Singularity Sky (40 page)

“Humbly report got more neutrino pulses, sir,” called the radar op. “Not from the one we nailed—”

Mirsky stared at the main screen. “Damage control. What about A deck?”

he demanded. “Helm. Everyone else running on bugout?”

“A deck is still empty to space, sir. I sent a control team, but they aren’t reporting back. Pressure’s dropping in the number four recycler run, no sign of external venting. Um, I’m showing a major power drain on the grid, sir, we’re losing megawatts somewhere.”

“Bugout message was sent a minute ago, sir. So far they’re all—” Vulpis cursed. “Sir! Kamchatka’s gone!”

“Where, dammit?” Mirsky leaned forward.

“Another IFF drop-off,” called radar. “From—” The man paused, eyes widening with shock. “Kamchatka,” he concluded. On the main plot at the front of the bridge, the Imperial ships’ vectors were lengthening, up to 300

k.p.s. now and creeping up steadily. The target planet hung central, infinitely far out of reach.

Mirsky glanced at his first officer. Ilya stared back apprehensively.

“With respect, sir, they’re not fighting any way we know—”

Red lights. Honking sirens. Damage Control shouting orders into his speaking horn. “Status!” roared Mirsky. “What’s going on, dammit?”

“Losing pressure on B deck segment one, sir! No readings anywhere on segment three from A down to D deck. Big power fluctuations, distribution board fourteen compartment D-nine-five is on fire. Ah, I have a compartment open to space and another compartment on fire in B-four-five.

I can’t get through to damage control on B deck at all and all hell has broken loose on C deck—”

“Seal off everything above F,” ordered Mirsky, his face white. “Do it now!

Guns, prep decoys two and three for launch—”

But he was already too late to save his ship; because the swarm of bacteria-sized replicators that had slammed into A deck at 600 k.p.s.—cushioned in a husk of reinforced diamond—and eaten their way down through five decks into the ship, were finally arriving in the engineering spaces. And eating, and breeding …

Vassily's voice quavered with a nervous, frightened edge that would have been funny under other circumstances. “I am arresting you for sabotage, treason, unlicensed use of proscribed technologies, and giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the New Republic! Surrender now, or it will be the worse for you!”

“Shut up and grab the back of that couch unless you want to walk home.

Martin, if you wouldn’t mind giving him a leg down—that’s right. I need to get this hatch shut—”

Rachel glanced around disgustedly. There was a beautiful view; stars everywhere, a terrestrial planet hanging huge and gibbous ahead, like a marbled blue-and-white hallucination— and this idiot child squawking in her ear. Meanwhile, she was clinging with both hands to the underside of the capsule lid, and with both feet to the pilot’s chair, trying to hold everything together. When she’d poked her head up through the hatch and seen who was clinging to the low-gain antenna, she’d had half a mind to duck back inside again and fire up the thrusters to jolt him loose; a stab of blind rage made her grind her teeth together so loudly a panicky Martin had demanded to know if her suit had sprung a leak. But the red haze of anger faded quickly, and she’d reached out and grabbed Vassily’s arm, and somehow shoved his inflated emergency suit in through the hatch.

“I’m coming down,” she said. Clenching her thighs around the back of the chair, she clicked the release catch on the hatch and pulled it down as far as she could, then locked it in position. The cabin below her was overfull: Vassily obviously didn’t have a clue about keeping himself out of the way, and Martin was busy trying to squirm into the leg well of his seat to make room. She yanked on her lifeline, dropped down until she was standing on the seat of her chair, then grabbed the hatch and pulled it the rest of the way shut. She felt the solid ripple-click of a dozen small catches locking home on all four sides.

“Okay. Autopilot, seal hatch, then repressurize cabin. Martin, not over there—that’s the toilet, you really don’t want to open that—yes, that’s the locker you want.” Air began hissing into the cabin from vents around the ceiling; white mist formed whirlpool fog banks that drifted across the main window. “That’s great. You, listen up: you aren’t aboard a Navy ship here.

Shut up, and we’ll give you a lift downside; keep telling me I’m under arrest, and I might get pissed off enough to push you overboard.”

“Urp.”

The Junior Procurator’s eyes went wide as his suit began to deflate around him. Behind the seats, Martin grunted as he rifled through the contents of one of the storage lockers. “This what you want?” He punted a rolled-up hammock at Rachel. She rolled around in her seat and stuck one end of it to the wall behind her, then let it unroll back toward Martin. He drifted out of the niche, narrowly avoided kicking their castaway in the head, and managed to get the other end fastened. “You. Out of that suit, into this hammock. As you may have noticed, we don’t have a lot of room.” She pressed the release stud, and her helmet let go of her suit and drifted free; catching it, she shoved it down behind her seat, under the hammock. “You can unsuit now.”

Martin peeled halfway out of his own suit, keeping his legs and lower body in the collapsed plastic bag. Vassily floated out of his niche, struggling with the flaccid bladder of his helmet: Martin steered him into the hammock and managed to get his head out of the bag before he managed to inhale it.

“You’re—” Vassily stopped. “Er, thank you.”

“Don’t even think about hijacking us,” Rachel warned darkly. “The autopilot’s slaved to my voice, and neither of us particularly wants to take our chances with your friends.”

“Er.” Vassily breathed deeply. “Um. That is to say—” He looked around wildly. “Are we going to die?”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Rachel said firmly.

“But the enemy ships! They must be—”

“It’s the Festival. Have you got any idea what they are?” asked Martin.

“If you know anything about it, you should have told the Admiral’s staff.

Why didn’t you tell them? Why—”

“We did tell them. They didn’t listen,” Rachel observed.

Vassily visibly struggled to understand. Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable. “What are you going to do now?”

“Well.” Rachel whistled tunelessly through her front teeth. “Personally, I’d like to land this lifeboat somewhere near, say, Novy Petrograd, book the honeymoon suite in the Crown Hotel, fill the bathtub with champagne, and lie in it while Martin feeds me caviar on black bread. However, what we actually do next really depends on the Festival, hmm? If Martin is right about it—”

“Believe it,” Martin emphasized.

“—the Navy force is going to quietly disappear, never to be seen again.

That’s what comes of assuming that everyone plays by the same set of rules. We’re just going to drift on through, then fire up our motor for a direct landing, meanwhile squawking that we’re neutral at the top of our voices.

The Festival isn’t what your leaders think it is, kid. It’s a threat to the New Republic—they got that much right—but they don’t understand what kind of threat it is, or how to deal with it. Going in shooting will only make it respond in kind, and it’s better at it than your boys.”

“But our Navy is good!” Vassily insisted. “They’re the best navy within twenty light-years! What would you anarchists do? You don’t even have a strong government, much less a fleet!”

Rachel chuckled. After a moment, Martin joined in. Gradually their laughter mounted, deafening in the confined space.

“Why are you laughing at me?” Vassily demanded indignantly.

“Look.” Martin hunched around in his chair until he could lock eyes with the Procurator. “You’ve grown up with this theory of strong government, the divine right of the ruling class, the thwack of the riding crop of firm administration on the bare buttocks of the urban proletariat and all that. But has it occurred to you that the UN system also works, and has maybe been around for twice as long as the New Republic? There’s more than one way to run a circus, as I think the Festival demonstrates, and rigid hierarchies like the one you grew up in are lousy at dealing with change. The UN

system, at least after the Singularity and the adoption of the planetary unconstitution—” He snorted.

“Once, the fringe anarchists used to think the UN was some kind of quasi-fascist world government. Back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when strong government was in fashion because the whole planetary civilization was suffering from future shock, because it was approaching a Singularity. After that passed, though—well, there weren’t a lot of viable authoritarian governments left, and the more rigid they were, the less well they could deal with the aftereffects of losing nine-tenths of their populations overnight. Oh, and the cornucopiae: it can’t be pleasant to run a central bank and wake up one morning to discover ninety percent of your taxpayers are gone and the rest think money is obsolete.”

“But the UN is a government—”

“No it isn’t,” Martin insisted. “It’s a talking shop. Started out as a treaty organization, turned into a bureaucracy, then an escrow agent for various transnational trade and standards agreements. After the Singularity, it was taken over by the Internet engineering task force. It’s not the government of Earth; it’s just the only remaining relic of Earth’s governments that your people can recognize. The bit that does the common-good jobs that everyone needs to subscribe to. World-wide vaccination programs, trade agreements with extrasolar governments, insurer of last resort for major disasters, that sort of thing. The point is, for the most part, the UN doesn’t actually do anything; it doesn’t have a foreign policy, it’s just a head on a stick for your politicians to rant about. Sometimes somebody or another uses the UN as a front when they need to do something credible-looking, but trying to get a consensus vote out of the Security Council is like herding cats.”

“But you’re—” Vassily paused. He looked at Rachel.

“I told your Admiral that the Festival wasn’t human,” she said tiredly. “He thanked me and carried right on planning an attack. That’s why they’re all going to die soon. Not enough flexibility, your people. Even trying to run a minor—and horrendously illegal—causality-violation attack wasn’t that original a response.” She sniffed. “Thought they’d turn up a week before the Festival, by way of that half-assed closed timelike path to avoid mines and sleepers. As if the Eschaton wouldn’t notice, and as if the Festival was just another bunch of primitives with atom bombs.”

A red light winked on the console in front of her. “Oh, look,” said Martin.

“It’s beginning. Better strap yourself in—we’re way too close for comfort.”

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?” asked Vassily.

Martin reached up to adjust a small lens set in the roof of the cabin, then glanced over his shoulder. “Can you juggle, kid?”

“No. Why?”

Martin pointed at the screen. “Spine ships. Or antibodies. Subsentient remotes armed with, um, you don’t want to know. Eaters and shapers and things. Nasty hungry little nanomachines. Gray goo, in other words.”

“Oh.” Vassily looked ill. “You mean, they’re going to—”

“Come out to meet the fleet and take a sniff, by the look of it. Unfortunately, I don’t think Commodore Bauer realizes that if he doesn’t make friendly noises, they’re all going to die; he still thinks it’s a battle, the kind you fight with missiles and guns. If they do decide to talk—well, the Festival is an infovore. We’re perfectly safe as long as we can keep it entertained and don’t shoot at it. Luckily, it doesn’t understand humor; finds it fascinating, but doesn’t quite get it. As long as we keep it entertained it won’t eat us; we may even be able to escalate matters to a controlling intelligence that can let us off the Bouncers’ hook and let us land safely.” He reached into the bag of equipment he’d dredged out of the locker behind the seats. “Ready to start broadcasting, Rachel? Here, kid, put this on. It’s showtime.”

The red nose floating in the air in front of Vassily’s face seemed to be mocking him.

The Telephone Repairman

Sitting in a highly eccentric polar orbit that drifted almost sixty thousand kilometers above the provincial township of Plotsk, the Festival’s prime node basked fat and happy at the heart of an informational deluge. The pickings in this system were sparse compared to some of the previous ports of call on its itinerary, but Rochard’s World was still unusual and interesting. The Festival had chanced upon few primitive worlds in its travel, and the contrast with its memories of them was great.

Now, as the first starwisps departed—aimed forward at new, unvisited worlds, and back along its track to the hot-cores of civilization where it had stopped before—the Festival took stock. Events on the ground had not gone entirely satisfactorily; while it had accrued a good body of folklore, and not a little insight into the social mores of a rigidly static society, the information channels on offer were ridiculously sparse, and the lack of demand for its wares dismaying. Indeed, its main source of data had been the unfortunate minds forcibly uploaded by some of the more dissolute, not to say amoral, fringe elements. The Critics, with their perennial instinct to explain and dissect, were moaning continuously—something about the colony succumbing to a disastrous economic singularity—but that sort of thing wasn’t the Festival’s problem. It would soon be time to move on; the first tentative transmissions from Trader clades had been detected, burbling and chirping in the Oort cloud, and the job of opening up communications with this civilization was nearly done.

Each of the hundreds of starwisps the high-orbit launchers were dispatching carried one end of a causal channel: a black box containing a collection of particles in a quantum-entangled state with antiparticles held by the Festival. (By teleporting the known quantum state of a third particle into one of the entangled particles, data could be transmitted between terminals infinitely fast, using up one entangled quantum dot for each bit.) Once the starwisps arrived at their destinations, the channels would be hooked into the communications grid the Festival’s creators had set out to construct. No longer limited by the choke point of the Festival’s back channel to its last destination, the population of Rochard’s World would be exposed to the full information flow of the polity it belonged to.