Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

  “I have exactly that.” Sauer grinned savagely. “You should know who he’s been passing on information to.” He pointed at her. “You are a known agent of a foreign power. Defendant has been communicating freely with you. Now, since you consented to defend him, you are acting as an officer of this court. I refer you to Article Forty-six: ‘Any person deputized to act as an officer of the court is subject to the discipline of the Articles.’ I conclude that you have courageously agreed to waive your diplomatic immunity in order to attempt to rescue your spy from the hangman’s noose.”

  For a moment, Rachel looked confused; she looked at Martin again, blinking rapidly. Then she turned back to the bench. “So you rigged this whole kangaroo court as an attempt to work around my immunity? I’m impressed. I really didn’t think you’d be quite this stupid—Utah!”

  Everything happened very quickly. Rachel dropped to her knees behind her makeshift desk; Sauer made a motion toward the ratings at the back of the room, intending to have them arrest the woman. But before he could do more than open his mouth, four sharp bangs burst around the room. The overhead air-conditioning ducts split open; things dropped down, complex and many-armed things squirting pale blue foam under high pressure. The foam stuck to everything it touched, starting with the judge’s bench and the guards at the back of the makeshift courtroom: it was lightweight but sticky, rapidly setting into a hard foam matrix.

  “Get her!” Sauer shouted. He grabbed for his pistol, but somewhere along the way a huge gobbet of blue foam engulfed his arm and cemented it to his side. A strong chemical odor came from the foam, something familiar from childhood visits to the dentist. Sauer breathed deeply, struggling to dislodge the sticky mass, and the fruity, sickly stench cut into his lungs; then the world turned hazy.

  rachel knew things were going to turn pear-shaped from the moment she walked into the room. She’d seen judges in hanging mode before, back on Earth, and on a dozen assignments since then. You could almost smell it, an acrid and unreasoning eagerness to order an execution, like the stench of death itself. This board had it—and something else. A sly reserve, a smug sense of anticipation; as if the whole thing was some kind of tremendous joke, with a punch line she could only guess at.

  When the security lieutenant delivered it—a half-formed, inadequate punch line, in her opinion, obviously something he’d stitched up on an ad hoc basis to fit the occasion—she glanced around at Martin. Please be ready. She blinked three times and saw him stiffen, then nod; the prearranged signal. She turned back to the bench, blinking again: green lights rippled behind her eyelids. “State two,” she subvocalized, the radio mike in her throat relaying the command to the drones waiting in the ventilation ducts. She turned back to the bench. The three officers sat there, glowering at her like thunder-clouds on a horizon. Buy time.

  “A point of law, sir. As it happens, thinking is not generally considered the same as doing.—” She carried on, wondering how they’d react to effectively being accused of rigging this charade; either they’d back down, or—

  “I have exactly that.” The political officer in the middle, the hatchet-faced one, grimaced horribly. “You should know who he’s been passing on information to.” He pointed straight at her. Here it comes, she thought. Subvocalizing again: “Luggage. Query readiness state.”

  “Lifeboat closed out for launch. Fuel storage subcritical and ready. Spare reaction mass loaded. Oxygen supply nominal. Warning, delta-vee to designated waypoint New Peterstown currently 86 k.p.s., decreasing. Total available maneuvering margin 90 k.p.s.” That would do, she decided. The saltwater rocket was nearly as efficient as an old-fashioned fusion rocket; back home, it would do for an Earth-Mars return trip, surface to surface. This was pushing it a bit—they wouldn’t be able to ride it back up into orbit without refueling. But it would do, as long as—

  “—I conclude that you have courageously agreed to waive your diplomatic immunity in order to attempt to rescue your spy from the hangman’s noose.”

  She swallowed, glanced at Martin and blinked twice, the signal for “hold your breath.” “Luggage: prep for launch. Expect crew arrival from one hundred seconds. Launch hold at T minus twenty seconds from that time.” Once they burned that particular bridge and jumped overboard, all she could do was pray that the bridge crew wouldn’t dare light off their radar—and risk warning the Festival—in order to find her and kill her. The lifeboat was a soap bubble compared to the capital ships of the New Republican naval force.

  Rachel turned her attention back to the bench and took a deep breath, tensing. “So you rigged this whole kangaroo court as an attempt to work around my immunity? I’m impressed. I really didn’t think you’d be quite this stupid—Utah!”

  She ducked. The last word was a shout, broadcast to the drones through her throat mike. A simultaneous crackle told her the shaped-charge cutters had blown. She yanked the transparent breather hood over her face and choked it shut, then powered up her cellular IFF.

  The drones swarmed in through holes in the ceiling. Spiders and crabs and scorpions, all made of carbon polymers—recycled sewage, actually—they sprayed sticky antipersonnel foam everywhere, releasing anesthetic trichloromethane vapor wherever anyone struggled. A rating made a move toward her, and her combat implants took over; he went down like a sack of potatoes before she consciously noted his existence, rabbit-punched alongside the head by an inhumanly fast fist. Everything narrowed into the gap between herself and Martin, standing wide-eyed behind a table, his arms half-raised toward her and a rating already beginning to steer him toward the door.

  Rachel went to combat speed, cutting her merely human nervous system out of the control loop.

  Time slowed and light dimmed; the chains of gravity weakened, but the air grew thick and viscous around her. Marionettes twirled in slow motion all around as she jumped over a table and ran at Martin. His guard began to turn toward her and throw up an arm. She grabbed it and twisted, feeling it pop out of its socket. She threw a brisk left-handed punch at the other guard; ribs snapped like brittle cardboard, and a couple of the fine bones in the back of her hand fractured with the impact. It was hard to remember—hard to think—but her own body was her worst enemy, more fragile than her reflexes would admit.

  She grabbed Martin with one arm, handling him delicately as bone china; the beginning of an oof of air from his lungs told her she’d winded him. The door wasn’t locked, so she kicked it open and dragged Martin through before it had time to rebound closed. She dropped him and spun in place, slammed it shut, then grabbed in a vest pocket for a lump of something like putty. “Omaha,” she shouted into her throat mike. Strobing patterns of red-and-yellow light raced over the surface of the putty—visible in her mechanized vision—and she jammed it into the doorframe and spat on it. It turned blue and began to spread rapidly, a wave of sticky liquid rushing around the gap between door and wall, setting hard as diamond.

  Between the glued door, the severed intercom cables, and the chloroform and antipersonnel foam, it might be a minute or two before anyone in the room managed to raise the alarm.

  Martin was trying to double over and gasp. She picked him up and ran down the corridor. It was like wading through water; she rapidly discovered it was easier to kick off with one foot, then the other, like low-gee locomotion.

  A red haze at the edge of her vision told her she was close to burnout. Her peripheral nervous system might have been boosted, but for this sort of speed, it relied on anaerobic respiration, and she was exhausting her reserves frighteningly fast. At the next intersection, a lift car stood open: she lurched into it, dragging Martin behind, and tapped the button for the accommodation level in officer country. Then she dropped back to normal speed.

  The doors slid shut as the lift began to rise, and Martin began to gasp. Rachel slumped against the far wall, black spots hazing her vision as she tried to draw air into straining lungs. Martin was first to speak. “Where—did you learn—”

  She blinked. A clock spi
raled in the left upper quadrant of her vision. Eight seconds since she’d yelled Utah—eight seconds? Minutes, maybe. She drew a deep breath that turned into a yawn, flushing the carbon dioxide from her lungs. All her muscles ached, burning as if there were hot wires running down her bones. She felt sick, and her left hand was beginning to throb violently. “Special. Implants.”

  “Think you nearly broke a—rib, back there. Where are we going?”

  “Life. Boat.” Gasp. “Like I said.”

  A light blinked above them. They’d crawled up one floor. One more to go.

  The door opened on the right level. Rachel staggered upright. Nobody there, which was a blessing; in her present state, she didn’t know if she could put a hamster in its place, much less a soldier. She stepped out of the lift, Martin following. “My room,” she said quietly. “Try to look at ease.”

  He raised his wrists. “Wearing these?”

  Shit. Should have ripped them apart before running out of boost. She shook her head and hunted in her hip pocket, pulled out a compact gray tube. “Stun gun.”

  They ran out of luck halfway down the last corridor. A door opened and a petty officer stepped out; he moved to give them room to pass, then his jaw dropped as he realized what he was seeing. “Hey!”

  Rachel shot him. “Hurry,” she hissed over her shoulder, and stumbled ahead. Martin followed her. Her door was ahead, just around a curve in the corridor. “Gold,” she called to the waiting lifeboat.

  Red lights flashed overhead: the PA system piped up, a warbling alert noise. “Security Alert! Green deck accommodation sector B, two armed insurgents on the loose. Armed and dangerous. Security to Green deck accommodation B. Alert!”

  “Shit,” Martin mumbled. A pressure door began to rumble shut ten meters ahead of them.

  Rachel went to combat speed again, her vision greying almost immediately. She threw herself forward: stood directly beneath the door and thrust straight up at the descending pressure barrier. Martin moved forward with glacial slowness as she felt the motors bear down on her, trying to crush her in half. He ducked and swam under the barrier. She followed him, letting go, and stayed fast, even though her hands and feet were becoming numb and a deadly warning pincushion sensation pricked at her face. The door to her cabin was two meters away. “Juno!” she yelled at it through her throat mike, the word coming out in a high-pitched gabble that sounded like the croaking of an aged dinosaur to her ears.

  The door swung open. Martin ran through inside, but it was too late for Rachel: she couldn’t see, and her knees were beginning to give way. The combat acceleration stopped, and she felt herself floating, a bruised impact along one side.

  Someone was dragging her over gravel and it hurt like hell.

  Her heart sounded as if it was about to explode. She couldn’t get enough air.

  Sound of a door slamming.

  Darkness.

  circus of death

  the committee for the Revolution had taken over the onion-domed orthodox cathedral in Plotsk, making it the headquarters of the Commissariat for Extropian Ideology. All those who rejected the doctrine of revolutionary optimization and refused to flee the town were dragged before the tribunal and instructed boringly and at length about the nature of their misdemeanor; then they were shot, minds mapped and uploaded into the Festival, and sentenced to corrective labor—usually all at once. There weren’t many of them; for the most part, the population had fled into the wilderness, transcended, or happily adopted the revolutionary cause.

  Sister Seventh’s hut, spun from local memories of myth and legend uploaded into the noosphere of the Festival, squatted in the courtyard outside the Revolutionary Commissariat and defecated massively. Presently, the house stood and ambled in the direction of the cherry trees that fringed the square: it was hungry, and the Bishop’s liking for cherry blossom wouldn’t stop it eating.

  Sister Seventh wrinkled her snout with displeasure and ambled indoors. The floor of the church was full of plaintiffs, queuing to demand this or appeal that. They stood before a kitchen table parked in the middle of the nave, behind which sat half a dozen bored-looking revolutionary functionaries. The small, frenetic human called Rubenstein waved his arms and exhorted their chairman, who was so heavily augmented with mechanical add-ons that he clanked when he walked. The subject of the exhortation seemed to be something to do with the need to reverse the previous policy of destroying the artistically illiterate. True, that priority rated low in the estimates of the Critics—after all, you can’t win an argument over esthetics with a corpse—but Rubenstein’s willingness to change his mind after only a day or two in her company didn’t commend his artistic integrity to her. These curious, lumpen humans were so impossibly gnomic in their utterances, so lacking in consistency, that sometimes she despaired of understanding their underlying esthetic.

  Sister Seventh lost herself for a while in the flux of knowledge from the Festival. It let a filtered feed of its awareness escape, titillating the Critic colony in orbit, who relayed choice tidbits her way. The Festival propagated by starwisp, that much was true. It also relied on causal channels to relay its discoveries home. Now, great Higgs boson factories were taking shape in the rings of machinery orbiting Sputnik, icy gas and dust congealing into beat-wave particle accelerators on the edge of planetary space. Thousands of huge fusion reactors were coming on-stream, each pumping out enough energy to run a continental civilization. The first batch of new starwisps was nearing readiness, and they had a voracious appetite, a tonne of stabilized antimatter each; then there were the causal channels, petabytes and exabytes of entangled particles to manufacture and laboriously, non-observationally, separate into matching batches. The first starwisps would soon take on their payloads, point their stubby noses at the void, and accelerate at nearly half a million gees, sitting atop the neutral particle beams emitted by vast launch engines in high orbit above Rochard’s World. Their primary destinations were the last two stops on the Festival’s route, to deliver fresh channels and a detailed report on the current visit; their other destinations—well, the Festival had been encamped for three months. Soon the traders would arrive.

  Traders followed the Festival everywhere. A self-replicating, natural source of causal channels, the Festival laid down avenues of communication, opening up new civilizations to trade—civilizations which, in the wake of a visitation, were usually too culture-shocked to object to the Traders’ abstraction of the huge structures the Festival had constructed and abandoned for its own purposes. More than a thousand megafortunes had been made by natives of dirt-based trader civilizations with FTL ships and just enough nous to follow the trail of the Festival; like birds in the wake of a plow turning over rich farm soil, they waited to pounce on juicy nuggets of intellectual property turned up by the passing farmer.

  Now something new tickled Sister Seventh’s hindbrain. She stopped beside a font and stooped to drink. A message from She Who Observes the First. Ships coming. Festival notices. Many ships coming in silence. Now that was interesting; normally, the traders would appear like a three-ring circus, flashing lights and loud music playing on all available wavelengths, trying to attract attention. Stealth meant trouble. Forty-two vessels itemized. All with drive kernels, all with low emissions: query thermal dump to stern, reduce visibility from frontal aspect. Range seven light-seconds.

  How peculiar. Sister Seventh straightened up. Someone—no, some construct of the Festival, human-child-high, but with long, floppy ears and a glossy fur coat, eyes mounted on the sides of its rodent face—was coming in through the side door.

  Sister mine. What reflex of Festival? she asked silently. Hardwired extensions patched her through the Festival’s telephonic nervous system, building a bridge to her sibling.

  Festival has noticed. Current activities not over; will not tolerate interference. Three Bouncers have been dispatched.

  Sister of Stratagems the Seventh shivered and bared her teeth. There were few things about the Festival that scared h
er, but Bouncers were second on the list, right behind the Fringe. The Fringe might kill you out of random pique. The Bouncers were rather less random . . .

  The leporine apparition in the aisle bounced toward her, a panicky expression on its face. Burya stopped lecturing Timoshevski and looked around. “What is it?” he demanded.

  Timoshevski rumbled forward. “Am thinking is rabbit stew for dinner.”

  “No! Please, sirs! Help!” The rabbit stopped short of them, pushing two aggrieved babushkas aside, and held out its front limbs—arms, Sister Seventh noticed, with disturbingly human hands at their extremities. It was wearing a waistcoat that appeared to consist entirely of pockets held together by zip fasteners. “Master in trouble!”

  “Are no masters here, comrade,” said Timoshevski, apparently categorizing the supplicant as inedible. “True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism. Where are you from, and where is your internal passport?”

  Rabbits have little control over their facial muscles; nevertheless, this one made a passable show of being nonplussed. “Need help,” it bleated, then paused, visibly gathering self-control. “My master is in trouble. Mime hunt! They got between us, a village ago; I escaped, but I fear they’re coming this way.”

  “Mimes?” Timoshevski looked puzzled. “Not clowns?” A metallic tentacle tipped in gun-muzzle flanges uncurled from his back, poked questing into the air. “Circus?”

  “Circus of death,” said Sister Seventh. “Fringe performance, very poor. If coming this way, will interfere with popular acclaim of your revolution.”