Herman said that they’re a realspace analogue: he called them a Boyce-Tipler robot. Self-replicating, slower-than-light interstellar probes that are sent out to gather information about the universe and feed it back to a center. Only the Festival isn’t just a dumb robot fleet. It carries upload processors, thousands of uploaded minds running faster than real time when there are resources to support them, downloaded into long-term storage during the long trips.”
Rachel had shuddered slightly at that, and he hugged her, misapprehending the cause of her distress. She let him, not wanting him to realize he had upset her. She’d dealt with uploads before. The first-generation ones, fresh from the meat puppet universe, weren’t a problem: it was the kids that got her. Born — if you could call it that — in a virtual environment, they rapidly diverged from any norm of humanity that she could see. More seriously, their grasp of the real world was poor. Which was fine as long as they didn’t have to deal with it, but when they did, they used advanced nanosystems for limbs and they sometimes accidentally broke things — planets, for instance.
It wasn’t intentional malice; they’d simply matured in an environment where information didn’t go away unless someone wanted it to, where death and destruction were reversible, where magic wands worked and hallucinations were dangerous. The real universe played by different rules, rules that their horrified ancestors had fled as soon as the process of migrating minds into distributed computing networks had been developed.
The Festival sounded like a real headache. On the one hand, an upload civilization, used to omnipotence within its own pocket universe, had decided for no obvious reason to go forth and play the galactic tourist. On the other hand, physical machinery of vast subtlety and power was bound to do their bidding at each port of call. Bush robots, for example: take a branching tree of fronds. Each bough split into two half-scale branches at either end, with flexible joints connecting them. Repeated down to the molecular level, each terminal branch was closed off with a nanomanipulator. The result was a silvery haze with a dumbbell-shaped core, glittering with coherent light, able to change shape, dismantle and reassemble physical objects at will — able to rebuild just about anything into any desired physical form, from the atomic scale up. Bush robots made the ultimate infantry; shoot at them, and they’d eat the bullets, splice them into more branches, and thank you for the gift of metals.
“I’m worried about what will happen when we arrive,” Martin admitted. He’d wrung his hands while he spoke, unconsciously emphasizing his points. “I don’t think the New Republicans can actually comprehend what’s going on. They see an attack, and I can understand why — the Festival has destroyed the political and social economy on one of their colonies as thoroughly as if it had nuked the place from orbit — but what I can’t see is any possible avenue to a settlement. There’s not going to be any common ground there. What does the Festival want? What could make them go away and leave the Republic alone?”
“I thought you didn’t like the New Republic,” Rachel challenged.
He grimaced. “And I suppose you do? I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”
“You did your bit to make it that way.”
“Yes.” He dropped his gaze to the floor, focusing intently on something invisible to her. “I wish there was an alternative. But Herman can’t just let them get away with it. Either causality is a solid law, or — things break. Far better for their maneuver simply to fail, so the whole voyage looks like a cack-handed mess, than for it to succeed, and encourage future adventurers to try for a timelike approach on their enemies.”
“And if you’re lashed to the mast as the ship heads for the maelstrom?”
“I never said I was omniscient. Herman said he’d try to get me out of here if I succeeded; I wish I knew what he had in mind. What are your options like?”
Her lips quirked. “Maybe he nobbled my boss — he taught me never to travel at sea without a lifeboat.” Martin snorted, obviously misunderstanding: “Well, they say a captain always goes down with his ship — shame they never mention the black gang drowning in the engine room!” An announcement from the helm brought Rachel back to the present: “Jump in one-zero-zero seconds.”
“Status, please,” said Commander Murametz. Each post called out in order; everything was running smoothly. ‘Time to transition?“
“Four-zero seconds. Kernel spin-down in progress; negative mass dump proceeding.” Far beneath their feet, the massive singularity at the core of the drive system was spooling down, releasing angular momentum into the energetic vacuum underlying space-time. There was no vibration, no sense of motion: nor could there be. Spin, in the context of a space drive, was a property of warped patches of space, nothing to do with matter as most people understood it.
“Commander Murametz, proceed.” The Captain stood back, hands clasped behind his back.
“Commodore, by your leave?”
Bauer nodded. “Proceed on your initiative.”
‘Transition in progress … we’re clear. Reference frame locked.“
“No obstructions,” called Radar One. “Um, looks like we’re on the nail.”
“One-zero gees, straight in on the primary,” said Ilya. He looked almost bored; they’d rehearsed this a dozen times in the past three days alone. “Confirm positional fix, then give me a passive scan. Standard profile.”
“Aye aye, sir. Nav confirmation; we have a star fix. Yes, we’re a good bit closer to the bucket than last time. I see a waste heat dump from Chancellor Romanoff; they’re through.” That cheered them up; even at ten gees constant acceleration, a miss of a couple of astronomical units could take hours or days to make up. “Nothing else in view.”
“Give me a lidar shout, then. Chirped, if you please, frontal nine-zero degrees.”
“Emission starting — now. Profile steady.” The main screen of the simulation showed megawatts of laser light pouring out into the depths of space, mostly hard ultraviolet tagged with the sawtooth timing pulses of the ship’s clock. “Scan closure. Lidar shutdown.”
Radar Two: “I’ve got backscatter! Range — Holy father! Sir, we’re right on top of them! Range six-zero K-kilometers, looks like metal!”
Bauer smiled like a shark.
“Helm: take us to full military power in one-zero seconds. Course plus one-zero, minus four-zero.”
“Aye aye, sir, bringing course to plus one-zero minus four-zero. Two-one one gees coming up in five …
three … now.” Like most regional powers, the New Republican Navy had adopted the Terran standard gee — ten meters per second squared. At full military power, Lord Vanek could go from a standing start to planetary escape velocity in less than sixty seconds; without a delicate balancing act, trading off the drive kernel’s spin against the curvature of space around the ship, the crew would be squashed flat and broken on the floor. But carrying a drive kernel had its price — a non-FTL, fission-powered missile could, at short range, outrun or out-turn a warship hobbled by the mass of a mountain.