Scratch Monkey (35 page)

"No."

The face began to tear, from the top down. The whiteness behind it was not a skull. It grinned at her, a moustache of worms twisting around and about it's mouth -- a circle of concentric rings of teeth, like a lamprey's. Evidently the tapeworm had not yet learned to program a video special effects unit.

"I want you," said the tapeworm.

"Well you can't have me." Oshi turned aside, muting the sound: "Bronstein. How soon can we launch?"

"It's premature but I can give you a window in one-twenty-four seconds. Is that soon enough?"

"Does that go for the entire fleet?"

"Are you --" Trotsky froze for an instant. "Ack, confirmed. All follower craft are at the same status level. It's going to be crowded, but they'll follow us out at three second intervals. We will be two thousand seven hundred seconds late for final rendezvous if we launch now, but I can coordinate and the last ship will depart in two ninety three seconds. Is that acceptable?"

Oshi felt her cheek twitch. "It better be," she confirmed.

"Good. Then shut up and leave me to it!" The AI vanished in a multicolour smear of optical static, leaving a burst of countdown indicators on-screen.

"Bomb, talk to me."

"I hear you." The voice was a muted crackle, low bandwidth comms over an encrypted channel. No image accompanied the voice.

"What's your status?"

"Ready. Interlocks one, two, and three active. Self-test green."

"Interlock one, go."

"Acknowledged. Password?"

"Hedgehog."

"Acknowledged. I am arming. Withdrawing safety interlock. I am armed."

Oshi glanced back at the screen with the tapeworm on it.
If it gets into the axial tube before the bomb is ready
-- she shuddered. She hated nukes: after that burning sky over Dragulic she'd been plagued by nightmares, had needed therapy to get over it. The thing still gave her the creeps, but it was the only way to be certain -- now that the worm had turned into something smarter and deadlier than the simple parasite it had been designed as.

"I love you," crooned the tapeworm: "come sleep with me in fields of azure ..."

"Bomb: interlock two, go."

"Acknowledged. Password?"

"Miramor."

"Acknowledged. Polonium trigger inserted. Firing circuits armed. I am ready to die for king and country."

Whoever had designed the bomb's control pack had a warped sense of humour, Oshi reflected. "Accept new yield setting. I want you to give maximum blast effect, whatever you can manage."

"Acknowledged. Yield increased to four megatons. Confirm?"

"Deny!" Oshi said hastily.
Shit, what was I thinking of?
"Set eighty kilotons." Four megatons would shred the fleet before it had time to get clear. She was going to set off a nuke in the axial redoubt, to clear the tapeworm out for good. There wouldn't be much of a blast, but the spallation fragments would be expelled fast. In space, there was no air to slow shrapnel: some of it would probably be blasted out at well above solar escape velocity.

"
Eighty
kilotons, acknowledged."

There were strange humming noises in the framework of the ship: pumps spooling up and down in test sequences, shock absorbers puffing themselves up and testing strain gauges. The freighter was alive, like a plant or a Von Neumann machine if not an animal. Oshi was distracted by it for a moment:
here I am, sitting in the stomach of a great machine about to take flight and it's messy. Mechanical farts, electronic belches. Just like a body! As if sophisticated structure requires a certain softness ...

"Will you still love me, will you stil love me, when I'm sixty four?" the tapeworm sang to her.

There was a barely audible buzz that set her teeth on edge. The faint docking bay lights went completely dark. The
Bronstein
was sucking electrical power out of what was left of the colony grid, bootstrapping its muon-catalysis cold fusion reactor into life. The reactor was cool only by virtue of its lack of a need for massive plasma containment circuits; it took a lot of power to ignite it.

T minus One Hundred Seconds
, Trotsky remarked, sending glowing green letters scudding across the screen. The docking bay lights stayed dark, but a tracery of red, blue and green navigation beacons sparked on. The reactor was on-stream now, feeding boiling nitrogen through refrigeration coils and pumps to produce electricity cleanly. Oshi waited, felt her guts tighten up slowly into a little ball just below her ribs. The anticipation of launch. Unseen scaffolding was retracting into the hull of the colony from around the ship, leaving it isolated and free. It bulged like a barnacle on the whale's flank of the docking bay end-wall.

A thought struck her. "Bomb. You still online?"

"Yo, boss!"

"What's in your vicinity? What do your perimeter traps show?" she asked. It occured to her that maybe if the tapeworm
had
figured out how to use a video mixer it would be smart enough to realise that this was its last chance to lure her out. So if it could subvert her unencrypted data channels, creep into the axis and masquerade as thin air before her video eyes ...

T minus Fifty Seconds
. The screen lit up in an eye-burning shade of turquoise. "No entities proximate," reported the bomb.

"Are you sure? Cancel that. Send me a slow-scan signal from your number two camera. Full encryption, no shortcuts."

A window appeared next to the tapeworm's singing ensemble. (A chorus line of fishnet-stockinged legs did the high-kick behind it, dissolved back into a ropy mass of coils ...) The window filled in slowly, scanning progressively finer detail into the picture as the bomb crammed compressed video elements down a low-bandwidth voice link. The view along the axial tube was dizzying. Service entrances outlined with blinking amber lights converged in the distance, vanishing into a perspective-point.

Something moved in the tube.

"Trotsky? I think you ought to launch
now
--" she began. "Bomb: interlock three, go. Password: Hree. Countdown: three hundred seconds. I tell you three times."

"Acknowledged -- "

Something writhed in the distance, growing rapidly larger.
It's broken in!
she realised, stomach flipping in cold fear. Maybe it burned through the far end. Or maybe she'd missed an airlock. The other monitors showed no signs of the incursion.

" -- Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name, what was puzzling you was the nature of my game!" sang the tapeworm. Bundles of fat white coils spun dreamily along the axial tube. They looked big enough to hold down a freighter. Some of them sprouted arms, carrying esoteric equipment: ominous cannisters and something that looked like a thermal lance.

T minus Ten Seconds
, warned Trotsky. "Launch cycle on automatic." Oshi blinked back her life support diagnostics, flickering behind one eyelid. The vibrations in the hull grew to a roar as the big fuel pumps kicked in, shunting thousands of litres of methane slurry past heat exchangers. Oshi consigned her soul to the mercy of the god of rocket propulsion.

"-- I'm a man of wealth and taste --" the tapeworm assured her
a capella
, its image growing in the bomb's eye. Then the screens went blank.

Umbilicals are go. Fuel lines are go. Parasite systems are go. Telemetry circuits are go. Ullage rails are go. T minus two seconds. All systems are go for launch.

The ullage rails powered up, great cam-driven springs that booted the ship clear of the launch pad in a push that settled the fuel in its tanks. The ship kicked away from the docking bay, jolting Oshi back in her web. Turbines screamed as a deluge of fuel sucked through them, bearings brought to white heat by the speed of their rotation. Laser light blasted into the mixture, flash-heating it into a plasma almost instantly: magnetic fields channelled it out of the tail of the ship. As the rocket motor lit, a terrible white glare etched shadows across the walls of the bay. Ceramic blast deflectors glowed cherry red behind the departing ship as a hurricane of tenuous gas raged through the huge chamber. The other ships rocked in the backwash as they powered up to follow the
Bronstein
out into space.

A gentle pressure pushed Oshi back into her web. The ship was accelerating at less than a third of a gee. The initial burn was scheduled to last for only a minute -- it drained fuel at a prodigious rate -- but in that time it would push the
Bronstein
until it was moving away from the colony at more than two thousand kilometers per hour. She glanced up at the smart screen and was surprised to see Leon beaming back at her, an expression of triumph squeezed into his pinched face. "No problems!" he announced triumphantly. "All systems functioning perfectly. Orbital corrections will be necessary one megasecond before we reach the primary rendezvous. The launch was successful, a complete vindication of the ideological soundness of relying on autonomous extensions of the proletariat."

Oshi breathed a shuddering sigh of relief and kept her political opinions to herself. "Give me a rear view," she said.

The screen flickered to an external view. The end-wall of the docking bay was huge beyond understanding: the
Bronstein
might as well have been a flea jumping for its life from an elephant. The huge grey disk of the docking bay filled the screen, rimmed with the absolute blackness of space. A tiny circle at the core shone with a welcome white light: a patch a third of the way out to one side glowed a dull cherry red.

There was a sudden flare of light to one side, violet-hot, surrounded by a reddish corona: a small black dot eclipsed the heart of the flare. It lit up the entire end wall, casting sharp shadows from the protruding spires of the other ships. "
Tojo
is launching," observed Trotsky. Another pinprick glare burst forth, began to move away from the far side of the disk. "
Churchill
is launching." More nuclear flares torched off. "Fleet operations control protocol is active.
Pol Pot
,
Ho Chi Minh
and
Rosa Luxemburg
are launching. C-cubed-I-squared protocol established. Fleet control is fully operational. Launch coordination is in effect."

The gentle thrust behind Oshi's back cut off. The disk of the end wall was receding visibly. She made a rough guess at its diameter:
we must be ten kilometres away already, pulling more than two thousand kilometers per hour relative to it.
It left her feeling curiously numb.
Will you still love me, will you still love me, when I'm sixty four?
She wondered if tapeworms had feelings, or just hunger. And if Raisa honestly thought she hated her.

More pinpricks of light glared from the colony wall every few seconds, drifting outwards. It was pock-marked with cooling red patches now. The lights began to blink out, their boost sequences completed. "How long since we launched?"

"One hundred and fifteen seconds," said Trotsky.

The pinprick of light at the centre of the disk suddenly blossomed outwards. "Shit! Give me a zoom shot of that."

"Check." The end wall filled the screen. Lovelorn filaments of white death cast around soundlessly, thrashing in the vacuum. A cloud of debris was expelled, bundles of white fluff boiling and shaking in the void. There was a flash of blue light and a massive tentacle spilled from the airlock. Huge and rugose, it quested about gingerly, confused by its harsh new environment.

"Back to the wide-angle view, I think." Oshi's stomach roiled. It wasn't space sickness: it was the thought of Raisa's face, splitting like a paper bag ... the abhuman seductionist waiting for Oshi in the colony medicentre ...

"Two hundred seconds. I take it the bomb will detonate in a hundred seconds?"

"You got it," Oshi said absently. The sparks of light were still lifting off from the distant tin-can's lid of the docking bay. The
Bronstein
was drifting up from it, so that the body of the colony was visible as a foreshortened cylinder, lit from above by the backwash of a score of fusion rockets. Turing hung vast and gibbous in the background, a spiral storm of methane and hydrogen churning in endless motion. Belts of red and orange gas swirled around its axis, trade winds vast enough to swallow smaller planets. The cylinder, capped at either end by the fractal complexities of its engineering systems, looked smooth and solid at this magnification. It rotated with ponderous grace, the motion evident only as a faint shifting of the surface texture of the cylinder. Shadows moved across it slowly, stretching and dimming and shortening and stretching again as the fleet departed.
Like a spasm launch from an ancient missile field
, Oshi thought: ICBM's leaving their silos in swarms, ahead of an incoming enemy threat cloud. She felt a curious euphoria as she looked down.

"Flash filters in place," announced Trotsky. "Two hundred and eighty seconds. Last ship launching. Confirmed:
Golda Meir
is launching. All ships are clear of the pad. Two hundred and ninety seconds."

They watched in silence as the last violet pinprick climbed slowly away from the foreshortened colony.

The image froze for an instant, static breaking out around the edges. A moment later, the view cleared. Oshi felt the hair on the back of her neck rise: she broke out in a cold sweat. A brilliant violet glow shone through the open axial lock where the tapeworm had been.

Trotsky spoke: "confirmed EMP. Confirmed gamma flash characteristic of secondary emissions from a plutonium bomb airburst. Any moment now --"

Slow as a dream, the colony cylinder began to bulge around its waist. A crack appeared: a ghastly radiance shone forth. A second crack appeared, directly behind the end-wall. The skin of the colony began to flake away like wood shavings on a lathe, great slabs of steel and rock spinning away into the void. The bulge in the cylinder spread from the grotesquely obese waist until the entire length of the colony was swollen. Purple light shone through a myriad of cracks along its length.

"It's a geodesic structure. It doesn't let go easily," said Trotsky.

Oshi watched in horrified fascination as the light faded to orange. The cracks broadened: flakes of stone the size of cities spun silently away from the rotating cylinder. Larger fragments began to curl out from the wall of the colony, peeling away like the rind of an orange. The glow inside dimmed to a sullen red.