Singularity Sky

Jokers

High in orbit above Rochard’s World, the Bouncers were stirring.

Two kilometers long, sleek and gray, each of them dwarfed the incoming naval task force. They’d been among the first artifacts the newly arrived Festival manufactured. Most of the Bouncers drifted in parking orbits deep in the Oort cloud, awaiting enemies closing along timelike attack paths deep in the future of the Festival’s world line; but a small detachment had accompanied the Festival itself, as it plunged deep into the inner system and arrived above the destination world.

Bouncers didn’t dream. Bouncers were barely sentient special units, tasked with the defense of the Festival against certain crude physical threats. For denial of service, decoherence attacks, and general spoofing, the more sophisticated antibodies could be relied on; for true causality-violation attacks, the Festival’s reality-maintenance crew would be awakened. But sometimes, the best defense is a big stick and a nasty smile— and that was what the Bouncers were for.

The arrival of the New Republican task force had been noted four days earlier. The steady acceleration profiles of the incoming warships stuck out like a sore thumb; while His Majesty’s Navy thought in terms of lidar and radar and active sensors, the Festival used more subtle instruments. Localized minima in the outer system’s entropy had been noted, spoor of naked singularities, echoes of the tunneling effect that let the conventional starships jump from system to system. The failure of the incoming fleet to signal told its own story; bouncers knew what to do without being told.

The orbiting Bouncer division began to accelerate. There were no fragile life-forms aboard these craft — just solid slabs of impure diamond and ceramic superconductors, tanks of metallic hydrogen held under pressures that would make the core of a gas giant planet seem like vacuum, and high-energy muon generators to catalyze the exotic fusion reactions that drove the ships. Also, of course, the fractal bushes that were the Bouncers’ cargo: millions of them clinging like strange vines to the long spines of the ships.

Fusion torches providing thrust in accordance with Newtonian laws might seem quaint to the New Republican Admiralty, who had insisted on nothing but the most modern drive singularities and curved-space engines for their fleet; but unlike the Admiralty, the Festival’s Bouncers had some actual combat experience. Reaction motors had important advantages for space-to-space combat, advantages that gave an unfair edge to a canny defender; a sensible thrust-to-mass ratio for one thing, and a low degree of observability for another. Ten-billion-tonne virtual masses made singularity-drive ships incredibly ponderous: although able to accelerate at a respectable clip, they couldn’t change direction rapidly, and to the Festival, they were detectable almost out to interstellar ranges. In contrast, a gimbaled reaction motor could change thrust vector fast enough to invite structural breakup if the ship wasn’t built to withstand the stresses. And while a fusion torch seen from astern was enough to burn out sensors at a million kilometers, the exhaust stream was very directional, with little more than a vague hot spot visible from in front of a ship.

With the much larger infrared emitter of the planet behind them, the Bouncers accelerated toward the New Republican first squadron at a bone-crushing hundred gees. Able to triangulate on the enemy by monitoring their drive emissions, the Bouncers peaked at 800 k.p.s., then shut down their torches and drifted silently, waiting for the moment of closest approach.

The operations room of the Lord Vanek was tense and quiet.

“Gunnery Two, ready a batch of six SEM-20s. Dial them all to one-zero-zero kilotonnes, time the first two for maximum EMP, next three for spallation debris along main axis. Gunnery One, I want two D-4

torpedoes armed for passive launch with a one-minute motor-on delay inlined into them.” Captain Mirsky sat back in his chair. “Prediction?” he muttered in the direction of Commander Vulpis.

“Holding ready, sir. A bit disturbing that we haven’t seen anything yet, but I can give you full maneuvering power within forty seconds of getting a drive signal.”

“Good. Radar. Anything new?”

“Humbly report nothing’s new on passive, sir.”

“Deep joy.” They were two hours out from perigee. Mirsky had to fight to control his impatience.

Tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair, he sat and waited for a sign, anything to indicate that there was life elsewhere in this empty cosmos. The fatal ping of a lidar illuminator glancing off the Lord Vanek’s stealthed hull, or the ripple of gravitomagnetic waves; anything to show that the enemy was out there, somewhere between the battle ship squadron and its destination.

“Any thoughts, Commander Vulpis?”

Vulpis’s eyes flickered around the fully manned stations in front of him. “I’d be a lot happier if they were making the effort to paint us. Either we’ve taken ’em completely by surprise, or …”

“Thank you for that thought,” Mirsky commented under his breath. “Marek!”

“Sir!”

“You’ve got a rifle. It’s loaded. Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”

“Sir?” Vulpis stared at his Captain.

“I will be in my cabin if anything happens,” Mirsky said lightly. “You have the helm, pending Commander Murametz’s or my own return. Call me at once if there’s any news.” Down in his stateroom, directly under the ops room, Mirsky collapsed into his chair. He sighed deeply, then poked at the dial of his phone. “Switchboard. My compliments to the Commodore and if he has a spare moment? Jolly good.” A minute later, the phonescreen dinged. “Sir!”

“Captain.” Commodore Bauer wore the expression of a very busy, very tired manager.

“I have a report for you on the, ah, annoyance. If you have time for it now.” Bauer made a steeple of his fingers. “If you can keep it short,” he said gloomily.

“Not difficult.” Mirsky’s eyes glittered in the gaslight. “It was all the fault of my idiot of an intelligence officer. If he hadn’t managed to kill himself, I’d have him in irons.” He took a deep breath. “But he didn’t act alone. As it is, sir, in confidence, I would recommend a reprimand for my FO, Fleet Commander Murametz, if not formal proceedings — except that we are so close to the enemy that—”

“Details, Captain. What did he do?”

“Lieutenant Sauer exceeded his authority by attempting to draw out the Terran spy — the woman, I mean — by means of a faked trial. He somehow convinced Commander Murametz to cover him, damned error of judgment if you ask me: he had no job making a mess in diplomat territory. Anyway, he pushed too hard, and the woman panicked. Ordinarily this would be no problem, but she somehow—” He coughed into his fist.

Bauer nodded. “I think I can guess the rest. Where is she now?” Mirsky shrugged. “Outside the ship, with the dockyard contractor. Missing, probably suited up, don’t know where they are, don’t know what in hell they thought they were doing — the Procurator’s missing too, sir, and there’s an embarrassing hole in our side where there used to be a cabin.” Slowly, the Commodore began to smile. “I don’t think you need waste any time searching for them, Captain. If we found them, we’d only have to throw them overboard again, what? I suppose the Procurator had a hand in this kangaroo court, didn’t he?“

“Ah, I suppose so, sir.”

“Well, this way we don’t have to worry about the civilians. And if they get a little sunburned during the engagement, no matter. I’m sure you’ll take care of everything that needs doing.”

“Yes, sir!” Mirsky nodded.

“So,” Bauer said crisply, “that’s tied down. Now, in your analysis, we should be entering the enemy’s proximity defense sphere when?”

Mirsky paused for thought. “About two hours, sir. That’s assuming that our emcon was sufficient and the lack of active probes is a genuine indication that they don’t know we’re out here.”

“I’m glad you added that qualifier. What’s your schedule for working up to stations?”

“We’re ready right now, sir. That is, there are some inessential posts that won’t lock down for another hour or so, but the ops crew and black gang are already on combat watch, and gunnery is standing by the weapons. The mess is due to send around some hot food; but in principle, we’re ready for action at a moment’s notice.”

“Very good.” Bauer paused and glanced down at his desk. Rubbed the side of his nose with one long, bony finger. Then he glanced up. “I don’t like this silence, Captain. It stinks of a trap.” Martin and Rachel glanced up in reflexive terror, seeking the source of the noise.

Aboard a spacecraft, any noise from outside spells trouble— big trouble. Their lifeboat was drifting toward Rochard’s World at well over solar escape velocity; a BB pellet stationary in their path would rip through them with the force of an antishipping missile. And while warships like the Lord Vanek could carry centimeters of foamed diamond armor and shock bumpers to absorb spallation fragments, the lifeboat’s skin was thin enough to puncture with a penknife.

“Masks,” snapped Rachel. A mess of interconnected transparent bags with complex seals and some sort of gas tank inside coiled from the console opposite Martin and bounced into his lap; for her part, she reached behind her seat and pulled out a helmet. Yanking it on over her head, she let its rim melt into her leotard, dripping sealant down her neck. Crude icons blinked inside the visor. She breathed out, relieved, hearing the fan whine behind her right ear. Beside her, Martin was still stuffing himself into the transparent cocoon. She looked up. “Pilot. Topside sensor view, optical, center screen.”

“Oh shit,” Martin said indistinctly.

The screen showed an indistinct blur that moved against a backdrop of pinprick stars. As they watched, the blur receded, dizzyingly fast, and sharpened into a recognizable shape. Moving.

She turned and stared at Martin. “Whoever he is, we can’t leave him out there,” he said.

“Not with a rescue beacon,” she agreed grimly. “Pilot. Oxygen supply. Recalculate on basis of fifty percent increase in consumption. How does it affect our existing survival margin?” An amber GANT chart flickered across the screen. “Bags of room,” Martin commented. “What about landfall? Hmm.” He prodded at his PA. “I think we can make it,” he added. “Mass ratio isn’t so much worse.”

“Think or know?” she replied pointedly. “If we get halfway down and run out of go-juice, it could put a real damper on this day-trip.”

“I’m aware of that. Let me see … yeah. We’ll be okay, Rachel. Whoever designed this boat must have thought you’d be carrying one hell of a diplomatic bag with you. More like a wardrobe.”

“Don’t say that.” She licked her lips. “Question two. We take him on board. How are we going to stop him if he decides to get in the way?”

“I think you get to use your feminine wiles on him,” Martin deadpanned.

“I should have known you’d come up with something like that.” Wearily, she groped for the stun gun.

“This won’t work in vacuum, you know? And it’s not a good idea to use the sucker in a confined space either.”

“Talking of confined spaces.” Martin pointed to the rather basic mass detector display. “Twelve kilometers and drifting. We don’t want to be this close when they spin up for combat.”

“No, we don’t,” Rachel agreed. “Okay. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. You got confirmation on suit integrity? Once we vent, you won’t be able to move much.” Martin nodded, held up a balloon-bloated glove. Rachel cranked open her oxygen regulator and yawned, deliberately, hunting the roof of the cabin for an attachment point for her survival tether. “Okay. Pilot, EVA cycle. Prepare to depressurize cabin.” An alarm pinged in the operations room.

“Contact.” Lieutenant Kokesova leaned over his subordinate’s shoulder and stared at the gauges on his console. Lights blinked violet and green. “I say again, contact.”

“Accepted.” Lieutenant Marek swallowed. “Comms, please signal captain to the ops room and condition red.”

“Aye aye, sir.” A red light began to strobe by the doorway. “Any specifics?” asked Marek.

‘Tracking. I have a definite fusion source, came up about two-zero seconds ago. I thought at first it was a sensor malfunction but it’s showing blue-shifted Balmer lines, and it’s bright as hell — black body temperature would be in the five-zero-zero M-degree range. Traveling at well above local stellar escape velocity.“

“Very good.” Marek tried to lean back in the command chair but failed, unable to force himself to relax that much. ‘Time to get a solution on it?“

“Any minute.” Lieutenant Kokesova, tech specialist, demonstrating his proficiency once again. “I’ll see if I can pickle some neutrinos for you.”

The door opened, and the guard beside it came to attention. Lieutenant Marek spun around and saluted stiffly. “Sir!”

“What’s the situation?”

“Humbly report we have a provisional fix on one incoming, sir,” said Marek. “We’re still waiting for a solution, but we have a blue-shifted fusion torch. Looks like we’re looking straight up their endplate mirror.”

Mirsky nodded. “Very good, Lieutenant. Is there anything else?”

“Anything else?” Marek was flustered. “Not unless something’s come up—”

“Contact!” It was the same sensor op. He looked up apologetically. “Begging your pardon, sir.”

“Describe.” It was the Captain’s turn.

“Second fusion source, about two M-kilometers above and south of the first. It’s tracking on a parallel course. I have a preliminary solution, looks like they’re vectoring to pass us at about one-zero-zero K-klicks, decelerating from eight-zero-zero k.p.s. Time to intercept, two K-seconds.”

“Any other activity?” asked Mirsky.

“Activity, sir?”

“You know. Anomalous lateral acceleration. Jamming, comms traffic, luminous pink tentacles, whatever.

Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then.” Mirsky stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Something doesn’t add up.” The door to the bridge opened again; Lieutenant Helsingus came in. “Permission to take fire control, sir?”

“Do it.” Mirsky waved his hand. “But first, riddle me this: Why by the Emperor’s beard can we see two drive torches, but nothing else?”

“Ah—” Marek shut up.

“Because,” Commander Vulpis said over Mirsky’s shoulder, “it’s an entrapment, Captain.”

“I don’t know how you could possibly imagine such a thing; they’re obviously inviting us to a dinner dance.” Mirsky grinned nastily. “Hmm. You think they ditched a bunch of mines before they fired up the torches?”

“Quite possibly.” Vulpis nodded. “In which case, we’re going to get hit in about”— he punched at his board—“two-five-zero seconds, sir. We won’t be in range of anything you can cram on a mine for very long, but at this speed, even a cloud of sand would make a mess of us.” Mirsky leaned forward. “Guns. Point defense to automatic! Comms, please request an ack from the commodore’s staff, and from Kamchatka and Regina. Make sure they’re watching for mines.” He smiled grimly. “Time to see what they’re made of, I think. Comms, my compliments to the Commodore, and please say that I am requesting permission to terminate emission control for defensive reasons.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Emission controls were desperately important to a warship. Active sensors like radar and lidar required an echo from a foreign body to confirm its presence; but a sufficiently distant (or stealthed) body wouldn’t return an echo loud enough to pick up. Sending out the initial pulse gave away a ship’s position with great accuracy to any enemy who happened to be stooging around outside the return range but within passive detection range. By approaching Rochard’s World under emission control, the battle squadron had attempted to conceal themselves. The first ship to start actively radiating would make its presence glaringly obvious — painting a target on itself in the process of lighting up the enemy.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Lieutenant Marek?”

“What if there are more than two ships out there? I mean, we carry probes and a shuttle. What if we’re up against some kind of larger force, and the two we can see are just a decoy?” Captain Mirsky grinned humorlessly. “That’s not a possibility, Lieutenant, it’s a near certainty.”

“Mine intercept waypoint one, four minutes.” Vulpis read off timings from the glowing nixie tubes before him. He glanced up at the command chair; Captain Mirsky, seated there, nodded.

“Weapons, arm torpedoes, stand by on missiles. Remotes, status on red, blue, orange.” Mirsky was calm and collected, and his presence was a settling influence on the otherwise tense ops room crew.

The red telephone rang, jangling. Mirsky listened, briefly, then replaced the handset. “Radar. You have permission to radiate.”

Radar One: “Going active now, sir. One-zero-second pulse-doppler train, four octave agile spread, go to jamming sequence alpha afterward. Decoys, sir?”

“You may launch decoys.” Mirsky folded his hands in his lap and gazed straight ahead at the main screen. Beneath the calm exterior, he was seriously worried; he was gambling his life and his ship — and all those aboard her — on a hypothesis about the nature of their pursuers. He wasn’t confident, but he was sufficiently well informed to make an educated guess about what was after them. Maybe the UN

woman had the right idea, he thought gloomily. He glanced around the ops room. “Commander Helsingus. Status, please?”

The bearded gunnery officer nodded. “First four rounds loaded as per order, sir. Two self-propelled torpedoes with remote ignition patches on my board, followed by six passive-powered missiles rigged for EMP in a one-zero-degree spread. Laser grid programmed for tight point-defense. Ballistic point-defense programs loaded and locked.”

“Good. Helm?”

“Holding steady on designated fleet approach pattern, sir. No evasion authorized by staff.”

“Radar?”

Lieutenant Marek stood up. He looked tense and drawn, new lines forming around his eyes- “Humbly report, sir, active is on cold clamp. Passive shows nothing yet, except on infrared trace, but that should give us a fix in”—he glanced down— “about three minutes and counting. Decoy is overboard, running out to radiation rangepoint one.” The decoy — a small unpowered drone trailing behind the warship on a ten-kilometer-long tether — was preparing to radiate an EM signature identical to that of the ship: synchronized by interferometer with the active sensors aboard the Lord Vanek, it would help confuse any enemy sensors as to the exact position of the battlecruiser.

“Good.” Mirsky looked at the clock beside the main forward display, then glanced down at the workstation before him. Time for the checklist. “At waypoint one, be prepared to commence burn schedule one on my word. That’s four-zero gees continuous until we build up to six-zero k.p.s. then shut down, full damping, course three-six-zero by zero by zero on current navigation lock. Comms, notify all elements of squadron one. Guns, at time zero plus five seconds, be prepared to drop torps one and two, on my word. Comms, signal torpedo passive drop to Squadron One. Please confirm.”

“Aye aye, sir. One and Two”—Helsingus snapped a brass switch over—“are armed for passive drop at time plus five.”

“Good.”

‘Time to possible mine intercept, two minutes, sir.“

“Thank you Nav Two, I can see the clock from here.” Mirsky gritted his teeth. “Helm, status.”

“Program locked. Main engine is available for burn in five-zero seconds, sir.”

“Radar, update.”

“We should pick ’em up in about two minutes, sir. No emissions—” Lieutenant Marek stopped. “What’s that?”

Radar Two: “Contact, sir! Lidar registers ping one. Waiting for—” An alarm shrilled. “Something just pinged us, sir,” said Marek.

Everybody except the radar techs were staring at Mirsky. He caught Helsingus’s eye and nodded.

‘Track beta.“

“Aye aye, sir. Guns Two, track beta.” An almost imperceptible thump shuddered through the structure of the battlecruiser as the main axial launch coil spat twenty tonnes of intricately machined heavy metal and fuel out through the nose of the ship. A second bump signaled the release of the second torpedo. Drifting unpowered, cold but for their avionics packages, they would wait behind when the Lord Vanek began to accelerate.

“Minus three-zero seconds,” called Nav Two.

“Beg to report on the contact, sir,” said Marek.

“Speak, Nav.”

“We managed to get a look at the pulse train on the contact, and it looks, um, strange. Noisy, if you follow my meaning; they’ve done a good job of concealing their recognition signature.”

“One-zero seconds.”

“All posts switch to plan two,” said Captain Mirsky. “Nav, pass that contact info on to Kamchatka and Ekaterina. Get anything you can off them.” He picked up the phone to notify his squadron captains of the impending change of plan.

“Aye aye, sir. Plan two burn commencing in five … two, one, now.” There was no change evident in the ops room, no shaking or shuddering or sudden leaden-limbed feeling of acceleration, but inside the guts of the starship, the extremal black hole twisted in sudden torment; the Lord Vanek fell forward at full military acceleration, four hundred meters per second squared, more than forty gees.

Another alarm trilled. Nav: “Full scan running.” Twenty gigawatts of laser light beamed out in all directions, a merciless glare bright enough to melt steel at a range of kilometers. Down in the bowels of the ship, heat exchanges glowed red-hot, flashing water into saturated high-pressure steam and venting it astern; this close to combat, running out the huge, vulnerable heat exchangers would be suicidal.

Guns: “Track beta launch commencing.” This time a real bump-and-grind made the ship shudder; the two missiles Helsingus had preloaded back when they’d been on the track alpha heading. As they hurtled ahead of the ship, a tenth of its total laser output focused up their tails, energizing their reaction mass.

This was the time of maximum danger, and Mirsky did his best to maintain a confident demeanor for the benefit of his crew. As the Commodore had put it in the privacy of his staff briefing room: “If they’re smart, they’ll send out just enough assets to make us reveal ourselves, then use whatever they’ve got in orbit to dump a snowstorm of mines in our path. They know where we’re going; that’s half the problem of pinpointing us. When we start radiating they’ll get their solution — and it’ll be a question of how much pounding they can hand out, and how much we can take.”

Attacking a fixed point — in this case, the low-orbit installations around a planet — was traditionally reputed to be the hardest task in deep-space warfare. The defenders could concentrate forces around it and rapidly bring defensive missile and laser screens to bear on anyone approaching; and if the attackers wanted to know just what they were attacking, they’d have to hang out high-energy signposts for the defenders to take aim on.

Seconds later, Mirsky breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “Point defense reports all quiet, sir. We’re inside their envelope, but they don’t seem to have dropped a minefield.” Drifting mines wouldn’t follow the deceleration curve of the enemy ships; they’d come slamming in way ahead of the warships that had dropped them overboard at peak velocity.

“That’s good,” Mirsky murmured. His eyes focused on the two red points on the main plotting screen.

They were still decelerating, painfully fast; almost as if they were aiming for a zero-relative-velocity slugging match. The Lord Vanek’s two missiles crawled toward them — in reality, boosting at a savage thousand gees, already over 1000 k.p.s. Presently, they shut down and coasted, retaining only enough reaction mass for terminal maneuvering when they got within ten seconds of the enemy. Ahead of the Lord Vanek, the glinting purple crosses of the unpowered torpedoes fell forward toward the enemy.

A minute later, Gunnery Two spoke up. “I’ve lost missile one, sir. I can ping it, but it doesn’t respond.”

“Odd—” Mirsky’s brow furrowed; he glanced at the doomsday clock. The battlecruiser was closing on the destination at a crawl, just 40 k.p.s. The enemy was heading toward them at better than 200 k.p.s., decelerating, but their thrust was dropping off — if this continued, closing unpowered at 250 k.p.s., their paths would intersect in about 500 seconds, and they’d be within missile-powered flight range 200

seconds before that. These long, ballistic shots weren’t expected to cause real damage, but if they came close, they would force the enemy to respond. But missile one had been more than 50,000 kilometers from the target—

“Humbly reporting, I’ve lost missile two as well, sir.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” muttered Helsingus. He glanced at the plot: a flurry of six more missiles, all fired from the Kamchatka, was closing in on their target: ranging shots all, with little chance of doing any damage, but—

Point Defense: “Sir, problem on deck one. Looks like— humbly report a debris impact, sir, lost a scattering of eyeballs on the lidar grid but nothing broke the inner pressure hull.”

“Looks like they’ve got bad dandruff,” Mirsky commented. “But their point defense is working.

Torpedoes?”

“Not yet, sir,” said Helsingus. “They’ve only got about five-zero-zero k.p.s. of delta-vee. Won’t be in position to light off for, ah, eight-zero more seconds.” Drifting toward the enemy almost 100 k.p.s. faster than the warship that had launched them, the torpedoes nevertheless had relatively short legs. Unlike the missiles, they had their own power plant, radar, and battle control computers, which made them valuable assets in event of an engagement — but they accelerated more slowly and had a lower total acceleration budget.

Radar Two: “Humbly report I think I spotted something, sir. About one-zero-zero milliseconds after missile two dropped off, detector three trapped a neutrino pulse; impossible to say for sure whether it came from the target or the missile, but it looked fairly energetic. Ah, no sign of any other radiation.”

“Most peculiar,” Mirsky murmured under his breath: an extreme understatement. “What’s our range profile?”

“Torpedo range in six-zero seconds. Active gunnery range in one-five-zero seconds; contact range in four-zero-zero seconds. Closest pass two-zero K-kilometers, speed on the order of two-six-zero k.p.s.

assuming no maneuvering. Range to target is one-zero-five K-kilometers on my mark, now.”

“Hah.” Mirsky nodded. “Gentlemen, this may look preposterous, but I have a problem with the way things are going. Helsingus, your two torpedoes — torch ’em off straight at bogey one.”

“But they’ll go ballistic short of—”

Mirsky raised a warning hand. “Just do it. Helm, option three-two. Signal all ships.” Once again, he picked up the phone to the Commodore’s battle room to confer with his flag officer.

“Aye aye, sir.” The display centered on Rochard’s World shifted, rolling; the orange line representing Lord Vanek’s course, hitherto straight in toward the planet, began to bend, curving away from the planet. The red lines showing the course of the two incoming enemy ships were also bending, moving to intercept the Lord Vanek and her five sister ships; meanwhile the twelve dots of blue, representing the torpedoes the squadron had dropped overboard almost two minutes earlier, began to grow outward.

Live torpedoes were not something any starship captain wanted to get too close to. Unlike a missile — essentially a tube full of reaction mass with a laser mirror in its tail and a warhead at the other end — a torpedo was a spacecraft with its own power plant, an incredibly dirty fission rocket, little more than a slow-burning atom bomb, barely under control as it spewed a horribly radioactive exhaust stream behind it. It was also the most efficient storable-fuel rocket motor available, without the complexity of fusion reactors or curved-space generators. Before the newer technologies came along, early-twenty-first-century pioneers had used it for the first crewed interplanetary missions.

“Fish are both running, sir. Ours are making nine-six and one-one-two gees respectively; general squadron broadside averages ninety-eight. They should burn out and switch to sustainer in one-zero-zero seconds and intersect bogeys one and two if they stay on current course in about one-five-zero seconds.

Guidance pack degradation should still be under control by then, we should be able to do terminal targeting control.”

“Good,” Mirsky said shortly. Heading in on the Lord Vanek on a reciprocal course, the enemy ships might well be able to start shooting soon: but the torpedoes would get in the way nicely, messing up the clear line of sight on the Lord Vanek while threatening them. Which was exactly what Mirsky was hoping for.

There was something extremely odd about the two ships, he noted. They weren’t following any kind of obvious tactical doctrine, just accelerating in a straight line, pulsing with lidar as they came — homing in blindly. There was no sign of sneaky moves. They’d lurched out and begun pinging away like drunken fools playing a barroom computer game, throwing away the advantage of concealment that they’d held.

Whoever was driving those birds is either a fool or—

“Radar,” he said softly. “Saturation cover forward and down. Anything there?”

“I’ll look.” Marek gulped, getting the Captain’s drift immediately. If these two were hounds, flushing their game out of hiding, something would be drifting in quietly from ahead. Not mines dropped at peak velocity, but something else. Maybe something worse, like a brace of powered torpedoes. “Um, humbly suggest optical scan as well, sir?”

“It can’t fix us for them any better,” Mirsky grunted. “They know where we are.” Radar Two: “Sir, nothing on mass. Nothing within two light-seconds ahead or down. Small amount of organic debris — we passed through a thin cloud of it back at waypoint one, picked up a couple of scratches on the nose — but no sign of escorts or weapons.”

“Sir, we are all clear ahead,” said Lieutenant Marek.

“Well, keep looking then.” Mirsky looked down at his hands. They were tightly entwined in his lap, veins standing out on their backs, old hands, the fine hair at his wrists turning gray. “How did I get this far?” he asked himself quietly.

His workstation pinged. “Incoming call for you, sir,” it said.

“Damn.” He punched up the image. It was Commodore Bauer.

“I’m busy,” he said tersely. “Torpedo run. Can it wait?”

“I don’t think so. There is something very flaky going on. Why do you think they aren’t shooting?”

“Because they’ve already shot at us, but the bullets haven’t arrived yet,” Mirsky said through gritted teeth.

Bauer stared at his Flag Captain for a moment, wordless agreement written on his face. Then he nodded.

“Get us the hell out of here, Captain. I’ll tell the rest of the squadron to follow your lead. Just give me as much delta-vee as you can between us and those — whatever.”

Radar Two: “Time to torpedo closest approach, eight-zero seconds. Sir, there are no signs that wolf one or two has seen the fish. But they’re well within sensor range if they’re using something equivalent to our G-90s.”

“Understood.” Mirsky paused. Something was nagging at the back of his mind; a nasty sense of having forgotten something. That neutrino pulse, that was it. Neutrinos meant strong nuclear force. So why no flash? “Guns, load up twelve SEM-20s for tail drop at shortest intercept course. Assuming they come in from behind.” He glanced back at his screen, but the commodore had hung up on him without waiting.

“Aye aye. Birds loaded.” Helsingus seemed almost happy, twitching levers and adjusting dials. It was the nearest thing to pleasure Mirsky remembered the dour gunnery officer showing since his dog had disappeared. “Ready at minus one-zero seconds.”

“Helm.” Mirsky paused. “Prepare to execute plan bugout on my command.” An alarm warbled at the radar desk. “Beg to report sir,” began the petty officer on duty, face whey-pale:

“I’ve lost Prince Vaclav.”

Faces looked up in shock all around the room. “What do you mean, lost it?” snapped Vulpis, bypassing the operational pecking order. “You didn’t just lose a battlecruiser—”

“Sir, she’s stopped responding. Stopped accelerating, too. I can see her on plot, but there’s something wrong with her—” The radar operator paused. “Sir, I can’t get an IFF heartbeat out of her. And she’s reflecting way too much energy — something must have ripped the front off her emission control coating.”

“Helm. Execute plan bugout,” Mirsky snapped in the sudden silence that followed the report.

“Aye aye, sir, bugout it is.” Lieutenant Vulpis began flipping switches in a frenzy.

A fundamental problem with combat in space was that if things began to go wrong, they could do so with dizzying speed — and to make matters worse, catastrophe would only become visible to a ship that was so deep into the enemy’s powered-missile envelope that escape was nearly impossible. Mirsky had gamed this situation repeatedly with Bauer and the other fleet captains; plan bugout was the result. It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse. Something had just reached out across ninety thousand kilometers and bushwhacked a battlecruiser. This wasn’t entirely unexpected; they were here to fight, after all. But they hadn’t seen any missiles, only their own birds and the debris from the blowout drifting in ahead of them, and the fine drizzle of organic ‘dandruff’

from the enemy ships — and in active mode, the Lord Vanek’s lidar could pin down a missile at almost a light-second, three hundred thousand kilometers. If the enemy had a beam weapon of some kind that was capable of trashing a capital ship at that range, nearly two orders of magnitude greater than their own point-defense energy weapons, they were already too damned close. All they could do was turn side-on and go to emergency thrust, generating a vector away from the enemy before they could respond.

Radar Two: “Torpedo intersect in four-zero seconds. Wolves one and two still tracking on course, acceleration down to one gee.”

“Well, that’s nice to know. Mr. Helsingus, I would appreciate it if you’d be so good as to prepare a warm welcome for anything our friends try to send after us. I don’t know just what they threw at Prince Vaclav, but I don’t propose to give them time to show us. And if you gentlemen will excuse me for a minute, I have a private call to make.” Mirsky pulled on his headset and pushed down on the antisound lever. “Comms, get me the Commodore.” His earpieces clicked. “Sir?”

“Have you started bugout?”

“Yes, sir. The Prince Vaclav—”

The screech of the decompression alarm cut through his ears like a knife. “By the numbers, damn you!” yelled Mirsky. “Suit up!” He yanked off his headset. Officers and men dashed to the emergency locker at the rear of the compartment and pulled their gear on, stumbled back to man posts while their backups followed suit. The ops room had already cycled onto its emergency supply, along with all the main nerve centers of the ship, but Mirsky wasn’t one to take chances. Not that being suited up would count for much protection in ship-to-ship combat, but decompression was another threat entirely, one dreaded aboard any starship almost as much as fire or Hawking radiation. “Damage control, talk to me,” he grunted. A passing CPO held out a suit for him; he stood up and pulled it on slowly, making sure to double-check its status display.

“Humbly report a big pressure drop on A deck, sir. Critical decompression, we’re still venting air. Ah, humbly report there appears to be some damage to lidar emitter quadrant three.”

“You make sure everybody’s buttoned down. Guns, Radar, where do we stand?” Radar One: “Torpedo intercept in one-five seconds. Bogey holding course, due to pass inside our terminal engagement envelope for two-zero seconds in one-two-zero then drop behind.” Helsingus nodded. “All tubes loaded,” he reported.

“Damage Control: Patch into life support and find out what the hell is loose.”

“Got it already, sir. I’ve got some kind of contamination, source inside life support one: weird organic molecules, low concentration. Also, er, localized outbreaks of fire. It’s mostly around A deck. The lidar grid damage is localized, around where the debris strike happened. Ah, I have one-six crew marked down on the status board. A deck segment two is open to space, and they were all inside at the time.” Gunnery: “Five seconds to torpedo terminal boost phase.”

“Let’s dazzle ’em now,” said Helsingus. “Grid to full power.”

“Aye aye, sir, full multispectral shriek in progress.”

Helsingus leaned sideways and muttered into his headset; Radar One muttered back. There was some mutual adjustment of switches as radar relinquished priority control on the huge phased-array laser grid that coated the warship, then Helsingus and his two assistants began entering instructions.

The Lord Vanek boosted at right angles to the two enemy craft, accelerating away from the two silent pursuers on a ripple of warped space-time. The two saltwater-fission torpedoes, bright sparks behind, accelerated toward the enemy warships like a pair of nuclear fireworks. Now the tight-packed mosaic of panels that covered much of the Lord Vanek’s cylindrical bulk began to glow with the intense speckled purity of laser light. A thousand different colors appeared, blending and clashing and forming a single brilliant diadem of light; megawatts, then gigawatts of power surged out, the skin of the ship burning like a directional magnesium flare. The glow built up, and most of it flowed out in two tightly controlled beams, intense enough to cut through steel plate like a blowtorch at a range of a thousand kilometers.

Simultaneously, the flight of torpedoes throttled up to maximum thrust, weaving erratically as they closed the final three thousand kilometers to the onrushing enemy ships. Hurtling in ten times faster than an ICBM of the pre-space age, the rockets jinked and wove to avoid the anticipated point-lasers, relying on passive sensors and sophisticated antispoofing algorithms to cut through the expected jamming and countermeasures of the enemy ships. They took barely thirty seconds to close the distance, and found the enemy point defense to be almost nonexistent.

From the ops room of the Lord Vanek, the engagement was undramatic. One of the pursuer points simply disappeared, replaced by an expanding shell of spallation debris and hot gases energized by an incandescent point far brighter than any conventional fission explosion; with the ship’s hull blown wide and drive mountings shattered, the antimatter bottle spilled its contents into a soup of metallic hydrogen, triggering a mess of exotic subnuclear reactions. But only one of the torpedoes struck home; the other eleven winked out.

“Humbly report got more neutrino pulses, sir,” called the radar op. “Not from the one we nailed—” Mirsky stared at the main screen. “Damage control. What about A deck?” he demanded. “Helm.

Everyone else running on bugout?”

“A deck is still empty to space, sir. I sent a control team, but they aren’t reporting back. Pressure’s dropping in the number four recycler run, no sign of external venting. Um, I’m showing a major power drain on the grid, sir, we’re losing megawatts somewhere.”

“Bugout message was sent a minute ago, sir. So far they’re all—” Vulpis cursed. “Sir! Kamchatka’s gone!”

“Where, dammit?” Mirsky leaned forward.

“Another IFF drop-off,” called radar. “From—” The man paused, eyes widening with shock. “ Kamchatka,” he concluded. On the main plot at the front of the bridge, the Imperial ships’ vectors were lengthening, up to 300 k.p.s. now and creeping up steadily. The target planet hung central, infinitely far out of reach.

Mirsky glanced at his first officer. Ilya stared back apprehensively.

“With respect, sir, they’re not fighting any way we know—”

Red lights. Honking sirens. Damage Control shouting orders into his speaking horn. “Status!” roared Mirsky. “What’s going on, dammit?”

“Losing pressure on B deck segment one, sir! No readings anywhere on segment three from A down to D deck. Big power fluctuations, distribution board fourteen compartment D-nine-five is on fire. Ah, I have a compartment open to space and another compartment on fire in B-four-five. I can’t get through to damage control on B deck at all and all hell has broken loose on C deck—”

“Seal off everything above F,” ordered Mirsky, his face white. “Do it now! Guns, prep decoys two and three for launch—”

But he was already too late to save his ship; because the swarm of bacteria-sized replicators that had slammed into A deck at 600 k.p.s. — cushioned in a husk of reinforced diamond — and eaten their way down through five decks into the ship, were finally arriving in the engineering spaces. And eating, and breeding …

Vassily's voice quavered with a nervous, frightened edge that would have been funny under other circumstances. “I am arresting you for sabotage, treason, unlicensed use of proscribed technologies, and giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the New Republic! Surrender now, or it will be the worse for you!”

“Shut up and grab the back of that couch unless you want to walk home. Martin, if you wouldn’t mind giving him a leg down — that’s right. I need to get this hatch shut—” Rachel glanced around disgustedly. There was a beautiful view; stars everywhere, a terrestrial planet hanging huge and gibbous ahead, like a marbled blue-and-white hallucination— and this idiot child squawking in her ear. Meanwhile, she was clinging with both hands to the underside of the capsule lid, and with both feet to the pilot’s chair, trying to hold everything together. When she’d poked her head up through the hatch and seen who was clinging to the low-gain antenna, she’d had half a mind to duck back inside again and fire up the thrusters to jolt him loose; a stab of blind rage made her grind her teeth together so loudly a panicky Martin had demanded to know if her suit had sprung a leak. But the red haze of anger faded quickly, and she’d reached out and grabbed Vassily’s arm, and somehow shoved his inflated emergency suit in through the hatch.

“I’m coming down,” she said. Clenching her thighs around the back of the chair, she clicked the release catch on the hatch and pulled it down as far as she could, then locked it in position. The cabin below her was overfull: Vassily obviously didn’t have a clue about keeping himself out of the way, and Martin was busy trying to squirm into the leg well of his seat to make room. She yanked on her lifeline, dropped down until she was standing on the seat of her chair, then grabbed the hatch and pulled it the rest of the way shut. She felt the solid ripple-click of a dozen small catches locking home on all four sides.

“Okay. Autopilot, seal hatch, then repressurize cabin. Martin, not over there — that’s the toilet, you really don’t want to open that — yes, that’s the locker you want.” Air began hissing into the cabin from vents around the ceiling; white mist formed whirlpool fog banks that drifted across the main window. “That’s great. You, listen up: you aren’t aboard a Navy ship here. Shut up, and we’ll give you a lift downside; keep telling me I’m under arrest, and I might get pissed off enough to push you overboard.”

“Urp.”

The Junior Procurator’s eyes went wide as his suit began to deflate around him. Behind the seats, Martin grunted as he rifled through the contents of one of the storage lockers. “This what you want?” He punted a rolled-up hammock at Rachel. She rolled around in her seat and stuck one end of it to the wall behind her, then let it unroll back toward Martin. He drifted out of the niche, narrowly avoided kicking their castaway in the head, and managed to get the other end fastened. “You. Out of that suit, into this hammock. As you may have noticed, we don’t have a lot of room.” She pressed the release stud, and her helmet let go of her suit and drifted free; catching it, she shoved it down behind her seat, under the hammock. “You can unsuit now.”

Martin peeled halfway out of his own suit, keeping his legs and lower body in the collapsed plastic bag.

Vassily floated out of his niche, struggling with the flaccid bladder of his helmet: Martin steered him into the hammock and managed to get his head out of the bag before he managed to inhale it. “You’re—” Vassily stopped. “Er, thank you.”

“Don’t even think about hijacking us,” Rachel warned darkly. “The autopilot’s slaved to my voice, and neither of us particularly wants to take our chances with your friends.”

“Er.” Vassily breathed deeply. “Um. That is to say—” He looked around wildly. “Are we going to die?”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Rachel said firmly.

“But the enemy ships! They must be—”

“It’s the Festival. Have you got any idea what they are?” asked Martin.

“If you know anything about it, you should have told the Admiral’s staff. Why didn’t you tell them?

Why—”

“We did tell them. They didn’t listen,” Rachel observed.

Vassily visibly struggled to understand. Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable. “What are you going to do now?”

“Well.” Rachel whistled tunelessly through her front teeth. “Personally, I’d like to land this lifeboat somewhere near, say, Novy Petrograd, book the honeymoon suite in the Crown Hotel, fill the bathtub with champagne, and lie in it while Martin feeds me caviar on black bread. However, what we actually do next really depends on the Festival, hmm? If Martin is right about it—”

“Believe it,” Martin emphasized.

“—the Navy force is going to quietly disappear, never to be seen again. That’s what comes of assuming that everyone plays by the same set of rules. We’re just going to drift on through, then fire up our motor for a direct landing, meanwhile squawking that we’re neutral at the top of our voices. The Festival isn’t what your leaders think it is, kid. It’s a threat to the New Republic — they got that much right — but they don’t understand what kind of threat it is, or how to deal with it. Going in shooting will only make it respond in kind, and it’s better at it than your boys.”

“But our Navy is good!” Vassily insisted. “They’re the best navy within twenty light-years! What would you anarchists do? You don’t even have a strong government, much less a fleet!” Rachel chuckled. After a moment, Martin joined in. Gradually their laughter mounted, deafening in the confined space.

“Why are you laughing at me?” Vassily demanded indignantly.

“Look.” Martin hunched around in his chair until he could lock eyes with the Procurator. “You’ve grown up with this theory of strong government, the divine right of the ruling class, the thwack of the riding crop of firm administration on the bare buttocks of the urban proletariat and all that. But has it occurred to you that the UN system also works, and has maybe been around for twice as long as the New Republic?

There’s more than one way to run a circus, as I think the Festival demonstrates, and rigid hierarchies like the one you grew up in are lousy at dealing with change. The UN system, at least after the Singularity and the adoption of the planetary unconstitution—” He snorted.

“Once, the fringe anarchists used to think the UN was some kind of quasi-fascist world government.

Back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when strong government was in fashion because the whole planetary civilization was suffering from future shock, because it was approaching a Singularity.

After that passed, though — well, there weren’t a lot of viable authoritarian governments left, and the more rigid they were, the less well they could deal with the aftereffects of losing nine-tenths of their populations overnight. Oh, and the cornucopiae: it can’t be pleasant to run a central bank and wake up one morning to discover ninety percent of your taxpayers are gone and the rest think money is obsolete.”

“But the UN is a government—”

“No it isn’t,” Martin insisted. “It’s a talking shop. Started out as a treaty organization, turned into a bureaucracy, then an escrow agent for various transnational trade and standards agreements. After the Singularity, it was taken over by the Internet engineering task force. It’s not the government of Earth; it’s just the only remaining relic of Earth’s governments that your people can recognize. The bit that does the common-good jobs that everyone needs to subscribe to. World-wide vaccination programs, trade agreements with extrasolar governments, insurer of last resort for major disasters, that sort of thing. The point is, for the most part, the UN doesn’t actually do anything; it doesn’t have a foreign policy, it’s just a head on a stick for your politicians to rant about. Sometimes somebody or another uses the UN as a front when they need to do something credible-looking, but trying to get a consensus vote out of the Security Council is like herding cats.”

“But you’re—” Vassily paused. He looked at Rachel.

“I told your Admiral that the Festival wasn’t human,” she said tiredly. “He thanked me and carried right on planning an attack. That’s why they’re all going to die soon. Not enough flexibility, your people. Even trying to run a minor — and horrendously illegal — causality-violation attack wasn’t that original a response.” She sniffed. “Thought they’d turn up a week before the Festival, by way of that half-assed closed timelike path to avoid mines and sleepers. As if the Eschaton wouldn’t notice, and as if the Festival was just another bunch of primitives with atom bombs.” A red light winked on the console in front of her. “Oh, look,” said Martin.

“It’s beginning. Better strap yourself in — we’re way too close for comfort.”

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?” asked Vassily.

Martin reached up to adjust a small lens set in the roof of the cabin, then glanced over his shoulder. “Can you juggle, kid?”

“No. Why?”

Martin pointed at the screen. “Spine ships. Or antibodies. Subsentient remotes armed with, um, you don’t want to know. Eaters and shapers and things. Nasty hungry little nanomachines. Gray goo, in other words.”

“Oh.” Vassily looked ill. “You mean, they’re going to—”

“Come out to meet the fleet and take a sniff, by the look of it. Unfortunately, I don’t think Commodore Bauer realizes that if he doesn’t make friendly noises, they’re all going to die; he still thinks it’s a battle, the kind you fight with missiles and guns. If they do decide to talk — well, the Festival is an infovore.

We’re perfectly safe as long as we can keep it entertained and don’t shoot at it. Luckily, it doesn’t understand humor; finds it fascinating, but doesn’t quite get it. As long as we keep it entertained it won’t eat us; we may even be able to escalate matters to a controlling intelligence that can let us off the Bouncers’ hook and let us land safely.” He reached into the bag of equipment he’d dredged out of the locker behind the seats. “Ready to start broadcasting, Rachel? Here, kid, put this on. It’s showtime.” The red nose floating in the air in front of Vassily’s face seemed to be mocking him.