Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty Read Free Book Online

her out of it. They agreed that Router/​Decomposer would handle the New Allegheny end of the investigation while Li went to Freetown. It stuck in her craw, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative.
    “The only way we could get you there without the UNSec pass codes is by a flat-out shotgun spincast,” he told her. “And that’s refugee tech. No sane person would use it unless it was a matter of life and death. And anyway, you couldn’t handle the New Allegheny end of things without me even if we could get you there. Cohen’s networks must be strung out halfway across the Drift by now. By my count so far—and I’m sure it’s far from complete—there are pieces of him on eighteen different planets in seven different star systems separated from one another by hundreds of light-years.”
    In the end he canceled his afternoon class and they went back to hisoffice, where they sat looking glumly at the star map of the planets bordering the Drift—a map that Li was getting to know far better than she wanted to. The image could have been captioned “Portrait of a Dying Empire.” Once there had been a clear line of demarcation between human-ruled UN space and the clone-dominated Syndicates. But now the UN’s frontier was shrinking, drawing back upon itself and leaving behind only a jagged crust of stranded settlements that looked like the ghost of an old coffee stain. Beyond that line lay the Syndicates, and the one outlying human settlement of New Allegheny. And beyond them surged the Drift.
    “That’s what the real fight’s about,” Router/​Decomposer said, following her gaze. “Whoever controls the Drift gets to dictate the shape of the future. For all of us.”
    “Just because they’ll have FTL—”
    “FTL’s not really the right word for it. Drift travel is certainly some kind of closed timelike loop. But it seems more a jump between quantum branchings or conmoving spacetime regions or—”
    “Oh, for God’s sake! Do we have to do the endless AI quibbling thing right
now
?”
    “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, it still doesn’t change the fact that I’m better suited to go out there than you are. Bose-Einstein relays all along the Wall are being decommissioned even as we speak in order to try to stretch the UN’s FTL resources a little further and keep more important colonies from falling offstream or falling prey to the Syndicates. There’s simply no way an organic entity can investigate his death in any meaningful time frame. It’ll take an AI to track his surviving fragments down. Or an army. But UNSec is still letting through low-bandwidth civilian communications, so I can do the compressed data packet boogie and inject a parasitical program into the New Allegheny’s noosphere. I’d lay even odds that’s how Cohen got out there himself. So just let me handle the New Allegheny end of things and you concentrate on Freetown.” He hesitated. “Besides, ALEF’s more likely to talk to you than to me.”
    Li frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. I thought they were separatists.”
    “Hah! Little do you know! In their eyes you’re just an inferior life-form. You don’t kick a donkey back when it kicks you, et cetera, et cetera. I, on the other hand, am a traitor.”
    “If you’re a traitor, what does that make Cohen?”
    The visual equivalent of a laugh flared across his representational matrix. “What was that nice nickname they had for you back in Israel?”
    “An abomination?”
    “Yep. That gets the general idea across pretty well.”
    “Still,” Li insisted. “Whatever happened, it happened in the Crucible. On New Allegheny. That’s where I need to be, not Freetown.”
    “Well, UNSec still controls the only in-system BE relay. So if you’re not hitching a ride with them, you’re shotgunning.”
    Li cursed under her breath and kicked at the leg of the desk in frustration. Shotgunning was refugee tech: quick and dirty, and the last refuge of people