Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Rachel Mansour worked hard at suppressing the treacherous grin of satisfaction that kept threatening to escape. The reaction she’d elicited from the security goons at the entrance to the base almost made up for the preceding three months of isolation and paranoia. They’d barely managed to hold her up before her phone call to the embassy dragged a flustered lieutenant commander out to blush red and stammer in front of her. When he’d half questioned her intent, she’d rammed her credentials down his throat with gusto; he escorted her with her luggage directly to the shuttlecraft for transfer to the battlecruiser, shuddering slightly and glancing over his shoulder all the way. (Evidently self-propelled shipping chests were yet another technology that the New Republic shunned.) Ludmilla Jindrisek, the cover identity she’d been using for the past month, had dissolved beneath the morning shower; Rachel Mansour, Special Agent, UN Standing Committee on Multilateral Interstellar Disarmament, stepped out of it. Ludmilla Jindrisek simpered, wore fashionable dresses, and deferred to wise male heads; Special Agent Mansour had started her career in bomb disposal (defusing terrorist nukes and disassemblers), graduated to calling in naval strikes on recalcitrant treaty-breakers, and wore a black paramilitary uniform designed specifically to impress militaristic outworlder hicks. It was, she noted, interesting to observe the effect the change of costume had on people, especially as she held her notional rank through equivalence, rather than actual military service. Meanwhile she watched her fellow passengers waiting under the beady eye of Chief Petty Officer Moronici.

The airlock door finally rolled open. “Attention!” barked the CPO. The ratings waiting in the bay stood sharply to attention. An officer ducked through the lock and straightened up: Moronici saluted, and he returned the gesture, ignoring Rachel.

“Very good there,” said the officer. “Chief Moronici, get these kids aboard. Don’t bother waiting for me, I’ve got business that’ll keep me here until the next run.” He glanced at Rachel. “You. What are you doing here?”

Rachel pointed her pass at him. “Diplomatic corps. I’m attached to the Admiral’s staff, by special order of Archduke Michael, Lieutenant.”

The Lieutenant gaped. “But you’re a—”

“—colonel in the United Nations of Earth Security Council combined armed forces. What part of ‘by special order of Archduke Michael’ don’t you understand? Are you going to stand there gaping, or are you going to invite me aboard?”

“Urgh. Um, yes.” The Lieutenant disappeared back into the shuttle’s flight deck; reappeared a minute later. “Um. Colonel, ah, Mansour? Please come aboard.”

Rachel nodded and walked past him. Still carefully expressionless, she seated herself immediately behind the flight deck door, in officer country. And listened.

The CPO was educating the new intake. “At ease, you lads,” he growled. “Find yerselves a seat. Front row, facing back, that’s right! Now buckle in. All six points, that’s right. Check the seat in front of you for a sick bag. Welcome to the vomit comet; this boat’s too small to have any gravity emulators and doesn’t accelerate faster’n a quadriplegic in a wheelbarrow, so if you get sick in free fall, you’re damn well going to throw up into those bags. Anyone who pukes up on the furniture and fittings can spend the next week cleaning ’em. Got that?”

Everyone nodded. Rachel felt cautiously optimistic; it looked as if everyone else on this run, apart from Chief Moronici, was a new assignment to the ship. Which meant her information was probably correct: they were working up to wartime levels, and departure wouldn’t be delayed long.

The door to the passenger cabin slid closed; there was a rumble below as automatic pallets rolled in and out of the shuttle’s cargo bay. Moronici knocked on the forward door and went through when it opened; he reappeared a minute later. “Launch in two minutes,” he announced. “Hang on tight!” The two minutes passed at a snail’s pace. Banging and thumping announced that dockside fuel and support lines were disconnecting; then there was a lurch and a jolt followed by a loud hissing that died away as the airlock seal was broken behind them. “You’re all new fish here,” Chief Moronici told the flyers. “Not surprising as we’re taking on a lot of new crew. Start of a new conscription cycle. Me,”—he pointed a meaty thumb at his chest—“I’m not a conscript. I live on the ship we’re going to. And I want to live on it long enough to collect my pension. Which means I don’t intend to let you, or anyone else, do anything that endangers me or my home. The first rule of space travel”—they lurched sideways, drunkenly, and there was a disconcertingly loud rattle from underneath— “is that mistakes are fatal.

Space isn’t friendly, it kills you. And there are no second chances.” As if to emphasize the point, the bottom suddenly dropped out of Rachel’s stomach. For a moment, she felt as if a huge, rubbery, invisible gripper was trying to pull her apart — and then she was floating. The ratings all looked as surprised as Chief Moronici looked smug.

“Main engine should come on in about five minutes,” Moronici announced. Banging and clicking shuddered through the cramped cabin, as it veered gently to the left: thrusters were busy nudging it out of the dock. “Like I was saying, mistakes here tend to kill people. And I have no intention of letting you kill me. Which is why, while you’re on board the Lord Vanek , you pukes will do exactly what I, or any other PO, or any officer, tells you to do. And you will do it with a shit-eating grin, or I will ram your head so far up your ass you’ll be able to give yourself a tonsillectomy with your teeth. Is that understood?” He continued to ignore Rachel, implicitly acknowledging that she lay outside his reach.

The ratings nodded. One of them, green-faced, gulped, and Moronici swiftly yanked a sick bag from the back of an adjacent seat and held it in front of the man’s face. Rachel saw what he was trying to do; the pep talk was as much a distraction from the disorientation of free fall as anything else.

Rachel closed her eyes and breathed deeply — then regretted it: the shuttle stank of stale sweat, with a faint undertone of ozone and the sickly-sweet odor of acetone. It had been a long time since she’d prayed for anything, but right now she was praying with all her might for this ride in a tin can to come to an end. It was the crummiest excuse for a shuttle she’d been on in decades, an old banger like something out of an historical drama. It seemed to go on and on. Until, of course, it stopped with a buffet and clang as they latched on to the Lord Vanek’s stabilized docking adapter, then a grinding creak as it pulled them in and spun them up, and a hiss as pressure equalized.

“Erm, Colonel?”

She opened her eyes. It was CPO Moronici. He looked somewhat green, as if unsure how to deal with her. “It’s alright, Chief. I’ve gone aboard foreign naval vessels before.” She stood. “Is there anyone waiting for me?”

“Yes’m.” He stared straight ahead, as if outrageously embarrassed.

“Fine.” She unbuckled, stood, feeling the uneven gravity of the battlecruiser’s spin, and adjusted her beret. “Let me at them.”

The airlock opened. “Section, present — arms!”

She stepped forward into the docking bay, feeling the incredulous stares from all sides. A senior officer, a commander if she read his insignia correctly, was waiting for her, face stiffly frozen to conceal the inevitable surprise. “Colonel Mansour, UN Disarmament Inspectorate,” she said. “Hello, Commander—”

“Murametz.” He blinked, perplexed. “Ah, your papers? Lieutenant Menvik says you’re attached to the Admiral’s staff. But they didn’t tell us to expect you—”