Release date: May 20, 2020
Subgenre: Space Opera
About Felons in the Eyes of God:
The planet Thyrhucis is prosperous and peaceful, governed by a
collective of uploaded post-human intelligences called the
Necrarchy. Thyrhucis is a nexus for interstellar travel, and
governments from all over the galaxy are seeking access to its
trade routes.
Christabel Cameron Carrington wants access for the Cultural
Revival, a multi-system movement that's bringing back old Earth
cultures. She's not above using underhand methods, including
hacking the planetary data networks, which brings her into direct
contact with the Necrarchy itself.
Rethis Veid wants access for the spartan world of Thur, a grim and
expansionist state that's considered suspect by everyone.
He's involving himself with dissident groups, whose concerns about
the Necrarchy become disturbingly relevant.
Laura Sabon, light years away, knows nothing about this - her only
concern is keeping her decrepit space freighter operational.
But she's drawn into the situation when her ship is chartered to
take a cargo to Thyrhucis - a cargo which just might contain the
end of interstellar civilization.
Excerpt:
The details on the screen look pretty comprehensive to me
– but Simon's right, we're reconstructing a lot of stuff through our strictly
unofficial earwigging on the Necrarchy's comms, and there is no guarantee we
will overhear anything germane. Large
physical objects like spaceships, we can track – the arcana of high-energy
particle physics, though, is something else entirely.
Large physical objects, like spaceships, we can
track. We can pull up identification,
registration, other details. The Orion
Commonwealth survey ship Srinivasa
Ramanujan had a crew of eighty-three.
One of those other details.
"What about the cube itself? It was just next to a massive explosion,
right? What happened to it?"
"The ship was still twenty-eight kilometres away
when she blew," says Simon.
"At that range, there'd be no significant blast damage, just the
initial radiation flash... which, well, the cube pretty much just...
reflects. No change in the cube's
status. One way or another." In vacuum, there's no blast wave from an
explosion, only the expanding vapours of the destroyed ship itself – which
would be little more than a puff of breath, at twenty-eight kilometres
range. For that matter, a fusion blast
is probably survivable at that sort of range – depends on the megatonnage, I
guess. I suppose I could get the details
of how many megatons the Ramanujan
died in... if I wanted to.
I don't think I want to.
"Can you pull anything out of that data feed about
the scans Ramanujan was
running?" I ask. "If we knew
what it did to... set that thing off...."
"I'll try," says Simon. "I'm guessing the actual data was stored
on-ship, or maybe tight-beamed to another Orion Commonwealth ship... there are
three in high orbitals just now. Besides
that –"
"Active scans will have been reflected off the
damned thing," says Fiona. "We
can piece together what the Ramanujan
was doing that way... maybe... given time.
But it may have been simple proximity, of course."
I close my eyes, turn to my onboard systems, start
thinking glyphs – transmitting a navigational hazard warning to every Revival
ship in orbit, for a start. How close
did Imbrium get, on her initial
orbit? I review the data. A hundred and ninety kilometres. If I were Captain Sabon, I'd be worrying
about this. Of course, if I were her,
I'd be worrying about so many different things already, I might not have time
for any new ones.
"Cube just changed," Simon annouces. "It's an octahedron, now. One hundred sixteen metres along each
edge."
"It's moving up the Platonic solids?" I ask.
"Your guess is as good as mine. I can't even fit a decent curve to the growth
increases. Still perfectly reflective,
zero mass. STC just hit it with megawatt
lasers."
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About Stephen James Wright:
Stephen James Wright uses his full name on his books, but has been
described as one of nature's Steves. He is obstinately opposed to
the whole "two cultures" thing, and, having an MA in linguistics
and an MSc in software engineering, he is (academically speaking)
neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring. He has been a fan
of science fiction, fantasy and horror all his life, which is
probably why he has never amounted to anything. He lives in the
Home Counties of England, and blogs about SF and related matters
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