Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Something crackled in the underbrush behind him. Felix turned, dislodging Raven, who flapped heavily upward, cawing in alarm. A human shape lurched into view on the other side of the clearing. It was male, adult in size, powdery white in color from head to foot. It moved jerkily like damaged clockwork, and there was no mistaking the circular, yellowish object it held in its right hand.

“Pie-ie-ie!” croaked Raven. ‘Time to die!“

Felix turned away from the Mime and put his head down. He ran blindly, branches tearing at his head and shoulders, shrubbery and roots trying to trip him up. Distantly, he heard the screaming and cawing of Raven mobbing the Mime, flapping clear of the deadly flan and pecking for eyes, ears, fingers. Just one sticky strand of orange goo from the pie dish would eat clear through bone, its disassembly nanoware mapping and reintegrating neural paths along its deadly way, to convert what was left of the body into a proxy presence in realspace.

The Mimes were broken, a part of the Fringe that had swung too close to a solar flare and succumbed to bit rot several Festival visits ago. They’d lost their speech pathways, right down to the Nucleus of Chomsky, but somehow managed to piggyback a ride on the Festival starwisps. Maybe this forcible assimilation was their way of communicating, of sharing mindspace with other beings. If so, it was misguided at best, like a toddler’s attempt to communicate with a dog by hitting it; but nothing seemed to deter them from trying.

A wordless scream from behind told him that Raven had certainly distracted that particular Mime. But Mimes traveled in packs. Where were the others? And where was Mr. Rabbit, with his trusty twelve-bore and belt of dried farmer’s scalps?

Noise ahead. Felix staggered to a stop. He was still holding the phone. “Help,” he gasped into it.

“Define help parameters.”

A fuzzy white shape moved among the trees in front of him. It had once been a woman. Now it was powder white, except for blood-red lips and bobble nose: layers of white clothing shrouded its putrefying limbs, held together with a delicate lacework of silvery metallic vines that pulsed and contracted as it moved. It swayed from side to side as it approached, bending coquettishly at the hips, as if the base of its spine had been replaced by a universal joint. It clutched a large pie dish in both bony hands. Collapsed eye sockets lined with black photoreceptive film grinned at him as it bowed and extended the bowl, like a mother offering her spoiled son his favorite dessert.

Felix gagged. The smell was indescribable. “Kill it. Make it go away,” he whimpered. He fell back against a tree. “Please!”

“ Acknowledged .” The Festival voice remained dusty and distant, but somehow its tone changed. “ Fringe security at your service. How may we be of assistance ?” The Mimes were closing in. “Kill them!” Felix gasped. “Get me out of here!”

“Target acquisition in progress. X-ray laser battery coming online. Be advised current orbital inclination is not favorable for surgical excision. Cover your eyes.” He threw an arm across his face. Bones flashed in red silhouette, followed a split second later by a crash of thunder and a blast of heat, as if someone had opened the oven door of hell right in front of his face.

His skin prickled as if Mrs. Hedgehog was embracing him, only all over. Trees falling in the forest, a flapping of panic-stricken wings. The flash and bang repeated itself a second later, this time behind him; then three or four more times, increasingly distant.

“Incident Control stand down. Threat terminated. Be advised you have received an ionizing radiation dose of approximately four Greys, and that this will be life-threatening without urgent remediation. A medical support package has been dispatched. Remain where you are, and it will arrive in twenty-two minutes. Thank you for your custom, and have a nice day.” Felix lay gasping at the base of his tree. He felt dizzy, a little sick: afterimages of his femur floated in ghostly purple splendor across his eyes. “I want Mr. Rabbit,” he mumbled into the phone, but it didn’t answer him. He cried, tears of frustration and loneliness. Presently, he closed his eyes and slept. He was still asleep when the spider slipped down from the stars and wove him into a cocoon of silvery not-silk to begin the task of dissolving and reforming his radiation-damaged body yet again. This was the third time so far; it was all his own fault for making that third wish. Youth, true friends … and what every little boy wished for in his heart, without quite grasping that an adventure-filled life isn’t much fun when you’re the person who has to live it.

Martin sat on the thin mattress in his cell, and tried to work out how many days he had left before they executed him.

The fleet was six days out from the final jump to Rochard’s World. Before that, they’d probably transfer supplies from the remaining support freighters and put any supernumeraries— conscripts who’d gone mad, contracted crippling diseases, or otherwise become superfluous to requirements — on board.

Maybe they’d move him over and send him back with the basket cases, back to the New Republic to face trial on the capital charge of spying in the dockyard. Somehow, he doubted that his defense (of shipyard necessity) would do him much good; that snot-nosed assistant from the Curator’s Office had it in for him, quite obviously, and would stop at nothing to see him hang.

That was one option. Another was that he’d be kept in the brig aboard ship until it arrived. At which point they’d realize that the cumulative clock-delay he’d bodged into the Lord Vanek’s fourspace guidance system had screwed the pooch, completely buggering their plan to sneak up on the Festival via a spacelike trajectory. In which case, they’d logically assume sabotage, and they’d have the saboteur already in the cells, trussed like a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Somehow, the fact that he’d succeeded, that his mission was accomplished and the threat of a wider causality violation averted, did not fill Martin with happiness. There might, he supposed, be heroes who would go to the airlock with a spring in their step, but he wasn’t one of them; he’d rather be opening Rachel’s bedroom door than opening that other door, learning to breathe in her muff rather than learning to inhale vacuum. It was, he supposed dismally, typical of the pattern of his life to fall in love — the kind of annoying obsession that won’t go away — just before stumbling irremediably into the shit. He’d been around enough to think he had few illusions left; Rachel had edges rough enough to use as a nail file, and in some ways, they had very little in common. But being banged up alone in a tiny cell was a frighteningiy lonely experience, all the lonelier for knowing that his lover was almost certainly less than thirty meters away — and completely unable to help him. Probably under suspicion herself. And however much he needed her, he didn’t, in all honesty, want her in here with him. He wanted to be with her on the outside — preferably somewhere many light-years from the New Republic, acquiring a long history of having absolutely nothing to do with it.

He lay back, rolled over on his stomach, and closed his eyes. Then the toilet began talking to him in a faint, buzzing voice.

“If you can hear me, tap one finger on the deck next to the base of the toilet, Martin. Just one.” I’ve lost it , he thought. They won’t bother executing me; they’ll put me in one of their psychiatric zoos and let the children throw bananas . But he reached out a hand and tapped at the base of the stainless-steel toilet that extruded from the wall of his cell.