Nothing happens on board without my knowledge and approval. Holmes has my full support. She speaks for me, and you can obey her orders without question, as if they were mine.” Her voice, already chilly, cooled noticeably. “Which, in fact, they are.”

“Only because you’ve made some sort of bargain with the devil—”

“We’re all devils, Major.” Avery spoke very softly now. “Surely you’ve been to war often enough to know that. I don’t need to speak to you as if you were a child. Surely two such old soldiers as us can admit between ourselves that morality is merely a matter of picking the more palatable evil?”

Li shook her head in inarticulate bewilderment. “But—”

“I think that’s enough heart-to-heart for one night,” Avery interrupted. “But there is one more thing that bears repeating: I promised just now to hand your husband over to you if you catch Llewellyn for me. And I keep my promises, no matter what you might have heard from the local rumor mill. If I say I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it.”

“Okay,” Li said warily. She’d just made a near-fatal misstep, though she still didn’t understand what it was. Avery had seemed about to boot her out of the room a moment ago, but now she was watching her over the rim of her glass, waiting on an answer. And the answer mattered. It mattered more than it should have mattered.

Who’s pulling your strings?
she wanted to ask Avery.
And how do you know they’re going to let you deliver on all your brave words about telling the truth and keeping promises?
But as soon as Li formed the question in her mind, the answer was clear: Avery didn’t know. She was making promises she suspected she might not be able to deliver on. And that was why she was so ashamed of this conversation that she’d had to get drunk to have it.

“All right,” Li said, not sure where she was even going with this. “I’ll help you. On one condition.”

“What?”

“You tell me the real story of what happened between you and Llewellyn.”

Again Avery flinched slightly. “You mean at the trial?”

“No, I mean before the trial. You had a front-row seat. You were
here
, on the spot, when everything was going wrong. So what happened? How did Llewellyn go from rising young Navy captain to wanted pirate? What pushed him over the edge?”

“Every bushel has a few bad apples,” Avery said. Her voice sounded wooden and the muscles around the corners of her mouth had gone dead.

“Bullshit!” Li snapped. And then, on one of those uncanny gut-level hunches that only struck a few times in a lifetime: “When did Nguyen decide to make Llewellyn the fall guy?”

“He did it to himself,” Avery snapped. “He may not have done exactly what they said he did—you know as well as anyone that there are
some secrets that can’t be bandied about even in a court-martial. But he laid himself open to it. Treason is the best possible light you can put on what he did. And piracy … well, it was fair enough.” Again she laughed that low and bitter laugh. “Fair enough as love and war go.”

“He may not have done exactly what whey said he did,” Li repeated slowly. And then it dawned on her. “It’s not what
they
said. It’s what
you
said. You’re not a liar, Avery. You’re not an angel, that’s for sure. But I’ll be damned if I’ll believe you’re a liar. So how did Nguyen manage to make you lie for her?”

Avery was so furious now that she was barely articulate.
“I didn’t lie for her!”

I didn’t lie for
her
.

So then who did you lie for?

But Li didn’t even have to ask the question. The answer was all over Avery’s face. And what could be simpler? It was the oldest answer there was—as old as apples. And it was almost a letdown, after all the intricate and carefully wrought webs of deception Li had been imagining.

“She told me it was the only way to save him,” Avery whispered, her voice so low that Li could barely make out the words. “I knew it would be bad, of course. I knew his career was over. I knew … I thought he’d go to prison, I thought she had to be lying when she promised a pardon. But I never thought they’d
hang
him!”