Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  Ilya stared at her, his expression unreadable. “I will tell the Captain,” he murmured. Then he stood. “In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would stay out of the operations room while I am in charge—or hold your counsel in public. And not to lay hands on any officer. Is that understood?”

  She met his gaze. If his expression was unreadable, hers was exactly the opposite. “I understand perfectly,” she breathed. Then she stood and left the room without another word, closing the door softly as she left.

  Ilya stared after her and shuddered. He shook himself angrily; then he picked up the telephone handset and spoke to the operator. “Get me the Captain,” he said. “It’s important.”

  It was a time capsule, pitted and tarnished from four thousand years in space. And it contained mail.

  The survey drone nudged up to it delicately, probing it with radar and infrared sensors. Drifting cold and silent, the capsule showed no sign of life save for some residual radioactivity around its after end. A compact matter/antimatter rocket, it had crossed the eighteen light-years from the New Republic at a sublight crawl, then decelerated into a parking orbit and shut down. Its nose cone was scratched and scarred, ablated in patches from the rough passage through the interstellar medium. But behind it waited a silvery sphere a meter in diameter. The capsule was fabricated from sintered industrial diamond five centimeters thick, a safety-deposit box capable of surviving anything short of a nuclear weapon.

  The mail was packed onto disks, diamond wafers sandwiching reflective gold sheets. It was an ancient technology, but incredibly durable. Using external waldoes, ratings controlling the survey drone unscrewed the plug sealing the time capsule and delicately removed the disk stacks. Then, having verified that they were not, in fact, explosives or antimatter, the survey drone turned and began to climb back out toward the Lord Vanek and the other ships of the first battleship squadron.

  The discovery of mail—and surely there was too much of it to only be tactical data about the enemy—put the crew in a frenzy of anticipation. They’d been confined to the ship’s quarters for two months now, and the possibility of messages from families and loved ones drove them into manic anticipation that alternated, individually, with deep depression at the merest thought that they might be forgotten.

  Rachel, however, was less sanguine about the mail: the chances of the Admiralty having let her employers message her under diplomatic cypher were, in her estimation, less than zero. Martin didn’t expect anything, either. His sister hadn’t written to him back in New Prague; why should she write to him now? His ex-wife, he wouldn’t want to hear from. In emotional terms, his closest current relationship—however unexpectedly it had dawned upon him—was with Rachel. So while the officers and crew of the Lord Vanek spent their off hours speculating about the letters from home, Rachel and Martin spent their time worrying about exposure. For, as she had pointed out delicately, he didn’t have diplomatic papers: and even leaving matters of Republican public morality aside, it would be a bad idea if anyone were to decide that he was a lever to use against her.

  “It’s probably not a good idea for us to spend too much time together in private, love,” she’d murmured at the back of his shoulder, as they lay together in his narrow bunk. “When everybody else is at action stations, they’re not liable to notice us—but the rest of the time—” His shoulders went tense, telling her that he understood.

  “We’ll have to work something out,” he said. “Can’t we?”

  “Yes.” She’d paused to kiss his shoulder. “But not if it risks some blue-nosed bigot locking you up for conduct unbecoming, or convinces the admiral’s staff that I’m a two-kopek whore they can grope or safely ignore, which isn’t too far from what some of them think already.”

  “Who?” Martin rolled over to face her, his expression grim. “Tell me—”

  “Ssh.” She’d touched a finger to his lips, and for a moment, he’d found her expression almost heartbreaking. “I don’t need a protector. Have their ideas been rubbing off on you?”

  “I hope not!”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She chuckled quietly and rolled against him.

  Martin was sitting alone in his cabin some days later, nursing wistful thoughts about Rachel and a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, when somebody banged on the hatch. “Who’s there?” he called.

  “Mail for the engineer! Get it in the purser’s office!” Feet hurried away, then there was a cacophony from farther down the corridor.

  “Hmm?” Martin sat up. Mail? On the face of it, it was improbable. Then again, everything about this voyage was improbable. Startled out of his reverie, he bent down and hunted for his shoes, then set out in search of the source of the interruption.

  He didn’t have any difficulty finding it. The office was a chaotic melee of enlisted men, all trying to grab their own mail and that of anyone they knew. The mail had been copy-printed onto paper, sealed in neat blue envelopes. Puzzled, Martin hunted around for anyone in charge.

  “Yes?” The harassed petty officer in charge of the sorting desk looked up from the pile he was trying to bundle together for transfer to the His Majesty’s courier ship Godot. “Oh, you. Over there, in the unsorted deck.” He pointed at a smallish box containing a selection of envelopes; missives for the dead, the mad, and the non-naval.

  Martin burrowed through the pile, curious, until he came to an envelope with his name on it. It was a rather fat envelope. How odd, he thought. Rather than open it on the spot, he carried it back to his cabin.

  When he opened it, he nearly threw it away immediately: it began with the dreaded phrase, “My dear Marty.” Only one woman called him that, and although she was the subject of some of his fondest memories, she was also capable of inspiring in him a kind of bitter, anguished rage that made him, afterward, ashamed of his own emotions. He and Morag had split eight years ago, and the recriminations and mutual blame had left a trench of silence between them.

  But what could possibly have prompted her to write to him now? She’d always been a very verbal person, and her e-mails had tended to be terse, misspelled sentences rather than the emotional deluges she reserved for face-to-face communications.

  Puzzled, Martin began to read.

  My Dear Marty,

  It’s been too long since I last wrote to you; I hope you’ll forgive me. Life has been busy, as they say, and doubly so, for I have also had Sarah to look after. Shes growing very tall these days, and looks just like her father. I hope you’ll be around for her sixteenth birthday…

  He stopped. This had to be an elaborate joke. His ex-wife seemed to be talking about a child—their child—who didn’t exist. And this was nothing like her style! It was almost as if someone else, writing from a dossier of his family history, was trying to—

  He began to read again, this time acutely alert for hidden messages.

  Sarah is studying theology at college these days. You know how studious she’s always been? Her new teacher Herman seems to have brought her out of her shell. She’s working on a dissertation about Eschatology; she insisted that I enclose a copy for you (attached below).

  The rest of the letter was filled with idle chatter about fictional friends, reminiscences about trivial and entirely nonexistent shared memories and major (presumably well-documented) ones, and—as far as Martin could see—a content-free blind.

  He turned to the “dissertation.” It was quite long, and he pondered Herman’s wisdom in sending it. Did New Republican schoolchildren write eight-page essays about God? And about God’s motives, as far as they could be deduced from the value of the cosmological constant? It was written in a precious, somewhat dull style that set his teeth on edge, like an earnest student essay hunting for marks of approval rather than a straight discursive monograph asserting a viewpoint. Then his eyes caught the footnotes:

  1. Consider the hypothetical case of a power that intends to create a localized causality violation that does not produce a light cone encompassing its origin
point. (We are implicitly assuming a perfectly spherical zone of sinfulness expanding at velocity c with origin at time TO.) If the spherical volume of sinfulness does not intersect with the four-space trajectory of the power’s initial location, we are not dealing with an original sin. Consequently we do not expect the Eschaton to condemn the entire sinful civilization to damnation, or a Type II supernova; redemption is possible. However, damnation of the sinful agency that causes the causality violation is required.

  He skipped down the page and began underlining significant words and phrases.

  2. Does the Eschaton always intervene destructively? The answer is probably “no”. We see the consequences of intervention in issues of original sin, but for every such intervention there are probably thousands of invisible nudges delivered to our world line with subtlety and precision. The agency by which such nudges are delivered must remain unknown for them to be effective. They probably flee the scene after intervention, hiding themselves in the teeming masses. The agency may even work in concert with our own efforts, as Eschaton-fearing human beings, to ensure no violations exist. It is possible that some Eschatologically aware government agencies may assist the Eschaton’s secret friends, if they are aware of their presence. Others, secret agents of sinful powers, may attempt to identify them by evidence and arrest them.

  Well, that was all fairly instructive. Steganographic back channels generally irritated Martin, with their potential for misunderstandings and garbled messages, but in this instance, Herman was being quite clear. Distrust the New Republican secret police. Possible help from other agencies—did that mean Rachel? No retaliation against the New Republic itself: that was a big weight off his conscience, for however much he might dislike or despise their social affairs, they didn’t deserve to die because of their leader’s inability to deal with an unprecedented problem. However, one last footnote remained impenetrable, however he tried to understand it:

  3. Of course, few people would contemplate breaking the law of causality without at least a very major apparent threat. One wonders what the invisible helpers of the Eschaton might do when confronted with the need to prevent a causality violation in the face of such a threat? At that point, they may find themselves with split loyalties: on the one hand, to defend the prime law of the anthropic cosmos, while at the same time, not wanting to surrender their misguided but nevertheless human peers into the claws of a great evil. Under these circumstances, I feel sure the Eschaton would tell its agents to look to their fellow humans’ interests immediately after preventing the rupture of space-time itself. The Eschaton may not be a compassionate God, but it is pragmatic and does not expect its tools to break in its service. However, the key issue is determining which side is least wrong. This leads us deep into the forest of ethics, wherein there is a festival of ambiguity. All we can do is hope the secret helpers make the right choices—otherwise, the consequences of criticism will be harsh.

  Martin sat back and scratched his head. “Now what the hell does that mean?” he muttered to himself.

  A SEMIOTIC WAR

  The Admiral was having a bad day.

  “Damn your eyes, man, g-g-get your hands off me!” he croaked at his batman. Robard ignored him and carried on lifting; Kurtz’s frail body wasn’t capable of resisting as he sat the old man up and plumped up the pillows behind him. “I’ll have you taken out and shot!”

  “Certainly, sir. Would that be before or after breakfast?”

  The Admiral growled, deep in the back of his throat, then subsided into a rasping pant. “‘M’not well. Not like I used to be. Dammit, I hate this!”

  “You’re getting old, sir. Happens to us all.”

  “Not that blas-asted Terran attache, dammit. He doesn’t get old. I remember him back on Lamprey. Took lots of daguerreotypes of me standing by a hill of skulls we built in the public square of New Bokhara. Had to do something with the rebel prisoners, after all, no Jesus to make the quartermaster’s loaves go further, ha-ha. Said he’d hang me, but never got around to it, the bastard. Wry cove, that wet fish. Could have sworn he was a female impersonator. What d’ye think, Kurt? Is he a shirt-lifter?”

  Robard coughed and slid a bed table bearing cup of weak tea and a poached egg on toast in front of the Admiral. “The UN inspector is a lady, sir.”

  Kurtz blinked his watery eyes in astonishment. “Why, bless my soul—what a surprise!” He reached for the teacup, but his hand was shaking so much he could barely lift it without slopping the contents. “I thought I knew that,” he accused.

  “You probably did, sir. You’ll feel better after you’ve taken your medicine.”

  “But if he’s a girl, and he was at First Lamprey, that means—” Kurtz looked puzzled. “Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know. Where’s my briefing?”

  “I’ll fetch it right after your breakfast, sir. Commodore Bauer said to tell you he’s looking after everything.”

  “Jolly good.”

  Kurtz concentrated on assaulting his egg. Presently, when he had accepted its surrender, Robard removed the table. “We’d better get you dressed and up, sir. Staff meeting in thirty minutes.”

  Thirty-five minutes later, the Admiral was ready to meet his staff in the huge conference room adjoining his suite. Donning a uniform and taking his medication seemed to have removed a decade from his shoulders; he shuffled into the room under his own power, leaning heavily on his canes, although Robard discreetly helped when the Admiral tried to return the assembled officers’ salute (and nearly caught a walking stick in one eye).

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” began the Admiral. “I gather the rail packet has been me—I’m sorry. I gather the r-r—mail packet has been received. Lieutenant Kossov. What word of our dispatches?”

  “Er—” Kossov looked green. “We have a problem, sir.”

  “What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems—that’s the enemy’s job!”

  “There was a stack of twenty disks in the time capsule—”

  “Don’t give me disks, give me answers! What word of the enemy?”

  Commodore Bauer leaned forward. “I think what the Lieutenant is trying to say,” he interrupted, “is that the dispatches were damaged.” Kossov eyed the Commodore with embarrassingly transparent gratitude.

  “That’s exactly right, sir. The private mail was intact, for the most part, but there was damage to the time capsule at one side—a micrometeoroid impact—and three of the disks were fragmented. We’ve retrieved a partial copy of a tenth of our orders from the remaining disks, but most of what came through consists of supply manifests for the quartermaster and a suggested menu for the Emperor’s Birthday Commemoration Dinner. No details of the enemy, order of battle, force dispositions, diplomatic analysis, intelligence, or anything remotely useful. It’s all shattered.”

  “I see.” The Admiral looked deceptively calm; Kossov quailed. “So our intelligence about the enemy disposition is absent. Ah, that-t makes life easier.” He turned to Bauer. “Then we shall have to proceed in accordance with Plan B in order to accomplish a successful attack! Every man shall do his duty, for right is on our side. I ex-expect you have incontingency plans for dealing with in-insurgents on the ground? Good, very good. The Festival we shall meet in orbit and, having destroyed their ships, we shall work on the assumption that there is an aspiration to depose His Majesty among the rebels on the ground and their allies from the enemy camp! Commodore. You will supervise our approach to the target system. Colonel von Ungern—Sternberg? Plans for the disposition of your marines and the re-re-reimposition of order once we arrive, if you please. Captain Mirsky, you will coordinate the, ah, la-la— maneuvers of the flotilla. Report to Midshipman Bauer if you please.”

  The Admiral rose, shakily, and made no protest when Ro-bard held him by one arm. “Diss-diss-missed!” he snap
ped and, turning, hobbled out of the room.

  Procurator Muller was bored. Bored and, furthermore, somewhat annoyed. Apart from the evidence of misconduct over a weissbier back in New Prague, there wasn’t anything he could hang on the engineer. Just the fact that he was a foreigner who espoused radical opinions liable to encourage moral turpitude among the lumpenproletariat—which put him in the company of roughly ninety percent of the population of the known universe. Admittedly, there had been the nonstandard plug-in from the man’s PA, but that wasn’t conclusive. Was it?

  He’d spent nearly two months of his life getting this much information. Much of the time, he was bored to tears; the crew and officers wouldn’t speak to him—he was one of the Curator’s men, charged with the preservation of society, and, like all police posts, this attracted some degree of suspicion—and he had long since exhausted the small wardroom library. With no duties but covert surveillance of a suspect who knew he was under suspicion, there was little for him to occupy his time with except idle fantasies about his forthcoming meeting, when they arrived on Rochard’s World. But there were only a finite number of words he could think of to address his father with—and small consolation in imagining himself saying them.

  However, one evening, it occurred to Vassily that there was another avenue he could follow in his exploration of the subject’s movements. Wasn’t Springfield spending an unhealthy amount of time in company with the foreign diplomat?

  Now there was a shady case! Vassily’s nostrils flared whenever he thought about her. If she hadn’t had diplomatic papers, he’d have had her in an interrogation room in a trice. Springfield might be a radical, but Colonel Mansour wore trousers— enough to get her arrested for indecency on the streets of the capital, special credentials or no. The woman was a dangerous degenerate; obviously of depraved tastes, a male impersonator, probably an invert, and liable to corrupt anyone she came into contact with. Indeed, her very presence on this warship was a threat to the moral hygiene of the crew! That the engineer spent much of his time with her was obvious (Vassily had seen the surveillance recordings of him slipping in and out of her cabin), and the question of where the incriminating evidence was kept seemed fairly clear-cut. Springfield was a dangerous anarchist spy, and she must be his evil scheming control; a secretive mistress of the art of diplomatic seduction, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.