‘Deal with them?’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘I thought they had an entire war fleet heading there.’
‘Oh, they do,’ the avatar said from beach level. ‘Still, you have to try, don’t you?’ It stood again.
Genar-Hofoen looked at it, trying to see if it was being ironic or just disingenuous. No way of telling. ‘So when do we get into the thick of things?’ he asked, trying to skip a flat stone over the waves, without success.
‘Well,’ Amorphia said, ‘the thick of things probably starts about thirty light years out from the point of the Excession itself, these days.’ The avatar stretched, flexing its arm far back behind it. ‘We should be there this evening,’ it said. Its arm snapped forward. The stone whistled through the air and skipped elegantly over the tops of half a dozen waves before disappearing.
Genar-Hofoen turned and stared at the avatar. ‘This evening?’ he said.
‘Time is a little tight,’ the avatar said with a pained expression, again peering into the distance. ‘It would be for the best for all of us if you’d talk to Dajeil . . . soon.’ It smiled vacuously at him.
‘Well, how about right now?’ the man said, spreading his hands.
‘I’ll see,’ the creature said, and turned abruptly on its heel. Suddenly there was a reflecting ovoid, like a giant silver egg stood on its end, where the avatar had been. The Displacer field vanished almost before the man had time to register its existence, seeming to shrink and collapse almost instantly to a point and then disappearing altogether. The process produced a gentle pop.
XI
The Killing Time plunged intact through the third wave of ancient Culture ships; they rushed on, towards the Excession. It fended off a few more of the warheads and missiles which had been directed at it, turning a couple of the latter back upon their own ships for a few moments before they were detected and destructed. The hulk of the Attitude Adjuster fell astern behind the departing fleet, coasting and twisting and tumbling in hyperspace, still heading away from and outstripping the Killing Time as it braked and started to turn.
There was only a vestigial fourth wave; fourteen ships (they were targeting it now). Had it known there were so few in the final echelon, the Killing Time would have attacked the second wave of ships. Oh well; luck counted too. It watched the Attitude Adjuster a moment longer to ensure it really was tearing itself apart. It was.
It turned its attention to the remaining fourteen craft. On its suicide trajectory it could take them all on and stand a decent chance of destroying perhaps four of them before its luck ran out; maybe a half-dozen if it was really lucky. Or it could push away and complete its brake-turn-accelerate manoeuvre to make a second pass at the main fleet. Even if they’d be waiting for it this time, it could reckon on accounting for a good few of them. Again, in the four-to-eight range.
Or it could do this.
It pulled itself round the edge of the fourteen ships in the rump of the fleet as they reconfigured their formation to meet it. Bringing up the rear they had had more warning of its attack and so had had time to adopt a suitable pattern. The Killing Time ignored the obvious challenge and temptation of flying straight into their midst and flew past and round, targeting only the outer five craft nearest it.
They gave a decent account of themselves but it prevailed, dispatching two of them with engine field implosures. This was, it had always thought, a clean, decent and honourable way to die. The pair of wreckage-shells coasted onwards; the rest of the ships sped on unharmed, chasing the main fleet. Not one of the ships turned back to take it on.
The Killing Time continued to brake, oriented towards the fast vanishing war fleet and the region of the Excession. Its engine fields were gouging great livid tracks in the energy grid as it back-pedalled furiously.
It encountered the ROU which had dropped aft with engine damage, falling back towards it as the Killing Time slowed and the other craft coasted onward and struggled to repair its motive power units. The Killing Time attempted to communicate with the ROU, was fired upon, and tried to take the craft over with its effector. The ROU’s own independent automatics detected the ship’s Mind starting to give in. They tripped a destruct sequence and another hypersphere of radiation blossomed beneath the skein.
Shit, thought the Killing Time. It scanned the hyper volumes around itself.
Nothing threatening.
Well, damn me, it thought, as it slowed. I’m still alive.
This was the one outcome it hadn’t anticipated.
It ran a systems check. Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines. It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours. Not too bad. Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop. Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose. Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs. Self-repair mechanisms champing at the bit. It looked around, concentrating on the view astern. No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers. Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds.
Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds. Hmm; it had felt longer. But then that was only natural.
Should it make a second pass? It pondered this while it signalled the Shoot Them Later and a couple of other distant Minds with details of the engagement. Then it copied to the Steely Glint, without leaving the comm channels open. It needed time to think.
It felt excited, energised, re-purified by the engagement it had undergone. Its appetite was whetted. A further pass would be no-holds-barred multi-destructional, not a series of semi-defensive side-actions while it concentrated on searching for one individual ship. This next time it could really get nasty . . .
On the other hand, it had inflicted a more than reasonable amount of damage on the fleet for no ship-loss whatsoever and a barely significant degradation to its operational capacity. It had ignored the advice of a superior Mind in wartime but it had triumphed. It had gambled and won and there was a kind of unexpected elegance in cashing in its gains now. To pursue the matter further might look like obsessive self-regard, like ultra-militarism, especially now that the original object of its ire had been bested. Perhaps it would be better to accept whatever praise and/or calumny might now be heaped upon it and re-submit itself to the jurisdiction of the Culture’s war-command structure (though it was starting to have its doubts about the part of the Steely Glint in all this).
It drew level with the debris clouds left by the two ships destroyed in the final wave of the war fleet. It let them drop astern.
The wreck of the Attitude Adjuster came tumbling slowly towards it in hyperspace; coasting, slowing, drifting gradually back up towards the skein. Externally, it looked unharmed.
The Killing Time slowed to keep pace with the slackly somersaulting craft. It probed the Attitude Adjuster carefully with its senses, its effector targeted on the other ship’s Mind, ready on the instant. In human terms, this was like taking somebody’s pulse while keeping a gun stuck in their mouth.
The Attitude Adjuster’s weakened engine fields were still tearing at what was left of its Mind, teasing and plucking and forcing it apart strand by strand, demolishing and shredding and cauterising the last remaining quanta of its personality and senses. It looked like there had been a dozen or so Affronters aboard. They were dead too, killed by stray radiations from the Mind’s self-destruction.
The Killing Time felt a modicum of guilt, even self-disgust at what it had forced upon what was still, in a sense, a sister ship, even while another part of its selfhood relished and gloried in the dying craft’s agonies.
The sentimental side won out; it blitzed the stricken vessel with a profusion of plasma fire from its two operational chambers, and kept station with the expanding shell of radiation for a few mom
ents, paying what little respect the traitor ship might be due.
The Killing Time came to its decision. It signalled the Steely Glint, informing the GCV that it would accept suggestions from now on. It would harry the war fleet if that was required, or it would join in whatever stand was to be made near Esperi if that was thought the best use that could be made of it.
It would probably still die, but it would meet its fate as a loyal and obedient component of the Culture, not some sort of rogue ship pursuing a private feud.
Then it slowly ramped its engines back to normal full power, pulling itself forward to a vanishingly brief moment of rest before powering onwards, accelerating hard and setting a hyperbolic course skirting around the fleet’s more direct route, heading for the location of the Excession.
It should still get there before the war fleet.
XII
‘What?’
‘I said I’ve made up my mind. I won’t talk to him. I won’t see him. I don’t even want to be on the same ship with him. Take me away. I want to leave. Now.’ Dajeil Gelian gathered her skirts about her and sat heavily on the seat in the circular room under the translucent dome.
‘Dajeil!’ exclaimed Amorphia, going down on its knees in front of her, eyes wide and shining. It made to take her hands in its but she pulled them away. ‘Please! See him! He has agreed to see you!’
‘Oh, has he?’ she said scornfully. ‘How magnanimous of him!’
The avatar sat back on its haunches. It looked at the woman, then it sighed and said, ‘Dajeil, I’ve never asked anything of you before. Please just see him. For me.’
‘I never asked anything of you,’ the woman said. ‘What you gave me you gave unasked. Some of it was unwanted,’ she said coldly. ‘All those animals, those other lives, those eternal births and childhoods; mocking me.’
‘Mocking you!’ the avatar exclaimed. ‘But--!’
Dajeil sat forward, shaking her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, that was wrong of me.’ Now she reached out and took Amorphia’s hands. ‘I’m truly grateful for all you’ve done for me, ship. I am. But I don’t want to see him. Please take me away.’
The avatar tried to argue on for a while longer, but to no avail.
The ship considered a lot of things. It considered asking the Grey Area - still in its forward Mainbay - to dip inside the woman’s brain the way it had insinuated its way into Genar-Hofoen’s to discover the truth of the events on Telaturier (and to implant the dream of the long-dead captain Zreyn Enhoff Tramow, not that that had proved either required or particularly well done). It considered requesting that the GCU used its effectors to make her want to have the child. It considered Displacing chemicals or biotechs which would force Dajeil’s body to have the child. It considered using one of its own effectors to do the same thing. It considered just Displacing her into Genar-Hofoen’s proximity, or he into hers.
Then it came up with a new plan.
‘Very well,’ the avatar said eventually. It stood. ‘He will stay. You may go. Do you wish to take the bird Gravious with you?’
The woman looked perplexed, even confused. ‘I--’ she began. ‘Yes, yes, why not? It can’t do any harm, can it?’
‘No,’ the avatar said. ‘No, it cannot.’ It bowed its head to her. ‘Goodbye.’
Dajeil opened her mouth to speak, but the avatar was Displaced away at the same instant; the sound it left behind was like a pair of hands giving a single, gentle clap. Dajeil closed her mouth, then put both her hands over her eyes and lowered her head, doubling up as well as she was able to. Next moment there was another, distant noise and from down the winding stairs she heard a thin, hoarse voice cry out.
‘Waa! Shit! Grief, where--?’ Then there was a confused flutter of wings.
Dajeil closed her eyes. Then there was another, closer-sounding pop. Her eyes flicked open.
A young woman, slim and black haired, was sitting looking surprised in the middle of the floor, dressed in black pyjamas and reading a small, old-fashioned book. Between her bottom and the room’s carpet there was a neat circle of pink material, still in the process of collapsing, air expelling flutteringly round the edges. Around her floated a small snow-storm of white particles, settling with a feather-like slowness. She jerked once, as though she had been leaning back on something which had just been removed.
‘What . . . the . . . fuck . . . ?’ she said softly. She looked slowly around, from side to side.
Her gaze settled on Dajeil. She frowned for a moment, then some kind of understanding imposed itself. She quickly completed her review of her surroundings, then pointed at the other woman. ‘Dajeil,’ she said. ‘Dajeil Gelian, right?’
Dajeil nodded.
XIII
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.885.3553]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
It was the Attitude Adjuster. It is dead now (signal + DiaGlyphs enclosed).
∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.885.3740]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
Not a pleasant way to go. Your friend the Killing Time deserves congratulations, and probably merits therapy. However, as I’m sure it would point out, it is a warship. This implicates the Steely Glint; the Attitude Adjuster was its daughter and was demilitarised (supposedly) by it seventy years ago. I trust your friend will treat the SG’s subsequent operational suggestions with a degree of caution.
∞
Indeed. But then as it seems quite enthusiastically intent upon achieving a glorious death at the earliest possible opportunity anyway, it is hard to see what more the Steely Glint can do to place it in further jeopardy. Whatever; we must leave that machine to its own fate. My concern now is that the evidence for the conspiracy is starting to look pretty damning, even if it is still circumstantial. I suggest we go public.
∞
Implicating the Steely Glint while it is in charge of the military developments around the Excession will only make us look like the guilty parties. We must ask ourselves what we have to gain. The war fleet from Pittance is under way and must arrive there in any event; exposing the conspiracy will do nothing to challenge it. The best we might hope for would be the worst for the chances of resisting the Affront’s purpose; that is, the removal from influence and general disgrace of the Steely Glint and its co-conspirators. It pains me to say it, but I still think we must let this sub-sequence of events run its course before we can consider broadcasting our suspicions. Hold for now, and gather what more weight of evidence we might, the better to tip the scales with our accusations when the time does come.
∞
Frankly, I was hoping you would say that. My own instinct (if I may slur my intellect with such an archaic term) was to keep quiet but I suspected I was merely being timorous and so wanted to make the suggestion we publicise with a positive skew, so that you could not be infected by any undue reticence on my part.
What of the volume around the E itself? Heard any more?
∞
Imbecile.
Last I heard regarding the Esperi thing itself there was no more news of the ZE’s Stargazers and the FATC was still recovering from the effects of its unexpected trip. Everybody else seems to have taken the hint and is hanging back. Well, except for the Affronter’s borrowed fleet and our old chum of course.
How are things in the realm of our three-legged friends?
Speaking personally, Screce Orbital is as pleasant as could be, and as devoutly un-militarised as one might wish a Peace faction world to be.
∞
No more news then.
Glad to hear Screce is so fair.
The Homomda are most accommodating and gracious hosts. I think I may have lost a couple of my Idiran crew members to the local pleasure-dens for the duration, but otherwise I have no complaints.
Stay safe. And peace, like they say, be with you.
XIV
The briefest
of introductions completed, they stood facing each other in the circular room under the translucent dome. ‘So,’ Dajeil said, inspecting the other woman from toe to crown. ‘You’re his latest, are you?’
Ulver frowned. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’s mine.’
Dajeil looked as though she wasn’t sure how to answer that.
‘Ms Seich, welcome aboard the Jaundiced Outlook,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘I’m sorry this is all so precipitate, but I have just received instructions from the Sleeper Service that you are to be evacuated aboard myself forthwith.’
‘Thank you,’ Ulver said, gazing round the room. ‘What about Churt Lyne?’
‘It has expressed a desire to stay aboard the Grey Area,’ the Jaundiced Outlook told her.
‘I thought those two were getting on suspiciously well,’ the girl muttered.
Dajeil looked like she wanted to ask something, but in the end said nothing. After a moment she stood up, putting her hand to the small of her back as she did so with a tiny grimace. She indicated the table to one side. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I was about to have dinner. Will you join me?’
‘I was about to have breakfast,’ Ulver said, and nodded. ‘Certainly.’
They sat at the table. Ulver held up the small book she’d been reading and which she still held in one hand. ‘I don’t want to be rude, but would you mind if I just finish this chapter?’ she asked.
Dajeil smiled. ‘Not at all,’ she murmured. Ulver gave a winning smile and stuck her nose back in the slim volume.
‘Excuse me,’ said a small hoarse voice from the doorway. ‘What the fuck’s going on then?’
Dajeil looked over at the black bird Gravious. ‘We’re being evacuated,’ she told it. ‘You can live in the cellar. Now go away.’
‘Well thanks for your hospitality,’ the bird spluttered, turning and hopping down the winding stairs.
‘That yours?’ Ulver asked Dajeil.