Free Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty

ghost had read him so easily.
    You have about as much idea of life in the Syndicates as a newborn babe has of running a Drift ship.
    “Are you condescending to me, you sanctimonious bugger?”
    Anyone who says something that stupid deserves to be condescended to. And anyway, you can’t run to the Syndicates. Not anymore. They just signed an extradition treaty with the UN.
    “How can you possibly know that?”
    Because I’m hacked into the station AI.
    That took a moment to sink in. “Right now?”
    Yes, Will. Right now. The ghost sounded like it was speaking to a child.
    “Can you check their files on us? See if we need to run?”
    I thought about it. But then I thought it would arouse undue suspicion. I’m planning to wait until they’ve relinquished navigation back to me before I run the check for you.
    He didn’t want to admit it, but the smug bastard was right. And smart. Creepy smart. “You’re not a normal AI,” he said.
    No. I’m one of a kind—and not a mere device.
    Llewellyn snorted. “Go in for funny hats, do you?”
    That earned a chuckle. Very good, Will. I like a man who knows his Thurber.
    “My mum read me the book when I was a kid.”
    I know. I remember. You’re her only son, Will. She adores you. How is she going to bear it when they hang you?
    “Don’t talk to me about my mother. You don’t know me. And you certainly don’t know her!”
    Don’t I? the ghost asked. And then it took hold of Llewellyn’s brain and turned it inside out and shook out all the memories that make up a man, as if they were just a pocketful of loose change. Until now the ghost had been all charm and finesse, strolling daintily through his memories like a beautiful woman who knew perfectly well why she’d been invited up to see the etchings and was playing hard to get merely as a matter of form. But now, just for a moment, it unveiled its power. It would take what it wanted from him. It would turn him into what it needed. And the only choice he had was whether the conquest would be a polite flirtation or unconditional war.
    He’d grappled with hostile Emergents before, of course. But usually in the heat of battle, where it was clear to everyone just who was friend and who was enemy. This was different. In fact it was verging perilously close to what he’d let Holmes do to the Ada. But he wasn’t going to think about that. There were some things in his past that he wasn’t going to share with the ghost unless he had to.
    All through the chatter, the ghost had been working navigational solutions, spinning out long, complex, nonlinear equations as effortlessly as a carny pulling cotton candy. Llewellyn felt a tense satisfaction at the sight. The
Christina
’s old NavComp had been no match for the Navy pirate hunters’ state-of-the-art shipboard AIs. And every trip into the Drift had brought the risk that they would be captured or shipwrecked or shunted off course by a minuscule miscalculation and left to drift in the eddies and backwaters of the Drift until they ran out of air and water.
    Well, at least that problem was gone. The man who’d sold him thenew NavComp hadn’t been lying. It
was
platformed on an Emergent: an Emergent of vast power and exceptional stability. God only knew where the poor wretch had been kidnapped from, since no such creature would willingly let himself be crammed into a lowly NavComp. But Llewellyn told himself with a ruthlessness born of desperation that he had lives depending on him and that the ghost’s misfortunes were beyond the scope of his captain’s duties.
    “You’re good at your job,” he told the ghost. “I’ll give you that. No Navy ship of the line could have run that course more prettily.”
    Ah, you silver-tongued Irish devil. Keep on like this and I’m going to start missing my wife even more than I already do.
    “Welsh, not Irish. By way of Pittsburgh. And your so-called wife is even less Irish than I am. She’s not even human if I understand the whole