~ I take your point. I still intend to attempt communication with the entity but I shall not recommend that a drone approach be made. I have to put all this to my humans, of course, but they usually concur.
~ Naturally. I urge you to argue strongly against sending any object towards the Excession, should your human crew suggest this.
~ I’ll see which way they jump. This could take a while; they like arguing.
~ Don’t be in any rush on my account.
II
The Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time swung out of the darkness between the stars and braked hard, scrubbing velocity off in a wild, extravagant flare of energies which briefly left a livid line of disturbance across the surface of the energy grid. It came to a local-relative stop a light month out from the cold, dark, slowly tumbling body that was the ship store Pittance, some way beyond the outside edge of the tiny world’s spherical cloud of defence/attack mechanisms. It flashed a Permission-To-Approach signal at the rock.
The reply took longer than it would have expected.
tight beam, M16, tra. @n4.28.882.1398]
xPittance Store
oROU Killing Time
(Permission withheld.) What is your business here?
∞
[tight beam, M16, tra. @n4.28.882.1399]
xROU Killing Time
oPittance Store
Just stopping by to make sure you’re all right. What’s the problem? (PTA burst.)
∞
(Permission withheld.) Who sent you?
∞
What makes you think I had to be sent? (PTA burst.)
∞
(Permission withheld.) I am a restricted entity. I have no duty or obligation to permit any other craft to approach my vicinity. Traditionally Stores are only approached on a need-to basis. What is your need?
∞
There is some activity in the volume which includes your current location. People are concerned. A neighbourly check-up seemed timely. (PTA burst.)
∞
(Permission withheld.) Such concern would be better expressed by leaving me alone. Your visit might even attract attention, all of which I find intrinsically unwelcome. Please leave immediately, and kindly create less of a display on departure than you made on your arrival.
∞
I consider it my duty to assess your current state of integrity. I regret to say I have not been reassured by your recalcitrant attitude. You will do me the minimally polite honour of allowing me to interface with your independent external event-monitoring systems. (PTA burst.)
∞
(Permission withheld.) No! I shall not! I am perfectly able to take care of myself and there is nothing of interest contained within my associated independent security systems. Any attempt to access them without my permission will be treated as an act of aggression. This is your last chance to quit my jurisdiction before I emit a protest-registering signal concerning your unreasonable and boorish behaviour.
∞
I have already composed my own report detailing your bizarre and uncooperative attitude and copying this signal exchange. I shall release the compac immediately if a satisfactory reply is not received to this message. (PTA burst.)
Acknowledge signal.
Acknowledge signal!
I repeat: I have already composed my own report detailing your bizarre and uncooperative attitude. I shall release the compac immediately if a satisfactory reply is not received to this message. I shall not warn you again. (PTA burst.)
∞
(Permission granted.) Purely in the interests of a quiet life, only on condition that my associate security monitoring systems remain untouched, and under protest.
∞
Thank you; of course.
Under way. Heaving to at 2km from your rotational envelope in thirty minutes.
~ Thanks to your delaying tactics, Commander, it probably already suspects something and may well have signalled back to whoever sent it already. Think yourself lucky we have as much as half an hour to prepare; it is being cautious.
They had re-sealed the airlocks from the accommodation section and pumped in some real atmosphere. Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe had been able to shed his space suit some days earlier. The gravity was still far too mild but it was better than floating. The Commander clicked his beak at the image on the screen presented by the mobile command centre they’d set up in what had been the humans’ pool/growing unit. A lieutenant at the Commander’s side spoke quietly but urgently to the twenty other Affronters distributed throughout the base’s caverns, letting them know what was going on.
The Commander looked back impatiently, waiting for the servant who’d been sent to fetch his suit the instant the Culture warship had appeared on the other craft’s sensors. On secondary screens, he could see suited Affronter technicians, their machines and some slaved drones working on the exteriors of the stored ships. They had about half of them ready to get out and go; a decent fleet, but they needed the rest, and preferably all at once, and as a complete surprise to the Culture and everybody else.
‘Can’t you destroy it?’ the Commander asked the traitor Culture vessel. He glanced at the status of the nearest Affront vessels. Far too far away. They had avoided approaching Pittance in case they could be monitored by other Culture craft.
The Attitude Adjuster didn’t like vocalising; it preferred to print out its side of a conversation:
~ If it gets to within a few minutes, yes, perhaps. It might have been relatively easy, if I could have caught it completely unawares. However, I doubt that was ever very likely given that it must have been suspicious to come here in the first place and is almost certainly completely out of the question now.
‘What about the ships we’ve cleared?’
~ Commander, they haven’t been woken up yet. Until I’ve done that they’re useless. And if we wake half of them now they’ll have too long to think, too much time to do their own checking around before we need them for the main action. Our project must all happen in a rush, in a state of perceived chaos, panic and urgency, or it cannot happen effectively at all.
There was a pause while the message scrolled along and off the screen, then:
~ Commander, I suspect this will be a formality, but I have to ask; do you wish to admit to what has happened here and turn your command over without a fight to the ROU Killing Time? This will probably be our last opportunity to avoid hostilities.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ the Commander said sourly.
~ I thought not. Very well. I shall vector away in the skein-shadow of the rock and try to loop round behind the ROU. Let it enter the defence system. Wait until it’s a week inside, no more, and then set everything you have upon it. I urge you again, Commander; turn over the tactical command apparatus to me.
‘No,’ the Commander said. ‘Leave and do whatever you think will best jeopardise the Culture vessel. I shall allow it to arrive at a point three weeks in and then attack.’
~ I am on my way. Do not let the ship come within a light week of the store itself, Commander. I know how it will think if it is attacked; this is not some genteel Orbital Mind or a nicely timorous General Contact Unit; this is a Culture warship showing every sign of being fully armed and ready to press matters.
‘What, creeping in as it is?’ the Commander sneered.
~ Commander, you would be amazed and appalled at how few bright sides there are concerning the appearance and behaviour of a warship like this. The fact it’s not charging in through the defence screen and metaphorically skidding to a stop is almost certainly a bad sign; it probably means it’s one of the wily ones. I repeat; do not wait until it is most of the way into the defence system before opening fire. Assaulted so far inside the defensive field it may well figure that it has no chance of escape and so might as well continue towards you and attack, and at that sort of range it would stand a decent chance of being able to obliterate the entire store and all the ships wit
hin it.
The Commander felt almost annoyed that the ship hadn’t appealed to his own personal sense of self-preservation. ‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘Half way in; two weeks.’
~ Commander, no! That is still too close. If we cannot destroy the ship in the first instant of the engagement it must be presented with a reasonable opportunity to escape, otherwise it may go for glory rather than attempt to extricate itself.
‘But if it escapes it can alert the Culture!’
~ If our attack is not immediately successful it will signal elsewhere anyway, assuming it has not already done so. We shall not be able to stop it. In that case, we shall have been discovered
... though with any luck that will only put our plans out by a few days. Believe me, the craft’s physical escape will not bring the Culture here any quicker than a signal would. You will be putting this entire mission in jeopardy if you allow the vessel to come within more than three light weeks of the store.
‘All right!’ the Commander spat. He flicked a tentacle over the glowing board of the command desk. The communication link was cut. The Attitude Adjuster did not attempt to re-establish it.
‘Your suit, sir,’ said a voice from behind. The Commander whirled round to find the gelding midshipman - uniformed but not suited - with his space suit in his limbs.
‘Oh, at last!’ the Commander screamed; he flicked a tentacle at the creature’s eye stalks; the blow bounced them back off its casing. The gelding whimpered and fell back, gas sac deflating. The Commander grabbed his suit and pulled himself inside it. The midshipman staggered along the floor, half blinded.
The Commander ordered his lieutenant to reconfigure the command desk. From here they could personally control all the systems that had been entrusted by the Culture to the Mind which the traitor ship had killed. The command desk was like an ultimate instrument of destruction; a giant keyboard to play death tunes on. Some of the keys, admittedly, had to be left to trigger themselves once set, but these controls really did control.
The holo screen projected a sphere out towards the Commander. The globe displayed the volume of real space around Pittance, with tiny green, white and gold flecks representing major components of the defence system. A dull blue dot represented the approaching warship, coasting in towards them. Another dot, bright red, on the directly opposite side of the ship store from the blue dot and much closer - though drawing quickly away - was the traitor ship Attitude Adjuster.
Another screen alongside showed an abstracted hyperspatial view of the same situation, indicating the two ships on different surfaces of the skein. A third screen showed a transparent abstract of Pittance itself, detailing its ship-filled caverns and surface and internal defence systems.
The Commander finished getting into his space suit and powering it up. He settled back into position. He reviewed the situation. He knew better than to try to conduct matters at a tactical level, but he appreciated the strategic influence he could wield here. He was dreadfully tempted, all the same, to take personal control and fire all the defence systems himself, but he was aware of the enormous responsibility he had been given in this mission and was equally conscious that he had been carefully selected for this task. He had been chosen because he knew when not to - what had the traitor ship called it? Go for glory. He knew when not to go for glory. He knew when to back off, when to take advice, when to retreat and regroup.
He flicked open the communicator channel to the traitor ship. ‘Did the warship stop exactly a light month out?’ he asked.
~ Yes.
‘That’s thirty-two standard Culture days.’
~ Correct.
‘Thank you.’ He closed the channel.
He looked at the lieutenant at his side. ‘Set everything within range to open fire on the warship the instant it crosses the eight-point one days’ limit.’ He sat back as the lieutenant’s limbs flickered over the holo displays, putting his command into effect. Only just in time, the Commander noted. He’d been longer getting into his suit than he’d thought.
‘Forty seconds, sir,’ the lieutenant said.
‘. . . Give it just enough time to relax,’ the Commander said, more to himself than to anybody else. ‘If that is how these things work . . .’
Exactly eight and a tenth light days in from the position the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had held while negotiating its permission to approach, space all around the blue dot on the screen scintillated abruptly as a thousand hidden devices of a dozen different types suddenly erupted into life in a precisely ordered sequence of destruction; in the real-space holo sphere it looked like a miniaturised stellar cluster suddenly bursting into existence all around the blue dot. The trace disappeared instantly inside a brilliant sphere of light. In the hyperspace holo sphere, the dot lasted a little longer; slowed down, it could be seen firing some munitions back for a microsecond or so, then it too disappeared in the wash of energies bursting out of the real-space skein and into hyperspace in twin bulging plumes.
The lights in the accommodation space flickered and dimmed as monumental amounts of power suddenly diverted to the rock’s own long-range weaponry.
The Commander left the comm channel to the traitor ship open. Its own course had altered the instant the defence weaponry had been unleashed; now its course was hooked, changing colour from red to blue and curving up and round and vectoring in hyperspace too, looping round to the point where the slowly fading and dissipating radiation shells marked the focus of the system’s annihilatory power.
A flat screen to the Commander’s left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it:
~ Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.
‘What?’ the Commander said.
The display flashed once and came clear again.
~ Commander; the Attitude Adjuster here again. As you may have gathered, we have failed.
‘What? But . . !’
~ Keep all defence and sensory systems at maximum readiness; ramp the sensor arrays up to significant degradation point in a week; we shall not need them beyond then.
‘But what happened? We got it!’
~ I shall move to plug the gap the attack left in our defences. Ready all the cleared ships for immediate awakening; I may have to rouse them within a day or two. Complete the tests on the Displacers; use a real ship if you have to. And run a total level-zero systems check of your own equipment; if the ship was able to insert a message into your command desk it may have been able to carry out more pertinent mischief therein.
The Commander slammed a limb end down on the desk. ‘What is going on?’ he roared. ‘We got the bastard, didn’t we?’
~ No, Commander. We ‘got’ some sort of shuttle or module. Somewhat faster and better equipped than the average example such a ship would normally carry, but possibly constructed en route with such a ruse in mind. Now we know why its approach appeared so politely leisurely.
The Commander peered into the holo spheres, juggling with magnifications and field-depths. ‘Then where the hell is it?’
~ Give me control of the primary scanner, Commander, just for a moment, will you?
The Commander fumed in his space suit for a moment, then nodded his eye stalks at the lieutenant.
The second holo sphere became a narrow, dark cone and swung so that the wide end was directed towards the ceiling. Pittance glowed at the very point of the other end of the projection, the screen of defence devices reduced to a tiny florette of coloured light, close in to the cone’s point. At the far, wide end there was a tiny, fiercely, almost painfully red dot.
~ There is the good ship Killing Time, Commander. It set off at almost the same time I did. Regrettably, it is both quicker and faster than I. It has already done us the honour of copying to me the signal it sent to the rest of the Culture the moment we opened fire on its emissary. I’ll transmit you a copy too, minus the various, venomous unpleasantnesses directed specifically at myself.
Thank you for the use of your control desk. You can have it back now.
The cone collapsed to become a sphere again. The traitor ship’s last message scrolled off the side of the flat screen. The Commander and the lieutenant looked at each other. The small screen came up with another incoming signal.
~ Oh, and will you contact Affront High Command, or shall I? Somebody had better tell them we’re at war with the Culture.
III
Genar-Hofoen woke up with a headache it took minutes to calm down; performing the relevant pain-management inside his head took far too much concentration for somebody feeling this bad to perform quickly. He felt like he was a child on a beach, swinging a toy spade and building a sea wall all around him as the tide rushed in; waves kept over-topping and he was constantly shovelling sand up to small breaches in his defences, and the worst of it was the more sand he piled up the deeper he dug and higher he had to throw. Eventually water started seeping in from the bottom of his sea fort, and he gave in; he just blanketed all pain. If somebody started holding flames to his feet or he jammed his fingers in a door that’d just be too bad. He knew better than to shake his head, so he imagined shaking his head; he’d never had a hangover this bad.
He tried opening one eye. It didn’t seem too keen on cooperating. Try the other one. No, that one didn’t want to face the world either. Very dark. Like being wrapped up inside a big dark cloak or some--
He jerked; both eyes tore open, making both smart and water. He was looking at some sort of big screen, in-holo’d. Space; stars. He looked down, finding it difficult to move his head. He was held inside a large, very comfortable but very secure chair; it was made of some sort of soft hide, it was half reclined and it smelled very pleasant, but it had big padded hoops that had clamped themselves over his forearms and his lower legs. A similar hide-covered bar looped over his lower abdomen. He tried moving his head again. It was held inside some sort of open-face helmet which felt like it was attached to the headrest of the chair.