Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Martin saw where the officer’s finger was pointing and winced. If some idiot conscript did something like that to him, he reflected, he probably wouldn’t stop at threatening to strangle him with his own intestines.

Although if the idiot had started playing with the MBAX, strangling him would be redundant: it didn’t usually have much effect on a charred corpse.

“Engineering Commander Krupkin?” he asked.

“Yes? Who? Oh. You must be the shipyard mechanic?” Krupkin turned toward him, leaving the hapless rating to scramble for cover. “You’re late.”

“Blame the Curator’s Office,” snapped Martin. As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them.

“I’m sorry. I’ve had a bad week. What can I do for you?”

“Secret state police, hmm? Won’t get many of those around here,” Krupkin grunted, abruptly conciliatory. “You know something about this toy box, then?”

“MiG sells them. You keep them running. People break them. I fix them. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“That’s a good start.” Krupkin suddenly grinned. “So let’s try another question. What do you know about preferential-frame clock-skew baseline compensators? Specifically, this model K-340, as currently configured. Tell me everything you can see about how it’s set up.” Martin spent the next hour telling him all the different ways it was out of alignment. After that, Krupkin showed him a real K-340, not a bodged test article. And then it was time for a working lunch while Krupkin picked his brains, and then a long working afternoon figuring out where everything went and going over change orders to make sure everything was where the paperwork said it was supposed to be.

And then back to base for the evening …

Rachel Mansour stood naked in the middle of the handwoven rug that covered the floor of the hotel room she had rented two hours earlier, in the naval port city of Klamovka: even though it was expensive, it smelled of damp and dry rot, carbolic soap and firewood. She breathed slowly and evenly as she stretched arms and legs in ritual sequence, limbering up. The curtains were drawn, the door locked, and her sensors stationed outside to warn her of intruders: for she was not inclined to explain her state to any hotel staff who might see it.

Rachel was not inclined to explain a lot of things to the people she moved among. The New Republic filled her with a bitter, hopeless anger — one which she recognized, understood to be a poor reflection on her professionalism, but nevertheless couldn’t set aside. The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’etre offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.

The New Republic was 250 years old, 250 light-years from Earth. When the Eschaton had relocated nine-tenths of Earth’s population via wormhole — for reasons it hadn’t deigned to explain — it had sorted some of them on the basis of ethnic or social or psychological affinity. The New Republic had picked up a mixed bag of East-European technorejectionists and royalists, hankering for the comforting certainties of an earlier century.

The founders of the New Republic had suffered at the hands of impersonal technological change. In the market-oriented democracies of preSingularity Earth, they’d seen people cast by their millions on the scrap heap of history. Given a new world to tame, and the tools to do it with, they had immediately established a conservative social order. A generation later, a vicious civil war broke out between those who wanted to continue using the cornucopia machines — self-replicating nano-assembler factories able to manufacture any physical goods — and those who wanted to switch to a simpler way of life where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everyone. The progressives lost: and so the New Republic remained for a century, growing into its natural shape— Europe as it might have been during the twentieth century, had physics and chemistry been finalized in 1890. The patent offices were closed; there were no homes for dreaming relativists here.

Standing naked in the middle of the carpet, she could set it aside for a while. She could ignore the world while her implants ran through their regular self-defense practice sequence. It started with breathing exercises, then the isometric contraction of muscle groups under the direction of her battle management system, then finally a blur of motion as the embedded neural network controllers took over, whirling her body like a marionette through a series of martial arts exercises. A ten-minute cycle performed twice a week kept her as ready for personal defense as an unaugmented adept who spent an hour or more every day.

Whirling and jerking on invisible strings she threw and dismembered intangible demons; it was no great effort to project her frustrations and anger onto them. This for the blind beggar she had passed in the street, his affliction curable in a culture that didn’t ban most advanced medical practices. That for the peasants bound to the soil they tilled by a law that saw them as part of the land, rather than as human beings. This for the women condemned to die giving birth to unwanted children. That for the priests who pandered to the prejudices of the ruling elite and offered their people the false consolation of the hereafter, when most of the horrors that besieged them had long since been banished from the civilized worlds. And this and this and that for treating her like a third-class citizen. Anger demanded many kata .

I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world, I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me …

There was a small bathroom next door — an expensive extra in this society. She used it to clean herself as efficiently as possible, sweat and grime washing away like memories. And some of the pessimism went with it. Things around here are going to get better , she reminded herself. That’s what I’m here for .

Once dry, she wandered back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she picked up her battered PA. “Get me the UN Consensus Ambassador,” she ordered. There was only one UN

ambassador in the New Republic; George Cho, permanent representative of the Security Council, to which she was ultimately answerable. (The New Republic persistently refused to recognize any of Earth’s more subtle political institutions.)

“Processing. Beep . Rachel, I’m sorry, but I’m not available right now. Waiting for information to become available about the incident at Rochard’s. If you’d like to leave a message after the tone … beep .”

“Hi, George. Rachel here. Calling from Klamovka. Give me a call back; I think I ought to go public, and I want diplomatic backup. Let’s talk. Message ends.”

She closed the PA and put it down again. Stared moodily at the dresser. Her costume (she found it hard to think of it as regular clothing, even after months of wearing it daily) lay heaped around the dressing table. There were visits to make, forms to be observed, before she could act openly. Fuck this for a game of soldiers , she thought. Living by the New Republic’s rules had gotten old fast. I need some civilized company before I go out of my skull . Speaking of which, there was that engineering contractor to call. A bit of a cold fish, and not very cooperative, but she be damned if she’d let him throw her off; she could probably dig more out of him in an hour over a restaurant table than she’d be able to get from the Admiralty office in a month of diplomatic cocktail parties and formal memoranda.