Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Martin looked past her head. She followed his gaze: grilles in the ceiling. She closed her eyes and squeezed shut; green raster images like a nightmare vision of a jail cell pasted themselves across the insides of her eyelids. The spy drones, remnant of the flock Vassily had unleashed, waited patiently behind the vents. They’d followed her to this room, loaded up with a little something to add interest to the proceedings.

Serve the little voyeur right , she thought bitterly about the spy. “I’ll get you out of this,” she told Martin, trying to reassure him.

“I understand.” He nodded, a slight inclination of his head. “You know what I, uh, I’m not so good at people things—”

She shook her head. “They’re doing this to get me to compromise myself. It’s not about you. It’s nothing personal. They just want me out of the way.”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “The midranking officers. The ones who figure a short victorious war is a ticket up the promotion ladder. The ones who don’t think I should be here in the first place, much less reporting back.

Not after First Lamprey. I was Red Cross agent-in-place there, you know? Investigating the war crimes.

Didn’t leave anybody looking too good, and I think they know it. They don’t want a negotiated settlement, they want guts and glory.”

“If it’s just you, why’s the chinless wonder from the Curator’s Office in here?” asked Martin.

She shrugged. ‘Two birds, one stone. Don’t sweat it. If they screw this up, they can blame the Curator’s cat’s-paw, make the enemy within look bad. There’s no love lost between Naval Intelligence and the civil secret police. If it works, they get us both out of the way. Reading the regs, they don’t have authority to pull this stunt, Martin. It takes a master and commander to issue a capital sentence except in the face of the enemy, so if they do execute you, it’s illegal enough to hang them all.“

“That’s a great reassurance.” He forced a smile, but it came out looking decidedly frightened. “Just do your — hell. I trust you.”

“That’s good.”

Then the doors opened.

“It's working,” Sauer commented. “She’s come out to defend her minion. Now we need to maneuver her into outright defiance. Shouldn’t be too hard; we have the bench.”

“Defiance?” Vulpis raised an eyebrow. “You said this was a trial.”

“A trial of wits, ours against hers. She’s consented to defend him; that means she’s acting as an officer of the court. Article Forty-six states that an officer of the court is subject to the discipline of the Articles and may himself be arraigned for malfeasance or contempt of court. By agreeing to serve before our court, she’s abandoning her claim of diplomatic immunity. It gets better. In about two hours, we go to stations.

While we may be a charade right now, at that point any commissioned officer is empowered to pass a capital sentence — or even order a summary execution — because it’s classified under Article Four, Obedience in the Face of the Enemy, Enforcement Thereof. Not that I’m planning on using it, but it does give us a certain degree of cover, no?”

Dr. Hertz removed his pince-nez and began to polish them. “I’m not sure I like it,” he said fussily. “This smells altogether too much of the kind of trickery the Stasis like handing down. Aren’t you concerned about playing for the Curator’s brat?”

“Not really.” Sauer finally grinned. “Y’see, what I really plan on doing is to get our new advocate so thoroughly wound up she’s insubordinate or something — but for the defendant himself, I’m thinking of an absolute discharge or a not guilty verdict.” He sniffed. “It’s quite obvious he didn’t know he was breaking any regulations. Plus, the device he had in his possession was inactive by the time it was discovered, so we can’t actually prove it was in a state fit for use at any time when he was aboard the ship. And the Admiralty will be angry if we make it hard for them to hire civilian contractors in future. I’m hoping we can keep her rattled enough not to realize there’s no case to answer until we’ve got her out of the way; then we discharge Springfield. Which will make our young Master Muller look like a complete and total idiot, not to mention possibly supplying me with cause to investigate him for suspicion of burglary, pilferage of personal effects, violation of a diplomat’s sealed luggage, immoral conduct, and maybe even deserting his post.” His grin became sharklike. “Need I continue?” Vulpis whistled quietly in awe. “Remind me never to play poker with you,” he commented.

Dr. Hertz reinstalled his spectacles. “Shall we resume the circus, gentlemen?”

“I think so.” Sauer drained his glass of tea and stood up. “After you, my brother officers, then send in the clowns!”

The shipping trunk in Rachel’s cabin had stopped steaming some time ago. It had shrunk, reabsorbing and extruding much of its contents. A viscous white foam had spread across the fittings of the cabin, eagerly digesting all available hydrocarbons and spinning out a diamond-phase substrate suitable for intensive nanomanufacturing activities. Solid slabs of transparent material were precipitating out of solution, forming a hollow sphere that almost filled the room. Below the deck, roots oozed down into the ship’s recycling circuits, looting the cesspool that stored biological waste during the inbound leg of a journey. (By long-standing convention, ships that lacked recyclers only discharged waste when heading away from inhabited volumes of space; more than one unfortunate orbital worker had been gunned down by a flash-frozen turd carrying more kinetic energy than an armor-piercing artillery shell.) The self-propelled trunk, which was frozen into the base of the glassy sphere, was now much lighter than it had been when Rachel boarded the ship. Back then, it had weighed the best part of a third of a tonne: Now it massed less than fifty kilos. The surplus mass had mostly been thick-walled capillary tubes of boron carbide, containers for thin crystals of ultrapure uranium-235 tetraiodide, and a large supply of cadmium; stuff that wasn’t easy to come by in a hurry. The trunk was capable of manufacturing anything it needed given the constituent elements. Most of what it wanted was carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, available in abundance in the ship’s sewage-processing plant. But if a diplomat needed to get away in a real hurry and didn’t have a potent energy source to hand … well, fission, an old and unfashionable technology, was eminently storable, very lightweight, and didn’t usually go bang without a good reason.

All you needed was the right type of unobtanium to hand in order to make it work. Which was why Rachel had been towing around enough uranium to make two or three good-sized atom bombs, or the core of a nuclear saltwater rocket.

A nuclear saltwater rocket was just about the simplest interplanetary propulsion system that could fit in a steamer trunk. On the other side of the inner pressure hull from Rachel’s cabin, the trunk had constructed a large tank threaded through with neutron-absorbing, boron-lined tubes: this was slowly filling with water containing a solution of near-critical uranium tetraiodide. Only a thin layer of carefully weakened hull plates and bypassed cable ducts held the glassy sphere and its twenty-tonne saltwater fuel tank on the other side of the bulkhead, inside the warship. The hybrid structure nestled under the skin of the ship like a maggot feeding on the flesh of its host, preparing to hatch.

Elsewhere in the ship, toilets were flushing sluggishly, the officer’s shower cubicle pressure was scandalously low, and a couple of environment techs were scratching their heads over the unexpectedly low sludge level in the number four silage tank. One bright spark was already muttering about plumbing leaks. But with a full combat engagement only hours away, most attention was focused on the ship’s weapons systems. Meanwhile, the luggage’s fabricator diligently churned away, extruding polymers and component materials to splice into the lifeboat it was preparing for its mistress. With only a short time until the coming engagement, speed was essential.