She wondered how much he thought she had changed, but knew there was almost no comparison. She still had all her memories of childhood and early adolescence, she appeared vaguely similar to how she’d looked when she’d left and she could contrive to sound much like her old self, but in every other regard she was another person altogether.
She used her neural lace to listen in to the Liveware Problem’s systems talking to each other, quickly took in a compensated view of the gulf of space ahead of the rushing ship, updated herself on any news from Sursamen and then from elsewhere, shared a casual handshake with Turminder Xuss, quiescent in her cabin, and then monitored her brother closely, listening to his heartbeat, sensing his skin conductivity, his blood pressure, implied core temperature and temperature distribution as well as the state of his slightly tense, tautened muscles. He was grinding his teeth, though he probably wasn’t aware of it himself.
She felt she ought to jolly Ferbin out of what might be a dark mood, but was not sure she herself was in the mood to do so. She glanded sperk, and soon was.
“Is Director General Shoum still on Sursamen?” Anaplian asked.
“No,” Hippinse said. “Left forty-plus days ago. Continuing her tour of Morthanveld possessions and protectorates in the Lesser Spine.”
“But she is contactable once we’re down there?”
“Definitely. At the moment she’s here, in transit between Asulious IV and Grahy on the Cat.4 CleaveHull “On First Seeing Jhiriit”. Due to arrive Grahy fourteen hours after we make Sursamen. Without the crash-stop,” Hippinse added archly. The avatoid had changed further just in the last day and was now positively muscular. He still looked burly compared to the two Sarl men, but he appeared far fitter and athletic than he had when they’d first met him a few days earlier. Even his blond hair was cropped and businesslike, similar to Djan Seriy’s.
The central holo-display they were seated around spun to show where Shoum’s ship was now, then rotated smoothly back to where it had been (Holse remembered the display of the dreadful planet Bulthmaas, and Xide Hyrlis’ face, lit from below). The display was false-coloured; all the stars were white. Sursamen was a gently blinking red dot hard by its star, Meseriphine. The Liveware Problem was an even tinier strobing blue point trailing a fading aquamarine wake. The positions of other major ships, where known, were also shown, colour-coded; Morthanveld craft were green. The Oct colour was blue; their possible presence was implied by a faint tinge all around Sursamen.
Djan Seriy looked at Ferbin. “You think Shoum will facilitate our travel to the Eighth if we have any problems with the Nariscene or the Oct?”
“She took some considerable interest in our plight,” Ferbin said. “It was she who arranged our conveyance to Xide Hyrlis, for all that that proved a futile expedition.” Ferbin did not try to suppress a sneer. “She found my quest for justice ‘romantic’, I recall.” He looked at his sister and shook his head. “She might be termed sympathetic; however, it could be just a passing sympathy. I cannot say.”
Djan Seriy shrugged. “Still, this is worth keeping in mind, I think,” she said.
“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Hippinse said. “With luck the Oct systems will be breezeable and the Nariscene won’t be alerted. I should be able to drop you straight into a lift. Maybe even a scendship.”
“That, as you say, is with luck,” Anaplian said. “I am thinking about if luck is not with us.” She looked quizzically at Hippinse. “Oramen is still at the Falls, is that correct?”
“Last we heard, yes,” the ship said through its avatoid. “Though the information is eight days old at least. The Oct/Aultridia tussling between levels is making communications unreliable.”
“How bad is this so-called ‘tussling’?” Anaplian asked.
“About as bad as it can get before the Nariscene would be obliged to step in.” The avatoid paused. “I’m a little surprised they haven’t already.”
Anaplian frowned. “Do they shoot at each other?”
“No,” Hippinse said. “They’re not supposed to within the Towers or near any secondary structure. Mostly the dispute involves taking over Towers using blocking scendships and remote reconfiguring of door-control fidelities.”
“Is this going to help or hinder us?”
“Could go either way. Multiplier rather than a valuer.”
Djan Seriy sat back. “Very well,” she said. “This is what will happen: we four descend together to Sursamen Surface. We have to try and get down through the levels before anybody works out we shouldn’t have got to the Meseriphine system so quickly and starts asking what ship brought us.” She nodded at Hippinse. “The Liveware Problem believes it can get us down and inserted into the Nariscene travel-admin system without anybody noticing, but short of trying to take over the whole Nariscene AI matrix on Sursamen – arguably an act of war in itself – it cannot stop us getting spotted as anomalous eventually. So; we attain the level of the Hyeng-zhar, expeditiously. We find Oramen; at the Falls, hopefully. We tell him he is in danger if he does not know already. We also get a message to him while we’re on our way, if possible. We do what we can to make him safe, or at least safer, if necessary, then we deal with tyl Loesp.”
“‘Deal with’?” the ship asked, through Hippinse.
Anaplian looked levelly at the avatoid. “Deal with as in apprehend. Capture. Hold, or ensure is held until a properly formulated court can decide his fate.”
“I would not anticipate a royal pardon,” Ferbin said icily.
“Meanwhile,” Djan Seriy continued, “the ship will be attempting to find out what the Oct are up to by seeing if all these missing ships really are turning up around Sursamen. Though of course by then the Morthanveld and Nariscene will have been informed of our suspicions regarding the Oct ship concentration and will doubtless be formulating their own responses. We can but hope these will complement the Liveware Problem’s, though it is not impossible they will be antagonistic.” Anaplian looked at Ferbin and Holse. “If the Oct are there in force then both Hippinse and I may have to leave you alone on minimal notice. I’m sorry, brother, but that is how it has to be. We must all hope it doesn’t come to that but if it does we’ll leave you with what advantage we can.”
“And what would that be?” Ferbin asked, looking from Anaplian to Hippinse.
“Intelligence,” said Djan Seriy.
“Better weaponry,” the ship told them.
They popped into existence within a vacant Oct scendship; its doors had just closed – unexpectedly, as far as the cloudily aware brain of the Tower Traffic Control was concerned. Then it rechecked, and found that the door closure was not unexpected after all; an instruction demanding just such an action had been there for some time. So that was all right. A very short time later there was no longer memory or record of it having found anything unexpected in the first place. That was even better.
The scendship was one of over twenty attached to a great carousel device which hung directly above the gaping fourteen-hundred-metre-diameter mouth that was the top of the Pandil-fwa Tower. The carousel was designed to load the selected scendship, like a shell into an immense gun, into one of the secondary tubes bundled within the main Tower which would allow the vessel to drop to any of the available levels.
The Oct’s Tower Traffic Control computer executed a variety of instructions it was under the completely erroneous impression had been properly authorised and the carousel machine ninety metres beneath it duly dropped the scendship from the access ring above to another ring below; this swung the ship over one of the tubes. The capsule craft was lowered, fitted, and then grasped by what were basically two gigantic, if sophisticated, washers. Fluids drained and were pumped away. Lock-rotates opened and closed and the ship shuffled down until it hung in vacuum, dripping, directly above a dark shaft fourteen hundred kilometres deep and full of almost nothing at all. The ship announced it was ready to travel. The Tower Traffic Control machine gave it permission. The scendship released its hold on the s
ide of the tube and started to fall, powered by nothing more than Sursamen’s own gravity.
That had been, as Anaplian had warned Ferbin and Holse, the easy bit. The Oerten Crater on Sursamen’s Surface stood directly over the fluted mouth of the Pandil-fwa Tower and was separated from it only by Secondary structure; the ship had had no difficulty – once it had checked its co-ordinates several thousand times and Displaced a few hundred microscopic scout motes – placing them straight into the scendship. Co-opting the Oct’s computer matrices – they barely merited the term AIs – had been, for the Mind of the Liveware Problem, a trivial matter.
They had chosen a stealthy approach, arriving without fanfare or – as far as they were aware – detection above Sursamen less than half an hour earlier. The Liveware Problem had spent the days of their approach modelling and rehearsing its tactics using the highly detailed knowledge of Nariscene and Oct systems it already had. It had grown confident it could put them straight into a scendship and remove the need for any exposure to the Surface itself. Arriving, it found pretty much what it had expected and sent them straight in.
Djan Seriy had spent the same time giving Ferbin and Holse a crash course in the use of certain Culture defensive and offensive technologies, up to the level she thought they could handle. It was a truism that some of the more rarefied Culture personal weapon systems were far more likely to kill an untrained user than anybody they were ostensibly aimed at, but even the defensive systems, while they were never going to kill you – that was, rather obviously, the one thing they were designed above all else to prevent – could give you a bowel-loosening fright, too, just due to the speed and seeming violence with which they could react when under threat.
The two men quickly got used to the suits they’d be wearing. The suits were default soot-black, their surfaces basically smooth once on but much straked and be-lumped with units, accoutrements and sub-systems not all of which Ferbin and Holse were even allowed to know about. The face sections could divide into lower mask and upper visor parts and defaulted clear so that facial expressions were readable.
“What if we get an itch?” Holse had asked Hippinse. “I got an itch wearing a Morthanveld swimming suit when we were being shown round one of their ships and it was disproportionately annoying.” They were on the hangar deck. It was crowded even by hangar deck standards but it still provided the largest open space the ship had for them to gather in.
“You won’t itch,” the avatoid told him and Ferbin. “The suit deadens that sort of sensation on interior contact. You can sense touch and temperature and so on, but not to the point of pain. It’s partly about damping distractive itching, partly about preemptive first-level damage control.”
“How clever,” Ferbin said.
“These are very clever suits,” Hippinse said with a smile.
“Not sure I like being so swaddled, sir,” Holse said.
Hippinse shrugged. “You become a new, hybrid entity in such a suit. There is a certain loss of absolute control, or at least absolute exposure, but the recompense is vastly heightened operational capability and survivability.”
Anaplian, standing nearby, looked thoughtful.
Ferbin and Holse had been willing and attentive pupils, though Ferbin had been just a little niggled at something he would not specify and his sister could not determine until the ship suggested she equip him with one more weapon, or perhaps a bigger one, than his servant. She asked Ferbin to carry the smaller of the two hypervelocity kinetic rifles the ship just happened to have in its armoury (she had the larger one). After that all had been well.
She’d been impressed with the quality of the suits.
“Very advanced,” she commented, frowning.
Hippinse beamed. “Thank you.”
“It seems to me,” Anaplian said slowly, scanning the suits with her re-enhanced senses, “that a ship would either have to have these suits physically aboard, or, if it was going to make them itself from scratch, have access to the most sophisticated and – dare I say it – most severely restricted patterns known only to some very small and unusual bits of the Culture. You know; the bits generally called Special Circumstances.”
“Really?” Hippinse said brightly. “That’s interesting.”
They floated over the floor of the scendship. The water started to fall away about them as the ship descended, draining to tanks beneath the floor. Within a couple of minutes they were in a dry, if still damp-smelling, near semi-spherical space fifteen metres across. Ferbin and Holse pushed the mask and visor sections of their suits away.
“Well, sir,” Holse said cheerily, “we’re home.” He looked round the scendship’s interior. “After a fashion.”
Djan Seriy and Hippinse hadn’t bothered with masks. They were dressed, like the two Sarl men, in the same dark, close-fitting suits each of which, Djan Seriy had claimed in all seriousness, was several times more intelligent than the entire Oct computational matrix on Sursamen. As well as sporting all those odd lumps and bumps, the suits each carried small, streamlined chest and back pouches and both Hippinse and Djan Seriy’s suits held long straked bulges on their backs which turned into long, dark weapons it was hard even to identify as guns. Ferbin and Holse each had things half the size of a rifle called CREWs which fired light, and a disappointingly small handgun. Ferbin had been hoping for something rather more impressive; however, he’d been mollified by being given the hypervelocity rifle, which was satisfyingly chunky.
Their suits also had their own embedded weapon and defensive systems which were apparently far too complicated to leave to the whims of mere men. Ferbin found this somewhat disturbing but had been informed it was for his own good. That, too, had not been the most reassuring thing he had ever heard.
“In the unlikely event we do get involved in a serious firefight and the suits think you’re under real threat,” Djan Seriy had told the two Sarl men, “they’ll take over. High-end exchanges happen too fast for human reactions so the suits will do the aiming, firing and dodging for you.” She’d seen the expressions of dismay on their faces, and shrugged. “It’s like all war; months of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It’s just the moments are sometimes measured in milliseconds and the engagement’s often over before you’re aware it has even begun.”
Holse had looked at Ferbin and sighed. “Welcome to the future, sir.”
Djan Seriy’s familiar, the drone thing called Turminder Xuss, had been Displaced attached to one thigh of her suit; another lozenged bulge. It had floated away as soon as they’d been Displaced in and was still floating around above them now that the water was all gone, seemingly inspecting the dripping interior of the scendship. Holse was watching the little machine closely, following it round the ship, squinting up at it.
The drone lowered itself in front of the man. “Can I help you, Mr Holse?” it asked.
“I always meant to ask,” he said. “How do things like you float in the air like that?”
“Why, with ease,” the drone said, ascending away from him again. Holse shrugged and chewed on a little crile leaf he’d persuaded the Liveware Problem to make for him.
Djan Seriy sat cross-legged near the centre of the floor, eyes closed. Enclosed by the tight black suit, only her face exposed, she looked oddly childlike, though her shape was certainly womanly enough, as even Ferbin noticed.
“Is my sister asleep?” Ferbin asked Hippinse quietly.
The avatoid – a compact, powerful-looking figure now – smiled. “She’s just checking the scendship’s systems. I’ve already done that, but it does no harm to verify.”
“So, are we successfully on our way?” Ferbin asked. He noticed that the avatoid had rolled the head part of his suit right back to form a collar, freeing his whole head. He did likewise.
“Yes, successfully so far.”
“And are you still the ship, or do you function independently yet?”
“You can still talk direct to the ship through me until we transfer,” H
ippinse told him.
Djan Seriy had opened her eyes and was already looking at the avatoid. “They’re here, aren’t they?” she said.
Hippinse nodded thoughtfully. “The missing Oct ships,” he said. “Yes. Three just discovered all at once, lined up above the end of the open Tower nearest to me. Strong suspicion the rest will be here or on their way too.”
“But we keep going,” Djan Seriy said, frowning.
Hippinse nodded. “They’re here, that’s all. Nothing else has changed yet. I’m signalling now. I imagine the Morthanveld and the Nariscene will know something of the Oct dispositions fairly shortly.” He looked round at all of them. “We keep going.”
The transfer took place halfway down the first section of the Tower, seven hundred kilometres from the Surface. The scendship slowed and stopped. They were fully suited up again; the drone had returned to attach itself to Anaplian’s thigh. The air was pumped from the scendship’s interior, the door swung open silently, a last puff of atmosphere dissipated into the vacuum and they followed it down a broad corridor, their shadows advancing hugely in front of them. When the scendship’s door closed, all normal light was cut off and they were left with a ghostly image built up from the faint radiations given off by the chilly walls and surfaces around them. This was the point at which the ship no longer directly controlled Hippinse and the avatoid was newly as alone in his own head as any normal human was in theirs. Ferbin watched for him to stumble or for his expression to change, but saw nothing.
Two sets of thick double doors rolled open in sequence, taking them to a great semicircular aperture which opened on to a broad oval balcony forty metres or more across; a hard, steely light returned, picking out several small, sleek craft sitting on cradles on the floor of the platform.
There was no wall or railing. The view dropped away for another seven hundred kilometres, seemingly to dark nothing. Above, tiny bright stars hung untwinkling.
Level One was a Seedsail nursery. Seedsails were some of the galaxy’s most ancient biologicals. Depending which authority you listened to, they had been around for either about half a dozen aeons, or nearly ten. The debate over whether they had evolved naturally or had been created by an earlier civilisation was equally unsettled. Only arguably self-aware, they were some of the galaxy’s greatest true wanderers, migrating across the entire lens over the eons, centiaeons and deciaeons it took for them to tack and run and spinnaker their way from star to star powered by sunlight alone.