Singularity Sky

Invitation To An Execution

A ragged row of crucifixes capped the hill overlooking the road to Plotsk. They faced the narrow river that ran along the valley, overlooking Boris the Miller’s waterwheel: their brown-robed human burdens stared sightlessly at the burned-out shell of the monastery on the other bank. The abbot of the Holy Spirit had gone before his monks, impaled like a bird on a spit.

“Kill them all, God will know his own,” Sister Seventh commented mockingly as she turned the doorway to face the grisly row. “Not is what their nest father-mother’s said in times gone before?” Burya Rubenstein shivered with cold as the bird-legged hut strode along the road from Novy Petrograd.

It was a chilly morning, and the fresh air was overlaid with a tantalizingly familiar odor, halfway between the brimstone crackle of gunpowder and something spicy-sweet. No smell of roast pork: they’d burned the monastery after killing the monks, not before. “Who did this?” he asked, sounding much calmer than he felt.

“You-know-who,” said the Critic. “Linger not thisways: understand Fringe performers hereabout more so deranged than citywise. Mimes and firewalker bushbabies. Very dangerous.”

“Did they—” Burya swallowed. He couldn’t look away from the fringe on the hilltop. He was no friend of the clergy, but this festival of excess far outstripped anything he could have condoned. “Was it the Fringe?”

Sister Seventh cocked her head on one side and chomped her walrus tusks at the air. “Not,” she declared. “This is human work. But headlaunchers have herewise been seeding corpses with further life.

Expect resurrection imminently, if not consensually.”

“Headlaunchers?”

“Fringeoids with fireworks. Seed brainpan, cannibalize corpus, upload and launch map containing mindseeds to join Festival in orbit.”

Burya peered at the row of crosses. One of them had no skull, and the top of the crucifix was charred.

‘“I'm going to be sick—”

He just made it to the edge of the hut in time. Sister Seventh made it kneel while he hung head down over the edge, retching and dry-heaving on the muddy verge below.

“Ready to continue? Food needed?”

“No. Something to drink. Something stiff.” One corner of the hut was stocked with a pyramid of canned foodstuffs and bottles. Sister Seventh was only passingly familiar with human idiom; she picked up a large tin of pineapple chunks, casually bit a hole in it, and poured it into the empty can that Burya had been using as a cup for the past day. He took it silently, then topped it up with schnapps from his hip flask. The hut lurched slightly as it stood up. He leaned against the wall and threw back the drink in one swallow.

“Where are you taking me now?” he asked, pale and still shivering with something deeper than a mere chill.

“To Criticize the culprits. This is not art.“ Sister Seventh bared her fangs at the hillside in an angry gape.

”No esthetics! Zip plausibility! Pas de preservatives!”

Rubenstein slid down the wall of the hut, collapsing in a heap against the pile of provisions. Utter despair filled him. When Sister Seventh began alliterating she could go on for hours without making any particular sense.

“Is it anyone in particular this time? Or are you just trying to bore me to death?” The huge mole-rat whirled to face him, breath hissing between her teeth. For a moment he flinched, seeing grinning angry death in her eyes. Then the fire dimmed back to her usual glare of cynical amusement. “Critics know who did this thing,” she rasped. “Come judge, come Criticize.” The walking hut marched on, carrying them away from the execution ground. Unseen from the vestibule, one of the crucified monk’s habits began to smolder. His skull exploded with a gout of blue flame and a loud bang as something the size of a fist flew up from it, a glaring white shock contrail streaming behind.

One more monk’s mind — or what had been left of it after a day of crucifixion, by the time the headlaunch seed got to it — was on its way into orbit, to meet the Festival datavores.

The hut walked all day, passing miracles, wonders, and abominations on every side. Two thistledown geodesic spheres floated by overhead like glistening diadems a kilometer in diameter, lofted by the thermal expansion of their own trapped, sun-heated air. (Ascended peasants, their minds expanded with strange prostheses, looked down from their communal eyrie at the ground dwellers below. Some of their children were already growing feathers.) Around another hill, the hut marched across a spun-silver suspension bridge that crossed a gorge that had not been there a month before — a gorge deep enough that the air in its depths glowed with a ruddy heat, the floor obscured by a permanent Venusian fog. A rhythmic thudding of infernal machinery echoed up from the depths. Once, a swarm of dinner-plate-sized, solar-powered silicon butterflies blitzed past, zapping and sputtering and stealing any stray electrical cabling and discrete components in their path: a predatory Stuka the size of an eagle followed them, occasionally screaming down in a dive that ended with one of their number crumpled and shredded in the claws sprouting from its wheel fairings. “Deep singularity,” Sister Seventh commented gnomically.

“Machines live and breed. Cornucopia evolution.”

“I don’t understand. What caused this?”

“Emergent property of complex infocology. Life expands to fill environmental niches. Now, machines reproduce and spawn as Festival maximizes entropy, devolves into way station.”

“Devolves into—” He stared at the Critic. “You mean this is only a temporary condition?” Sister Seventh looked at him placidly. “What made you think otherwise?”

“But—” Burya looked around. Looked at the uncared-for fields, already tending toward the state of weed banks, at the burned-out villages and strange artifacts they were passing. “Nobody is prepared for that,” he said weakly. “We thought it would last!”

“Some will prepare,” said the Critic. “Cornucopiae breed. But Festival moves on, flower blossoming in light of star before next trip across cold, dark desert.”

Very early the next day, they came within sight of Plotsk. Before the Festival incursion, Plotsk had been a sleepy gingerbread market town of some fifty thousand souls, home to a regional police fortress, a jail, two cathedrals, a museum, and a zeppelin port. It had also been the northernmost railhead on the planet, and a departure point for barges heading north to the farms that dotted the steppes halfway to the Boreal Ocean.

Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral.

Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half gunpowder and half orchids, was back again. Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deeply. “One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bushbot baby uploads and cyborg militia. Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse.”

“What are you talking about!” Burya sat on the edge of the pile of smelly blankets from which the Critic had fashioned her nest.

“Is gone nanostructure crazy,” she said happily. “Civilization! Freedom, Justice, and the American Way!”

“What’s a merkin way?” Burya asked, peeling open a fat garlic bratwurst and, with the aid of an encrusted penknife, chopping large chunks off it and stuffing them into his mouth. His beard itched ferociously, he hadn’t bathed in days, and worst of all, he felt he was beginning to understand Sister Seventh. (Nobody should have to understand a Critic; it was cruel and unusual punishment.) A bright green glare flashed on above them, shining starkly in through the doorway and lighting up the dingy corners of the hut. “Attention! You have entered a quarantined area! Identify yourselves immediately!” A deep bass humming shook Burya to his bones. He cringed and blinked, dropping his breakfast sausage.

“Why not you answer them?” Sister Seventh asked, unreasonably calmly.

“Answer them?”

“ATTENTION! Thirty seconds to comply!”

The hut shook. Burya stumbled, treading on the wurst. Losing his temper, he lurched toward the doorway. “Stop that racket at once!” he yelled, waving a fist in the air. “Can’t a man eat his breakfast in peace without you interfering, you odious rascals? Cultureless imbeciles, may the Duke’s whore be taken short and piss in your drawers by mistake!”

The light cut out abruptly. “Oops, sorry,” said the huge voice. Then in more moderate tones, “Is that you, Comrade Rubenstein?”

Burya gaped up at the hovering emerald diamond. Then he looked down. Standing in the road before him was one of Timoshevski’s guards — but not as Burya had known him back in Novy Petrograd.

Rachel sat on her bunk, tense and nervous. Ignoring the banging and clattering and occasional disturbing bumps from the rear bulkhead, she tried desperately to clear her head. She had a number of hard decisions to make — and if she took the wrong one, Martin would die, for sure, and more than that, she might die with him. Or worse, she might be prematurely bugging out, throwing away any chance of fulfilling her real mission. Which made it all the harder for her to think straight, without worrying.

Thirty minutes ago an able flyer had rapped on her door. She’d hastily buttoned her tunic and opened it.

“Lieutenant Sauer sends his compliments, ma’am, and says to remind you that the court-martial convenes this afternoon at 1400.”

She’d blinked stupidly. “What court-martial?”

The flyer looked nonplussed. “I don’t know, ma’am. He just told me to tell you—”

“That’s quite alright. Go away.”

He’d gone, and she’d hurriedly pulled her boots on, run a comb through her hair, and gone in search of someone who knew.

Commander Murametz was in the officers’ wardroom, drinking a glass of tea. “What’s all this about a court-martial?” she demanded.

He’d stared at her, poker-faced. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just that engineer who’s under arrest. Can’t have him aboard when we go into battle, so the old man scheduled a hearing for this afternoon, get the business out of the way.”

“What do you mean?” she asked icily.

“Can’t go executing a man without a fair trial first,” Ilya said, barely bothering to conceal his contempt.

He rapped his glass down next to the samovar. “Trial’s in this very room, this afternoon. Be seeing you.” The next thing she knew she was back in her cabin. She couldn’t remember getting there; she felt cold and sick. They want to kill Martin, she realized. Because they can’t get at me any other way. She cursed herself for a fool. Who was behind it, how many enemies had she racked up? Was it the Admiral?

(Doubtful, he didn’t need the formality of a trial if he wanted to have someone shot.) Or Ilya — yes, there was someone who’d taken against her. Or the kid spook, the wet-behind-the-ears secret policeman? Or maybe the Captain? She shook her head. Someone had decided to get her, and there were no secrets aboard the ship; however discreet she and Martin had thought they’d been, someone had noticed.

The cold emptiness in her stomach congealed into a knot of tension. This whole voyage was turning into a fiasco. With what she’d learned from Martin — including his mission— there was no way the Navy could make a success of it; in fact, they’d probably all be killed. Her own role as a negotiator was pointless.

You negotiate with human beings, not with creatures who are to humans as humans are to dogs and cats.

(Or machines, soft predictable machines that come apart easily when you try to examine them but won’t fit back together again.)

Staying on was useless, it wouldn’t help her deliver the package for George Cho, and as for Martin—

Rachel realized she had no intention of leaving him behind. With the realization came a sense of relief, because it left her only one course of action. She leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Luggage: open sesame. Plan Titanic. You have three hours and ten minutes. Get started.” Now all she had to do was work out how to get him from the kangaroo court in the wardroom to her cabin; a different, but not necessarily harder task than springing him from the brig.

The trunk silently rolled forward, out from under her bunk, and its lid hinged back. She tapped away at the controls for a minute. A panel opened, and she pulled out a reel of flexible hose. That went onto the cold-water tap on her tiny sink. A longer and fatter hose with a spherical blob on the end got fed down the toilet, a colonoscopy probing the bowels of the ship’s waste plumbing circuit. The chest began to hum, expelling pulses of viscous white liquid into the toilet tube. Thin filaments of something like plastic began to creep back up the bowl of the toilet, forming a tight seal around the hose; a smell of burning leaked into the room, gunpowder and molasses and a whiff of shit. Rachel checked a status indicator on the trunk; satisfied, she picked up her gloves, cap, anything else she would need — then checked the indicator again, and hastily left the room.

The toilet rumbled faintly, and pinged with the sound of expanding metal pipework. The vent pipe grew hot; steam began to hiss from the effluent tube, and was silenced rapidly by a new growth of spiderweb stuff. An overhead ionization alarm tripped, but Rachel had unplugged it as soon as she arrived in her cabin. The radiation warning on the luggage blinked, unseen, in the increasingly hot room. The diplomatic lifeboat was beginning to inflate.

“Don't worry son. It’ll work.” Sauer slapped Procurator Muller on the back.

Vassily forced a wan smile. “I hope so, sir. I’ve never attended a court-martial before.”

“Well.” Sauer considered his words carefully. “Just think of this as an educational experience. And our best opportunity to nail the bitch legally …”

Truth be told, Sauer felt less confident than he was letting on. This whole exercise was more than slightly unauthorized; it exceeded his authority as ship’s security officer, and without the active support of Commander Murametz, first officer, he wouldn’t have dared proceed with it. He certainly didn’t have the legal authority to convene a court-martial on his own initiative in the presence of superior officers, much less to try a civilian contractor on a capital charge. What he did have was a remit to root out subversion by any means necessary, including authorized deception, and a first officer willing to sign on the dotted line. Not to mention an institutional enthusiasm to show the Curator’s agent up for the horse’s ass that he was.

They were short of time. Since coming out of their jump on the edge of the inner system, the heavy squadron had been running under total radio silence at a constant ten gees, the heavy acceleration compensated for by the space-time-warping properties of their drive singularities. (Ten gees, without compensation, would be enough to make a prone man black out; bone-splintering, lung-crushing acceleration.) There had apparently been some sort of navigation error, a really bad one which had the admiral’s staff storming about in a black fury for days, but it hadn’t betrayed them to the enemy, which was the main thing.

Some days ago, the squadron had flipped end over end and executed a deceleration sequence to slow them down to 100 k.p.s. relative to Rochard’s World. In the early hours of this morning, they had reached engagement velocity; they would drift the last thirty light-seconds, resuming acceleration (and increasing their visibility) only within active radar range of the enemy. Right now, they were about two million kilometers out. Some time around midnight, shipboard time, they would begin their closest approach to the planet, go to full power, and engage the enemy ships — assuming they were willing to come out and fight. (If they didn’t, then the cowards had conceded control of the low orbital zone to the New Republic, tantamount to abandoning their ground forces.) In any event, any action against the UN

inspector had to be completed before evening, when the ship would lock down for battle stations—

assuming they didn’t run into anything before then.

In Sauer’s view, it was a near miracle that Ilya had agreed to join in this deception. He could easily have scuppered it, or referred it to Captain Mirsky, which would have amounted to the same thing. This close to a major engagement, just detaching himself plus a couple of other officers who didn’t have active duty stations to prepare was enough of a wonderment to startle him.

Sauer walked up to the table at the front of the room and sat down. It was actually the officer’s dining table, decked out in a white tablecloth for the occasion, weighted down with leather-bound tomes that contained the complete letter of the Imperial Articles of War. Two other officers followed him; Dr. Hertz, the ship’s surgeon, and Lieutenant Commander Vulpis, the relativist. They looked suitably serious. Sauer cleared his throat. “Court will come to order,” he intoned. “Bring in the accused.” The other door opened. Two ratings marched in, escorting Martin Springfield who, being hobbled and handcuffed, moved rather slowly. Behind them, a door banged. “Ah, er, yes. Please state your name for the court.”

Martin looked around. His expression was pale but collected. “What?” he said.

“Please state your name.”

“Martin Springfield.”

Lieutenant Sauer made a note on his blotter. Irritated, he realized that his pen held no ink; no matter. This wasn’t an affair that called for written records. “You are a civilian, subject of the United Nations of Earth.

Is that correct?”

A look of irritation crept over Martin’s face. “No it bloody isn’t!” he said. “I keep telling you people, the UN is not a government! I’m affiliated to Pinkertons for purposes of legislation and insurance; that means I obey their rules and they protect me against infringers. But I’ve got a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force which, I believe, covers situations like this one. I’ve also got agreements with half a dozen other quasi-governmental organizations, but none of them is entitled to claim sovereignty over me — I’m not a slave!”

Dr. Hertz turned his head and looked pointedly at Sauer; his pince-nez glinted beneath the harsh glare of the tungsten lamps. Sauer snorted. “Let it be entered that the accused is a subject of the United Nations of Earth,” he intoned.

“No he isn’t.” Heads turned. While Martin had been speaking, Rachel Mansour had slipped in through a side door. Her garb was even more scandalous than usual; a skintight white leotard worn beneath various items of padding and a bulky waistcoat resembling a flak jacket. Almost like a space suit liner, Sauer noted, puzzled. “The United Nations is not a—”

“Silence!” Sauer pointed at her. “This is a court of military justice, and I do not recognize your right to speak. Stay silent, or I’ll have you thrown out.”

“And create a diplomatic incident?” Rachel grinned unpleasantly. ‘Try it, and I’ll make sure you regret it.

In any event, I believe the accused is permitted to retain an advocate for the defense. Have you advised him of his rights?“

“Er—” Vulpis looked down.

“Irrelevant. The trial will continue—”

Martin cleared his throat. “I’d like to nominate Colonel Mansour as my advocate,” he said.

It’s working. Sauer made a pretense of scribbling on his blotter. At the back of the room, he could see Vassily’s sharp intake of breath. The young whippersnapper was getting his hopes up already. “The court recognizes UN inspector Mansour as the defendant’s counsel. I am obliged to warn you that this trial is being conducted under the Imperial Articles of War, Section Fourteen, Articles of Combat, in view of our proximity to the enemy. If you are ignorant of those rules and regulations, you may indicate so and withdraw from the trial now.”

Rachel’s smile broadened. “Defense moves for an adjournment in view of the forthcoming engagement.

There will be plenty of time for this after the battle.”

“Denied,” Sauer snapped. “We need a fair trial on the record before we can execute the sentence.” That made her smile slip. “Court will go into recess for five minutes to permit the defendant to brief his advocate, and not one minute longer.” He rapped on the table with his fist, stood, and marched out of the room. The rest of the tribunal followed suit, trailed by a paltry handful of spectators, leaving Rachel, Martin, and four ratings standing guard on the doors.

“You know this is just a rubber stamp? They want to execute me,” Martin said. His voice was husky, a trifle unsteady; he wrung his hands together, trying to stop them from shaking.

Rachel peered into his eyes. “Look at me, Martin,” she said quietly. “Do you trust me?”

“I — yes.” He glanced down.

She reached a hand out, across the table, put it across the back of his left wrist. “I’ve been reading up on their procedures. This is well out of order, and whatever happens I’m going to. lodge an appeal with the Captain — who should be chairing this, not some jumped-up security officer who’s also running the prosecution.” She glanced away from him, looking for the air vents; simultaneously, she tapped the back of his hand rapidly. He tensed his wrist back in a well-understood pattern, message understood: Next session. See me blink three times you start hyperventilating. When I blink twice hold breath.

His eyes widened slightly. “There won’t be time for them to do anything before perigeon, anyway,” she continued verbally. “We’re about two astronomical units out and closing fast; engagement should commence around midnight if there’s to be a shooting war.” Got lifeboat, she added via Morse code.

“That’s—” he swallowed. How escape? he twitched. “I’m not confident they’re going to observe all the niceties. This kangaroo court—” He shrugged.

“Leave it all to me,” she said, squeezing his hand for emphasis. “I know what I’m doing.” For the first time, there was hope in his expression. She broke contact and leaned back in her chair. “It’s stuffy in here,” she complained. “Where’s the ventilation?”

Martin looked past her head. She followed his gaze: grilles in the ceiling. She closed her eyes and squeezed shut; green raster images like a nightmare vision of a jail cell pasted themselves across the insides of her eyelids. The spy drones, remnant of the flock Vassily had unleashed, waited patiently behind the vents. They’d followed her to this room, loaded up with a little something to add interest to the proceedings.

Serve the little voyeur right, she thought bitterly about the spy. “I’ll get you out of this,” she told Martin, trying to reassure him.

“I understand.” He nodded, a slight inclination of his head. “You know what I, uh, I’m not so good at people things—”

She shook her head. “They’re doing this to get me to compromise myself. It’s not about you. It’s nothing personal. They just want me out of the way.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “The midranking officers. The ones who figure a short victorious war is a ticket up the promotion ladder. The ones who don’t think I should be here in the first place, much less reporting back.

Not after First Lamprey. I was Red Cross agent-in-place there, you know? Investigating the war crimes.

Didn’t leave anybody looking too good, and I think they know it. They don’t want a negotiated settlement, they want guts and glory.”

“If it’s just you, why’s the chinless wonder from the Curator’s Office in here?” asked Martin.

She shrugged. ‘Two birds, one stone. Don’t sweat it. If they screw this up, they can blame the Curator’s cat’s-paw, make the enemy within look bad. There’s no love lost between Naval Intelligence and the civil secret police. If it works, they get us both out of the way. Reading the regs, they don’t have authority to pull this stunt, Martin. It takes a master and commander to issue a capital sentence except in the face of the enemy, so if they do execute you, it’s illegal enough to hang them all.“

“That’s a great reassurance.” He forced a smile, but it came out looking decidedly frightened. “Just do your — hell. I trust you.”

“That’s good.”

Then the doors opened.

“It's working,” Sauer commented. “She’s come out to defend her minion. Now we need to maneuver her into outright defiance. Shouldn’t be too hard; we have the bench.”

“Defiance?” Vulpis raised an eyebrow. “You said this was a trial.”

“A trial of wits, ours against hers. She’s consented to defend him; that means she’s acting as an officer of the court. Article Forty-six states that an officer of the court is subject to the discipline of the Articles and may himself be arraigned for malfeasance or contempt of court. By agreeing to serve before our court, she’s abandoning her claim of diplomatic immunity. It gets better. In about two hours, we go to stations.

While we may be a charade right now, at that point any commissioned officer is empowered to pass a capital sentence — or even order a summary execution — because it’s classified under Article Four, Obedience in the Face of the Enemy, Enforcement Thereof. Not that I’m planning on using it, but it does give us a certain degree of cover, no?”

Dr. Hertz removed his pince-nez and began to polish them. “I’m not sure I like it,” he said fussily. “This smells altogether too much of the kind of trickery the Stasis like handing down. Aren’t you concerned about playing for the Curator’s brat?”

“Not really.” Sauer finally grinned. “Y’see, what I really plan on doing is to get our new advocate so thoroughly wound up she’s insubordinate or something — but for the defendant himself, I’m thinking of an absolute discharge or a not guilty verdict.” He sniffed. “It’s quite obvious he didn’t know he was breaking any regulations. Plus, the device he had in his possession was inactive by the time it was discovered, so we can’t actually prove it was in a state fit for use at any time when he was aboard the ship. And the Admiralty will be angry if we make it hard for them to hire civilian contractors in future. I’m hoping we can keep her rattled enough not to realize there’s no case to answer until we’ve got her out of the way; then we discharge Springfield. Which will make our young Master Muller look like a complete and total idiot, not to mention possibly supplying me with cause to investigate him for suspicion of burglary, pilferage of personal effects, violation of a diplomat’s sealed luggage, immoral conduct, and maybe even deserting his post.” His grin became sharklike. “Need I continue?” Vulpis whistled quietly in awe. “Remind me never to play poker with you,” he commented.

Dr. Hertz reinstalled his spectacles. “Shall we resume the circus, gentlemen?”

“I think so.” Sauer drained his glass of tea and stood up. “After you, my brother officers, then send in the clowns!”

The shipping trunk in Rachel’s cabin had stopped steaming some time ago. It had shrunk, reabsorbing and extruding much of its contents. A viscous white foam had spread across the fittings of the cabin, eagerly digesting all available hydrocarbons and spinning out a diamond-phase substrate suitable for intensive nanomanufacturing activities. Solid slabs of transparent material were precipitating out of solution, forming a hollow sphere that almost filled the room. Below the deck, roots oozed down into the ship’s recycling circuits, looting the cesspool that stored biological waste during the inbound leg of a journey. (By long-standing convention, ships that lacked recyclers only discharged waste when heading away from inhabited volumes of space; more than one unfortunate orbital worker had been gunned down by a flash-frozen turd carrying more kinetic energy than an armor-piercing artillery shell.) The self-propelled trunk, which was frozen into the base of the glassy sphere, was now much lighter than it had been when Rachel boarded the ship. Back then, it had weighed the best part of a third of a tonne: Now it massed less than fifty kilos. The surplus mass had mostly been thick-walled capillary tubes of boron carbide, containers for thin crystals of ultrapure uranium-235 tetraiodide, and a large supply of cadmium; stuff that wasn’t easy to come by in a hurry. The trunk was capable of manufacturing anything it needed given the constituent elements. Most of what it wanted was carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, available in abundance in the ship’s sewage-processing plant. But if a diplomat needed to get away in a real hurry and didn’t have a potent energy source to hand … well, fission, an old and unfashionable technology, was eminently storable, very lightweight, and didn’t usually go bang without a good reason.

All you needed was the right type of unobtanium to hand in order to make it work. Which was why Rachel had been towing around enough uranium to make two or three good-sized atom bombs, or the core of a nuclear saltwater rocket.

A nuclear saltwater rocket was just about the simplest interplanetary propulsion system that could fit in a steamer trunk. On the other side of the inner pressure hull from Rachel’s cabin, the trunk had constructed a large tank threaded through with neutron-absorbing, boron-lined tubes: this was slowly filling with water containing a solution of near-critical uranium tetraiodide. Only a thin layer of carefully weakened hull plates and bypassed cable ducts held the glassy sphere and its twenty-tonne saltwater fuel tank on the other side of the bulkhead, inside the warship. The hybrid structure nestled under the skin of the ship like a maggot feeding on the flesh of its host, preparing to hatch.

Elsewhere in the ship, toilets were flushing sluggishly, the officer’s shower cubicle pressure was scandalously low, and a couple of environment techs were scratching their heads over the unexpectedly low sludge level in the number four silage tank. One bright spark was already muttering about plumbing leaks. But with a full combat engagement only hours away, most attention was focused on the ship’s weapons systems. Meanwhile, the luggage’s fabricator diligently churned away, extruding polymers and component materials to splice into the lifeboat it was preparing for its mistress. With only a short time until the coming engagement, speed was essential.

“Court will reconvene.“ Sauer rapped on the tabletop with an upturned glass. ”Defendant Martin Springfield, the charges laid against you are that on the thirty-second day of the month of Harmony, Year 211 of the Republic, you did with premeditation carry aboard the warship Lord Vanek a communications device, to wit a causal channel, without permission from your superior officer or indeed any officer of that ship, contrary to Article Forty-six of the Articles of War; and that, furthermore, you did make use of the said device to communicate with foreign nationals, contrary to Article Twenty-two, and in so doing, you disclosed operational details of the running of the warship Lord Vanek contrary to Section Two of the Defense of the Realm Act of 127, and also contrary to Section Four of the Articles of War, Treachery in Time of War. The charges laid against you therefore constitute negligent breach of signals control regulations, trafficking with the enemy, and treason in time of war. How do you plead?“ Before he could open his mouth, Rachel spoke up. “He pleads not guilty to all charges. And I can prove it.” There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes; she stood very straight, with her hands clasped behind her back.

“Does the accused accept that plea?” Vulpis intoned.

“The colonel speaks for me,” said Martin.

“First, evidence supporting the charges. Item: on the thirty-second day of the month of Harmony, year 211 of the Republic, you did with premeditation carry aboard the warship Lord Vanek a communications device, to wit a causal channel, without permission from your superior officer or indeed any officer of that ship, contrary to Article Forty-six. Clerk, present the item.” A rating stepped forward, stony-faced, bearing a small paper bag. He shook the contents out over the tabletop; a small, black memory cartridge. “Item one: a type twelve causal channel, embedded within a standard model CX expansion cartridge as used by personal assist machines throughout the decadent Terran sphere. The item was removed from defendant’s personal assist machine by Junior Procurator Vassily Muller, of the Curator’s Office on assignment to monitor the conduct of the defendant, on the thirty-second day of Harmony as noted. A sworn deposition by the Procurator is on record. Does anyone contest the admissibility of this evidence? No? Good—”

“I do.” Rachel pointed at the small black cartridge. “Firstly, I submit that the Junior Procurator’s search of the defendant’s personal property was illegal and any evidence gained from it is inadmissible, because the defendant is a civilian and not subject to the waiver of rights in the oath of allegiance sworn by a serving soldier — his civil rights, including the right to property, cannot be legally violated without a judicial warrant or an order from an official vested with summary powers subject to Article Twelve. Unless the Junior Procurator obtained such an order or warrant, his search was illegal and indeed may constitute burglary, and any information gathered in the process of an illegal search is not admissible in court.

Secondly, if that thing is a causal channel, I’m a banana slug. That’s a standard quantum dot storage card; if you get a competent electronic engineer in, they’ll tell you the same. Thirdly, you don’t have authority to hold this charade of a trial; I’ve been checking in the Articles, and they state quite clearly that courts-martial can only be convened by order of the senior officer present. Where’s your written order from the Admiral?“

She crossed her arms and stared at the bench.

Sauer shook his head. “The Junior Procurator has standing orders to investigate Springfield; that makes anything he does legal in the eyes of the Curator’s Office. And I must register my extreme displeasure at the defense’s imputation that I do not have authority to convene this court. I have obtained such authority from my superior officer and will use it.” Carefully, he avoided specifying precisely what kind of authority he had. “As for the item of evidence being misidentified, we have on record a statement by the defendant to the effect that it is a causal channel, which he was asked to carry aboard by foreign parties, to wit the dockyard. As the Articles concern themselves specifically with intent, it does not matter whether the item is in fact a banana slug: the defendant is still guilty of thinking he was carrying a communications device.” He paused for a moment. “Let it be entered that the item of evidence was admitted.” He glared at Rachel: Got you, you bitch. Now what are you going to do?

Rachel glanced at Martin and blinked rapidly. Then she turned back to face the bench. “A point of law, sir. As it happens, thinking is not generally considered the same as doing. Indeed, in this nation, which refuses to even consider the use of thought-controlled machinery, the distinction is even sharper than in my own. You appear to be attempting to try the defendant for his opinions and beliefs rather than his actions. Do you have any evidence of his actually passing on information to a third party? If not, there is no case to answer.”

“I have exactly that.” Sauer grinned savagely. “You should know who he’s been passing on information to.” He pointed at her. “You are a known agent of a foreign power. Defendant has been communicating freely with you. Now, since you consented to defend him, you are acting as an officer of this court. I refer you to Article Forty-six: ‘Any person deputized to act as an officer of the court is subject to the discipline of the Articles.’ I conclude that you have courageously agreed to waive your diplomatic immunity in order to attempt to rescue your spy from the hangman’s noose.” For a moment, Rachel looked confused; she looked at Martin again, blinking rapidly. Then she turned back to the bench. “So you rigged this whole kangaroo court as an attempt to work around my immunity? I’m impressed. I really didn’t think you’d be quite this stupid— Utah!” Everything happened very quickly. Rachel dropped to her knees behind her makeshift desk; Sauer made a motion toward the ratings at the back of the room, intending to have them arrest the woman. But before he could do more than open his mouth, four sharp bangs burst around the room. The overhead air-conditioning ducts split open; things dropped down, complex and many-armed dungs squirting pale blue foam under high pressure. The foam stuck to everything it touched, starting with the judge’s bench and the guards at the back of the makeshift courtroom: it was lightweight but sticky, rapidly setting into a hard foam matrix.

“Get her!” Sauer shouted. He grabbed for his pistol, but somewhere along the way a huge gobbet of blue foam engulfed his arm and cemented it to his side. A strong chemical odor came from the foam, something familiar from childhood visits to the dentist. Sauer breathed deeply, struggling to dislodge the sticky mass, and the fruity, sickly stench cut into his lungs; then the world turned hazy.

Rachel knew things were going to turn pear-shaped from the moment she walked into the room. She’d seen judges in hanging mode before, back on Earth, and on a dozen assignments since then. You could almost smell it, an acrid and unreasoning eagerness to order an execution, like the stench of death itself.

This board had it — and something else. A sly reserve, a smug sense of anticipation; as if the whole thing was some kind of tremendous joke, with a punch line she could only guess at.

When the security lieutenant delivered it — a half-formed, inadequate punch line, in her opinion, obviously something he’d stitched up on an ad hoc basis to fit the occasion — she glanced around at Martin. Please be ready. She blinked three times and saw him stiffen, then nod; the prearranged signal. She turned back to the bench, blinking again: green lights rippled behind her eyelids. “State two,” she subvocalized, the radio mike in her throat relaying the command to the drones waiting in the ventilation ducts. She turned back to the bench. The three officers sat there, glowering at her like thunderclouds on a horizon. Buy time.

“A point of law, sir. As it happens, thinking is not generally considered the same as doing. — ” She carried on, wondering how they’d react to effectively being accused of rigging this charade; either they’d back down, or—

“I have exactly that.” The political officer in the middle, the hatchet-faced one, grimaced horribly. “You should know who he’s been passing on information to.” He pointed straight at her. Here it comes, she thought. Subvocalizing again: “Luggage. Query readiness state.”

“Lifeboat closed out for launch. Fuel storage subcritical and ready. Spare reaction mass loaded.

Oxygen supply nominal. Warning, delta-vee to designated waypoint New Peter-stown currently 86

k. p.s., decreasing. Total available maneuvering margin 90 k.p.s.” That would do, she decided. The saltwater rocket was nearly as efficient as an old-fashioned fusion rocket; back home, it would do for an Earth-Mars return trip, surface to surface. This was pushing it a bit — they wouldn’t be able to ride it back up into orbit without refueling. But it would do, as long as—

“—I conclude that you have courageously agreed to waive your diplomatic immunity in order to attempt to rescue your spy from the hangman’s noose.”

She swallowed, glanced at Martin and blinked twice, the signal for “hold your breath.” “Luggage: prep for launch. Expect crew arrival from one hundred seconds. Launch hold at T minus twenty seconds from that time.” Once they burned that particular bridge and jumped overboard, all she could do was pray that the bridge crew wouldn’t dare light off their radar— and risk warning the Festival — in order to find her and kill her. The lifeboat was a soap bubble compared to the capital ships of the New Republican naval force.

Rachel turned her attention back to the bench and took a deep breath, tensing. “So you rigged this whole kangaroo court as an attempt to work around my immunity? I’m impressed. I really didn’t think you’d be quite this stupid— Utah!”

She ducked. The last word was a shout, broadcast to the drones through her throat mike. A simultaneous crackle told her the shaped-charge cutters had blown. She yanked the transparent breather hood over her face and choked it shut, then powered up her cellular IFF.

The drones swarmed in through holes in the ceiling. Spiders and crabs and scorpions, all made of carbon polymers— recycled sewage, actually — they sprayed sticky antipersonnel foam everywhere, releasing anesthetic trichloromethane vapor wherever anyone struggled. A rating made a move toward her, and her combat implants took over; he went down like a sack of potatoes before she consciously noted his existence, rabbit-punched alongside the head by an inhumanly fast fist. Everything narrowed into the gap between herself and Martin, standing wide-eyed behind a table, his arms half-raised toward her and a rating already beginning to steer him toward the door.

Rachel went to combat speed, cutting her merely human nervous system out of the control loop.

Time slowed and light dimmed; the chains of gravity weakened, but the air grew thick and viscous around her. Marionettes twirled in slow motion all around as she jumped over a table and ran at Martin. His guard began to turn toward her and throw up an arm. She grabbed it and twisted, feeling it pop out of its socket. She threw a brisk left-handed punch at the other guard; ribs snapped like brittle cardboard, and a couple of the fine bones in the back of her hand fractured with the impact. It was hard to remember — hard to think — but her own body was her worst enemy, more fragile than her reflexes would admit.

She grabbed Martin with one arm, handling him delicately as bone china; the beginning of an oof of air from his lungs told her she’d winded him. The door wasn’t locked, so she kicked it open and dragged Martin through before it had time to rebound closed. She dropped him and spun in place, slammed it shut, then grabbed in a vest pocket for a lump of something like putty. “Omaha,” she shouted into her throat mike. Strobing patterns of red-and-yellow light raced over the surface of the putty — visible in her mechanized vision — and she jammed it into the doorframe and spat on it. It turned blue and began to spread rapidly, a wave of sticky liquid rushing around the gap between door and wall, setting hard as diamond.

Between the glued door, the severed intercom cables, and the chloroform and antipersonnel foam, it might be a minute or two before anyone in the room managed to raise the alarm.

Martin was trying to double over and gasp. She picked him up and ran down the corridor. It was like wading through water; she rapidly discovered it was easier to kick off with one foot, then the other, like low-gee locomotion.

A red haze at the edge of her vision told her she was close to burnout. Her peripheral nervous system might have been boosted, but for this sort of speed, it relied on anaerobic respiration, and she was exhausting her reserves frighteningly fast. At the next intersection, a lift car stood open: she lurched into it, dragging Martin behind, and tapped the button for the accommodation level in officer country. Then she dropped back to normal speed.

The doors slid shut as the lift began to rise, and Martin began to gasp. Rachel slumped against the far wall, black spots hazing her vision as she tried to draw air into straining lungs. Martin was first to speak.

“Where — did you learn—”

She blinked. A clock spiraled in the left upper quadrant of her vision. Eight seconds since she’d yelled Utah — eight seconds? Minutes, maybe. She drew a deep breath that turned into a yawn, flushing the carbon dioxide from her lungs. All her muscles ached, burning as if there were hot wires running down her bones. She felt sick, and her left hand was beginning to throb violently. “Special. Implants.”

“Think you nearly broke a — rib, back there. Where are we going?”

“Life. Boat.” Gasp. “Like I said.”

A light blinked above them. They’d crawled up one floor. One more to go.

The door opened on the right level. Rachel staggered upright. Nobody there, which was a blessing; in her present state, she didn’t know if she could put a hamster in its place, much less a soldier. She stepped out of the lift, Martin following. “My room,” she said quietly. ‘Try to look at ease.“ He raised his wrists. “Wearing these?”

Shit. Should have ripped them apart before running out of boost. She shook her head and hunted in her hip pocket, pulled out a compact gray tube. “Stun gun.” They ran out of luck halfway down the last corridor. A door opened and a petty officer stepped out; he moved to give them room to pass, then his jaw dropped as he realized what he was seeing. “Hey!” Rachel shot him. “Hurry,” she hissed over her shoulder, and stumbled ahead. Martin followed her. Her door was ahead, just around a curve in the corridor. “Gold” she called to the waiting lifeboat.

Red lights flashed overhead: the PA system piped up, a warbling alert noise. “Security Alert! Green deck accommodation sector B, two armed insurgents on the loose. Armed and dangerous. Security to Green deck accommodation B. Alert!”

“Shit,” Martin mumbled. A pressure door began to rumble shut ten meters ahead of them.

Rachel went to combat speed again, her vision greying almost immediately. She threw herself forward: stood directly beneath the door and thrust straight up at the descending pressure barrier. Martin moved forward with glacial slowness as she felt the motors bear down on her, trying to crush her in half. He ducked and swam under the barrier. She followed him, letting go, and stayed fast, even though her hands and feet were becoming numb and a deadly warning pincushion sensation pricked at her face. The door to her cabin was two meters away. “Juno!” she yelled at it through her throat mike, the word coming out in a high-pitched gabble that sounded like the croaking of an aged dinosaur to her ears.

The door swung open. Martin ran through inside, but it was too late for Rachel: she couldn’t see, and her knees were beginning to give way. The combat acceleration stopped, and she felt herself floating, a bruised impact along one side.

Someone was dragging her over gravel and it hurt like hell. Her heart sounded as if it was about to explode. She couldn’t get enough air.

Sound of a door slamming.

Darkness.