All this matched with the intelligence the Yawning Angel had already received regarding the set-up and intentions of the Eccentric GSV. So far so good, then.
Content that all was well, the Yawning Angel drifted in to match velocities with Teriocre, the middle Orbital and the one with the gas-giant environments. It docked underneath the Orbital’s most populous section and drew up a variety of travel and leave arrangements for its own inhabitants while setting up a schedule of visits, events and parties aboard to thank its hosts for their hospitality.
Everything went swimmingly until the second day.
Then, without warning, just after dawn had broken over the part of the Orbital the Yawning Angel had docked beneath, Stored bodies and giant animals started popping into existence all over Teriocre.
Posed people, some still in the clothes or uniforms of the tableaux they had been part of on board the Sleeper Service, suddenly appeared inside sports halls, on beaches, terraces, boardwalks and pavements, in parks, plazas, deserted stadia and every other sort of public space the Orbital had to offer. To the few people who witnessed these events, it was obvious the bodies had been Displaced; the appearance of each was signalled by a tiny point of light blinking into existence just above waist level; this expanded rapidly to a two-metre grey sphere which promptly popped and disappeared, leaving behind the immobile Storee.
Unmoving people were left lying on dewy grass or sitting on park benches or scattered by the hundred across the patterned mosaic of squares and piazzas as though after some terrible disaster or a particularly assertive public sculpture exhibition; dim cleaning machines spiralling methodically within such spaces were left bemused, picking erratic courses amongst the rash of new and unexpected obstructions.
In the seas, the surface swelled and bulged in hundreds of different places as whole globes of water were carefully Displaced just beneath the surface; the sea creatures contained within were still gently sedated and moved sluggishly in their giant fish bowls, each of which retained its separation from the surrounding water for a few hours, osmosing fields gradually adjusting the conditions within to those in the sea outside.
In the air, similar gauzy fields surrounded whole flocks of buoyant atmosphere fauna, bobbing groggily in the breeze.
Further along the vast shallow sweep of the Orbital, the gas-giant environments were witness to equivalent scenes of near-instant immigration followed by gradual integration.
The Yawning Angel’s own drones - its ambassadors on the Orbital - were witness to a handful of these sudden manifestations. After a nanosecond’s delay to ask permission, the GSV clicked into the Orbital’s own monitoring systems, and so watched with growing horror as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more Stored bodies and animals came thumping into existence all over the surface and all through the air, water and gas-ecologies of Teriocre.
The Yawning Angel flash-woke all its systems and switched its attention to the Sleeper Service.
The big GSV was already moving, rolling and twisting to point directly upwards out of the system. Its engine fields reconnected with the energy grid, its scanners were all already back on line and the rest of its multi-layered field complex was rapidly configuring itself for sustained deep-space travel.
It moved off, not especially quickly. Its Displacers had switched to pick rather than put now; in a matter of seconds they had snapped almost its entire fleet of smaller ships out of the system, their genuine yet deceptive delivery missions completed. Only the furthest, most massive vessels were left behind.
The Yawning Angel was already frantically making its own preparations to depart in pursuit, closing off most of its transit corridors, snap-Displacing drones from the Orbital, hurrying through a permission-to-depart request to the world’s Hub and drawing up schedules for ferrying people back to the Orbital on smaller craft once it had got under way while at the same time bringing other personnel back before its own velocity grew too great.
It knew it was wasting its energy, but it signalled the Sleeper Service anyway. Meanwhile, it watched intently as the departing ship accelerated away.
The Yawning Angel was gauging, judging, calibrating.
It was looking for a figure, comparing an aspect of the reality that was the absconding craft with the abstraction that was a simple but crucial equation. If the Sleeper Service’s velocity could at any point over time be described by a value greater than .54 x ns2, the Yawning Angel might be in trouble.
It might be in trouble anyway, but if the larger vessel was accelerating significantly quicker than its normal design parameters implied - allowing for the extra mass of the craft’s extraneous environments - then that trouble started right now.
As it was, the Yawning Angel was relieved to see, the Sleeper Service was moving away at exactly that rate; the ship was still perfectly apprehendable, and even if the Yawning Angel waited for another day without doing anything it would still be able to track the larger craft with ease and catch up with it within two days. Still suspecting some sort of trick, the Yawning Angel started an observation routine throughout the system for unexpected Displacings of gigatonnes of water and gas-giant atmosphere; suddenly dumping all that extra volume and mass now would be one way the Sleeper Service could put on an extra burst of speed, even if it would still be significantly slower than the Yawning Angel.
The smaller GSV retransmitted its polite but insistent signal. Still no reply from the Sleeper Service. No surprise there then.
The Yawning Angel signalled to tell other Contact craft what was happening and sent one of its fastest ships - a Cliff class superlifter stationed in space outside the GSV’s own fields for exactly this sort of eventuality - in pursuit of the escaping GSV, just so it would know this precocious, irksome action was being taken seriously.
Probably the Sleeper Service was simply being awkward rather than up to something more momentous, but the Yawning Angel couldn’t ignore the fact the larger craft was abandoning a significant proportion of its smaller ships, and had resorted to Displacing people and animals. Displacing was - especially at such speed - inherently and unfinessably dangerous; the risk of something going horribly, terminally wrong was only about one in eighty million for any single Displacement event, but that was still enough to put the average, fussily perfectionist ship Mind off using the process for anything alive except in the direst of emergencies, and the Sleeper Service - assuming it had rid itself of its entire complement of souls - must have carried out thirty-thousand plus Displacements in a minute or less, nudging the odds up well into the sort of likelihood-of-fuck-up range any sane Mind would normally recoil from in utter horror. Even allowing for the Sleeper Service’s Eccentricity, that did tend to indicate that there was something more than usually urgent or significant about its current actions.
The Yawning Angel looked up what was in effect an annoyance chart; it could leave right now - within a hundred seconds - and aggravate lots of people because they were on board itself instead of the Orbital, or vice-versa . . . or it could depart within twenty hours and leave everybody back where they ought to be, even if they were irritated at their plans being upset.
Compromise; it set an eight-hour departure time. Terminals in the shape of rings, pens, earrings, brooches, articles of clothing - and the in-built versions, neural laces - woke startled Culture personnel all over the Orbital and the wider system, insisting on relaying their urgent message. So much for keeping everybody happy with a week’s leave . . .
The Sleeper Service accelerated smoothly away into the darkness, already well clear of the system. It began to Induct, flittering between inferior and superior hyperspace. Its apparent real-space velocity jumped almost instantly by a factor of exactly twenty-three. Again, the Yawning Angel was comforted to see, spot on. No unpleasant surprises. The superlifter Charitable View raced after the fleeing craft, its engines unstressed, energy expenditure throttled well back, also threading its way between the layers of four-dimensional space. The process had been compared
to a flying fish zipping from water to air and back again, except that every second air-jump was into a layer of air beneath the water, not above it, which was where the analogy did rather break down.
The Yawning Angel was quickly customising thousands of carefully composed, exquisitely phrased apologies to its personnel and hosts. Its schedule of ship returns, varied to reflect the different courses the Sleeper Service might take if it didn’t remain on its present heading, didn’t look too problematic; it had delayed letting people venture far away until the Sleeper Service had sent most of its own fleet out, an action even it had thought over-cautious at the time but which now seemed almost prescient. It delegated part of its intellectual resources to drawing up a list of treats and blandishments with which to mollify its own people when they returned, and planned for a two-week return to Dreve, packed with festivities and celebrations, to say sorry when it was free of the obligation to follow this accursed machine and was able to draw up its own course schedule again.
The Charitable View reported that the Sleeper Service was still proceeding as could be expected.
The situation, it appeared, was in hand.
The Yawning Angel reviewed its own actions so far, and found them exemplary. This was all very vexing, but it was responding well, playing it by the book where possible and extemporising sensibly but with all due urgency where it had to. Good, good. It could well come out of this shining.
Three hours, twenty-six minutes and seventeen seconds after setting off, the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service reached its nominal Terminal Acceleration Point. This was where it ought to stop gaining speed, plump for one of the two hyperspatial volumes and just cruise along at a nice steady velocity.
It didn’t. Instead it accelerated harder; that .54 figure zoomed quickly to .72, the Plate class’s normal design maximum.
The Charitable View communicated this turn of events back to the Yawning Angel, which went into shock for about a millisecond. It rechecked all its in-system ships, drones, sensors and external reports. There was no sign that the Sleeper Service had dumped its extra mass anywhere within range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors. Yet it was behaving as though it had. Where had it done it? Could it have secretly built longer-range Displacers? (No; half its mass would have been required to construct a Displacer capable of dumping so much volume beyond the range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors, and that included all the extra mass it had taken on board over the years in the form of the extraneous environments in the first place . . . though - now that it was thinking in such outrageous terms - there was another, associated possibility that just might . . . but no; that couldn’t be. There had been no intelligence, no hint ... no, it didn’t even want to think about that . . .)
The Yawning Angel rescheduled everything it had already arranged in a flurry of re-drafted apologies, pleas for understanding and truncated journeys. It halved the departure warning time it had given. Thirty-three minutes to departure, now. The situation, it tried to explain to everybody, was becoming more urgent.
The Sleeper Service’s acceleration figures remained steady at their design maxima for another twenty minutes, though the Charitable View - keeping a careful watch on every aspect of the GSV’s performance from its station a few real-space light days behind - reported some odd events at the junctions of the Sleeper Service’s traction fields with the energy grid.
By now the Yawning Angel was existing in a state of quiveringly ghastly tension; it was thinking at maximum capacity, worrying at full speed, suddenly and appallingly aware how long things took to happen; a human in the same state would have been clutching a churning stomach, tearing their hair out and gibbering incoherently.
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Ships, even ships; they were restricted to speeds below the speed of sound in the bubble of air around the ship and the docks it was joined to. It reviewed how practicable it would be to just let the air go and move everything in vacuum. It made sense. Thankfully, it had already shifted all vulnerable pleasure craft out of the way and sealed and secured its unconnected hull apertures. It told the Hub what it was doing; the Hub objected because it was losing some of its air. The GSV dumped the air anyway. Everything started moving a little faster. The Hub screamed in protest but it ignored it.
Calm; calm; it had to remain calm. Stay focused, keep the most important objectives in mind.
A wave of what would have been nausea in a human swept through the Yawning Angel’s Mind as a signal came in from the Charitable View. Now what?
Whatever it might have feared, this was worse.
The Sleeper Service’s acceleration factor had started to increase. Almost at the same time, it had exceeded its normal maximum sustainable velocity.
Fascinated, appalled, terrified, the Yawning Angel listened to a running commentary on the other GSV’s progress from its increasingly distant child, even as it started the sequence of actions and commands that would lead to its own near-instant departure. Twelve minutes early, but that couldn’t be helped, and if people were pissed off, too bad.
Still increasing. Time to go. Disconnect. There.
The Charitable View signalled that the Sleeper Service’s outer-most field extent had shrunk to within a kilometre of naked-hull minima.
The Yawning Angel dropped away from the orbital, twisting and aiming and punching away into hyperspace only a few kilometres away from the world’s undersurface, ignoring incandescent howls of protest from the Hub over such impolite and feasibly dangerous behaviour and the astonished - but slow, so slow - yelps from people who an instant earlier had been walking down a transit corridor towards a welcoming foyer in the GSV and now found themselves bumping into emergency seal-fields and staring at nothing but blackness and stars.
The superlifter’s continuous report went on: the Sleeper Service’s acceleration kept on increasing slowly but steadily, then it paused, dropping to zero; the craft’s velocity remained constant.
Could that be it? It was still catchable. Panic over?
Then the fleeing ship’s velocity increased again; as did its rate of acceleration. Impossible!
The horrific thought which had briefly crossed the Yawning Angel’s mind moments earlier settled down to stay with all the gruesome deliberation of a self-invited house guest.
It did the arithmetic.
Take a Plate class GSV’s locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value . . . make that thirty-two at a time . . . and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service’s acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.
The Charitable View reported another smooth increase in the Sleeper Service’s rate of progress leading to another step, another pause. It was increasing its own acceleration to match.
The Yawning Angel sped after the two of them, already fearing the worst. Do the sums, do the sums. The Sleeper Service had filled at least four of its General bays with extra engine, bringing them on line two at a time, balancing the additional impetus . . .
Another increase.
Six. Probably all eight, then. What about the engineering space behind? Had that gone too?
Sums, sums. How much mass had there been aboard the damn thing? Water; gas-giant atmosphere, highly pressurised. About four thousand cubic kilometres of water alone; four gigatonnes. Compress it, alter it, transmute it, convert it into the ultra dense exotic materials that comprised an engine capable of reaching out and down to the energy grid that underlay the universe and pushing against it . . . ample, ample, more than enough. It would take months, even years to build that sort of extra engine capacity ... or only days, if you’d spent, say, the last few decades preparing the ground.
Dear holy shit, if it was all engine even the superlifter wouldn’t be able to
keep up with it. The average Plate class could sustain about one hundred and four kilolights more or less indefinitely; a good Range class, which was what the Yawning Angel had always been proud to count itself as, could easily beat that by forty kilolights. A Cliff class superlifter was ninety per cent engine; faster even than a Rapid Offensive Unit in short bursts. The Charitable View could hit two-twenty-one flat out, but that was only supposed to be for an hour or two at a time; that was chase speed, catch-up speed, not something it could maintain for long.
The figure the Yawning Angel was looking at was the thick end of two-thirty-three, if the Sleeper Service’s engineering space had been packed with engine too.
The Charitable View’s tone had already turned from one of amusement to amazement, then bewilderment. Now it was plain peevish. The Sleeper Service was topping the two-fifteen mark and showing no signs of slowing down. The superlifter would have to break away within minutes if it didn’t top-out soon. It asked for instructions.
The Yawning Angel, still accelerating for all its worth, determined to track and follow for as long as it could or until it was asked to give up the chase, told its offspring craft not to exceed its design parameters, not to risk damage.
The Sleeper Service went on accelerating. The superlifter Charitable View gave up the chase at two-twenty. It settled back to a less frenetic two hundred, dropping back all the time; even so it was still not a speed it could maintain for more than a few hours.
The Yawning Angel topped out at one forty-six.
The Sleeper Service finally hit cruise at around two-thirty-three and a half, disappearing ahead into the depths of galactic space. The superlifter reported this but sounded like it couldn’t believe it.