Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“What are you talking about!” Burya sat on the edge of the pile of smelly blankets from which the Critic had fashioned her nest.

“Is gone nanostructure crazy,” she said happily. “Civilization! Freedom, Justice, and the American Way!”

“What’s a merkin way?” Burya asked, peeling open a fat garlic bratwurst and, with the aid of an encrusted penknife, chopping large chunks off it and stuffing them into his mouth. His beard itched ferociously, he hadn’t bathed in days, and worst of all, he felt he was beginning to understand Sister Seventh. (Nobody should have to understand a Critic; it was cruel and unusual punishment.) A bright green glare flashed on above them, shining starkly in through the doorway and lighting up the dingy corners of the hut. “ Attention! You have entered a quarantined area! Identify yourselves immediately !” A deep bass humming shook Burya to his bones. He cringed and blinked, dropping his breakfast sausage.

“Why not you answer them?” Sister Seventh asked, unreasonably calmly.

“Answer them?”

“ATTENTION! Thirty seconds to comply!”

The hut shook. Burya stumbled, treading on the wurst. Losing his temper, he lurched toward the doorway. “Stop that racket at once!” he yelled, waving a fist in the air. “Can’t a man eat his breakfast in peace without you interfering, you odious rascals? Cultureless imbeciles, may the Duke’s whore be taken short and piss in your drawers by mistake!”

The light cut out abruptly. “ Oops , sorry,” said the huge voice. Then in more moderate tones, “ Is that you, Comrade Rubenstein ?”

Burya gaped up at the hovering emerald diamond. Then he looked down. Standing in the road before him was one of Timoshevski’s guards — but not as Burya had known him back in Novy Petrograd.

Rachel sat on her bunk, tense and nervous. Ignoring the banging and clattering and occasional disturbing bumps from the rear bulkhead, she tried desperately to clear her head. She had a number of hard decisions to make — and if she took the wrong one, Martin would die, for sure, and more than that, she might die with him. Or worse, she might be prematurely bugging out, throwing away any chance of fulfilling her real mission. Which made it all the harder for her to think straight, without worrying.

Thirty minutes ago an able flyer had rapped on her door. She’d hastily buttoned her tunic and opened it.

“Lieutenant Sauer sends his compliments, ma’am, and says to remind you that the court-martial convenes this afternoon at 1400.”

She’d blinked stupidly. “What court-martial?”

The flyer looked nonplussed. “I don’t know, ma’am. He just told me to tell you—”

“That’s quite alright. Go away.”

He’d gone, and she’d hurriedly pulled her boots on, run a comb through her hair, and gone in search of someone who knew.

Commander Murametz was in the officers’ wardroom, drinking a glass of tea. “What’s all this about a court-martial?” she demanded.

He’d stared at her, poker-faced. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just that engineer who’s under arrest. Can’t have him aboard when we go into battle, so the old man scheduled a hearing for this afternoon, get the business out of the way.”

“What do you mean?” she asked icily.

“Can’t go executing a man without a fair trial first,” Ilya said, barely bothering to conceal his contempt.

He rapped his glass down next to the samovar. “Trial’s in this very room, this afternoon. Be seeing you.” The next thing she knew she was back in her cabin. She couldn’t remember getting there; she felt cold and sick. They want to kill Martin , she realized. Because they can’t get at me any other way . She cursed herself for a fool. Who was behind it, how many enemies had she racked up? Was it the Admiral?

(Doubtful, he didn’t need the formality of a trial if he wanted to have someone shot.) Or Ilya — yes, there was someone who’d taken against her. Or the kid spook, the wet-behind-the-ears secret policeman? Or maybe the Captain? She shook her head. Someone had decided to get her, and there were no secrets aboard the ship; however discreet she and Martin had thought they’d been, someone had noticed.

The cold emptiness in her stomach congealed into a knot of tension. This whole voyage was turning into a fiasco. With what she’d learned from Martin — including his mission— there was no way the Navy could make a success of it; in fact, they’d probably all be killed. Her own role as a negotiator was pointless.

You negotiate with human beings, not with creatures who are to humans as humans are to dogs and cats.

(Or machines, soft predictable machines that come apart easily when you try to examine them but won’t fit back together again.)

Staying on was useless, it wouldn’t help her deliver the package for George Cho, and as for Martin—

Rachel realized she had no intention of leaving him behind. With the realization came a sense of relief, because it left her only one course of action. She leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Luggage: open sesame. Plan Titanic. You have three hours and ten minutes. Get started.” Now all she had to do was work out how to get him from the kangaroo court in the wardroom to her cabin; a different, but not necessarily harder task than springing him from the brig.

The trunk silently rolled forward, out from under her bunk, and its lid hinged back. She tapped away at the controls for a minute. A panel opened, and she pulled out a reel of flexible hose. That went onto the cold-water tap on her tiny sink. A longer and fatter hose with a spherical blob on the end got fed down the toilet, a colonoscopy probing the bowels of the ship’s waste plumbing circuit. The chest began to hum, expelling pulses of viscous white liquid into the toilet tube. Thin filaments of something like plastic began to creep back up the bowl of the toilet, forming a tight seal around the hose; a smell of burning leaked into the room, gunpowder and molasses and a whiff of shit. Rachel checked a status indicator on the trunk; satisfied, she picked up her gloves, cap, anything else she would need — then checked the indicator again, and hastily left the room.

The toilet rumbled faintly, and pinged with the sound of expanding metal pipework. The vent pipe grew hot; steam began to hiss from the effluent tube, and was silenced rapidly by a new growth of spiderweb stuff. An overhead ionization alarm tripped, but Rachel had unplugged it as soon as she arrived in her cabin. The radiation warning on the luggage blinked, unseen, in the increasingly hot room. The diplomatic lifeboat was beginning to inflate.

“Don't worry son. It’ll work.” Sauer slapped Procurator Muller on the back.

Vassily forced a wan smile. “I hope so, sir. I’ve never attended a court-martial before.”

“Well.” Sauer considered his words carefully. “Just think of this as an educational experience. And our best opportunity to nail the bitch legally …”

Truth be told, Sauer felt less confident than he was letting on. This whole exercise was more than slightly unauthorized; it exceeded his authority as ship’s security officer, and without the active support of Commander Murametz, first officer, he wouldn’t have dared proceed with it. He certainly didn’t have the legal authority to convene a court-martial on his own initiative in the presence of superior officers, much less to try a civilian contractor on a capital charge. What he did have was a remit to root out subversion by any means necessary, including authorized deception, and a first officer willing to sign on the dotted line. Not to mention an institutional enthusiasm to show the Curator’s agent up for the horse’s ass that he was.