Singularity Sky Read online

  Marek looked puzzled. “Couldn’t it go either way, sir? On the one hand, they have tools that let them build lots of weapons quickly without getting their hands dirty. But on the other hand, if they’re not used to working, isn’t there a good chance that they’re moral degenerates? The ability to manufacture doesn’t confer victory automatically, if the people who have it are weakened and corrupted by their decadent robot-supported lifestyle. How can they possibly have the traditions and ésprit of an honorable military force?”

  “That remains to be seen,” the Captain said cryptically. “For the time being, I prefer to assume the worst. And the worst case is that the enemy has cornucopia machines, and is not decadent and cowardly.”

  Marek shook his head slightly.

  “You have a question?” asked Mirsky.

  “Uh. I thought—” Marek looked worried. “Is that possible?”

  “Anything is possible,” the Captain said, heavily. “And if we plan for the worst, with luck all our surprises will be favorable.” He glanced away from the naive Lieutenant. “Next.”

  Krupkin, who as an engineer had his own opinion about the advisability of banning the use of technologies for social reasons, nodded to himself. While Mirsky wouldn’t say so in public, he had a very good idea what the Captain was thinking—having a decadent robot-supported lifestyle doesn’t preclude having military traditions. In fact, it may give them more time to focus on the essentials. The Captain continued to poll his officers, publicly querying the readiness of their posts.

  “—Engineering status. Commander Krupkin?”

  Krupkin stifled a grunt of annoyance. “The shipyard contractor is still applying the upgrade patches to our baseline compensators. I am awaiting a precise hand-off estimate, but as of this morning, we expected three more shifts to complete the modifications, and another shift to test them. I have no complaints about his efficiency: he’s as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with, a real virtuoso. Other than that, the secondary compensator set—which is not being upgraded—is fully operational. We are moving at full speed, but will not have full redundancy and the new upgrade modifications ready for another four to five days—at a minimum.”

  “I see.” The Captain made a note on his blotter. He looked back at the engineer: a piercing blue-eyed stare that would have turned a less experienced officer into a nervous wreck. “Can the modifications be expedited? We will be passing into foreign space-time in two days; thereafter, we must anticipate the presence of enemy minelayers and warships along our route.”

  “Um—probably, sir. Unfortunately, the upgrades aren’t straightforward enough for our routine engineering staff. Springfield is a specialist, and he is exerting himself fully. I believe that we might be able to speed things up, but at the risk of errors creeping in because of fatigue. If I can use an analogy, it’s like a master surgeon performing an operation. Extra pairs of hands simply get in the way, and you can’t prop a surgeon up for days on end and expect his work to remain acceptable. I think we might be able to shave a day or two off the four-to-five-day estimate, but no more.”

  “I see.” Captain Mirsky glanced at Murametz significantly. “But we are still able to move and fight, and the new black-box system is already integrated.” He nodded. “Helsingus, how is TacOps?”

  “I’ve been running daily exercises predicated on a standard fleet aggressor profile for the past week, sir, using the standard models Admiralty shipped us. We could do with a bit longer, but I think the boys have generally got the right idea. Barring any major surprises in enemy tactical doctrine, we’re ready to deal with them, whoever they are, one-on-one.”

  “Good.” Mirsky sat in thought for a minute. “I have to tell you that I have a meeting this afternoon with Commodore Bauer and a teleconference with the other captains. You should assume that, as of now, this ship is on a war footing. You should be prepared for combat operations in the near future. Meanwhile, I expect daily reports on drive and gunnery readiness.

  “That goes for the rest of you, too. I want daily readiness reports. We’ve wasted a lot of time churning conscripts this month, and I want us up to ninety-five percent operational capability as soon as possible. We will be bunkering a full fuel load and munitions from the supply ship Aurora tomorrow, and I expect that, as soon as we spool up for our first jump, we will be going to battle stations. That gives you about thirty-six hours to get ready for action. Are there any questions, gentlemen?”

  Helsingus raised a hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir. Minelayers? Where are we going that might be mined?”

  Mirsky nodded. “A good point, Commander. Our initial jump is going to be a short-hauler to Wolf Depository Five. I know that’s not on a direct course for Rochard’s World, but if we go straight there—well, I presume our enemies can plot a straight course, too. What we don’t know is how much they know about us. I hope to know more about them this afternoon.” He stood up. “If they launch a surprise attack, we’ll be ready for them. God is on our side; all the indications are that this Festival is a pagan degeneracy, and all we need to do is be of good heart and man our guns with enthusiasm. Any other questions?” He looked around the room. Nobody raised a hand. “Very good. I am now leaving and will be in closed conference with the Commodore. Dismissed.”

  The Captain left the room in silence. But as soon as the door closed behind him, there was an uproar.

  martin was in a foul mood. Krupkin had broken the news to him hours earlier: “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is,” he’d said. “Double shifts. We’re on a war footing. You especially don’t get to sleep until the upgrade job is done; orders from the skipper, who is not in a reasonable mood. Once it’s done, you can crash out for as long as you want, but we need it before we see combat.”

  “It’s going to be sixteen hours, minimum, whatever happens,” Martin told him, trying hard to keep his cool. “The patches will be installed and active by the end of this shift, but I can’t release the system to you until it’s tested out fully. The regression tests are entirely automatic and take twenty thousand seconds to run. Then there’s the maneuver testing, which would normally take all week if this was a new hull we were upgrading. Finally, there’s drive qualification time which is three months for a new and untested system like the one your Admiralty ordered, and what do you think the chances are that you’re going to sit still for that?”

  “Skip it,” Krupkin said briskly. “We’re going to be maneuvering on it tomorrow. Can you start the white-box phase today?”

  “Fuck it.” Martin pulled his goggles and gloves back on. “Talk to me later, okay? I’m busy. You’ll get your bloody drive mods. Just point me at a bunk this evening.” He dived back into the immersive interface, ignoring the commander—who took it surprisingly mildly.

  Which was perhaps just as well. Martin was keeping a tight rein on his anger, but beneath the brittle exterior, he was disturbed. The business with Rachel had unsettled him; he was now intensely nervous, and not just because of the volatility of the situation. Her approach had caught him off guard and vulnerable, and the potential consequences ranged from the unpredictable to the catastrophic.

  For the rest of the day, he worked furiously, checking the self-extending array of connectors linking the new drive control circuitry into the existing neural networks. He headed off several possible problems in the performance profile of the control feedback sensors, tuned the baseline compensators for extra precision, and added several patches to the inner hard control loops that monitored and pulled the hair on the black hole; but he left the midlife kicker traps alone. And he installed the special circuit that Herman had asked him to add.

  He worked on into the evening shift, then started the regression tests going: a series of self-test routines, driven by software, that would exercise and report on every aspect of the drive upgrade. Installing and testing the module was the easy task: tomorrow he’d have to start testing how it interacted with the kernel—an altogether more nerve-
wracking experience. So it was that, at 2500, he yawned, stretched, set aside his gloves and feedback sensors, and stood up.

  “Aargh.” He stretched further. Joints popped with the effort; he felt dizzy, and tired, and slightly sick. He blinked; everything seemed flat and monochromatic after the hours immersed in false-color 3-D controls, and his wrists ached. And why, in this day and age, did warships smell of pickled cabbage, stale sweat, and an occasional undertone of sewage? He stumbled to the door. A passing rating glanced at him curiously. “I need to find a bunk,” he explained.

  “Please wait here, sir.” He waited. A minute or so later, one of Krupkin’s minions came into view, hand-over-hand down the wall like a human fly.

  “Your berth? Ah, yes, sir. D deck, Compartment 24, there’s an officer’s room waiting for you. Breakfast call at 0700. Paulus, please show the gentleman here to his room.”

  “This way, sir.” The crewman quietly and efficiently guided Martin through the ship, to a pale green corridor lined with hatches like those of a capsule hotel. “There you are.” Martin blinked at the indicated door, then pulled it aside and climbed in.

  It was like a room in a capsule hotel or a compartment on a transcontinental train—one with two bunks. The lower one flipped upside down to make a desk when not in use. It was totally sterile, totally clean, with ironed sheets and a thin blanket on the lower bunk, and it smelled of machine oil, starch, and sleepless nights. Someone had laid out a clean overall with no insignia on it. Martin eyed it mistrustfully and decided to stick to his civilian clothes until they were too dirty to tolerate. Surrendering to the New Republic’s uniform seemed symbolic; letting them claim him as one of their own would feel like a small treason.

  He palmed the light to low, and stripped his shoes and socks off, then lay down on the lower bunk. Presently, the light dimmed and he began to relax. He still felt light-headed, tired and angry, but at least the worst hadn’t happened: no tap on the shoulder, no escort to the brig. Nobody knew who he really worked for. You could never tell in this business, and Martin had a prickly feeling washing up and down his spine. This whole situation was completely bizarre, and Herman’s request that he plonk himself in the middle of it was well out of the usual run of assignments. He shut his eyes and tried to push away the visions of spinning yellow blocks that danced inside his head.

  The door opened and closed. “Martin,” said a quiet voice beside his pillow, “keep your voice down. How did things go?”

  He jackknifed upright and nearly smashed his head on the underside of the bunk overhead. “What!” He paused. “What are you—”

  “Doing here?” A quiet, ironic laugh. “I’m doing the same as you; feeling tired, wondering what the hell I’m doing in this nuthouse.”

  He relaxed a little, relieved. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “It’s my job to be here; I’m attached to the Admiral’s staff as a diplomatic representative. Look, I can’t stay long. It would be a really bad idea for anyone to find me in your room. At best, they’d assume the worst, and at worst, they might think you were a spy or something—”

  “But I am a spy,” he blurted out in a moment of weakness. “At least, you wanted—”

  “Yeah, right, and I’ve got your secret-agent decoder ring right here. Look, I want to talk, but business first. Are the drive upgrades finished?”

  His eyes adjusted to the dark; he could see the outline of her face. Short hair and shadows made her look very different, harder and more determined. But something in her expression as she watched him made her look slightly uncertain. Business first, she said. “The upgrades are going to take some time,” he said. “They’re about ready for testing to start tomorrow, but it’s a risky proposition. I’m going to be ironing bugs out of the high-precision clocks for the next week.” He paused. “Are you sure this is safe? How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard. Thank MiG for the security system schematics. Life Support and Security think you’re alone in here. I thought it was safer to visit in person than to try to page you.”

  Martin shuffled around and sat up, making room for her, and Rachel sat down next to him. He noticed for the first time that she was wearing a uniform—not a New Republican one. “You’re here for the whole voyage?”

  She chuckled. “The better to get to know you. Relax. If you want to talk to your local diplomatic representative, that’s me. Besides, they need me, or someone like me. Who else is going to negotiate a cease-fire for them?”

  “Aah.” Martin fell silent for a moment, thinking. He was aware of her next to him, almost painfully so. “You’re taking a risk,” he said after a while. “They aren’t going to thank you—”

  “Hush.” She leaned closer. He felt her breath on his cheek: “The drive patches you’re installing are part of an illegal weapons system, Martin. I’m sure of it. I’m not sure what kind of illegality is being contemplated, but I’m sure it involves causality violation. If they commence training maneuvers shortly, I’ll get a chance to see just what they’re planning to use the upgrades for. That’s why I need to be here. And why I need your help. I wouldn’t normally dump this on you, but I really need your help, active help, in figuring out what’s going on. Do you understand?”

  “I understand very little,” Martin said nervously, priming his autonomic override to keep his pulse steady so as not to betray the lie. He felt unaccountably guilty about withholding the truth from her. Rachel seemed like the least likely person to jeopardize his mission—and he liked her, wanted to be able to relax in her presence freely, without worries. But caution and experience conspired to seal his lips. “I’m just along for the ride,” he added. He simply couldn’t tell her about Herman. Without knowing how she’d react, the consequences might be disastrous. Might. And it was a risk he dared not take.

  “Understand this,” she said quietly. “A lot of lives are at stake. Not just mine, or yours, or this ship’s, but just about everyone within a thirty-light-year radius of here. That’s a lot of people.”

  “Why do you think this is going to drag the big E into the situation?” he prompted. He was deathly tired and didn’t want to have to lie to her. Can I keep her talking? he wondered. If she didn’t keep speaking, he was afraid he might tell her too much. Which would be a big mistake.

  She touched his arm. “The Eschaton will be interested for a simple reason; it is absolutely opposed to causality violation. Please don’t pretend you’re that naive, Martin. I’ve seen your résumé. I know where you’ve been and what you’ve done. You’re not an idiot, and you know what a well-tuned warp drive can do in the hands of an expert. In terms of special relativity, being able to travel faster than light is effectively equivalent to time travel—at least from the perspective of observers in different frames of reference. They see the light from your arrival, which is close to them, a long time before they see the light from your departure, which is a long way away. Because you’re outrunning the speed of light, events appear to happen out of sequence. Okay? Same with a causal link, an instantaneous quantum-entanglement communicator. It doesn’t mean there’s real time travel involved, or that you can create temporal paradoxes, but being able to mess with an observer’s view of events at a distance is a boon for strategists.

  “The Eschaton doesn’t care about such trivial kinds of time travel, but it stamps hard on the real thing; any manifestation of closed timelike paths that could jeopardize its own history. The big E doesn’t want anyone doing a knight’s move on it, back in time and then forward again, to screw over its origin. Someone tries to build an instantaneous communicator? No problem. They go on to build a logic gate that transmits its output into its own past, where it’s wired into the input? That’s the basis of acausal logic, and it gives you the first tool you need to build a transcendent artificial intelligence. Poof, the planet is bombarded from orbit with cannibal lemmings or bitten to death by killer asteroids or something.

  “Anyway, I don’t really care all that much what the New Rep
ublic does to the Festival. I mean, maybe I care about individual people in the New Republic, and maybe the Festival folks are really nice, but that’s not the point. But I do care if they do whatever they’re going to do inside Earth’s light cone. If it involves large-scale causality violation, the E might decide to take out the entire contaminated zone. And we know it seeded colonies as much as three thousand light-years away—even assuming it still wants humans around, it can afford to wipe out a couple of hundred planets.” Martin had to bite his cheek to keep from correcting her. She fell silent. He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t; she seemed almost depressed.

  “You have a lot of clout. Have you told them what you’ve deduced? Or told anybody else?”

  She chuckled, a peculiarly grim laugh. “If I did that, how long do you think it would be before they chucked me overboard, with or without a vacsuit? They’re paranoid enough already; they think there’s a spy on board, and they’re afraid of minelayers and saboteurs along the way.”

  “A spy?” He sat up, scared. “They know there’s a—”

  “Be quiet. Yes, a spy. Not one of us; some goon from the Curator’s Office who they sent along to keep an eye on you. Be quiet, I said. He’s just a kid, some wet-behind-the-ears trainee cop. Try to relax around him. As far as you’re concerned, you’re allowed to talk to me; I’m the nearest representative of your government.”

  “When are we going to get off this ship?” he asked tensely.

  “Probably when we arrive.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “Do your job and keep your head down,” she said calmly. “Just don’t, whatever you do, act guilty or confess to anything. Trust me, Martin, like I told you before: we’re on the same team for the duration.”

  Martin leaned close to her. She was tense, very tense. “This is quite insane,” he said very slowly and carefully as he slid an arm around her shoulders. “This idiotic expedition is probably going to get us both killed.”