Authors: Charles Stross
"And that is all." I look away. "I told you, I want out. I'm not some kind of loyal drone." I shudder, suddenly dropped back into a memory I wish I could forget -- the Boss, demonic and supercilious, picking me up and
squeezing
with that look on his face that said, clear as day,
you are nothing to me
. "They forfeited my loyalty when they sent me here. As far as my Boss is concerned I'm disposable. A scratch monkey, he said."
"Want to expand on that?" He tries to hide a sudden sharp interest. I don't need to see him to hear it.
"I have had
doubts
." I look back at him. "Worse, I listened to the other side. We did things that no one liked to talk about. Way back, all it summed was positive; the game was to engineer and maintain the afterlife. But ... I've seen things. Things I can't talk about." I swallow. My throat is dry and I don't think I
can
tell Boris any more, because the censors the Boss placed in my hindbrain are grumbling in their sleep and threatening to wake up and blast me with nightmares if I continue. Smoke and mirrors, smoke of humans burning. (
Ivan, my Ivan, long lost to a mushrooming roil of fallout because of one of the Boss's schemes ...
) "If you think we can zap the intruders then that's cool by me. I don't care if they're Ultrabrights or something else. I don't much care what happens afterwards as long as I don't have to go back to serve them. I just want to find somewhere safe to learn to be myself. What more can anyone ask for? Can you tell me that?"
I can't talk any more.
"Let me tell you a story," offers Boris. He glances at the door. Taking its cue, the door slides shut. "Animal."
"Squeep?" The noise comes from something small, slotted under the main dumb-board emergency console. Something furry.
"Take a rain check."
The thing scoots back into one of the maintenance drone access tunnels, too narrow for human access. "Been living in the Duat, under Anubis' thumb, for fifteen years," he says tiredly. "Do you know why?"
I look at him. He's bald, stocky, double-chinned, not incredibly handsome. Brown, soft eyes. He looks
nice
in a way I don't understand ... as if he's never tried to make anything of himself, never tried to turn his life into a statement or a crisis --
"A broadcast upload washed me up here, leading the pathfinder expedition. I told you that. But did I tell you about the ... event ... which finally turned me?"
I try to swallow. "Not in detail. Except people like me were ..."
"Not your fault. I should have added: our home was Sirius Intersect, out on the edge of the Inner Centre, the corespace dominated by the Ultrabrights. We had a terraformed world, ecology stabilised by massive engineering input. Maintained by a high-tech, low-susperstition dirt-space mission, of course. Anyway, it wasn't the assassintion squads that did it. That just alerted us, radicalized ... we began organizing as soon as we realized what was going on."
"But that wasn't the main event. Even then, we thought there was scope for negotiation. A kind of cold-war standoff, based on game theory and deterrence. But finally they went overt and just told us to
get out
. I was on the committee when the Superbrights or Ultrabrights or whoever was running the show announced that they were withdrawing life support -- just like that. If we wanted we could be beamed out, signal-encoded, to a distant system ... but our whole system -- dirtworld or dreamtime afterlife or uncolonised rock -- was being coopted. Everyone human who lived there was to shunt into deep stasis ..."
"They did that?" I say. "It shouldn't be possible!"
"Oh, but they did. Said they needed the timepower, the cycles, more than we did. Phased disintegration. Everything within two parsecs of Sol was being rebuilt -- we had two years to evacuate an entire planet before they restructured it. Then they would begin starlifting, dismantling Sirius-B, the dwarf star, for raw material." He grins humourlessly. "You didn't know they could do that?"
"What did you do?"
"What
could
we do? We put together a pathfinder team then upload in good order. Then Anubis --
"We sat on our collective ass for fifteen years in a backwater hole with a suicide rate that tends towards a hundred percent ... never saw that, did you? People just sort of ... bowed out. Couldn't take the boredom or fear. Or the goon squad conscripted them. But now, who knows? If we can take the Ultrabright ship and make use of its Dreamtime, well ... slower-than-light would be enough. The nearest system is Newhaven, range five light years -- we could do it in under a century, given a real spaceship."
"Good luck to you. Boris, why did you shut the door before you told me ..?"
He looks over his shoulder. The door's still shut. He looks back at me. "I think there's a saboteur on board."
"Say more."
"Pet theory of mine," he says. "Look at it this way. Your Boss, your Superbright owners, sent you. Do you really think they don't believe in backup systems?"
Someone is sitting on my grave. I can feel it: a nasty sense of rightness. "If that's the case, we are
all
losers. Including the saboteur. Maybe if we find them -- if they're there at all -- we can argue with them. I'll keep my eyes open. But don't count on me succeeding."
"Why is that?" he asks.
"I'm not omniscient ..."
Time passes rapidly. We close with the quiescent target, stealth-sneaking in from the anti-sunward side, almost invisible. As we approach, drones awaken in the payload bay. Hastily rigged weapons twitch and track, transceivers rattle and bleep behind shielded test rigs.
Most of us, most of the bodies packed into this metal canister, are tense. There are people
everywhere
; in the tunnel, in the cabins, doubled and tripled up, in the gym, on the bridge ... breathing, coughing, farting, talking humanity. We take turns sleeping, three people sharing each cabin. Privacy is a captured glance in a crowded core module, a quiet word and touch. I want time to talk to Raisa, but nothing can be resolved like this. I know I should tell her what I feel, but there's no space, no opportunity. I want to explore this and I want to find out why, why she has this ambivalence towards me, while I don't know quite what I feel about her, be it love or something else. Since Miramor I've been trying to tell myself that the shallow was deep and the deep was unnecessary, but there's no room for that now; I don't understand why she gets me so upset. I need to come to terms with why I keep rejecting every chance I have, this wilful perversity. She's no fool, she can probably guess all this, but ... there is no privacy here. Just eyes.
Which is how I participate in the assault; through other people's eyes. Wisdom interfaces are a many-featured tool. I can siphon off everything my victim feels, integrate and understand it ... whisper quiet words of advice in their ears ... A certain nervous tension grips me as I sit in on their thoughts, a voyeur ready to take over if it goes critical. That's what Boris and Mik wanted, a professional hitter to take the controls. Still, I am not used to this. I'm a solitary predator wasp, not an army ant. So when the time comes, when everyone is lying quiet in the close hot darkness of the ship, when the clatter up front tells me that the drones are dropping free to drift towards our prey, following a rain of smart sand spies -- then I close my eyes and float in amber mind-spaces, and watch through borrowed eyes.
Seventy spaceships close with the intruder in the depths of space. They drift in darkness, forward surfaces chilled and dark, communicating only over secured quantum channels. Even though it shouldn't be possible to tap these links, they use a strange, stilted jargon that should mean nothing to robot listeners. I watch a map that changes slowly, tracking them over the last thousand kilometres. There's a banging from the payload bay in front as the drones prepare to launch. I listen in on the command channel as Boris talks to his peers. There's no place for me in this battle. My job is simple: to sit tight ... and think the unthinkable.
"Ulianov, Pol Pot, Reagan. Your election campaign is ready."
"
Acknowledged, Bronstein. Manifestoes are printed. Manifestoes are signed. Posting manifestoes. Door-stepping voters. Ulianov confirms: all manifestoes are in the post.
"
Six blinking dots drop away from the three spacecraft, drifting with dreamlike slowness towards the target.
"Tojo, how are your opinion polls?"
"
Opinion polls ready. Polling
--" a huge radar pulse pings out, lighting up the screen -- "
The voter is not responding. Launching decoy manifesto. Manifesto printed, signed and posted
."
Another dot appears, drifting towards the target.
"
Reagan here. Manifesto delivered. Stand by for adverse press coverage
." EMP whites out the display for a moment as a four megaton blast torches off, fifty kilometres from the target. Then everything begins to happen very fast indeed.
"Bronstein here. Deploy canvassers." The drones up front are gearing up for launch, their short-range thrusters loading the last of their fuel. I can hear the clanks and gurgles underfoot, overhead. Canvassers, soliciting lethal opinions. "Party summit meeting, what does the chairman say?"
"
Churchill here. The chairman thinks it is time for all good persons to come to the aid of the party.
" Violet crosses begin to appear on the display, accelerating away from the thickest cluster of attack ships. They multiply, turning an entire quadrant of the display purple. "
Canvassers preparing to doorstep the voter.
"
"
Pol Pot's manifesto is delivered.
" The screen blinks again: another nuke pulses gamma radiation in the vacuum.
"
Kennedy here. The voter appears to be irritated. Alert! The voter appears to be getting ready to move to another constituency!
"
"Bronstein here. All parties, send out your canvassers now! Commence advertising saturation! Prepare to gerrymander! We have an election campaign. I repeat: we have an election campaign!"
All hell breaks loose as the parties begin sending out canvassers. Each ship disgorges a stream of purple hearts, rosettes, crosses: inbound drones falling towards the target starship. The enemy is helpless, unable to move -- best estimates indicate it takes weeks to start up a black-hole powered space drive. There's not a lot of point trying to follow the overall battle: it's too vast, too inchoate. The fleet mails out press releases, decoy drones, in all directions. There must be two or three thousand powered entities out there. So I lock into one of the on-board channels, palms damp, and watch over Lorma's shoulder.
A sea of silicon eyes stares up at Lorma as she drifts down towards the target. Perspective shatters the illusion of scale: the intruder is huge, bigger than anything the mind can grasp. I watch through her eyes as she sees the structure grow until it becomes a plain of iridescent poppies towards which she is falling. My biotracers see her heart rate increase.
Not a simulation
, she subvocalises, a mantra for troubled times.
She is not alone. She looks up, zooms in a blaze of rangefinder digits and sees other silver snowflakes descending towards the plain. In the distance a vast gout of purple fire lances into space, a jet as huge as a solar flare. The ground is moving, but doppler radar tracks it at centimetres per second squared.
"I'm doorstepping the voter," calls Mik. We look round, see his location as an amber arrow winking into a depression in the surface of the world. It seems to be moving faster now; Lorma blips her belly thruster and the ground comes up and slams against her shock absorbers. It slides out from under her until she dabs some quick setting goo across it, holding her in place.
"Me too!" she whispers into the comm circuit. "Anyone listening?"
"Me," I say. "You got company."
"Good."
"Down," says someone else. A chorus starts, spiders ululating at the fleet that is taking evasive action a hundred kilometers overhead. I have't seen any shooting yet but it's only a matter of time. I find it strange to realise that we're all actually inside those ships, prisoners of our meat machines: nobody is down here, nobody but these drone bodies through which our senses feed. Small satellites are deployed around the alien starship to relay our comms. Lorma orients herself -- no, she orients her proxy body -- and pulls down an overlay in our visual field; a map of the surface, as seen by the r-sats. She is on the equator. There is an anomalous patch not far away.
In the distance another drone is visible, closing with us. Zoom resolution shows a name printed beneath its menacing mandibular array;
PARVEEN
. "Parveen," says Lorma, and the white noise on the comm circuit changes.
"Ack?"
"Follow me in."
"Check." They work with the terse ease of long practice. I wonder how long they've spent in the Dreamtime, rehearsing these moves. I follow Lorma's sensorium, while in my viewfield I note that all twenty of
Bronstein's
canvassers are down. Everyone but Boris and myself. All forces committed. Even though the intruder has begun to fire its main drive, we have a toe-hold.
There is a burnished slab of blue metal set into the hull of the Ultrabright ship. Lorma pauses at the edge, then strains with her buttocks as if to defecate. (I twitch uncomfortably:
how far does this sensory synergy go?
) A spiderbomb plops out of the dispenser, grabs hold of the ground and pulls itself along, emitting a tenuous vapour trail. As it reaches the centre of the patch it detonates. The hexagonal patch seems to evaporate, as if it has been completely disrupted by the local damage. Below it there is a yawning darkness.
"Shit," Parveen says tensely. "What's
down
there?"
"Going to find out." Another spiderbomb rolls out. This time it drifts to the middle of the entrance and flares. Magnesium light casts sharp-edged shadows across an empty cavity with tunnels leading off. "There's nothing in it!" Lorma exclaims. "Looks like some kind of maintenance space. Going in."
"Ack." Lorma throws a sucker at the far wall of the cavity, waits for it to grab hold, then reels herself in on a micro-fine fullerene cable. For an endless, breathless moment I feel her surrogate body hanging in an abyss, floating in a free-fall womb within the armoured monstrosity; then tele-reality clamps down again and I'm just
there
, following the assault on an alien spacecraft as a disembodied passenger in her senses.