Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  The cyborg nodded jerkily. Her fellows stood (or in one case, uncoiled) and shouldered their packs; Burya walked over to Sister Seventh’s hut and climbed inside. Presently the party moved off.

  “Not understand revolutionary sense,” commented the Critic, munching on a sweet potato as the hut bounced along the dirt track behind the detachment from the Plotsk soviet. “Sense of identity deprecated? Lagomorph Criticized for affinity to self? Nonsense! How appreciate art without sense of self?”

  Burya shrugged. “They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.” He leaned against the swaying wall of the hut. “I got so tired of trying to wake them up…”

  Sister Seventh snorted. “What you call that?” she asked, pointing through the door of the hut. Ahead of them marched a column of wildly varied cyborgs, partially augmented revolutionaries frozen halfway beyond the limitations of their former lives. At its head marched the rabbit, leading them into the forest of the partially transcended wilderness.

  Burya peered at the rabbit. “I’d call it anything it wants. It’s got a gun, hasn’t it?”

  By noon, the forest had changed beyond recognition. Some strange biological experiment had warped the vegetation. Trees and grass had exchanged leaves, so that now they walked on a field of spiny pine needles, while flat blades waved overhead; the leaves were piebald, black and green, with the glossy black spreading. Most disturbingly of all, the shrubbery seemed to be blurring at the edges, species exchanging phenotypic traits with unnatural promiscuous abandon. “What’s responsible for this?” Burya asked Sister Seventh, during one of their hourly pauses.

  The Critic shrugged. “Is nothing. Lysenkoist forestry fringe, recombinant artwork. Beware the Jabberwocky, my son. Are there only Earth native derivations in this biome?”

  “You asking me?” Rubenstein snorted. “I’m no gardener.”

  “Guesstimation implausible,” Sister Seventh replied archly. “In any event, some fringeworks are recombinant. Non human-centric manipulations of genome. Elegant structures, modified for non-purpose. This forest is Lamarckian. Nodes exchange phenotype-determinant traits, acquire useful ones.”

  “Who determines their usefulness?”

  “The Flower Show. Part of the Fringe.”

  “What a surprise,” Burya muttered.

  At the next stop, he approached the rabbit. “How far?” he demanded.

  The lagomorph sniffed at the breeze. “Fifty kilometers? Maybe more?” It looked faintly puzzled, as if the concept of distance was a difficult abstraction.

  “You said sixty kilometers this morning,” Burya pointed out, “We’ve come twenty. Are you sure? The militia doesn’t trust you, and if you keep changing your mind, I may not be able to stop them doing something stupid.”

  “I’m just a rabbit.” Ears twitched backward, swiveling to either side to listen for threats. “Know where master is, was,

  attacked by Mimes. Haven’t heard much from him since, you bet. Always know where he is, don’t know how—but can’t tell you how far. Like fucking compass in my head, mate, you understand?”

  “How long have you been a rabbit?” asked Rubenstein, an awful suspicion coming to mind.

  The rabbit looked puzzled. “I don’t rightly know. I think I once—” He stopped talking. Iron shutters came down, blocking the light behind his eyes. “No more words. Find master. Rescue!”

  “Who is your master?” Burya demanded.

  “Felix,” said the rabbit.

  “Felix… Politovsky?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe.” Rabbit twitched his ears right back and bared his teeth. “Don’t want to talk! We there tomorrow. Rescue master. Kill the Mimes.”

  Vassily looked down at the stars wheeling beneath his feet. I’m going to die, he thought, swallowing acrid bile.

  When he closed his eyes, the nausea went away a little. His head still hurt where he’d thumped it against the wall of the cabin on his way through; everything had blurred for a while, and he’d caught himself floating away on a cloud of pain. Now he had time to reflect, the pain seemed like an ironic joke; corpses didn’t hurt, did they? It told him he was still alive. When it stopped hurting—

  He relived the disaster again and again. Sauer checking everybody was suited up. “It’s just a pinhole,” someone said, and it had seemed so plausible—the woman had let some air out of her cabin to trip the decompression interlocks—and then the bright flash of the cutting cord proved him wrong. The howling maelstrom had reached out and yanked the lieutenant and the CPO right out of the ship, into a dark tunnel full of stars. Vassily had tried to catch a door handle, but the clumsy mitten hands of his emergency suit wouldn’t grip. They’d left him tumbling over and over like a spider caught in the whirlpool when a bath plug is pulled.

  Stars whirled, cold lights like daggers in the night outside his eyelids. This is it. I’m really going to die. Not going home again. Not going to arrest the spy. Not going to meet my father and tell him what I really think of him. What will the Citizen think of me?

  Vassily opened his eyes. The whirling continued; he must be spinning five or six times a minute. The emergency suit had no thrusters, and its radio had a pathetic range, just a few hundred meters—more than enough for shipboard use, perhaps enough to make a beacon if anyone came looking for him. But nobody had. He was precessing like a gyroscope; every couple of minutes, the ship swam briefly into view, a dark splinter outlined against the diamond dust of the heavens. There’d been no sign of a search party heading his way; just that golden fog of waste water spreading out around the ship, which had been over a kilometer away before he first saw it.

  It looked like a toy; an infinitely desirable toy, one he could pin all his hopes of life and love and comradeship and warmth and happiness on—one that hung forever out of reach, dangling in a cold wasteland he couldn’t cross.

  He glanced at the crude display mounted on his left wrist, watching the air dial tick down the hours left in his oxygen bottle. There was a dosimeter there, too, and this wasteland was hot, charged particles streaming through it at a rate that might suffice to prevent his mummified corpse decaying.

  Vassily shuddered. Bitter frustration seized him: Why couldn’t I do something right? he wondered. He’d thought he was doing the right thing, enlisting in the Curator’s Office, but when he’d pridefully shown his mother the commission, her face had closed like a shop front, and she’d looked away from him in that odd manner she used when he’d done something wrong but she didn’t want to chastise him for it. He’d thought he was doing the right thing, searching the engineer’s luggage, then the diplomat’s—but look where it had taken him. The ship beneath his shoes was a splinter against the dark, several kilometers away and getting farther out of reach all the time. Even his presence aboard the ship—if he was honest, he’d have done better to stay at home, wait for the ship (and the engineer) to return to New Prague, there to resume his pursuit. Only the news from Rochard’s World, the place of exile, had filled him with a curious excitement. And if he hadn’t wanted to go along, he wouldn’t be here now, spinning in a condemned man’s cell of memories.

  He tried to think of happier times, but it was difficult. School? He’d been bullied mercilessly, mocked because of who and what his father was—and was not. Any boy who bore his mother’s name was an object of mockery, but to have a criminal for a father as well, a notorious criminal, made him too easy a target. Eventually he’d pounded one bully’s face into pulp, and been caned for it, and they’d learned to avoid him, but it hadn’t stopped the whispering and sniggering in quiet corners. He’d learned to listen for that, to lie in wait after classes and beat the grins off their faces, but it hadn’t gained him friends. />
  Basic training? That was a joke. A continuation of school, only with sterner taskmasters. Then police training, and the cadet’s college. Apprenticeship to the Citizen, whom he strived to impress because he admired the stern inspector vastly; a man of blood and iron, unquestionably loyal to the Republic and everything it stood for, a spiritual father whom he’d now managed to disappoint twice.

  Vassily yawned. His bladder ached, but he didn’t dare piss— not in this suit of interconnected bubbles. The thought of drowning was somehow more terrifying than the idea of running out of air. Besides, when the air went—wasn’t this how they executed mutinous spacers, instead of hanging?

  A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless. His eyes stung; he squeezed them tightly shut against the whirling daggers of night and tried to regain control of his breathing.

  And when he opened them again, as if in answer to his prayers, he saw that he was not alone in the deep.

  JOKERS

  High in orbit above Rochard’s World, the Bouncers were stirring.

  Two kilometers long, sleek and gray, each of them dwarfed the incoming naval task force. They’d been among the first artifacts the newly arrived Festival manufactured. Most of the Bouncers drifted in parking orbits deep in the Oort cloud, awaiting enemies closing along timelike attack paths deep in the future of the Festival’s world line; but a small detachment had accompanied the Festival itself, as it plunged deep into the inner system and arrived above the destination world.

  Bouncers didn’t dream. Bouncers were barely sentient special units, tasked with the defense of the Festival against certain crude physical threats. For denial of service, decoherence attacks, and general spoofing, the more sophisticated antibodies could be relied on; for true causality-violation attacks, the Festival’s reality-maintenance crew would be awakened. But sometimes, the best defense is a big stick and a nasty smile— and that was what the Bouncers were for.

  The arrival of the New Republican task force had been noted four days earlier. The steady acceleration profiles of the incoming warships stuck out like a sore thumb; while His Majesty’s Navy thought in terms of lidar and radar and active sensors, the Festival used more subtle instruments. Localized minima in the outer system’s entropy had been noted, spoor of naked singularities, echoes of the tunneling effect that let the conventional starships jump from system to system. The failure of the incoming fleet to signal told its own story; bouncers knew what to do without being told.

  The orbiting Bouncer division began to accelerate. There were no fragile life-forms aboard these craft—just solid slabs of impure diamond and ceramic superconductors, tanks of metallic hydrogen held under pressures that would make the core of a gas giant planet seem like vacuum, and high-energy muon generators to catalyze the exotic fusion reactions that drove the ships. Also, of course, the fractal bushes that were the Bouncers’ cargo: millions of them clinging like strange vines to the long spines of the ships.

  Fusion torches providing thrust in accordance with Newtonian laws might seem quaint to the New Republican Admiralty, who had insisted on nothing but the most modern drive singularities and curved-space engines for their fleet; but unlike the Admiralty, the Festival’s Bouncers had some actual combat experience. Reaction motors had important advantages for space-to-space combat, advantages that gave an unfair edge to a canny defender; a sensible thrust-to-mass ratio for one thing, and a low degree of observability for another. Ten-billion-tonne virtual masses made singularity-drive ships incredibly ponderous: although able to accelerate at a respectable clip, they couldn’t change direction rapidly, and to the Festival, they were detectable almost out to interstellar ranges. In contrast, a gimbaled reaction motor could change thrust vector fast enough to invite structural breakup if the ship wasn’t built to withstand the stresses. And while a fusion torch seen from astern was enough to burn out sensors at a million kilometers, the exhaust stream was very directional, with little more than a vague hot spot visible from in front of a ship.

  With the much larger infrared emitter of the planet behind them, the Bouncers accelerated toward the New Republican first squadron at a bone-crushing hundred gees. Able to triangulate on the enemy by monitoring their drive emissions, the Bouncers peaked at 800 k.p.s., then shut down their torches and drifted silently, waiting for the moment of closest approach.

  The operations room of the Lord Vanek was tense and quiet.

  “Gunnery Two, ready a batch of six SEM-20s. Dial them all to one-zero-zero kilotonnes, tune the first two for maximum EMP, next three for spallation debris along main axis. Gunnery One, I want two D-4 torpedoes armed for passive launch with a one-minute motor-on delay inlined into them.”

  Captain Mirsky sat back in his chair. “Prediction?” he muttered in the direction of Commander Vulpis.

  “Holding ready, sir. A bit disturbing that we haven’t seen anything yet, but I can give you full maneuvering power within forty seconds of getting a drive signal.”

  “Good. Radar. Anything new?”

  “Humbly report nothing’s new on passive, sir.”

  “Deep joy.” They were two hours out from perigee. Mirsky had to fight to control his impatience. Tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair, he sat and waited for a sign, anything to indicate that there was life elsewhere in this empty cosmos. The fatal ping of a lidar illuminator glancing off the Lord Vanek’s stealthed hull, or the ripple of gravitomagnetic waves; anything to show that the enemy was out there, somewhere between the battle ship squadron and its destination.

  “Any thoughts, Commander Vulpis?”

  Vulpis’s eyes flickered around the fully manned stations in front of him. “I’d be a lot happier if they were making the effort to paint us. Either we’ve taken ‘em completely by surprise, or…”

  “Thank you for that thought,” Mirsky commented under his breath. “Marek!”

  “Sir!”

  “You’ve got a rifle. It’s loaded. Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”

  “Sir?” Vulpis stared at his Captain.

  “I will be in my cabin if anything happens,” Mirsky said lightly. “You have the helm, pending Commander Murametz’s or my own return. Call me at once if there’s any news.”

  Down in his stateroom, directly under the ops room, Mirsky collapsed into his chair. He sighed deeply, then poked at the dial of his phone. “Switchboard. My compliments to the Commodore and if he has a spare moment? Jolly good.” A minute later, the phonescreen dinged. “Sir!”

  “Captain.” Commodore Bauer wore the expression of a very busy, very tired manager.

  “I have a report for you on the, ah, annoyance. If you have time for it now.”

  Bauer made a steeple of his fingers. “If you can keep it short,” he said gloomily.

  “Not difficult.” Mirsky’s eyes glittered in the gaslight. “It was all the fault of my idiot of an intelligence officer. If he hadn’t managed to kill himself, I’d have him in irons.” He took a deep breath. “But he didn’t act alone. As it is, sir, in confidence, I would recommend a reprimand for my FO, Fleet Commander Murametz, if not formal proceedings—except that we are so close to the enemy that—”

  “Details, Captain. What did he do?”

  “Lieutenant Sauer exceeded his authority by attempting to draw out the Terran spy—the woman, I mean—by means of a faked trial. He somehow convinced Commander Murametz to cover him, damned error of judgment if you ask me: he had no job making a mess in diplomat territory. Anyway, he pushed too hard, and the woman panicked. Ordinarily this would be no problem, but she somehow—” He coughed into his fist.

  Bauer nodded. “I think I can guess the rest. Where is she now?”

  Mirsky shrugged. “Outside the ship, with the dockyard contractor. Missing, probably suited up, don’t k
now where they are, don’t know what in hell they thought they were doing—the Procurator’s missing too, sir, and there’s an embarrassing hole in our side where there used to be a cabin.”

  Slowly, the Commodore began to smile. “I don’t think you need waste any time searching for them, Captain. If we found them, we’d only have to throw them overboard again, what? I suppose the Procurator had a hand in this kangaroo court, didn’t he?”

  “Ah, I suppose so, sir.”

  “Well, this way we don’t have to worry about the civilians. And if they get a little sunburned during the engagement, no matter. I’m sure you’ll take care of everything that needs doing.”

  “Yes, sir!” Mirsky nodded.

  “So,” Bauer said crisply, “that’s tied down. Now, in your analysis, we should be entering the enemy’s proximity defense sphere when?”

  Mirsky paused for thought. “About two hours, sir. That’s assuming that our emcon was sufficient and the lack of active probes is a genuine indication that they don’t know we’re out here.”

  “I’m glad you added that qualifier. What’s your schedule for working up to stations?”

  “We’re ready right now, sir. That is, there are some inessential posts that won’t lock down for another hour or so, but the ops crew and black gang are already on combat watch, and gunnery is standing by the weapons. The mess is due to send around some hot food; but in principle, we’re ready for action at a moment’s notice.”

  “Very good.” Bauer paused and glanced down at his desk. Rubbed the side of his nose with one long, bony finger. Then he glanced up. “I don’t like this silence, Captain. It stinks of a trap.”

  Martin and Rachel glanced up in reflexive terror, seeking the source of the noise.