Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  “Kill them all, God will know his own,” Sister Seventh commented mockingly as she turned the doorway to face the grisly row. “Not is what their nest father-mother’s said in times gone before?”

  Burya Rubenstein shivered with cold as the bird-legged hut strode along the road from Novy Petrograd. It was a chilly morning, and the fresh air was overlaid with a tantalizingly familiar odor, halfway between the brimstone crackle of gunpowder and something spicy-sweet. No smell of roast pork: they’d burned the monastery after killing the monks, not before. “Who did this?” he asked, sounding much calmer than he felt.

  “You-know-who,” said the Critic. “Linger not thisways: understand Fringe performers hereabout more so deranged than citywise. Mimes and firewalker bushbabies. Very dangerous.”

  “Did they—” Burya swallowed. He couldn’t look away from the fringe on the hilltop. He was no friend of the clergy, but this festival of excess far outstripped anything he could have condoned. “Was it the Fringe?”

  Sister Seventh cocked her head on one side and chomped her walrus tusks at the air. “Not,” she declared. “This is human work. But headlaunchers have herewise been seeding corpses with further life. Expect resurrection imminently, if not consensually.”

  “Headlaunchers?”

  “Fringeoids with fireworks. Seed brainpan, cannibalize corpus, upload and launch map containing mindseeds to join Festival in orbit.”

  Bury a peered at the row of crosses. One of them had no skull, and the top of the crucifix was charred. ‘“M going to be sick—”

  He just made it to the edge of the hut in time. Sister Seventh made it kneel while he hung head down over the edge, retching and dry-heaving on the muddy verge below.

  “Ready to continue? Food needed?”

  “No. Something to drink. Something stiff.” One corner of the hut was stocked with a pyramid of canned foodstuffs and bottles. Sister Seventh was only passingly familiar with human idiom; she picked up a large tin of pineapple chunks, casually bit a hole in it, and poured it into the empty can that Burya had been using as a cup for the past day. He took it silently, then topped it up with schnapps from his hip flask. The hut lurched slightly as it stood up. He leaned against the wall and threw back the drink in one swallow.

  “Where are you taking me now?” he asked, pale and still shivering with something deeper than a mere chill.

  “To Criticize the culprits. This is not art.” Sister Seventh bared her fangs at the hillside in an angry gape. “No esthetics! Zip plausibility! Pas de preservatives!”

  Rubenstein slid down the wall of the hut, collapsing in a heap against the pile of provisions. Utter despair filled him. When Sister Seventh began alliterating she could go on for hours without making any particular sense.

  “Is it anyone in particular this time? Or are you just trying to bore me to death?”

  The huge mole-rat whirled to face him, breath hissing between her teeth. For a moment he flinched, seeing grinning angry death in her eyes. Then the fire dimmed back to her usual glare of cynical amusement. “Critics know who did this thing,” she rasped. “Come judge, come Criticize.”

  The walking hut marched on, carrying them away from the execution ground. Unseen from the vestibule, one of the crucified monk’s habits began to smolder. His skull exploded with a gout of blue flame and a loud bang as something the size of a fist flew up from it, a glaring white shock contrail streaming behind. One more monk’s mind—or what had been left of it after a day of crucifixion, by the time the headlaunch seed got to it—was on its way into orbit, to meet the Festival datavores.

  The hut walked all day, passing miracles, wonders, and abominations on every side. Two thistledown geodesic spheres floated by overhead like glistening diadems a kilometer in diameter, lofted by the thermal expansion of their own trapped, sun-heated air. (Ascended peasants, their minds expanded with strange prostheses, looked down from their communal eyrie at the ground dwellers below. Some of their children were already growing feathers.) Around another hill, the hut marched across a spun-silver suspension bridge that crossed a gorge that had not been there a month before—a gorge deep enough that the air in its depths glowed with a ruddy heat, the floor obscured by a permanent Venusian fog. A rhythmic thudding of infernal machinery echoed up from the depths. Once, a swarm of dinner-plate-sized, solar-powered silicon butterflies blitzed past, zapping and sputtering and stealing any stray electrical cabling and discrete components in their path: a predatory Stuka the size of an eagle followed them, occasionally screaming down in a dive that ended with one of their number crumpled and shredded in the claws sprouting from its wheel fairings. “Deep singularity,” Sister Seventh commented gnomically. “Machines live and breed. Cornucopia evolution.”

  “I don’t understand. What caused this?”

  “Emergent property of complex infocology. Life expands to fill environmental niches. Now, machines reproduce and spawn as Festival maximizes entropy, devolves into way station.”

  “Devolves into—” He stared at the Critic. “You mean this is only a temporary condition?”

  Sister Seventh looked at him placidly. “What made you think otherwise?”

  “But—” Burya looked around. Looked at the uncared-for fields, already tending toward the state of weed banks, at the burned-out villages and strange artifacts they were passing. “Nobody is prepared for that,” he said weakly. “We thought it would last!”

  “Some will prepare,” said the Critic. “Cornucopiae breed. But Festival moves on, flower blossoming in light of star before next trip across cold, dark desert.”

  Very early the next day, they came within sight of Plotsk. Before the Festival incursion, Plotsk had been a sleepy gingerbread market town of some fifty thousand souls, home to a regional police fortress, a jail, two cathedrals, a museum, and a zeppelin port. It had also been the northernmost railhead on the planet, and a departure point for barges heading north to the farms that dotted the steppes halfway to the Boreal Ocean.

  Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral. Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half gunpowder and half orchids, was back again. Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deeply. “One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bush-bot baby uploads and cyborg militia. Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse.”

  “What are you talking about!” Burya sat on the edge of the pile of smelly blankets from which the Critic had fashioned her nest.

  “Is gone nanostructure crazy,” she said happily. “Civilization! Freedom, Justice, and the American Way!”

  “What’s a merkin way?” Burya asked, peeling open a fat garlic bratwurst and, with the aid of an encrusted penknife, chopping large chunks off it and stuffing them into his mouth. His beard itched ferociously, he hadn’t bathed in days, and worst of all, he felt he was beginning to understand Sister Seventh. (Nobody should have to understand a Critic; it was cruel and unusual punishment.)

  A bright green glare flashed on above them, shining starkly in through the doorway and lighting up the dingy corners of the hut. “Attention! You have entered a quarantined area! Identify yourselves immediately!” A deep bass humming shook Burya to his bones. He cringed and blinked, dropping his breakfast sausage.

  “Why not you answer them?” Sister Seventh asked, unreasonably calmly.

  “Answer them?”

  “ATTENTION! Thirty seconds to comply!”

  The hut shook. Burya stumbled, treading on the wurst. Losing his temper, he lurched toward the doorway. “Stop that racket at once!” he yelled, waving a fist in the air. “Can’t a man eat his breakfast in peace without you interfering, you odious rascals? Cultureless imbeciles, may the Duke’s whore be taken short and piss in your drawers by mistake!”


  The light cut out abruptly. “Oops, sorry,” said the huge voice. Then in more moderate tones, “Is that you, Comrade Rubenstein?”

  Burya gaped up at the hovering emerald diamond. Then he looked down. Standing in the road before him was one of Timoshevski’s guards—but not as Burya had known him back in Novy Petrograd.

  Rachel sat on her bunk, tense and nervous. Ignoring the banging and clattering and occasional disturbing bumps from the rear bulkhead, she tried desperately to clear her head. She had a number of hard decisions to make—and if she took the wrong one, Martin would die, for sure, and more than that, she might die with him. Or worse, she might be prematurely bugging out, throwing away any chance of fulfilling her real mission. Which made it all the harder for her to think straight, without worrying.

  Thirty minutes ago an able flyer had rapped on her door. She’d hastily buttoned her tunic and opened it. “Lieutenant Sauer sends his compliments, ma’am, and says to remind you that the court-martial convenes this afternoon at 1400.”

  She’d blinked stupidly. “What court-martial?”

  The flyer looked nonplussed. “I don’t know, ma’am. He just told me to tell you—”

  “That’s quite alright. Go away.”

  He’d gone, and she’d hurriedly pulled her boots on, run a comb through her hair, and gone in search of someone who knew.

  Commander Murametz was in the officers’ wardroom, drinking a glass of tea. “What’s all this about a court-martial?” she demanded.

  He’d stared at her, poker-faced. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just that engineer who’s under arrest. Can’t have him aboard when we go into battle, so the old man scheduled a hearing for this afternoon, get the business out of the way.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked icily.

  “Can’t go executing a man without a fair trial first,” Ilya said, barely bothering to conceal his contempt. He rapped his glass down next to the samovar. “Trial’s in this very room, this afternoon. Be seeing you.”

  The next thing she knew she was back in her cabin. She couldn’t remember getting there; she felt cold and sick. They want to kill Martin, she realized. Because they can’t get at me any other way. She cursed herself for a fool. Who was behind it, how many enemies had she racked up? Was it the Admiral? (Doubtful, he didn’t need the formality of a trial if he wanted to have someone shot.) Or Ilya—yes, there was someone who’d taken against her. Or the kid spook, the wet-behind-the-ears secret policeman? Or maybe the Captain? She shook her head. Someone had decided to get her, and there were no secrets aboard the ship; however discreet she and Martin had thought they’d been, someone had noticed.

  The cold emptiness in her stomach congealed into a knot of tension. This whole voyage was turning into a fiasco. With what she’d learned from Martin—including his mission— there was no way the Navy could make a success of it; in fact, they’d probably all be killed. Her own role as a negotiator was pointless. You negotiate with human beings, not with creatures who are to humans as humans are to dogs and cats. (Or machines, soft predictable machines that come apart easily when you try to examine them but won’t fit back together again.)

  Staying on was useless, it wouldn’t help her deliver the package for George Cho, and as for Martin—

  Rachel realized she had no intention of leaving him behind. With the realization came a sense of relief, because it left her only one course of action. She leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Luggage: open sesame. Plan Titanic. You have three hours and ten minutes. Get started.” Now all she had to do was work out how to get him from the kangaroo court in the wardroom to her cabin; a different, but not necessarily harder task than springing him from the brig.

  The trunk silently rolled forward, out from under her bunk, and its lid hinged back. She tapped away at the controls for a minute. A panel opened, and she pulled out a reel of flexible hose. That went onto the cold-water tap on her tiny sink. A longer and fatter hose with a spherical blob on the end got fed down the toilet, a colonoscopy probing the bowels of the ship’s waste plumbing circuit. The chest began to hum, expelling pulses of viscous white liquid into the toilet tube. Thin filaments of something like plastic began to creep back up the bowl of the toilet, forming a tight seal around the hose; a smell of burning leaked into the room, gunpowder and molasses and a whiff of shit. Rachel checked a status indicator on the trunk; satisfied, she picked up her gloves, cap, anything else she would need—men checked the indicator again, and hastily left the room.

  The toilet rumbled faintly, and pinged with the sound of expanding metal pipework. The vent pipe grew hot; steam began to hiss from the effluent tube, and was silenced rapidly by a new growth of spiderweb stuff. An overhead ionization alarm tripped, but Rachel had unplugged it as soon as she arrived in her cabin. The radiation warning on the luggage blinked, unseen, in the increasingly hot room. The diplomatic lifeboat was beginning to inflate.

  “Don't worry son. It’ll work.” Sauer slapped Procurator Muller on the back.

  Vassily forced a wan smile. “I hope so, sir. I’ve never attended a court-martial before.”

  “Well.” Sauer considered his words carefully. “Just think of this as an educational experience. And our best opportunity to nail the bitch legally…”

  Truth be told, Sauer felt less confident than he was letting on. This whole exercise was more than slightly unauthorized; it exceeded his authority as ship’s security officer, and without the active support of Commander Murametz, first officer, he wouldn’t have dared proceed with it. He certainly didn’t have the legal authority to convene a court-martial on his own initiative in the presence of superior officers, much less to try a civilian contractor on a capital charge. What he did have was a remit to root out subversion by any means necessary, including authorized deception, and a first officer willing to sign on the dotted line. Not to mention an institutional enthusiasm to show the Curator’s agent up for the horse’s ass that he was.

  They were short of time. Since coming out of their jump on the edge of the inner system, the heavy squadron had been running under total radio silence at a constant ten gees, the heavy acceleration compensated for by the space-time-warping properties of their drive singularities. (Ten gees, without compensation, would be enough to make a prone man black out; bone-splintering, lung-crushing acceleration.) There had apparently been some sort of navigation error, a really bad one which had the admiral’s staff storming about in a black fury for days, but it hadn’t betrayed them to the enemy, which was the main thing.

  Some days ago, the squadron had flipped end over end and executed a deceleration sequence to slow them down to 100 k.p.s. relative to Rochard’s World. In the early hours of this morning, they had reached engagement velocity; they would drift the last thirty light-seconds, resuming acceleration (and increasing their visibility) only within active radar range of the enemy. Right now, they were about two million kilometers out. Some time around midnight, shipboard time, they would begin their closest approach to the planet, go to full power, and engage the enemy ships—assuming they were willing to come out and fight. (If they didn’t, then the cowards had conceded control of the low orbital zone to the New Republic, tantamount to abandoning their ground forces.) In any event, any action against the UN inspector had to be completed before evening, when the ship would lock down for battle stations— assuming they didn’t run into anything before then.

  In Sauer’s view, it was a near miracle that Ilya had agreed to join in this deception. He could easily have scuppered it, or referred it to Captain Mirsky, which would have amounted to the same thing. This close to a major engagement, just detaching himself plus a couple of other officers who didn’t have active duty stations to prepare was enough of a wonderment to startle him.

  Sauer walked up to the table at the front of the room and sat down. It was actually the officer’s dining table, decked out in a white tablecloth for the occasion, weighted down with leather-bound tomes that contained the complete letter of
the Imperial Articles of War. Two other officers followed him; Dr. Hertz, the ship’s surgeon, and Lieutenant Commander Vulpis, the relativist. They looked suitably serious. Sauer cleared his throat. “Court will come to order,” he intoned. “Bring in the accused.”

  The other door opened. Two ratings marched in, escorting Martin Springfield who, being hobbled and handcuffed, moved rather slowly. Behind them, a door banged. “Ah, er, yes. Please state your name for the court.”

  Martin looked around. His expression was pale but collected. “What?” he said.

  “Please state your name.”

  “Martin Springfield.”

  Lieutenant Sauer made a note on his blotter. Irritated, he realized that his pen held no ink; no matter. This wasn’t an affair that called for written records. “You are a civilian, subject of the United Nations of Earth. Is that correct?”

  A look of irritation crept over Martin’s face. “No it bloody isn’t!” he said. “I keep telling you people, the UN is not a government! I’m affiliated to Pinkertons for purposes of legislation and insurance; that means I obey their rules and they protect me against infringers. But I’ve got a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force which, I believe, covers situations like this one. I’ve also got agreements with half a dozen other quasi-governmental organizations, but none of them is entitled to claim sovereignty over me—I’m not a slave!”

  Dr. Hertz turned his head and looked pointedly at Sauer; his pince-nez glinted beneath the harsh glare of the tungsten lamps. Sauer snorted. “Let it be entered that the accused is a subject of the United Nations of Earth,” he intoned.

  “No he isn’t.” Heads turned. While Martin had been speaking, Rachel Mansour had slipped in through a side door. Her garb was even more scandalous than usual; a skintight white leotard worn beneath various items of padding and a bulky waistcoat resembling a flak jacket. Almost like a space suit liner, Sauer noted, puzzled. “The United Nations is not a—”