Singularity Sky

Circus Of Death

The committee for the Revolution had taken over the onion-domed orthodox cathedral in Plotsk, making it the headquarters of the Commissariat for Extropian Ideology. All those who rejected the doctrine of revolutionary optimization and refused to flee the town were dragged before the tribunal and instructed boringly and at length about the nature of their misdemeanor; then they were shot, minds mapped and uploaded into the Festival, and sentenced to corrective labor— usually all at once. There weren’t many of them; for the most part, the population had fled into the wilderness, transcended, or happily adopted the revolutionary cause.

Sister Seventh’s hut, spun from local memories of myth and legend uploaded into the noosphere of the Festival, squatted in the courtyard outside the Revolutionary Commissariat and defecated massively.

Presently, the house stood and ambled in the direction of the cherry trees that fringed the square: it was hungry, and the Bishop’s liking for cherry blossom wouldn’t stop it eating.

Sister Seventh wrinkled her snout with displeasure and ambled indoors. The floor of the church was full of plaintiffs, queuing to demand this or appeal that. They stood before a kitchen table parked in the middle of the nave, behind which sat half a dozen bored-looking revolutionary functionaries. The small, frenetic human called Rubenstein waved his arms and exhorted their chairman, who was so heavily augmented with mechanical add-ons that he clanked when he walked. The subject of the exhortation seemed to be something to do with the need to reverse the previous policy of destroying the artistically illiterate. True, that priority rated low in the estimates of the Critics — after all, you can’t win an argument over esthetics with a corpse — but Rubenstein’s willingness to change his mind after only a day or two in her company didn’t commend his artistic integrity to her. These curious, lumpen humans were so impossibly gnomic in their utterances, so lacking in consistency, that sometimes she despaired of understanding their underlying esthetic.

Sister Seventh lost herself for a while in the flux of knowledge from the Festival. It let a filtered feed of its awareness escape, titillating the Critic colony in orbit, who relayed choice tidbits her way. The Festival propagated by starwisp, that much was true. It also relied on causal channels to relay its discoveries home. Now, great Higgs boson factories were taking shape in the rings of machinery orbiting Sputnik, icy gas and dust congealing into beat-wave particle accelerators on the edge of planetary space. Thousands of huge fusion reactors were coming on-stream, each pumping out enough energy to run a continental civilization. The first batch of new starwisps was nearing readiness, and they had a voracious appetite, a tonne of stabilized antimatter each; then there were the causal channels, petabytes and exabytes of entangled particles to manufacture and laboriously, non-observationally, separate into matching batches.

The first starwisps would soon take on their payloads, point their stubby noses at the void, and accelerate at nearly half a million gees, sitting atop the neutral particle beams emitted by vast launch engines in high orbit above Rochard’s World. Their primary destinations were the last two stops on the Festival’s route, to deliver fresh channels and a detailed report on the current visit; their other destinations — well, the Festival had been encamped for three months. Soon the traders would arrive.

Traders followed the Festival everywhere. A self-replicating, natural source of causal channels, the Festival laid down avenues of communication, opening up new civilizations to trade — civilizations which, in the wake of a visitation, were usually too culture-shocked to object to the Traders’ abstraction of the huge structures the Festival had constructed and abandoned for its own purposes. More than a thousand megafortunes had been made by natives of dirt-based trader civilizations with FTL ships and just enough nous to follow the trail of the Festival; like birds in the wake of a plow turning over rich farm soil, they waited to pounce on juicy nuggets of intellectual property turned up by the passing farmer.

Now something new tickled Sister Seventh’s hindbrain. She stopped beside a font and stooped to drink.

A message from She Who Observes the First. Ships coming. Festival notices. Many ships coming in silence. Now that was interesting; normally, the traders would appear like a three-ring circus, flashing lights and loud music playing on all available wavelengths, trying to attract attention. Stealth meant trouble. Forty-two vessels itemized. All with drive kernels, all with low emissions: query thermal dump to stern, reduce visibility from frontal aspect. Range seven light-seconds.

How peculiar. Sister Seventh straightened up. Someone — no, some construct of the Festival, human-child-high, but with long, floppy ears and a glossy fur coat, eyes mounted on the sides of its rodent face — was coming in through the side door.

Sister mine. What reflex of Festival? she asked silently. Hardwired extensions patched her through the Festival’s telephonic nervous system, building a bridge to her sibling.

Festival has noticed. Current activities not over; will not tolerate interference. Three Bouncers have been dispatched.

Sister of Stratagems the Seventh shivered and bared her teeth. There were few things about the Festival that scared her, but Bouncers were second on the list, right behind the Fringe. The Fringe might kill you out of random pique. The Bouncers were rather less random …

The leporine apparition in the aisle bounced toward her, a panicky expression on its face. Burya stopped lecturing Timoshevski and looked around. “What is it?” he demanded.

Timoshevski rumbled forward. “Am thinking is rabbit stew for dinner.”

“No! Please, sirs! Help!” The rabbit stopped short of them, pushing two aggrieved babushkas aside, and held out its front limbs — arms, Sister Seventh noticed, with disturbingly human hands at their extremities.

It was wearing a waistcoat that appeared to consist entirely of pockets held together by zip fasteners.

“Master in trouble!”

“Are no masters here, comrade,” said Timoshevski, apparently categorizing the supplicant as inedible.

‘True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism. Where are you from, and where is your internal passport?“

Rabbits have little control over their facial muscles; nevertheless, this one made a passable show of being nonplussed. “Need help,” it bleated, then paused, visibly gathering self-control. “My master is in trouble.

Mime hunt! They got between us, a village ago; I escaped, but I fear they’re coming this way.”

“Mimes?” Timoshevski looked puzzled. “Not clowns?” A metallic tentacle tipped in gun-muzzle flanges uncurled from his back, poked questing into the air. “Circus?”

“Circus of death,” said Sister Seventh. “Fringe performance, very poor. If coming this way, will interfere with popular acclaim of your revolution.”

“Oh, how so?” Timoshevski focused on Sister Seventh suspiciously.

“Listen to her, Oleg,” growled Burya. “She came with the Festival. Knows what’s going on.” He rubbed his forehead, as if the effort of making that much of a concession to her superior knowledge was painful.

“Oh?” Wheels turned slowly behind Timoshevski’s skull; evidently his plethora of augmentations took a goodly amount of his attention to run.

Sister Seventh stamped, shaking the floor. “Mimes are boring. Say help rabbit. Learn something new, maybe stage rescue drama?”

“If you say so.” Burya turned to Oleg. “Listen, you’re doing a reasonable job holding things down. I’d like to take six of your finest — who do I talk to? — and go sort these Mimes out. We really don’t need them messing things up; I’ve seen what they do, and I don’t like it.” A sallow-faced commissar behind Oleg shouldered his way forward. “I don’t see why we should listen to you, you pork-fed cosmopolitan,” he snarled in a thick accent. “This isn’t your revolution; this is the independent Plotsk soviet soyuz community, and we don’t take any centralist reactionary shit!”

“Quiet, Babar,” said Oleg. The tentacle sticking out of his back rotated to face the easterner: a dim red light glowed from its tip. “Burya is good comrade. If wanted force centralism on us, am thinking he would have come with force, no?”

“He did,” said Sister Seventh, but the revolutionaries ignored her.

“He go with detachment of guards. End to argument,” Oleg continued. “A fine revolutionary; trust him do right by this— rabbit.”

“You better be right, Timoshevski,” grunted Babar. “Not fools, us. Am not tolerating failure.” Sauer was out of the wardroom and into the security watch office less than a minute after regaining consciousness, cursing horribly, blinking back a painful chloroform headache, and tugging creases from his rumpled and spattered tunic. The petty officer on duty sprang to his feet hastily, saluting; Sauer cut him off. “General security alert. I want a full search for the UN spy and the shipyard engineer immediately, all points. Pull all the surveillance records for the UN spy in the past hour on my workstation, soon as you’ve got the search started. I want a complete inventory on all off-duty personnel as soon as you’ve done that.” He flung himself down behind his desk angrily. He ran fingers through his razor-cut hair and glared at the screen set into his desktop, then hit the switchboard button. “Get me the duty officer in ops,” he grunted. Turning around, “Chief, what I said — I need it now. Grab anyone you need.”

“Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir, beg permission to ask — what are we expecting?”

“The Terran diplomat is a saboteur. We flushed her, but she ran, taking the engineer with her. Which might have done us all a favor, except, firstly, they’re still loose, and, secondly, they’re armed and aboard this ship right now. So you’re to look for crazed foreign terrorists with illegal off-world technology lurking in the corridors. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” The flyer looked bemused. “Very clear, sir.”

The workstation bonged. Sauer turned to face it. Captain Mirsky stared at him inquiringly; “I thought you were busy keeping an eye on that damned chinless wonder from the Curator’s Office,” he commented.

“Sir!” Sauer sat bolt upright. “Permission to report a problem, sir!”

“Go ahead.”

“Security violation.” Sweat stood out on Sauer’s forehead. “Suspecting a covert agenda on the part of the Terran diplomat, I arranged a disinformation operation to convince her we had her number.

Unfortunately, we convinced her too well; she escaped from custody with the shipyard engineer and is loose on the ship right now. I’ve started a search and sweep, but in view of the fact that we appear to have armed hostiles aboard, I’m recommending a full lockdown and security alert.” The Captain didn’t even blink. “Do it.” He turned around, out of camera view for a few seconds. “The operations room is now sealed.” Beyond the sound-insulating door of the security office, a siren began to wail. “Report your status.”

Sauer looked around; the rating standing by the door nodded at him. “Beg to report, sir, security office is sealed.”

“We’re locked down in here, sir,” said Sauer. “The incident only began about three minutes ago.” He leaned sideways. “Found the records yet, Chief?”

“Backtracking now, sir,” said the Chief Petty Officer. “Ah, found external— damn. Begging your pardon, sir, but twelve minutes ago the surveillance cameras in Green deck, accommodation block — that’s where her quarters are — were disabled. An internal shutdown signal via the maintenance track, authorized by — ah. Um. The shutdown signal was authorized under your ID, sir.”

“Oh.” Sauer grunted. “Have you traced off-duty crew dispositions?”

“Yes, sir. Nobody was obviously out of bounds during the past hour. ‘Course that doesn’t mean anything — worst thing a sneak would normally get for being caught without a tracking badge would be a day or two in the brig.”

“You don’t say. Get a team down there now, I want that corridor covered!” Sauer didn’t remember the open phone channel until the Captain cleared his throat. “I take it you’re secure for the time being,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” The Lieutenant’s ears began to turn red. “Someone disabled the sensors outside the inspector’s cabin, using my security authentication. Sir, she’s really put one over on us.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Mirsky raised an eyebrow. “Come on. I want a solution.”

“Well—” Sauer stopped, “Sir, I believe I’ve located the saboteurs. Permission to go get them?” Mirsky grinned humorlessly. “Do it. Take them alive. I want to ask them some questions.” It was the first time Sauer had seen his captain look angry, and it made his blood run cold. “Yes, make sure they’re alive. I don’t want any accidents. Oh, and Sauer, another thing.”

“Sir?”

“When this is over I want a full, written report explaining how and why this whole incident happened. By yesterday morning.”

“Yes, sir.” The Captain cut the connection abruptly; Sauer stood up. “You heard the man,” he said.

“Chief, I’m taking a pager. And arms.” He walked over to the sealed locker and rammed his thumb against it; it clicked open, and he began pulling equipment out. “You’re staying here. Listen on channel nineteen. I’m going to be heading for the cabin. Keep an eye on my ID. If you see it going somewhere I’m not, I want you to tell me about it.” He pulled on a lightweight headset, then picked up a taser, held it beside his temple while the two computers shook hands, then rolled his eyes to test the target tracking.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. Should I notify the red tabs on green deck?”

“Of course.” Sauer brought the gun to bear on the door. “Open the hatch.”

“Aye aye, sir.” There was a click as latches retracted; the rating outside nearly dropped his coffee tray when he saw the Lieutenant.

“You! Maxim! Dump that tray and take this!” Sauer held out another firearm, and the surprised flyer fumbled it into place. “Stick to channel nineteen. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. Now follow me.” Then he was off down the corridor, airtight doors scissoring open in front and slamming closed behind him, turning the night into a jerky red-lit succession of tunnels.

The first thing she realized was her head hurt. The second …

She was lying in an acceleration couch. Her feet and hands were cold. “Rachel!” She tried to say “I’m awake,” but wasn’t sure anything came out. Opening her eyes took a tremendous effort of will. ‘Time. Wassat? How long—?“

“A minute ago,” said Martin. “What’s happened in here?” He was in the couch next to her. The capsule was claustrophobically tiny, like something out of the dawn of the space age. The hatch above them was open, though, and she could just see the inner door of her cabin past it. “Hatch, close. I said I had a lifeboat, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, and I thought you were just trying to keep my spirits up.” Martin’s pupils were huge in the dim light. Above him, the roof of the capsule began to knit itself together. “What’s going on?”

“We’re sitting on top of—” She paused to pant for breath. “Ah. Shit. On top of — a saltwater rocket.

Fission. Luggage full of — of uranium. And boron. Sort of unobtanium you need in ’mergency, stuff you can’t find easily. My little insurance policy.”

“You can’t just punch your way out of an occupied spaceship!” Martin protested.

“Watch me.” She grimaced, lips pulling back from her teeth. “Sealed — bulkheads. Airtight cocoon

‘round us. Only question is—”

“Autopilot ready,” announced the lifeboat. An array of emergency navigation displays lit up on the console in front of them.

“Whether they shoot at us when we launch.”

“Wait. Let me get this straight. We’re less than a day out from Rochard’s World, right?

This — thing — has enough legs to get us there? So you’re going to punch a neat hole in the wall and eject us, and they’re just going to let us go?”

“’S about the size of it,” she said. Closing her eyes to watch the pretty blue displays projected on her retinas: “About ten thousand gee-seconds to touchdown. We’re about forty thousand seconds from perigee right now. So we’re going to drift like a turd, right? Pretend to be a flushed silage tank. If they light out their radar, they give themselves away; if they shoot, they’re visible. So they’ll let us go, figure to pick us up later ’s long as we get there after they do. If we try to get there first, they’ll shoot …”

“You’re betting the Festival will finish them off.”

“Yup,” she agreed.

“Ready to arm initiator pump,” said the autopilot. It sounded like a fussy old man.

“M’ first husband,” she said. “He always nagged.”

“And here was me thinking it was your favorite pet ferret.” Martin busied himself hunting for crash webbing. “No gravity on this crate?”

“’S not a luxury yacht.”

Something bumped and clanked outside the door. “Oh shit.”

“We launch in — forty-two seconds,” said Rachel.

“Hope they give us that long.” Martin leaned over and began strapping her into the couch. “How many gees does this thing pull?”

She laughed: it ended in a cough. “Many as we can take. Fission rocket.”

“Fission?” He looked at her aghast. “But we’ll be a sitting duck! If they—”

“Shut up and let me work.” She closed her eyes again, busy with the final preparations.

Sneak was, of course, of the essence. A fission rocket was a sitting duck to a battlecruiser like the Lord Vanek; it had about four hours’ thrust, during which time it might stay ahead — if the uncompensated acceleration didn’t kill its passengers, and if the ship didn’t simply go to full military power and race past it — but then it was out of fuel, a ballistic casualty. To make matters worse, until she managed to get more than about ten thousand kilometers away from the Lord Vanek, she’d be within tertiary laser defense range — close enough that the warship could simply point its lidar grid at the lifeboat and curdle them like an egg in a microwave oven.

But there was a difference between could and would which, Rachel hoped, was big enough to fly a spaceship through. Activating the big warship’s drive would create a beacon that any defenders within half a light-minute or so might see. And torching off the big laser sensor/killer array would be like lighting up a neon sign saying invading warship — come and get me. Unless Captain Mirsky was willing to risk his Admiral’s wrath by making a spectacle of himself in front of the Festival, he wouldn’t dare try to nail Rachel so blatantly. Only if she lit off her own drive, or a distress beacon, would he feel free to shoot her down — because she would already have given his position away.

However, first she had to get off the ship. Undoubtedly, they’d be outside her cabin door within minutes, guns and cutters in their hands. The weakened bulkheads between the larval lifeboat and the outer pressure hull were all very well, but how to achieve a clean separation without warning them?

“Mech one. Broadcast primary destruct sequence.”

“Confirm. Primary destruct sequence for mech one.”

“Sword. Confirm?”

“Confirmed.”

The transponder in her luggage was broadcasting a siren song of destruction, on wavelengths only her spy mechs— those that were left — would be listening to. Mech one, wedged in a toilet’s waste valve in the brig, would hear. Using what was left of its feeble power pack, it would detonate its small destruct charge. Smaller than a hand grenade — but powerful enough to rupture the toilet’s waste pipe.

Warships can't use gravity-fed plumbing; the Lord Vanek’s sewage-handling system was under pressure, an intricate network of pipes connected by valves to prevent backflow. The Lord Vanek didn’t recycle its waste, but stored it, lest discharges freeze to shrapnel, ripping through spacecraft and satellites like a shotgun loaded with ice. But there are exceptions to every rule; holding waste in tanks to reduce the risk of ballistic debris creation was all very well, but not at the risk of shipboard disaster, electrical short circuit, or life-support contamination.

When Rachel’s makeshift bomb exploded, it ruptured a down pipe carrying waste from an entire deck to the main storage tanks. Worse, it took out a backflow valve. Waste water backed up from the tank and sprayed everywhere, hundreds of liters per second drenching the surrounding structural spaces and conduits. Damage control alarms warbled in the maintenance stations, and the rating on duty hastily opened the main dump valves, purging the waste circuit into space. The Lord Vanek had a crew of nearly twelve hundred, and had been in flight for weeks; a fire spray of sewage exploded from the scuppers, nearly two hundred tonnes of waste water purging into space just as Rachel’s lifeboat counted down to zero.

In the process of assembling her lifeboat, the robot factory in Rachel’s luggage had made extensive — not to say destructive — changes to the spaces around her cabin. Supposedly solid bulkheads fractured like glass; on the outer hull of the ship, a foam of spun diamond half a meter thick disintegrated into a talc-like powder across a circle three meters in diameter. The bottom dropped out of Rachel’s stomach as the hammock she lay in lurched sideways, then the improvised cold-gas thrusters above her head kicked in, shoving the damply newborn lifeboat clear of its ruptured womb. Weird, painful tidal stresses ripped at her; Martin grunted as if he’d been punched in the gut. The lifeboat was entering the ship’s curved-space field, a one-gee gradient dropping off across perhaps a hundred meters of space beyond the hull; the boat creaked and sloshed ominously, then began to tumble, falling end over end toward the rear of the warship.

On board the Lord Vanek, free-fall alarms were sounding. Cursing bridge officers yanked at their seat restraints, and throughout the ship, petty officers yelled at their flyers, calling them to crash stations.

Down in the drive maintenance room, Commander Krupkin was cursing up a blue streak as he hit the scram switch, then grabbed his desk with one hand and the speaking tube to the bridge with the other to demand an explanation.

Without any fuss, the warship’s drive singularity entered shutdown. The curved-space field that provided both a semblance of gravity and shielding against acceleration collapsed into a much weaker spherical field centered on the point mass in the engine room — just in time to prevent two hundred tons of bilgewater, and a twenty-tonne improvised lifeboat, from hammering into the rear of the Lord Vanek’s hull and ripping the heat exchangers to shreds.

In the Green deck accommodation block corridor, a nightmare cacophony of alarms was shrilling for attention. Lights strobed overhead, blue, red, green; blowout alarm, gravity failure alarm, everything.

Lieutenant Sauer cursed under his breath and grappled with an emergency locker door; “Help me, you idiot!” he shouted at Able Flyer Maxim Kravchuk who, whey-faced with fear, was frozen in the middle of the corridor. “Grab this handle and pull for your life!” Farther up the corridor, damage control doors were sliding shut; as they closed, struts extended from their inner surfaces and extended bright orange crash nets. Maxim grabbed the handle Sauer pointed him at and yanked. Together they managed to unseal the stiff locker door. “Get inside, idiot,” Sauer grunted.

The blowout alarm, terror of all cosmonauts, stopped strobing, but now he could feel the keening of the gravity failure siren deep in his bones — and the floor was beginning to tilt. Kravchuk tumbled inside the locker and began to belt himself to the wall, hands working on instinct alone. Sauer could see the whites of the man’s terrified eyes. He paused in the entrance, glancing up the corridor. The UN bitch’s cabin was in the next segment — he’d have to secure this one and get breathing apparatus before he could go and find out what she’d done to his ship. It’s not just the skipper who‘ll be asking questions, he thought bitterly.

Sauer clambered into the locker even as the floor began to tilt sideways; but the tilt stabilized at a relatively tolerable thirty degrees. He began to feel light on his feet. Drive must be going into shutdown, he realized. Leaving the door open — it would close automatically if there was a pressure drop — he began systematically to pull on an emergency suit. The emergency suit was basically a set of interconnected transparent bags, with enough air to last six hours in a backpack, no good for EVA but a lifesaver inside a breached hull. “You get dressed,” he told the frightened rating. “We’re going to find out what caused this.”

Four minutes later, Chief Molotov and four armed red-tab police arrived, laboriously cycling through the sealed-off corridor segments; the young Procurator tagged along behind them, face flushed, evidently struggling with the unfamiliar survival suit. Sauer ignored him. “Chief, I have reason to believe there are armed saboteurs inside the next corridor segment, or the third compartment in it. When I give the signal, I want this door open and the corridor behind it cleared. I don’t know what the occupants have by way of defenses, but they’re definitely armed, so I suggest you just saturate with taser fire. Once we’ve done that, if it’s empty, we move on the compartment. Got that?”

“Aye,” said Molotov. “Any idea who’s inside?”

Sauer shrugged. “My best bet is the engineer, Springfield, and the woman from Earth. But I could be wrong. How you handle this your call.”

“I see.” Molotov turned. “You and you; either side of the door. When it opens, shoot anything that moves.” He paused. “Remote override on the cabin door?”

“It’s locked. Manual hinges only, too.”

“Right you are.” Molotov unslung a knapsack, began unrolling a fat cable. “You’ll want to stand back, then.” He grabbed the emergency door override handle. “On my mark! Mark!” The emergency door hummed up into the ceiling, and the ratings tensed, but the corridor was empty.

“Right. The cabin, lads.”

He approached the cabin door carefully. “Says it’s open to vacuum, sir,” he said, pointing to the warning lights on the door frame.

“Bet you it’s a pinhole leak she’s rigged to keep us out. Just get everyone into suits before we blow it.” Sauer approached and watched as Molotov attached the cable of rubbery cord to the door frame, running it alongside the hinges and then around the door handle and lock, holding it in place with tape.

“I’m going to use cutting cord. Better tell Environment to seal this corridor for a pressure drop-off until we repressurize this compartment.”

“Sir—” It was Muller, the cause of this whole mess.

“What is it?” Sauer snapped, not bothering to conceal his anger.

“I, uh—” Vassily recoiled. “Please be careful, sir. She — the inspector — isn’t a fool. This makes me nervous—”

“Keep pestering me, and I’ll make you nervous. Chief, if this man makes a nuisance of himself, feel free to arrest him. He caused this whole fiasco.”

“He did, did he?” Chief Molotov glared at the Subcurator, who wilted and retreated down the passage.

“I’ll get Environment to seal us off.” Sauer was on the command channel again, as Molotov retrieved some wires and a detonator, and began cabling up the explosives. Finally, he retreated a few paces down the corridor and waited. “All clear,” said Sauer. “Okay. Is everybody ready?” He backed up until he stood beside Molotov. “Are you ready?” The chief nodded. “Then go.” There was a loud whip crack, and smoke jetted from the sides of the door. Then there was an unbelievably loud bang, and Sauer’s ears popped. The doorway was gone. Behind it, a rolling darkness dragged at him with icy claws, howling and sucking the others out into the void. Not a pinhole? He tried to grab at the nearest emergency locker door, but it was already slamming shut, and he was dragged down the corridor. Something thumped him hard between the shoulders, so hard that he couldn’t breathe. Everything was dark, and the pain was unbelievable. A dark cylinder spun before his eyes, and there was a ringing whistling in his ears. Plastic flapped against his face. Must have ripped my suit, he thought vaguely. I wonder what happened to… Thinking was hard work; he gave up and fell into a doze, which spiraled rapidly down into dreamless silence.

Vassily Muller, however, was luckier.