Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“Continue as ordered.”

“Continue as ordered, aye. Recce? Your ball.”

“Ready and waiting.” Lieutenant Marek turned around in his chair and looked at Ilya inquiringly. “Do you want to inspect the drone, sir?”

“No. If it doesn’t run, I’ll know whom to blame.” Ilya smiled, trying to pull some of the sting from his words; with his lips pulled back from his teeth, it merely made him look like a cornered wolf. “Launch profile?”

“Holding at minus ten minutes, sir.”

“Right, then. Run the self-test sequence again. It can’t hurt.” Everyone was on edge from not knowing for sure whether the metallic reflector they’d picked up was the time capsule from home. Maybe the drone would tell them, and maybe not. But the longer they waited, the more edgy everyone got, and the edgier they were, the more likely they were to make mistakes.

“Looks pretty good to me. Engine idle at about one percent, fuel tanks loaded, ullage rail and umbilical disconnects latched and ready, instrument package singing loud on all channels. I’m ready to begin launch bay closeout whenever you say, sir.”

“Well then.” Ilya breathed deeply. “Get on the blower to whoever’s keeping an eye on it. Get things moving.”

Down near the back end of the ship, far below the drive compartment and stores, lay a series of airlocks.

Some of them were small, designed for crew egress; others were larger, and held entire service vehicles like the station transfer shuttle. One bay, the largest of all, held a pair of reconnaissance drones: three-hundred-tonne robots capable of surveying a star system or mapping a gas giant’s moons. The drones couldn’t carry a gravity drive (nothing much smaller than a destroyer could manage that), but they could boost at a respectable twentieth of a gee on the back of their nuclear-electric ion rocket, and they could keep it up for a very long time indeed. For faster flybys, they could be equipped with saltwater-fueled fission rockets like those of the Lord Vanek’s long-range torpedoes — but those were dirty, relatively inefficient, and not at all suited to the stealthy mapping of a planetary system.

Each of the drones carried an instrument package studded with more sensors than every probe launched from Earth during the twentieth century. They were a throwback to the Lord Vanek’s nominal design mission, the semi-ironic goal inscribed on the end-user certificate: to boldly go where no man had gone before, to map new star systems on long-duration missions, and claim them in the name of the Emperor.

Dropped off in an uninhabited system, a probe could map it in a couple of years and be ready to report in full when the battlecruiser returned from its own destination. They were a force multiplier for the colonial cartographers, enabling one survey ship to map three systems simultaneously.

Deep in the guts of the Lord Vanek , probe one was now waking up from its two-year sleep. A team of ratings hurried under the vigilant gaze of two chief petty officers, uncoupling the heavy fueling pipes and locking down inspection hatches. Sitting in a lead-lined coffin, probe one gurgled and pinged on a belly full of reaction mass and liquid water refrigerant. The compact fusion reactor buzzed gently, its beat-wave accelerators ramming a mixture of electrons and pions into a stream of lithium ions at just under the speed of light; neutrons spalled off, soaked into the jacket of water pipes, warming them and feeding pressure waves into the closed-circuit cooling system. The secondary solar generators, dismounted for this mission because of their irrelevance, lay in sheets at one end of the probe bay.

“Five minutes to go. Launch bay reports main reactor compartment closeout. Wet crew have cleared the fueling hoses, report tank pressure is stable. I’m still waiting on telemetry closeout.”

“Carry on.” Ilya watched patiently as Marek’s team monitored progress on the launch. He looked around briefly as the ops room door slid open; but it wasn’t the Captain or the Commodore, just the spy — no, the diplomatic agent from Earth. Whose presence was a waste of air and space, the Commander opined, although he could see reasons why the Admiral and his staff might not want to impede her nosy scrutiny.

“What are you launching?” she asked shortly.

“Survey drone.”

“What are you surveying?”

He turned and stared at her. “I don’t remember being told you had authority to oversee anything except our military activities,” he commented.

The inspector shrugged, as if attempting to ignore the insult. “Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it,” she said.

“Unlikely.” He turned away. “Status, lieutenant?”

‘Two minutes to go. Telemetry bay closeout. Ah, we have confirmation of onboard control. It’s alive in there. Waiting on ullage baffle check, launch rail windup, bay depressurization coming up in sixty seconds.“

“There’s the message capsule,” the inspector said quietly. “Hoping for a letter from home, Commander?”

“You are annoying me,” Ilya said, almost casually. “That’s a bad idea. I say, over there! Yes, you! Status please!”

“Bay pressure cell dump in progress. External launch door opening … launch rail power on the bus, probe going to internal power, switch over now. She’s on her own, sir. Launch in one minute. Final pre-flight self-test in progress.”

“It’s my job to ask uncomfortable questions, Commander. And the important question to ask now is—”

“Quiet, please!”

“—Was the artifact you’re about to prod placed there by order of your Admiralty, or by the Festival?”

“Launch in three-zero seconds,” Lieutenant Marek announced into the silence. He looked up. “Was it something I said?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Ilya.

Rachel shook her head. Arms crossed: “If you don’t want to listen, be my guest.”

“One-zero seconds to launch. Ullage pressure jets open. Reactor criticality coming up. Muon flux ramp nominal, accelerator gates clear. Um, reactor flux doubling has passed bootstrap level. Five seconds.

Launch rail is go! Main heat pump is down to operating temperature!” The deck began to shudder, vibrating deep beneath the soles of their feet. ‘Two seconds. Reactor on temperature. Umbilical separation. Zero. We have full separation now. Probe one is clear of the launch bay. Doors closing.

Gyrodyne turn in progress, ullage pressure maximal, three seconds to main engine ignition.“ The shudder died away. ”Deflection angle clear. Main engine ignition.“ In the ops room, nothing stirred; but bare meters away from the ship, the probe’s stingerlike tail spat a red-orange beam of heavy metal ions. It began to drop away from the battlecruiser: as it did so, two huge wings, the thermal radiators, began to extend from its sides.

Ilya came to a decision. “Lieutenant Marek, you have control,” he said. “Colonel. Come with me.” He opened the door; she followed him into the passage outside. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re going to have a little talk,” he said. Hurrying along toward the conference suite, he didn’t wait for her to keep up. Up the elevator, along the next passage, and into a room with a table and chairs in it; thankfully unoccupied. He waited for her to enter, then shut the door. “Sit down,” he said.

The inspector sat on the edge of a chair, leaning forward, looking up at him with an earnest expression.

“You think I’m going to tear a strip off you,” he began. “And you’re right, but for the wrong reason.” She raised a hand. “Let me guess. Raising policy issues in an executive context?” She looked at him, almost mockingly. “Listen, Commander. Until I came on the deck and saw what you were doing, I didn’t know what was happening either, but now I do I think you really want to hear what I’ve got to tell you, then tell it to the Captain. Or the Commodore. Or both. Chains of command are all very well, but if you’re going to retrieve that orbiting anomaly, then I think we may have less than six hours before all hell breaks loose, and I’d like to get the message across. So if we can postpone the theatrics until we’ve got time to spare, and just get on with things …?”