Ghost Spin (64 page)

“I’m in the women’s gallery,” Cohen called from the loft overhead—and Llewellyn began climbing the steep stairs toward his voice.

No furniture here, either. Cohen sat cross-legged on the floor, in a simple robe of white wool like those Llewellyn had seen on the old man who’d blown his nose into the gutter.

“Where is this?” Llewellyn asked, knowing somehow that this was no pastiche; that this perfect cube of space had once truly existed out there in the real world beyond the AI’s networks.

“Córdoba. You’re standing in the synagogue Maimonides prayed in. Amazing, isn’t it? Look at the place. It couldn’t hold forty people. And yet from this tiny beginning his words went out to fill the universe. They will outlive humanity. They’ll probably outlive me. They may even outlive the universe itself.”

A bird called in the open air outside, and its shadow flitted past the intricate latticework of the window screens.

“Words are powerful things,” Cohen went on, seeming almost to have forgotten Llewellyn’s presence. “Maimonides believed that every true word ever spoken by a human mouth is a Name of God. That God created us so that we could name Him, and in listening to us the universe could know itself.”

“Then what’s a lie?”

“A lie is an Unnaming. The worst possible thing you can do in the world.”

“So liars go to hell? Even if they didn’t mean to do it?”

Cohen’s smile was softly mocking and infinitely gentle. “That’s so Catholic of you. There is no hell, William. Only a God made in man’s image could even think of such a thing. Do you think the One who made this”—he swept a hand around the tiny room, and Llewellyn suddenly saw it as Cohen saw it: a perfect volume of space in which shadow and sunlight quivered like a plucked string in the eternal quantum song of the ongoing creation—“would spend eternity in judgment and punishment? You punish yourself. And the lies that really matter are the ones you tell yourself.”

And just like that, Llewellyn was plunged headlong into the last and worst memory.

The one he’d wanted above all other ones to hide from Cohen.

The one he wanted above all others to hide from himself.

“And what was Avery’s answer?” the ghost asked in the silence after the worst rush of the painful memory had faded. “After the fight in the fantail, before the crew mutinied and took the ship back to New Allegheny?”

“Mutiny.” The word tasted as hot and bitter in Llewellyn’s mouth as blood. “A fucking mutiny. Sital and Okoro sided with me, but the rest of the crew went with Avery. And they took Ada back to dry dock and wiped her. Just like Holmes wanted them to in the first place.”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing. I tried to go up the chain of command. I went over Holmes’s head and asked for my orders in writing. And the next thing I knew I was in prison for piracy and fighting to keep my neck out of the noose.”

“Did Nguyen actually talk to you before the trial?”

“She visited me in prison.”

He shuddered at the memory of her serene expression and her quiet, perfectly modulated voice, and the things she had said she’d do to Avery, to Okoro, to Sital, to everyone if he didn’t play along with her.

“And what was she going to give you if you did play along?”

“My life,” Llewellyn said bitterly. “My life and a fucking medical discharge.
Just like poor Cartwright got when they did whatever they did to the
Jabberwocky
.”

“I assume you tried to argue.”

“For whatever good it did me.”

The ghost pinged the memory, and it washed over Llewellyn again like a suffocating wave of bilgewater. His defiance. Nguyen’s amusement. And then her final words, murmured in that elegant, dangerous, alarmingly quiet voice. “You think a dishonorable discharge is the worst thing that can happen to you? You’re being accused of kidnapping a Drift ship. That’s not just disobeying orders. It’s piracy.”

“And then what?”

“And then Avery lied on the stand. And Sital and Okoro didn’t lift a finger to stop her.”

“So now it’s Okoro and Sital’s fault, too?”

“I never—”

“Oh, yes you did. You’ve blamed everyone. You’ve blamed Holmes. You’ve blamed Avery. You’ve blamed Sital and Okoro.”

Llewellyn shrugged resignedly.

“In fact it seems to me there’s only one person left on board this ship that you haven’t blamed.”

“I’ve never tried to say I wasn’t at fault. I’ve said all along that—”

“Hush, child. I’m not saying you haven’t taken responsibility. I’m only saying you haven’t told me the whole story. I’m only saying that there’s one memory you haven’t shared with me. I can feel it. I see the threads that bind it to your other memories. I can map its boundaries. And I think we both know what you did—or what you believe or fear or suspect you might have done. Do you really want to try to rewrite your entire life to avoid that memory? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look it in the face and be done with it?”

Cohen fell silent and sat looking calmly at nothing in particular, as if he were waiting politely for Llewellyn to finish an important conversation with someone else before interrupting him. Llewellyn listened to the birds singing in the sunlight outside the ancient stone building, and the boy still selling cakes from his heavy tray, and the shoes of a passing horse sliding on the rounded cobblestones.

When it became clear that Llewellyn wasn’t going to answer, the ghost pushed again—gently, yes, but in a place where even the slightest pressure brought instant, searing agony.

“The mutineers didn’t take the
Ada
in streamspace. They didn’t use the kill switch, or there would have been nothing left for Holmes to hard cycle, and the ship would have gone back to New Allegheny as salvage. So what did you do, William Llewellyn? What did you do that you never testified to at your trial because Helen Nguyen oh-so-carefully set it up to preclude any possibility of your testifying to what really happened out there? What did you say to Ada that made her surrender herself to the Navy and go willingly back to dry dock, where they murdered her?”

The fight went out of Llewellyn in that instant. He could feel it leave him, like air rushing out of a punctured tire. Like breath rattling out of a dying man.

“I talked her down. I convinced her to turn control of the ship over to them. I told her I could broker a deal. I told her I could save her life if she trusted me.”

“And did you believe it?”

“I wanted to. Haven’t you ever wanted to believe something so much that you almost convinced yourself it was really true?”

The ghost smiled gently. “Every minute of every day.”

“Does it work?”

“I’ll let you know when the universe ends and we can total everything out.”

Llewellyn laughed and then grew suddenly serious again. “I honestly don’t know if I can live with this.”

“You look alive to me. Not very comfortable, perhaps. But definitely alive.”

“I’ve thought about killing myself. Maybe I should.”

“Maybe. But having actually tried it, I can assure you that suicide’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Also, what would be the point exactly? At the risk of seeming like I’m meddling in things that are none of my business—because you know how I hate to meddle—might I suggest that you consider sticking around and trying to fix things?”

“Ah shit,” Holmes muttered as they swooped in on the Datatrap. “I hate fighting in free fall.”

Li peered at the tiny window in the corner of the monitor—the best view she was likely to get of the action, the way things were going. She could see the pirate ship, embedded in the outer rim of the Datatrap like a nail stuck into a cart wheel. But the wheel, which should have been spinning and imparting its rotational gravity to the docked ship, was strangely still.

“Christ, have they lost spin? I’ve never seen a whole station lose spin before.”

“They don’t
have
spin,” the Cohen frag of the day told her. “It’s a deep space datatrap. They have no human crew. Why would they waste money on rotational gravity?”

“I don’t know,” Li said, feeling stupid and annoyed about it. “Then why have a hab ring, either?”

“Because they need a hab ring for the cat herders. And it’s cheaper to use the same design they always use than it is to go back to the drawing board and design something different.”

She’d never actually seen one of these before, though she’d known they existed. It was funny, she thought, the way the UN’s deep space datatraps were essentially invisible technology. She’d never even so much as seen one in her fighting career, and for the first time that struck her as odd. But in fact even when the structures became military
targets, it was easier to bomb them than to devote troops to capturing them.

As the battle unfolded, Li realized that she was going to see even less of it than she’d expected. They were firewalled inside their little room with nothing but the little monitor and Cohen’s streamspace simulation of the battle to tell them what was happening beyond the walls. And Holmes was playing gatekeeper, which today’s Cohen fragment didn’t like at all.

He made his move when she dropped the firewalls to let him tap the enemy ship’s datastream. It was just an instant. But it was enough.

The simulation shivered and flashed and words appeared where a moment before there had been only the scrolling chaos of the two shipboard AIs’ dueling networks. Now words were reeling up the screen instead of numbers, flicking back and forth across the glimmering surface in a pattern that reminded Li of something she couldn’t put her finger on … something disturbingly familiar, something that was both domestic and violent, both tame and dangerous, and that she knew she ought to be able to put a name to …

At first Holmes didn’t notice it because she was so focused on the battle outside. But then she turned and caught the tail end of a line as it whipped by.

“What the hell?” she muttered. She tapped at the keys, trying to
fix it. But the simulation onscreen wasn’t slowing down. It was speeding up.

“What the hell is that?” Holmes snapped.

Li just shook her head.

“He’s through the firewall!” Holmes was starting to sound panicked.

Caitlyn reached for the keyboard, but Holmes swatted her hand away. And then before Caitlyn even saw it coming, she had a weapon to her head.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she told Holmes.

Maybe Holmes could have saved herself if she’d acted faster. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference what she did. Li wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Holmes was gasping now, her eyes streaming and her face so flushed that Li thought at first she’d choked on something. She dropped her weapon, which clattered to the floor unnoticed. “Need water!” she gasped. “Hot!”

Li put a hand on her. She was burning up. And still the words flickered through the air in front of them, the text flowing faster as the font size diminished.

“Stop it!” Li screamed. But the ghost didn’t answer.

Holmes made a spitting sound, put her hand over her mouth, and then jackknifed onto the floor and began thrashing around in the grip of a grand mal seizure.

Li dropped to her knees and began to shake the other woman, trying to pull her out of it. But she was on fire. Li knew the moment she touched her that the seizures wouldn’t stop unless the fever went down. And a moment after that she knew that it wouldn’t go down, no matter what anyone did.

Because it wasn’t Holmes who was on fire. It was the ceramsteel filaments of her internals, miles and miles of them, snaking through every organ in her body. The ghost had come through the shipboard AI, parasitized Holmes’s diagnostic subroutines, and was burning the wires right out of her.

Li came awake to the sharp
crack!
of distant rifle fire, and only remembered where she was when she heard the clang and rumble of the great iron dogs turning on the inner airlock door of the
Christina
’s portside auxiliary fantail cargo hold.

She didn’t know what she expected to come through the door. But it certainly wasn’t what actually did come through: one of Doyle’s men with her webbing, armor, and weapons, which he tossed in a pile at her feet before retreating back into the relative safety of the gangway.