Singularity Sky Read online

  meanwhile, on the bridge, the battlecruiser Lord Vanek was counting down for main drive activation.

  As the flagship of the expedition, Lord Vanek was at the heart of squadron one, along with three of the earlier Glorious-class battlecruisers, and the two Victory-class battleships Kamchatka and Regina (now sadly antiquated, relics that had seen better days). Squadron Two, consisting of a mixed force of light cruisers, destroyers, and missile carriers, would launch six hours behind Squadron One; finally, the supply train, with seven bulk cargo freighters and the liner Sikorsky’s Dream (refitted as a hospital ship) would depart eight hours later.

  Lord Vanek was, in interstellar terms, a simple beast: ninety thousand tonnes of warship and a thousand crew held in tight orbit around an electron-sized black hole as massive as a mountain range. The hole—the drive kernel—spun on its axis so rapidly that its event horizon was permeable; the drive used it to tug the ship about by tickling the singularity in a variety of ways. At nonrelativistic speeds, Lord Vanek maneuvered by dumping mass into the kernel; complex quantum tunneling interactions—jiggery-pokery within the ergosphere—transformed it into raw momentum. At higher speeds, energy pumped into the kernel could be used to generate the a jump field, collapsing the quantum well between the ship and a point some distance away.

  The kernel had a few other uses: it was a cheap source of electricity and radioisotopes, and by tweaking the stardrive, it was possible to use it to produce a local curved-space gravity field. As a last resort, it could even be jettisoned and used as a weapon in its own right. But if there was one word that wouldn’t describe it, that word must be “maneuevrable.” Eight-billion-ton point masses do not make right-angle turns.

  Commander Krupkin saluted as a rating held the bridge door open for him. “Engineering Commander reporting on the state of machinery, sir!”

  “Very good.” Captain Mirsky nodded from his command chair at the rear of the room. “Come in. What do you have for me?”

  Krupkin relaxed slightly. “All systems operational and correct, sir,” he announced formally. “We’re ready to move at any time. Our status is clear on—” He rapidly rattled through the series of watches under his control. Finally: “The drive control modifications you ordered, sir—we’ve never run anything like this before. They look alright, and the self-test says everything is fine, but I can’t say any more than that without unsealing the black boxes.”

  Mirsky nodded. “They’ll work alright.” Krupkin wished he could feel as confident as the Captain sounded; the black boxes, shipped aboard only a week ago and wired into the main jump drive control loop, did not fill him with confidence. Indeed, if it hadn’t been obvious that the orders to integrate them came from the highest level and applied to every ship in the fleet, he’d have thrown the nearest thing to a tantrum that military protocol permitted. It was his job to keep the drive running, and dammit, he should know everything there was to know about how it worked! There could be anything in those boxes, from advanced (whisper it, illegal) high technology to leprechauns—and he’d be held responsible if it didn’t work.

  A bearded man at the other side of the bridge stood. “Humbly request permission to report, sir.”

  “You have permission,” said Mirsky.

  “I have completed downloading navigation elements from system traffic control. I am just now having them punched into the autopilot. We will be ready to spin up for departure in ten minutes.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant. Ah, Comms, my compliments to the Admiral and the Commodore, and we are preparing for departure in ten minutes. Lieutenant Helsingus, proceed in accordance with the traffic control departure plan. You have the helm.”

  “Aye, sir, I have the helm. Departure in ten minutes.” Helsingus bent over his speaking tube; ratings around him began turning brass handles and moving levers with calm deliberation, sending impulses along the nerves of steel that bound the ship into an almost living organism. (Although nano- electronics might be indispensable in the engine room, the New Republican Admiralty held the opinion that there was no place for suchlike newfangled rubbish on the bridge of a ship crewed by the heroic fighting men of the empire.)

  “Well, Commander.” Mirsky nodded at the engineer. “How does it feel to be moving at last?”

  Krupkin shrugged. “I’ll be happier when we’re in flat space. There are rumors.”

  For a moment, the Captain’s smile slipped. “Indeed. Which is why we will be going to action stations at departure and staying that way until after our first jump. You can never tell, and the Commodore wants to be sure that no spies or enemy missile buses are lying in wait for us.”

  “A wise precaution, sir. Permission to return to my station?”

  “Granted. Go with God, Commander.”

  Krupkin saluted, and headed back for his engineering control room as fast as his short legs would carry him. It was, he reflected, going to be a busy time, even with as quietly competent a dockyard consultant engineer as Martin to help him keep the magic smoke in the drive control boxes.

  the colony of Critics writhed and tunneled in their diamond nest, incubating a devastating review. A young, energetic species, descended from one of the post-Singularity flowerings that had exploded in the wake of the Diaspora three thousand years in their past, they held precious little of the human genome in their squamous, cold-blooded bodies. Despite their terrestrial descent, only their brains bound them tightly to the sapiens clade—for not all the exiles from Earth were human.

  As hangers-on, the Critics had no direct access to the Festival’s constellation of relay satellites or the huge network of visual and auditory sensors that had been scattered across the surface of the planet. (Most of the Festival’s senses were borne on the wings of tiny insectoidal robots, with which they had saturated the biosphere, sending a million for every single telephone that had rained down from orbit.) Instead, the Critics had to make do with their own devices; a clumsy network of spy-eyes in low orbit, winged surveillance drones, and precarious bugs planted on the window ledges and chimney pots of significant structures.

  The Critics watched, with their peculiar mixture of bemusement and morbid cynicism, while the soldiers of the First and Fourth Regiments shot their officers and deserted en masse to the black flag of Burya Rubenstein’s now-overt Traditional Extropian Revolutionary Front. (Many soldiers burned their uniforms and threw away their guns; others adopted new emblems and took up strange silvery arms churned out by the committee’s replicator farm.) The Critics looked on as peasants greedily demanded pigs, goats, and in one case, a goose that laid golden eggs from the Festival; their womenfolk quietly pleaded for medicinal cures, metal cutlery, and fabric. In the castle, shots were heard as the servants butchered the Duke’s menagerie for food. A rain of gold roubles ordered by some economic saboteur fell widely across the streets of Novy Petrograd, and was equally widely ignored: to that extent, the economic collapse brought about by the Festival’s advent was already complete.

  “They are truly pathetic,” commented She Who Observes the First; she clashed her tusks over a somatic bench that depicted a scene below, some of the few remaining loyal grenadiers dragging a terrified cobbler toward the gates of the castle, followed by his screaming, pleading family. “Unregulated instincts, unable to assimilate reality, bereft of perspective.”

  “Chew roots; dig deep.” Guard Man the Fifth champed lugubriously, demonstrating his usual level of insight (intelligence not being a particularly useful characteristic in tunnel-running warriors). “Tastes of blood and soil.”

  “Everything tastes of soil to a warrior,” She Who Observes snorted. “Eat tubers, brother, while your sisters discuss matters beyond your ken.” She rolled sideways, butting up against Sister of Stratagems the Seventh, who nipped at her flank gently. “Sibling-litter-peer. Uncertainty flows?”

  “A time of exponentiating changes is upon them.” Sister Seventh was much given to making such gnomic pronouncements, perhaps in the naive hope that it would gain he
r a reputation for vision (and, ultimately, support when she made her bid for queendom). “Perhaps they are disorganized surface- scrabblers, clutching at stems, but there is a certain grandeur to their struggle; a level of sincerity seldom approached by primitives.”

  “Primitive they are: their internal discourse is crippled by a complete absence of intertextuality. I cringe in astonishment that Festival wastes its attention on them.”

  “Hardly. They are Festival’s antithesis, do you not feel this in your whiskers?” Sister Seventh blinked redly at She Who Observes, pawing for the control tree of the somatic bench. “Here we see a nest-drone.” The scene slewed into an enclosed space, following the abducted cobbler into the walls of the castle. “Phenotypic dispersal leads to extended specialization, as ever, with the usual degree of free will found in human civilization. But this one is structured to prevent information surge, do you not see?”

  “Information surge? Prevented? Life is information!”

  Sister Seventh farted smugly. “I have been monitoring the Festival. Not one of the indigines has asked it for information! Artifacts, yes. Food, yes. Machines, up to and including replicators, yes. But philosophy? Art? Mathematics? Ontology? We might be witnessing our first zombie civilization.”

  Zombies were a topic that fascinated Sister Seventh. An ancient hypothesis of the original pre-Singularity ur-civilization, a zombie was a non-self-conscious entity that acted just like a conscious one: it laughed, cried, talked, ate, and generally behaved just like a real person, and if questioned, would claim to be conscious—but behind its superficial behavior, there was nobody home, no internalized model of the universe it lived in.

  The philosophers had hypothesized that no such zombies existed, and that everything that claimed personhood was actually a person. Sister Seventh was less convinced. Human beings—those rugose, endothermic anthropoids with their ridiculously small incisors and anarchic social arrangements—didn’t seem very real to her. So she was perpetually searching for evidence that, actually, they weren’t people at all.

  She Who Observes was of the opinion that her littermate was chewing on the happy roots again, but then, unlike Sister Seventh, she wasn’t a practical critic: she was an observer.

  “I think we really need to settle the zombie question here before we fix their other problems.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” asked She Who Observes. “It’s the subjectivity problem again. I tell you, the only viable analytical mode is the intentional stance. If something claims to be conscious, take it at its own word and treat it as if it has conscious intentions.”

  “Ah, but I can so easily program a meerkat to chirp ‘I think, therefore I am!’ No, sister, we need to tunnel nearer the surface to find the roots of sapience. A test is required, one that a zombie will stick in, but an actor will squeeze through.”

  “Do you have such a test in mind?”

  Sister Seventh pawed air and champed her huge, yellow tusks. “Yes, I think I can construct one. The essential characteristic of conscious beings is that they adopt the intentional stance: that is, they model the intentions of other creatures, so that they can anticipate their behavior. When they apply such a model to others, they acquire the ability to respond to their intentions before they become obvious: when they apply it to themselves, they become self-conscious, because they acquire an understanding of their own motivations and the ability to modify them.

  “But thus far, I have seen no evidence that their motivations are self-modifying, or indeed anything but hardwired reflexes. I want to test them, by introducing them to a situation where their own self-image is contradicted by their behavior. If they can adapt their self-image to the new circumstances, we will know that we are dealing with fellow sapients. Which will ultimately influence the nature of our review.”

  “This sounds damaging or difficult, sister. I will have to think on it before submitting to Mother.”

  Seventh emitted a bubbling laugh and flopped forward onto her belly. “Oh, sibling! What did you think I have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. But be it anything like your usual—” She Who Observes stopped, seeing the triumphant gleam in her sister’s eye.

  “I merely propose to Criticize a handful of them a trifle more thoroughly than usual,” said Sister Seventh. “And when I’m done, any who live will know they’ve been Criticized. This is my methodology . . .”

  commander krupkin took nearly two hours to get around to seeing Vassily Muller: it wasn’t intentional on his part. Almost as soon as the main drive field was powered up and running, and the ship surfing smoothly away from the Klamovka beanstalk, his pager beeped:

  ALL OFFICERS TO BRIEFING ROOM D IMMEDIATELY

  “Shit and corruption,” he muttered. Passing Pavel Grubor: “The old man wants me right now. Can you take care of the shipyard technician and find out how long he’s going to be in closing out the installation of the baseline compensator? Page me when you’ve got an answer.” He headed off without waiting for a response.

  Mikhail Krupkin enjoyed his job, and didn’t particularly expect or want any further promotions; he’d been in shipboard systems for the past fourteen years and expected to serve out his career in them before enjoying a long and happy retirement working for some commercial space line. However, messages like this one completely destroyed his peace of mind. It meant that the boss was going to ask him questions about the availability of his systems, and with the strange patch boxes installed in the drive room, the Lord Vanek might be mobile, but he couldn’t in all honesty swear it was one hundred percent solid.

  He didn’t know just what was in those boxes, but he was sure there was a reason why the Admiralty was spending several million crowns on a drive upgrade. And in any event, they’d been remarkably cagey about the extra control software for them. Boxes, hooked into the drive, which also hooked into the new, high-bandwidth linkup to the tactical network: something smelled.

  All this and more was on his mind as he took the express elevator up to the conference suite in officer country. The door to Room D was open, waiting for him. Most of the other senior officers were already there. Ilya Murametz, the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Helsingus from fire control, the usual battle operations team, Vulpis from Relativity . . . he was probably last, but for the Captain, by reason of having come farthest. “Ilya. What’s going on?”

  Ilya glanced at him. “The Captain is with the Admiral. When he arrives he will make an announcement,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it except that it’s nothing specific.” Krupkin breathed a silent sight of relief; “nothing specific” meant that it wasn’t about the running of the ship. Nobody was going to be hauled over the coals today. Not that Captain Mirsky was a martinet by the standards of the New Republican Navy, but he could be merciless if he thought someone was asleep at the switch or not doing his job properly.

  Suddenly there was a change of atmosphere in the room. Everyone turned to face the doorway: conversations stopped, and officers came to attention. Captain Mirsky stood for a long moment, surveying his staff. Evidently what he saw gratified him; when he spoke his first words were, “Gentlemen, please be seated.” He walked to the head of the table and laid down a thick folder in front of his chair.

  “It is now 1130. The door to this room is shut, and will remain shut, barring emergencies, until 1200. I am authorized to inform you that we are now under battle orders. I am not privy to the political discussions behind our orders, but I am informed by Admiral Kurtz’s staff that it appears likely that no resolution of the crisis short of war is possible; accordingly, we have been ordered to proceed as part of Task Group One to Rochard’s World, by way of Battle Plan Omega Green Horizon.” Now he pulled his chair out and sat down. “Are there any questions about the background before I go into our specific orders?” he asked.

  Lieutenant Marek raised a hand. “Sir, do we know anything about the aggressor? It seems to me that the censor’s office has been more than usually di
ligent.”

  Captain Mirsky’s cheek twitched. “A good question.” Krupkin glanced at the lieutenant; a young hotshot in TacOps, who’d joined the ship less than six months ago. “A good question deserves a good answer. Unfortunately, I can’t give you one because nobody has seen fit to tell me. So, Lieutenant. How do you think our armed forces stack up, in a worst-possible-case situation?”

  Lieutenant Marek gulped; he hadn’t been on board long enough to have figured out the Captain’s Socratic style of testing his subordinates’ knowledge—a holdover from Mirsky’s two tours as a professor in the Naval Staff Academy. “Against whom, sir? If it was just a matter of suppressing a local rebellion, there wouldn’t be any problem at all. But Rochard’s World had a picket force consisting of a destroyer plus point defenses, and they’d be as good as us at suppression. So they wouldn’t be sending us if that was enough to deal with the situation. There must be an active enemy who has already stopped the local picket force intervening.”

  “An accurate summary.” Captain Mirsky smiled humorlessly. “One that holds true whatever we face. Unfortunately, you now know as much as I do, but for one thing: apparently the destroyer Sakhalin was eaten. I don’t know if this is metaphor or literal truth, but it appears that nobody knows who this Festival is, or what they are capable of, or whether the destroyer gave them indigestion. Let us not forget our oath of allegiance to the Emperor and the Republic; whatever they choose to do, we are sworn to be their right arm. If they decide to strike at an enemy, well, let us strike hard. Meanwhile, let us assume the worst. What if the enemy has cornucopia machines?”