perfidy

Ministry crony EDog has issued a challenge. Write a complete novel in a hundred days. He suckered me into the NaNoWriMo contest last November, and as it happened, that was simply too much for me at the time. However, it's summer, and I am feeling optimistic. Also, an 80k word novel is inherently more saleable than a 50k word novella - novellas basically being the red-headed stepchildren of the publishing industry. Conceivably, there could be a bright shiny pile of cash at the end of the tunnel. EDog has graciously spotted me the 10k words I wrote for Nanowrimo last fall, and the story of Baby and interstellar genocide will continue.

EDog's looking at starting no later than July 1, so look for more space madness in the coming weeks. I'll see if I can get Rocket Jones to play, too.

My son told me a story this morning. I took a break from disinfecting my computer and acted as scribe for young Hemingway:

Once upon a time, a sleeping dragon in a cave dreamt of scaring people. When he woke, the dragon (whose name was Dragon) slithered to John's house. There, he asked if John could come out and play. So John and Dragon went into the backyard and played in the sandbox.

The End

Part three of the Ministry's collaborative fiction-writing project is after the break. Previous installments: part 2, part 1.
On this particular day, Alexei disrupted his longstanding lunchtime routine of munching a sandwich with his nose buried in a paperback in order to go to the bank. As menial as his staple-removing job was, he had still managed for the first time in his life to accumulate a little extra money and thought it might be a good time to try to drop that into a savings account. Moreover, whether it was the diesel, allergies, or a cold coming on, Alexei had been growing quite a headache behind his eyes. It was bad enough that he had swallowed a few painkillers and still had to stop sharking staples every so often to shake away stars that crept into the corners of his vision. Maybe some fresh air and a walk would do him good.

The streets around the office building were not too different from the streets around his apartment save for a greater density of brutal concrete architecture. The squat blocky skyscrapers hogged any warmth the sunlight could provide, and created plenty of dim nooks where chilly breezes stirred drifts of plastic bags and discarded paper. This part of downtown was usually quiet, with very few businesses of the type that needed foot traffic, so Alexei's walk to the nearest branch of Imperial Trust was lonely except for the odd clutch of office girls or homeless people shivering into coats in the weak spring sun.

As he walked, each step thudded behind his eyes and made the world judder like a video feed from a badly-held camera. Things kept happening at the corners of his eyes: shadows resolved themselves into shapes that moved toward him with purpose; green darts leapt around storefront windows; an office girl separated herself from her gaggle to sprout a pair of gigantic white wings and leap into the sky. When he turned his head, Alexei saw a Dumpster, a green pennant flapping on the breeze, a girl in a dirty white raincoat.

Alexei stepped into the warmth of the bank and stopped a moment to massage his head. An attractive woman behind a desk to the left was watching him. As he caught her gaze she said brightly, "Are you here to see someone, sir? In particular?"

"I want to, I..." said Alexei as a wave of pain crashed over him. "...savings account," he managed to finish.

"Very good sir, won't-you-have-a-seat-I-won't-be-a-minute," said the woman as she stood and began to walk toward a door in the far wall.

Alexei slumped gratefully into the chair. "Sarah Moloney," he said to himself absently as his eyes skipped around her nearly bare desk, found her nameplate, and settled on the people at the next station. A man in an ugly necktie was helping a tired-looking middle aged couple with a loan application. As Alexei watched, the man's necktie danced and dangled around the rim of a large coffee mug. As he leaned forward to gesticulate with his pen toward a paragraph at the end of the document, it slipped in.

Alexei leaned forward a bit to say something, and sat back nonplussed as the man's necktie began to bulge and pulsate rhythmically.

"Good afternoon Mr..." said Sarah Moloney, as she sat down again.

"Hi. I need to..." was as far as Alexei got before another pain-wave broke. "I'm sorry... I'm having the worst day. I have a terrible headache and I might be going, uh, a little crazy. I swear I just saw that guy's necktie..."

"I'm sorry to hear that, sir,' said Sarah Moloney, then leaned in to stage-whisper, "Carl does wear the worst clothes, doesn't he?" Her face as it came closer seemed pale, her smile a little frozen. She leaned back and picked up a glossy brochure from her desk. "Savings account was it, sir?" Sarah Moloney's knuckles were white on the brochure, and the tip of a turquoise pump visible under her desk quivered.

"That's right, but... I think I'd better go. I'm seeing things. I've got this terrible headache. My eyes are killing me."

"Well then, sir, you'd better try mine," Sarah Moloney chirped as her thumbs went to her face and began to press. A tiny whimper escaped her throat and her smile slipped the slightest bit as her thumbs disappeared and her eyes popped loose from their sockets.

My continuation of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's collaborative writing exercise is below the break. Read the first installment, written by GeekLethal, here.
It didn't help that the only job Alexei could seem to keep - the only job that hadn't ended in some ignominious frogmarch to a distant office on a top floor where he was harangued in words he barely even understood like "malfeasance" and "restraining order," or lying bent and bruised underneath some cruel steaming machine with a nickname like "The Mangler" or "Hobart," was a job in a nearly forgotten department of a past its prime molded plastics concern removing staples from endless reams of flimsy yellow paper.

Endless reams of yellow paper that flapped, folded, stuck and tore at the slightest touch. Endless reams of yellow paper faintly inscribed with fifth-generation carbon copies of nearly irrelevant data, crinkled and landscaped, spindled and folded. Endless reams of yellow paper with edges that, for all their insubstantial creperie, cut like a razor. Endless reams of yellow paper that some craven middle management types insisted must be saved, must be kept! in case of lawsuit or audit by overly curious head honcho.

But the staples added, so the craven middle management types held, the equivalent of five pages' thickness to any given thinly stapled document, and so in order to save file space, they must first be removed. Alexei knew, as any intelligent person would, that this was silliness of the first water. But it paid the bills and it left his mind free to wander far afield from his shabby bus stop, from his grimy office/closet with the dingy grey-tan carpet, from the stifling pong of the diesel fumes, from the suffocating closeness of the endless reams of flimsy yellow paper, from the trailing skein of bad timing and bad decisions that clung to him like stale cigarette smoke.

Plus, he got to use a staple shark.

The Ministry is all about sharing.

We share so much with each other- our knowledge; our wisdom; our decades of experience with fighting robots, prostitutes, fart jokes, industrial construction, rhetoric, and prostitutes- that as a unit we are better equipped to bring enlightenment to the world than any other random sampling of five men.

Our long term goal is, at its core, quite simple: to bring our love of sharing to the scattered, feral remnants of humanity still stubbornly clinging to life after the Ragnarok, and generously share our whips and bullets with them.

But aside from cruel leather, cold steel, and the hard heart to wield them both, we want to ensure that the arts survive as well. Toward that end, we are going to write a story. We wanted to store fine literature, paintings, and sculpture in the Ministry Culture Bunker and Catastratorium, but after making a go of it found that that stuff takes up too much space. We are putting some Grecian and Chinese pottery to use, storing Kool Aid and pencils and whatnot, but anything without an apparent utilitarian application was left outside.

We felt it was up to us to do someting to ensure the written word would survive beyond the Apocalypse.

We are now crafting the literature that the mutated inheritors of the cursed Earth might care to read sometime, maybe between avoiding deathbot patrols or after outrunning a zombie horde. It's the first fiction piece co-written and serialized by participating Ministers and, although the planned release date is sometime after Doomsday, we will share drafts with our loyal reader.

Readers. Loyal readers.

Forthwith, the first installment of our first stab at serial writing:

Part 1: Diesel Angst

Alexei Weber detested the bus.

The one he waited for every morning was enough to loathe, just on its own. The engine’s rushing roar hurt his ears, and sometimes the hurt migrated between them and became a headache. The mephitic stench of burning diesel fuel singed his nostrils and made him nauseous. He didn’t like the tint on the windows, allowing those inside to see out- and in all probability laugh at him, he felt- yet preventing outsiders from seeing in. He never was quite sure what he’d find inside, hiding behind those opaque windows. Even the scale of the thing: too long, too high, with too-big tires, unsettled him.

The bus stop nearest his apartment was shabby and dark. Litter tended to accumulate there, blown on winds that in other parts were pleasant, but by the time they reached his shabby end of this shabby city were hostile. Regardless of the season and time of day, the bus stop was always in deep shadow. The old office buildings and millworks that dominated those dozen forlorn blocks of the North End weren’t good for much else now than as obstacles. The economy was long gone, leaving only huge brick husks that blocked the most direct route to somewhere else. It made grim sense to Alexei that the ones on his street would block the sun, too.

And beyond hating the bus just for being a bus, he resented it. He resented that he was reduced to riding it. He resented that the city was so broke it only ran twice a day. He resented that the only job he could land was downtown and much too far to walk, and beneath him. He resented having to live in his tiny walk-up apartment. He resented the dumb luck that put him there, and the poor decisions that kept him there.

Everything that Alexei Weber had ever done wrong was made manifest in the bus, and it came to remind him every morning.

Like me, Ted has signed on for the ProNaNoWriMo program, the Procrastinator's National Novel Writing Month. He's got two chunks of his magnum opus up over at Rocket Jones, here and here. Worth a read, and you can help pick out a title and win large cash prizes.

[wik] And I'll have more of my story up real soon now.

Now that the National Novel Writing Month is over, by more than a week, I propose the Procrastinator's National Novel Writing Month, which shall last until further notice. Now that that administrivia is out of the way, on to the status of my novel. Before the end of November, I had actually finished an additional five thousand words beyond the 4300 or so I had already posted. As the deadline approached, and dark forces beyond my control converged upon me, I realized that I had made a great mistake. Several, actually.

First, I picked as my topic something that required altogether too much thought. The storyline involves several things that I have been thinking about for a long time, and therefore wanted to get exactly right – details of space combat, to be sure; but also issues revolving around the singularity, artificial intelligence and the nature of first contact. Getting things exactly right does not interact well with wanting to get it done in thirty days.

Second, I started an impossible recursive exercise wherein the things I wrote in the five thousand words I didn't post required changes in the four thousand I did, and vice versa, ad infinitum. I have largely resolved those issues now, but now is December.

Third, I picked the wrong month to write a novel in. A variety of outside influences militated strongly against any possibility of finishing the novel in the agreed framework. Work, vacations, and finally solo child rearing while my wife was in Kansas are all killer when you're trying to write.

Fourth, I procrastinated. Not as much as you'd think, but I didn't make terribly efficient use of what time I did have.

Now that I have resolved most of my philosophical difficulties, and now that many of the other impediments have at least lessened, I plan to start posting the rest of what I've written, and move on to finish the story. I plan on getting the up over ten thousand words posted within a week or so, and somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand words a week thereafter until the damn thing is done.

As for the fate of baby, I'm not altogether sure what will happen in the end, but at least I know how it will happen.

Thanks all for your patience, and the kind words you've already given.

Before I start though, I'm gonna go read Ian's forklift racing story.

Perfidious Crony EDog is well into his NaNoWriMo entry, and it's pretty darn good! Read Propane Jockeys, about the secret underground world of forklift racing, today.

In flat spacetime, acceleration is mass over force. The larger the mass, the harder it is to effect a change in speed or direction. Change in velocity requires the application of force, a result of the transformation of energy into work. At the dawn of the space age, chemical energy converted into force by the simple expedient of burning provided the motive power for most every space vehicle. Since then, advancing science and the exigencies of war have led to a few refinements.

Baby has eighty nine seconds to lay some weapons grade confusion on the mind of her opponent. The best sort of confusion, she felt, is massive indeterminacy of location. Near the center of her, deft magnetic fingers stripped layer after molecule thin layer from a dense white brick of solid antihydrogen. Other magnetic fields, kept wandering normal matter from interfering with the ultimately reactive material. Out of containment, the wisps of antimatter moved purposefully toward annihilation.

In a bottle built of fields of force, matter meets antimatter. As each atom touches its mirror image, they merge and are consumed utterly, the only remnant being a stupendous amount of radiant energy. This same energy, used very like a rocket, propelled her, and the entire fleet from the crumbling moon across four years of space to here. But now, it would be used rather differently.

Energy is mass, mass energy. Dense enough fields of energy can warp the fabric of spacetime just as matter can. But energy is infinitely more malleable than its slower cousin. The energy released within that chamber, coaxed and wheedled by means of abstruse mathematics, spun and folded, stretched into a eleven dimensional cat's cradle of strung out quantum states. The process repeats, twice, four times, and by a recursive logic light is transformed into a distilled essence of gravity.

Autonomous intelligences monitor the growth in planck-sized slices of time, alternately feeding and starving the ravenous little monster. Baby begins to feel a twisting inside – flat spacetime develops a curve and she senses the slope as gravity. But this is an echo. The infant black hole, already more than a million tons in virtual weight, is already gone. In a second, the dimple in space time is ten thousand kilometers ahead of her, and more than a million times more massive.

This twisted skein of spacetime is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of sorts. It gathers in virtual particles from the quantum foam that is the stuff of which all other stuff made. It grips itself smaller, tighter, until its gravitational pull is that of a small world. The small dimple in space has become a deep but narrow well of gravitational force. Like a woman pulling in her skirt, the hole draws in space around it. But the exponentially growing pseudo gravity scrabbles at the flat space around it, and dragging it slower like a cat on ice. And as it slows, baby gets ready to surf.

Baby rides sloping spacetime to within a klick of the warp. As even the earliest space travelers knew, the closer in to a gravity well you get, the more energy you can extract from it. None of the early probes were able to pass so close to a planet, if for no other reason than the immense bulk of the planet was in the way. This close to a point mass, baby can effect dramatic delta-v.

This close, she sees a pale halo of coruscating blue light, as virtual particle pairs created on the event horizon are split forever – one sucked into the maw of the warp, the other released as energetic light. She steps uptime, and she can see that the light is brightening and flattening as the artificial black hole spin spins faster.

A single chirp from her drive, and she's in the box. Gravitational riptides feel like nausea as she is wrenched from the path that Newton's laws had laid down for her. She sings as she flies, and thoughtfully drops a few presents for oscar in her wake.

Nothing comes for free. She feels hungry. Thirteen percent of her antimatter reserve consumed in tricking the universe into letting her make a right turn in space. And nothing is free. That black hole is not the real black hole, as it is now belatedly discovering. As long as the cat's cradle can consume, it grows. The skein is limited in its ability to roll quantum energy into distortions in spacetime, and when that threshold is crossed, the skein begins to unwind.

Twenty seconds after she passed, the hole is unraveling. Gravitational fingers that had pinched the fabric of space weaken, and the holes apparent mass approaches that of a small asteroid. Fifteen seconds later, at the mass of a large mountain, another threshold is reached. Gravity too weak to contain the energy invested in its creation lets go completely. After a brief detour as a supermassive virtual object, the antimatter explosion that began, resumes.

A hundred small grey cylinders fall in formation toward a disk of eldritch blue. The blue winks out. Soundless fury in its place, the unbearable whiteness only the smallest and weakest portion of the energy released. Most of the energy is squeezed up toward the blue end of the spectrum - gamma and even more energetic rays. It turns out that the only thing more powerful than an antimatter explosion is to take an antimatter explosion, wad it up into a impossibly tight ball, and then let it explode.

Baby feels regret wasting a CRAM for a course change. The effect of a compressed radiation AM bomb on a large habitat is glorious to behold. But not entirely wasted. As the shock front of the explosion reaches the cylinders, energetic photons suffuse the long core at the center. With so powerful an explosion it is a matter of a fraction of a moment before they saturate, and the core lases. X-ray lasers are perhaps the most inefficient means of creating a beam of coherent light ever devised by man. But if you're lighting off a two point nine gigaton explosion anyway, energy is not your biggest problem.

In preparation for future the intense, jaw dropping action that is to come, a small change has been made to the last paragraph of chapter five.

[wik] Before undertaking this craziness, I never would have imagined that one could spend two hours describing events that take less than thirty five seconds.

I know that I just posted chapter five, and have not yet posted chapter four. Baby's story is coming together more quickly and completely in my head; and I know exactly what is going to happen to her, and oscar, and the taskgroup over the next hour. Back with the captain, I have a only a vague idea, so I think I'll let him slide a bit in the interest of getting words on paper. (Although I did write a chapter near the end with him, but that's maybe chapter 90 or something, and I don't want to get that far out of whack.) Total published words is up to 3314, or twenty words short of where I should have been at the end of day two. I have another thousand or so written - but which is too far out of sequence to be published right this moment. I really need to pick up the pace.

Sometime soon, I'll start putting links in at the end of the chapters to allow easier navigation. For starters, the start of the story is here.

[wik] And from Dawn via Rocket Jones, I added a writing Progress 'O Meter to the right sidebar. I hope my cobloggers don't mind me hogging up valuable blog real estate with my vanity project.

[alsø alsø wik] Look at me! Look at me!

Baby drifts toward oscar-5 at a speed that is a small, but still significant fraction of the speed of light. The light of three suns is joined by the distant and fading glimmer of twelve small stars that once were populous worlds, and more recently targets of fleet RKVs. Here in the dim reaches of the Proxima's Kuiper Belt, that amounts to one small notch above total darkness.

Sensor take from the hk's ansibles back and forth, and Baby's dense processor matrix distills the raw data into a cetacean-amenable worldview. Light and heat, gravity and neutrinos are to her as sound once was, the window through which the world impinges on her consciousness. That the senses are different means little, nor the fact that they are filtered first through vastly more computing power than the entire world possessed when first man flew in space.

Now that she is closer, she again begins to see emissions from oscar. Two orders of magnitude lower than before, but at this range easily detectable to baby's exquisitely tuned senses. No heavy neutrino pulses that would indicate large power sources. No evidence of ultradense matter. No sign at all that the target is anything other than a hapless slowmover. Baby is by nature cautious, no matter what the walking squids in tacops feel. Caution, then application of extreme firepower. It is a lesson that many human warriors have learned, and one that baby learned from her mother's milk. Of course, she used different weapons, then.

Within herself, some of her new weapons are waking. Fleet tacops wants a softkill. Hunting is joyful, always, but Baby has come to relish the bright glorious release of the hardkill. The masked actinic glare of antimatter penetrators detonating from within a target, the subtleties of targeting a spread kinetic lances, maneuver for gravity gauge, or an artfully laid killgrid of megaton class self-imploding singularities.

None of this. Along her ventral surface, just forward of her drive shield, a small bay door snaps open and a fraction of second later snaps closed. In that fraction, a small bag is propelled on jet of nitrogen as cold (precisely as cold) as the ambient vacuum. The bag opens, and almost magically continues to open, each fold seeming to occur naturally, until in moments the small bag is a transparent film over a click in diameter.

The film seems to pause, and then stretches as if being tugged on the edge. At the point of maximum tension, the film snaps dissolves utterly. And where the film was, is now a flat cloud of fog that for a moment glints in the dim weapon light. Baby chirps her drive, giving her a minutely different course from the now invisible foglet. A while later the process repeats, and then again. Baby waits, and for every second she waits, her trajectory departs more and more from the three spreading clouds.

Baby waits, and finally spins; she points her tail directly toward the target and lets loose a long burst from her drive. In exactly 46 seconds, oscar-5 will know exactly where she was. But she won't be there.

message-id: [42f0f069b.d752d0d7db110e-A5d0ddd194d4d.004564E].
date: 21 apr 2105 23:22:35 -5461 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 2048bit.
authenticator: 53d.b1f0.69e.0a11/word of the day is bitches.
message reads:
weapons away.
range 18.8mclicks/0.75min.
commencing evasive.
Taskgroup 14.9/55 target box patt 5/2
[attachment: tg sensor take mission time 28:27:79]
baby not sure about this one.
[attachment: extract fleet a-2 subagency concl #14-17 report slowmovers]

***

At a minimum, just over ninety-two seconds will elapse before the earliest possible response from oscar could arrive - assuming millisecond reflexes and light speed weapons, which is not an unreasonable assumption at all. Activating her drive again would only create a glowing "you are here" for oscar to vector violent traffic towards her. And given the size of oscar – a small asteroid's worth of mass – molecular assemblers can convert that amount of matter into a truly frightening quantity of weaponry, even in the amount of time that oscar may, or may not have been aware of her and (possibly) the balance of her taskgroup.

True surprise in the strategic sense is difficult to impossible to achieve when war is fought in a completely transparent medium. Given sufficient processing capacity – a fungible commodity even if when strong AI is impossible - and enough eyes, nothing is undetectable. Mass, heat and power all conspire against those who would like to be invisible. Strategic surprise can only be achieved at speeds crowding very close to C.

At such colossal velocities, intelligence of an attacker's existence only just outpaces the attacker itself. That knowledge is necessarily, and drastically, outdated. By the time even an alert defender sees the enemy there, they are already nearly here.

The less energetic the speed, the more difficult it is to gain surprise. However, tactical surprise can be achieved by a clever attacker. Light speed delay provides a lever for wedging the way inside an opponent's decision loop. What the invaders failed to do, and what the fleet had done only weeks before in return was one way to exploit the (mostly) iron laws of causality and observation imposed by the speed of light. Non-relativistic combat required the opposite. By presenting a bewilderingly large array of choices for the enemy to chew on, the gap between action and observation built into the very fabric of spacetime makes it possible to lock an opponent into constantly reorienting to a new conception of the conflict, and never taking effective action.

As baby's drive stabs into the darkness, her fifteen shadows burn to life. Though she didn't feel it, baby's consciousness spread over hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

Ansible links connected her mind with the minds of her drones. Instantaneous (albeit low bandwidth) communication made these far distant parts of her mind effectively closer than parts of her own body. She experienced herself as one, though she and her fifteen skittle drones are farther apart than earth from the rubble of earth's moon. She felt no more spread out than a human feels spread apart by looking out though two eyes or hearing through two ears.

The tiny drones are small versions of the hunter killer whose mind they shared. Narrow, lethal shapes clothed in deepest black. Where the hunter's skin enveloped many complex engines of war, and the capacity to radically alter its form, the drone was relatively simple - a capsule of fuel, a drive made to appear (at a long enough remove) just like an hk's, and everything needful to give the appearance of a much larger warship. The sensors on the skin of the drones were in every respect similar to those on the skin of its parent, and contributed to baby's growing sense of the battlespace.

Sixteen targets might have been a challenge for a mid-twentieth century wet navy warship. But no ship since. Baby's constellation of iridescent commas still shine as she endeavors to be somewhere else.

***

It's day four of the novel writing, and I have two days worth in the can. Unlike the madly prolific EDog (7500 words) I am having trouble achieving, let alone maintaining, the required clip of 1667 words a day. Still, this is the most fiction I have ever written in such a small period of time. I've been significantly more productive many times on the non-fiction side, and that leaves me some small hope that I can eventually pick up the pace.

Funny thing, though, writing non fiction is for me easy. You all may argue amongst yourselves about the quality of that writing, but at least the production of it is no real burden for me. It generally flows out my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen without skull sweat, headaches or worry. Fiction, on the other hand, hurts my brain. I'm not sure about the deep psychological reasons for it - but some part of me seems to think that fiction is vastly more important than non fiction. There is a pressure in me to make sure that it is really good before writing it, let alone letting others see it. I don't feel that at all with the non-fiction. Maybe because I always wanted to be an author of sf novels, I can't afford to fail. I didn't grow up wanting to be an essayist or blogger and perhaps that is why it feels easier. It's difficult, too, to post these things. I cringe before clicking the submit button. Even telling you that I cringe before clicking the button is easier than letting you see the fiction. Let us hope that this all builds character.

Aside from the neurosis and paranoia, I am also thinking harder on all of this than even the more complicated posts, or on term papers back in school. This is a good thing, I believe, but it is tiring. Writing five hundred words of fiction is more tiring than a day's worth of heavy blogging, even if it only takes an hour. Trying to keep in my head the evolving characters and plot is not so hard, but applying that knowledge consistently is. I've wasted a fair chunk of time writing background material, even though I'd promised myself not to. But it is so much easier - it's more like nonfiction.

And of course, it's easier to write this post than to write the next chapter. If I can avoid Civ IV tonight, hopefully I can get a couple more in the bag.

Mind lives in – is – a narrow wedge of utter blackness. Within the light drinking skin are engines, weapons and the mind that humans call hk-55 or, sometimes, baby. Baby is a hole in the darkness of space, coasting in the vast emptiness on the edge of the system.

Five hours away is oscar-5, the sole focus of baby's attention. Emissions still dribble from the target, indicating to baby's hunter mind either carelessness or high cunning of a variety she has only encountered once since her pod arrived in this space. Baby's podmates are spread across a cubic day, senses straining the void. They all hope for ambush, for sport; though they will never tell the people.

Baby ponders the target. Intelligence sub-agencies have categorized this contact according to a Byzantine taxonomy laboriously constructed from the evidence of probes, hk's, warships, killers, and the wreckage of thousands of softkilled targets. Baby knows the details in the new parts of her mind, but doesn't care. Only if something surprising had surfaced in the analysis would she have paid close attention. She savors the emissions, smelling the minute dimpling of spacetime, and the wake of its passage.

It's a big one, and slow. It must have been climbing upsystem for years before we arrived. She'd been seeing more of these lately. The fast movers only met their fate faster. She knows her prey, and knows what surprises they are capable of.

Emission spike! This tastes like fear. Now silence, but this prey is too late to discipline. Baby ansibles her new podmates.

message-id: [9198d4ee0.511030705q94e4aff4f].
date: 21 apr 2105 16:59:57 -9120 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: list: taskgroup 14.9/55 [deltagreen].
subject: oscar-5
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 1024bit.
authenticator: 2g6.h249.56j.204/word of the day is gumbo
message reads:
sensor spike/emission quiet
indic. target aware
group close, patt.5/2
group 360/60 outwatch, maintain emcon
baby softkill, gunnr sift ashes

Four pings. Her pod will watch for sharks, while she closes with the target. None knew exactly what made the target spook. Perhaps an attentive eye saw a shadow drift before a distant star. Or maybe simply fear. Very reasonable fear. It mattered not - the hunters were too close. Baby coasts on. Her vector will in time bring her within range of the slowmover regardless of how it maneuvers. She understands the complexities of orbital mechanics and maneuver in flat space as she had once understood currents and cold water. She remembers the water, before the people had taken her, and remade her. But she was happy. This was hunting like nothing she had known, and better by far.

Spread apart more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to the sun, Baby's taskgroup responds instantly to the causal channel message. The other hunter killers bend their trajectories on quiet streams of fast ions. They will provide outwatch, high cover. Two were heading downsystem, spinward of the target. Shaping course to box the slowmover, they are on the opposite side and their drives invisible, pointed away from both to the target and what remains of life in system. The third hunter killer is upsystem of baby, thrusting down and watching in. Gunnr coasts in baby's wake. She will not take part in the battle, but feast on the remains.

***

The USS Constitution, flagship of task force 14-9, is mostly quiet. Quiet because it is nighttime according to the ship clocks, clocks now running faster than at any time in the last two (or six) years since the ship finished breaking down to non-relativistic speeds on a torch of antimatter. Quiet because it is a warship. Quiet because it is following the wake of four relativistic kill vehicles that, though they left three years Earth time after the fleet, they arrived here only two weeks ago, local time. They didn’t have to slow down gently. They would go from within a loud shout of C to nothing in a fraction of a second, imparting all of their energy of motion in a cataclysm more ferocious by far than the asteroid which once, long ago, ended the dinosaurs on far away Earth.

In the cold depths, just outside the cometary halo, the three suns of the Centauri were bright pinpoints of yellow, yellow and red. Long, needle-like and black, the RKVs had exhausted all but a tiny fraction of their antimatter fuel accelerating out from Earth’s fractured moon to travel twenty-four trillion miles at 92% of the speed of light. Half a year out, the shipminds absorbed the sensor take from the starwisp probes that preceded them. The probes, in their hundreds, had wafted into the system months earlier. Only hundreds of grams in weight, their gossamer wings brought a simple payload, a fabricator seed enveloped in bardo cone insulation. The solar wind of the destination stars slowed the wisps to manageable speeds, so that when the seed hit a useful body the fabricator seed would survive the impact. Once planted in a cometary body the seed, powered by a small subcritical isotope pile and informed by a carbon matrix library of designs, set about constructing a small but powerful observatory from the dirty ice.

On the Constitution, the crew and the shipmind's military intelligence sub-agencies analyze the fresh data and compared it with the picture generated by Big Eye, the carefully hidden, extremely long baseline interferometer observatory in the Oort Cloud four light years behind. Many emission sources had gone dark, others were dramatically dimmer. The enemy attempted to hide, no matter how impossible it was to hide a system-wide information and industrial ecology.

The four killers divide and divide again, fissioning into 256 needles, every one of which harbored a fragment of the shipmind, a reservoir of antimatter for terminal guidance, and a target. Each mirv moved through the darkness at 92 percent of the speed of light. Each mirv headed was for the most populous inhabited bodies orbiting the three stars of the system. Each mirv had, by right of its fantastic momentum, enough kinetic energy to sere a continent to ashes, or break to pieces a medium sized asteroid. The mirved RKVs jockey for position as final orders are ansibled to the killers. The minds of the ships, weak AI inhabiting a nucleus of quantum foam around which orbited a constellation of submolar processors, intend only destruction.

***

The world seemed small as Captain Sely left command space and settled into the confines of his mind. Agencies and voices clamored for attention at the edges of his consciousness, but he pushes them aside. For now, coffee is the top of the agenda. Caffeine to restore alertness, and to dull the pain of living a wider life than God intended.

Sely unfolded his wiry frame from the acceleration couch he had occupied for the last seventy-two hours. The last dribbles of shockgel disappeared into the fabric of the couch as he floated toward the desk at the opposite side of the cabin. Looking around the spacious cabin, he smiled at the thought that despite years in the vastness of interstellar space, space was what he would miss most when in a few hours the ship would collapse in on itself, hollow spaces mostly disappearing to make the ship ready for combat. The easy days of the long passage were almost gone.

Work-ups for the coming weeks were going well – a quick inner glance and training information scrolled across his vision for a moment before flicking away – the crew was tight. As well they should be, he thought, after two years of unending practice in the simulation spaces. Fleet two-shop had digested the intel dump from the probe network, and had fed the final targets into the killers. His own intel group even now was cataloguing targets, and working with ops to spin up a target matrix for 14-9's area of responsibility.

For now, though… Coffee. Sely opened a small cabinet and removed something that looked like a large syringe. Which in a way, it was. Almost a century of hard-won experience had shown that a French press was the only traditional method of coffee preparation even remotely suitable for freefall. Filling a bulb with coffee, he drifted over to his desk.

He could never avoid looking at the old-style photograph clipped to the top of the desk. A picture of woman and child, his wife and daughter. Dead since the invaders dropped some very, very large rocks on his home. And on the homes of almost two billion others. Sely and his son had been in the moon. Not that they escaped anything save death there.

A redness flicked at the edges of his vision. Sely's medical automation asking permission to adjust his cognition to dampen out anguish, and replace it with calmness and focus. Sely brushed this aside as he always did. Only in combat would he accept that sort of meddling. In combat, he never needed it.

Sely looked about him and contemplated the small bubble of air and light and heat that encased him. I've had two years of respite from horror, he thought. And used it to plan the visitation of horror. Now the planning is nearly done. Soon, it will be killing time.

***

That was a 589 word snippet. I'm editing the next eight hundred or so. Don't worry though, I won't be commenting like this throughout the whole novel, though I will occasionally - and probably in greater depth as I writhe in the agonies of procrastination. Like now.

There are currents in space more subtle than those in any ocean. The glimmering of the Milky Way and a hundred billion stars only teases the mind with light, but does not light the way. Through the darkness coasts a ship, call it that though it has no crew. It has mind, which is the ship. A mind that once hunted through dark waters but now hunts different prey, with different senses.

Tenuous wisps of gas so thin that more than a single molecule in a cubic meter counts as dense brush the skin of the ship. Mind feels gentle tugging currents of electromagnetic fields, and the pull of a stars years in the distance. Far behind, mind senses the mother ship, and the humans who brought it across a gulf of years for vengeance. Hours to the side are its podmates, searching and seeking. Sniffing and listening but silent in the deep just as mind is.

Light impinges on delicate sensors, lightly aged and with the flavor of metal and machine. Prey. Mind touches a part of its sensorium, activating the ansible causal channel back to the mother. Entangled quantum particles separated at birth, each knowing what happens to other no matter the distance between them. An ever dwindling pool of communication, instantaneous and unreadable. Once consumed in the act of communication, the causal channel is nothing but a useless bit of entropy.

message-id: [7533020.1114066576010].
date: 20 apr 2105 23:56:15 -0700 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2a21.24e4.5bb.234/word of the day is euphonious.
message reads:
new contact.
designate oscar-5.
range ~81mclicks/4.5lmin.
[attachment: sensor take mission time 05:01:79]
prelim:
target acquisition due to poor target emission control. (.78 probable)
‘civilian’ vessel/habitat (.56 probable)
orders?

Mind waits, knowing what the answer will be. It is always the same. It misses the hunting songs it sang in a long distant ocean. A living mind instantiated in a quantum foam computing matrix (with the small bit of living flesh without which Mind would not exist) cannot sing, except to itself. Mind coasts through the silent darkness.

Mind focuses on the passive sensor arrays layered on its nose. Designed and crafted atom by atom to drink in any light no matter what its frequency, the arrays give both sight and stealth. Running powered almost completely down, mind emits very little heat, and that shunted carefully backward, excreted in dribbles of infrared photons from folded fractal heat exchangers.

Mind listens, attentive to the emissions from oscar-5. There is no sense to them, nothing intelligible or decipherable, at least not to mind’s inboard expert systems. But the flavor… It tastes like softness, carelessness. Low microwave emissions, sideband emanations from insufficiently shielded devices. Leaky internal communications? The enemy, talking to itself knowing that someone is listening yet unable to maintain disciplined silence.

A tickle from the ansible. Mind turns its attention to the incoming message queue.

message-id: [OF8D833F44.C4FCE053-ON85256FE7.0047217E].
date: 20 apr 2105 00:01:30 -0430 - [relative].
from: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
to: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
subject: re: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2f8.2cc.b52.254/word of the day is niggardly.
message reads:
confirm local analysis.
track new contact oscar-5, pursue to termination.
softkill, maintain emcon.
new taskgroup 14/7, your lead, hk-32/hk-57/hk-59/mb-02 seconded.
upload softkill intel via mb-02 ansiblelink.
be alert for other habs, lurkers. good hunting, baby.

Mind sends ansible pings to its new podmates, gaining and giving position coordinates and relative vectors. A brief flurry of transmissions establish roles and timetables. Incremental genocide to proceed at their earliest convenience.

***

Today is day one of a month of enjoyable hell. Or miserable heaven. Or... something. I have just under 30 days from this moment to complete a 50,000 word novel. EDog is the son of a bitch who got me hooked on this idea. So I, and perhaps you, have him to blame. In the meantime, go read his second National Novel Writing Month effort, Propane Jockeys. John from Texas Best Grok is also participating in the madness - check out his efforts as well.

I am an innovative procrastinator. For starters, I'm writing this post. Also, I haven't come up with a name for my novel larva. So, once everyone has had a chance to read a bit of what I'm going to post, submit title suggestions in the comments.

As I was preparing to post the first chunk of my magnum opus, I realized with horror that I didn't have a category for my novel posts. This led to almost an hour of web searching, photoshopping and web admining, and so I can no present to you our new Perfidious category, NaNoWriMo. Click on that link, or the category link in the left toolbar, and you will be able to access all of my novel related posts. Or, just watch for the watch icon on new posts, and you'll know that during novel writing month, there is only one time, and that is too late.

The first chunk should be up shortly, and more later this evening. I'm going to try to get to the required average speed of 1667 words a day for the first week, then pick up the pace because I know I'm going to be wicked short of time come Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoy it.

Loyal Reader #0016(EDog) is participating in a New Times Fiction Contest that restricts the writer to 55 words or less per story. 55 words from setup to punchline - that's tough, and the New Times' rules are fairly restritive as well; twenty-eight counts as two words, as does "screw'em." The best such stories will get published on real actual paper and sent to real actual readers who will read your words - on paper! Trust me when I say this is a delicious thrill orders of magnitude greater than blogging.

The Ministry hereby encourages all readers to consider participation. Your compliance is appreciated; indeed, it is expected.

Here is one of EDog's submissions for your entertainment and edification.

Straight Line, No Chaser by Ian Healy

It was the night Jeremy Stain played the Dove. She stood by the bar, looking available.

“I’m Stan,” I smiled.

“Ella.”

“Want to get out of here?”

“Can’t. Waiting for someone.”

“Buy you a drink?”

“Got one, thanks.”

I paused, considering my next move. “Want to make out in the girls’ bathroom?”

“Ok.” She grinned.

Reader EDog, he of the Wildebeets, emails,

PS: Are you and the other evil geniuses at perfidy.org going to do NaNoWriMo this year? If you don't know what it is, visit www.nanowrimo.org. You all ought to do it, because there are novelists inside each of you screaming and clawing to get out. I dare you!

Yeesh, I dunno... Last time I took a dare I found myself running down Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh clad only in my skivvies, fleeing for my life from an enraged mob of Steelers fans. Kinda makes me bearish on the whole dare thingy. But still.