Singularity Sky (7 page)

Blood, tissues, teeth, and organs began to congeal in place as the nano-assemblers pumped synthetic enzymes, DNA, ribosomes, and other cellular machinery into the lipid vesicles that were due to become living cells.

Presently, the Critics’ bodies began to twitch.

The Spacelike Horizon

The door to the study opened and a liveried footman entered. “Commodore Bauer to see the admiral,” he announced.

“Sh-show him in, then!”

Commodore Bauer entered the Admiral’s study and saluted. Seated behind an imposing hardwood desk in the center of the huge room (paneled in ferociously expensive imported hardwoods, with raw silk curtains and not a little gold leaf on the cornices), the admiral looked tiny: a wizened turtle sporting a walrus moustache, adrift on a sea of blue-and-silver carpet.

Nevertheless, he was in good condition today, wearing his uniform, resplendent with decorations and ribbons, and seated in a real chair.

“Commmmmander. Welcome. Please be seated.”

Commodore Bauer walked toward the desk and took the indicated chair.

“And how is your father these days? It’s—it’s a while since I saw him.”

“He’s very well sir.” At least as well as he could be, considering he died four years ago. Bauer looked at his superior sadly. Once the sharpest saber in the New Republic’s arsenal, Rear Admiral Kurtz was rusting at a terrifying rate: they must already be planning the funeral. He still had periods of lucidity, sometimes quite extended ones, but forcing him to go on this expedition—and no officer could realistically refuse a royal commission and expect to continue to hold his post— was positively cruel; surely His Majesty must have known about his state? “May I ask why you summoned me, sir?”

“Ah—ah—ah, yes.” The Admiral jerked as if someone had just administered an electric shock to him. Suddenly his expression tightened. “I must apologize, Commodore: I have too many vague moments. I wanted to discuss the flisposition of the—I mean, the disposition—the fleet. Obviously you will be in day-to-day command of the task force, and in overall tactical command once it arrives at Rochard’s World. The matter of planning, however, is one to which I feel I can make a contribution.” A wan smile flitted across his face. “Do you agree with this?”

“Ah, yes, sir.” Bauer nodded, slightly encouraged. The grand old man might be drifting into senility, but he was still razor-sharp during his better moments: if he was willing to sit back and let Bauer do most of the driving, perhaps things might work out. (As long as he remembered who Bauer was, the commodore reminded himself.) They’d worked together before: Bauer had been a junior lieutenant under captain Kurtz during the Invasion of Thermidor, and had a keen respect for his intellect, not to mention his dogged refusal to back down in the face of heavy opposition. “I was led to believe that the General Staff Directorate has some unusual plans for lifting the siege; is this what you have in mind?”

“Yes.” Admiral Kurtz pointed at a red leather folder lying on his desk.

“Contingency Omega. I had a ha-hand in the first paper, ten years ago, but I fear younger minds will have to refine it into a plan of attack.”

“Contingency Omega.” Bauer paused. “Wasn’t that shelved, because of, ah, legal concerns?”

“Yes.” Kurtz nodded. “But only as a plan of att-att-attack. We are not allowed to fly closed timelike paths—use faster-than-light travel to arrive before war breaks out. Leads to all— all—sorts of bother. Neighbors say God doesn’t like it. Blithering nonsense if you ask me. But we’ve already been attacked. They came to us. So we can arrive in our own past, but after the attack began: I must confess, I think it is a bit of a pathetic excuse, but there we are. Contingency Omega it is.”

“Oh.” Bauer reached toward the red folder. “May I?”

“Cer-certainly.”

The Commodore began to read.

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century.

However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

A couple of these techniques relied on quantum trickery, strange hacks involving Bose-Einstein condensates to flip bits in quantum dots separated by light-years; as with the causal channel, the entangled dots had to be pulled apart at slower-than-light speeds, making them fine for communication but useless for transporting bodies. Some of them—like the Eschaton’s wormholes—were inexplicable, relying on principles no human physicist had yet discovered. But two of them were viable propulsion systems for spaceships; the Linde-Alcubierre expansion reciprocal, and the jump drive. The former set up a wave of expansion and contraction in the space behind and in front of the ship: it was peerlessly elegant, and more than somewhat dangerous—a spacecraft trying to navigate through the dense manifold of space-time ran the risk of being blown apart by a stray dust grain.

The jump drive was, to say the least, more reliable, barring a few quirks. A spaceship equipped with it would accelerate out from the nearest star’s gravity well. Identifying a point of equipotential flat space-time near the target star, the ship would light up the drive field generator, and the entire spaceship could then tunnel between the two points without ever actually being between them. (Assuming, of course, that the target star was more or less in the same place and the same state that it appeared to be when the starship lit off its drive field—if it wasn’t, nobody would ever see that ship again.)

But the jump drive had huge problems for the military. For one thing, it only worked in flat space-time, a very long way out from stars or planets, which meant you had to arrive some way out, which in turn meant that anyone you were attacking could see you coming. For another thing, it didn’t have a very long range. The farther you tried to jump, the higher the probability that conditions at your destination point weren’t what you were expecting, creating more work for the loss adjusters. Most seriously, it created a tunnel between equipotential points in space-time. Miscalculate a jump and you could find yourself in the absolute past, relative to both your starting point and the destination. You might not know it until you went home, but you’d just violated causality. And the Eschaton had a serious problem with people who did that.

This was why Contingency Omega was one of the more sensitive documents in the New Republican Navy’s war plan library. Contingency Omega discussed possible ways and means of using causality violation—time travel within the preferred reference frame—for strategic advantage.

Rochard’s World was a good forty light-years from New Austria; normally that meant five to eight jumps, a fairly serious journey lasting three or four weeks. Now, in time of war, the direct approach zones from New Austria could be presumed to be under guard. Any attack fleet would have to jump around the Queen’s Head Nebula, an effectively impassable cloud within which three or four protostellar objects were forming. And to exercise Contingency Omega—delicately balancing their arrival time against the receipt of the first distress signal from Rochard’s World, so that no absolute causality violation would take place but their arrival would take their enemies by surprise—well, that would add even more jumps, taking them deep into their own future light cone before looping back into the past, just inside the spacelike event horizon.

It was, Bauer realized, going to be the longest-range military operation in the history of the New Republic. And—God help him—it was his job to make sure it worked.

Burya Rubenstein whacked on the crude log table with a worn-out felt boot.

“Silence!” he yelled. Nobody paid any attention; annoyed, he pulled out the compact pistol the trade machine had fabricated for him and fired into the ceiling. It only buzzed quietly, but the resulting fall of plaster dust got everybody’s attention. In the midst of all the choking and coughing, he barked, “Committee will come to order!”

“Why should we?” demanded a heckler at the back of the packed beer hall.

“Because if you don’t shut up and let me talk, you’ll have to answer to Politovsky and his dragoons. The worst I’ll do to you is shoot you—if the Duke gets his hands on you, you might have to work for a living!” Laughter.

“His living. What we’ve got here is an unprecedented opportunity to cast off the shackles of economic slavery that bind us to soil and factory, and bring about an age of enlightened social mobility in which we are free to better ourselves, contribute to the common good, and learn to work smarter and live faster. But, comrades, the forces of reaction are ruthless and vigilant; even now a Navy shuttle is ferrying soldiers to Outer Chelm, which they plan to take and turn into a strongpoint against us.”

Oleg Timoshevski stood up with an impressive whining and clanking. “No worries! We’ll smash ‘em!” He waved his left arm in the air, and his fist morphed into the unmistakable shape of a gun launcher. Having leapt into the pool of available personal augmentation techniques with the exuberance of the born cyborg, he could pose as a poster for the Transhu-manist Front, or even the Space and Freedom Party.

“That’s enough, Oleg.” Burya glared at him, then turned back to the audience. “We can’t afford to win this by violence,” he stressed. “In the short term, that may be tempting, but it will only serve to discredit us with the masses, and tradition tells us that, without the masses on our side, there can be no revolution. We have to prove that the forces of reaction corrode before our peace-loving forces for enterprise and progress without the need for repression—or ultimately all we will succeed in doing is supplanting those forces, and in so doing become indistinguishable from them. Is that what you want?”

“No! Yes! NO!” He winced at the furor that washed across the large room.

The delegates were becoming exuberant, inflated with a sense of their own irresistible destiny, and far too much free wheat beer and vodka. (It might be synthetic, but it was indistinguishable from the real thing.)

“Comrades!” A fair-haired man, middle-aged and of sallow complexion, stood inside the main door to the hall. “Your attention please! Reactionary echelons of the imperialist junta are moving to encircle the Northern Parade Field! The free market is in danger!”

“Oh bugger,” muttered Marcus Wolff.

“Go see to it, will you?” Burya asked. ‘Take Oleg, get him out of my hair, and I’ll hold the fort here. Try to find something for Jaroslav to do while you’re about it—he can juggle or fire his water pistol at the soldiers or something; I can’t do with him getting underfoot.“

“Will do that, boss. Are you serious about, uh, not breaking heads?”

“Am I serious?” Rubenstein shrugged. “I’d rather we didn’t go nuclear, but feel free to do anything necessary to gain the upper hand—as long as we keep the moral high ground. If possible. We don’t need a fight now; it’s too early. Hold off for a week, and the guards will be deserting like rats leaving a sinking ship. Just try to divert them for now. I’ve got a communique to issue which ought to put the cat among the pigeons with the lackeys of the ruling class.”

Wolff stood and walked around to Timoshevski’s table. “Oleg, come with me. We have a job to do.” Burya barely noticed: he was engrossed, nose down in the manual of a word processor that the horn of plenty had dropped in his lap. After spending his whole life writing longhand or using a laborious manual typewriter, this was altogether too much like black magic, he reflected. If only he could figure out how to get it to count the number of words in a paragraph, he’d be happy: but without being able to cast off, how could he possibly work out how much lead type would be needed to fill a column properly?

The revolutionary congress had been bottled up in the old Corn Exchange for three days now. Bizarre growths like black metal ferns had colonized the roof, turning sunlight and atmospheric pollution into electricity and brightly colored plastic cutlery. Godunov, who was supposed to be in charge of catering, had complained bitterly at the lack of tableware (as if any true revolutionary would bother with such trivia) until Misha, who had gotten much deeper into direct brain interfaces than even Oleg, twitched his nose and instructed the things on the roof to start producing implements.

Then Misha went away on some errand, and nobody could turn the spork factory off. Luckily there seemed to be no shortage of food, munitions, or anything else for that matter: it seemed that Burya’s bluff had convinced the Duke that the democratic soviet really did have nuclear weapons, and for the time being the dragoons were steering well clear of the yellow brick edifice at the far end of Freedom Square.

“Burya! Come quickly! Trouble at the gates!”

Rubenstein looked up from his draft proclamation. “What is it?” he snapped.

“Speak clearly!”

The comrade (Petrov, wasn’t that his name?) skidded to a halt in front of his desk. “Soldiers,” he gasped.

“Aha.” Burya stood. “Are they shooting yet? No? Then I will talk to them.”

He stretched, trying to ease the stiffness from his aching muscles and blinking away tiredness. ‘Take me to them.“

A small crowd was milling around the gates to the Corn Exchange. Peasant women with head scarves, workers from the ironworks on the far side of town—idle since their entire factory had been replaced by a miraculous, almost organic robot complex that was still extending itself—even a few gaunt, shaven-headed zeks from the corrective labor camp behind the castle: all milling around a small clump of frightened-looking soldiers. “What is going on?” demanded Rubenstein.

“These men, they say—”

“Let them speak for themselves.” Burya pointed to the one nearest the gate.

“You. You aren’t shooting at us, so why are you here, comrade?”

“I, uh,” the trooper paused, looking puzzled.

“We’s sick of being pushed around by them aristocrats, that’s wot,” said his neighbor, a beanpole-shaped man with a sallow complexion and a tall fur hat that most certainly wasn’t standard-issue uniform. “Them royalist parasite bastids, they’s locked up in ‘em’s castle drinking champagne and ’specting us to die keeping ‘em safe. While out here all ’uns enjoying themselves and it’s like the end of the regime, like? I mean, wot’s going on?