Singularity Sky

Confessions

The Lord Vanek accelerated at an economical two gees, using its drive kernel to curve the space-time ahead of it into a valley into which it slid easily, without imposing punishing stress on crew or machinery.

Ninety-two thousand tonnes of warship (with an eight-billion-tonne black hole at her core) took a lot of moving, but once set in motion, it could go places fast. It would take days to cross the vast gulf that separated Lord Vanek’s parking station from the first jump point on the return leg of its timelike path — but nothing like the years that humanity’s earliest probes had taken to cover similar distances.

The ships of the fleet had traveled barely twenty light-years from the New Republic, but in the process, they had hopped forward in time by four thousand years, zigzagging between the two planetless components of the binary system in an attempt to outrun any long-term surveillance that the Festival might have placed on them. Soon the spacelike component of the voyage would commence, with a cruise to a similar system not far from Rochard’s World; then the fleet would pursue a bizarre trajectory, looping back into the past of their own world line without actually intersecting that of their origin point.

Along the way, the fleet tenders would regularly top up the warships with consumable provisions, air and water and food; no less than eight merchant ships would be completely stripped and abandoned to fall forever between the stars, their crews doubled up aboard other vessels. The voyage would strain the Navy’s logistic system beyond the point of failure: something had to give, and an entire year’s shipbuilding budget would go into the supply side of this operation alone.

As they cruised between jumps, the warships exercised continually. Tentative lidar pulses strobed at the deep vacuum beyond the heliopause as officers sought firing solutions on the ships of the other squadrons; missile and torpedo trajectories were plotted, laser firing solutions entered into the tireless gear mills of the analytical engines. Tracking ships at long range was difficult, for they didn’t emit much detectable radiation. Radar was hopeless: to pump out sufficient energy to get a return, the Lord Vanek would have produced enough waste heat to broil her crew alive. As it was, only her vast radiator panels, spread to the stars and now glowing a dull red, allowed them to run the lidar at high intensity for short periods of time. (Vacuum is a most effective insulator — and active sensors capable of reaching out across billions of kilometers run hot.)

Martin Springfield knew nothing of this. Lying in his cell he’d spent the past two days in despondent boredom, alternating between depression and guarded optimism by turns. Still alive, he thought. Then: Not for long. If only there was something he could do! But on board a starship, there was nowhere to run. He was enough of a realist to understand this: if they ran out of options here, he was dead. He’d simply have to hope that they hadn’t worked out what he’d done, and would release him rather than antagonizing the shipyard.

He was sitting on the bunk one evening when the door opened. He looked up at once, expecting Sauer or the Curator’s kid spook. His eyes widened. “What are you doing here?”

“Just visiting. Mind if I sit down?”

He nodded uneasily. Rachel sat on the edge of the bunk. She was wearing a plain black jumpsuit and had tied her hair back severely; her manner was different, almost relaxed. It wasn’t a disguise, he realized; she wasn’t acting the part of a woman of easy virtue or a diplomat posted to a banana republic, or anyone else, for that matter. She was being herself — a formidable figure. “I thought they’d have locked you up, too,” he said.

“Yes, well …” She looked distracted. “One moment.” She glanced at her pocket watch. “Ah.” She leaned over toward the head end of his bunk and placed something small and metallic on it.

“I already spiked the bugs,” he said. “They won’t hear much.” She glared at him. “Thanks for nothing.”

“What—”

“I want the truth,” she said flatly. “You’ve been lying to me. I want to know why.”

“Oh.” He tried not to cringe. Her expression was unnaturally controlled, the calm before a storm.

“You’ve got only one chance to tell the truth,” she said, pitching her voice in conversational tones that were belied by a brittle edge in it. “I don’t think they know you’re lying yet, but when we get back — well, they’re not dummies and you’re digging yourself in deeper. The Curator’s Office will be watching. If you act guilty, the boy wonder will draw the only available conclusion.” He sighed. “And what if the conclusion is right? What if I am guilty?” he asked.

“I trusted you,” she said flatly. “As yourself. Not as a player. I don’t like being lied to, Martin. In business or my personal life, whichever.”

“Well.” He contemplated the shiny jammer she’d placed on his pillow. It was easier than facing her anger and hurt. “If I said they told me they were the shipyard, would that satisfy you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You’re not dumb enough to fall for a cover story, anyway.” She looked away. “I don’t like being lied to,” she said bitterly.

He looked at her. Rachel was an up-to-date professional, unlike the bumbling amateurs of the New Republic; she’d have speech analysis reflexes, lie detectors, any number of other gadgets trained on him, if this was business, and if she hadn’t completely lost it. If she had — well, he could hardly blame her for being mad at him. In her place, he’d be angry, too. And hurt. “I don’t like telling lies,” he said, which was true enough. “Not without an overriding reason,” he admitted.

She took a deep breath, visibly steeling herself. “I’m the nearest thing to a lawyer you’re going to get here, Martin. I’m the nearest representative of your government — what they think is your government — within four thousand years and a two-hundred-light-year radius. They have a legalistic system of government, for all that they’re medieval throwbacks, and they let me visit you as your advocate. I can plead your case if it comes up to a court-martial because you’re a civilian, and I might be able to deflect things short of that. But only if you tell me everything, so I know what I’m defending.”

“I can’t talk about it,” he said uncomfortably. He picked up his book, half trying to shelter his guilty conscience behind it. “I’m not allowed to. I thought you of all people would be able to understand that?”

“Listen.” Rachel glared at him. “Remember what I told you about trust? I’m really disappointed. Because I did trust you, and it seems to me that you betrayed that trust. As it is, I’m going to have to do a lot of fast talking if I’m going to try to get your ass off the hook you’re caught on, or at least get you out of here alive. And before I do that, I want to know what you’ve been lying to me about.” She stood up. “I’m a fool. And a damned fool for trusting you, and a worse fool for getting involved with you. Hell, I’m an unprofessional fool! But I’m going to ask you again, and you’d better answer truthfully.

There are a lot of lives at stake this time, Martin, because this is not a game. Who the fuck are you working for?”

Martin paused a moment, dizzy with a sense of events moving out of control. Can’t tell her, can’t not tell her—he looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. It was the hurt expression that made his mind up for him: no amount of rationalization would help him sleep that night if he left her feeling like this.

Feeling betrayed by the only person she’d been able to trust within a radius of light-years. One moment of unprofessionalism deserved to be answered by another. His mouth felt dry and clumsy as he spoke: “I work for the Eschaton.”

Rachel sat down heavily, her eyes wide with disbelief. “What?” He shrugged. “You think the E’s only way of dealing with problems is to drop a rock on them?” he asked.

“Are you kidding?”

“Nope.” He could taste bile in the back of his throat. “And I believe in what I’m doing, else I wouldn’t be here now, would I? Because truly, the alternative is to drop a planet-buster on the problem. The Eschaton finds that easier. And it makes the appropriate noises. It scares people. But really— most of the time, the E likes to solve problems more quietly through people like me.”

“How long?”

“About twenty years.” He shrugged again. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Why?” She buried her hands between her knees, holding them together tightly, looking at him with a miserably confused expression on her face.

“Because—” He tried to drag his scattered thoughts together. “Believe me, the Eschaton prefers it when people like you do the job first. It saves a lot of pain all around. But once the fleet moved, and you lost the argument with them, there was no alternative. You didn’t really think they’d set up the prerequisites for a closed timelike path and not follow it through to the logical end?” He took a deep breath. “That’s the sort of job I do. I’m a plumber, for when the Eschaton wants to fix a leak quietly.”

“You’re an agent, you mean.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Like you.”

“Like me.” She made a croaking noise that sounded as if it might have been intended as a laugh. “Shit, Martin, that is not what I was expecting to hear.”

“I wish this hadn’t happened. Especially with — well, us. In the middle.”

“Me too, with brass knobs on,” she said shakily. “Was that all there was?”

“All there was? That’s all I was holding out on you, honest.” A long pause. “Alright. It was, uh, purely professional?”

He nodded. “Yes.” He looked at her. “I don’t like lying. And I haven’t been lying, or withholding the truth, about anything else. I promise.”

“Oh. Okay.” She took a deep breath and grinned tiredly, simultaneously looking amused and relieved.

“It’s really been eating you, hasn’t it?” he asked.

“Oh, you could say that,” she said, with heavy irony.

“Um.” He held out a hand. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

“Apology accepted — conditionally.” She squeezed his hand, briefly, then let go. “Now, are you going to tell me what the Eschaton has in mind for us?”

Martin sighed. “Yes, inasmuch as I know. But I’ve got to warn you, it’s not good. If we can’t get off this ship before it arrives, we’re probably going to die …”

Time travel destabilises history.

History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order. A single misunderstood telegram in June of 1917 permitted the Bolshevik revolution to become a possibility; a single spy in 1958 extended the Cold War by a decade. And without both such events, could a being like the Eschaton ever have come to exist?

Of course, in a universe which permits time travel, history itself becomes unstable — and the equilibrium can only be restored when the diabolical mechanism edits itself out of the picture. But that’s scant comfort for the trillions of entities who silently cease to exist in the wake of a full-blown time storm.

It’s hardly surprising that, whenever intelligent beings arise in such a universe, they will seek to use closed timelike curves to prevent their own extinction. Faster-than-light travel being possible, general relativity tells us that it is indistinguishable from time travel; and this similarity makes the technologies of total annihilation dreadfully accessible. In the small, stupid little organizations like the New Republic seek to gain advantage over their contemporaries and rivals. In the large, vast, cool intellects seek to stabilize their universe in the form most suitable to them. Their tampering may be as simple as preventing rivals from editing them out of the stable historical record — or it may be as sophisticated as meddling with the early epochs of the big bang, back before the Higgs field decayed into the separate fundamental forces that bind the universe together to ensure just the right ratio of physical constants to support life.

This is not the only universe; far from it. It isn’t even the only universe in which life exists. Like living organisms, universes exist balanced on the edge of chaos, little bubbles of twisted urspace that pinch off and bloat outward, expanding and cooling, presently giving birth to further bubbles of condensed space-time; a hyperdimensional crystal garden full of strange trees bearing stranger fruit.

But the other universes are not much use to us. There are too many variables in the mix. As the initial burst of energy that signals the birth of a universe cools, the surging force field that drives its initial expansion becomes tenuous, then breaks down into a complex mess of other forces. The constants that determine their relative strengths are set casually, randomly. There are universes with only two forces; others, with thousands. (Ours has five.) There are universes where the electron is massive: nuclear fusion is so easy there that the era of star formation ends less than a million of our years after the big bang.

Chemistry is difficult there, and long before life can evolve, such universes contain nothing but cooling pulsars and black holes, the debris of creation brought to a premature end.

There are universes where photons have mass — others where there is too little mass in the universe for it to achieve closure and collapse in a big crunch at the end of time. There are, in fact, an infinity of universes out there, and they are all uninhabitable. There is a smaller infinitude of possibly habitable ones, and in some of them, intelligent life evolves; but more than that we may never know. Travel between universes is nearly impossible; materials that exist in one may be unstable in another. So, trapped in our little fishbowl of space we drift through the crystal garden of universes — and our own neighborly intelligences, beings like the Eschaton, do their best to prevent the less-clever inmates from smashing the glass from within.

The man in gray had explained all this to Martin at length, eighteen years ago. “The Eschaton has a strong interest in maintaining the integrity of the world line,” he had said. “It’s in your interest, too. Once people begin meddling with the more obscure causal paradoxes, all sorts of lethal side-effects can happen. The Eschaton is as vulnerable to this as any other being in the universe — it didn’t create this place, you know, it just gets to live in it with the rest of us. It may be a massively superhuman intelligence or cluster of intelligences, it may have resources we can barely comprehend, but it could probably be snuffed out quite easily; just a few nuclear weapons in the right place before it bootstrapped into consciousness, out of the preSingularity networks of the twenty-first century. Without the Eschaton, the human species would probably be extinct by now.”

“Epistemology pays no bills,” Martin remarked drily. “If you’re expecting me to do something risky …”

“We appreciate that.” The gray man nodded. “We need errands run, and not all of them are entirely safe.

Most of the time it will amount to little more than making note of certain things and telling us about them — but occasionally, if there is a serious threat, you may be asked to act. Usually in subtle, undetectable ways, but always at your peril. But there are compensations.”

“Describe them.” Martin put his unfinished drink down at that point.

“My sponsor is prepared to pay you very well indeed. And part of the pay — we can smooth the path if you apply for prolongation and continued residency.” Life-extension technology, allowing effectively unlimited life expectancy beyond 160 years, was eminently practical, and available on most developed worlds. It was also as tightly controlled as any medical procedure could be. The controls and licensing were a relic of the Overshoot, the brief period in the twenty-first century when Earth’s population blipped over the ten-billion mark (before the Singularity, when the Eschaton bootstrapped its way past merely human intelligence and promptly rewrote the rule book). The aftereffects of overpopulation still scarred the planet, and the response was an ironclad rule — if you want to live beyond your natural span, you must either demonstrate some particular merit, some reason why you should be allowed to stay around, or you could take the treatment and emigrate. There were few rules that all of Earth’s fractured tribes and cultures and companies obeyed, but out of common interest, this was one of them. To be offered exemption by the covert intervention of the Eschaton—

“How long do I have to think about it?” asked Martin.

“Until tomorrow.” The gray man consulted his notepad. ‘Ten-thousand-a-year retainer. Ten thousand or more as a bonus if you are asked to do anything. And an essential status exemption from the population committee. On top of which, you will be helping to protect humanity as a whole from the actions of some of its more intemperate — not to say stupid— members. Would you care for another drink?“

“It’s alright,” said Martin. They’re willing to pay me? To do something I’d volunteer for? He stood up. “I don’t need another day to think about it. Count me in.” The gray man smiled humorlessly. “I was told you’d say that.” The gold team was on full alert. Not a head moved when the door opened, and Captain Mirsky walked in, followed by Commodore Bauer and his staff. “Commander Murametz, please report.”

“Yes, sir. Time to jump transition, three-zero-zero seconds. Location plot confirmed, signals operational.

All systems running at an acceptable level of readiness for engagement plan C. We’re ready to go to battle stations whenever you say, sir.”

Mirsky nodded. “Gentlemen, carry on as ordered.” The Commodore nodded and quietly instructed his adjutant to take notes. Elsewhere on the ship, sirens blatted: the clatter of spacers running to their stations didn’t penetrate the bulkheads, but the atmosphere nevertheless felt tense. Low-key conversations started at the various workstations around the room as officers talked over the tactical circuits.

“Ready for jump in two-zero-zero seconds,” called Relativistics.

Rachel Mansour — wearing her disarmament inspector’s uniform — sat uncomfortably close to one of the walls, studying a packed instrument console over the shoulder of a petty officer. Brass handles and baroque red LEDs glowed at her; a pewter dog’s head barked silently from an isolation switch.

Someone had spent half a lifetime polishing the engravings until they gleamed as softly as butter. It seemed a bitter irony, to observe such art in a place of war; the situation was, she thought, more than somewhat repulsive, and finding anything even remotely beautiful in it only made things worse.

The Festival: of all the stupid things the New Republic might attack, the Festival was about the worst.

She’d spoken to Martin about it, piecing together his information with her own. Together they’d pieced together a terrifying hypothesis. “Herman was unusually vague about it,” Martin admitted. “Normally he has a lot of background detail. Every word means something. But it’s as if he doesn’t want to say too much about the Festival. They’re — he called them, uh, glider-gun factories. I don’t know if you know about Life—”

“Cellular automata, the game?”

“That’s the one. Glider guns are mobile cellular automata. There are some complex life structures that replicate themselves, or simpler cellular structures; a glider-gun factory is a weird one. It periodically packs itself into a very dense mobile system that migrates across the grid for a couple of hundred squares, then it unpacks itself into two copies that then pack down and fly off in opposite directions.

Herman said that they’re a realspace analogue: he called them a Boyce-Tipler robot. Self-replicating, slower-than-light interstellar probes that are sent out to gather information about the universe and feed it back to a center. Only the Festival isn’t just a dumb robot fleet. It carries upload processors, thousands of uploaded minds running faster than real time when there are resources to support them, downloaded into long-term storage during the long trips.”

Rachel had shuddered slightly at that, and he hugged her, misapprehending the cause of her distress. She let him, not wanting him to realize he had upset her. She’d dealt with uploads before. The first-generation ones, fresh from the meat puppet universe, weren’t a problem: it was the kids that got her. Born — if you could call it that — in a virtual environment, they rapidly diverged from any norm of humanity that she could see. More seriously, their grasp of the real world was poor. Which was fine as long as they didn’t have to deal with it, but when they did, they used advanced nanosystems for limbs and they sometimes accidentally broke things — planets, for instance.

It wasn’t intentional malice; they’d simply matured in an environment where information didn’t go away unless someone wanted it to, where death and destruction were reversible, where magic wands worked and hallucinations were dangerous. The real universe played by different rules, rules that their horrified ancestors had fled as soon as the process of migrating minds into distributed computing networks had been developed.

The Festival sounded like a real headache. On the one hand, an upload civilization, used to omnipotence within its own pocket universe, had decided for no obvious reason to go forth and play the galactic tourist. On the other hand, physical machinery of vast subtlety and power was bound to do their bidding at each port of call. Bush robots, for example: take a branching tree of fronds. Each bough split into two half-scale branches at either end, with flexible joints connecting them. Repeated down to the molecular level, each terminal branch was closed off with a nanomanipulator. The result was a silvery haze with a dumbbell-shaped core, glittering with coherent light, able to change shape, dismantle and reassemble physical objects at will — able to rebuild just about anything into any desired physical form, from the atomic scale up. Bush robots made the ultimate infantry; shoot at them, and they’d eat the bullets, splice them into more branches, and thank you for the gift of metals.

“I’m worried about what will happen when we arrive,” Martin admitted. He’d wrung his hands while he spoke, unconsciously emphasizing his points. “I don’t think the New Republicans can actually comprehend what’s going on. They see an attack, and I can understand why — the Festival has destroyed the political and social economy on one of their colonies as thoroughly as if it had nuked the place from orbit — but what I can’t see is any possible avenue to a settlement. There’s not going to be any common ground there. What does the Festival want? What could make them go away and leave the Republic alone?”

“I thought you didn’t like the New Republic,” Rachel challenged.

He grimaced. “And I suppose you do? I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”

“You did your bit to make it that way.”

“Yes.” He dropped his gaze to the floor, focusing intently on something invisible to her. “I wish there was an alternative. But Herman can’t just let them get away with it. Either causality is a solid law, or — things break. Far better for their maneuver simply to fail, so the whole voyage looks like a cack-handed mess, than for it to succeed, and encourage future adventurers to try for a timelike approach on their enemies.”

“And if you’re lashed to the mast as the ship heads for the maelstrom?”

“I never said I was omniscient. Herman said he’d try to get me out of here if I succeeded; I wish I knew what he had in mind. What are your options like?”

Her lips quirked. “Maybe he nobbled my boss — he taught me never to travel at sea without a lifeboat.” Martin snorted, obviously misunderstanding: “Well, they say a captain always goes down with his ship — shame they never mention the black gang drowning in the engine room!” An announcement from the helm brought Rachel back to the present: “Jump in one-zero-zero seconds.”

“Status, please,” said Commander Murametz. Each post called out in order; everything was running smoothly. ‘Time to transition?“

“Four-zero seconds. Kernel spin-down in progress; negative mass dump proceeding.” Far beneath their feet, the massive singularity at the core of the drive system was spooling down, releasing angular momentum into the energetic vacuum underlying space-time. There was no vibration, no sense of motion: nor could there be. Spin, in the context of a space drive, was a property of warped patches of space, nothing to do with matter as most people understood it.

“Commander Murametz, proceed.” The Captain stood back, hands clasped behind his back.

“Commodore, by your leave?”

Bauer nodded. “Proceed on your initiative.”

‘Transition in progress … we’re clear. Reference frame locked.“

“No obstructions,” called Radar One. “Um, looks like we’re on the nail.”

“One-zero gees, straight in on the primary,” said Ilya. He looked almost bored; they’d rehearsed this a dozen times in the past three days alone. “Confirm positional fix, then give me a passive scan. Standard profile.”

“Aye aye, sir. Nav confirmation; we have a star fix. Yes, we’re a good bit closer to the bucket than last time. I see a waste heat dump from Chancellor Romanoff; they’re through.” That cheered them up; even at ten gees constant acceleration, a miss of a couple of astronomical units could take hours or days to make up. “Nothing else in view.”

“Give me a lidar shout, then. Chirped, if you please, frontal nine-zero degrees.”

“Emission starting — now. Profile steady.” The main screen of the simulation showed megawatts of laser light pouring out into the depths of space, mostly hard ultraviolet tagged with the sawtooth timing pulses of the ship’s clock. “Scan closure. Lidar shutdown.”

Radar Two: “I’ve got backscatter! Range — Holy father! Sir, we’re right on top of them! Range six-zero K-kilometers, looks like metal!”

Bauer smiled like a shark.

“Helm: take us to full military power in one-zero seconds. Course plus one-zero, minus four-zero.”

“Aye aye, sir, bringing course to plus one-zero minus four-zero. Two-one one gees coming up in five …

three … now.” Like most regional powers, the New Republican Navy had adopted the Terran standard gee — ten meters per second squared. At full military power, Lord Vanek could go from a standing start to planetary escape velocity in less than sixty seconds; without a delicate balancing act, trading off the drive kernel’s spin against the curvature of space around the ship, the crew would be squashed flat and broken on the floor. But carrying a drive kernel had its price — a non-FTL, fission-powered missile could, at short range, outrun or out-turn a warship hobbled by the mass of a mountain.

“Radar, get me some details on that bounce.” Mirsky leaned forward.

“Aye aye, sir.” A plot came up on the forward display. Rachel focused on the readouts, looking over the razor-scarred rolls at the base of Petty Officer Borisovitch’s skull. “Confirming …” Radar Two: “More contacts! Repeat, I have multiple contacts!”

“How far?” demanded the captain.

“They’re — too close! Sir, they’re very faint. Took a few seconds for the analysis grid to resolve them, in fact. They’ve got to be black body emitters with stealth characteristics. Range nine-zero K, one-point-three M, seven M, another at two-five-zero K … we’re in the middle of it!” Rachel closed her eyes. A chill ran up her spine as she thought about small robot factories, replicators, the swarm of self-replicating weapons breeding in low orbit around a distant gas giant moon. She breathed deeply and opened her eyes.

Radar Two interrupted her reverie: ‘Target! Range six-point-nine M-klicks, big emission profile. Course minus five-five, plus two-zero.“

Mirsky turned to his executive officer: “Ilya, your call.”

“Yes, sir. Designate the new contact as target alpha. Adopt convergent course for alpha, closest pass at three-zero K, full military power.”

“Aye aye, targeting alpha.”

“You expect something, sir,” Ilya said quietly. Rachel tilted her head slightly, to let her boosted hearing focus on the two senior officers at the back of the room.

“Damn right I do. Something wiped out the system defense flotilla,” Mirsky murmured. “Something that was sitting there, waiting for them. I don’t expect anything except hostile contacts as soon as we come out of jump.”

“I didn’t expect them to be this close, though.” Murametz looked troubled.

“I had to do some digging, but thanks to Inspector Mansour”—the Captain nodded in her direction—“we know a bit about their capabilities, which are somewhat alarming. It’s not in the standard intelligence digest because the fools didn’t think it worth mentioning. We’re up against cornucopiae, you see, and nobody back at Naval Intel bothered asking what a robot factory can do tactically.” Commander Murametz shook his head. “I don’t know. Sir? Does it have any military bearing?”

“Yes. You see, robots can breed. And spawn starwisps.”

“Starwisps—” Enlightenment dawned. Ilya looked shocked. “How big would they be?” he asked the captain.

“About half a kilogram mass. You can cram a lot of guidance circuitry into a gram of diamond-substrate nanomachinery. The launchers that fire them probably mass a quarter of a tonne each — but a large chunk of that is stored antimatter to power the neutral particle beam generators. At a guess, there could be a couple of thousand out here; that’s probably what those low aspect contacts are. If you trip-wire one of them, and it launches on you, expect the starwisp riding the beam to come out at upward of ten thousand gees. But of course, you probably won’t even see it unless it gets lock-on and you get some sidescattered radiation from the beam. Basically, we’re in the middle of a minefield, and the mines can shoot relativistic missiles at us.”

“But—” Ilya looked horrified. “I thought this was a standard firing setup!”

“It is, Commander,” Bauer said drily.

“Ah.” Ilya looked slightly green at the edges.

“Backscatter!” It was Radar Three. “I have backscatter! Something is launching from target alpha, acceleration one-point-three — no, one-point-five gees. Cooking off gammas at one-point-four MeV.”

“Log as candidate one,” said Ilya. Urgently: “Sir, humbly request permission to resume immediate control?”

“Granted,” snapped the Captain.

Rachel glanced around at the ops room stations. Officers hunched over their workstations, quietly talking into headset microphones and adjusting brass-handled dials and switches. Mirsky walked over to the command station and stood at Ilya’s shoulder. “Get radar looking for energy spikes,” he commented.

“This is going to be difficult. If I’m right, we’re in the middle of a minefield controlled by a central command platform; if we leak again, we’re not getting out of here.” Rachel leaned forward too, focusing on the main screen. It was, she thought, remarkable: if this was typical of their teamwork, then with a bit of luck they might even make it into low orbit around Rochard’s World.

The tension rose over the next ten minutes, as the Lord Vanek accelerated toward the target. Its singularity drive was virtually undetectable, even at close range (spotting the mass of a mountain at a million kilometers defied even the most sensitive gravity-wave detectors), but all the enemy strongpoint had to do was switch on a pulse-doppler radar sweep and the battlecruiser would show up like a sore thumb. The first rule of space warfare — and the ancient submarine warfare that preceded it — was, “If they can see you, they can kill you.”

On the other hand, the enemy base couldn’t be sure exactly where the ship was right now; it had changed course immediately after shutting down its search lidar. Four more brief lidar pulses had swept across the ship’s hull, as other members of the squadron dropped in and took their bearings: since then, nothing but silence.

“Second trace!” called Radar One. “Another live bird moving out. Range on this one is four-seven M-klicks, vector toward lidar source three, the Suvaroffi. ”

“Confirm course and acceleration,” ordered Ilya. “Log it as candidate two.”

“Confirm three more,” said Radar Two. “Another source, um, range nine-zero M-klicks. Designation beta. They’re thick around here, aren’t they?”

“Watch out for a—”

“Third echo from local target alpha,” called Radar Two. “Scattering relative to candidates one and two.

Looks like a third missile. This one’s heading our way.”

“Give me a time to contact,” Mirsky said grimly. Rachel studied him: Mirsky was a wily old bird, but even though he’d figured out what was going on, she couldn’t see how he planned to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. At any moment she expected to hear the shriek of alarms as one or another observer picked up the telltale roar of a relativistic particle stream, with a beamriding starwisp hurtling toward them on top of it, armed with a cargo of antimatter.

Of course, it was too much to expect the New Republic’s government to realize just how thoroughly they were outclassed; their cultural bias was such that they couldn’t perceive the dangers of something like the Festival. Even their best naval tacticians, the ones who understood forbidden technologies like self-replicating robot factories and starwisps, didn’t comprehend quite what the Festival might do with them.

The Lord Vanek’s chances of surviving this engagement were thin. In fact, the entire expedition was predicated on the assumption that what they were fighting was sufficiently human in outlook to understand the concept of warfare and to use the sort of weapons overeducated apes might throw at one another.

Rachel had a hopeless, unpleasant gut feeling that acting without such preconceptions, the Festival would be far deadlier to the New Republican expeditionary force than they could imagine. Unfortunately, it appeared she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.

“More backscatter. Target gamma! We have another target — range two-seven-zero M-klicks. Ah, another missile launching.”

“That’s—” Ilya paused. “One base per cubic AU? One M bases, if they’re evenly distributed through the outer system.” He looked stunned.

“You don’t think you’re fighting people, do you?” asked Mirsky. “This is a fully integrated robot defense network. And it’s big. Mind-bogglingly big.” He looked almost pleased with his own perspicacity. “The Admiralty didn’t listen when I explained it to them the first time, you know,” he added. “Eighteen years ago. One of the reasons I never made flag rank—”

“I listened,” Bauer said quietly. “Proceed, Captain.”

“Yes sir. Solution on target alpha?”

Fire control: “Time to range on target alpha, two-zero-zero seconds, sir.”

“Hmm.” Mirsky contemplated the display. “Commander. Your opinion.” Ilya swallowed. “I’d get in close and use the laser grid.”

Mirsky shook his head, slightly. “You forget they may have X-ray lasers.” Louder: “Relativity, I want you ready to give me a microjump. If I give the word, I want us out of here within five seconds. Destination can be anywhere within about one-zero AUs, I’m not fussy. Can you do that?”

“Aye aye, sir. Kernel is fully recharged; we can do that. Holding at T minus five seconds, now.”

“Guns: I want six SEM-20s in the tube, armed and ready to launch in two minutes. Warheads dialed for directional spallation, two-zero degree spread. Three of them go to alpha target; hold the other three in reserve ready for launch on five seconds’ notice. Next, load and arm two torpedoes. I want them hot and ready when I need them.”

“Aye aye, sir. Three rounds for alpha, three in reserve, and two torpedoes. Sir, six birds on the rail awaiting your command. The hot crew is fueling the torpedoes now; they should be ready in about four minutes.”

“That’s nice to know,” Mirsky said, a trifle too acid; the lieutenant at the gunnery console flinched visibly.

“As you were,” added the Captain.

“Proximity in one-two-zero seconds, sir. Optimum launch profile in eight-zero.”

“Plot the positions of the nearest identified mines. Show vectors on command station alpha, assuming they fire projectiles holding a constant acceleration of ten kilo-gees. Can they nail us in just four-zero seconds?”

“Checking, sir.” Navigation. “Sir, they can’t nail us before we take out that command post, unless target alpha also has a speed demon or two up his sleeve. But they’ll get us one-five seconds later.” Mirsky nodded. “Very good. Guns: we launch at four-zero seconds to target. Helm, relativity: at contact plus five seconds, that’s five seconds after our fire on target, initiate that microjump.”

“Launch T minus five-zero seconds, sir … mark.”

Rachel watched the display, a fuzzball of red pinpricks and lengthening lines. Their own projected vector, in blue, stretched toward one of the red dots, then stopped abruptly. Any second now, she guessed, something nasty was bound to happen.

Guns: ‘T minus three-zero. Birds warm. Launch grid coming up to power now. T minus two-zero.“ Radar One interrupted: “I’m picking up some fuzz from astern.”

“One-zero seconds. Launch rails energized,” added the gunnery post.

“Fire on schedule,” said the captain.

“Yes, sir. Navigation updated. Inertial platforms locked. Birds charged, warheads green.”

“Light particles!” yelled Radar One. “Big explosion off six M-klicks, bearing six-two by five-nine! Looks like — damn, one of the cruisers bought it. I’m getting a particle stream from astern! Bearing one-seven-seven by five, sidescatter, no range yet—”

“Five seconds to launch. Launch commencing, bird one running. Lidar lock. Drive energized. Bird one main engine ignition confirmed. Bird two loaded and green … running. Gone. Drive energized. Bird three running—”

“Radar One, I have a lidar lock! ECM engaged from directly astern! Someone’s painting us. I have a range — five-two K — and—”

Mirsky stepped forward. “Guns. I want all three spare missiles ejected straight astern now. Passive seekers, we will illuminate the targets for them.”

“Aye aye, sir. Bird four, coming up … green. Bird four running. Five, green, running.”

“Radar Two, we have a seeker on our tail. Range four-five K, closing at — Holy Mother of God, I don’t believe it!”

“Bird six running astern. What do you want me to lock on?”

“Radar Two, feed your plot to gunnery for birds four through six to target. Guns, shoot as soon as you see a clear fix — buy us some time.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Lieutenant, ashen-faced, hunched over his console and pushed buttons like a man possessed.

“Range to firing point on alpha?” asked Mirsky.

“Three-zero seconds, sir. You want to push the attack?” The nav officer looked apprehensive Every watt of power they pumped at the attack salvo via the laser grid was one watt less to point at the incoming interceptor.

“Yes, Lieutenant. I’ll trust you not to tell me my job.” The nav officer flushed and turned back to his console. “Guns, what’s our situation?”

“I’ve pumped the forward birds right up, sir, maximum acceleration the warheads will take. MECO is in one-five seconds. Soon as that happens I’ll divert power to our trailers. Ah, bird one burnout in one-zero seconds.”

Rachel nodded to herself. Remembering lectures on the basics of relativistic physics, strategy in the post-Einsteinian universe, and the implications of a light cone expanding across an evenly spaced grid of points. Any moment now the fossil light from the next shell of interceptors should reach us …

“Holy Father!” shouted Radar Three. “I have beam spillover on all sides! We’re boxed!”

“Control yourself,” snapped Mirsky. “How many sources?”

“They — they—” radar punched buttons. Red lines appeared on the forward screen. “One-six of ’em, coming in from all points!”

“I see.” Mirsky stroked his moustache. “Helm, are you ready with that microjump?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Mirsky smiled, tight-lipped. “Guns, status.”

“Bird one burnout. Boosting bird four. Bird two, bird three, burnout. I’m diverting all propulsion beam power to the second salvo. Salvo time to target, one-five seconds. Ah, we have one-seven inbound aggressors. Three outbound antimissiles.”

“Hold further fire,” ordered the Captain. “How long until the first hostile is in range?”

“Should happen at — oh. Two seconds postcontact, sir.”

“Nav! Pull the jump forward five seconds. We’ll not stay around to count coup.”

“Aye aye.”

Radar One: “More scattering! Sir, I have … no, they’re not going to get us in time.”

“How many, Lieutenant?”

“We’re boxed. Incoming beamriders in all directions, at long range. I count—”

“Bird one detonating now! Bird two, detonating. Bird three gone. Sir, three detonations on target.”

“Jump in five. Four—”

“One-eight-point-nine K — no, one-nine K beamriders incoming!”

“Incoming number one, range one-two K and closing—”

“Confirmed kill on target alpha, oxygen, nitrogen in emission spectra.”

“Two.”

“Nine K.”

“Three-two K incoming hostiles! No, three-two and—”

“One. Jump commit.”

The red emergency lights dimmed as the main overhead lights came up. There was silence on the bridge for a moment, then Commodore Bauer cleared his throat. “Congratulations, gentlemen,” he announced to Mirsky and his stunned ops crew. “Of all the ships in the squadron who have run that tape so far, you are the only one to have escaped at all, much less to have taken any of the enemy down. There will be a meeting in my office at 1600 to discuss the assumptions underlying this exercise and explain our new tactical doctrine for dealing with situations like this — massively ramified robot defense networks with fire control mediated by causal channel. Then we’ll run it again tomorrow and see how well you do with your eyes open …”