The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “Renfield,” I say. “You got her, didn’t you?” I’m on my feet now, crouched but balancing on two points, not three. “Managed to slip a geas on her, but she can’t release you herself. Hexenhammer, too?”

  “Cle-VER.” Matron gloats at me from inside her summoning grid. “Hex-EN-heimer first. Soon, you TOO.”

  “Why me?” I demand, backing away from the doorway and the walls—the Sister’s track runs right round the room, following the walls—skirting the summoning grid warily. “What do you want?”

  “Acc-CESS to the LAUNDRY!” buzzes the summoning grid’s demonic inmate. “We wants re-VENGE! Freedom!” In other words, it wants the same old same old. These creatures are so predictable, just like most predators. It’s just a shame I’m between it and what it evidently wants.

  Two of the Sisters begin to glide menacingly towards me: one drifts towards the mainframe console, but the fourth stays stubbornly in front of the door. “Come on, we can talk,” I offer, tongue stumbling in my too-dry mouth. “Can’t we work something out?”

  I don’t really believe that the trapped extradimensional abomination wants anything I’d willingly give it, but I’m running low on options and anything that buys time for me to think is valuable.

  “Free-DOM!” The two moving Sisters commence a flanking movement. I try to let go of the chess board and dodge past the summoning grid, but I slip—and as I stumble I shove the chess board hard. The piece I’m holding clicks sideways like a car’s gearshift, and locks into place: “DIVIDE BY ZERO!” Shriek the Sisterhood, grinding to a halt.

  I stagger a drunken two-step around Matron, who snarls at me and throws a punch. The wall of the grid absorbs her claws with a snap and crackle of blue lightning, and I flinch. Behind me, a series of clicks warn me that the Sisters are resetting: any second now they’ll come back on-line and grab me. But for the moment, my fingers aren’t stuck to the board.

  “Come to MEEE!” The thing in the grid howls as the first of her robot minions’ eyes light up with amber malice, and the wheels begin to turn. “I can give you Free-DOM!”

  “Fuck off.” That wiring loom in the open cabinet is only four metres away. Within its open doors I see more than just an i/o interface: in the bottom of the rack there’s a bunch of stuff that looks like a tea-stained circuit diagram I was reading the other day—

  Why exactly did Angleton point me at the power supply requirements? Could it possibly be because he suspected Matron was off her trolley and I might have to switch her off?

  “Con-SENT is IRREL-e-VANT! PRE-pare to be loboto-MIZED—”

  Talk about design kluges—they stuck the i/o controller in the top of the power supply rack! The chess board is free in my left hand, pieces still stuck to it. And now I know what to do. I take hold of one of the rooks, and wiggle until I feel it begin to slide into a permitted move. Because, after all, there are only a few states that this automaton can occupy and if I can crash the Sisters for just a few seconds while I get to the power supply—

  The Sisters begin to roll around the edge of the room, trying to get between me and the row of cabinets. I wiggle my hand and there’s a taste of violets, and a loud rattle of solenoids tripping. The nearest Sister’s motors crank up to a tooth-grinding whine and she lunges past me, rolling into her colleagues with a tooth-jarring crash.

  I lunge forward, dropping the chess board, and reach for the master circuit breaker handle. I twist it just as screech of feedback behind me announces the Matron-monster’s fury: “I’M FREE!” It shrieks, just as I twist the handle hard in the opposite direction. Then the lights dim, there’s a bright blue flash from the summoning grid, and a bang so loud it rattles my brains in my head.

  For a few seconds I stand stupidly, listening to the tooth-chattering clatter of overloaded relays. My vision dims as ozone tickles my nostrils: I can see smoke. I’ve got to get out of here, I realize: something’s burning. Not surprising, really. Mainframe power supplies—especially ones that have been running steady for nearly forty years—don’t take kindly to being hard power-cycled, and the 1602 was one of the last computers built to run on tubes: I’ve probably blown half its circuit boards. I glance around, but aside from one of the sisters (lying on her side, narrow-gauge wheels spinning maniacally) I’m the only thing moving. Summoning grids don’t generally survive being power-cycled either, especially if the thing they were set to contain, like an electric fence, is halfway across them when the power comes back on. I warily bypass the blue, crackling pentacle as I make my way towards the corridor outside.

  I think when I get home, I’m going to write a report urgently advising HR to send some human nurses for a change—and to reassure Cantor and his colleagues that they’re not about to sell off the roof over their heads just because they happen to have finished their research project. Then I’m going to get very drunk and take a long weekend off work. And maybe when I go back, I’ll challenge Angleton to a game of chess.

  I don’t expect to win, but it’ll be very interesting to see what rules he plays by.

  Copyright © 2008 by Charles Stross

  Cover art copyright © 2008 by Craig Philips

  Books by Charles Stross

  Accelerando

  Glasshouse

  Halting State

  Saturn’s Children

  THE LAUNDRY SERIES

  The Atrocity Archives

  The Jennifer Morgue

  The Fuller Memorandum

  THE SINGULARITY SKY SERIES

  Singularity Sky

  Iron Sunrise

  THE MERCHANT PRINCES

  The Family Trade

  The Hidden Family

  The Clan Corporate

  The Merchants’ War

  The Revolution Business

  The Trade of Queens

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Toast

  Wireless

  NONFICTION

  The Web Architect’s Handbook (Addison-Wesley, 1996)

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  This is true, I swear:

  I was in Orlando in October, staying in one of those big, bland conference hotels. DARPA, the Pentagon department tasked with nurturing Mad Science in all its most speculative forms, had decided to throw a brainstorming conference on the 100 Year Starship—a mind-meld to try and figure out what research they’d have to conduct in order to have a hope of beginning to build a starship some time in the twenty-second century. And for no reason I clearly understood, they decided to fly in a bunch of SF authors from all over the world. I’m not sure why the Pentagon might want a starship, but I was glad someone was paying for me to go to Orlando and kibitz on their conference, and I was happy to bloviate about such things from a hard SF point of view.

  The 100YSS conference exceeded all my expectations—and everyone else’s. But the sheer amount of information on tap made the experience feel a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. It turns out there’s a lot we don’t know about how to build a starship, but also a lot that we do know, and this was the mother of all networking opportunities for folks with an interest in the field.

  Like all networking sessions, a lot of the interesting stuff happens among small groups by the poolside bar, or over a dinner table in a nearby restaurant. You get talking to some interesting-sounding folks who ply you with beer, and the next thing you know you discover you’ve been drafted into some kind of DARPA-funded think tan
k, or wake up with a hangover in a North Korean labour camp, doomed to spend the next two years coaching the Great Leader’s son through writing the Nobel Prize–winning SF novel that daddy expects him to produce.

  Luckily that’s never happened to me, but I have had an eye-opening experience or two. Like the chat I had on Sunday evening by the swimming pool.

  The Orlando conference center where they held the 100 Year Starship event had a resort-grade outdoor water attraction. Not only were there hot tubs and a regular swimming pool and a water slide, this hotel had an artificial river about a quarter of a mile long, down which you could drift along on a truck tire, propelled by aquajets and drenched by fountains. On a muggy October evening, after a long day of listening to talks about liquid indium ion drives and aneutronic boron fusion reactors, this was exactly the right place to hang out if you wanted to bump into inebriated floating rocket scientists. Like Greg Benford’s twin brother, Jim.

  You probably know Greg Benford best as a physicist and hard SF writer, one of the “Killer B’s” who dominated the field in the 1980s and who is still actively writing novels and research papers. But you might not be aware that Greg has an identical twin, or that his sibling Jim is a card-carrying rocket scientist. Back in 2011, Jim was doing impressive things with microwave sails, and Greg was talking up the applications of a lot of recently declassified Russian research into nuclear thermal rockets: “They built this underground test complex near Semipalatinsk, so that they could capture the exhaust. And then they ran their motor for nearly five hundred hours. That’s about a thousand times longer than Project NERVA managed, in total—in one burn! It’s safe, and it’s reliable, and it’s the best way of getting to the outer planets.” His tire spun slowly round as he drifted under one of the fountains, and because we were orbiting near opposite sides of the artificial river, our paths diverged. Intrigued, I paddled to catch up.

  “Don’t you think launching a nuclear reactor might be a bit problematic?” I asked, as I closed to within hailing distance. “I mean, the antinuclear protests when Cassini launched…”

  Jim waved dismissively. “It’s safe as houses,” he assured me. “You’re looking for safety, right? Nuclear thermal, you launch the reactor fuel piecemeal in Soyuz or Dragon capsules with a man-rated launch escape system, then fuel the reactor once it’s in orbit. No, nuclear-thermal is fine. Not very efficient, but it’s not going to kill anyone. If you want efficient propulsion technology, you’ve got to look elsewhere. But unfortunately the best rocket tech we know of is far too dangerous to use.”

  “How dangerous?”

  Jim winked at me. “Let me introduce you to Leonard,” he said as we drifted toward the poolside cocktail bar. “He’ll fill you in on it…”

  Leonard Hansen—not his real name—is a tanned seventy-something rocket scientist who spent the 1950s in California and New Mexico, as a graduate student researching rocket fuels under John D. Clark and then as a fuels scientist working on various missile programs. Today he lives in semiretirement in Florida, but he retains a keen interest in the field of rocket fuel design.

  “What you need to understand is that in order to go faster, you need to increase the exhaust velocity,” he explained. “You can do this by making it much hotter, or by using lighter exhaust particles. If you want to make it hotter, however, you need to pump more energy into it. So if you’re using chemical rockets, you need to use very energetic reagents—fuel and oxidizer.”

  He paused for a mouthful of lime margarita. “Take the space shuttle,” he said wistfully. “With just two tweaks, we could have put a hundred tons into its payload bay!”

  “Two tweaks?” I asked doubtfully. A hundred-ton payload (in a vehicle already massing close to a hundred tons) would have put the shuttle in the same bracket as the Saturn V.

  “Yes.” He smiled sourly. “They could have stretched it, given it a bigger thermal protection system as well—the Columbia disaster wouldn’t have happened. But they rejected my proposal. The first part, to upgrade the SRBs, would have been trivially easy! Although the alternate oxidizer for the space shuttle main engines would have presented certain handling difficulties, that much is true…”

  “Tell him about the SRBs first,” Jim suggested. He leaned forward expectantly; at a guess, he’d heard this before.

  “All right. First, the solid rocket boosters. Regular SRBs run on a mixture of ammonium perchlorate—the oxidizer—and finely powdered aluminum, suspended in a rubbery polymer that holds everything together and provides additional reaction mass. When they ignite you get aluminum oxide and ammonium chloride and lots of energy. But it’s not really enough! We could make them about twenty percent more efficient if we just replaced the aluminum with powdered beryllium. It’s a lighter atom and the redox reaction is more energetic—”

  “Hang on!” I stared at him. “Beryllium is really poisonous. Wouldn’t that—”

  Leonard shook his head. “Nonsense.” A small smile. “You see, then there was my second proposal. If you replace the oxidizer in the space shuttle main engines with liquid fluorine, you could also get an extra twenty percent out of them. And I know what you’re going to say next: wouldn’t that give rise to an exhaust plume of extremely hot hydrofluoric acid? You’re absolutely right: it would! But hydrofluoric acid reacts with beryllium oxide to give you beryllium fluoride—which is almost inert in comparison—and hydrochloric acid, which is neither here nor there.” A shadow crossed his face. “It’s totally safe, compared to some of the other projects I’ve worked on. But NASA took one look at the environmental impact statement and, and…” His shoulders began to shake; whether with laughter or tears, I couldn’t tell.

  Now, I have a background in chemistry. And I think I should explain at this point that liquid fluorine is not your friend. Fluorine is the most active elemental oxidizing agent in the periodic table, and liquid fluorine makes liquid oxygen look inert and unreactive. It likes to oxidize things we don’t usually think of as oxidizable, like water—which it reacts with to product hydrofluoric acid, which is in turn nasty enough that sane people avoid working with it because if you forget for one second what you’re dealing with it’s liable to dissolve your bones.

  Back in the nineteenth century, chemists used to joke that you could tell who had just discovered elemental fluorine by reading the obituary columns. But liquid fluorine and hydrofluoric acid are themselves not the worst oxidizing agents out there. Elemental fluorine may be the thuggish hit-man of the halide world, but if you torment it with chloride ions you can turn it into the chemical equivalent of Hannibal Lecter: chlorine trifluoride, an oxidizing agent so malignant that it will set fire to water and burn explosively on contact with sand, asbestos, or rocket scientists.

  Jim Benford smiled. “Now why don’t you tell him about the proposal for NAIL SPIKE?”

  “What?” Leonard looked confused for a moment. “I thought he’d be more interested in D-SLAM—”

  “Wasn’t that Project PLUTO?” I asked. I’m enough of a crazy cold war projects geek to have heard of the atomic powered cruise missile—a device that only Dr. Strangelove could have loved—from the 1960s.

  “Yes, D-SLAM was PLUTO,” said Jim. “But it’s not that interesting, unless you want a power source for a drone that can explore the atmosphere of Jupiter for years at a time. NAIL SPIKE, on the other hand—”

  “NAIL SPIKE was a CIA project.” Leonard polished off his cocktail and put the glass down on the bar, just loudly enough to get my attention. He caught my eye. I sighed, and waved at the bartender.

  “Are you supposed to be talking to me about it, then?” I asked. “Me being a foreigner, remember?” Not that I wasn’t curious, but I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about unintentionally having my stay in the US extended by a few years due to someone else’s loose lips.

  “Oh, it’s old hat.” Jim waved my question away. “We’re talking about 1970s projects here. It was declassified in the 90s, after the end of the cold war.”

>   “The CIA were into rocketry?” I couldn’t help myself.

  “After a fashion.” Our new round of drinks arrived. Leonard took a cautious sip of his. “Who was that writer friend of yours, Jim, from California…?”

  “Larry, Larry Niven. ‘Any reaction motor is a weapon of efficiency proportional to its efficiency as a rocket.’ That’s what you were thinking of?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. He was spot-on, you know. NAIL SPIKE was about building a really efficient rocket motor and then marketing it to the opposition.”

  “Wait, what?” (I can’t easily describe the experience of involuntary nasal irrigation with a lime margarita, so I won’t bother. Just try not to do it.)

  When I stopped convulsing Leonard continued: "The idea is quite simple. During the 1940s and 1950s we experimented with a number of really quite unpleasant substances before settling in the 1960s on a handful of slightly less unpleasant stuff as our propellants of choice—liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, kerosene, and solids based on powdered aluminum. Of course, there were exceptions; Titan ran on dinitrogen tetroxide and a hydrazine/UDMH mixture, for example. Hydrazine isn’t just explosive, it’s corrosive and poisonous too. There’s a reason the EPA-bullied wimps at NASA won’t use it for launch vehicles these days. Dinitrogen tetroxide is explosive and corrosive. But we more or less stopped using really nasty stuff like red fuming nitric acid—we leave that to the Russians these days.