“Epistemology pays no bills,” Martin remarked drily. “If you’re expecting me to do something risky . . .”
“We appreciate that.” The gray man nodded. “We need errands run, and not all of them are entirely safe. Most of the time it will amount to little more than making note of certain things and telling us about them—but occasionally, if there is a serious threat, you may be asked to act. Usually in subtle, undetectable ways, but always at your peril. But there are compensations.”
“Describe them.” Martin put his unfinished drink down at that point.
“My sponsor is prepared to pay you very well indeed. And part of the pay—we can smooth the path if you apply for prolongation and continued residency.” Life-extension technology, allowing effectively unlimited life expectancy beyond 160 years, was eminently practical, and available on most developed worlds. It was also as tightly controlled as any medical procedure could be. The controls and licensing were a relic of the Overshoot, the brief period in the twenty-first century when Earth’s population blipped over the ten-billion mark (before the Singularity, when the Eschaton bootstrapped its way past merely human intelligence and promptly rewrote the rule book). The after-effects of overpopulation still scarred the planet, and the response was an ironclad rule—if you want to live beyond your natural span, you must either demonstrate some particular merit, some reason why you should be allowed to stay around, or you could take the treatment and emigrate. There were few rules that all of Earth’s fractured tribes and cultures and companies obeyed, but out of common interest, this was one of them. To be offered exemption by the covert intervention of the Eschaton—
“How long do I have to think about it?” asked Martin.
“Until tomorrow.” The gray man consulted his notepad. “Ten-thousand-a-year retainer. Ten thousand or more as a bonus if you are asked to do anything. And an essential status exemption from the population committee. On top of which, you will be helping to protect humanity as a whole from the actions of some of its more intemperate—not to say stupid—members. Would you care for another drink?”
“It’s alright,” said Martin. They’re willing to pay me? To do something I’d volunteer for? He stood up. “I don’t need another day to think about it. Count me in.”
The gray man smiled humorlessly. “I was told you’d say that.”
the gold team was on full alert. Not a head moved when the door opened, and Captain Mirsky walked in, followed by Commodore Bauer and his staff. “Commander Murametz, please report.”
“Yes, sir. Time to jump transition, three-zero-zero seconds. Location plot confirmed, signals operational. All systems running at an acceptable level of readiness for engagement plan C. We’re ready to go to battle stations whenever you say, sir.”
Mirsky nodded. “Gentlemen, carry on as ordered.” The Commodore nodded and quietly instructed his adjutant to take notes. Elsewhere on the ship, sirens blatted: the clatter of spacers running to their stations didn’t penetrate the bulkheads, but the atmosphere nevertheless felt tense. Low-key conversations started at the various workstations around the room as officers talked over the tactical circuits.
“Ready for jump in two-zero-zero seconds,” called Relativistics.
Rachel Mansour—wearing her disarmament inspector’s uniform—sat uncomfortably close to one of the walls, studying a packed instrument console over the shoulder of a petty officer. Brass handles and baroque red LEDs glowed at her; a pewter dog’s head barked silently from an isolation switch. Someone had spent half a lifetime polishing the engravings until they gleamed as softly as butter. It seemed a bitter irony, to observe such art in a place of war; the situation was, she thought, more than somewhat repulsive, and finding anything even remotely beautiful in it only made things worse.
The Festival: of all the stupid things the New Republic might attack, the Festival was about the worst. She’d spoken to Martin about it, piecing together his information with her own. Together they’d pieced together a terrifying hypothesis. “Herman was unusually vague about it,” Martin admitted. “Normally he has a lot of background detail. Every word means something. But it’s as if he doesn’t want to say too much about the Festival. They’re—he called them, uh, glider-gun factories. I don’t know if you know about Life—”
“Cellular automata, the game?”
“That’s the one. Glider guns are mobile cellular automata. There are some complex life structures that replicate themselves, or simpler cellular structures; a glider-gun factory is a weird one. It periodically packs itself into a very dense mobile system that migrates across the grid for a couple of hundred squares, then it unpacks itself into two copies that then pack down and fly off in opposite directions. Herman said that they’re a real-space analogue: he called them a Boyce-Tipler robot. Self-replicating, slower-than-light interstellar probes that are sent out to gather information about the universe and feed it back to a center. Only the Festival isn’t just a dumb robot fleet. It carries upload processors, thousands of uploaded minds running faster than real time when there are resources to support them, downloaded into long-term storage during the long trips.”
Rachel had shuddered slightly at that, and he hugged her, misapprehending the cause of her distress. She let him, not wanting him to realize he had upset her. She’d dealt with uploads before. The first-generation ones, fresh from the meat puppet universe, weren’t a problem: it was the kids that got her. Born—if you could call it that—in a virtual environment, they rapidly diverged from any norm of humanity that she could see. More seriously, their grasp of the real world was poor. Which was fine as long as they didn’t have to deal with it, but when they did, they used advanced nanosystems for limbs and they sometimes accidentally broke things—planets, for instance.
It wasn’t intentional malice; they’d simply matured in an environment where information didn’t go away unless someone wanted it to, where death and destruction were reversible, where magic wands worked and hallucinations were dangerous. The real universe played by different rules, rules that their horrified ancestors had fled as soon as the process of migrating minds into distributed computing networks had been developed.
The Festival sounded like a real headache. On the one hand, an upload civilization, used to omnipotence within its own pocket universe, had decided for no obvious reason to go forth and play the galactic tourist. On the other hand, physical machinery of vast subtlety and power was bound to do their bidding at each port of call. Bush robots, for example: take a branching tree of fronds. Each bough split into two half-scale branches at either end, with flexible joints connecting them. Repeated down to the molecular level, each terminal branch was closed off with a nanomanipulator. The result was a silvery haze with a dumbbell-shaped core, glittering with coherent light, able to change shape, dismantle and reassemble physical objects at will—able to rebuild just about anything into any desired physical form, from the atomic scale up. Bush robots made the ultimate infantry; shoot at them, and they’d eat the bullets, splice them into more branches, and thank you for the gift of metals.
“I’m worried about what will happen when we arrive,” Martin admitted. He’d wrung his hands while he spoke, unconsciously emphasizing his points. “I don’t think the New Republicans can actually comprehend what’s going on. They see an attack, and I can understand why—the Festival has destroyed the political and social economy on one of their colonies as thoroughly as if it had nuked the place from orbit—but what I can’t see is any possible avenue to a settlement. There’s not going to be any common ground there. What does the Festival want? What could make them go away and leave the Republic alone?”
“I thought you didn’t like the New Republic,” Rachel challenged.
He grimaced. “And I suppose you do? I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in th
is crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”
“You did your bit to make it that way.”
“Yes.” He dropped his gaze to the floor, focusing intently on something invisible to her. “I wish there was an alternative. But Herman can’t just let them get away with it. Either causality is a solid law, or—things break. Far better for their maneuver simply to fail, so the whole voyage looks like a cack-handed mess, than for it to succeed, and encourage future adventurers to try for a timelike approach on their enemies.”
“And if you’re lashed to the mast as the ship heads for the maelstrom?”
“I never said I was omniscient. Herman said he’d try to get me out of here if I succeeded; I wish I knew what he had in mind. What are your options like?”
Her lips quirked. “Maybe he nobbled my boss—he taught me never to travel at sea without a lifeboat.”
Martin snorted, obviously misunderstanding: “Well, they say a captain always goes down with his ship—shame they never mention the black gang drowning in the engine room!”
An announcement from the helm brought Rachel back to the present: “Jump in one-zero-zero seconds.”
“Status, please,” said Commander Murametz. Each post called out in order; everything was running smoothly. “Time to transition?”
“Four-zero seconds. Kernel spin-down in progress; negative mass dump proceeding.” Far beneath their feet, the massive singularity at the core of the drive system was spooling down, releasing angular momentum into the energetic vacuum underlying space-time. There was no vibration, no sense of motion: nor could there be. Spin, in the context of a space drive, was a property of warped patches of space, nothing to do with matter as most people understood it.
“Commander Murametz, proceed.” The Captain stood back, hands clasped behind his back. “Commodore, by your leave?”
Bauer nodded. “Proceed on your initiative.”
“Transition in progress . . . we’re clear. Reference frame locked.”
“No obstructions,” called Radar One. “Um, looks like we’re on the nail.”
“One-zero gees, straight in on the primary,” said Ilya. He looked almost bored; they’d rehearsed this a dozen times in the past three days alone. “Confirm positional fix, then give me a passive scan. Standard profile.”
“Aye aye, sir. Nav confirmation; we have a star fix. Yes, we’re a good bit closer to the bucket than last time. I see a waste heat dump from Chancellor Romanoff; they’re through.” That cheered them up; even at ten gees constant acceleration, a miss of a couple of astronomical units could take hours or days to make up. “Nothing else in view.”
“Give me a lidar shout, then. Chirped, if you please, frontal nine-zero degrees.”
“Emission starting—now. Profile steady.” The main screen of the simulation showed megawatts of laser light pouring out into the depths of space, mostly hard ultraviolet tagged with the sawtooth timing pulses of the ship’s clock. “Scan closure. Lidar shutdown.”
Radar Two: “I’ve got backscatter! Range—Holy father! Sir, we’re right on top of them! Range six-zero K-kilometers, looks like metal!”
Bauer smiled like a shark.
“Helm: take us to full military power in one-zero seconds. Course plus one-zero, minus four-zero.”
“Aye aye, sir, bringing course to plus one-zero minus four-zero. Two-one one gees coming up in five . . . three . . . now.” Like most regional powers, the New Republican Navy had adopted the Terran standard gee—ten meters per second squared. At full military power, Lord Vanek could go from a standing start to planetary escape velocity in less than sixty seconds; without a delicate balancing act, trading off the drive kernel’s spin against the curvature of space around the ship, the crew would be squashed flat and broken on the floor. But carrying a drive kernel had its price—a non-FTL, fission-powered missile could, at short range, outrun or out-turn a warship hobbled by the mass of a mountain.
“Radar, get me some details on that bounce.” Mirsky leaned forward.
“Aye aye, sir.” A plot came up on the forward display. Rachel focused on the readouts, looking over the razor-scarred rolls at the base of Petty Officer Borisovitch’s skull. “Confirming . . .”
Radar Two: “More contacts! Repeat, I have multiple contacts!”
“How far?” demanded the captain.
“They’re—too close! Sir, they’re very faint. Took a few seconds for the analysis grid to resolve them, in fact. They’ve got to be black body emitters with stealth characteristics. Range nine-zero K, one-point-three M, seven M, another at two-five-zero K . . . we’re in the middle of it!”
Rachel closed her eyes. A chill ran up her spine as she thought about small robot factories, replicators, the swarm of self-replicating weapons breeding in low orbit around a distant gas giant moon. She breathed deeply and opened her eyes.
Radar Two interrupted her reverie: “Target! Range six-point-nine M-klicks, big emission profile. Course minus five-five, plus two-zero.”
Mirsky turned to his executive officer: “Ilya, your call.”
“Yes, sir. Designate the new contact as target alpha. Adopt convergent course for alpha, closest pass at three-zero K, full military power.”
“Aye aye, targeting alpha.”
“You expect something, sir,” Ilya said quietly. Rachel tilted her head slightly, to let her boosted hearing focus on the two senior officers at the back of the room.
“Damn right I do. Something wiped out the system defense flotilla,” Mirsky murmured. “Something that was sitting there, waiting for them. I don’t expect anything except hostile contacts as soon as we come out of jump.”
“I didn’t expect them to be this close, though.” Murametz looked troubled.
“I had to do some digging, but thanks to Inspector Mansour”—the Captain nodded in her direction—“we know a bit about their capabilities, which are somewhat alarming. It’s not in the standard intelligence digest because the fools didn’t think it worth mentioning. We’re up against cornucopiae, you see, and nobody back at Naval Intel bothered asking what a robot factory can do tactically.”
Commander Murametz shook his head. “I don’t know. Sir? Does it have any military bearing?”
“Yes. You see, robots can breed. And spawn starwisps.”
“Starwisps—” Enlightenment dawned. Ilya looked shocked. “How big would they be?” he asked the captain.
“About half a kilogram mass. You can cram a lot of guidance circuitry into a gram of diamond-substrate nanomachin ery. The launchers that fire them probably mass a quarter of a tonne each—but a large chunk of that is stored antimatter to power the neutral particle beam generators. At a guess, there could be a couple of thousand out here; that’s probably what those low aspect contacts are. If you trip-wire one of them, and it launches on you, expect the starwisp riding the beam to come out at upward of ten thousand gees. But of course, you probably won’t even see it unless it gets lock-on and you get some side-scattered radiation from the beam. Basically, we’re in the middle of a minefield, and the mines can shoot relativistic missiles at us.”
“But—” Ilya looked horrified. “I thought this was a standard firing setup!”
“It is, Commander,” Bauer said drily.
“Ah.” Ilya looked slightly green at the edges.
“Backscatter!” It was Radar Three. “I have backscatter! Something is launching from target alpha, acceleration one-point-three—no, one-point-five gees. Cooking off gammas at one-point-four MeV.”
“Log as candidate one,” said Ilya. Urgently: “Sir, humbly request permission to resume immediate control?”
“Granted,” snapped the Captain.
Rachel glanced around at the ops room stations. Officers hunched over their workstations, quietly talking into headset microphones and adjusting brass-handled dials and switches. Mirsky walk
ed over to the command station and stood at Ilya’s shoulder. “Get radar looking for energy spikes,” he commented. “This is going to be difficult. If I’m right, we’re in the middle of a minefield controlled by a central command platform; if we leak again, we’re not getting out of here.” Rachel leaned forward too, focusing on the main screen. It was, she thought, remarkable: if this was typical of their team-work, then with a bit of luck they might even make it into low orbit around Rochard’s World.
The tension rose over the next ten minutes, as the Lord Vanek accelerated toward the target. Its singularity drive was virtually undetectable, even at close range (spotting the mass of a mountain at a million kilometers defied even the most sensitive gravity-wave detectors), but all the enemy strongpoint had to do was switch on a pulse-doppler radar sweep and the battlecruiser would show up like a sore thumb. The first rule of space warfare—and the ancient submarine warfare that preceded it—was, “If they can see you, they can kill you.”
On the other hand, the enemy base couldn’t be sure exactly where the ship was right now; it had changed course immediately after shutting down its search lidar. Four more brief lidar pulses had swept across the ship’s hull, as other members of the squadron dropped in and took their bearings: since then, nothing but silence.
“Second trace!” called Radar One. “Another live bird moving out. Range on this one is four-seven M-klicks, vector toward lidar source three, the Suvaroff.”
“Confirm course and acceleration,” ordered Ilya. “Log it as candidate two.”
“Confirm three more,” said Radar Two. “Another source, um, range nine-zero M-klicks. Designation beta. They’re thick around here, aren’t they?”
“Watch out for a—”
“Third echo from local target alpha,” called Radar Two. “Scattering relative to candidates one and two. Looks like a third missile. This one’s heading our way.”
“Give me a time to contact,” Mirsky said grimly. Rachel studied him: Mirsky was a wily old bird, but even though he’d figured out what was going on, she couldn’t see how he planned to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. At any moment she expected to hear the shriek of alarms as one or another observer picked up the telltale roar of a relativistic particle stream, with a beam-riding starwisp hurtling toward them on top of it, armed with a cargo of antimatter.
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