Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

  “Humbly reporting, I’ve lost missile two as well, sir.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” muttered Helsingus. He glanced at the plot: a flurry of six more missiles, all fired from the Kamchatka, was closing in on their target: ranging shots all, with little chance of doing any damage, but—

  Point Defense: “Sir, problem on deck one. Looks like—humbly report a debris impact, sir, lost a scattering of eyeballs on the lidar grid but nothing broke the inner pressure hull.”

  “Looks like they’ve got bad dandruff,” Mirsky commented. “But their point defense is working. Torpedoes?”

  “Not yet, sir,” said Helsingus. “They’ve only got about five-zero-zero k.p.s. of delta-vee. Won’t be in position to light off for, ah, eight-zero more seconds.” Drifting toward the enemy almost 100 k.p.s. faster than the warship that had launched them, the torpedoes nevertheless had relatively short legs. Unlike the missiles, they had their own power plant, radar, and battle control computers, which made them valuable assets in event of an engagement—but they accelerated more slowly and had a lower total acceleration budget.

  Radar Two: “Humbly report I think I spotted something, sir. About one-zero-zero milliseconds after missile two dropped off, detector three trapped a neutrino pulse; impossible to say for sure whether it came from the target or the missile, but it looked fairly energetic. Ah, no sign of any other radiation.”

  “Most peculiar,” Mirsky murmured under his breath: an extreme understatement. “What’s our range profile?”

  “Torpedo range in six-zero seconds. Active gunnery range in one-five-zero seconds; contact range in four-zero-zero seconds. Closest pass two-zero K-kilometers, speed on the order of two-six-zero k.p.s. assuming no maneuvering. Range to target is one-zero-five K-kilometers on my mark, now.”

  “Hah.” Mirsky nodded. “Gentlemen, this may look preposterous, but I have a problem with the way things are going. Helsingus, your two torpedoes—torch ’em off straight at bogey one.”

  “But they’ll go ballistic short of—”

  Mirsky raised a warning hand. “Just do it. Helm, option three-two. Signal all ships.” Once again, he picked up the phone to the Commodore’s battle room to confer with his flag officer.

  “Aye aye, sir.” The display centered on Rochard’s World shifted, rolling; the orange line representing Lord Vanek’s course, hitherto straight in toward the planet, began to bend, curving away from the planet. The red lines showing the course of the two incoming enemy ships were also bending, moving to intercept the Lord Vanek and her five sister ships; meanwhile the twelve dots of blue, representing the torpedoes the squadron had dropped overboard almost two minutes earlier, began to grow outward.

  Live torpedoes were not something any starship captain wanted to get too close to. Unlike a missile—essentially a tube full of reaction mass with a laser mirror in its tail and a warhead at the other end—a torpedo was a spacecraft with its own power plant, an incredibly dirty fission rocket, little more than a slow-burning atom bomb, barely under control as it spewed a horribly radioactive exhaust stream behind it. It was also the most efficient storable-fuel rocket motor available, without the complexity of fusion reactors or curved-space generators. Before the newer technologies came along, early-twenty-first-century pioneers had used it for the first crewed interplanetary missions.

  “Fish are both running, sir. Ours are making nine-six and one-one-two gees respectively; general squadron broadside averages ninety-eight. They should burn out and switch to sustainer in one-zero-zero seconds and intersect bogeys one and two if they stay on current course in about one-five-zero seconds. Guidance pack degradation should still be under control by then, we should be able to do terminal targeting control.”

  “Good,” Mirsky said shortly. Heading in on the Lord Vanek on a reciprocal course, the enemy ships might well be able to start shooting soon: but the torpedoes would get in the way nicely, messing up the clear line of sight on the Lord Vanek while threatening them. Which was exactly what Mirsky was hoping for.

  There was something extremely odd about the two ships, he noted. They weren’t following any kind of obvious tactical doctrine, just accelerating in a straight line, pulsing with lidar as they came—homing in blindly. There was no sign of sneaky moves. They’d lurched out and begun pinging away like drunken fools playing a barroom computer game, throwing away the advantage of concealment that they’d held. Whoever was driving those birds is either a fool or—

  “Radar,” he said softly. “Saturation cover forward and down. Anything there?”

  “I’ll look.” Marek gulped, getting the Captain’s drift immediately. If these two were hounds, flushing their game out of hiding, something would be drifting in quietly from ahead. Not mines dropped at peak velocity, but something else. Maybe something worse, like a brace of powered torpedoes. “Um, humbly suggest optical scan as well, sir?”

  “It can’t fix us for them any better,” Mirsky grunted. “They know where we are.”

  Radar Two: “Sir, nothing on mass. Nothing within two light-seconds ahead or down. Small amount of organic debris—we passed through a thin cloud of it back at waypoint one, picked up a couple of scratches on the nose—but no sign of escorts or weapons.”

  “Sir, we are all clear ahead,” said Lieutenant Marek.

  “Well, keep looking then.” Mirsky looked down at his hands. They were tightly entwined in his lap, veins standing out on their backs, old hands, the fine hair at his wrists turning gray. “How did I get this far?” he asked himself quietly.

  His workstation pinged. “Incoming call for you, sir,” it said.

  “Damn.” He punched up the image. It was Commodore Bauer.

  “I’m busy,” he said tersely. “Torpedo run. Can it wait?”

  “I don’t think so. There is something very flaky going on. Why do you think they aren’t shooting?”

  “Because they’ve already shot at us, but the bullets haven’t arrived yet,” Mirsky said through gritted teeth.

  Bauer stared at his Flag Captain for a moment, wordless agreement written on his face. Then he nodded. “Get us the hell out of here, Captain. I’ll tell the rest of the squadron to follow your lead. Just give me as much delta-vee as you can between us and those—whatever.”

  Radar Two: “Time to torpedo closest approach, eight-zero seconds. Sir, there are no signs that wolf one or two has seen the fish. But they’re well within sensor range if they’re using something equivalent to our G-90s.”

  “Understood.” Mirsky paused. Something was nagging at the back of his mind; a nasty sense of having forgotten something. That neutrino pulse, that was it. Neutrinos meant strong nuclear force. So why no flash? “Guns, load up twelve SEM- 20s for tail drop at shortest intercept course. Assuming they come in from behind.” He glanced back at his screen, but the commodore had hung up on him without waiting.

  “Aye aye. Birds loaded.” Helsingus seemed almost happy, twitching levers and adjusting dials. It was the nearest thing to pleasure Mirsky remembered the dour gunnery officer showing since his dog had disappeared. “Ready at minus one-zero seconds.”

  “Helm.” Mirsky paused. “Prepare to execute plan bugout on my command.”

  An alarm warbled at the radar desk. “Beg to report sir,” began the petty officer on duty, face whey-pale: “I’ve lost Prince Vaclav.”

  Faces looked up in shock all around the room. “What do you mean, lost it?” snapped Vulpis, bypassing the operational pecking order. “You didn’t just lose a battlecruiser—”

  “Sir, she’s stopped responding. Stopped accelerating, too. I can see her on plot, but there’s something wrong with her—” The radar operator paused. “Sir, I can’t get an IFF heartbeat out of her. And she’s reflecting way too much energy—something must have ripped the front off her emission control coating.”

  “Helm. Execute plan bugout,” Mirsky snapped in the sudden silence that followed the report.

  “Aye aye, sir, bugout it is.” Lieutenant Vulpis
began flipping switches in a frenzy.

  A fundamental problem with combat in space was that if things began to go wrong, they could do so with dizzying speed—and to make matters worse, catastrophe would only become visible to a ship that was so deep into the enemy’s powered-missile envelope that escape was nearly impossible. Mirsky had gamed this situation repeatedly with Bauer and the other fleet captains; plan bugout was the result. It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse. Something had just reached out across ninety thousand kilometers and bushwhacked a battlecruiser. This wasn’t entirely unexpected; they were here to fight, after all. But they hadn’t seen any missiles, only their own birds and the debris from the blow-out drifting in ahead of them, and the fine drizzle of organic “dandruff” from the enemy ships—and in active mode, the Lord Vanek’s lidar could pin down a missile at almost a light-second, three hundred thousand kilometers. If the enemy had a beam weapon of some kind that was capable of trashing a capital ship at that range, nearly two orders of magnitude greater than their own point-defense energy weapons, they were already too damned close. All they could do was turn side-on and go to emergency thrust, generating a vector away from the enemy before they could respond.

  Radar Two: “Torpedo intersect in four-zero seconds. Wolves one and two still tracking on course, acceleration down to one gee.”

  “Well, that’s nice to know. Mr. Helsingus, I would appreciate it if you’d be so good as to prepare a warm welcome for anything our friends try to send after us. I don’t know just what they threw at Prince Vaclav, but I don’t propose to give them time to show us. And if you gentlemen will excuse me for a minute, I have a private call to make.” Mirsky pulled on his headset and pushed down on the antisound lever. “Comms, get me the Commodore.” His earpieces clicked. “Sir?”

  “Have you started bugout?”

  “Yes, sir. The Prince Vaclav—”

  The screech of the decompression alarm cut through his ears like a knife. “By the numbers, damn you!” yelled Mirsky. “Suit up!” He yanked off his headset. Officers and men dashed to the emergency locker at the rear of the compartment and pulled their gear on, stumbled back to man posts while their backups followed suit. The ops room had already cycled onto its emergency supply, along with all the main nerve centers of the ship, but Mirsky wasn’t one to take chances. Not that being suited up would count for much protection in ship-to-ship combat, but decompression was another threat entirely, one dreaded aboard any starship almost as much as fire or Hawking radiation. “Damage control, talk to me,” he grunted. A passing CPO held out a suit for him; he stood up and pulled it on slowly, making sure to double-check its status display.

  “Humbly report a big pressure drop on A deck, sir. Critical decompression, we’re still venting air. Ah, humbly report there appears to be some damage to lidar emitter quadrant three.”

  “You make sure everybody’s buttoned down. Guns, Radar, where do we stand?”

  Radar One: “Torpedo intercept in one-five seconds. Bogey holding course, due to pass inside our terminal engagement envelope for two-zero seconds in one-two-zero then drop behind.”

  Helsingus nodded. “All tubes loaded,” he reported.

  “Damage Control: Patch into life support and find out what the hell is loose.”

  “Got it already, sir. I’ve got some kind of contamination, source inside life support one: weird organic molecules, low concentration. Also, er, localized outbreaks of fire. It’s mostly around A deck. The lidar grid damage is localized, around where the debris strike happened. Ah, I have one-six crew marked down on the status board. A deck segment two is open to space, and they were all inside at the time.”

  Gunnery: “Five seconds to torpedo terminal boost phase.”

  “Let’s dazzle ’em now,” said Helsingus. “Grid to full power.”

  “Aye aye, sir, full multispectral shriek in progress.”

  Helsingus leaned sideways and muttered into his headset; Radar One muttered back. There was some mutual adjustment of switches as radar relinquished priority control on the huge phased-array laser grid that coated the warship, then Helsingus and his two assistants began entering instructions.

  The Lord Vanek boosted at right angles to the two enemy craft, accelerating away from the two silent pursuers on a ripple of warped space-time. The two saltwater-fission torpedoes, bright sparks behind, accelerated toward the enemy warships like a pair of nuclear fireworks. Now the tight-packed mosaic of panels that covered much of the Lord Vanek’s cylindrical bulk began to glow with the intense speckled purity of laser light. A thousand different colors appeared, blending and clashing and forming a single brilliant diadem of light; megawatts, then gigawatts of power surged out, the skin of the ship burning like a directional magnesium flare. The glow built up, and most of it flowed out in two tightly controlled beams, intense enough to cut through steel plate like a blowtorch at a range of a thousand kilometers.

  Simultaneously, the flight of torpedoes throttled up to maximum thrust, weaving erratically as they closed the final three thousand kilometers to the onrushing enemy ships. Hurtling in ten times faster than an ICBM of the pre-space age, the rockets jinked and wove to avoid the anticipated point-lasers, relying on passive sensors and sophisticated antispoofing algorithms to cut through the expected jamming and countermeasures of the enemy ships. They took barely thirty seconds to close the distance, and found the enemy point defense to be almost nonexistent.

  From the ops room of the Lord Vanek, the engagement was undramatic. One of the pursuer points simply disappeared, replaced by an expanding shell of spallation debris and hot gases energized by an incandescent point far brighter than any conventional fission explosion; with the ship’s hull blown wide and drive mountings shattered, the antimatter bottle spilled its contents into a soup of metallic hydrogen, triggering a mess of exotic subnuclear reactions. But only one of the torpedoes struck home; the other eleven winked out.

  “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, w
ere 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.”