Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“Damage Control: Patch into life support and find out what the hell is loose.”

“Got it already, sir. I’ve got some kind of contamination, source inside life support one: weird organic molecules, low concentration. Also, er, localized outbreaks of fire. It’s mostly around A deck. The lidar grid damage is localized, around where the debris strike happened. Ah, I have one-six crew marked down on the status board. A deck segment two is open to space, and they were all inside at the time.” Gunnery: “Five seconds to torpedo terminal boost phase.”

“Let’s dazzle ’em now,” said Helsingus. “Grid to full power.”

“Aye aye, sir, full multispectral shriek in progress.”

Helsingus leaned sideways and muttered into his headset; Radar One muttered back. There was some mutual adjustment of switches as radar relinquished priority control on the huge phased-array laser grid that coated the warship, then Helsingus and his two assistants began entering instructions.

The Lord Vanek boosted at right angles to the two enemy craft, accelerating away from the two silent pursuers on a ripple of warped space-time. The two saltwater-fission torpedoes, bright sparks behind, accelerated toward the enemy warships like a pair of nuclear fireworks. Now the tight-packed mosaic of panels that covered much of the Lord Vanek’s cylindrical bulk began to glow with the intense speckled purity of laser light. A thousand different colors appeared, blending and clashing and forming a single brilliant diadem of light; megawatts, then gigawatts of power surged out, the skin of the ship burning like a directional magnesium flare. The glow built up, and most of it flowed out in two tightly controlled beams, intense enough to cut through steel plate like a blowtorch at a range of a thousand kilometers.

Simultaneously, the flight of torpedoes throttled up to maximum thrust, weaving erratically as they closed the final three thousand kilometers to the onrushing enemy ships. Hurtling in ten times faster than an ICBM of the pre-space age, the rockets jinked and wove to avoid the anticipated point-lasers, relying on passive sensors and sophisticated antispoofing algorithms to cut through the expected jamming and countermeasures of the enemy ships. They took barely thirty seconds to close the distance, and found the enemy point defense to be almost nonexistent.

From the ops room of the Lord Vanek , the engagement was undramatic. One of the pursuer points simply disappeared, replaced by an expanding shell of spallation debris and hot gases energized by an incandescent point far brighter than any conventional fission explosion; with the ship’s hull blown wide and drive mountings shattered, the antimatter bottle spilled its contents into a soup of metallic hydrogen, triggering a mess of exotic subnuclear reactions. But only one of the torpedoes struck home; the other eleven winked out.

“Humbly report got more neutrino pulses, sir,” called the radar op. “Not from the one we nailed—” Mirsky stared at the main screen. “Damage control. What about A deck?” he demanded. “Helm.

Everyone else running on bugout?”

“A deck is still empty to space, sir. I sent a control team, but they aren’t reporting back. Pressure’s dropping in the number four recycler run, no sign of external venting. Um, I’m showing a major power drain on the grid, sir, we’re losing megawatts somewhere.”

“Bugout message was sent a minute ago, sir. So far they’re all—” Vulpis cursed. “Sir! Kamchatka’s gone!”

“Where, dammit?” Mirsky leaned forward.

“Another IFF drop-off,” called radar. “From—” The man paused, eyes widening with shock. “ Kamchatka ,” he concluded. On the main plot at the front of the bridge, the Imperial ships’ vectors were lengthening, up to 300 k.p.s. now and creeping up steadily. The target planet hung central, infinitely far out of reach.

Mirsky glanced at his first officer. Ilya stared back apprehensively.

“With respect, sir, they’re not fighting any way we know—”

Red lights. Honking sirens. Damage Control shouting orders into his speaking horn. “Status!” roared Mirsky. “What’s going on, dammit?”

“Losing pressure on B deck segment one, sir! No readings anywhere on segment three from A down to D deck. Big power fluctuations, distribution board fourteen compartment D-nine-five is on fire. Ah, I have a compartment open to space and another compartment on fire in B-four-five. I can’t get through to damage control on B deck at all and all hell has broken loose on C deck—”

“Seal off everything above F,” ordered Mirsky, his face white. “Do it now ! Guns, prep decoys two and three for launch—”

But he was already too late to save his ship; because the swarm of bacteria-sized replicators that had slammed into A deck at 600 k.p.s. — cushioned in a husk of reinforced diamond — and eaten their way down through five decks into the ship, were finally arriving in the engineering spaces. And eating, and breeding …

Vassily's voice quavered with a nervous, frightened edge that would have been funny under other circumstances. “I am arresting you for sabotage, treason, unlicensed use of proscribed technologies, and giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the New Republic! Surrender now, or it will be the worse for you!”

“Shut up and grab the back of that couch unless you want to walk home. Martin, if you wouldn’t mind giving him a leg down — that’s right. I need to get this hatch shut—” Rachel glanced around disgustedly. There was a beautiful view; stars everywhere, a terrestrial planet hanging huge and gibbous ahead, like a marbled blue-and-white hallucination— and this idiot child squawking in her ear. Meanwhile, she was clinging with both hands to the underside of the capsule lid, and with both feet to the pilot’s chair, trying to hold everything together. When she’d poked her head up through the hatch and seen who was clinging to the low-gain antenna, she’d had half a mind to duck back inside again and fire up the thrusters to jolt him loose; a stab of blind rage made her grind her teeth together so loudly a panicky Martin had demanded to know if her suit had sprung a leak. But the red haze of anger faded quickly, and she’d reached out and grabbed Vassily’s arm, and somehow shoved his inflated emergency suit in through the hatch.

“I’m coming down,” she said. Clenching her thighs around the back of the chair, she clicked the release catch on the hatch and pulled it down as far as she could, then locked it in position. The cabin below her was overfull: Vassily obviously didn’t have a clue about keeping himself out of the way, and Martin was busy trying to squirm into the leg well of his seat to make room. She yanked on her lifeline, dropped down until she was standing on the seat of her chair, then grabbed the hatch and pulled it the rest of the way shut. She felt the solid ripple-click of a dozen small catches locking home on all four sides.

“Okay. Autopilot, seal hatch, then repressurize cabin. Martin, not over there — that’s the toilet, you really don’t want to open that — yes, that’s the locker you want.” Air began hissing into the cabin from vents around the ceiling; white mist formed whirlpool fog banks that drifted across the main window. “That’s great. You, listen up: you aren’t aboard a Navy ship here. Shut up, and we’ll give you a lift downside; keep telling me I’m under arrest, and I might get pissed off enough to push you overboard.”

“Urp.”

The Junior Procurator’s eyes went wide as his suit began to deflate around him. Behind the seats, Martin grunted as he rifled through the contents of one of the storage lockers. “This what you want?” He punted a rolled-up hammock at Rachel. She rolled around in her seat and stuck one end of it to the wall behind her, then let it unroll back toward Martin. He drifted out of the niche, narrowly avoided kicking their castaway in the head, and managed to get the other end fastened. “You. Out of that suit, into this hammock. As you may have noticed, we don’t have a lot of room.” She pressed the release stud, and her helmet let go of her suit and drifted free; catching it, she shoved it down behind her seat, under the hammock. “You can unsuit now.”