Charles Stross - Scratch Monkey

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Scratch Monkey
Charles Stross
1: Year Zero Man
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.
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.
" 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.
New Salazar:
Primary
G1 Dwarf
Distance
1.24 A.U.
Second planet of seven
none of rest habitable
Moons
None
Diameter
13,000 K.M.
Land area
68% of total surface
Colonised
Year 2427
Present t minus 709 years
Last update
t minus 231 years
Population
1,390,000,000 (last update)
Growth 1.2 % pa
Nations
214
Languages
4 (316 dialects)
Technology
Low => Moderate
Industrialization
(inferred; currently Moderate)
Ethnicity
Unrecorded
... It goes on from there. Two hundred nations? Double the land area of Terra? A population
measured in billions? I could be hunting a needle in a haystack, except that Year Zero Man is
hardly inconspicuous.
The rim of the heat shield glows a pleasant cherry red as the g's stack up then began to tail off
again; first the sky turns ruddy orange, then the shell of the pod shrieks in protest when it drops
through the highest reaches of the stratosphere. The plasma conic burns out. The plan was to head
for the land mass with the highest rate of change of population density we could derive from
Dreamtime transient loading ...
BANG!
I look up. The first aerobrake has deployed, detonating high overhead: I switch my peripheral
nervous system back on and experience a shivery high of visceral fear. The sky is swinging back
and forth above me like a pendulum as the machmeter drops towards One, and then I'm falling
subsonic, altitude two thousand metres and the counter timing down to impact. There's a gurgle
and my ears ring as the suspension gel liquifies and drains away.
-- Three, two, one. Suddenly a giant hand grabs me around the shoulders and buttocks. I'm flying
high on a gossamer kite, wings outstretched above me. I look down and there's nothing under the
capsule but a vast expanse of green, slashed in half by the ochre gash of a dirt trail. My stomach
does a backflip as I reach out and grab the side-arm controller. Two heartbeats and the ground
disappears behind a wisp of low cloud, but I've got no time to waste daydreaming: I'm gliding
down to an alien forest and I've got just three minutes flying time left. The capsule handles like a
brick; it's carrying enough fuel to make orbit.
Right, I think. Where do I land?
I'm down to one thousand metres so I risk a quick flash on radar. There are no metal structures
out there so I decide the road's as safe as anywhere -- this is rainforest country, my briefing
whispers in my head, and I don't want the wingsail to get wrapped up in the trees. (A brief vision
flashes before my eyes; a skeleton in a stealth capsule gently sways in the breeze beneath a
canopy of tree bearing strange fruit, while Year Zero Man continues to play his deadly game and
the distortions in the Dreamtime get worse.) Year Zero Man is a murderous bastard: killing so
many people that - the activity surge in the Dreamtime was measurable at a range of fifteen light
years --
The dusty road is coming up beneath me as I trigger the capsule motor (for just a tenth of a
second -- I don't want to set fire to the forest) and dump the wingsail. It drifts gracefully away
and the capsule drifts gently down between smoke-fumed tree trunks. I can see burning
vegetation as there's a jarring thump from below. The rocket shuts off. Quick! Move! The canopy
retracts and the thermal tiles are still hot beneath my boots as I jump down and turn -- to see a
large deadfall which, if I look at it carefully, might almost be the silhouette of a parked orbiter
capsule.
I lumber through the undergrowth, out onto the road, trot along to the wingsail (which has come
down right in the most visible damn spot in the forest). The fabric billows and it's obviously
entangled in the undergrowth, but that's no problem. I duck down behind it, pull out a ring pull,
and stand back. The sail begins to dissolve. I look round again, see a confused tangle of
undergrowth and anonymous tree-trunks. It's going to be easy to lose the capsule here, so I gash
the tree-trunk with an armoured finger and retreat about ten metres back from the road. Then I
check the time. It's been eleven minutes since I left the station. That's too slow; if this was a
network-ready world they'd have been all over me ten minutes ago. What's up with these people?
How primitive are they?
As I wait for the soldiers to arrive, I strip off my suit and bury it. It takes a minute or two for the
suit's sensitive control systems to disentangle themselves from my spinal cord and viscera, then
the bolts begin to slide back into their sockets and the segments of armour begin to slough off
like the skin of a ceramic snake. The jungle air is a rich compost smell overlaid with the acrid
tang of the dissolving wingsail. Now I look at them, the plants are really strange. All their
branches come in threes, and the leaves are more blue than green: something chitters in the
undergrowth nearby and the insects rasp like a chorus of malfunctioning drones. I shrug out of
my dismembered suit, stand bare-ass naked but for my built-in extras, and look around. There's
no-one watching, so I disentangle my knapsack from the supply locker in the back of the life
support unit. I open it and drag out a grey overall, rough-woven sandals, and a small moneybelt
that bulges. I put them on, wearing the belt inside the suit. I don't know if I look like a native, but
frankly I don't really care. What I care about is not looking like trouble, and the armour is more
of a liability than anything else; its purpose is unmistakable.
It's been nearly two hundred and fifty years since anyone physically visited this world. Since then
it's been out of touch except for the basic Dreamtime function, a one-way stream of emigré
minds. People dying and being uploaded into the wider continuum supported by our insterstellar
digital afterlife. The same people being shunted out across the interstellar gatecoder links,
funnelled into whatever corner of the growing Dreamtime has room for the additional load,
because they don't know how to work the system. Yes, this planet's on the net, but nobody here
knows how to use it. There are more things to the Dreamtime net than interstellar travel and
continued consciousness after death: but it takes a certain degree of knowledge to make use of
them.
Burying the armour is hard work without power assistance, so I just dig a shallow trench and pull
some loose undergrowth over it. Then I stare at the spot, and think hard; a sapphire triangle
appears in my left eye as my inertial tracker locks on. Something grabs at my attention for a
moment: a flashback to a childhood of darkness. I shiver, breathe deeply and look round again.
The colours -- that's what I can never get over. (The colours: try explaining them to a blind
woman.)
... Or to a corpse. I hunker down and switch to infrared, and boost my ears so that the dull rumble
of the engine coming up the road is overlayed with faint sounds of conversation from the driver's
cab. It's a truck, I decide, and it's going to arrive here in less than half a minute. It looks like my
wait is over. I check my chronograph again. It's been all of half an hour since I left the station.
The truck rumbles into view, spurting dusty blue fumes into the humid air. It's quite bulky, and
looks very inefficient -- a huge engine cowling looms over great disc-wheels, a smokestack twice
as high again protruding above it. It's dragging a wagon train on wheels, six creaking wooden
trailers with sealed sides and roofs with small ventilation ducts on top. The whole thing is
travelling not much faster than a brisk marching pace. Little nut-brown men and women with
black hair cling to the sides; they're naked but for loin-cloths and all of them are carrying guns.
As it trundles past my hiding-place, I see into the cab; a sweaty figure is shovelling something
black into a furnace, and another man stands guard with rifle raised. It might be a trading
caravan, but knowing what the Boss told me about Year Zero syndrome I doubt this. The
squealing of axles and rattling of chains and pistons drowns out any noise from inside the sealed
wagons.
It's so big that it takes a minute to pass my hiding place, and in that time I count eight guards. The
only efficient-looking things in the whole convoy are their guns; black, polished, functional. The
soldiers have that thousand yard stare, peering into the jungle with fingers loosely wrapped
around the triggers of their weapons. I've seen that casual, sprawled-out pose among troops
before, lying prone on their trailers or clinging to handholds with the gun half-slung in the crook
of an arm. Don't be fooled: they're not laid-back. They can tear you up faster than the eye can see.
I wait until the last wagon has rumbled by, then I scramble on hands and knees to the edge of the
road and peer after it. They missed the wingsail -- not surprising, even I can barely see its
corroded wreckage and I know where to look -- and the tail guards aren't looking particularly
closely at the side of the road. They seem to be looking at the sky: I squeeze my eyes shut and
pay attention to the microwave sidebands. The webs of phased-array receiver cells implanted at
the back of my eyes go to work. The world goes a dim fuzzy orange, and I can see through trees:
the sky is a sodium-lit hell paraded by aurorae. But there's no sweep radar! I remember the guns.
The projectiles they shoot are unguided, judging by the lack of sights. Do these people even have
radar?
I hear a buzzing from the sky as I wait for the convoy to pass out of view. I itch in the damp heat,
and the insects are trying to bite my face. This planet's been terraformed too well for my liking. I
swat them away, watching the trail of reddish dust and blue smoke diminishing into the distance
as I listen: what now?
The buzzing gets louder. I peep for radar again but nobody's scanning, so I raise my head for an
eyeball search; I see a dragonfly through the tangled branches, a dragonfly the size of the engine
at the head of the road train. Shit! I hug the nearest tree trunk. One look tells all. The plane is
primitive -- rotary airscrews and guy lines to hold the wings taut. Not so far advanced over the
coal-burning crew up ahead. Speaking of whom --
Well, yes. I hear the crackle of small arms fire from the convoy. They're shooting at the
dragonflyer, assault rifles against piston power. Quaint but deadly. That explains the look-outs. I
squat, pull up the hood of my jumpsuit, then roll it right down across my forehead. I fasten it tight
and adjust the eye-patches so I can see, then I pull on my gloves. Thunder rumbles off the baking
road surface ahead. There's a switch in my right palm, and when I trigger it my hand shimmers
and slowly dissolves into cyanic chaos against the vegetation. Wrapped head to foot in this suit
I'm a chameleon: it's not a cloak of invisibility, exactly, but the next best thing. I step onto the
road and jog towards the column of smoke. Which is no longer blue and ochre and dry, but black
and oily and hot.
By the time I get close enough to see the wreckage the dragonflyer is long gone, vanished into the
hazy skies like a lethal mirage. The smoke is dense, billowing in clouds from flames that lick
eagerly at the engine and front carriage. The road train has jack-knifed into the trees that line the
edge of the road. Two of the rear trailers are overturned. A thin keening noise rises from them,
grating on my nerves; the sound of many voices crying out in fear. I know what's in them now,
and why the pilot of the dragonflyer would strafe her own people on their transport to oblivion.
About a hundred metres from the wreckage I pass the first corpse. She's lying in a pool of her
own blood, thrown there by the force of the blast. The flyer only carried small bombs: anything
bigger would have annihilated the entire convoy. The fire is spreading fast so I don't bother
looking too closely at the body -- I've got more important things to do.
Someone's moving up ahead. I trot forward, passing a puddle of burning oil here and a mass of
crumpled metal there. One of the trailers has burst open, spilling human flesh like a twist of
corruption across the pristine chaos of the jungle. Some of the flesh is moving. I jog past them: a
mass of men and women, all naked and bloody, shaven scalps weirdly pale above their tanned
bodies. Those who can crawl, crawl; those who can stand, stand. Their hands are upraised, and
some of them appear to be looking up, searching for the signs of deliverance: but that's wrong, as
I see when I get closer. My stomach gives an odd lurch, something I thought I'd gotten over long
ago; The Year Zero Men responsible for this atrocity are nothing if not efficient.
All of them have recently had their eyes gouged out.
The bodies of the dead guards lie strewn around the sides of the road. Some of them lie like
broken puppets, their limbs bent at odd angles, while others look perfectly healthy. A few have
skin the consistency of a pulpy, rotten fruit, and tongues that bulge and glisten gruesomely.
Hydrostatic shock kills in a myriad of ways, all of them final but some of them uglier than others.
Listening in on the high frequency cellcom bands I can hear a raucous twittering, neural mapping
data being uploaded into the invisible, omnipresent Dreamtime. At a conservative estimate, the
convoy consisted of twelve guards ferrying five hundred prisoners; less than fifty will survive the
wreck, and all will die before they reach civilisation. Which is a small mercy, I suppose, because
those who reach what passes for civilisation on this planet will only take longer to die.
I spot what I'm looking for and give the escaping prisoners a wide berth as I sprint towards the
head of the train. One of the guards there has been thrown clear. On infrared I can see the pulse in
her throat, the warm breath rising unevenly from her mouth. If I can get to her before the
prisoners stumble this far I may have a chance to save her.
First aid crowds out the questions that clamour in the shadows of my mind as I bend over the
guard. She's still breathing raggedly, and appears to be unconscious, but I give her a quick scan
with my eyes on active and she doesn't seem to have any broken bones. Possible concussion,
then, and maybe some internal bleeding. Well, there's nothing I can do about that. She's almost as
tall as I am, skin tanned and tattooed in strange designs -- vortices and death's heads and the more
arcane geometries of soft tissue injuries -- and her hair is cropped into a narrow, spiky helmet.
Her fatigues are stained and grimy and there's a knife at her belt. I ditch the toothpick and pick
her up, somehow roll her across my shoulders, and head for the edge of the road.
Picking my way through trees and bushes carrying a woman who weighs nearly as much as I do
is not exactly my idea of fun, but neither is getting a bullet in the back of the neck. It seems to go
on forever, but my chronometer keeps me informed with merciless precision; I spend fifteen
minutes and eight seconds pushing through a seething wall of turquoise-streaked khaki
vegetation. Frond-like leaves brush my sweat-slick face, and thorny branches whip around after
me or catch on my chameleon suit. There are strange rustlings in the undergrowth and all the
while a chorus of beetles and arthropods covers the possible sound of pursuit.
I pitch her down at the foot of a forest giant and stop to breathe. Black spots swim before my
eyes; I've pushed half a kilometre into this wilderness just to get away from that ochre killing-
ground. The raw, eyeless sockets of the victims seem to stare at me through the jungle, accusing
me of ... shit, I think, why couldn't someone else have pulled this end of the stick? Mannanash, or
Davud ... anyone? Anyone but me! Maybe it was the Boss's decision. I've never trusted his sense
of humour; it's as unhuman as He is. This is just the sort of assignment that would strike him as
amusing.
I blink and tell my eyes to run their power-on self-test. They flash through it in two seconds,
sequences of light shimmering on the inside of my eyelids to tell me that all's well and I can see
as easily as anyone else. Twenty-two years I've had the ability to see; twenty-two years out of my
thirty-four subjective. Distant Intervention gave me my eyes back when they recruited me. I open
them and look about, then down at the body that's muttering incoherent gibberish. There's work
to be done, I see; work to justify my vision. And yes ... it's going to be grim.
I slip my hand through my left pocket and unzip the inside lining, then open my belt pouch.
There are a number of small items inside; I select the ring and slide it onto my index finger, then
remove a couple of tiny cylinders. Then I seal the pouch and pocket, roll my hood back, and
switch my suit to a dust-grey colour that is anything but invisible against the lunatic glare of the
vegetation.
First cylinder. I peel back the tag and press it against the side of her neck; she sighs slightly and
relaxes. "Tell me your name," I say.
"Ash fnargle ... " she swallows and twitches slightly. My mind goes a blank as something rams
my tongue into gear, and my mouth makes strange noises. The culture of nanobots in the injector
are making their way to her brain, linking up with and reprogramming the monitors that cluster
thickly throughout her cerebral cortex. Soon they'll have her language centres dowloading direct
into my own head, ready for me to make use of their neural mappings. She makes some more
inarticulate gargling sounds and coughs; my mouth writhes through glottal stops and half-
swallowed vowels as my hijacked larynx shadows her vocalisation. The nanosensors that thread
her brain, constantly transmitting her sensory encoded personality to the afterlife receivers, are
amenable to some low level reprogramming; and she's undefended. Like everyone else on this
world, she doesn't even know she's got them. (How much else have they lost? Or remembered?)
For a minute longer she spouts gibberish; then, suddenly, everything seems to shift and clear, and
it all makes perfect sense.
" ... Seventh special action team. Blasted Hv'ranth flyer picked us up on the run back home and ...
here I am. Here you are too, I guess. Where's here? Who're you?"
"Never mind where we are," I say smoothly, "who are you? Tell me about yourself ..."
There are standard methods for lifting material out of brains. Everyone, everywhere in human
space, is riddled with nanotech Dreamtime encoders. They're in the air, in the soil, in their cells
and reproducing like bacteria. They constantly monitor cerebral activity, transmitting updates of
their host personality to the encoders, that upload minds into the Dreamtime when their bodies
cease to support them. It even makes a neat debriefing tool, if you have the equipment to
interrogate the brain encoders directly. (Only Distant Intervention, that I know of, is allowed to
play with this kind of kit.)
I make fairly good time; it takes me about fifteen minutes to establish that she is second-sergeant
Mavreen Tor'Jani -- or Tor'Jani Mavreen if you put the family name first as these people seem to
-- and she's attached to one of the Year Zero meat convoys. A piece of luck: the target is on this
continent. Tor'Jani's married -- polyandrous, three husbands -- no children -- just joined this unit
so doesn't have any close friends here -- absolutely perfect. Year Zero Man has been strutting his
bloody stuff for eight years and has conquered half the planet; the next continent over put up a
spirited resistance and is now a steaming charnel house, while his own people have been slightly
more lucky so far. Especially those who collaborate in the process, like this one. Special Action
Teams ... murderers in bulk.
The more I hear the angrier I get. Year Zero Man is a woman this time; a charismatic leader
called Marat Hree, some kind of jumped-up politician who appeared from nowhere and who is
now running the standard course. A nation called the Kingdom of Alpagia was her springboard to
empire. I don't get any more from Mavreen about the Compassionate Mother and Teacher, who is
none of those, but then I don't really need to; she was on escort duty for one of the consignments
to a local slaughterhouse and I might as well tag along for the ride. After a while I stop her in
mid-spiel and ask her who I am. She looks up at me and tenses, and her eyes go wide just before I
break her neck. Then I open my make-up kit and begin to reconstruct my face.
Second sergeant Tor'Jani Mavreen -- or a good likeness thereof -- stumbles out of the jungle half
an hour later, a good hour after the attack on the train. She's dazed, and has a gigantic lump above
her left eye; but for all that she's in better shape than the convoy. (She may even be a little taller,
a trifle heavier than before; but there's a limit to what even nanotech restructuring can achieve in
the way of instant plastic surgery.)
The convoy is an utter shambles. Four carriages are consumed by fire, along with the engine and
seven of the guards: the cacophony from the surviving cargo is deafening, the drowning squeal of
a sackful of kittens amplified a thousandfold. Mavreen grabs forceman Kaidmaan by the shoulder
and demands to know what's going on, who's in charge; Kaidmaan shrugs numbly and looks at
her. "You are," he says vaguely: "everyone else is dead. Brazzia radio'd for help and they said to
wait here."
"Oh great," snarls Mavreen, surveying the wreckage of which she is now -- by default --
commander. "Who else is fighting fit, then?"
"What do you mean?" asks Kaidmaan. "There's me, you --" he looks at her bleeding forehead
dubiously "-- Brazzia, and, uh, Nord's arm is broken. That's it. Everyone else is dead!"
Mavreen shakes him hard. "Listen," she says, "you go to pieces on me and I'll have your balls for
-- " She looks over her shoulder. "What's that?"
He cowers. "They're coming back!"
"Crap." She listens some more. "That's our aerovac, fool. Get the others moving! It's only eighty
leagues to Radiant Progress Base Number Six, we can't leave these cattle here. I want those
wagons unhitched; get us ready to roll as soon as they can get a new engine down here."
Forceman Kaidmaan looks at her strangely, but scrambles to obey.
Mavreen looks at the sky and scowls, murderously angry over the loss of two-thirds of her cargo;
the aerovac team is coming and when Highcom gets to know about the mess that's gone down
here they're going to want to know why, and maybe some negligent eyes are going to get gouged.
She gets a warm, weak feeling at the thought. Already she's formulating her account of the
convoy. Damned partisans ...
Somewhere behind her face I'm grinning with rage.
Aerovac is a zeppelin, not a dragonflyer. A ribbed brown cylinder with bat-wings and carved
wooden gondolas slung below it, it cruises silently above the forest trail. There are human skulls
hanging from the command cabin, and seven-pointed iron stars and the other fetishes of an age of
enlightenment turned bloody-dark by Year Zero. I muster my scanty forces, fingers curled
loosely round the butt of my automatic rifle as Brazzia, the radioman, hunches over his sparking
contraption and listens to the squeal of the airwaves. "Tell them we're okay but we need a new
engine and driver to recover these jungle monkeys," I tell him. Nord looks at me with wide eyes,
favouring her broken arm which Kaidmaan wrapped in cloth torn from the uniforms of our dead
colleagues.
"We could use some ground support," I say, staring into the jungle; "if the sodding partisans are
coordinating with the Hv'Ranth we could lose the lot of them." The words come easily but the
meanings are more difficult; I take it that the Hv'Ranth are one of the remaining free nations of
New Salazar, and the partisans are those subject peoples who rise up against the Enlightened
New Empire of The Compassionate Mother and Teacher. Meanwhile I mouth the syllables, in
search of deeper meaningful associations; the mutilated semiotics of ethnic cleansing make great
fig-leaves for hypocritical righteousness.
"I'll tell them," mutters Brazzia; "I'll tell the bastards!" He taps away at his spark key as the green
helix spins in the lower-left corner of my visual field, and information tools grind down data in
the recesses of my skull. "Get us out of here!" he subvocalises, unaware that I can hear a pin drop
at half a kilometre, should I choose to do so: "-- fucking bitch is going to get us all killed if we sit
摘要：

ScratchMonkeyCharlesStross1:YearZeroManAsIfastenmycrashwebbingSareenalooksatmeandshakesherhead."Whatisit?"Iask.Shepausesasshepre-checkstheheatshield:shelooksembarrassed."Doyouhaveanylastwishes?"sheasks,stumblingoverherwords."Imean,doyouwantmetotellanyoneifyou..?"Igrinupatherhumourlessly.She'slittlem...

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