Free Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty Page B

Avery for certain, he protested, dropping into AI-space instinctively as his internals revved up for action.
    And then the ghost said something that it should never have been able to say—and that made Llewellyn break out in a cold, panicked sweat underneath his uniform.
    You think I don’t know Holmes when I smell her? I know her better than I know you, William.
    Llewellyn cleared his throat and spoke into a silence that suddenly seemed as dangerous as drawn knives. “The NavComp says it’s Avery.”
    “The
NavComp
?” Sital echoed.
    “It’s hacked into the station AI.”
    “How—”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Is it
talking to you
?” Doyle’s voice cut across the silence. Dangerous, that. The fear in his voice was natural. Reasonable, even. And when the quartermaster spoke, you could bet he had others behind him. Llewellyn realized suddenly that danger was facing him from within the ship as well as without.
    Sailors were a superstitious tribe. They had always seen their ships as living things, endowed with will and luck and karma. They’d felt that way even back on Earth, when their ships were no more than inert shells of wood and canvas. And they had far stranger and more convoluted emotions about the fragile shells that protected them from the killing Deep. Modern shipboard systems were so complex that even the simplest tramp freighter possessed a rudimentary kind of sentience. Every sailor had stories of haunted ships; of ships’ AIs wreaking vengeancefor lost captains; of ships driven mad by guilt and grief after life support systems failure, rocketing across the endless reaches of space with their bellies full of corpses. Sailors loved their ships, but that love could turn to fear and distrust in a moment, especially among the common sailors whose unwired brains gave them no direct access to the shipboard AI and for whom every AI was a sort of ghost. A captain might have disagreements with his ship, might have to make compromises in order to keep the waters smooth and the AI sweet-tempered. But he bent to the AI in front of his crew. A crew that began to doubt whether its captain was in control of the ship was already halfway to mutiny.
    “Of course it’s talking to me,” Llewellyn told Doyle as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
    “I’m not sure I like that, Will. I’m not sure I want to trust my life to some stranger—”
    “It’s not a stranger,” Llewellyn said, putting an easy confidence into his voice that he was far from feeling. “It’s the ship. The same ship we’ve always had. There’s no difference between a new NavComp and any other routine upgrade.”
    “Given past experience, I don’t find that reassuring!”
    “Relax, Doyle,” Ike Okoro said from his usual post at Systems. Okoro was the ship’s cat herder—its sentient systems engineer. He had been cut out personally by Llewellyn’s decision to download the AI directly into his skull, and he had as much reason to be angry about it as any man on board. But Ike didn’t do angry; his naturally levelheaded temperament had been honed into an almost Zen-like calm by decades of coaxing top performance out of temperamental combat AIs and weathering their prima ballerina posing and periodic emotional meltdowns. Now Llewellyn could see him soothing Doyle just as ably as he would have soothed a jittery young AI on the eve of its first live-fire exercise. “The new NavComp’s doing its job, and it’s doing a damn good job from what I can see. I know it’s no fun to be in a pinch with an AI you don’t know. But we’ll all have plenty of time to get to know each other after we get out of this.”
    Doyle looked disgruntled. But Okoro was too popular with the crewto argue with. And even Doyle liked him too much to do more than shrug his disagreement.
    “So what do we do now?” Sital asked in her usual blessedly phlegmatic tone—and, not for the first time, Llewellyn admired the seamless way in which his first mate