Free Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

serious about, uh, not breaking heads?”

    “Am I serious?” Rubenstein shrugged. “I’d rather we didn’t go nuclear, but feel free to do anything necessary to gain the upper hand—as long as we keep the moral high ground. If possible. We don’t need a fight now; it’s too early. Hold off for a week, and the guards will be deserting like rats leaving a sinking ship. Just try to divert them for now. I’ve got a communique to issue which ought to put the cat among the pigeons with the lackeys of the ruling class.”

    Wolff stood and walked around to Timoshevski’s table. “Oleg, come with me. We have a job to do.” Burya barely noticed: he was engrossed, nose down in the manual of a word processor that the horn of plenty had dropped in his lap. After spending his whole life writing longhand or using a laborious manual typewriter, this was altogether too much like black magic, he reflected. If only he could figure out how to get it to count the number of words in a paragraph, he’d be happy: but without being able to cast off, how could he possibly work out how much lead type would be needed to fill a column properly?

    The revolutionary congress had been bottled up in the old Corn Exchange for three days now. Bizarre growths like black metal ferns had colonized the roof, turning sunlight and atmospheric pollution into electricity and brightly colored plastic cutlery. Godunov, who was supposed to be in charge of catering, had complained bitterly at the lack of tableware (as if any true revolutionary would bother with such trivia) until Misha, who had gotten much deeper into direct brain interfaces than even Oleg, twitched his nose and instructed the things on the roof to start producing implements.

    Then Misha went away on some errand, and nobody could turn the spork factory off. Luckily there seemed to be no shortage of food, munitions, or anything else for that matter: it seemed that Burya’s bluff had convinced the Duke that the democratic soviet really did have nuclear weapons, and for the time being the dragoons were steering well clear of the yellow brick edifice at the far end of Freedom Square.

    “Burya! Come quickly! Trouble at the gates!”

    Rubenstein looked up from his draft proclamation. “What is it?” he snapped.
    “Speak clearly!”

    The comrade (Petrov, wasn’t that his name?) skidded to a halt in front of his desk. “Soldiers,” he gasped.

    “Aha.” Burya stood. “Are they shooting yet? No? Then I will talk to them.”
    He stretched, trying to ease the stiffness from his aching muscles and blinking away tiredness. ‘Take me to them.“

    A small crowd was milling around the gates to the Corn Exchange. Peasant women with head scarves, workers from the ironworks on the far side of town—idle since their entire factory had been replaced by a miraculous, almost organic robot complex that was still extending itself—even a few gaunt, shaven-headed zeks from the corrective labor camp behind the castle: all milling around a small clump of frightened-looking soldiers. “What is going on?” demanded Rubenstein.

    “These men, they say—”

    “Let them speak for themselves.” Burya pointed to the one nearest the gate.
    “You. You aren’t shooting at us, so why are you here, comrade?”

    “I, uh,” the trooper paused, looking puzzled.

    “We’s sick of being pushed around by them aristocrats, that’s wot,” said his neighbor, a beanpole-shaped man with a sallow complexion and a tall fur hat that most certainly wasn’t standard-issue uniform. “Them royalist parasite bastids, they’s locked up in ‘em’s castle drinking champagne and ’specting us to die keeping ‘em safe. While out here all ’uns enjoying themselves and it’s like the end of the regime, like? I mean, wot’s going on?
    Has true libertarianism arrived yet?”

    “Welcome, comrades!” Burya opened his arms toward the soldier. “Yes, it is true! With help from our allies of the Festival, the iron