Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“I only joined the Navy to see the fleshpots of Malacia,” Grubor observed. “Spend too long nursing the ship’s sewage-processing farm and before long the bridge crew starts treating you like a loose floater in free fall. They go off to receptions and suchlike whenever we enter port, but all I get is a chance to flush the silage tanks and study for the engineering board exams.”

“Fleshpots!” Boursy snorted. “Pavel, you take your prospects too seriously. There’re no fleshpots on Malacia that you or I would be allowed anywhere near. Most places I can’t so much as breathe without Sauer taking notes on how well I’ve polished my tonsils; and then the place stinks, or it’s full of evil bugs, or the natives are politically unsound. Or weird. Or deformed, and into hideous and unnatural sexual perversions. You name it.”

“Still.” Grubor studied his drink. “It would have been nice to get to see at least one hideous and unnatural sexual perversion.”

Kravchuk twisted the lid off the bottle and pointed it in the direction of their glasses. Grubor shook his head; Boursy extended his for a top-up. “What I want to know is how we’re going to get back,” Kravchuk muttered. “I don’t understand how we can do that. Time only goes one way, doesn’t it?

Stands to reason.”

“Reason, schmeason.” Grubor took a mouthful of spirit. “It doesn’t have to work that way. Not just

‘cause you want it to.” He glanced around. “No ears, eh? Listen, I think we’re in it up to our necks.

There’s this secret drive fix they bought from Lord God-knows-where, that lets us do weird things with the time axis in our jumps. We only headed out to this blasted hole in space to minimize the chances of anyone finding us — or of the jumps going wrong. They’re looking for some kind of time capsule from home to tell us what to do next, what happened in the history books. Then we go back — farther than we came to get here, by a different route — and get where we’re going before we set off. With me so far?

But the real problem is God. They’re planning on breaking the Third Commandment.” Boursy crossed himself and looked puzzled. “What, disrespecting the holy father and mother? My family—”

“No, the one that says thou shalt not fuck with history or else , signed Yours Truly, God. That Third Commandment, the one burned into Thanksgiving Rock in letters six feet deep and thirty feet high. Got it?”

Boursy looked dubious. “It could have been some joker in orbit with a primary-phase free-electron laser—”

“Weren’t no such things in those days. I despair of you sometimes, I really do. Look, the fact is, we don’t know what in hell’s sixteen furnaces is waiting for us at Rochard’s World. So we’re sneaking up on it from behind, like the peasant in the story who goes hunting elephants with a mirror because he’s never seen one and he’s so afraid that—” Out of the corner of his eye, Grubor noted Sauer — unofficially the ship’s political officer — walk in the door.

“Who are you calling a cowardly peasant?” rumbled Boursy, also glancing at the door. “I’ve known the Captain for eighty-seven years, and he’s a good man! And the Admiral, are you calling the Admiral a fairy?”

“No, I’m just trying to point out that we’re all afraid of one thing or another and—” Grubor gesticulated in the wrong direction.

“Are you calling me a poof?” Boursy roared.

“No, I’m not!” Grubor shouted back at him. Spontaneous applause broke out around the room, and one of the junior cadets struck up a stirring march on the pianola. Unfortunately his piano-playing was noteworthy more for his enthusiasm than his melodious harmony, and the wardroom rapidly degenerated into a heckling match between the cadet’s supporters (who were few) and everyone else.

“Nothing can go wrong,” Boursy said smugly. “We’re going to sail into Rochard’s system and show the flag and send those degenerate alien invaders packing. You’ll see. Nothing will, er, did, go wrong.”

“I dunno about that.” Kravchuk, normally tight-lipped to the point of autism, allowed himself to relax slightly when drinking in private with his brother officers. “The foreign bint, the spy or diplomat or whatever. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on us, right? Don’t see why the Captain’s going so easy on

’em, I’d march ’er out the dorsal loading hatch as soon as let ’er keep breathing our good air.”

“She’s in this too,” said Boursy. “Bet you she wants us to win, too — look pretty damn stupid if we didn’t, what? Anyway, the woman’s got some kind of diplomatic status; she’s allowed to poke her nose into things if she wants.”

“Huh. Well, the bint had better keep her nose out of my missile loaders, less she wants to learn what the launch tubes look like from inside.”

Grubor stretched his legs out. “Just like Helsingus’s dog, huh.”

“Helsingus has a pet dog?” Boursy was suddenly all ears.

“He had a dog. Past tense. A toy schnauzer this long.” Grubor held his hands improbably close together.

“Little rat-brained weasel of an animal. Bad-tempered as hell, yapped like a bosun with a hangover, and it took to dumping in the corridor to show it owned the place. And nobody said anything — nobody could say anything.”

“What happened?” asked Boursy.

“Oh, one day it picked the wrong door to crap outside. The old man came out in a hurry and stepped in it before the rating I’d sent to follow the damn thing around got there to mop up. I heard about this, but I never saw the animal again; I think it got to walk home. And Helsingus sulked for weeks, I can tell you.”

“Dog curry in the wardroom,” said Kravchuk. “I had to pick hairs out of my teeth for days.” Boursy did a double take, then laughed hesitantly. Slugging back his schnapps to conceal his confusion, he asked: “Why did the Captain put up with it that long?”

“Who knows, indeed? For that matter, who the hell knows why the Admiral puts up with the foreign spy?” Grubor stared into his glass and sighed. “Maybe the Admiral actually wants her along. And then again, maybe he’s just forgotten about her …”

“Beg to report, I’ve got something, sir,” said the sensor op. He pointed excitedly at his plot on the bridge of the light cruiser Integrity .

Lieutenant Kokesova looked up, bleary-eyed. “What is it now, Menger?” he demanded. Six hours on this interminable dog-watch was getting to him. He rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed, and tried to focus them on his subordinate.

“Plot trace, sir. Looks like … hmm, yes. It’s a definite return, from the first illumination run on our survey sector. Six-point-two-three light-hours. Er, yes. Tiny little thing. Processing now … looks like a metal object of some kind, sir. Orbiting about two-point-seven billion kilometers out from the, uh, primary, pretty much at opposition to us right now, hence the delay.”

“Can you fix its size and orbital components?” asked the Lieutenant, leaning forward.

“Not yet, but soon, sir. We’ve been pinging on the hour; that should give me enough to refine a full set of elements pretty soon — say when the next response set comes in. But it’s a long way away, ‘bout four-zero astronomical units. Um, preliminary enhancement says it’s about five-zero meters in diameter, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Might be a lot smaller than that if it’s got reflectors.”

“Hmm.” Kokesova sat down. “Nav. You got anything else in this system that fits the bill?”

“No, sir.”

Kokesova glanced up at the forward screen; the huge red-rimmed eye of the primary glared back at him, and he shuddered, flicked a hand gesture to avert the evil eye. “Then I think we may have our time capsule. Menger, do you have any halo objects? Anything else at all?”