Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

  Sauer walked up to the table at the front of the room and sat down. It was actually the officer’s dining table, decked out in a white tablecloth for the occasion, weighted down with leather-bound tomes that contained the complete letter of the Imperial Articles of War. Two other officers followed him; Dr. Hertz, the ship’s surgeon, and Lieutenant Commander Vulpis, the relativist. They looked suitably serious. Sauer cleared his throat. “Court will come to order,” he intoned. “Bring in the accused.”

  The other door opened. Two ratings marched in, escorting Martin Springfield who, being hobbled and handcuffed, moved rather slowly. Behind them, a door banged. “Ah, er, yes. Please state your name for the court.”

  Martin looked around. His expression was pale but collected. “What?” he said.

  “Please state your name.”

  “Martin Springfield.”

  Lieutenant Sauer made a note on his blotter. Irritated, he realized that his pen held no ink; no matter. This wasn’t an affair that called for written records. “You are a civilian, subject of the United Nations of Earth. Is that correct?”

  A look of irritation crept over Martin’s face. “No it bloody isn’t!” he said. “I keep telling you people, the UN is not a government! I’m affiliated to Pinkertons for purposes of legislation and insurance; that means I obey their rules and they protect me against infringers. But I’ve got a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force which, I believe, covers situations like this one. I’ve also got agreements with half a dozen other quasi-governmental organizations, but none of them is entitled to claim sovereignty over me—I’m not a slave!”

  Dr. Hertz turned his head and looked pointedly at Sauer; his pince-nez glinted beneath the harsh glare of the tungsten lamps. Sauer snorted. “Let it be entered that the accused is a subject of the United Nations of Earth,” he intoned.

  “No he isn’t.” Heads turned. While Martin had been speaking, Rachel Mansour had slipped in through a side door. Her garb was even more scandalous than usual; a skintight white leotard worn beneath various items of padding and a bulky waistcoat resembling a flak jacket. Almost like a space suit liner, Sauer noted, puzzled. “The United Nations is not a—”

  “Silence!” Sauer pointed at her. “This is a court of military justice, and I do not recognize your right to speak. Stay silent, or I’ll have you thrown out.”

  “And create a diplomatic incident?” Rachel grinned unpleasantly. “Try it, and I’ll make sure you regret it. In any event, I believe the accused is permitted to retain an advocate for the defense. Have you advised him of his rights?”

  “Er—” Vulpis looked down.

  “Irrelevant. The trial will continue—”

  Martin cleared his throat. “I’d like to nominate Colonel Mansour as my advocate,” he said.

  It’s working. Sauer made a pretense of scribbling on his blotter. At the back of the room, he could see Vassily’s sharp intake of breath. The young whippersnapper was getting his hopes up already. “The court recognizes UN inspector Mansour as the defendant’s counsel. I am obliged to warn you that this trial is being conducted under the Imperial Articles of War, Section Fourteen, Articles of Combat, in view of our proximity to the enemy. If you are ignorant of those rules and regulations, you may indicate so and withdraw from the trial now.”

  Rachel’s smile broadened. “Defense moves for an adjournment in view of the forthcoming engagement. There will be plenty of time for this after the battle.”

  “Denied,” Sauer snapped. “We need a fair trial on the record before we can execute the sentence.” That made her smile slip. “Court will go into recess for five minutes to permit the defendant to brief his advocate, and not one minute longer.” He rapped on the table with his fist, stood, and marched out of the room. The rest of the tribunal followed suit, trailed by a paltry handful of spectators, leaving Rachel, Martin, and four ratings standing guard on the doors.

  “you know this is just a rubber stamp? They want to execute me,” Martin said. His voice was husky, a trifle unsteady; he wrung his hands together, trying to stop them from shaking.

  Rachel peered into his eyes. “Look at me, Martin,” she said quietly. “Do you trust me?”

  “I—yes.” He glanced down.

  She reached a hand out, across the table, put it across the back of his left wrist. “I’ve been reading up on their procedures. This is well out of order, and whatever happens I’m going to lodge an appeal with the Captain—who should be chairing this, not some jumped-up security officer who’s also running the prosecution.” She glanced away from him, looking for the air vents; simultaneously, she tapped the back of his hand rapidly. He tensed his wrist back in a well-understood pattern, message understood: Next session. See me blink three times you start hyperventilating. When I blink twice hold breath.

  His eyes widened slightly. “There won’t be time for them to do anything before perigeon, anyway,” she continued verbally. “We’re about two astronomical units out and closing fast; engagement should commence around midnight if there’s to be a shooting war.” Got lifeboat, she added via Morse code.

  “That’s—” he swallowed. How escape? he twitched. “I’m not confident they’re going to observe all the niceties. This kangaroo court—” He shrugged.

  “Leave it all to me,” she said, squeezing his hand for emphasis. “I know what I’m doing.” For the first time, there was hope in his expression. She broke contact and leaned back in her chair. “It’s stuffy in here,” she complained. “Where’s the ventilation?”

  Martin looked past her head. She followed his gaze: grilles in the ceiling. She closed her eyes and squeezed shut; green raster images like a nightmare vision of a jail cell pasted themselves across the insides of her eyelids. The spy drones, remnant of the flock Vassily had unleashed, waited patiently behind the vents. They’d followed her to this room, loaded up with a little something to add interest to the proceedings. Serve the little voyeur right, she thought bitterly about the spy. “I’ll get you out of this,” she told Martin, trying to reassure him.

  “I understand.” He nodded, a slight inclination of his head. “You know what I, uh, I’m not so good at people things—”

  She shook her head. “They’re doing this to get me to compromise myself. It’s not about you. It’s nothing personal. They just want me out of the way.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged. “The midranking officers. The ones who figure a short victorious war is a ticket up the promotion ladder. The ones who don’t think I should be here in the first place, much less reporting back. Not after First Lamprey. I was Red Cross agent-in-place there, you know? Investigating the war crimes. Didn’t leave anybody looking too good, and I think they know it. They don’t want a negotiated settlement, they want guts and glory.”

  “If it’s just you, why’s the chinless wonder from the Curator’s Office in here?” asked Martin.

  She shrugged. “Two birds, one stone. Don’t sweat it. If they screw this up, they can blame the Curator’s cat’s-paw, make the enemy within look bad. There’s no love lost between Naval Intelligence and the civil secret police. If it works, they get us both out of the way. Reading the regs, they don’t have authority to pull this stunt, Martin. It takes a master and commander to issue a capital sentence except in the face of the enemy, so if they do execute you, it’s illegal enough to hang them all.”

  “That’s a great reassurance.” He forced a smile, but it came out looking decidedly frightened. “Just do your—hell. I trust you.”

  “That’s good.”

  Then the doors opened.

  “it’s working,” sauer commented. “She’s come out to defend her minion. Now we need to maneuver her into outright defiance. Shouldn’t be too hard; we have the bench.”

  “Defiance?” Vulpis raised an eyebrow. “You said this was a trial.”

  “A trial of wits, ours against hers. She’s consented to defend him; that means she’s acting as an officer of the court
. Article Forty-six states that an officer of the court is subject to the discipline of the Articles and may himself be arraigned for malfeasance or contempt of court. By agreeing to serve before our court, she’s abandoning her claim of diplomatic immunity. It gets better. In about two hours, we go to stations. While we may be a charade right now, at that point any commissioned officer is empowered to pass a capital sentence—or even order a summary execution—because it’s classified under Article Four, Obedience in the Face of the Enemy, Enforcement Thereof. Not that I’m planning on using it, but it does give us a certain degree of cover, no?”

  Dr. Hertz removed his pince-nez and began to polish them. “I’m not sure I like it,” he said fussily. “This smells altogether too much of the kind of trickery the Stasis like handing down. Aren’t you concerned about playing for the Curator’s brat?”

  “Not really.” Sauer finally grinned. “Y’see, what I really plan on doing is to get our new advocate so thoroughly wound up she’s insubordinate or something—but for the defendant himself, I’m thinking of an absolute discharge or a not guilty verdict.” He sniffed. “It’s quite obvious he didn’t know he was breaking any regulations. Plus, the device he had in his possession was inactive by the time it was discovered, so we can’t actually prove it was in a state fit for use at any time when he was aboard the ship. And the Admiralty will be angry if we make it hard for them to hire civilian contractors in future. I’m hoping we can keep her rattled enough not to realize there’s no case to answer until we’ve got her out of the way; then we discharge Springfield. Which will make our young Master Muller look like a complete and total idiot, not to mention possibly supplying me with cause to investigate him for suspicion of burglary, pilferage of personal effects, violation of a diplomat’s sealed luggage, immoral conduct, and maybe even deserting his post.” His grin became sharklike. “Need I continue?”

  Vulpis whistled quietly in awe. “Remind me never to play poker with you,” he commented.

  Dr. Hertz reinstalled his spectacles. “Shall we resume the circus, gentlemen?”

  “I think so.” Sauer drained his glass of tea and stood up. “After you, my brother officers, then send in the clowns!”

  the shipping trunk in Rachel’s cabin had stopped steaming some time ago. It had shrunk, reabsorbing and extruding much of its contents. A viscous white foam had spread across the fittings of the cabin, eagerly digesting all available hydrocarbons and spinning out a diamond-phase substrate suitable for intensive nanomanufacturing activities. Solid slabs of transparent material were precipitating out of solution, forming a hollow sphere that almost filled the room. Below the deck, roots oozed down into the ship’s recycling circuits, looting the cesspool that stored biological waste during the inbound leg of a journey. (By long-standing convention, ships that lacked recyclers only discharged waste when heading away from inhabited volumes of space; more than one unfortunate orbital worker had been gunned down by a flash-frozen turd carrying more kinetic energy than an armor-piercing artillery shell.)

  The self-propelled trunk, which was frozen into the base of the glassy sphere, was now much lighter than it had been when Rachel boarded the ship. Back then, it had weighed the best part of a third of a tonne: Now it massed less than fifty kilos. The surplus mass had mostly been thick-walled capillary tubes of boron carbide, containers for thin crystals of ultrapure uranium-235 tetraiodide, and a large supply of cadmium; stuff that wasn’t easy to come by in a hurry. The trunk was capable of manufacturing anything it needed given the constituent elements. Most of what it wanted was carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, available in abundance in the ship’s sewage-processing plant. But if a diplomat needed to get away in a real hurry and didn’t have a potent energy source to hand . . . well, fission, an old and unfashionable technology, was eminently storable, very lightweight, and didn’t usually go bang without a good reason. All you needed was the right type of unobtanium to hand in order to make it work. Which was why Rachel had been towing around enough uranium to make two or three good-sized atom bombs, or the core of a nuclear saltwater rocket.

  A nuclear saltwater rocket was just about the simplest interplanetary propulsion system that could fit in a steamer trunk. On the other side of the inner pressure hull from Rachel’s cabin, the trunk had constructed a large tank threaded through with neutron-absorbing, boron-lined tubes: this was slowly filling with water containing a solution of near-critical uranium tetraiodide. Only a thin layer of carefully weakened hull plates and bypassed cable ducts held the glassy sphere and its twenty-tonne saltwater fuel tank on the other side of the bulkhead, inside the warship. The hybrid structure nestled under the skin of the ship like a maggot feeding on the flesh of its host, preparing to hatch.

  Elsewhere in the ship, toilets were flushing sluggishly, the officer’s shower cubicle pressure was scandalously low, and a couple of environment techs were scratching their heads over the unexpectedly low sludge level in the number four silage tank. One bright spark was already muttering about plumbing leaks. But with a full combat engagement only hours away, most attention was focused on the ship’s weapons systems. Meanwhile, the luggage’s fabricator diligently churned away, extruding polymers and component materials to splice into the lifeboat it was preparing for its mistress. With only a short time until the coming engagement, speed was essential.

  “court will reconvene .” Sauer rapped on the tabletop with an upturned glass. “Defendant Martin Springfield, the charges laid against you are that on the thirty-second day of the month of Harmony, Year 211 of the Republic, you did with premeditation carry aboard the warship Lord Vanek a communications device, to wit a causal channel, without permission from your superior officer or indeed any officer of that ship, contrary to Article Forty-six of the Articles of War; and that, furthermore, you did make use of the said device to communicate with foreign nationals, contrary to Article Twenty-two, and in so doing, you disclosed operational details of the running of the warship Lord Vanek contrary to Section Two of the Defense of the Realm Act of 127, and also contrary to Section Four of the Articles of War, Treachery in Time of War. The charges laid against you therefore constitute negligent breach of signals control regulations, trafficking with the enemy, and treason in time of war. How do you plead?”

  Before he could open his mouth, Rachel spoke up. “He pleads not guilty to all charges. And I can prove it.” There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes; she stood very straight, with her hands clasped behind her back.

  “Does the accused accept that plea?” Vulpis intoned.

  “The colonel speaks for me,” said Martin.

  “First, evidence supporting the charges. Item: on the thirty-second day of the month of Harmony, year 211 of the Republic, you did with premeditation carry aboard the warship Lord Vanek a communications device, to wit a causal channel, without permission from your superior officer or indeed any officer of that ship, contrary to Article Forty-six. Clerk, present the item.”

  A rating stepped forward, stony-faced, bearing a small paper bag. He shook the contents out over the tabletop; a small, black memory cartridge. “Item one: a type twelve causal channel, embedded within a standard model CX expansion cartridge as used by personal assist machines throughout the decadent Terran sphere. The item was removed from defendant’s personal assist machine by Junior Procurator Vassily Muller, of the Curator’s Office on assignment to monitor the conduct of the defendant, on the thirty-second day of Harmony as noted. A sworn deposition by the Procurator is on record. Does anyone contest the admissibility of this evidence? No? Good—”

  “I do.” Rachel pointed at the small black cartridge. “Firstly, I submit that the Junior Procurator’s search of the defendant’s personal property was illegal and any evidence gained from it is inadmissible, because the defendant is a civilian and not subject to the waiver of rights in the oath of allegiance sworn by a serving soldier—his civil rights, including the right to property, cannot be legally violated without a judicial warrant or an order from an official
vested with summary powers subject to Article Twelve. Unless the Junior Procurator obtained such an order or warrant, his search was illegal and indeed may constitute burglary, and any information gathered in the process of an illegal search is not admissible in court. Secondly, if that thing is a causal channel, I’m a banana slug. That’s a standard quantum dot storage card; if you get a competent electronic engineer in, they’ll tell you the same. Thirdly, you don’t have authority to hold this charade of a trial; I’ve been checking in the Articles, and they state quite clearly that courts-martial can only be convened by order of the senior officer present. Where’s your written order from the Admiral?”

  She crossed her arms and stared at the bench.

  Sauer shook his head. “The Junior Procurator has standing orders to investigate Springfield; that makes anything he does legal in the eyes of the Curator’s Office. And I must register my extreme displeasure at the defense’s imputation that I do not have authority to convene this court. I have obtained such authority from my superior officer and will use it.” Carefully, he avoided specifying precisely what kind of authority he had. “As for the item of evidence being misidentified, we have on record a statement by the defendant to the effect that it is a causal channel, which he was asked to carry aboard by foreign parties, to wit the dockyard. As the Articles concern themselves specifically with intent, it does not matter whether the item is in fact a banana slug: the defendant is still guilty of thinking he was carrying a communications device.”

  He paused for a moment. “Let it be entered that the item of evidence was admitted.” He glared at Rachel: Got you, you bitch. Now what are you going to do?

  Rachel glanced at Martin and blinked rapidly. Then she turned back to face the bench. “A point of law, sir. As it happens, thinking is not generally considered the same as doing. Indeed, in this nation, which refuses to even consider the use of thought-controlled machinery, the distinction is even sharper than in my own. You appear to be attempting to try the defendant for his opinions and beliefs rather than his actions. Do you have any evidence of his actually passing on information to a third party? If not, there is no case to answer.”