Charles Stross - Year zero

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1: Year Zero Man

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As I fasten my crash webbing Sareena looks at me and shakes her head. "What is it?" I

ask. She pauses as she pre-checks the heat shield: she looks embarrassed.

"Do you have any last wishes?" she asks, stumbling over her words. "I mean, do you want

me to tell anyone if you ..?"

I grin up at her humourlessly. She's little more than a shadow cast by the glare of the

floodlights, so I can't see her expression. "What do you think?" I ask, hoping for

something to distract me from what's about to happen.

She straightens up and checks over the ejection rail another time. It's ancient, a history

book nightmare. Everything on this station is ancient: the planetary colony abandoned

space travel, along with most everything else, when they cut themselves off from contact

centuries ago. Cold and dark, the station was mothballed for centuries, until the we

beamed in and reactivated it. Now it has new owners, and a very different purpose to the

one it was designed for. "Okay," she says calmly. "So if you don't come back, you don't

want anyone to cry ..."

"Not for me," I say, jerking a thumb over my shoulder towards the sealed airlock bay

doors, amber lights strobing across the danger zone to indicate pressure integrity. "But if I

don't come back, you can cry for the natives. Nobody else will."

"Yeah, well. Looks like the heat shield's good for one more trip, at least." She finishes

with her handheld scanner and hooks it to her utility belt, then turns and waves at the

redlit Launch Control room, high among the skeletal girders above us. "Does your your

life support integrity check out?"

"Check." A green helix coils slowly in the bottom left corner of my visual field, spiralling

down the status reading on my suit; more head-up displays wind past my other eye in a

ruby glare of countdown digits. The oxy pressure on my countercurrent infuser is fine but

I have a tense feeling like an itch. I can't breathe with my lungs. Got to make this reentry

drop immersed in a bubble of liquid. The decceleration on reentry is going to be ferocious.

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1: Year Zero Man

The comm circuit comes to life: it's launch control. " Launch window opens in

two hundred seconds. You should make your modified orbital

perigee in two seven nine seconds at one-niner five

kilometres. You'd better clear the bay, Sar."

"Okay." She shrugs. "Outer helmet?"

I nod clumsily and she lowers it into place over my head. I cut in my external sensors and

sit tight in the frame of the drop capsule, webbed in by refrigerant feeds. The thick aerated

liquid gurgles around my ears then begins to thicken into a gel. The pod's active stealth

skin tests itself, flashing chameleon displays at the wall. "All systems go," I tell her, voice

distorted by the gunk clogging my throat: "you tie one on for me, okay?" I smile, and she

gives me a thumbs-up.

" You're go, Adjani," cuts in launch control; Helmut and Davud are in charge.

We've been through this all before: they sound professionally bored.

" Pressure drop in one-forty seconds, re-entry window in one-

ninety and counting. Repeat, Go for drop in two minutes."

"Check," Sareena calls over her shoulder, then stops for one last word. "Take care, Oshi,"

she says. "We'll miss you."

"So will I," I say, feeling like a hollow woman as the wise-crack comes out. She half-

reaches out toward me, but doesn't quite make it: she pulls back instead, and jogs towards

the access hatch. I track her with the capsule sensors, testing the image filters we

yesterday. Seen by the light of radio emissions her skeleton is a hot synthetic pink

overlaid with luminous green flesh and a thin blue spiderweb of nanotech implants just

beneath the skin. It could have been her, I tell myself, trying to imagine myself retreating

through that door and sealing it on her; it didn't have to be me. All right, so I volunteered.

So why have second thoughts at this stage? The Boss said it's important, so I suppose it

must be. There's a very important job to be done and then I'm going to come back okay, no

doubt about it. It's going to be good --

" One minute, Adjani. Any last words?"

"Yeah," I say. Suddenly my mouth is dry. "This is --"

The lights on the bay wall flash into a blinding red glare and a spume of vapour forms

whirlpools around the air vent: the clam-shell door is opening onto space, draining out the

frail pool of air.

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1: Year Zero Man

" Pulling sockets, Adjani. Good ... "

I don't get to hear the rest. The launch rail kicks me in the small of the back and the head-

up display blanks out the starscape in a blaze of tracking matrices. When my eyeballs

unsquash I erase the unnecessary read-outs and take a look. The planet is a vast, ego-

numbing blueness into which I'm falling. I re-run the mission profile as the orientation

thrusters cut in, spinning the drop capsule so that I'm racing backwards into a sea of

swirling gas at Mach thirty. The capsule is going to make an unpowered re-entry like a

meteor; it's designed to pull fifty gees of deceleration on the way down (far more than any

sane pilot would dream of), shedding fiery particles like a stone out of heaven. This is

going to happen in about three minutes time.

I'm busy for a few seconds, heart in my mouth as I scan for search radar and missile

launches, but no-one's detected me and by the time I can look up the black-surfaced

station is invisible against the thin scattering of stars above me. I could almost be alone

out here -- but I'm not, quite. Someone is down there: someone dangerous. Otherwise

Distant Intervention wouldn't have seen fit to send a team through the system Gatecoder,

fifteen light-years from anywhere else; otherwise it wouldn't have rated a visit of any kind,

let alone the attention of a Superbright like the Boss. Because if nobody lives here, why

the hell is it pumping out so many uploaded minds that it distorts Dreamtime processing

throughout the entire sector?

A Year Zero event, that's what. I'm told we've run across this sort of thing before, but

rarely, less than once a century in the whole wide spread of human settlement; and that's

why I'm here.

That's why everyone's afraid I'm not coming back ...

From the second when the pod first drops below orbital velocity to the moment it

penetrates the stratopause and deploys wings, there's not a lot for me to do. That's only

about two minutes, but it feels like forever: I'm suspended in a tank of high pressure

liquid, feeling my bones grate under the huge stresses of deceleration.

I run my test routines, muscles tensing, relaxing, counting down the milliseconds to

landing: the green helix spins in my left eye, pacing out the moments. While my body is in

spasm I call up the wisdom download they gave me, a huge database of predigested

memories sitting in the implants that thread my brain. It's full of details about the planets

population, and I go over them -- got to check my knowledge, even though I already know

it a thousand times over -- as the first wisps of atmosphere tear at the rim of my heat

shield. When I begin to feel heavy I switch off my inner ears and follow the g-forces on a

display; New Salazar makes for daunting reading.

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Charles Stross - Year zero

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