~That is entirely compatible with our own intentions. We’ll let you know where any disloc was targeted, whether successful or not.
~Thank you.
There were people ahead. The spaces around the airship Equatorial 353 had been becoming more populated over the days he had been keeping pace with it. Ground vehicles rumbled slowly past ahead on a broad roadway; they were gaudy, booming with music. Across the gulf of the tunnel he could see a train, trundling, keeping pace, searchlights on it pointing back at the airship, flicking slowly off and on again as they passed behind supporting struts. A smaller airship, like a tiny white cloud made solid, appeared from a side tunnel and drew slowly ahead of the Equatorial 353, scattering clouds of sparkling, coloured dust which a rear-facing laser lit up in gyrating abstract patterns.
The skin of the Equatorial 353 exhibited a series of large moving images, as though projected onto its smooth curvature. There appeared to be seven or eight of these distorted displays covering the airship’s surface at any one time. Some of the photographs were stills, most moved, and they sometimes fused together to provide larger images. Some appeared only to make any sort of sense considering the airship as a whole, in other words imagining the form of the display on the other side of the craft. The most common themes appeared to be records of earlier art installations aboard the craft over the last few years, nature in the form of plants and animals, historical and presently existing forms of transport, and pornography.
~We carry four sixty-four-unit platoons of marine combat arbites, the 8*Churkun’s captain told him. ~They are at your disposal, Colonel. Shall I have my tactical engagements officer ready some or all of them for deployment?
~Please do.
He had to push through a small parade of people – dressed in motley, many dancing as they moved, some singing, some chanting – to get to the edge of the space where the balcony gave out onto the open tunnel of curving ribs and spiralling pipes. There he found the Equatorial 353, filling the monstrous tube like a comically slow shell in the biggest, least efficient gun ever made.
Then Colonel Agansu had a sudden, literal flash of memory, and remembered the magnified shadow of his own suited form being thrown out across the elevator shaft within the Incast facility on Bokri as the combat arbite Uhtryn, behind him, was dissolved in a pointillist spray of tiny, fierce anti-matter explosions, blasting a blindingly intense sleet of radiation past him, through him.
~How many of the combat arbites do you need, Colonel?
A chorus of beeps, trills, clangs and musical phrases – followed by some cheers and the start of a fireworks display from the top of the giant airship – announced that it was midnight on Zyse, and the Instigation was only two days away.
~All of them.
Twenty-one
(S -2)
“Because you’re liable to get killed.”
“That doesn’t seem to be stopping you.”
“Of course not. I’m an avatar. ‘Killed’ doesn’t even mean the same thing for me. You’re a bio; I’ve seen how you guys die and it’s messy.”
“I meant as the ship. The Mistake Not … You’re liable to get killed. Aren’t you?”
“A slightly more weighty consideration, I accept, but even then; I’ve already transmitted my mind-state to my home GSV and switched to full combat readiness, so I’m kind of ready for death. And anyway, not dead yet.”
“This is my fight, though, isn’t it? More than yours?”
Berdle sighed. “This is about the Gzilt, but the Culture appears to be all mixed up in it, through QiRia, so it’s our problem to sort out.”
“It’s still basically about us. You can’t do everything. You’re not our … parent.”
“You’re not even backed-up, Cossont. If you die, you die.”
“Can’t you back me up?”
“No.”
She had a sudden thought. “Did you back-up QiRia, his mind-state from the grey cube?”
“Yes. Also transmitted, with a note it’s private and to be wiped if the original survives.”
She frowned. “Why can’t you back me up?”
“You’ve no neural lace; even starting right now it would take far too long. We’re already out of time.” Berdle waved his hands, as though exasperated. “Why are you so keen to risk your life anyway? You’re a military reservist civilian facing Subliming in a couple of days; why the rush to die? And, I’m telling you: having you present will make my job harder, not easier. You won’t be contributing, you’ll be jeopardising.”
“First of all, on that last point, I don’t believe you. I think you’re just trying to protect me, being all male-gallant. I’m flattered but there’s no need.”
“I’m a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I’m not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don’t give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.”
“Anyway. You can’t keep me prisoner on the ship. You’re Culture and I’m a free agent. I demand to be set down in the Girdlecity.”
“They are looking for you, remember? They think you trashed Fzan-Juym with your bare hands or whatever the fuck.”
“So you’d better look after me then.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you! I don’t need that extra workload! And if you insist on quitting the ship I’ll put you down wherever I damn well please, not where you specifically demand, so there you are; you can’t win.”
Cossont, already dressed in the same figure-hugging under-suit she’d worn at Bokri, stood looking levelly at the avatar across the module’s lounge. “If you don’t give a fuck about flattering me,” she said slowly, “and if you can just switch off any sentiments you have concerning me, you can do that down there, on the planet, in the Girdlecity, in the airship. So you don’t have to worry about me, and I will help, not hinder.”
Berdle stared at her. Then he smiled, and relaxed. His tone of voice changed. “I don’t know about you, Vyr,” he said, conversationally, “but I’m sort of posturing here.” He shrugged. “If you insist on coming, you can, though it’s your funeral and I won’t risk any part of what I’m supposed to be doing to keep you safe at all, not if it’s a trade-off; just nothing.” He shook his head. “I thought maybe you were just putting on a sort of good-enough show. You know; so you could feel okay about yourself even though you didn’t want to go, or expect to. So, one last chance, in all seriousness: please don’t come.”
“One last time: I want to. Take me with you.”
Berdle sighed. “Okay. You can’t say you weren’t warned. Put that on.” He nodded behind Cossont. She turned round to see a bizarre vision of a man in close-fitting armour – half mirror, half soot-black, headless – marching out of an alcove, growing an extra pair of arms and peeling itself open as it approached her.
“What’s that?”
“A better suit. I’m downloading a copy of QiRia’s mind-state to it now, so we can access the old geezer’s memories direct if we get hold of his eyes without the ship around. Go on; just step in as you are. We’ve ninety seconds before we snap aboard, so don’t take too long.”
“I thought we had ten minutes!”
“Not any more; the ship’s powering back out again, hoping to lure the battleship away from Xown.”
“Shit.” Cossont stepped over to the suit and then into it; it flowed closed around her, leaving the helmet component down. “Think that’ll work?” she asked.
“Doubt it,” the avatar admitted. “Assuming the battleship’s been talking to the battle-cruiser, it’ll know I’ve already been moving faster than it can, but it might factor in too much main traction stress degradation after all the dashing about I’ve been doing lately and think it has a chance. Assuming its engines aren’t slightly fucked too, of course. Worth a try.”
Pyan, sprawled loosely on a couch all this time, came flapping over and stood on a seat-ba
ck, facing her like a small, stiff flag. “Well done you!” it said. “I think you’re being terribly brave but I’m sure it’ll all work out splendidly! And just remember: I’ve always loved you!”
Cossont was about to say something like, Okay, now I’m worried … when her eyes narrowed and she looked at Berdle. “Did you put it up to that?”
Berdle shrugged. “Also worth a try.”
“But I do!” Pyan exclaimed, twisting to face Berdle, then back to Cossont. “But I do!”
“Yeah,” Cossont said.
“Twenty seconds.”
The ship sent a tiny update of its mind-state to its home GSV, mostly just so there would be a record of Cossont insisting on going with its avatar and other on-planet forces into the Girdlecity.
The ship was a constrained shell of force hurtling across the system now, re-accelerating hard, packaged within its wrapping of concentric fields like something cocooned, engines howling in frequencies no biological living thing would ever sense, a kilometre-long projectile submerged beneath the skein of real space, components of three outer fields lasing in hyperspace to direct the signal to its distant ship-mother, then clicking off again after a nanosecond, while other configurations of fields slid and flicked, stacked and snicked, readying for a series of multiple high-speed, high-accuracy Displaces to a complex-topography target deep in a gravity well; probably opposed.
This was, the ship knew, going to be challenging.
Most serious Culture ships, and all with any pretensions to being warships, possessed burst units: specialised engine components like motive power capacitors capable of providing sudden, brief flares of energy and movement. The Mistake Not …’s were more powerful and capable than most craft its size, which was kind of a game-giving-away liability if you actually had to use them in the presence of somebody able to spot such shenanigans, but – on the other hand – this was exactly the situation where they might help save the day, so …
The ship was already heading dangerously close to Xown’s gravity well, having to adjust its course in hyperspace to avoid crashing into the downward curve of skein. It jinked closer still at the last moment, using up all its burst unit energies both to swerve and slow, then focused in on the relatively tiny part of itself that held the module where its avatar and the humanoid were, snapping the two human-shaped forms and the woman’s pet away and then the module separately. It loosed the module first, targeting the Displace at a spot just outside the Girdlecity twelve hundred metres above local ground level and ten kilometres back from the current location of the airship Equatorial 353.
It was, given the relative velocities involved, one of the most accurate and precisely located Flying Displaces it had ever heard of, snapping the module into the air within an elegantly aligned pocket of vacuum that collapsed at just the right rate to allow the craft to continue on its way – under its own power, now – so smoothly that the ship doubted somebody standing inside the module – had there been anybody – would even have wobbled as the transition was completed.
That the whole craft was almost immediately snatched away again by an almost equally heavy-duty disloc facility – with a most inelegant bang like a sonic boom, caused by the caisson-field collapsing uncontrolled – was, happily, quite beside the point. While the Gzilt ship was busy doing this the Mistake Not … was merrily zapping all its real payloads – its avatar and Cossont included – into the places it had wanted to in the first place.
That done, within the same millisecond, it was off again, spiralling down under even fiercer acceleration as though intent on diving right under the planet’s depression in the skein and aiming for the energy grid far beneath. It steadied, zoomed, sped off, tracked but not targeted by the Gzilt war-craft, which remained stationary, hugging close to the planet.
Pyan was dumped into the ship’s last remaining human habitable space, a six-person shuttle.
~Where’s this? the creature said.
~New home, the ship sent.
~It’s small and boring!
~So are you.
~What! How dare you!
~Would you rather be on the planet?
~Which is safer?
The Mistake Not … watched the Gzilt ship staying – annoyingly, frustratingly – exactly where it was, singularly failing to pursue it, even though the Mistake Not … had pretended to be less quick than it really was, just to make it think it had a chance.
~Probably the planet, now, it admitted.
~The planet, then … Well? Hurry up!
~Too far. Next pass/approach.
~You’re going back?
~Of course I’m going back.
~I protest at this behaviour towards me! Why wasn’t I—?
~Best you go to sleep now, the ship said.
Pyan flopped inert to the floor of the little shuttle and was tidied, neatly folded, into a slim locker by a small ship drone, which then checked that everything else in the tiny craft was stowed and strapped in case there was any wild manoeuvring. Then it, too, stowed itself securely in another locker.
xGSV Empiricist
oLOU Caconym
oGSV Contents May Differ
oGCU Displacement Activity
oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
oUe Mistake Not …
oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
oMSV Pressure Drop
oLSV You Call This Clean?
Open question, specifically to the Mistake Not …: Are you sure you are doing the right thing? It is plausible that the Gzilt craft is an 8*; possibly the ship responsible for what happened at Ablate. It is certainly powerful and may be unconstrained by conscience.
∞
xUe Mistake Not …
No, not sure at all. But committed, so let’s see what happens.
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
I am equally worried re the Beats Working. It just transmitted its mind-state.
∞
xLOU Caconym
Suggestion? Tell it whatever it’s thinking of doing, don’t.
∞
xGSV Contents May Differ
I have been trying to contact it after the mind-state signal arrived. Nothing. To pass the time while I wait for a reply, I have been trawling the banks for evidence that this is anything other than a bad sign, coming from a Contact Unit. Guess what?
∞
xGSV Empiricist
The Beats Working is with the largest part of the Ronte fleet, heading for Vatrelles. The Gzilt saw them off but only as far as the system outskirts, then returned, with no known other hostility. That leaves the Liseiden. We have the Thug-class Value Judgement with the main squadron, do we not?
∞
xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
Yes, though the main – the largest – squadron is not the flagship flotilla. They re-dispositioned, bringing various of their separate squadrons together into a more martial meta-configuration following the original decision on preferred Scavenger status going against them. One group of three ships joined the three of the flagship squadron, but three separate groups of three also amalgamated, and as that then constituted the greatest force they had, that is the one the Value Judgement was sent to shadow. We have nothing with the flagship squadron commanded by Ny-Xandabo Tyun, and – as that was the force already also converging on Zyse – that is the force most likely to offer any threat to the Ronte attempting to make Vatrelles.
∞
xLOU Caconym
oMSV Pressure Drop
Shit. I bet the Gzilt told the Liseiden where it looked like the Ronte were heading. And if the fucking Empiricist had let us use those Delinquents we wouldn’t be looking at this debacle.
∞
xGSV Empiricist
I suggest I send my fastest ship to rendezvous with the Beats Working and the Ronte, while signalling the Liseiden to desist from any hostile action they may be contemplating. I am sure we have such a preponderance of fo
rces locally we can prevent any mooted unpleasantness.
∞
xLOU Caconym
oMSV Pressure Drop
Here we go. Spoken like a ship with no idea of how things actually work. It’s not about what forces you’ve got, it’s about what forces you’ve got where. You’d think even a civilian would understand that.
∞
You may be being too harsh. Agreed, nothing it has can get to the likely volume of combat in time, but it has a point regarding a warning possibly being enough.
∞
That would apply if we had nothing military here at all; we are who we are and we can call any shots at any time. That still might not stop the Liseiden from making a point to the Ronte, just to show who’s boss in future.
∞
Let’s hope you’re wrong.
∞
Yes, why don’t we? That ought to pass the time. Anyway, let’s hear what the Empiricist thinks we ought to do.
∞
xGSV Empiricist
I am despatching the ROU Learned Response, the LOU New Toy and the GOU Questionable Ethics in string formation, ROU leading, to maximum reach and make rendezvous, the LOU to 50 per cent and the GOU 12.5 per cent distance, adjusting to hold at those increments.
∞
xLOU Caconym
oMSV Pressure Drop
Oh fuck, now it’s making pretty patterns.
The/My squadron of six Liseiden ships, led by myself on the pride of our fleet, the Collective Purposes vessel and flagship Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya, fell (/ruthlessly*) upon the pitiful/limping/struggling/fearsome* Ronte fleet with resolute professionalism/exemplary courage/heavy hearts**, our jaws/mouthparts forced [n.b.: awkward/over-species-specific in translation; suggest restructure using “given no choice” or equivalent] by the [?]/ responded to the Ronte fleet’s outrageous* provocations/unprovoked aggression**/aggressive intransigence with the only language they understand.**
*[n.b.: word choice? potentially hoary]
**[n.b.: phrase choice? potentially clichéd]