Singularity Sky (30 page)

Sauer sat up. He put his pipe down; it had flamed out, and though the bowl was hot to the touch, it held nothing but white-stained black shreds. “You were wondering if I could sign him over to you and put you on the slow boat home with your man in tow.”

Vassily half smiled, embarrassed. “Exactly right, I’m sure. The man’s guilty as hell, anyone can see that; he needs to be sent home for a proper trial and execution—what do you say?”

Sauer leaned back in his chair and contemplated the analytical engine.

“You have a point,” he admitted. “But things aren’t quite so clear-cut from where I’m sitting.” He relit his pipe.

“Nice tobacco, sir,” ventured Vassily. “Tastes a bit funny, though. Very relaxing.”

“That’ll be the opium,” said Sauer. “Good stuff, long as you don’t overdo it.”

He puffed contentedly for a minute. “Why do you think Springfield’s in the brig in the first place?”

Vassily looked puzzled. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He violated Imperial regulations. In fact, that’s just what I’d been looking for.”

“Executing him isn’t going to make it easy for the Admiralty to convince foreign engineers to come work for us, though, is it?” Sauer sucked on his cigar. “If he was a spacer, lad, he’d have done the frog kick in the airlock already. I’ll tell you what. If you insist on dragging him home on the basis of what you found on him, all that will happen is that the Admiralty will sit on it for a few months, hold an inquiry, conclude that no real harm was done, court-martial him for something minor, and sentence him to time served—on general principles, that is—and leave you looking like an idiot. You don’t want to do that; trust me, putting a blot on your record card at this stage in the game is a bad move.”

“Ah, so what do you suggest, sir?”

“Well.” Sauer stubbed out his cigar and looked at it regretfully. “I think you’re going to have to decide whether or not to have a little flutter on the horses.”

“Horses, sir?”

“Gambling, Mr. Muller, gambling. Double or quits time. You have decided that this engineer is working for the skirt from Earth, no? It seems a justifiable suspicion to me, but there is a lack of firm evidence other than the disgraceful way she plays for him. Which, let us make no mistake, could equally well be innocent—disreputable but innocent of actual criminal intent against the Republic, I say. In any event, she has made no sign of wrongdoing, other than possessing proscribed instruments in her diplomatic bag and generally being detrimental to morale by virtue of her rather unvirtuous conduct. We have no grounds for censure, much less for declaring her persona non grata. And irritating though she may be, her presence on this mission was decreed by His Excellency the Archduke. So I think the time has come for you to either shit or get off the can. Either accept that Mr. Springfield is probably going to waltz free, or shoot for the bigger target and hope you find something big to pin on her so that we can overcome her immunity.”

Vassily turned pale. Perhaps it hadn’t really sunk in until now; he’d overstepped his authority already, rummaging in Rachel’s cabin, and either he must find a justification, or his future was in jeopardy. “I’ll gamble, sir. Do you have any recommendations, though? It seems like an awfully big step; I wouldn’t want to make any mistakes.”

Sauer grinned, not unpleasantly. “Don’t worry, you won’t. There’re others who want her out of the way and are willing to stick their necks out a bit to help. Here’s how we’ll flush her cover …”

Invitation To An Execution

A ragged row of crucifixes capped the hill overlooking the road to Plotsk.

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

“Kill them all, God will know his own,” Sister Seventh commented mockingly as she turned the doorway to face the grisly row. “Not is what their nest father-mother’s said in times gone before?”

Burya Rubenstein shivered with cold as the bird-legged hut strode along the road from Novy Petrograd. It was a chilly morning, and the fresh air was overlaid with a tantalizingly familiar odor, halfway between the brimstone crackle of gunpowder and something spicy-sweet. No smell of roast pork: they’d burned the monastery after killing the monks, not before. “Who did this?” he asked, sounding much calmer than he felt.

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

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

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

Expect resurrection imminently, if not consensually.”

“Headlaunchers?”

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

Burya peered at the row of crosses. One of them had no skull, and the top of the crucifix was charred. ‘“I'm going to be sick—”

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

“Ready to continue? Food needed?”

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

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

“To Criticize the culprits. This is not art.“ Sister Seventh bared her fangs at the hillside in an angry gape. ”No esthetics! Zip plausibility! Pas de preservatives!”

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

“Is it anyone in particular this time? Or are you just trying to bore me to death?”

The huge mole-rat whirled to face him, breath hissing between her teeth.

For a moment he flinched, seeing grinning angry death in her eyes. Then the fire dimmed back to her usual glare of cynical amusement. “Critics know who did this thing,” she rasped. “Come judge, come Criticize.”

The walking hut marched on, carrying them away from the execution ground. Unseen from the vestibule, one of the crucified monk’s habits began to smolder. His skull exploded with a gout of blue flame and a loud bang as something the size of a fist flew up from it, a glaring white shock contrail streaming behind. One more monk’s mind—or what had been left of it after a day of crucifixion, by the time the headlaunch seed got to it—was on its way into orbit, to meet the Festival datavores.

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

“Machines live and breed. Cornucopia evolution.”

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

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

“Devolves into—” He stared at the Critic. “You mean this is only a temporary condition?”

Sister Seventh looked at him placidly. “What made you think otherwise?”

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

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

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

Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral. Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half gunpowder and half orchids, was back again.

Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deeply. “One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bushbot baby uploads and cyborg militia.

Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse.”

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

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

“What’s a merkin way?” Burya asked, peeling open a fat garlic bratwurst and, with the aid of an encrusted penknife, chopping large chunks off it and stuffing them into his mouth. His beard itched ferociously, he hadn’t bathed in days, and worst of all, he felt he was beginning to understand Sister Seventh. (Nobody should have to understand a Critic; it was cruel and unusual punishment.)

A bright green glare flashed on above them, shining starkly in through the doorway and lighting up the dingy corners of the hut. “Attention! You have entered a quarantined area! Identify yourselves immediately!” A deep bass humming shook Burya to his bones. He cringed and blinked, dropping his breakfast sausage.

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

“Answer them?”

“ATTENTION! Thirty seconds to comply!”

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

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

Burya gaped up at the hovering emerald diamond. Then he looked down.

Standing in the road before him was one of Timoshevski’s guards—but not as Burya had known him back in Novy Petrograd.

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

Thirty minutes ago an able flyer had rapped on her door. She’d hastily buttoned her tunic and opened it. “Lieutenant Sauer sends his compliments, ma’am, and says to remind you that the court-martial convenes this afternoon at 1400.”

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

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

“That’s quite alright. Go away.”

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” she asked icily.

“Can’t go executing a man without a fair trial first,” Ilya said, barely bothering to conceal his contempt. He rapped his glass down next to the samovar. “Trial’s in this very room, this afternoon. Be seeing you.”

The next thing she knew she was back in her cabin. She couldn’t remember getting there; she felt cold and sick. They want to kill Martin, she realized. Because they can’t get at me any other way. She cursed herself for a fool. Who was behind it, how many enemies had she racked up? Was it the Admiral? (Doubtful, he didn’t need the formality of a trial if he wanted to have someone shot.) Or Ilya—yes, there was someone who’d taken against her. Or the kid spook, the wet-behind-the-ears secret policeman?