~ Very well. Reluctantly, but very well.
The Appeal To Reason stopped the drone’s launch countdown before a hundredth of a second had elapsed. The Fate Amenable To Change stood down its Displacer and left its avatar aboard.
It all made little difference. The Fate Amenable To Change had secretly been upgrading its effectors over the past couple of days and had intended attempting to carry out its own subtle jeopardising of any drones dispatched towards the Excession, but it was not to have the chance. Even while the hurriedly called vote was taking place on board the Appeal To Reason, the Fate received a message from another craft.
xExplorer Ship Break Even (Zetetic Elench, Stargazer, 5th)
oGCU Fate Amenable To Change (Culture)
Greetings. Please be advised I and my sister craft the Within Reason and Long View are also in attendance, just out of your primary scanner range. We have reconfigured to an Extreme Offence back-up form and shall soon be joined by the two remaining ships of our fleet, similarly recast. We would hope that you do not intend any interference with the plan our sister craft Appeal To Reason intends to effect.
Two other, confirmatory signals came in from divergent angles compared to that first message, purporting to be from the Within Reason and the Long View.
Shit, thought the GCU. It had been reasonably confident it could either fool the two nearby Elench craft or just plain overpower their efforts to contact the Excession, but faced with five ships, three of them on a war footing, it knew it would never be able to prevail.
It replied, saying that of course it intended no mischief, and glumly watched events unfold.
The vote aboard the Appeal To Reason went the same way as before, though a few more humans did vote against the idea of sending the drone in than had the last time. Two requested an immediate transfer to the Sober Counsel, then changed their minds; they would stay aboard. The Fate took its avatars off both the Elencher ships. It had used its heavy-duty displacer for the task, attenuating it to make it look as though it had utilised one of the lesser systems. It left the unit running at full readiness.
The Appeal To Reason’s drone was duly launched; a small, fragile-looking, gaily adorned thing, its extremities sporting ribbons, flowers and little ornaments and its casing covered with drawings, cartoons and well-wishing messages scrawled by the crew. It puttered hesitantly towards the Excession, chirpily beaming signals of innocent goodwill.
If the Fate Amenable To Change had been a human, at this point it would have looked down, put one hand over its eyes, and shaken its head.
The small machine took minutes to creep up to the seemingly unnoticing Excession’s dull skein-surface; an insect crawling up to a behemoth. It activated a short-range, one time hyperspace unit and disappeared from the skein as though passing through a mirror of dark fluid.
In Infraspace, it . . . disappeared too, for an instant.
The Fate Amenable To Change was watching the drone from a hundred different angles via its remotes. They all saw it just disappear. An instant later it reappeared. It looped back through its little quantum burrow, returning to the skein of real space to start back, no less hesitantly, towards the Appeal To Reason.
The Fate Amenable To Change crash-ramped its plasma chambers then isolated and readied a clutch of fusion warheads. At the same moment, it signalled urgently.
~ Was the drone meant to disappear that way?
~ Hmm, sent the Appeal To Reason. ~ Well . . .
~ Destroy it, the Fate urged. ~ Destroy it, now!
~ It has communicated, slim-text only, as per instructions, the Appeal To Reason replied, sounding thoughtful, if wary. ~ It has gathered vast quantities of data on the entity. There was a pause, then, excitedly; ~ It has located the mind-state of the Peace Makes Plenty!
~ Destroy it! Destroy it!
~ No! sent the Sober Counsel.
~ How can I? the Appeal To Reason protested.
~ I’m sorry, the Fate Amenable To Change signalled to both the nearby craft, an instant after initiating a Displace sequence which flicked compressed spheres of plasma and a spray of fusion bombs down their own instantaneous wormholes towards the returning drone.
XIV
Ulver Seich tossed her damply tangled black hair over her shoulder and plonked her chin on Genar-Hofoen’s chest. She traced gentle circles round his left nipple with one finger; he put a sweaty arm round her slim back, drew her other hand to his mouth and delicately kissed her fingers, one by one. She smiled.
Dinner, talk, drink, shared smoke-bowl, agreeing fuzzy heads might be cleared by a dip in the Grey Area’s pool, splashing, fooling around . . . and fooling around. Ulver had been holding back a little for part of the evening until she’d been certain the man didn’t just expect anything to happen, then when she’d convinced herself that he wasn’t taking her for granted, that he liked her and that - after that awful time in the module - they did get on, that was when she’d suggested the swim.
She raised her chin off his chest a little and flicked her finger back and forth over his tinily erect nipple. ‘You were serious?’ she asked him. ‘An Affronter?’
He shrugged. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to know what it was like to be one of them.’
‘So now would you have to declare war on yourself?’ she asked, pressing down on his nipple and watching it rise back up, her brows creased with concentration.
He laughed. ‘I suppose so.’
She looked into his eyes. ‘What about women? You ever wonder the same? You took the change once, didn’t you?’ She settled her chin back on his chest.
He breathed in deeply, raising her head as though on an ocean swell. He put one arm behind his head and stared up at the roof of her cabin. ‘Yes, I did it once,’ he said quietly.
She smoothed her palm over his chest for a while, watching his skin intently. ‘Was it just for her?’
He craned his head up. They looked at each other.
‘How much do you know about me?’ he asked her. He’d tried quizzing her over dinner on what she knew and why she’d been sent to Tier to intercept him, but she’d played mysterious (and, to be fair, he wasn’t able to tell her exactly why he was on his way to the Sleeper Service).
‘Oh, I know all about you,’ she said softly, seriously. Then she looked down. ‘Well, I know the facts. I suppose that’s not everything.’
He lowered his head to the pillow again. ‘Yes, it was just for her.’
‘Mm-hmm,’ she said. She continued to stroke his chest. ‘You must have loved her a lot.’
After a moment, he said, ‘I suppose I must have.’
She thought he sounded sad. There was a pause, then he sighed again and, in a more cheerful voice, he said; ‘What about you? Ever a guy?’
‘No,’ she said, with a laugh that might have held a trace of scorn. ‘Maybe one day.’ She shifted a little and circled his nipple with the tip of her tongue for a moment. ‘I’m having too much fun being a girl.’
He reached down and pulled her up to kiss her.
Then in the silence, a tiny chime sounded in the room.
She broke off. ‘Yes?’ she said, breathing hard and scowling.
‘I’m very sorry to intrude,’ said the ship, making no great effort to sound sincere. ‘May I speak to Mr Genar-Hofoen?’
Ulver made an exasperated noise and rolled off the man.
‘Good grief, can’t it wait?’ Genar-Hofoen said.
‘Yes, probably,’ said the ship reasonably, as though this had just occurred to it. ‘But people usually like to know this sort of thing immediately. Or so I thought.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘The sentient module Scopell-Afranqui is dead,’ the ship told him. ‘It conducted a limited destruct on the first day of the war. We have only just heard. I’m sorry. Were you close?’
Genar-Hofoen was silent for a moment. ‘No. Well . . . No. Not that close. But I’m sorry to hear it. Thank you for telling me.?
??
‘Could it have waited?’ the ship asked conversationally.
‘It could, but I suppose you weren’t to know.’
‘Oh well. Sorry. Good night.’
‘Yes, good night,’ the man said, wondering at his feelings.
Ulver stroked his shoulder. ‘That was the module you lived on, wasn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘We never really got on,’ he told her. ‘Mostly my fault, I suppose.’ He turned his head to look at her. ‘I can be a scum-bag sometimes, frankly.’ He grinned.
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said, climbing back on top of him.
10
Heavy Messing
I
Grief, nothing worked! The Fate Amenable To Change’s ordnance directed at the Elench drone ship just disappeared, snatched away to nowhere; it had to react quickly to deal with the collapsing wormholes as they slammed back, now endless, towards its Displacers. How could anything do that? (And had the watching Elench warships noticed?) The little Elench drone flew on, a few seconds away from its home ship.
~ I confess I just tried to destroy your drone, the Fate sent to the Appeal To Reason. ~ I make no apologies. Look what happened. It enclosed a recording of the events. ~ Now will you listen? There seems little point in trying to destroy the machine. Just get away from it. I’ll try to work out another way of dealing with it.
~ You had no business attempting to interfere with my drone, the Appeal To Reason replied. ~ I am glad that you were frustrated. I am happy that the drone appears to be under the protection of the entity. I take it as an encouraging sign that it is so.
~ What? Are you mad?
~ I’ll thank you to stop impugning my mental state with such regularity and allow me to get on with my job. I have not informed the other craft of your disgraceful and illegal attack on my drone; however, any further endeavours of a similar nature will not be treated so leniently.
~ I shall not try to reason with you. Goodbye and fare well.
~ Where are you going?
~ I am not going anywhere.
II
The General Contact Unit Grey Area was about to rendezvous with the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service. The GCU had gathered its small band of passengers in a lounge for the occasion; one of the ship’s skeletal slave-drones joined them as they watched the view of hyperspace behind them on a wall screen. The GCU was making the best speed it could, rushing beneath the skein at a little over forty kilolights on a gently, decreasingly curved course that was now almost identical to that of the larger craft approaching from astern.
‘This will require a coordinated full engine shut-off and Displace, ’ the small cube of components that was the drone told them. ‘For an instant, none of us will be within my full control.’
Genar-Hofoen was still trying to think of a cutting remark when the drone Churt Lyne said, ‘Won’t slow down for you, eh?’
‘Correct,’ the slave-drone said.
‘Here it comes,’ said Ulver Seich. She sat cross-legged on a couch drinking a delicately scented infusion from a porcelain cup. A dot appeared in the representation of space behind them; it rushed towards them, growing quickly. It swelled to a fat shining ovoid that rushed silently underneath them; the view dipped quickly to follow it, beginning to perform a half-twist to keep the orientation correctly aligned. Genar-Hofoen, standing near where Ulver sat, had to put his hand out to the back of the couch to steady himself. In that instant, there was a sensation of a kind of titanically enveloping slippage, the merest hint of vast energies being gathered, cradled, unleashed, contained, exchanged and manipulated; unimaginable forces called into existence seemingly from nothing to writhe momentarily around them, collapse back into the void and leave reality, from the perspective of the people on the Grey Area, barely altered.
Ulver Seich tssked as some of her infusion spilled into the cup’s saucer.
The view had changed. Now it snapped to a grey-blue expanse of something curved, like a cup of cloud seen from the inside. It pivoted again, and they were looking at a series of vast steps like the entrance to an ancient temple. The broad shelves of the stairs led up to a rectangular entrance lined with tiny lights; a dark space beyond twinkled with still smaller lamps. The view drew back to reveal a series of such entrances arranged side by side, the rest of which were closed. Above and below, set into the faces of the steps, were smaller doors, all similarly shut.
‘Success,’ the slave-drone said.
The view was changing again as the ship was drawn slowly backwards towards the single opened bay.
Genar-Hofoen frowned. ‘We’re going inside?’ he asked the slave-drone.
It swivelled to face him, paused just long enough for the human to form the impression he was being treated like some sort of cretin. ‘. . . Well, yes . . .’ it said, slowly, as one might to a particularly dim child.
‘But I was told--’
‘Welcome aboard the Sleeper Service,’ said a voice behind them. They turned to see a tall, angular, black-dressed creature walking into the lounge. ‘My name is Amorphia.’
III
The drone returned to the Appeal To Reason and was taken back aboard. Seconds passed.
~ Well? the Fate Amenable To Change asked.
There was a brief pause. A microsecond or so. Then: ~ It’s empty, the Appeal To Reason sent.
~ Empty?
~ Yes. It didn’t record anything. It’s like it never went anywhere.
~ Are you sure?
~ Take a look for yourself.
A data dump followed. The Fate Amenable To Change shunted it into a memory core it had set up for just such a purpose the moment it had realised what the Excession was, almost a month earlier. It was the equivalent of a locked room, an isolation ward, a cell. More information poured out of the Appeal To Reason; a gushing river of data trying to flood in after the original data dump. The Culture ship ignored it. Part of its Mind was listening to the howling, thumping noises coming out of that locked room.
Information flickered between the Appeal To Reason and the Sober Counsel, an instant before the Fate sent its own warning signal. It cursed itself for its procrastination, even if its warning would almost certainly have gone unheeded anyway.
It signalled the distant, war-readied Elench craft instead, begging them to believe the worst had happened. There was no immediate reply.
The Appeal To Reason was the nearer of the two Elencher ships. It turned and started accelerating towards the Fate. It broadcast, tight-beamed, lasered and field-pulsed vast, impossibly complicated signals at the Culture craft. The Fate squirted back the contents of that locked room, evacuating it. Then it swivelled and powered up its engines. So I am going somewhere, it thought, and moved off, away from the Appeal To Reason, which was still signalling wildly and remained on a heading taking it straight for the Culture ship.
The Fate raced outwards, powering away from the Elencher vessel and heading out on a great curve that would take it rolling over the invisible sphere that was the closest approach limit it had set. The Sober Counsel was moving off on an opposite course from the Appeal To Reason, which was still following the Culture ship. A direction which would turn into an intercept course if they all held these headings. Oh, shit, the Fate thought.
They were still close enough to each other to just talk, but the Fate thought it ought to be a little more formal, so it signalled.
xGCU Fate Amenable To Change (Culture)
oExplorer Ship Sober Counsel (Whoever)
Whatever you are, if you advance on an intercept course on the far side of the closest approach limit, I’ll open fire. No further warnings.
No reply. Just the blaze of multi-band mania from the Appeal To Reason, following behind it. The Sober Counsel’s course didn’t alter.
The Fate concentrated its attention on the last known locations of the three other Elench craft; the trio which the Break Even had said were all war-configured. The other two couldn’t be ignored, but the new arrivals h
ad to constitute the greatest threat for now. It scanned the data it had on the specifications of the Elench craft, calculating, simulating; war-gaming. Grief, to be doing this with ships that were practically Culture ships! The simulation runs came out equivocal. It could easily deal with the two craft, even staying within range of the Excession (as though that was a wise limitation anyway!), but if the other three joined in the fun, and certainly if they attacked, it could well find itself in trouble.
It signalled the Break Even again. Still nothing.
The Fate was starting to wonder what the point was of sticking around here. The big guns would start arriving in a day or two; it looked like it was going to be in some sort of ludicrous continual chase with the two Elencher ships until then, which would be tiresome (with the possibility that the other three, war-ready Elencher ships might join in, which would be downright dangerous) and, after all, there was that war fleet on its way. What more was it usefully going to be able to do here? Certainly, it could keep a watch on the Excession, see if it did anything else interesting, but was that worth the risk of being overwhelmed by the Elench? Or even by the Excession itself, if it was as invasive as it now appeared to be? Enough of its drones, platforms and sensor platforms might be able to evade the Elenchers for the time it took until the other craft got here; they could keep watch on the situation, couldn’t they?
Ah, to hell with this, it thought to itself. It dodged unexpectedly along the surface of the closest-approach limit, producing corresponding alterations in the headings of the two Elencher ships. It speeded up for a while, then slowed until it was stopped relative to the Excession.
The position it held now was such that if you drew a line between the Excession and the direction it was expecting the MSV Not Invented Here to arrive from, it would be on that line too.
The Fate signalled the two Elencher ships once more, trying to get sense from the Appeal To Reason and any reply at all from the Sober Counsel. It was careful to target the last known positions of the Break Even and its two militarily configured sister ships as well, still trying to elicit a response. None was forthcoming. It waited until the last possible moment, when it looked like the Appeal To Reason was about to ram it in its enthusiasm to overwhelm it with signals, then broke away from it, heading straight out, directly away from the Excession.