Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  We didn’t expect nails to rain out of the sky.

  Some of us looked up and saw them coming, the nails. There is only the thinnest whiff of sulfur dioxide for an atmosphere here on our little moon. But it was enough to heat up the nails with a dull blue glow as they came streaking down upon us. Those who saw the nails called out, and the rest of us turned our eyes to the heavens.

  The nails were very beautiful as they fell. The youngest children didn’t understand, and they smiled at the beautiful sight.

  The defense rocketry fired off, but the approaching bits of metal were not meteors and comets—they were not a single entity that could be broken up, dispersed. Not a single layer, not a clump. No. A steady rain. How do you blast a hole in rain?

  The rain fell on all. It fell on the Io-adapted, the space-adapted, the rich, the poor, the old, and the young. It fell on our children. It tore through all structures—houses, places of business and worship. It almost seemed alive, viperlike, seeking out life. There was no shelter.

  It fell into the volcano itself, a driving rain, and sent great plumes of sulfurous gas spewing. Huge clouds of sulfur and iron dioxide rose into the air as the nails slammed into the ground. Almost immediately, the clouds cooled, changed phases. Became liquid.

  That often happens on Io when Pele or one of the other volcanoes or geysers erupts—especially the ones that are not tapped for geothermal energy. A sulfur rain falls. For those of us who are surface-adapted, it is a pleasant, noxious thing. We love the smell of sulfur here. It’s our life bread; it is how we buy our water; it’s where we live, and how we live. We call our moon the Yellow Rose. But this sulfur rain was different.

  It mixed with the nails.

  The nails cut our flesh. They tore through our pellicles as if we were covered with parchment. They ricocheted within us, bouncing off our bones until the bones broke and the tissue was torn to shreds. And then we were hit again and again.

  Some of us hid under roofs, under ledges. These protected us for a time. We heard the nails pounding above us. We prayed that the roofs would hold.

  The nails fell and fell.

  Our prayers were not answered.

  The lucky were knocked senseless by the collapsing debris. The others ran screaming into the hard, hard rain. They fell and rose no more.

  Blood condenses, freezes almost instantly on the surface. Pools of red ice—iron and water—formed about the bodies. But this is ever-churning, ever-burning Io, and the hot spots migrate. Blood on the surface would melt, flow, recongeal, then flow again. Hot nails fell into the blood and would have boiled it away, but the sulfur rain cooled the blood. Another cycle, another circumstance of our deaths.

  Pieces of our bodies remained. Some retained animation through their grist pellicles. Arms and legs moved feebly. A child’s hand crawled toward its mother’s—the grist within knowing only the simple urges of instinct. But the energy flowed quietly away. Few were able to touch before the cold set in, and the final, everlasting death.

  Some soldiers still lived. The ones who were held in reserve deep below the surface. Some citizens still lived—those who managed to flee below into the deeper reaches of the habitat. But we could not look to the machinery; we could not keep the lid on the volcano. We could only think of surviving this instant, then the next.

  And so Pele blew. After all the years of being harnessed, the regulators overloaded, the power grid went off-line, and there was nothing to channel the volcano’s fury.

  And, with a great pyroclastic boom, Pele erupted. The sulfur flowed. Down the sides. Into the habitat entrances, broken open by the nail rain, that led underground. That led into our last places of refuge.

  The sulfur found us there and burnt us. It choked our screams. It burnt us up. We died clawing at our arms and faces, in agony.

  Somehow, the merci was also jammed. Our free converts were cut off from outside contact and could not copy themselves elsewhere. When the grist matrix was destroyed, they had nowhere to go. We all died together.

  Dying inside the Yellow Rose.

  A tattered, battered few had crawled under rocky ledges on the surface. Some crews who were working outside, in the highlands above the habitat and geothermal plant. A few soldiers on patrol. Semisentient programs contained within pieces of equipment. Not a single fully conscious free convert survived.

  Two thousand five hundred twenty-two people. They were the only ones who lived. The rest of us died.

  Two hundred fifty-seven thousand people. Men, women, children.

  And then, after forever, the rain stopped falling. The last nails fell into a dead surface. There was a respite. Pele, as if sensing that its work of destruction was over, became dormant, with only a few rumblings to betray that it still seethed within. An hour passed before those of us in the highlands were convinced the rain was over.

  We emerged to the devastation. Our families were dead. Our homes were destroyed. Nothing remained.

  “Look up! Look up! It’s starting again,” one of us said.

  Indeed, in the sky, there were black specks. We ran for cover. We crawled back under the rocks. But these specks were not the rain. They were ships—ships full of DIED soldiers. One landed nearby, and troops bristling with guns disgorged. They surrounded our soldiers, who quickly threw down their weapons. They surrounded us all.

  We looked at them with blank, empty eyes.

  They lowered their guns. They gazed at us in wonder.

  We didn’t even try to escape. Where was there to go? We stumbled. We sat down on the ground. Those of us who survived were all Io-adapted. We wept as Ionians do. We wept tears that fell, then evaporated near to the surface—that curled away in gaseous wisps.

  We wept yellow, sulfur tears.

  Eight

  Leo Sherman felt like a traitor, but there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t even talk to anyone.

  So far as his mission went, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for Leo that Met forces had taken Io. He’d been part of the action—had shot at Federal Army forces. Hell, face it—he’d killed a man.

  Yet, even though this was a major setback for the fremden forces, he was in the Jupiter system, and near the front. He was in the perfect position to make his run across the lines and deliver the cargo ensconced in his chest.

  The archived copy of Amés’s chief of intelligence.

  I have opportunity and motive enough, Leo thought. Now I have to scout out the means.

  If the intelligence knowledge within the urn was as important as he believed it to be, it would save thousands, maybe millions, of lives. But there was one life it would not save—the man Leo had blasted out of existence with his Auger pistol in the storming of the Capacitor. The man, of course, would not have hesitated to kill Leo. Leo was wearing the uniform of the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division, after all. He was identified as the enemy.

  But I know who I am, thought Leo. Don’t I? I’m partisan. I’m fremden. Have to make sure this Aschenbach persona doesn’t take too much control of me. Wish I could talk to Jill about this. She’s killed a lot of people, I guess. Or even the kid, Aubry; she brought out the best in me. Or, hell, why not Folsom? If only that goddamn extremely competent, hot babe of a sergeant wouldn’t blow my head off the moment I confessed! Ah, well. Jill. Dory Folsom. I’m a complete sucker for jock girls.

  Leo smiled, lay back in his bunk, and tried to think about women in order to drift off to sleep. It didn’t work for long. He tossed and turned. He remembered the blank face of the man he’d killed, just before the soldier sizzled away from Leo’s positronic bolt.

  The only way I can make it mean anything that I’ve killed that guy is to go ahead with my mission, Leo thought. Cross the lines. Deliver the merchandise. Wallowing in sorrow won’t play.

  Finally, he fell into a troubled sleep, only to wake two hours later. The platoon was bugging out, hunting down remnants of the fremden force who were thought to be hiding in a nearby gorge.

  S
ince the DIED victory of a week earlier, Leo’s platoon was stationed at the Capacitor. They had been part of the mop-up operation.

  We literally mopped up poor Llosa, Leo thought. He remembered the fury with which Folsom had slain Llosa’s attacker—a grist-coated knife in the back, then cut his neck almost in two as he fell. No reprieve from that kind of injury, no matter how good your internal repair systems were. Wonder who the kid was? He was on my side. Don’t forget that. I’m for the guys who are shooting at me.

  God, your head could get pretty mixed up when you were a spy.

  After that, they’d emptied the gristlock. They’d fed the free converts into the transfer gate and flashed them all to Mars. Poor souls. Most people in the Met had no idea what was going on at Silicon Valley, but the partisans had found out the truth. Leo knew the gate technicians were sending these people to a concentration camp for sentient computer programs—a camp which they’d probably never survive.

  He could try to sabotage the gate mechanism. Save the ten thousand free converts in some handy nearby grist supercomplex. Sure. He could have pretended to be shooting at the fremden resistance. Sure, sure. That kind of shit worked fine in merci thrillers. It would get him found out and killed here in real life. He’d be dead already.

  Instead, Leo was covered with sulfur dust, tromping in near vacuum down a lifeless valley. At least he hoped it was lifeless. He poked cautiously ahead along with his platoon as they made their way down a tributary to the deep gorge they’d been assigned to sweep for the remaining enemy. Like Earth’s moon, one side of Io perpetually faced Jupiter. The Capacitor was on the north pole, and Jupiter took up half the sky to the southwest. The valley they were probing was to the southeast, however, and as they went deeper into it, the great face of Jupiter gradually “set” behind them.

  The platoon had lost six people in the fighting, including Lieutenant Chatroom. Now there were only the sorry four of them left to do a job that required, by Leo’s estimate, at least sixteen. The new lieutenant, Tae—just arrived from West Point on Earth—had blithely ordered them out anyway. Folsom had smiled grimly and said, “Yes, sir,” and here they all were: ambush bait.

  Whatever the other moral ambiguities of war, Leo figured that, given the chance, he would shoot Lieutenant Tae without compunction.

  Surf 1, Corporal Alliance, was at point with all sensors forward. Even so, he almost missed the zip net. Folsom was the one who noticed it. Leo wasn’t sure how she knew. It was completely invisible to him. The woman had a powerful survivor’s instinct.

  “Well, well,” said Folsom. “What have we here?” She was speaking in virtual, through the vinculum. Io’s atmosphere was nearly nonexistent. No sound carried there.

  The platoon held up. Suddenly Alliance’s readouts, to which they were all attuned, went code red, and indicated the outlines of the zip net. “Shit,” said the corporal. “I would have walked right into that.”

  “You can’t always trust e-m to detect these things quickly,” said Folsom. “Remember, they’re half a molecule thick.”

  Lieutenant Tae came up from the rear.

  “It’s covering the whole valley floor. Goes up twenty, thirty meters,” Folsom told him.

  “Can’t we hop over it with our attitude rockets?”

  “We could,” said Folsom. “But there might be something nastier up there.” She pointed toward some ominously overhanging ledges several hundred feet above them.

  Before anyone could say another word, a single Auger pistol blast, and then a burst of bullets rained down among them. The platoon scrambled for cover. Leo felt himself yanked down. He rolled under the overhang of a boulder to find himself next to Folsom. Another spray of bullets sent up yellow puffs from the ground. They made no sound.

  “They’re low on ammo,” Folsom said. “No grenades. A single antimatter blast, then nothing else but bullets, Lieutenant. Do you copy that?” No answer. “Lieutenant Tae?”

  Leo looked out as best he could from under the boulder. Oh shit. Traces of blood had congealed and frozen around the tiny zip-net strands, and now the net was as plain as a spider’s web—glinting a lustrous red in the wan light of the canyon. The blood was Lieutenant Tae’s. And there was Tae himself. In several pieces. He’d run right into the zip net and cut himself to ribbons.

  Folsom followed Leo’s gaze. “Fuck,” she said. “Not another one.”

  “Sliced and diced,” Leo muttered. “Hell of a way to go.”

  “Those bastards planned to drive us all into that net,” said Folsom. “Well, I’ve about had enough of this bullshit.” She straightened both her arms at the elbow, cocking them into rifle stock mode, then rolled out quickly and fired in the general direction the bullets had come from. She quickly rolled back under. “I think I got a lock on their position. Surf 1, you still with us?”

  Alliance answered in a shaky voice. “Yeah, Sarge. I’m hiding behind a rock, but I’m feeling kind of exposed on top.”

  “We’ve got to triangulate. Check your readouts.”

  “I’m…I don’t know if I’m able to…”

  “Alliance, pull yourself together and check those readouts.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Op 1, you there?”

  No answer.

  So it was just Leo, Folsom, and Alliance.

  “Surf 1?”

  “Got it! You should have the coordinates.”

  “Me? Us. We’re all going to fire at once. Then we’re going to hightail it down this canyon for home, full rocket assist. Got it?”

  Leo and Alliance answered in unison. “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “All right. Ready. Aim.” They rolled out from under their rock. “Fire!”

  The bugout down the canyon valley was a blur of running, flying, banging into rocks, picking himself up, gathering speed, then rocketing himself farther along until he had to set down and run again in order to turn a corner. Folsom brought up the rear, returning fire. There was a reverberating explosion. Leo risked a glance back and saw that it was just him and Folsom now.

  “Surf 1?” he gasped.

  “I guess they had a grenade after all,” said Folsom with disgust. “Move it!”

  They ran and rocketed onward until they could see the orange-white face of Jupiter rising before them. Only then did they know that they were out of the valley at last.

  Thank God, thought Leo when they were finally back on the plains of Io. Thank God I’m not dead.

  And thank God that Amés has won the battle, but not the war.

  PART THREE

  TRANSFINITE GESTURE

  January to April, Year 3017, E-standard

  One

  From

  Cryptographic Man

  Secret Code and the Genesis of Modern Individuality

  By Andre Sud, D. Div, Triton

  If two people want to use a secret code to communicate, they have to depend on a third person to deliver the key to the code they will use. The third “person” can be a system, like the merci, or the old-time telephone grid on Earth—but that system is maintained by people. Those are the people who can grab the key as it flows through and make a copy. History shows that, sooner or later, they will always try to steal the key. An ax was only the physical means by which Mary Queen of Scots was executed. What really cut off her head was the sharp edge of a broken code.

  Take an example. Say Alice wants to tell secret agent Bob to assassinate Chief Cardinal Icebreak III. She has a series of instructions that she has to deliver over time. She can’t visit or communicate with Bob publicly, because to do so will compromise his sleeper status—and then the jig will be up before the Cardinal is whacked. The only solution is to send the key to the coded message separately, through a third party.

  Governments in the past spent vast resources on arranging ways to securely deliver keys. In the precomputer days of Vigenere squares and substitution ciphers, special messengers had to deliver the secret word necessary to transpose the text. If you are the king, whisperi
ng your favorite key word to your ambassador when he is back in the kingdom for instructions is all well and good, but once he’s in foreign lands, a king is asking for catastrophe if he relies on the same key for every message.

  In what was called the Second World War in the twentieth century on Earth, the problem of getting daily keys to the operators of the complex Enigma machines was a chore that taxed even the famously efficient German army. The German fleet of submarines, called U-boats, which stayed at sea for extended periods, were a gigantic headache for German high command to keep up-to-date. (In fact, the German Third Reich hastened its own downfall when the Enigma machines fell into the possession of the Allied powers opposing them—but that’s another story.)

  The problem of key distribution has flummoxed cryptographers since the first coded messages. How do you get the key to decode a secret message to your intended recipient without the key itself being intercepted and employed by your enemy to crack the message? If you use a different keypad for every message and every recipient, the problem is solved. But as soon as you move beyond one message needing to be sent to one person at one particular time, you run into a logistical problem that even a network as vast as the merci cannot solve. When you have an army of soldiers, or even an army of spies, single-pad keys are impossible to use in practice.

  But wait! Isn’t there a simple way around the key distribution problem? To go back to Alice the Puppetmaster and Bob the Cardinal killer…

  Say Alice sends Bob the secret message without sending him her key. Bob doesn’t bother attempting to read the message, knowing the attempt would be futile. Instead, Bob double-encodes the message himself, using his own key, and sends it back to Alice. The message is now double-encrypted. Couldn’t Alice take off her encryption, leaving on Bob’s, then send the message back to Bob? He can then use his own key to decode his encryption and read the message, right?

  It won’t work, of course. Imagine that Alice’s original message is written on a piece of paper inside a small locked box (her encryption) that is inside Bob’s larger locked steamer trunk (Bob’s encryption). She can’t get to her box to unlock it. It’s locked inside Bob’s trunk. This is the classic “last on, first off” problem that for centuries was taken as a fundamental truth of cryptography. You had to find a secure way of exchanging a key.