Singularity Sky (12 page)

“A very basic skill, Muller. Yet we all learn best from our mistakes. See that you learn from this one, eh? I don’t care if you have to follow your man all the way to Rochard’s World and back, as long as you keep your eyes open and spot it when he makes his move. And think about all the other things you’ve been told to do. I’ll tell you this for free: you’ve forgotten to do something else, and you’ll be happier if you notice it before I have to remind you!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good-bye.” The videophone link dissolved into random blocks, then went blank. Vassily eased out of his cubicle, trying to work out just what the Citizen’s parting admonition meant. The sooner he cleared everything up, proving once and for all that Springfield was or was not a spy, the better—he wasn’t cut out for shipboard life. Maybe it would be a good idea to start the new day by interviewing the engineering chief Springfield was working under? Probably that was what the Citizen meant for him to do; he could leave following up on the whore until later. (The idea filled him with an uncomfortable sense of embarrassment.)

No sooner did he poke his nose into the corridor than he was nearly run down by a team of ratings, hustling a trolley laden with heavy equipment at the double. On his second attempt, he took the precaution of looking both ways before venturing out: there were no obstacles. He made his way through the cramped, blue-painted corridor, following the curve of the inner hull. Floating free, the Lord Vanek relied on its own curved-space generator to produce a semblance of gravity. Vassily hunted for a radial walkway, then a lift down to the engineering service areas located at the heart of the ship, two-thirds of the way down its length.

There were people everywhere, some in corridors, some in chambers opening off the passageways, and others in rooms to either side. He caught a fair number of odd glances on his way, but nobody stopped him: most people would go out of their way to avoid the attentions of an officer in the Curator’s Office. It took him a while to find the engineering spaces, but eventually, he found his way to a dimly lit, wide-open chamber full of strange machines and fast-moving people. Oddly, he felt very light on his feet as he waited in the entrance to the room. No sign of Springfield, but of course, that was hardly surprising; the engineering spaces of a capital ship were large enough to conceal any number of sins. “Is this the main drive engineering deck?” he asked a passing technician.

“What do you think it is? The head?” called the man as he hurried off.

Vassily shrugged irritably and stepped forward— and forward—and forward—“What are you doing there?” Someone grabbed his elbow. “Hey, watch out!” He flailed helplessly, then stopped moving as he realized what was going on. The ceiling was close and the floor was a long way away and he was falling toward the far wall—

“Help,” he gasped.

“Hold on tight.” The hand on his elbow shifted to his upper arm and yanked, hard. A large rack of equipment, bolted to the floor, came close, and he grabbed and held on to it.

“Thanks. Is this the engineering deck? I’m looking for the chief drive engineer,” he said. It took an effort to talk over the frantic butterfly beat of his heart.

“That would be me.” Vassily stared at his rescuer. “Couldn’t have you bending the clocks now, could I? They curve badly enough as it is. What do you want?”

“It’s—” Vassily stopped. “I’m sorry. Could we talk somewhere in private?”

The engineering officer—his overalls bore the name Krupkin—frowned mightily. “We might, but I’m very busy. We’re moving in half an hour. Is it important?”

“Yah. It won’t get your work done any faster, but if you help me now it might take less of your time later.”

“Huh. Then we’ll see.” The officer turned and pointed at the other side of the open space. “See that office cubicle? I’ll meet you in there in ten minutes.” And he turned abruptly, kicked off, and disappeared into the gloom, chaos and moving bodies that circled the big blue cube at the center of the engineering bay.

“Holy Father!” Vassily took stock of his situation. Marooned, clinging to a box of melting clocks at the far side of a busy free-fall compartment from his destination, he could already feel his breakfast rising in protest at the thought of crossing the room.

Grimly determined not to embarrass himself, he inched his way down to floor level. There were toeholds recessed into the floor tiles, and now he looked at them he saw that they were anchored, but obviously designed to be removed frequently. If he pretended that the floor was a wall, then the office door was actually about ten meters above him, and there were plenty of handholds along the way.

He took a deep breath, pulled himself around the clock cabinet, and kicked hard against it where it joined the floor. The results were gratifying; he shot up, toward the office. The wall dropped toward him, and he was able to grab hold of a passing repair drone and angle his course toward the doorway. As he entered it, gravity began to return—he slid along the deck, coming to an undignified halt lying on his back just inside. The office was small, but held a desk, console, and a couple of chairs; a rating was doing something with the console. “You,” he said, “out, please.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The fresh-faced rating hurriedly closed some kind of box that was plugged into the console, then saluted and withdrew into the free-fall zone. Shaken, Vassily sat down in the seat opposite the desk and waited for Engineering Commander Krupkin to arrive. It was already 1100, and what had he achieved today? Nothing, so far as he could tell, except to learn that the Navy’s motto seemed to be “Hurry up and wait.” The Citizen wouldn’t be pleased.

Meanwhile, on the bridge, the battlecruiser Lord Vanek was counting down for main drive activation.

As the flagship of the expedition, Lord Vanek was at the heart of squadron one, along with three of the earlier Glorious-class battlecruisers, and the two Victory-class battleships Kamchatka and Regina (now sadly antiquated, relics that had seen better days). Squadron Two, consisting of a mixed force of light cruisers, destroyers, and missile carriers, would launch six hours behind Squadron One; finally, the supply train, with seven bulk cargo freighters and the liner Sikorsky’s Dream (refitted as a hospital ship) would depart eight hours later.

Lord Vanek was, in interstellar terms, a simple beast: ninety thousand tonnes of warship and a thousand crew held in tight orbit around an electron-sized black hole as massive as a mountain range. The hole—the drive kernel—spun on its axis so rapidly that its event horizon was permeable; the drive used it to tug the ship about by tickling the singularity in a variety of ways. At nonrelativistic speeds, Lord Vanek maneuvered by dumping mass into the kernel; complex quantum tunneling interactions—jiggery-pokery within the ergosphere—transformed it into raw momentum.

At higher speeds, energy pumped into the kernel could be used to generate the a jump field, collapsing the quantum well between the ship and a point some distance away.

The kernel had a few other uses: it was a cheap source of electricity and radioisotopes, and by tweaking the stardrive, it was possible to use it to produce a local curved-space gravity field. As a last resort, it could even be jettisoned and used as a weapon in its own right. But if there was one word that wouldn’t describe it, that word must be “maneuevrable.” Eight-billion-ton point masses do not make right-angle turns.

Commander Krupkin saluted as a rating held the bridge door open for him.

“Engineering Commander reporting on the state of machinery, sir!”

“Very good.” Captain Mirsky nodded from his command chair at the rear of the room. “Come in. What do you have for me?”

Krupkin relaxed slightly. “All systems operational and correct, sir,” he announced formally. “We’re ready to move at any time. Our status is clear on—” He rapidly rattled through the series of watches under his control.

Finally: “The drive control modifications you ordered, sir—we’ve never run anything like this before. They look alright, and the self-test says everything is fine, but I can’t say any more than that without unsealing the black boxes.”

Mirsky nodded. “They’ll work alright.” Krupkin wished he could feel as confident as the Captain sounded; the black boxes, shipped aboard only a week ago and wired into the main jump drive control loop, did not fill him with confidence. Indeed, if it hadn’t been obvious that the orders to integrate them came from the highest level and applied to every ship in the fleet, he’d have thrown the nearest thing to a tantrum that military protocol permitted. It was his job to keep the drive running, and dammit, he should know everything there was to know about how it worked! There could be anything in those boxes, from advanced (whisper it, illegal) high technology to leprechauns—and he’d be held responsible if it didn’t work.

A bearded man at the other side of the bridge stood. “Humbly request permission to report, sir.”

“You have permission,” said Mirsky.

“I have completed downloading navigation elements from system traffic control. I am just now having them punched into the autopilot. We will be ready to spin up for departure in ten minutes.”

“Very good, Lieutenant. Ah, Comms, my compliments to the Admiral and the Commodore, and we are preparing for departure in ten minutes.

Lieutenant Helsingus, proceed in accordance with the traffic control departure plan. You have the helm.”

“Aye, sir, I have the helm. Departure in ten minutes.” Helsingus bent over his speaking tube; ratings around him began turning brass handles and moving levers with calm deliberation, sending impulses along the nerves of steel that bound the ship into an almost living organism. (Although nano-electronics might be indispensable in the engine room, the New Republican Admiralty held the opinion that there was no place for suchlike newfangled rubbish on the bridge of a ship crewed by the heroic fighting men of the empire.)

“Well, Commander.” Mirsky nodded at the engineer. “How does it feel to be moving at last?”

Krupkin shrugged. “I’ll be happier when we’re in flat space. There are rumors”

For a moment, the Captain’s smile slipped. “Indeed. Which is why we will be going to action stations at departure and staying that way until after our first jump. You can never tell, and the Commodore wants to be sure that no spies or enemy missile buses are lying in wait for us.”

“A wise precaution, sir. Permission to return to my station?”

“Granted. Go with God, Commander.”

Krupkin saluted, and headed back for his engineering control room as fast as his short legs would carry him. It was, he reflected, going to be a busy time, even with as quietly competent a dockyard consultant engineer as Martin to help him keep the magic smoke in the drive control boxes.

The colony of Critics writhed and tunneled in their diamond nest, incubating a devastating review. A young, energetic species, descended from one of the post-Singularity flowerings that had exploded in the wake of the Diaspora three thousand years in their past, they held precious little of the human genome in their squamous, cold-blooded bodies. Despite their terrestrial descent, only their brains bound them tightly to the sapiens clade—for not all the exiles from Earth were human.

As hangers-on, the Critics had no direct access to the Festival’s constellation of relay satellites or the huge network of visual and auditory sensors that had been scattered across the surface of the planet. (Most of the Festival’s senses were borne on the wings of tiny insectoidal robots, with which they had saturated the biosphere, sending a million for every single telephone that had rained down from orbit.) Instead, the Critics had to make do with their own devices; a clumsy network of spy-eyes in low orbit, winged surveillance drones, and precarious bugs planted on the window ledges and chimney pots of significant structures.

The Critics watched, with their peculiar mixture of bemusement and morbid cynicism, while the soldiers of the First and Fourth Regiments shot their officers and deserted en masse to the black flag of Burya Rubenstein’s now-overt Traditional Extropian Revolutionary Front. (Many soldiers burned their uniforms and threw away their guns; others adopted new emblems and took up strange silvery arms churned out by the committee’s replicator farm.) The Critics looked on as peasants greedily demanded pigs, goats, and in one case, a goose that laid golden eggs from the Festival; their womenfolk quietly pleaded for medicinal cures, metal cutlery, and fabric. In the castle, shots were heard as the servants butchered the Duke’s menagerie for food. A rain of gold roubles ordered by some economic saboteur fell widely across the streets of Novy Petrograd, and was equally widely ignored: to that extent, the economic collapse brought about by the Festival’s advent was already complete.

“They are truly pathetic,” commented She Who Observes the First; she clashed her tusks over a somatic bench that depicted a scene below, some of the few remaining loyal grenadiers dragging a terrified cobbler toward the gates of the castle, followed by his screaming, pleading family.

“Unregulated instincts, unable to assimilate reality, bereft of perspective.”

“Chew roots; dig deep.” Guard Man the Fifth champed lugubriously, demonstrating his usual level of insight (intelligence not being a particularly useful characteristic in tunnel-running warriors). “Tastes of blood and soil.”

“Everything tastes of soil to a warrior,” She Who Observes snorted. “Eat tubers, brother, while your sisters discuss matters beyond your ken.” She rolled sideways, butting up against Sister of Stratagems the Seventh, who nipped at her flank gently. “Sibling-litter-peer. Uncertainty flows?”

“A time of exponentiating changes is upon them.” Sister Seventh was much given to making such gnomic pronouncements, perhaps in the naive hope that it would gain her a reputation for vision (and, ultimately, support when she made her bid for queendom). “Perhaps they are disorganized surface-scrabblers, clutching at stems, but there is a certain grandeur to their struggle; a level of sincerity seldom approached by primitives.”

“Primitive they are: their internal discourse is crippled by a complete absence of intertextuality. I cringe in astonishment that Festival wastes its attention on them.”