Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  WOLF DEPOSITORY INCIDENT

  The shooting began with a telegram.

  Locked in a loose formation with six other capital ships, the Lord Vanek hurtled toward the heliopause, where the solar wind met the hard vacuum of interstellar space. Wolf Depository lay five light-years ahead, and almost five years in the future—for the plan was that fleet would follow a partially closed timelike path, plunging deep into the future (staying within the scope of a light cone with its apex drawn on New Prague at the time of first warning of attack), then use the black boxes attached to their drive modules to loop back into the past. Without quite breaking the letter of the Eschaton’s law—Thou shalt not globally violate causality—the fleet would arrive in orbit around Rochard’s World just after the onslaught of the Festival, far faster than such a task force would normally cover the eight hops separating them from the colony world. In the process, it would loop around any forces sent by the enemy to intercept a straightforward counter-strike—and pick up a time capsule containing analyses of the battle written by future historians, the better to aid the Admiral’s planning.

  At least, that was what theory dictated. Get there implausibly fast, with more firepower than any attacker could possibly expect, and with advance warning of the attacker’s order of battle and defensive intentions. What could go wrong?

  The operations room was a hive of concentration as the gold team officers—the crew shift who would be on duty at the time of the forthcoming first jump, the one that would take the fleet into the future, as well as out into deep space—ran through their set-up checklists.

  Captain Mirsky stood at the rear of the room, next to the heavy airtight door, watching his officers at their posts: a running display of telemetry from the ship’s battle management systems ran up the main wall-screen. The atmosphere was tense enough to cut with a knife. It was the first time any warship of the New Republic had engaged a high-technology foe; and no one, to the best knowledge of Commodore Bauer’s staff, had ever tried to pull off this tactical procedure before. Anything could be waiting for them. Five years into the future was as far as they dared probe in one jump; in theory, there should be a navigation beacon awaiting them, but if something went awry, the enemy might be there instead. Mirsky smiled thinly. All the more reason to get it right, he reasoned. If we mess it up, there won’t be a second time.

  The military attache from Earth had invited herself in to rubberneck at the proceedings and presumably report back to her masters in due course. Not that it made any difference at this point, but it annoyed Mirsky’s sense of order to have a tourist along, let alone one whose loyalty was questionable. He resolved to ignore her—or, if that became impossible, to eject her immediately.

  “First breakpoint in five-zero seconds,” called the flight engineer. “Slaved to preferential-frame compensation buffers. Range to jump initiation point, six-zero seconds.” More jargon followed, in a clipped, tense voice; the routine stock-in-trade of a warship, every phrase was defined by some procedural manual.

  Gunnery one: “Acknowledged. Standing by to power up laser grid.” A mass of lasers—more than a million tiny cells scattered across the skin of the ship, able to operate as a single phased array—cycled through their power-up routines and reported their status. The ship was nearing the jump point; as it did so, it sucked energy out of the energized, unstable vacuum ahead of it and stored it by spinning up its drive kernel, the tiny, electrically charged black hole that nestled at the heart of the engine room containment sphere.

  Engineering: “Main inertial propulsion holding at minus two seconds. Three-zero seconds to jump.”

  The ship drifted closer to the lightspeed transition point. The rippled space ahead of it began to flatten, bleeding energy into the underlying vacuum state. Six more huge warships followed behind at five-minute intervals; Squadron Two, the light screen of fast-movers who had set off behind the Lord Vanek, had overhauled them the day before and jumped through six hours ago.

  Comms: “Telegram from the flag deck, sir.”

  “Read it,” called Mirsky.

  “Telegram from Admiral Kurtz, open, all ears. Begins: Assume enemy warships ahead, break. Initiate fire on contact with hostiles, break. For the glory of the empire. Ends. Sent via causal channel to all sister ships.” The causal channels between the ships would die, their contents hopelessly scrambled, as soon as the ships made their first jump between equipotential points: quantum entanglement was a fragile phenomenon and couldn’t survive faster-than-light transitions.

  Mirsky nodded. “Acknowledge it. Exec, bring us battle stations.” Alarms began to honk mournfully throughout the ship.

  “Reference frame trap executed.” Relativistics. “Jump field engaged. We have a white box in group B, repeat, white box in B.” A captive reference frame meant the ship had mapped the precise space-time location of its origin perfectly. Using the newly installed drive controllers, the Lord Vanek could return to that point in time from some future location, flying a closed timelike loop.

  Mirsky cleared his throat. “Jump at your convenience.”

  No lights dimmed, there was no sense of motion, and virtually nothing happened—except for a burst of exotic particles injected into the ergo-sphere of the quantum black hole in the ship’s drive module. Nevertheless, without any fuss, the star patterns outside the ship’s hull changed.

  “Jump confirmed.” Almost everybody breathed a slight sight of relief.

  “Survey, let’s see where we are.” Mirsky showed no sign of stress, even though his ship had just jumped five years into its own future, as well as a parsec and a half out into the unknown.

  “Yes, sir: laser grid coming up.” About two gigawatts of power—enough to run a large city—surged into the laser cells in the ship’s skin: if there was one thing a starship like the Lord Vanek had, it was electricity to burn. The ship lit up like a pulsar, pumping out a blast of coherent ultraviolet light powerful enough to fry anyone within a dozen kilometers. It stabilized, scanning rapidly in a tight beam, quartering the space ahead of the ship. After a minute it shut down again.

  Radar: “No obstructions. We’re well clear.” Which was to be expected. Out here, fifteen to fifty astronomical units away from the primary, you could travel for 100 million kilometers in any direction without meeting anything much larger than a snowball. The intense UV lidar pulse would propagate for minutes, then hours, before returning the faint trace of a skin signature.

  “Very good. Conn, take us forward. One gee, total delta of one-zero k.p.s.” Mirsky stood back and waited as the helm officer punched in the maneuver. Ten k.p.s. wasn’t much speed, but it would take the Lord Vanek comfortably away from its point of emergence without emitting too much drive noise, leaving room for the rest of the flotilla behind them. A lidar pulse in the depths of the halo could only signify a warship on the prowl, and it would be extremely unhealthy to stay too close to its point of origin. In the Oort cloud of an industrialized system, even the snowballs could bite.

  “Ping at nine-two-six-four!” crowed Radar Two. “Range four-point-nine M-klicks, bearing one by seven-five by three-three-two. Lots of hot one-point-four MeV gammas—they’re cooking on antimatter!”

  “Acceleration?” asked Mirsky.

  “Tracking… one-point-three gees, confirmed. No change. Uh, wait—”

  “Comms bulletin from the Kamchatka, sir.”

  “Comms, call it.”

  “Message reads, quote, under attack by enemy missile layers break. Situation serious break. Where are the BBs, break. All units please respond, ends.”

  Mirsky blinked. Enemy warships? This soon? Wolf Depository was right on the New Republic’s doorstep, a mining system owned and exploited by the rich, heavily industrialized Septagon Central. What on earth were they doing allowing alien warships—

  “Second burst at nine-two-six-four,” called Radar One. “Same emission profile. Looks like we scared up a swarm!”

  “Wait,” grated Mirsky. He shook himself, visi
bly surprised by the news. “Wait, dammit! I want to see what else is out there. Comms, do not, under any circumstances, respond to signals from the Kamchatka, or anybody who came through ahead of us without clearing it with me first. If there are enemy ships out here, we’ve got no way of knowing whether our signals have been compromised.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Signal silence on all screening elements.”

  “Now.” He bent his head, pondering the screen ahead. “If it is an ambush…”

  The gamma-ray traces lit up on the main screen, labeled icons indicating their position and vector relative to the system ahead. One-point-three gees wasn’t particularly fast, but it was enough to send cold shudders up Mirsky’s spine: it meant serious high-delta-vee propulsion systems, fusion or antimatter or quantum gravity induction, not the feeble ion drive of a robot tug. That could mean a number of things: sublight relativistic bombers, missile buses, intrasystem interceptors, whatever. The Lord Vanek would have to skim past them to get to the next jump zone. Which could give them a passing shot at over 1000 k.p.s… a speed at which it took very little, maybe a sand grain, to total a ship. If it was an ambush, it had probably nailed the entire task force cold.

  “Radar,” he said, “give me a second lidar pulse, three-zero seconds. Then plot a vector intersect on those bogies, offset one-zero kiloklicks at closest pass, acceleration one-zero gees, salvo of two SEM-20s one-zero-zero kiloklicks out.”

  “Aye aye, skipper.”

  “Missiles armed, launch holding at minus one-zero seconds.” Commander Helsingus, stationed at Gunnery One.

  “I want them to get a good look at our attack profile,” murmured the Captain. “Nice and close.” Ilya Murametz glanced at him sidelong. “Keep the boys on their toes,” Mirsky added, meeting his eye. Ilya nodded.

  “Gamma burst!” called Radar Two. “Burst at one-four-seven-one. Range one-one point-two M-klicks, bearing one by seven-five by three-three-two. Looks like shooting, sir!”

  “Understood.” Mirsky clasped his hands together: Muram-etz winced as he cracked his knuckles. “Hurry up and wait. Helm: How’s the attack course?”

  “We’re prepping it now, sir.”

  “Forward lidar. Looks like we are in a shooting war. And they know we’re here by now. So let’s get a good look at them.”

  Comms: “Sir, new message purportedly from the Kamchatka. Message from the Aurora, too.”

  “Read them.”

  Mirsky nodded at the comms station, where the petty officer responsible read from a punched paper tape unreeling from the brass mouth of a dog’s head. “Kamchatka says, quote, engaged by enemy missile boats break we are shooting back break enemy warships astern painting us with target designation radar break situation desperate where are you. Ends. Aurora says, quote, no contact with enemies break Kamchatka off course stand by for orbital elements correction break what is all the shooting about. Ends.”

  “Oh bloody hell.” Murametz turned red.

  “Indeed,” Mirsky said drily. “The question is, whose? TacOps: what’s our status?”

  “Target acquired, sir. Range down to four-point-eight M-klicks, speed passing one-zero-zero k.p.s. Engagement projected within two-point-four kiloseconds.”

  “We have a… three-zero-zero-second margin,” said Mirsky, checking the clock display. “That should be plenty. We can get a look at the closest one without getting so close their launch base can shoot at us if it’s a missile bus. Everyone clear? Guns: I want real-time logging of those birds. Let’s see how they perform. Radar: Can you lock a spectroscope on the target?”

  “At three K-klicks per second, from one-zero K-klicks away? I think so, sir, but we’ll need a big fat beacon to spot against.”

  “You’ll have one.” Murametz smiled widely. “Guns: dial those birds down to point-one of a kiloton before you fire them. Standard MP-3 warheads?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Keep ‘em.”

  Standing at the back of the bridge, Rachel tried not to wince. Wearing her arms inspectorate hat, she was all too familiar with the effects of americium bombs: nuclear weapons made with an isotope denser and more fissile than plutonium, more stable than californium. Just good old-fashioned fission bombs, jacketed with a high-explosive shaped charge and a lens of pre-fragmented copper needles—shrapnel that, in a vacuum engagement, would come spalling off the nuclear fireball in a highly directional cone, traveling at a high fraction of Hghtspeed.

  The next thirty minutes passed in tense silence, broken only by terse observations from Radar One and Two. No more targets burst from hiding; there might well be others in the Kuiper belt, but none were close enough to see or be seen by the intense lidar pulses of the warship. In that time, passive sensors logged two nuclear detonations within a range of half a light-hour; someone was definitely shooting. And behind them, the telltale disturbances of six big ships emerged from jump, then powered up their combat lidar and moved out.

  “Launch point in six-zero seconds,” called Helsingus. “Two hot SEM-20s on the rail.”

  “Fire on schedule,” said Mirsky, straightening his back and looking directly ahead at the screen. The green arrow showing the Lord Vanek’s vector had grown until it was beginning to show the purple of relativistic distortion around its sensitive extrapolative tip: the ship was already nearing half a percent of lightspeed, a dangerous velocity. Too high a speed and it might not be able to track targets effectively: worse, it wouldn’t be able to dodge or change its vector fast, or jump safely.

  “Three-zero seconds. Arming birds. Birds show green, sir.”

  “I’m getting emissions from the target,” called Radar Two. “Lots of—looks like jamming, sir!”

  “Laser grid. Illuminate the target,” said Mirsky. “Guns, set to passive.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Under passive homing mode, the missiles would lock onto the target, illuminated by the Lord Vanek’s laser battery, and home in on its reflection.

  “Target still accelerating slowly,” said Radar One. “Looks like a missile boat.”

  “One-zero seconds. Launch rails energized.”

  “You have permission to fire at will, Commander,” said the Captain.

  “Yes, sir. Eight seconds. Navigation updated. Inertial platforms locked. Birds charged, warheads… green. Five seconds. Launch commencing, bird one. Gone.” The deck shuddered briefly: ten tons of missile hurtled the length of the ship in the grip of a coilgun, ejected ahead of the starship at better than a kilometer per second. “Lidar lock. Drive energized. Bird one main engine ignition confirmed. Bird two loaded and green… launch. Gone. Drive energized.”

  “Bingo,” Ilya said quietly.

  Red arrows indicating the progress of the missiles appeared on the forward screen. They weren’t self-powered; nobody in his right mind would dare load a quantum black hole and its drive support mechanism into a robot suicide machine. Rather, the ship’s phased-array lasers bathed them in a sea of energy, boiling and then superheating the reaction mass they carried until they surged forward far faster than the starship. Strictly a close-range low-delta-vee weapon, missiles were mostly obsolescent; their sole job was to get a nuclear device onto the right interception vector, like the “bus” on an ancient twentieth-century MIRV. They’d burn out after only thirty seconds, but by then the warheads would be closing the gap between the Lord Vanek’s projected course and the enemy ship itself. Shortly after the starship ran the gauntlet, its missiles would arrive—and deliver the killing blow.

  “Radar One. Where are they?” Mirsky asked softly.

  “Tracking as before,” called the officer. “Still maintaining course and vector. And emitting loads of spam.”

  “Bird one MECO in one-zero seconds,” said Helsingus. “They’re trying to jam, sir. Nothing doing.” He said it with heavy satisfaction, as if the knowledge that the anonymous victims of the attack were offering some token resistance reassured him that he was not, in fact, about to butcher them without justification. Even committed officers
found the applied methods of three centuries of nuclear warfare hard to stomach at times.

  Comms Two, voice ragged with tension: “Jamming stopped, sir! I’m receiving a distress beacon. Two—no, three! I say again, three distress beacons. It’s like they’re bailing out before we hit them.”

  “Too late,” said Helsingus. “We’ll have ’em in three-two seconds. They’ll be inside the burst radius.”

  Rachel shuddered. Suddenly a horrible possibility began to rise to the surface of her mind.

  Mirsky cracked his knuckles again, kneading his hands together. “Guns. I want a last-ditch evasion program loaded, activate at closest approach minus one-zero seconds if we’re still here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Helsingus said heavily. “Laser grid support?”

  “Anything you like.” Mirsky waved a hand magnanimously. “If we’re still here to enjoy the light show.”

  Helsingus began flipping switches like a man possessed. On the screen, the outgoing birds passed their main engine cutout points and went ballistic; more enemy missiles began hatching like sinister blue fingers reaching out from the target point.

  “Captain,” Rachel said slowly.

  “—One-zero seconds. They’re jamming hard, sir, but the birds are still holding.”

  “What if Kamchatka is wrong? What if those are civilian mining ships?”

  Captain Mirsky ignored her.

  “Five seconds! Bird one ready to go—range down to one-zero K. Three. EMP lockdown is go. Sensor stepdown mag six is go. Optics shielded—bang. Sir, I confirm that bird one has detonated. Bang. Bird two is gone.”

  “Radar. What do you see?” asked Mirsky.

  “Waiting on the fog to clear—ah, got sensors back sir. Incoming missiles still closing. Fireball remnants hashing up radar, lidar is better. Uh, the impact spectroscope has tripped, sir, we have a confirmed impact on the target alpha. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbonitrile emissions from the hull. I think we holed him, sir.”

  “We holed him—” Mirsky stopped. Turned to glance at Rachel. “What did you say?” he demanded.