Charles Stross - The Boys

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The Boys

Charles Stross

The boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull

bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles

and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of

authority: the boys didn't care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead,

stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their

incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose.

Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as

it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass

modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her

screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver.

"Boys; He's been dead for half an hour." The constables flinched and whined; she

noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste.

"Nothing here," she told the autopilot. "Get the skull, then take us home."

The small noises of relief were drowned out by the roar of the fans. Some of the

cyborged dogs muttered and scratched their implants as the carrier turned and rumbled back

towards the castle. In the wake of the hovercraft the cobblestones were darker than before,

by an increment of congealing blood.

The castle, a cube with edges a kilometer long, shone with an ominous red glow that

filtered through the grime of centuries. The degenerate bioforms of the landscape twisted

away from the laser-veined monolith of lunar basalt; nerve-trees bubbled into fatty shapes

and acanthopods bristled as they crept past. The clouds above it reflected a red glow,

megawatts of energy expended in a display of power. The ceiling of the world, a continuation

of the floor, hung thirty kilometers overhead, masked by clouds: cylindrical storms and spiral

winds induced by convection from the algae-fogged solar windows were the predominant

weather pattern. The world existed in a soyuz-shell; TransLunar Seven, the Islamic

Revolutionary Shogunate, had seen better days.

The view from the incoming drifter would have been spectacular if anyone had

bothered to observe it. The pod closed in on the habitat slowly, waiting to be picked up by a

tug as it drifted past. Its self-sustaining ecosystem basked in the glare of sunlight close to the

sun, pulsing out a call sign to the tracking systems of the orbital city. At a range of a hundred

kilometers the orbital nation was a slowly rolling wall of grey metal and ceramic. Outlying

parabolic light farms provided a hook for the eye, stationary mylar mirrors focussed on

geodesic domes that could contain anything from algae tanks to laser cells. Thin stems of

plastic fastened them to the hub regions at either end of the colony. They were huge,

kilometers in diameter, as were the gigantic solar windows set into the wall of the world. The

drift pod was a bacillus approaching a dinosaur.

But the pod was bigger than any reptile, and carried a varied cargo of sentience.

There were the pod's native bionics and their supportive life-system, and more – a human

cargo. Nike was a fully gender-identified female human; she had the right complement of

arms, legs and sensory organs, which was not mandatory. Coming from Troy-Jupiter, where

lots of things called themselves human, this was quite a surprise. But Nike wasn't bothering

about the scenery; she was worrying about customs.

"You're still set on going in?" asked the pod personna, an expert system that called

itself Valentin Zero.

"Maybe." Nike stared into inner space, mirrored contact lenses turning her eyelids

into projection screens for the video nodes in her optic nerves. "I may just go through with

this. I may. Just."

She ground to a halt, thoughtfully, remembering what it had been like when she had

been here before. A modified wasp buzzed to a six-point landing on her left arm, abdomen

curved to inject. Its lance slid out and penetrated her skin, extending feathery biosensors into

her peripheral circulation.

"Spying again, Valentin?" She opened her eyes and looked at the wasp. Its metallic

carapace shone with black and red stripes, tiny alphanumerics embossed on its wings.

"I can never tell what you're thinking," said the program. "It makes me nervous."

Nike tried an experimental grin, her face twisting into a semblance of spontaneity.

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Charles Stross - The Boys

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