Singularity Sky (28 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re boxed!”

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

Three outbound antimissiles.”

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

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

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

“Aye aye.”

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

“How many, Lieutenant?”

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

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

“Jump in five. Four—”

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

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

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

“Two.”

“Nine K.”

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

“One. Jump commit.”

The red emergency lights dimmed as the main overhead lights came up.

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

Diplomatic Behavior

Meanwhile, two thousand years away, a small boy lay curled in darkness, whimpering in the grip of a dream of empire.

Felix moaned and shivered and dragged the tattered blanket closer around his shoulders. The abandoned hayloft was unheated, and the gaps between the log walls admitted a furious draft, but at least it was a roof over his head. It was warmer than the stony ground. Wolves roamed the untamed wilderness, and for a lad to sleep beneath the stars at this time of year was hazardous even in normal times.

Raven roosted on the thick oak beam above Felix’s head, his long black beak tucked under one wing. Occasionally, he would wake for a moment, shake his feathers out, shuffle from one foot to the other, and glance around. But as long as the door stayed barred, nothing could reach them that he couldn’t deal with; and so he would rejoin his master in sleep.

Rain battered on the roof, occasionally leaking through the sods that covered the rough-cut timber, dripping to the floor in thin cold streams. The smell of half-decayed hay hung heavy in the air. Felix hadn’t dared light a fire after Mr. Rabbit pointed out how dangerous that could be. There were things out there that could see heat, silent things without mouths. Things that liked to eat little boys’ brains.

Felix dreamed of Imperial orders, men in shiny uniforms, and women in silky gowns; of starships and cavalry parades and ceremonies and rituals.

But his dreams were invaded by a tired and pervasive cynicism. The nobles and officers were corrupt hangers-on, their women grasping harpies searching for security. The ceremonies and rituals were meaningless and empty, a charade concealing a ghastly system of institutional injustices orchestrated to support the excesses of the rulers. Dreaming of New Prague, he felt himself to be a duke or prince, mired in a dung heap, chained down by responsibility and bureaucracy, unable to move despite the juggernaut of decaying corruption bearing down on him.

When he twitched and cried out in his dream, Mr. Rabbit crawled closer and sprawled against him, damp fur rising and falling with his breath.

Presently Felix eased deeper into sleep, and Mr. Rabbit rolled away, curling nose to tail to resume his nightly regurgitation and cud-chewing. If it was hard being a small boy in a time of rapid change, it was a doubly hard burden to be a meter-tall rabbit cursed with human sentience and cunicular instincts.

In the early-morning light, Felix yawned, rubbed his eyes, and stretched stiffly, shivering with cold. “Rabbit?”

“Caaaw!” Raven flapped down from overhead and hopped closer, head cocked to one side. “Rabbit gone to vill-lage.”

Felix blinked, slowly. “I wish he’d waited.” He shivered, feeling a sense of loneliness very alien to a nine-year-old. He stood up and began to pack his possessions into a battered-looking haversack; a blanket, a small tin can, a half-empty box of matches, and one of the curious metal phones by which the Festival communicated with people. He paused over the phone for a moment, but eventually his sense of urgency won, and he shoved it into the pack. “Let’s play hunt the wabbit,” he said, and opened the door.

It was a cold, bright morning, and the ground in the abandoned farmyard was ankle deep in squelching mud. The blackened ruin of the house squatted on the other side of the quagmire like the stump of a tree struck by lightning, the Holy Father’s fire. Behind it, a patch of dusty gray mud showed the depletion layer where the Festival’s nanosystems had sucked the soil dry of trace elements, building something huge; it was almost certainly connected with the disappearance of the farmer and his family.

The village lay about two kilometers downhill from the farmhouse, around a bend in the narrow dirt track, past a copse of tall pine trees. Felix shrugged on his backpack and, after a brief pause to piss against the fire-blackened wall of the house, slowly headed down the road. He felt like whistling or singing, but kept his voice to himself; there was no telling what lived in the woods hereabouts, and he wasn’t inclined to ignore Mr. Rabbit’s warnings.

He was a very serious little boy, very grown-up.

Raven hopped after him, then flapped forward heavily and landed in the ditch some way down the path. His head ducked repeatedly. “Brrrreak-fast!”

he cawed.

“Oh, good!” Felix hurried to catch up, but when he saw what Raven had found to eat he turned away abruptly and pinched the bridge of his nose until the tears came, trying not to gag. Tears came hard; a long time ago, a very long distance away, Nurse had told him, “Big boys don’t cry.” But he knew better now. He’d seen much bigger boys crying, men even, as they were stood up against the bullet-pocked wall. (Some of them didn’t cry, some of them held themselves stiffly upright, but it made no difference in the end.) “Sometimes I hate you, Raven.”

“Caaww?” Raven looked up at him. The thing in the ditch was still wearing a little girl’s dress. “Hungrrry.”

“You might be—but I we’ve got to find Pyotr. Before the Mimes catch us.”

Felix looked over his shoulder nervously. They’d been running scared, one jump ahead of the Mimes, for the past three days. The Mimes moved slowly, frequently fighting an invisible wind or trying to feel their way around intangible buildings, but they were remorseless. Mimes never slept, or blinked, or stopped moving.

A hundred meters closer to the village, the phone woke up. It chirped like a curious kitten until Felix rummaged through his bag and pulled it out.

“Leave me alone!” he exclaimed, exasperated.

“Felix? It’s Mr. Rabbit.”

“What?” He looked at the phone, startled. Chrome highlights glinted beneath grubby oil-slick fingerprints.

“It’s me. Your flop-eared friend. I’m in the village. Listen, don’t come any closer.”

“Why not?” He frowned and carried on walking.

“They’re here. My luck ran out; don’t think I can get away. You—” The giant lagomorph’s voice broke into something utterly inhuman for a moment, a rodent squeal of rage and fright. “—Behind you, too! Go cross-country. Run, boy.”

The phone buzzed, disconnected. Felix raised it angrily, meaning to dash it to the ground, then stopped. Ahead of him. Raven stared at him, beady-eyed and bloody-beaked. “Fly over the village,” Felix ordered the bird. “Tell me what you see.”

“Caaaw!” Raven took a running leap into the air, lumbering heavily over the grass, then climbing up over the treetops. Felix looked at the phone again, mingled rage and grief in his eyes. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair! All he wanted was to be young and carefree, and to have fun. The companions came later; at first there had been Mrs. Hedgehog as well, but she’d been killed by a random Fringe performance, electrical discharges flashing to ground from an ionosphere raped by induced solar flares. The Fringe was like that; a mindless thing, infinitely dangerous and fickle, as trustworthy as a venomous snake but sometimes capable of producing works of great beauty. (The auroral displays had lasted for weeks.) Felix looked around, nervously. Over the hedgerow, back down the road, something seemed to move. He held the phone to his cheek. “Somebody talk to me?”

“Will you entertain us?”

“I don’t know how!” he burst out.

“Tell story. Provide entertaining formal proof of correctness. Sing, dance, clap your hands.”

“What will you do for me in return?”

“What do you require?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded tinny, distant, compressed through the bandwidth ligature of a causal channel.

“Bad men are after me. They throw custard pies, turn me into one of them.

Can you stop them? Protect me from the Mimes?”

“Tell story.” It wasn’t a statement or a question, it was an order.

Felix took a deep breath. He glanced up and saw Raven circling overhead.

He jumped the ditch, then ducked under the first branches and began to weave his way into the woods. He talked as he walked. “In the beginning there was a duke who lived in a palace, on the banks of the river, overlooking the only city on the world. He wasn’t a very wise duke, but he did what he thought was best for his people. Then one morning, it began to rain telephones, and the world changed. This is the duke’s story.”

It was a long and rambling story, and it went on for some time. How the duke’s palace had been besieged by anarchist terrorists, who unleashed chaos and plastic cutlery on the town. All his soldiers deserted after looting the palace and the zoo; he escaped through a secret passage under the Curator’s waiting rooms in the sub-sub-basement. The elderly duke had escaped with three trusty retainers. Grief-stricken, he had barely been able to understand what had happened to his world. Why had everything changed? A telephone chirped at him, like a curious kitten, from the rubbish in a back alley. He bent to pick it up and the motion saved his life for two renegade soldiers shot at him with their rifles. They killed Citizen Von Beck, but not before the Citizen marked them with his slow gun—for the Citizens of the Curator’s Office were allowed to use forbidden weapons in the course of their duties. (Bullets from a slow gun flew on hummingbird wings, seeking their prey wherever they might flee. Bullets from a slow gun killed by stinging with their neurotoxin barbettes, like wasps with secret police insignia. They were a terror weapon, to demonstrate the horrors of unrestricted technology.)

Felix slipped down a root-woven embankment and crossed a clearing studded with green-sprouting stumps as he continued. The duke talked to the phone in his despair, and it offered him three wishes. He asked to be made young again, thinking it a bitter joke; to his surprise, his youth was magically restored. Next, he asked for companions; and he was given friends, wonderful friends, who would do anything for him and ask nothing in return. Even the third wish, the little-boy wish made in the first flush of restored youth, had been granted. None of which was exactly what he’d wanted, or would have asked for had he not been in a very disturbed state of mind at the time, but it was better than the wishes some people he’d met subsequently had made. (The kulak whose wish had been a goose that laid golden eggs, for example. It was a wonderful animal, until you held it close to a railway man’s dosimeter and discovered the deluge of ionizing radiation spewing invisibly from the nuclear alchemist’s stone in its gizzard.

Which you only thought to do when the bloody stools became too much to bear, and your hair began to fall out in clumps.)

The duke-turned-child had walked across three hundred kilometers in the past month, living from hand to mouth. His friends had looked after him, though. Raven, who could see over and around things, told him of traps or ambushes or deadfalls before he walked into them. Mr. Rabbit hopped along at his side, and with his acute hearing, nose for trouble, and plain, old-fashioned common sense, kept him from starving or freezing to death.

Mrs. Hedgehog had helped, too, bustling around, cooking and cleaning and keeping camp, occasionally fending off beggars and indigent trash with her bristles and sharp teeth. That was before the lightning storm took her.