Singularity Sky

Bouncers

The Admiral sat at his desk and squinted.

Commodore Bauer cleared his throat. “If I may have your attention, sir.”

“Huh? Speak up-up, young man!”

“We enter terminal engagement range with the enemy tonight,” Bauer said patiently. “We have to hold the final pre-approach session, sir, to articulate our immediate tactical situation. I need you to sign off on my orders if we are to conduct the battle.”

“Very well.” Admiral Kurtz tried to sit up in his chair; Robard’s helping hands behind his frail shoulders steadied him. “You have them?”

“Sir.” Bauer slid a slim folder across the polished oak. “If you would care to see—”

“No, no.” The Admiral waved a frail hand. “You’re a sound man. You give-ive those natives jolly what for, won’t you?”

Bauer stared at his commander in mixed desperation and relief. “Yes, sir, I will,” he promised. “We will be in lidar range of the planetary surface in another hour, then we should be able to establish their order of battle fairly accurately. Task Group Four will illuminate and take the first blood, while the heavies stay under emission control and punch out anything we can identify after we get within close broadside range.

I have the destroyer squadrons ready to go after any fixed emplacements we find in GEO, and the torpedo boats are tasked with high-delta-vee intercepts on anything fleeing—”

“Give the natives what-ho,” Kurtz said dreamily. “Make a hill of skulls in the town square. Volley fire by platoons. Bomb the bastards!”

“Yes, sir. If you’d be so good as to sign here—”

Robard put the pen between the Admiral’s fingers, but they shook so much that his crimson signature on the orders was almost completely obscured by a huge blot, like fresh blood.

Bauer saluted. “Sir! With your permission I will implement these orders forthwith.” Kurtz looked up at the Commodore, his sunken eyes glowing for a split second with an echo of his former will. “Make it so! Victory is on-on our side, for our Lord will not permit his followers to come to—” A look of vast puzzlement crossed his wrinkled face, and he slumped forward.

“Sir! Are you—” The Commodore leaned forward, but Robard had already pulled the Admiral’s chair back from the table.

“He’s been overwrought for days,” Robard commented, reclining his charge’s chair. “I shall take him back to his bedchamber. As we approach the enemy—” He tensed. “Would sir please accept my apologies and call the ship’s surgeon?”

Half an hour later, ten minutes late for his own staff meeting, Commodore Bauer surged into the staff conference room. “Gentlemen. Please be seated.”

Two rows sat before him, before the podium from which the Admiral commanding could address his staff and line officers. “I have a very grave announcement to make,” he began. The folio under his right arm bent under the tension with which he gripped it. “The Admiral—” A sea of faces upturned before him, trusting, waiting. “The Admiral is indisposed,” he said. Indisposed indeed, if you could call it that, with the ship’s surgeon in attendance and giving him a ten percent chance of recovery from the cerebral hemorrhage that had struck him down as he signed the final order. “Ahem. He has instructed me to proceed with our prearranged deployment, acting as his proxy while he retains overall control of the situation. I should like to add that he asked me to say, he knows every man will do his duty, and our cause will triumph because God is on our side.”

Bauer shuffled his papers, trying to dismiss his parting image of the Admiral from his awareness; lying prone and shriveled on his bed, the surgeon and a loblolly boy conferring over him in low voices as they awaited the arrival of the ship’s chaplain. “First, to review the situation. Commander Kurrel. What word on navigation?”

Commander Kurrel stood. A small, fussy man who watched the world with sharp-eyed intelligence from behind horn-rimmed glasses, he was the staff navigation specialist. “The discrepancy is serious, but not fatal,” he said, shuffling the papers in front of him. “Evidently Their Lordships’ projected closed timelike path was more difficult to navigate than we anticipated. Despite improvements to the drive timebase monitors, a discrepancy of no less than sixteen million seconds crept in during our traversal — which, I might add, is not entirely inexplicable, considering that we have made a grand total of sixty-eight jumps spaced over some 139 days, covering a distance of just over 8053 light-years; a new and significant record in the history of the Navy.”

He paused to adjust his spectacles. “Unfortunately, those sixteen mega-seconds lay in precisely the worst possible direction — timewise, into the domain within which the enemy occupied our territory. Indeed, we would have done little worse had we simply made the normal five-jump crossing, a distance of some forty-four light-years. A full pulsar map correlated for spin-down indicates that our temporal displacement is some three million seconds into the future of our origin point, when it is extrapolated to the destination’s world line. This is confirmed by classical planetary ephemeris measurements; according to local history, the enemy — the Festival — has been entrenched for thirty days.” A single intake of breath rattled around the table, disbelief and muted anger mingling. Commodore Bauer watched it sharply. “Gentlemen.” Silence resumed. “We may have lost the anticipated tactical benefits of this hitherto untried maneuver, but we have not entirely failed; we are still only ten days in the future of our own departure light cone, and using a conventional path we wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days or so. As we have not heard anything from signals intelligence, we may assume that the enemy, although entrenched, are not expecting us.” He smiled tightly. “An inquiry into the navigation error will be held after the victory celebrations.” That statement brought a brief round of “ayes” from the assembly.

“Lieutenant Kossov. General status report, if you please.”

“Ah, yes, sir.” Kossov stood. “All ships report ready for battle. The main issues are engineering failures with the Kamchatka—they report that pressure has been restored to nearly all decks, now — and the explosion in the waste-disposal circuits of this ship. I understand that, with the exception of some cabins on Green deck, and localized water damage near the brig, we are back to normal; however, several persons are missing, including Security Lieutenant Sauer, who was investigating some sort of incident at the time of the explosion.”

“Indeed.” Bauer nodded at Captain Mirsky. “Captain. Anything to report?”

“Not at this time, sir. Rescue parties are currently busy trying to recover those who were expelled from the ship during the decompression incident. I don’t believe this will affect our ability to fight. However, I will have a full and detailed report for you at your earliest convenience.” Mirsky looked grim; and well he might, for the Flag Captain’s ship was not expected to disgrace the fleet, much less to lose officers and crew to some sort of plumbing accident — if indeed it was an accident. “I must report, sir, that the Terran diplomat is among those listed as missing following this incident. Normally, I would conduct a search for survivors, but in the current situation—” His shrug was eloquent.

“Let me extend my sympathies, Captain; Lieutenant Sauer was a fine officer. Now, as to our forthcoming engagement, I have decided that we will deploy in accordance with attack plan F. You’ve gamed it twice in exercises; now you get a chance to play it for real, this time against a live but indeterminate foe—” A bumping on the hull brought Martin to his senses. He blinked, hair floating in front of his eyes, and stared at the wall in front of him. It had slid past his eyes as the cold-gas thrusters tried to yank him into the ceiling, turning from solid gray into a sheet of blackness stippled with the glaring diamond dust of stars. The tides of the Lord Vanek had tried to yank his arms and legs off; he ached with a memory of gravity. Rachel lay next to him, her lips twitching as she communed with the lifeboat’s primitive brainstem.

Huge gray clouds blocked the view directly overhead, waste water from the scuppers. As he looked, yellow beacons flashed in it, rescue workers searching for something.

“You alright?” he croaked.

“Just a minute.” Rachel closed her eyes again and let her arms float upward until they almost touched the glassy overhead screen — which was much, much closer than Martin had originally thought. The capsule was a truncated cylinder, perhaps four meters in diameter at the base and three at the top, but it was less than two meters high; about the same volume as the passenger compartment of a hackney carriage. (The fuel tanks and motor beneath it were significantly larger.) It hummed and gurgled quietly with the rhythm of the life-support pipework, spinning very slowly around its long axis. “We’re making twelve meters per second. That’s good. Puts us a kilometer or so from the ship … damn, what’s going on back there?”

“Somebody on EVA? Looking for us.”

“Seems like more than one of ’em. Almost like a debris cloud.” Her eyes widened in horror as Martin watched her.

“Whatever happened, it happened after we left. If you’d triggered a blowout, we’d be surrounded by debris, wouldn’t we?”

She shook her head. “We should go back and help. We’ve got a—”

“Bullshit. They’ve got EVA teams suited up all the time they’re at battle stations, you know that as well as I do. It’s not your problem. Let me guess. Someone tried to get into your cabin after we left. Tried a bit too hard, by the look of it.”

She stared at the distant specks floating around the rear of the warship, a stubby cylinder in the middle distance. “But if I hadn’t—”

“I’d be on my way to the airlock with my hands taped behind my back, and you’d be under arrest,” he pointed out.

Tired, cold, rational. His head ached; this capsule must be at a lower pressure than the ship. His hands were shaking and cold in reaction to the events of the past five minutes. Ten minutes. However long it had been. “You saved my life, Rachel. If you’d stop kicking yourself over it for a minute, I’d like to thank you.”

“If there’s anyone out there and we leave them—”

“The EVA crew will get them. Trust me on this, I figure they tried to blow their way into your cabin.

Didn’t check that it wasn’t open to space first, and got blown a bit farther than they expected. That’s what warships have away teams and jolly boats for. What we should be worrying about now is hoping nobody notices us before the final event.”

“Um.” Rachel shook her head: her expression relaxed slightly, tension draining. A certain darkness seemed to lift. “We’re still going to be entirely too close for my liking. We’ve got another cold-gas tank, that’ll give us an extra ten meters per second; if I use it now that means we’ll have drifted about 250

kilometers from the ship before perigee, but before then, they should begin maneuvering and widen the gap considerably. We’ve got enough water and air for a week. I was figuring on a couple of full-on burns to take us downside while they’re busy paying attention to the enemy defenses, whatever they turn out to be. If there are any.”

“I’m betting on eaters, shapers.” Martin nodded briefly, then held his head still as the world seemed to spin around him. Not spacesickness, surely? The thought of being cooped up in this cubbyhole for a week with a bad case of the squirts was too revolting to contemplate. “Maybe antibodies. Nothing the New Republic understands, anyway. Probably easy enough for us to avoid, but if you go in shooting—”

“Yeah.” Rachel yawned.

“You look exhausted.” Concern filled him. “How the hell did you do that? I mean, back on the ship? It must take it out on you later—”

“It does.” She bent forward and fumbled with a blue fishnet, down around what would have been the floor of the cabin. Surprisingly homely containers of juice floated out, tumbling in free fall. She grabbed one and began to suck on the nozzle greedily. “Help yourself.”

“Not that I’m ungrateful or anything,” Martin added, batting a wandering mango and durian fruit cordial out of his face, “but— why?” She stared at him for a long moment. “Oh,” he said.

She let the empty carton float free and turned to face him. “I’d prefer to give you some kind of bullshit about trust and duty and so on. But.” She shrugged uncomfortably in her seat harness. “Doesn’t matter.” She held out a hand. Martin took it and squeezed, wordlessly.

“You didn’t blow your mission,” he pointed out. “You never had a mission out here. Not realistically, anyway, not what your boss, what was his name?”

“George. George Cho.”

“—George thought. Insufficient data, right? What would he have done if he’d known about the Festival?”

“Possibly nothing different.” She smiled bleakly at the empty juice carton, then plucked another from the air. “You’re dead wrong; I still have a job to do, if and when we arrive. The chances of which have just gone down by, oh, about fifty percent because of this escapade.”

“Huh. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, alright?” Martin stretched, then flinched with a remembered pain. “You wouldn’t have seen my PA would you? After—”

“It’s bagged under your chair, along with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. I hit your cabin after they pulled you in.”

“You’re a star,” he exclaimed happily. He bent double and began fishing around in the cramped space under the control console. “Oh my—” Straightening up, he opened the battered gray book. Words and pictures swam across the pages in front of him. He tapped an imaginary keyboard; new images gelled.

“You need any help running this boat?”

“If you want.” She drained the second container, thrust both the empties into the bag. “Yes, if you want.

You’ve flown before?”

“Spent twelve years at L5. Basic navigation, no problem. If it’s got a standard life-support module, I can program the galley, too. Traditional Yorkshire habit, that, learning how to cook black pudding in free fall.

The trick is to spin the ship around the galley, so that the sausage stays still while the grill rotates—” She chuckled; a carton of cranberry juice bounced off his head. “Enough already!”

“Alright.” He leaned back, the PA floating before him. Its open pages showed a real-time instrument feed from the lifeboat’s brain. (A clock in one corner spiraled down the seconds to Rachel’s first programmed deceleration burn, two thousand seconds before perigee.) Frowning, he scribbled glyphs with a stylus.

“We should make it. Assuming they don’t shoot at us.”

“We’ve got a Red Cross transponder. They’d have to manually override their IFF.”

“Which they won’t do unless they’re really pissed off. Good.” Martin tapped a final period on the page.

“I’d be happier if I knew what we were flying into, though. I mean, if the Festival hasn’t left anything in orbit—” They both froze.

Something scraped across the top of the escape capsule, producing a sound like hollow metal bones rattling against a cage.

The rabbit snarled and hefted his submachine gun angrily. Ears back and teeth visible, he hissed at the cyborg.

Sister Seventh sat up and stared at the confrontation. Everyone else except Burya Rubenstein ducked; Burya stepped forward into the middle of the clearing. “Stop this! At once!” For a long moment the rabbit stood, frozen. Then he relaxed his stiff-backed pose and lowered his gun muzzle. “He started it.”

“I don’t care what he started: we have a job to do, and it does not require shooting each other.” He turned to the cyborg whom the rabbit had confronted. “What did you say?” The revolutionary looked bashful; her fully extended claws retracted slowly. “Is not good extropian. This creature—” her gesture at the rabbit brought another show of teeth—“believe cult of personality! Is counterrevolutionary dissident. Headlaunch now! Headlaunch now!” Burya squinted. Many of the former revolutionaries had gone overboard on the personal augmentations offered by the Festival, without realizing that it was necessary to modify their central nervous systems in order to run them. This led to a certain degree of confusion. “But, comrade, you have a personality, too.

A sense of identity is a necessary precondition to consciousness, and that, as the great leaders and teachers point out, is the keystone upon which the potential for transcendence is built.” The cyborg looked puzzled. Mirror-finished nictitating membranes flashed across her eyeballs, reflecting inner thoughts. “But within society of mind there is no personality. Personality arises from society; therefore, individual can have no—”

“I think you misunderstand the great philosophers,” Rubenstein said slowly. “This is not a criticism, comrade, for the philosophers are, of their essence, very brilliant and hard to follow; but by ‘society of mind’, they were referring to the arrival of consciousness within the individual, arising from lesser pre-conscious agents, not to society outside the person. Thus, it follows that being attached to one’s own consciousness is not to follow a cult of personality. Now, following another’s—” He broke off and looked sharply at the rabbit. “I don’t think we will pursue this question any further,” he said primly. “Time to move on.”

The cyborg nodded jerkily. Her fellows stood (or in one case, uncoiled) and shouldered their packs; Burya walked over to Sister Seventh’s hut and climbed inside. Presently the party moved off.

“Not understand revolutionary sense,” commented the Critic, munching on a sweet potato as the hut bounced along the dirt track behind the detachment from the Plotsk soviet. “Sense of identity deprecated? Lagomorph Criticized for affinity to self? Nonsense! How appreciate art without sense of self?”

Burya shrugged. “They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.” He leaned against the swaying wall of the hut. “I got so tired of trying to wake them up …” Sister Seventh snorted. “What you call that?” she asked, pointing through the door of the hut. Ahead of them marched a column of wildly varied cyborgs, partially augmented revolutionaries frozen halfway beyond the limitations of their former lives. At its head marched the rabbit, leading them into the forest of the partially transcended wilderness.

Burya peered at the rabbit. “I’d call it anything it wants. It’s got a gun, hasn’t it?” By noon, the forest had changed beyond recognition. Some strange biological experiment had warped the vegetation. Trees and grass had exchanged leaves, so that now they walked on a field of spiny pine needles, while flat blades waved overhead; the leaves were piebald, black and green, with the glossy black spreading. Most disturbingly of all, the shrubbery seemed to be blurring at the edges, species exchanging phenotypic traits with unnatural promiscuous abandon. “What’s responsible for this?” Burya asked Sister Seventh, during one of their hourly pauses.

The Critic shrugged. “Is nothing. Lysenkoist forestry fringe, recombinant artwork. Beware the Jabberwocky, my son. Are there only Earth native derivations in this biome?”

“You asking me?” Rubenstein snorted. “I’m no gardener.”

“Guesstimation implausible,” Sister Seventh replied archly. “In any event, some fringeworks are recombinant. Non human-centric manipulations of genome. Elegant structures, modified for non-purpose.

This forest is Lamarckian. Nodes exchange phenotype-determinant traits, acquire useful ones.”

“Who determines their usefulness?”

“The Flower Show. Part of the Fringe.”

“What a surprise,” Burya muttered.

At the next stop, he approached the rabbit. “How far?” he demanded.

The lagomorph sniffed at the breeze. “Fifty kilometers? Maybe more?” It looked faintly puzzled, as if the concept of distance was a difficult abstraction.

“You said sixty kilometers this morning,” Burya pointed out, “We’ve come twenty. Are you sure? The militia doesn’t trust you, and if you keep changing your mind, I may not be able to stop them doing something stupid.”

“I’m just a rabbit.” Ears twitched backward, swiveling to either side to listen for threats. “Know where master is, was, attacked by Mimes. Haven’t heard much from him since, you bet. Always know where he is, don’t know how — but can’t tell you how far. Like fucking compass in my head, mate, you understand?“

“How long have you been a rabbit?” asked Rubenstein, an awful suspicion coming to mind.

The rabbit looked puzzled. “I don’t rightly know. I think I once—” He stopped talking. Iron shutters came down, blocking the light behind his eyes. “No more words. Find master. Rescue!”

“Who is your master?” Burya demanded.

“Felix,” said the rabbit.

“Felix … Politovsky?”

“Don’t know. Maybe.” Rabbit twitched his ears right back and bared his teeth. “Don’t want to talk! We there tomorrow. Rescue master. Kill the Mimes.”

Vassily looked down at the stars wheeling beneath his feet. I’m going to die, he thought, swallowing acrid bile.

When he closed his eyes, the nausea went away a little. His head still hurt where he’d thumped it against the wall of the cabin on his way through; everything had blurred for a while, and he’d caught himself floating away on a cloud of pain. Now he had time to reflect, the pain seemed like an ironic joke; corpses didn’t hurt, did they? It told him he was still alive. When it stopped hurting—

He relived the disaster again and again. Sauer checking everybody was suited up. “It’s just a pinhole,” someone said, and it had seemed so plausible — the woman had let some air out of her cabin to trip the decompression interlocks — and then the bright flash of the cutting cord proved him wrong. The howling maelstrom had reached out and yanked the lieutenant and the CPO right out of the ship, into a dark tunnel full of stars. Vassily had tried to catch a door handle, but the clumsy mitten hands of his emergency suit wouldn’t grip. They’d left him tumbling over and over like a spider caught in the whirlpool when a bath plug is pulled.

Stars whirled, cold lights like daggers in the night outside his eyelids. This is it. I’m really going to die.

Not going home again. Not going to arrest the spy. Not going to meet my father and tell him what I really think of him. What will the Citizen think of me?

Vassily opened his eyes. The whirling continued; he must be spinning five or six times a minute. The emergency suit had no thrusters, and its radio had a pathetic range, just a few hundred meters — more than enough for shipboard use, perhaps enough to make a beacon if anyone came looking for him. But nobody had. He was precessing like a gyroscope; every couple of minutes, the ship swam briefly into view, a dark splinter outlined against the diamond dust of the heavens. There’d been no sign of a search party heading his way; just that golden fog of waste water spreading out around the ship, which had been over a kilometer away before he first saw it.

It looked like a toy; an infinitely desirable toy, one he could pin all his hopes of life and love and comradeship and warmth and happiness on — one that hung forever out of reach, dangling in a cold wasteland he couldn’t cross.

He glanced at the crude display mounted on his left wrist, watching the air dial tick down the hours left in his oxygen bottle. There was a dosimeter there, too, and this wasteland was hot, charged particles streaming through it at a rate that might suffice to prevent his mummified corpse decaying.

Vassily shuddered. Bitter frustration seized him: Why couldn’t I do something right? he wondered.

He’d thought he was doing the right thing, enlisting in the Curator’s Office, but when he’d pridefully shown his mother the commission, her face had closed like a shop front, and she’d looked away from him in that odd manner she used when he’d done something wrong but she didn’t want to chastise him for it. He’d thought he was doing the right thing, searching the engineer’s luggage, then the diplomat’s — but look where it had taken him. The ship beneath his shoes was a splinter against the dark, several kilometers away and getting farther out of reach all the time. Even his presence aboard the ship — if he was honest, he’d have done better to stay at home, wait for the ship (and the engineer) to return to New Prague, there to resume his pursuit. Only the news from Rochard’s World, the place of exile, had filled him with a curious excitement. And if he hadn’t wanted to go along, he wouldn’t be here now, spinning in a condemned man’s cell of memories.

He tried to think of happier times, but it was difficult. School? He’d been bullied mercilessly, mocked because of who and what his father was — and was not. Any boy who bore his mother’s name was an object of mockery, but to have a criminal for a father as well, a notorious criminal, made him too easy a target. Eventually he’d pounded one bully’s face into pulp, and been caned for it, and they’d learned to avoid him, but it hadn’t stopped the whispering and sniggering in quiet corners. He’d learned to listen for that, to lie in wait after classes and beat the grins off their faces, but it hadn’t gained him friends.

Basic training? That was a joke. A continuation of school, only with sterner taskmasters. Then police training, and the cadet’s college. Apprenticeship to the Citizen, whom he strived to impress because he admired the stern inspector vastly; a man of blood and iron, unquestionably loyal to the Republic and everything it stood for, a spiritual father whom he’d now managed to disappoint twice.

Vassily yawned. His bladder ached, but he didn’t dare piss — not in this suit of interconnected bubbles.

The thought of drowning was somehow more terrifying than the idea of running out of air. Besides, when the air went — wasn’t this how they executed mutinous spacers, instead of hanging?

A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless. His eyes stung; he squeezed them tightly shut against the whirling daggers of night and tried to regain control of his breathing.

And when he opened them again, as if in answer to his prayers, he saw that he was not alone in the deep.