Authors: Charles Stross
I hit bottom then. Everything is dark, inside as well as out. Maybe Eri senses this because she squeezes my shoulder and says; "no worries. Not your fault. No problems -- I've got mine here."
"You -- no. If we had one we could --" she fumbles around my lap, finds my hand and forces something round and cold between my fingers. "Cut the stonework out and maybe we can crawl ..."
"Would be way too tight. Have you figured out how much room we've got, yet?"
"No -- " I try to stand up. I don't do it very fast, which is a good thing because the ceiling is very low indeed. Poured concrete. My stomach lurches. I've just remembered: there's no echo in here. "This is a tube tunnel, right?"
"Ack." quiet, now.
"And it's terminal?" I shuffle forward, hands stretched out in front until I graze rough rock with my knuckles. Turn round, shuffle back, step over Eri's legs, fumble my way to the mass of rubble at the other end of the tunnel. "Damn. four, five metres. Couldn't you have found something bigger?"
Even though it's pitch black I can sense her watching me. "It was the best I could do. They were behind us, Oshi. They can strip a horse down to bonemeal in under a minute. Teeth like a man trap."
I sit down again, feel my way across the floor towards her. The first thing I catch is her fingers: we hold hands for a minute as I try to make sense of this cold coffin burial she saved us for. "If we're more than about five metres under we won't make it. Damn, I hope we've got enough air. Or maybe Ivan and Ton will dig us out. You never know."
"Depends," she says quietly. "They might not be around."
"You figure that?"
The silence hangs guilty over my head.
"I wish you hadn't asked," she says.
"Oh --" I squeeze her hand. Feel self pity and anger wash over me. And loss, angst, hatred.
Maybe they'll make it
-- and maybe I'll stop kidding myself.
"Is it murder to hand a toddler a loaded pistol and tell them it's a toy?"
The silence is gravid. Something rattles, a long way away. I lean against her shoulder. "If the web's set up right we can maybe capture those who're still hooked for Dreamtime upload. Thus removing the Partei power-base at a stroke. You suppose diMichaelis will wait before setting off the carpet bombs?"
"No. You're being optimistic. I think it all smells wrong, Oshi. The Partei are very tough people. That can't be what the Boss is planning."
"But ..." I stop and think. A vision steals into my eyes: Eri strokes my visual cortex with a low-level wisdom burst. Nukes wrapped in carpets. The carpets are upload webs, holographic tracking nodes capable of spitting souls wholesale into the afterlife -- the real bomb, more terminal than any nuke. A weapon designed to subvert the minds of the people it is used against. "The idea was that if we got turned over the Stasi would mistake it for a nuke job. And you don't need more than one nuke per city, do you?"
"Wrong-o, Osh. You can't rely on ignorance -- that's underestimating the enemy.
Think
about it." She leans against me. "I'm too tired to say. It's real bad. We don't have much longer, I guess."
"Huh? What's --"
going on
, I was about to say, but it all clicks together and suddenly makes a horrible kind of sense, like a thermite explosion going off behind my eyes. "But the Stasi don't
have
nuclear demolition charges! Even if they knew how to use them."
She strokes my shoulder. "They have them now. Thanks to us. And they know we're planning something for the city. They're opposed to the Dreamtime in a serious way, some kind of political control-meme that's taken over. If they figure we're going to upload the entire city they might just --"
"Don't say it." I shake her hand off angrily. "Nobody could be that cruel --"
I'm lying across her legs and she's moaning. I'm dizzy from the noise that goes on and on like an earthquake. Everything creaks and shudders around us. The floor tips up and the angry giant shakes us some more, but the roar is dying away. My ears hurt. "What's that?" I say, unable to hear my own voice. "I say what's that?"
She sits up and clutches at me desperately, "the fuckers did it, they're mad, gave a pistol to the paranoids, like a scorpion that stings itself to death if it sees itself in a mirror and can't kill the reflection --"
A hot wind blows through the tube. The floor tilts some more and the pile of rubble slides towards us and a cold horror bathes me in cold sweat. Shuddering, I roll over and shake her, drag her down on top of me, "
lie still, open your mouth, hope the overpressure doesn't --
"
A shower of gravel bursts over us and round us and we kick and shove against a slurry of rocks and hot stinking shit-churned mud. "
Oh heaven oh hell what have we done
--" The cloud is choking us and it's hot, too hot to breathe. With a groaning roar the end of our coffin pokes out of the seared ground; overhead, the noon sky is the colour of an angry sunset. We slide down the gravel heap towards the back end of the tube. "Got to get out," she says aloud, very clearly. There's a ringing in my ears that at first I think is real -- then I realise it's my wisdom, listening to raw microwaves torn from a bleeding sky.
Moments later, without really understanding how, I'm standing on top of the cracked pavement outside. Eri is with me, propping me up; my ankle throbs. The pavement is hot, almost too hot to stand on. There's rubble everywhere. Something like a broken stick, on fire, protrudes from a shattered car with half a house lying across the front of it. Flesh runs molten. There's a sickly meat smell in the air that makes me want to salivate and throw up simultaneously. And a continuous rumble of fire, drumming desolation across the wasteland that only a minute ago was a city.
I look up. From this close -- only a couple of kilometers away -- the cloud looks nothing like a mushroom. It's more like a great angry pillar of fire that merges with the red sky, a bridge between earth and gehenna. I'm deaf, wisdom cut off abruptly by the magnetic storm triggered by the dying fireball. I don't think anyone around us can have survived.
"We did it," Eri sobs. "Handed them a pistol and showed them, 'if you don't use it now we'll do it for you.' And they believed it. They fell for it. Like a scorpion faced with a mirror ..."
I slap her face, turn and hobble away.
Ivan and Ton Ang are dead
, I tell myself.
Dead forever
. They died shortly before the blast: it takes time to be packet-shifted out to the gatecoders, up to the great afterlife processors in the sky, and nukes are notorious for scrambling uploads. Feeling something nameless and unimaginable, I concentrate on going anywhere, just so long as it is away from the rumbling tower of death that casts a shadow over us.
Why couldn't it be me
? In the distance, over the hills and far away, the sky is still blue; it seems like such a monstrous injustice that I'm alive to see it.
I don't need this kind of guilt.
Nuclear sunburn prickles on the nape of my neck as the city smoulders. I stop, look down at an obstruction. A body lies at my feet, blackened like a log in a forest fire: no face, just a grinning cinder suggestive of eyes and teeth.
diMichaelis must have told the Stasi where to find us. Then planted both devices at just the right time, with just enough information to tell the Partei leaders what we were doing. Which made them--
"Wait for me." I feel her presence behind me. "Wait, please. Oshi. You shouldn't be running. Slow down. Don't leave me alone here."
I stumble, stop in the shadow of a stone building with windows that lie in the street outside, frames blistered and scorched. She trudges up behind me. For the first time I realise she's limping worse than I am. Face covered in grime, native costume ripped and smeared and scorched, blood on her hands and face. "It's not my fault. They had to destroy their own city in order to save it for their ideology," she explains. She looks like a madwoman, eyes staring from a soot-smudged face, grimy blonde hair turned to fire by the setting nuclear sunburst.
"I know," I say. "But if it's not our fault, why did we give them the means to do it?"
She stares at me open-mouthed: tears pool in the corners of her eyes. "But we
didn't know
," she repeats. "They never told us. We just followed orders." She sounds as if she's trying to answer a question, but I never asked her it. I doubt that I could.
"Come on." I hold out an arm. She catches it and clutches it to herself, holds me tight: we stumble forwards. Echoing from the distant hills, I hear the throb of an approaching helicopter. Meanwhile, overhead, the new sun is dying.
We have sinned; and soon the black rain will begin.
Will you still love me
The radiation storm passes, watched only by impassive sensors mounted on the hub of the colony cylinder.
The eye of the storm is a small black hole: a spark of evil light in the abyss. It burns with a cold heat, blasting a sleet of hard gamma radiation out into the darkness of space. The hole itself is smaller than a protein molecule, a tiny knot of tortured spacetime that weighs as much as a mountain range. A halo of decaying matter swirls around it, dragged ever inwards by a force of gravity turned in on itself. As it closes in on the sump at the bottom of the gravity well the accretion disk heats up, until atoms split in the incandescent glare of an on-going explosion. A hot spray of high-energy radiation floods off it, hosing across the plane of the gas giant's system of moons. The hole is being used as a synchrotron source, an energy weapon bright enough to shine across interplanetary distances. A dark shape hides behind it, indistinct but almost as large as the colony: the physical body of the Ultrabright attack drone. The drone is a dumb killing machine, unmotivated -- as yet -- by the cool and unsympathetic mind of its maker. Given time, this will change ...
Its path takes it a long way from icy Turing or airless Pascal, but that makes no difference to their fate. A steady stream of exotic particles sprays out, bracketing Pascal and the L5 colony quite neatly. It's hotter than a solar flare, hotter than a nova: the radiation temperature is astronomical, hot enough to boil lead.
Closest approach is ten million kilometres. Drifting at under two percent of light-speed, the hole falls onward through the stellar system. In sixteen hours time it will reach the orbit of Wirth, the terraforming candidate that circles close in around Ridgegap-47.
The neutral particle beam that bathes the hole in exotic matter shuts off abruptly. Unseen moderators clamp down, damping the postron/electron reactions in the accretion disk. The hole continues to digest its halo of matter for a few scant minutes, but the dinner is over. Now it will starve until it reaches Wirth and the terraforming station Anubis abandoned years before. It is already a small hole, dangerously close to the lower bounds of stability. Small holes are hot, decaying by emitting Hawking radiation; this one is already toasting in the millions of degrees. When it explodes, the flash will be visible light years away. That event is due in just over sixteen days time, some kilometres beneath the crust of the doomed planet ...
Oshi only really grasped the immensity of what had happened on the third day after the storm.
Awakening had been hard. She'd struggled up from the depths of a nightmarish dream in which she recapitulated the events of her early adulthood: condemned to relive the horrific awakening on Miramor Dubrovnic, then to undergo the hardening of the cynical shell that had protected her until the fateful mission on New Salazar. It was like sleep-walking through hard-setting clay, or struggling for breath beneath the cool suffocation of an avalanche. Remembering when she'd had Ivan was the least of it: his loss was somewhat faded now, a sepia photographic memory with edges too blunted to cut deep. (Her childhood, by contrast, remained the only thing that could easily break through the armour she wore.)
But on the third morning she had opened her eyes gasping, her arms outstretched before her in the idiot zombie-posture of free fall relaxation. "Where is --" she began.
Axial redoubt command bunker. Status report available
.
"That's --" she stopped and blinked, the thick encrustation of sleep heavy on her eye-lashes. She could feel the uncomfortable intrusions of her exoskeleton, tubes probing deep within to irrigate and clean and feed her body. "
How long have I been asleep?
"
Two days.
Two days. She felt as if it had been two hours. "What's happened?"
Radiation levels decreased to normal. External life support remains down. External colony support is on criticality rung seven of eight. Prognosis: this station will cease to be habitable in the near future.
"Oh."
It was all she could think of to say. She glanced round, taking in the survival gear lockers, the airlock leading up and out towards the manufacturing and docking complexes of the hub: the huge monitor that covered the end-wall of the command bunker. "External sensors," she mumbled. "Give me what rim coverage you can manage: I want to take a look."
Affirmative. Viewport on main screen ...
Over the next hour, Oshi learned that she was alone. The radiation had killed off most of the higher life forms in the colony. Insects survived, thriving on the corpses, but nothing else above the level of a mouse had survived for long, except the tapeworm.
The biological weapon was unstoppable. After taking root, it had erupted from the corpse to wage systematic warfare on the entire colony. It ran wild through the residential sectors, hyphae digesting the putrefying bodies that dotted the complex. Although it had started as a mere parasite flatworm, it was now the most elaborate predator in the colony. It cannibalised the genetic heritage of its victims, absorbing the data via an elaborate nanoscale assimilation engine; a post-Lamarckian organism, it evolved by integrating and expressing characteristics usually associated with other species. Fat cords and furry ropes of fungus lay, corpulent and glistening, in pools of purulent fluid that contained anything it couldn't digest. It randomly interpreted the DNA of dead people and animals, sprouting random experiments derived from homoeobox control sequences. Strange phalloid structures towered over the bulbous buildings, the bones of humans and deer and Goon Squad meat machines scattered around their omnivorous trunks. An arm coated in fur waved feebly from a bush of throbbing viscera near the medicentre. A cylindrical, dark-skinned mushroom, its cap a wrinkled topology looted from some other species, overlooked the wreckage of the Administrator's office with an expression of murine horror on its flattened rodent face. Dying landpussies -- aerobic octopi, customised for low-gee harvesting -- hung like purulent fruit from the mycotic trees, their skins strobing through silvery-green panic hues as they died. Strange, rodent bushes whirred and chittered among the branches, chained to their parent organism by long umbilical cords that resembled everted intestines.