Singularity Sky Read online

  “Uh, yes.” He stared at her and tried to look as if he’d just realized that she was, in fact, a devil, and he had signed away his soul. He hoped she’d believe him—naive engineer, sucked in out of his depths, confronted with an agent of Higher Authority—but had a cold sense that if she didn’t fall for it, he might be in real trouble. Herman and the CMID weren’t exactly on speaking terms . . .

  “Excellent.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a battered-looking, gunmetal-colored PA. “Speaking. Send: Rabbit green. Ack.”

  The PA spoke back: “Ack. Message sent.” It took Martin a moment or two to recognize the voice as his own.

  She slipped the case away and stood to leave the compartment. “You see,” she said from the doorway, a quirky smile tugging at her lips, “life here isn’t necessarily as dull as you thought! See you later . . .”

  preparations for departure

  his imperial majesty the Emperor Ivan Hasek III, by grace of God the protector of the people of the New Republic, growled exasperatedly. “Get the Admiral out of bed and make him presentable—I have a cabinet meeting at noon, and I need to talk to him now.”

  “Yes, sir! I most humbly beg your pardon, and beg leave to be excused to do as Your Majesty commands.” The butler virtually bowed and scraped his way off the telephone.

  “What’s the implied ‘or else’?” Duke Michael, the Emperor’s brother, inquired drily. “You’d have him clapped in irons?”

  “Hardly.” The Emperor snorted, showing as much amusement as his dignity permitted. “He’s over eighty; I suppose he’s entitled to stay in bed once in a while. But if he’s so ill he can’t even rise for his Emperor in time of war, I’d have to force him to retire. And then there’d be an uproar in the Admiralty. You can’t imagine the waves it would make if we started forcing admirals to retire.” He sniffed. “We might even have to think about giving them all pensions! That’d go down as well as suggesting to Father that he abdicate.”

  Duke Michael coughed, delicately. “Perhaps somebody should have. After the second stroke—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I still think offering him the fleet is unreasonable.”

  “If you think that is unreasonable, I don’t suppose you’d care to discuss the likely response of their naval lordships if I didn’t give him first refusal?” The priority telephone rang again before his brother had a chance to answer the pointed question; a liveried servant offered the ivory-and-platinum handset to His Majesty. The Duke picked up a second earpiece, to listen in on the call.

  “Sire? My Lord Admiral Kurtz is ready to talk to you. He extends his deepest apologies, and—”

  “Enough. Just put him on, there’s a good fellow.” Ivan tapped his fingers irritably on the arm of his chair, a Gothic wooden monstrosity only one step removed from an instrument of torture. “Ah, Admiral. Just the man! Capital, how splendid to talk to you. And how are we today?”

  “Today-ay?” A reedy, quavering voice echoed uncertainly over the copper wires. “Ah-hum, yes, today. Indeed, yes. I’m very well, thank you, milady, I don’t suppose you’ve seen any chameleons?”

  “No, Admiral, there are no chameleons in the palace,” the Emperor stated with firm, but resigned, persistence. “You know who you are speaking to?”

  In the momentary silence he could almost hear the elderly admiral blinking in confusion. “Ah-hum. Your Majesty? Ah, Ivan, lad? Emperor already? How time flies!”

  “Yes, Uncle. I’m phoning you because—” A thought struck the Emperor. “Are you up and about?”

  “Yes, ahuhuhum. I’m, ah, in my bath chair. It’s my old legs, you know. They’re awfully fragile. Got to wrap them up in lots of blankets in case they shatter. They don’t blow legs the way they used to, when I was a lad. But I’m out of bed now.”

  “Oh, good. You see, um—” The Emperor’s brain went into a wheel-spin as he considered and reconsidered the options. He’d heard, of course, about the Admiral’s indisposition, but he hadn’t actually encountered it directly until now. A strong case could be made, he supposed, for dismissing the Admiral; the man was patently ill. Charging him with this duty would be unfair, and more importantly, not in the best interests of the state.

  But he was still the senior fighting admiral, war hero of the New Republic, defender of the empire, slaughterer of the infidels, conqueror of no less than three bucolic and rather backward colony worlds—and, not to put too much of a point on it, the Emperor’s uncle by way of his grandfather’s second mistress. Because of the long-standing tradition that admirals never retired, nobody had ever thought to make provisions for pensioning off old warhorses; they usually died long before it became an issue. To dismiss him was unthinkable, but to expect him to lead a naval expedition—Ivan struggled with his conscience, half hoping that the old man would turn it down. No dishonor would accrue—nobody expected an octogenarian in a bath chair to die for the fatherland—and meantime they’d find a hard-headed young whippersnapper to lead the fleet into battle.

  Coming to a decision, the Emperor took a deep breath. “We have a problem. Something abominable has happened, and Rochard’s World is under siege. I’m going to send the fleet. Are you too ill to lead it?” He winked at his brother the Duke, hoping—

  “War!” The old man’s bellow nearly deafened Ivan. “Victory to the everlastingly vigilant forces of righteousness waging unceasing struggle on enemies of the New Conservatives! Death to the proponents of change! A thousand tortures to the detractors of the Emperor! Where are the bastards? Let me at them!” The clattering in the background might have been the sound of a walking frame being cast aside.

  Duke Michael grimaced unhappily at his brother. “Well I suppose that answers one question,” he mouthed. “I’m not going to say I told you so, but who are we going to send to push his wheelchair?”

  new prague was only a thousand kilometers north of the equator (this planet being notoriously cold for a water-belt terraform) and the train pulled into the Klamovka station shortly after lunchtime. Martin disembarked and hailed a cab to the naval depot at the foot of the beanstalk, pointedly ignoring Rachel—or whatever her real name was. Let her make her own way: she was an unwelcome, potentially disastrous complication in his life right now.

  The beanstalk loomed over the military depot like the ultimate flagpole; four tapered cones of diamondoid polymers stretching all the way to geosynchronous orbit and a bit beyond, a radical exception to the New Republic’s limitations on technology. Bronzed, bullet-nosed elevator carriages skimmed up and down the elevator cables, taking a whole night to make the journey. Here there was no fin-de-siècle ambience: just rugged functionality, sleeping capsules manufactured to a template designed for Kobe’s ancient salarymen, and a stringent weight limit. (Gravity modification, although available, was another of the technologies that the New Republic shunned—at least, for non-military purposes.) Martin hurried aboard the first available pod and, to his relief, saw no sign of Rachel.

  Upon arrival, he disembarked into the military sector of the space station, presented himself to the warrant officer’s checkpoint, and was ushered straight through a crude security scan that probably exceeded his annual allowed dose of X-rays in one go. There was one bad moment when a master sergeant asked him to demonstrate his PA, but the explanation—that it was a personal assist, that it stored all his working notes, and that he’d be unable to cope without it—was accepted. After which he cooled his heels for half an hour in a spartan guardroom painted institutional green.

  Eventually a rating came to collect him. “You’d be the engine man?” said the flyer. “We been waiting for you.”

  Martin sighed unhappily. “And I’ve been waiting, too.” He stood up. “Take me to your CO.”

  The New Republic had paid Mikoyan-Guerevitch-Kvaerner back on Luna to design them a battlecruiser fit to bear the name of their Navy’s founder: one that looked the way a warship ought to look, not like a cubist’s vision of a rabies virus crossed with a soft dri
nk can (as most real warships did). Style imposed strictures on functionality: despite which, it was still worthy of a degree of respect—you could be killed by its baroque missile batteries and phased-array lasers just as surely as by a more modern weapon. Besides, it looked good, which had enabled MiG to make a killing selling knockoffs to gullible juntas everywhere, demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.

  In Martin’s opinion, the Lord Vanek was cut from the same comic-opera fabric as the rest of the New Republic—a comic opera that was far less funny once it had you in its jaws. The ceremonials, flags and Imperial logos splashed across every available surface, the uniformed flunkies, and elaborate pyramid of military etiquette, all suggested to Martin that taking this job had not been a good idea: the gibbeted dissidents hanging from the eaves of the Basilisk had confirmed it. Right now, he’d happily repay his entire fee just to be allowed to go home—were it not for the call of duty.

  After a confusing tour of the station’s docking facilities and the warship’s transit tubes, he fetched up in the doorway of a crowded, red-lit, octagonal space, maintained in zero gee by a local relaxation of the laws of physics. A squat, balding engineering officer was bawling out a frightened-looking teenager in front of an open access panel. “That’s the last bloody time you touch anything without asking me or Chief Otcenasek first, you bumbling numb-fingered oaf! See that panel? That’s the backup master bus arbitration exchange, there. And that”—he pointed at another, closed panel—“is the backup master circuit breaker box, which is what chief told you to check out. That switch you were about to throw—

  Martin saw where the officer’s finger was pointing and winced. If some idiot conscript did something like that to him, he reflected, he probably wouldn’t stop at threatening to strangle him with his own intestines. Although if the idiot had started playing with the MBAX, strangling him would be redundant: it didn’t usually have much effect on a charred corpse.

  “Engineering Commander Krupkin?” he asked.

  “Yes? Who? Oh. You must be the shipyard mechanic?” Krupkin turned toward him, leaving the hapless rating to scramble for cover. “You’re late.”

  “Blame the Curator’s Office,” snapped Martin. As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a bad week. What can I do for you?”

  “Secret state police, hmm? Won’t get many of those around here,” Krupkin grunted, abruptly conciliatory. “You know something about this toy box, then?”

  “MiG sells them. You keep them running. People break them. I fix them. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “That’s a good start.” Krupkin suddenly grinned. “So let’s try another question. What do you know about preferential-frame clock-skew baseline compensators? Specifically, this model K-340, as currently configured. Tell me everything you can see about how it’s set up.”

  Martin spent the next hour telling him all the different ways it was out of alignment. After that, Krupkin showed him a real K-340, not a bodged test article. And then it was time for a working lunch while Krupkin picked his brains, and then a long working afternoon figuring out where everything went and going over change orders to make sure everything was where the paperwork said it was supposed to be. And then back to base for the evening . . .

  rachel mansour stood naked in the middle of the handwoven rug that covered the floor of the hotel room she had rented two hours earlier, in the naval port city of Klamovka: even though it was expensive, it smelled of damp and dry rot, carbolic soap and firewood. She breathed slowly and evenly as she stretched arms and legs in ritual sequence, limbering up. The curtains were drawn, the door locked, and her sensors stationed outside to warn her of intruders: for she was not inclined to explain her state to any hotel staff who might see it.

  Rachel was not inclined to explain a lot of things to the people she moved among. The New Republic filled her with a bitter, hopeless anger—one which she recognized, understood to be a poor reflection on her professionalism, but nevertheless couldn’t set aside. The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.

  The New Republic was 250 years old, 250 light-years from Earth. When the Eschaton had relocated nine-tenths of Earth’s population via wormhole—for reasons it hadn’t deigned to explain—it had sorted some of them on the basis of ethnic or social or psychological affinity. The New Republic had picked up a mixed bag of East-European technorejectionists and royalists, hankering for the comforting certainties of an earlier century.

  The founders of the New Republic had suffered at the hands of impersonal technological change. In the market-oriented democracies of pre-Singularity Earth, they’d seen people cast by their millions on the scrap heap of history. Given a new world to tame, and the tools to do it with, they had immediately established a conservative social order. A generation later, a vicious civil war broke out between those who wanted to continue using the cornucopia machines—self-replicating nano-assembler factories able to manufacture any physical goods—and those who wanted to switch to a simpler way of life where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everyone. The progressives lost: and so the New Republic remained for a century, growing into its natural shape—Europe as it might have been during the twentieth century, had physics and chemistry been finalized in 1890. The patent offices were closed; there were no homes for dreaming relativists here.

  Standing naked in the middle of the carpet, she could set it aside for a while. She could ignore the world while her implants ran through their regular self-defense practice sequence. It started with breathing exercises, then the isometric contraction of muscle groups under the direction of her battle management system, then finally a blur of motion as the embedded neural network controllers took over, whirling her body like a marionette through a series of martial arts exercises. A ten-minute cycle performed twice a week kept her as ready for personal defense as an unaugmented adept who spent an hour or more every day.

  Whirling and jerking on invisible strings she threw and dismembered intangible demons; it was no great effort to project her frustrations and anger onto them. This for the blind beggar she had passed in the street, his affliction curable in a culture that didn’t ban most advanced medical practices. That for the peasants bound to the soil they tilled by a law that saw them as part of the land, rather than as human beings. This for the women condemned to die giving birth to unwanted children. That for the priests who pandered to the prejudices of the ruling elite and offered their people the false consolation of the hereafter, when most of the horrors that besieged them had long since been banished from the civilized worlds. And this and this and that for treating her like a third-class citizen. Anger demanded many kata.

  I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world, I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me . . .

  There was a small bathroom next door—an expensive extra in this society. She used it to clean herself as efficiently as possible, sweat and grime washing away like memories. And some of the pessimism went with it. Things around here are going to get better, she reminded herself. That’s what I’m here for.

  Once dry, she wandered back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she picked up her battered PA. “Get me the UN Consensus Ambassador,” she ordered. There was only one UN ambassador in the New Republic; George Cho, permanent representative of the Security Council, to which she was ultimately answerable. (The New Republic persistently refused to recognize any of Earth’s more subtle political institutions.)

  “Processing. Beep. Rachel, I’m sorry, but I’m not available right now. Waiting for information to become available about the incident at Rochard’s. If you’d like to leave a message after the tone . . . beep.”

  “Hi, George. Rachel here. Calling from Klamovka. Give me a call ba
ck; I think I ought to go public, and I want diplomatic backup. Let’s talk. Message ends.”

  She closed the PA and put it down again. Stared moodily at the dresser. Her costume (she found it hard to think of it as regular clothing, even after months of wearing it daily) lay heaped around the dressing table. There were visits to make, forms to be observed, before she could act openly. Fuck this for a game of soldiers, she thought. Living by the New Republic’s rules had gotten old fast. I need some civilized company before I go out of my skull. Speaking of which, there was that engineering contractor to call. A bit of a cold fish, and not very cooperative, but she be damned if she’d let him throw her off; she could probably dig more out of him in an hour over a restaurant table than she’d be able to get from the Admiralty office in a month of diplomatic cocktail parties and formal memoranda.

  She picked up the PA again. “PA, page engineer Springfield’s voice mail for me. Speech only. I have a message for him. Message begins . . .”

  george cho, ambassador Plenipotentiary from the United Nations Security Council to the court of His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Ivan Hasek III (by grace of God, et cetera), sweated under his high collar and nodded politely. “Yes, Your Excellency, I quite understand your point. Nevertheless, although the territory in dispute is annexed to the New Republic, I must state again that we believe the situation falls within our remit, if only because it is not a purely domestic affair—unless this Festival is some peculiar tradition of yours that I have not hitherto been apprised of?—and consequently, the ugly matter of Clause Nineteen rears its head again.”

  His Excellency the Archduke Michael Hasek shook his head. “We cannot accept that,” he stated. He stared at Cho from watery but piercing blue eyes. Bloody foreign busybodies, he thought. Not that Cho was a bad sort, for a degenerate Terran anarchist technophiliac. He reminded Michael of a bloodhound; baggy-eyed, jowly, perpetually sad-looking, and a mind like a spring-steel trap.