Consider Phlebas

8. The Ends of Invention

Maybe she’s a clone, Horza thought. Maybe it’s coincidence. He sat on the floor of Kraiklyn’s cabin — his cabin now — staring at the locker doors in the far wall; aware that he needed to do something, but not sure what it ought to be. His brain wasn’t able to take all the knocks and shocks it had had. He needed to sit and think for a moment.

He tried telling himself he was mistaken, that it wasn’t really her, that he was tired and confused and getting paranoid, seeing things. But he knew it was Balveda, though sufficiently altered so that probably only a close friend or a Changer could possibly recognise her, but definitely her, alive and well and probably armed to the teeth…

He got up, mechanically, still staring straight ahead. He took off the wet clothes and went out of the cabin, down to the wash area, where he left the clothes to dry and cleaned himself up. Back in the cabin he found a robe and put it on. He started inspecting the small, packed space and finally came across a small voice recorder. He flicked it back and listened.

“…ahhh… including, ahh, Yalson,” Kraiklyn’s voice said from the small speaker in the machine, “who I guess was, umm… in her relationship, with ahh… Horza Gobuchul. She’s… been pretty abrupt, and I don’t think I’ve had the support from her… which she… which I ought to get… I’ll have a word with her if it goes on, but, ahhh… for now, during the repairs and such… there doesn’t seem much point… I’m not putting off… ah… I just think we’ll see how she shapes up after the Orbital’s blown and we’re on our way.

“Ahh… now this new woman… Gravant… she’s all right. I get the impression she might… ah, need… need a bit of ordering around… seems to need discipline… I don’t think she’ll have, ah, too much conflict with anybody. Yalson, especially, I was worried about, but I don’t think… ah, I think it’ll be fine. But you can never tell with women, ah… of course, so… but I like her… I think she’s got class and maybe… I don’t know… maybe she could make a good number two if she shapes up.

“I really need more people… Umm… things haven’t gone all that well recently, but I think I’ve been… they’ve let me down. Jandraligeli, obviously… and I don’t know; I’ll see if maybe I can do something about him because… he’s really sort of just been… ahh… he’s betrayed me; that’s the way… that’s what it is I think; anybody would agree. So maybe I’ll have a word with Ghalssel, at the game, assuming he arrives… I don’t think the guy’s really up to standard and I’ll tell Ghalssel as much because we’re both… in the same, ah… business, and I’m… I know that he’ll have heard… well, he’ll listen to what I have to say, because he knows about the responsibilities of leadership and… just, ah… the way I do.

“Anyway… I’ll do some more recruiting after the game, and after the GSV takes off there’ll be some time… we have enough time still to run in this bay and I’ll put the word out. There’s bound to be… a lot of people ready to sign on… Ah, oh yeah; mustn’t forget about the shuttle tomorrow. I’m sure I can get the price down. Ah, I could just win at the game, of course—” The small voice from the speaker laughed: a tinny echo. “…and just be incredibly rich and—” The laughter came again, distorted. “…and not give a fuck about any of this crap any more… shit, just… ha… give the CAT away… well, sell it… and retire… But we’ll see…”

The voice faded. Horza switched off the machine in the silence. He put it down where he had found it, and rubbed the ring on the small finger of his right hand. Then he took off the robe and put his — his — suit on. It started talking to him; he told it to turn its voice off.

He looked at himself in the reverser field on the locker doors, drew himself up, made sure the plasma pistol strapped to his thigh was switched on, pushed the pains and tiredness to the back of his mind, then went out of the cabin and up the corridor to the mess.

Yalson and the woman who was Balveda were sitting talking in the long room, at the far end of the table under the screen, which had been turned off. They looked up when he came in. He went over and sat a couple of seats down from Yalson, who looked at his suit and said, “We going somewhere?”

“Maybe,” Horza said, looking briefly at her, then switching his gaze to the Balveda woman, smiling and saying, “I’m sorry, Ms Gravant; but I’m afraid, having reconsidered your application, I have to turn you down. I’m sorry, but there’s no place for you on the CAT. I hope you understand.” He clasped his hands on the table and grinned again. Balveda — the more he looked the surer he was that it was her — looked crestfallen. Her mouth opened slightly; she looked from Horza to Yalson then back again. Yalson was frowning deeply.

“But—” Balveda began.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Yalson said angrily. “You can’t just—”

“You see,” Horza smiled, “I’ve decided that we need to cut down on the numbers on board, and—”

“What?” Yalson exploded, slapping the table with the palm of her hand. “That’s six of us left! What the hell are six of us meant to do…?” Her voice trailed off, then came back lower and slower, her head twisting to one side, her eyes narrowing as she looked at him. “…Or have we just struck lucky in… oh, a game of chance perhaps, and don’t want to cut in more directions than absolutely necessary?”

Horza looked briefly at Yalson again, smiled and said, “No, but you see I’ve just re-hired one of our ex-members, and that does alter the plans a bit… The place I had intended to slot Ms Gravant into in the ship’s company is now filled.”

“You got Jandraligeli to come back, after what you called him?” laughed Yalson, stretching back in her seat.

Horza shook his head.

“No, my dear,” he said. “As I would have been able to tell you if you hadn’t kept interrupting, I just met our friend Mr Gobuchul in Evanauth, and he’s keen to rejoin.”

“Horza?” Yalson seemed to shake a little, her voice on an edge of tension, and he could see her trying to control herself. Oh gods, a small voice inside him said, why does this hurt so much? Yalson said, “Is he alive? Are you sure it was him? Kraiklyn, are you?”

Horza switched his gaze rapidly from one woman to the other. Yalson was leaning forward over the table, her eyes glittering in the mess-room light, her fists clenched. Her lean body seemed tensed, the golden down on her dark skin shining. Balveda looked uncertain and confused. Horza saw her start to bite her lip, then stop.

“I wouldn’t kid you about it, Yalson,” Horza assured her. “Horza is alive and well, and not very far away.” Horza looked at the repeater screen on his suit cuff, where the time showed. “As a matter of fact, I’m meeting him at one of the port reception spheres in… well, just before the GSV takes off. He said he had one or two things to work out in the city first. He said to say… ahhh… he hoped you were still betting on him…” He shrugged. “Something like that.”

“You’re not kidding!” Yalson said, her face creasing with a smile. She shook her head, put a hand through her hair, slapped the table softly a couple of times. “Oh…” she said, then sat back again in her seat. She looked from the woman to the man and shrugged, silent.

“So you see, Gravant, you just aren’t needed right now,” Horza told Balveda. The Culture agent opened her mouth, but it was Yalson who spoke first, coughing quickly and then saying.

“Oh, let her stay, Kraiklyn. What difference does it make?”

“The difference, Yalson,” Horza said carefully, thinking hard about Kraiklyn, “is that I am captain of this ship.”

Yalson seemed about to say something, but instead she turned to Balveda and spread her hands. She sat back, one hand picking at the edge of the table, her eyes lowered. She was trying not to smile too much.

“Well, Captain,” Balveda said, rising from her seat, “you do know best. I’ll get my gear.” She walked quickly from the mess. Her footsteps merged with others, and Horza and Yalson both heard some muffled words. In a moment, Dorolow, Wubslin and Aviger, gaily dressed and looking flushed and happy, piled into the mess, the older man with his arm around the small, plump woman.

“Our captain!” Aviger shouted. Dorolow held one of his hands at her shoulder. She smiled. Wubslin waved dreamily; the stocky engineer looked drunk. “Been at the wars, I see,” Aviger went on, staring at Horza’s face, which still showed signs of being in a fight, despite his internal attempts to minimise the damage.

“What has Gravant done, Kraiklyn?” Dorolow squeaked. She seemed merry, too, and her voice was even higher than he remembered it.

“Nothing,” Horza said, smiling at the three mercenaries. “But we’re getting Horza Gobuchul back from the dead, so I decided we didn’t need her.”

“Horza?” Wubslin said, his large mouth opening wide in an almost exaggerated expression of surprise. Dorolow looked past Horza at Yalson, the look on her face saying, “Is this true?” through her grin. Yalson shrugged and looked happily, hopefully, still slightly suspiciously, at the man she thought was Kraiklyn.

“He’ll be coming aboard shortly before the Ends leaves,” Horza said. “He had some sort of business in the city. Maybe something shady.” Horza smiled in the condescending way Kraiklyn sometimes had. “Who knows?”

“There,” Wubslin said, looking unsteadily at Aviger over Dorolow’s stooped frame. “Maybe that guy was looking for Horza. Maybe we should warn him.”

“What guy? Where?” Horza asked.

“He’s seeing things,” Aviger said, waving one hand. “Too much liverwine.”

“Rubbish!” Wubslin said loudly, looking from Aviger to Horza, and nodding. “And a drone.” He held both hands out in front of his face, palms together, then separated them by about a quarter-metre. “Little bugger. No bigger’n that.”

“Where?” Horza shook his head. “Why do you think somebody might be after Horza?”

“Out there, under the traveltube,” Aviger said, while Wubslin was saying:

“Way he came out of that capsule, like he expected to be in a fight any second, and… aww, I can just tell… that guy was… police… or something…”

“What about Mipp?” asked Dorolow. Horza was silent for a second, frowning at nothing and nobody in particular. “Did Horza mention Mipp?” Dorolow asked him.

“Mipp?” he said, looking at Dorolow. “No.” He shook his head. “No, Mipp didn’t make it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorolow said.

“Look,” Horza said, staring at Aviger and Wubslin, “you think there’s somebody out there looking for one of us?”

“A man,” Wubslin nodded slowly, “and a little, tiny, really mean-looking drone.”

With a chill, Horza recalled the insect which had settled momentarily on his wrist in the smallbay outside, just before he had boarded the CAT. The Culture, he knew, had machines — artificial bugs — that size.

“Hmm,” Horza said, pursing his lips. He nodded to himself, then looked at Yalson. “Go and make sure Gravant gets off the ship, quickly, all right?” He stood up and got out of the way while Yalson moved. She went down the corridor to the cabins. Horza looked at Wubslin and motioned the engineer forward towards the bridge, with his eyes. “You two stay here,” he said quietly to Aviger and Dorolow. Slowly they let go of each other and sat down in a couple of seats. Horza went through to the bridge.

He pointed Wubslin to the engineer’s seat and sat down in the pilot’s. Wubslin sighed heavily. Horza closed the door, then quickly reeled through all he had learned about the procedures on the bridge during the first weeks he had been aboard the CAT. He was reaching forward to open the communicator channels when something moved under the console, near his feet. He froze.

Wubslin peered down, then bent with an audible effort and stuck his big head down between his legs. Horza smelled drink.

“Haven’t you finished yet?” Wubslin’s muffled voice said.

“They took me off to another job; I only just got back,” wailed a small, thin, artificial voice. Horza sat back in his seat and looked under the console. A drone, about two thirds the size of the one which had escorted him from the elevator to the CAT’s bay, was disentangling itself from a jumble of fine cables protruding from an open inspection hatch.

“What,” Horza said, “is that?”

“Oh,” Wubslin said wearily, belching, “same one that’s been here… you remember. Come on, you,” he said to the machine. “The captain wants to do a communication test.”

“Look,” the little machine said, its synthesised voice full of exasperation, “I have finished. I’m just tidying everything away.”

“Well, get a move on,” Wubslin said. He withdrew his head from underneath the console and looked apologetically at Horza. “Sorry, Kraiklyn.”

“Never mind, never mind.” Horza waved his hand. He powered up the communicator. “Ah…” He looked at Wubslin. “Who’s controlling traffic movements around here? I’ve forgotten who to ask for. What if I want the bay doors opened?”

“Traffic? Doors opened?” Wubslin looked at Horza with a puzzled expression. He shrugged and said, “Well, just traffic control, I suppose, like when we came in.”

“Right,” Horza said; he flicked the switch on the console and said, “Traffic control, this is…” His voice trailed off.

He’d no idea what Kraiklyn had called the CAT instead of its real name. He hadn’t got that as part of the information he’d bought, and it was one of the many things he had meant to learn once he’d accomplished the most immediate task of getting Balveda off the ship, and with luck following a false trail. But the news that there might be somebody looking for him in this bay — or anybody, for that matter — had rattled him. He said, “…This is the craft in Smallbay 27492. I want immediate clearance to leave the bay and the GSV; we’ll quit the Orbital independently.”

Wubslin stared at Horza.

“This is Evanauth Port traffic control, GSV temporary section. One moment, Smallbay 27492,” said the speakers set in Horza and Wubslin’s seat headrests. Horza turned to Wubslin, switching off the communicator send button.

“This thing is ready to fly, isn’t it?”

“Wha—? Fly?” Wubslin looked perplexed. He scratched his chest, looked down at the drone still working to stuff the wires back under the console. “I suppose so, but—”

“Great.” Horza started switching everything on, motors included. He noticed the bank of screens carrying information about the bow laser flickering on along with everything else. At least Kraiklyn had had that repaired.

“Fly?” Wubslin repeated. He scratched his chest again and turned towards Horza. “Did you say ‘fly’?”

“Yes. We’re leaving.” Horza’s hands flicked over the buttons and sensor switches, adjusting the systems of the waking ship as though he really had been doing it for years.

“We’ll need a tug…” Wubslin said. Horza knew the engineer was right. The CAT’s anti-gravity was only strong enough to produce an internal field; the warp units would blow so close to (in fact, inside) a mass as great as the Ends, and you couldn’t reasonably use the fusion motors in an enclosed space.

“We’ll get one. I’ll tell them it’s an emergency. I’ll say we’ve got a bomb aboard, or something.” Horza watched the main screen come on, filling the previously blank bulkhead in front of him and Wubslin with a view of the rear of the Smallbay.

Wubslin got his own monitor screen to display a complicated plan which Horza eventually identified as a map of their level of the GSV’s vast interior. He only glanced at it at first, then ignored the view on the main screen and looked more carefully at the plan, and finally put a holo of the GSV’s whole internal layout onto the main screen, quickly memorising all he could.

“What…” Wubslin paused, belched again, rubbed his belly through his tunic and said, “What about Horza?”

“We’ll pick him up later,” Horza said, still studying the layout of the GSV. “I made other arrangements in case I couldn’t meet him when I said.” Horza punched the transmit button again. “Traffic control, traffic control, this is Smallbay 27492. I need emergency clearance. Repeat, I need emergency clearance and a tug straight away. I have a malfunctioning fusion generator I can’t close down. Repeat, nuclear fusion generator breakdown, going critical.”

“What!” a small voice screeched. Something banged into Horza’s knee, and the drone working under the console wobbled quickly into view, festooned with cables like a streamer-draped party goer. “What did you say?”

“Shut up and get off the ship. Now,” Horza told it, turning up the gain on the receiver circuits. A hissing noise filled the bridge.

“With pleasure!” the drone said, and shook itself to get rid of the cables looped round its casing. “As usual I’m the last to be told what’s going on, but I know I don’t want to stick around this—” it was muttering when the hangar lights went out.

At first Horza thought the screen had blown, but he slid the wavelength control up, and a dim outline of the bay reappeared, showing its appearance on infra-red. “Oh-oh,” said the drone, turning first to the screen, then looking back at Horza. “You lot did pay your rent, didn’t you?”

“Dead,” Wubslin announced. The drone got rid of the last of its cables. Horza looked sharply at the engineer.

“What?”

Wubslin pointed at the transceiver controls in front of him. “Dead. Somebody’s cut us off from traffic control.”

A shudder ran through the ship. A light blinked, indicating that the main hold lift had just slammed up automatically.

A draught briefly stirred the air in the flight deck, then died. More lights started flashing on the console. “Shit,” Horza said. “Now what?”

“Well, goodbye chaps,” the drone said hurriedly. It shot past them, sucked the door open and whooshed down the corridor, heading for the hangar stairwell.

“Pressure drop?” Wubslin said to himself, scratching his head for a change and knotting his brows as he looked at the screens in front of him.

“Kraiklyn!” Yalson’s voice shouted from the seat headrest speakers. A light on the console showed that she was calling from the hangar.

“What?” Horza snapped.

“What the hell’s going on?” Yalson shouted. “We were nearly crushed! The air’s going from the Smallbay and the hangar lift just emergencied on us! What’s happening?”

“I’ll explain,” Horza said. His mouth was dry, and he felt as though there was a lump of ice in his guts. “Is Ms Gravant still with you?”

“Of course she’s still fucking with me!”

“Right. Come back up to the mess room right away. Both of you.”

“Kraiklyn—” Yalson began, then another voice cut in, starting from a distance but quickly coming closer to the mike.

“Closed? Closed? Why is this lift door closed? What is going on on this vessel? Hello, bridge? Captain?” A sharp tap-tap noise came from the headrest speakers, and the synthesised voice went on, “Why am I being obstructed? Let me off this ship at—”

“Get out of the way, you idiot!” Yalson said, then: “It’s that goddam drone again.”

“You and Gravant get up here,” Horza repeated. “Now.” Horza closed down the hangar com circuit. He wheeled out of the seat and patted Wubslin on the shoulder. “Strap in. Get us ready to roll. Everything.” Then he swung through the open door. Aviger was in the corridor, coming from the mess to the bridge. He opened his mouth to speak but Horza squeezed quickly past him. “Not now, Aviger.” He put his right glove to the lock on the armoury door. It clicked open. Horza looked inside.

“I was only going to ask—”

“…what the hell’s going on?” Horza completed the old man’s sentence for him as he lifted the biggest neural stun pistol he could see, slammed the armoury doors shut and paced quickly down the corridor, through the mess room where Dorolow was sitting asleep in a chair, and into the corridor through the accommodation section. He switched the gun on, turned its power control to maximum, then held it behind his back.

The drone appeared first, flying up the steps and darting along the corridor at eye level. “Captain! I really must prot—”

Horza kicked a door open, caught the bevelled front of the drone as it came towards him and threw the machine into the cabin. He slammed the door shut. Voices were coming up the steps from the hangar. He held onto the handle of the cabin door. It was pulled hard, then thumped. “This is outrageous!” a distant, tinny voice wailed.

“Kraiklyn,” Yalson said as her head appeared at the top of the steps. Horza smiled, readying the gun he held behind his back. The door resounded again, shaking his hand.

“Let me out!”

“Kraiklyn, what is going on?” Yalson said, coming along the corridor. Balveda was almost up the stairs, carrying a large kitbag over her shoulder.

“I’m going to lose my temper!” The door shook again.

A whine, high and urgent, came from behind Yalson, from Balveda’s kitbag; then a static-like crackle. Yalson didn’t hear the high-pitched whine — which was an alarm. Horza, though, was distantly aware of Dorolow stirring somewhere behind him in the mess room. At the burst of static, which was a highly compressed message or signal of some sort, Yalson started to turn back to Balveda. At the same moment Horza leapt forward, taking his hand off the cabin door handle and bringing the heavy stun gun round to bear on Balveda. The Culture woman was already dropping the kitbag, one hand flashing — so fast even Horza could hardly follow the movement down to her side. Horza threw himself into the space between Yalson and the corridor bulkhead, knocking the woman mercenary to one side. At the same time, with the big stun gun pointing straight at Balveda’s face, he pulled the trigger. The weapon hummed in his hand as he continued forward, dropping. He tried to keep the gun pointing at Balveda’s head all the way down. He hit the deck just before the sagging Culture agent did.

Yalson was still staggering back after being thumped against the far bulkhead. Horza lay on the deck watching Balveda’s feet and legs for a second, then he quickly scrambled up, saw Balveda move groggily, her red-haired head scraping on the deck surface, her dark eyes opening briefly. He pulled the stun-gun trigger again, keeping it depressed and pointing the gun at the woman’s head. She shook spastically for a second, saliva drooling from one corner of her mouth, then went limp. The red bandanna rolled off her head.

“Are you crazy?” Yalson screamed. Horza turned to her.

“Her name isn’t Gravant; it’s Perosteck Balveda, and she’s an agent in the Culture’s Special Circumstances section. That’s their euphemism for Military Intelligence, in case you didn’t know,” he said. Yalson was backed up almost to the mess-room entrance, her eyes full of fear, her hands clutching at the surface of the bulkhead on either side of her. Horza went up to her. She shrank from him, and he sensed her getting ready to strike out. He stopped short of her, turned the stun gun round and handed it to her, grip first. “If you don’t believe me we’ll probably all end up dead,” he said, edging the gun forward towards her hands. She took it eventually. “I’m serious,” he told her. “Search her for weapons. Then get her into the mess and strap her into a seat. Tie her hands down, tight. And her legs. Then strap in yourself. We’ve leaving; I’ll explain later.” He started to go past her, then he turned and looked into her eyes.

“Oh, and keep stunning her every now and again, on maximum power. Special Circumstancers are very tough.” He turned and went towards the mess room. He heard the stun gun click.

“Kraiklyn,” Yalson said.

He stopped and turned round again. She was pointing the gun straight at him, holding it in both hands and level with his eyes. Horza sighed and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said.

“What about Horza?”

“He’s safe. I swear it. But he’ll be dead if we don’t get out of here now. And if she wakes up.” He nodded past Yalson at the long, inert form of Balveda. He turned again, then walked into the mess, the back of his head and the nape of his neck tingling with anticipation.

Nothing happened. Dorolow looked up from the table and said, “What was that noise?” as Horza went past.

“What noise?” Horza said as he went through to the bridge.

Yalson watched Kraiklyn’s back as he walked through the mess room. He said something to Dorolow, then he was through to the bridge. She let the stun gun down slowly; it hung in one hand. She looked at the gun thoughtfully and said to herself, quietly, “Yalson, my girl, there are times when I think you’re a little too loyal.” She raised the gun again as the cabin door opened just a crack and a small voice said, “Is it safe out there yet?”

Yalson grimaced, pushed the door open and looked at the drone, which was retreating further into the cabin. She nodded her head to the side and said, “Get out here and give me a hand with this bod, you liverless piece of clockwork.”

“Wake up!” Horza kicked Wubslin’s leg as he swung back into his chair. Aviger was sitting in the third seat in the flight deck, looking anxiously at the screens and controls. Wubslin jumped, then looked round with bleary eyes.

“Eh?” he said, then: “I was just resting my eyes.”

Horza pulled out the CAT’s manual controls from their recess in the edge of the console. Aviger looked at them with apprehension.

“Just how hard did you knock your head?” he said to Horza.

Horza smiled coldly at him. He scanned the screens as fast as he could and threw the safety switches on the ship’s fusion motors. He tried traffic control once more. The Smallbay was still dark. The outside pressure gauge registered zero. Wubslin was talking to himself as he checked over the craft’s monitoring systems.

“Aviger,” Horza said, not looking at the older man, “I think you’d better strap in.”

“What for?” Aviger asked quietly, measuredly. “We can’t go anywhere. We can’t move. We’re stuck here until a tug arrives to take us out, aren’t we?”

“Of course we are,” Horza said, adjusting the readying controls of the fusion motors and putting the ship leg controls on automatic. He turned and looked at Aviger. “Tell you what; why don’t you go and get that new recruit’s kitbag? Take it down to the hangar and shove it into a vactube.”

“What?” Aviger said, his already creased face becoming more lined as he frowned. “I thought she was leaving.”

“She was, but whoever is trying to keep us in here started evacuating the air from the Smallbay before she could get off. Now I want you to take her kitbag and all the other gear she may have left lying around and stow it in a vactube, all right?”

Aviger got up from the seat slowly, looking at Horza with a tense, worried expression on his face. “All right.” He started to leave the bridge, then hesitated, looking back at Horza. “Kraiklyn, why am I putting her kitbag in the vactube?”

“Because there’s almost certainly a very powerful bomb in it; that’s why. Now get down there and do it.”

Aviger nodded and left, looking even less happy. Horza turned back to the controls. They were almost ready. Wubslin was still talking to himself and hadn’t strapped in properly, but he seemed to be doing his part competently enough, despite frequent belches and pauses to scratch his chest and head. Horza knew he was putting the next bit off, but it had to be done. He pressed the ident button.

“This is Kraiklyn,” he said, and coughed.

“Identification complete,” the console said immediately. Horza wanted to shout, or at least to sag in his seat with relief, but he hadn’t the time to do either, and Wubslin would have thought it a little strange. So might the ship’s computer, for that matter: some machines were programmed to watch for signs of joy or relief after the formal identification was over. So he did nothing to celebrate, just brought the fusion motor primers up to operating temperature.

“Captain!” The small drone dashed back into the bridge, coming to a halt between Wubslin and Horza. “You will let me off this ship at once and report the irregularities taking place aboard immediately, or—”

“Or what?” Horza said, watching the temperature in the CAT’s fusion motors soar. “If you think you can get off this ship you’re welcome to try; probably Culture agents would blow you to dust even if you did get out.”

“Culture agents?” the small machine said with a sneer in its voice. “Captain, for your information this GSV is a demilitarised civilian vessel under the control of the Vavatch Hub authorities and within the terms laid down in the Idiran-Culture War Conduct Treaty drawn up shortly after the commencement of hostilities. How—”

“So who turned the lights off and let the air out, idiot?” Horza said, turning to the machine briefly. He looked back to the console, turning the bow radar up as high as it would go and taking readings through the blank wall of the rear of the Smallbay.

“I don’t know,” the drone said, “but I rather doubt it would be Culture agents. Who or what do you think these supposed agents are after? You?”

“What if they were?” Horza took another look at the holo display of the GSV’s internal layout. He briefly magnified the volume around Smallbay 27492 before switching the repeater screen off. The drone was silent for a second, then backed off through the doorway.

“Great. I’m locked in an antique with a paranoid lunatic. I think I’ll go and look for somewhere safer than this.”

“You do that!” Horza yelled down the corridor after it. He turned the hangar circuit back on. “Aviger?” he said.

“I’ve done it,” said the old man’s voice.

“Right. Get to the mess fast and strap in.” Horza killed the circuit again.

“Well,” Wubslin said, sitting back in his seat and scratching his head, looking at the bank of screens in front of him with their arrays of figures and graphs, “I don’t know what it is you’re intending to do, Kraiklyn, but whatever it is, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be to do it.” The stout engineer looked across at Horza, lifted himself slightly from his seat and pulled the restraining straps over his body. Horza grinned at him, trying to look confident. His own seat’s restrainers were a little more sophisticated, and he just had to throw a switch for cushioned arms to swing over and inertia fields to come on. He pulled his helmet over his head from the hinged position and heard it hiss shut.

“Oh my God,” Wubslin said, looking slowly away from Horza to stare at the almost featureless rear wall of the Smallbay shown on the main screen. “I sure as hell hope you’re not going to do what I think you are.”

Horza didn’t reply. He hit the button to talk to the mess. “All right?”

“Just about, Kraiklyn, but—” Yalson said. Horza killed that circuit, too. He licked his lips, took the controls in his gloved hands, sucked in a deep breath, then flicked the thumb buttons on the CAT’s three fusion motors. Just before the noise started he heard Wubslin say:

“Oh, my God, you are—”

The screen flashed, went dark, then flashed again. The view of the Smallbay’s rear wall was lit by three jets of plasma bursting from underneath the ship. A noise like thunder filled the bridge and reverberated through the whole craft. The two outboard motors were the main thrust, vectored down for the moment; they blasted fire onto the deck of the Smallbay, scattering the machinery and equipment from underneath and around the craft, slamming it into walls and off the roof as the blinding jets of flame steadied under the vessel. The inboard, lift-only nose motor fired raggedly at first, then settled quickly, starting to burn its own hole through the thin layer of ultradense material which covered the Smallbay floor. The Clear Air Turbulence stirred like a waking animal, groaning and creaking and shifting its weight. On the screen, a huge shadow veered across the wall and the roof in front as the infernal light from the nose fusion motor burned under the ship; rolling clouds of gas from burning machinery were starting to haze over the view. Horza was amazed that the walls of the Smallbay had held out. He flicked the bow laser at the same time as increasing the fusion motor power.

The screen detonated with light. The wall ahead burst open like a flower seen in time lapse, huge petals throwing themselves towards the ship and a million pieces of wreckage and debris flashing past the vessel’s nose on the shock wave of air bursting in from the far side of the lasered wall. At the same time, the Clear Air Turbulence lifted off. The leg-weight readouts stopped at zero, then blanked out as the legs, glowing red with heat, stowed themselves inside the hull. Emergency undercarriage cooling circuits whined into action. The craft started to slew to one side, shaking with its own power and with the impact of debris swirling about it. The view ahead cleared.

Horza steadied the ship, then gunned the rear motors, flinging some of their power backwards, towards the Smallbay doors. A rear screen showed them glowing white hot. Horza would dearly have liked to head that way, but reversing and ramming the doors with the CAT would have probably been suicidal, and turning the craft in such a confined space impossible. Just going forward was going to be hard enough…

The hole wasn’t big enough. Horza saw it coming towards him and knew straight away. He used one shaking finger on the laser beam-spread control set in the semi-wheel of the controls, turning the spread up to maximum then firing once more. The screen washed out with light again, all around the perimeter of the hole. The CAT stuck its nose and then its body into another Smallbay. Horza waited for something to hit the sides or roof of the white-hot gap, but nothing happened; they sailed through on their three pillars of fire, throwing light and wreckage and waves of smoke and gas before them. The dark waves blasted out over shuttles; the whole Smallbay they were now moving slowly through was full of shuttles of every shape and description. They were floating over them, battering them and melting them with their fire.

Horza was aware of Wubslin sitting on the seat beside him, his eyes locked onto the view ahead, his legs drawn up as far as possible so that his knees stuck up above the edge of the console, and his arms locked in a sort of square over his head, each hand grasping the bicep of the other arm. His face was a mask of fear and incredulity when Horza turned round to glance at him, and grinned. Wubslin pointed frenziedly at the main screen. “Watch!” he shrieked over the racket.

The CAT was shaking and bouncing, rocked by the stream of superheated matter pouring from under its hull. It would be using the atmosphere around it to produce plasma, now that there was air available, and in the relatively confined space of the Smallbays the turbulence created was enough to shake the vessel bodily.

There was another wall ahead, coming up faster than Horza would have liked. They were slewing slightly again as well; he narrowed the laser angle again and fired, pulling the ship round at the same time. The wall flashed once around its edges; the roof and floor of the Smallbay flashed in loops of flame where the laser caught them, and dozens of parked shuttles ahead of them pulsed with light and heat.

The wall ahead started to fall slowly back, but the CAT was coming up on it faster than it was crumpling. Horza gasped and tried to pull back; he heard Wubslin howl, as the vessel’s nose hit the undamaged centre of the wall. The view on the main screen tilted as the ship rammed into the wall material. Then the nose came down, the Clear Air Turbulence quivered like an animal shaking water from its fur, and they were rocking and yawing into yet another Smallbay. It was totally empty. Horza gunned the engines a little more, took a couple of bursts with the laser at the next wall, then watched in amazement as this wall, instead of falling back like the last one, crashed down towards them like a vast castle drawbridge, slamming in one fiery piece onto the deck of the empty Smallbay. In a fury of steam and gas, a mountain of water appeared over the top of the collapsing wall and poured out in a huge wave towards the approaching ship.

Horza heard himself shouting. He rammed the motor controls full on and kept the laser fire button hard down.

The CAT leapt forward. It flashed over the surface of the cascading water, enough of the plasma heat smashing into its liquid surface to instantly fill all the space of Smallbays its passage had created with a boiling fog of steam. As the tide of water continued to pour from the flooded Smallbay and the CAT screeched above it, the air about the ship filled with superheated steam. The external pressure gauge went up too quickly for the eye to follow; the laser blasted even more vapour off the water in front, and with an explosion like the end of the world the next wall blew out ahead of the vessel — weakened by the laser and finally blasted away by the sheer pressure of steam. The Clear Air Turbulence shot out from the tunnel of linked Smallbays like a bullet from a gun.

Motors flaming, in the middle of a cloud of gas and steam which it quickly outdistanced, it roared into a canyon of air-filled space between towering walls of bay doors and opened accommodation sections, lighting up kilometres of wall and cloud, screaming with its three flame-filled throats, and seemingly pulling after it a tidal wave of water and a volcano-like cloud of steam, gas and smoke. The water fell, turning from a solid wave into something like heavy surf, then spray, then just rain and water vapour, following the huge flapping card of the bay door tumbling through the air. The CAT wrenched itself round, twisting and slewing through the air in an attempt to check its headlong rush towards the far wall of Smallbay doors facing it across that vast internal canyon. Then its motors flickered and went out. The Clear Air Turbulence started to fall.

Horza gunned the controls, but the fusion motors were dead. The screen showed the wall of doors to other bays on one side, then air and clouds, then the wall of bay doors on the other side. They were in a spin. Horza looked over at Wubslin as he fought with the controls. The engineer was staring at the main screen with a glazed expression on his face. “Wubslin!” Horza screamed. The fusion motors stayed dead—

“Aaah!” Wubslin seemed to have woken up to the fact that they were falling out of control; he leapt at the controls in front of him. “Just fly it!” he shouted. “I’ll try the primers! Must have over-pressured the motors!”

Horza wrestled with the controls while Wubslin tried to restart the engines. On the screen, walls spun crazily about them and clouds beneath them were coming up fast — beneath them; really beneath them; a dead flat layer of clouds. Horza shook the controls again.

The nose motor burst into life, guttering wildly, sending the spinning craft careering off towards one side of the artificial cliff of bay doors and walls. Horza cut the motor out. He steered into the spin, using the craft’s control surfaces rather than the motors, then he aimed the whole ship straight down and put his fingers on the laser buttons again. The clouds flashed up to meet the vessel. He closed his eyes and squeezed the laser controls.

The Ends of Invention was so huge it was built on three almost totally separate levels, each over three kilometres deep. They were pressure levels, there because otherwise the differential between the very bottom and the very top of the giant ship would have been the difference between standard sea level and a mountain top somewhere in the tropopause. As it was, there existed a three and a half thousand metre difference between the base and roof of each pressure level, making sudden journeys by traveltube from one to the other inadvisable. In the immense open cave that was the hollow centre of the GSV the pressure levels were marked by force fields, not anything material, so that craft could pass from one level to another without having to go outside the vessel, and it was towards one of those boundaries, marked by cloud, that the Clear Air Turbulence was falling.

Firing the laser did no good whatsoever, though Horza didn’t know that at the time. It was a Vavatch computer, which had taken over the internal monitoring and control from the Culture’s own Minds, which opened a hole in the force field to let the falling vessel through. It did so in the mistaken assumption that less damage would be caused to The Ends of Invention by letting the rogue vessel fall through than having it impact.

In the centre of a sudden maelstrom of air and cloud, in its own small hurricane, the CAT burst through from the thick air at the bottom of one pressure level and into the thin atmosphere at the top of the one below. A vortex of rag-clouded air blew out after it like an inverted explosion. Horza opened his eyes again and saw with relief the distant floor of the GSV’s cavernous interior, and the climbing figures on the main fusion motors’ monitor screens. He hit the engine throttles again, this time leaving the nose motor alone. The two main engines caught, shoving Horza back in his seat against the cloying hold of the restrainer fields. He pulled the nose of the diving craft up, watching the floor far below gradually disappear from view as it was replaced by the sight of another wall of opened bay doors. The doors were much larger than those of the Smallbays in the level they had just left, and the few craft Horza could see either nosing into or appearing out of the lit lengths of the huge hangars were full-size starships.

Horza watched the screen, piloting the Clear Air Turbulence exactly like an aircraft. They were travelling quickly along a vast corridor over a kilometre across, with the layer of clouds about fifteen hundred metres above them. Starships were moving slowly through the same space, a few on their own AG fields, most towed by light lifter tugs. Everything else was moving slowly and without a fuss; only the CAT disturbed the calm of the giant ship’s interior, screaming through the air on twin swords of brilliant flame pulsing from white-hot plasma chambers. Another cliff-face of huge hangar doors faced them. Horza looked about him at the curve of main screen and pulled the CAT over on a long banking left turn, diving a little at the same time to head down an even broader canyon of space. They flashed over a slow-moving clipper being towed towards a distant open Mainbay, rocking the starship in their wake of superheated air. The wall of doors and opened entrances slanted towards them as Horza tightened the turn. Ahead, Horza could see what looked like a cloud of insects: hundreds of tiny black specks floating in the air.

Far beyond them, maybe five or six kilometres away, a thousand metre square of blackness, bordered with a slowly flashing strip of subdued white light, was the exit from The Ends of Invention. It was a straight run.

Horza sighed and felt his whole body relax. Unless they were intercepted, they had done it. With a little luck now, they might even get away from the Orbital itself. He gunned the engines, heading for the inky square in the distance.

Wubslin suddenly sat forward, against the pull of acceleration, and punched some buttons. His repeater screen set in the console magnified the centre section of the main screen, showing the view ahead. “They’re people!” he shouted.

Horza frowned over at the man. “What?”

“People! Those are people! They must be in AG harnesses! We’re going to go right through them!”

Horza looked briefly over at Wubslin’s repeater screen. It was true; the black cloud which almost filled the screen was made up of humans, flying slowly about in suits or ordinary clothes. There were thousands of them, Horza saw, less than a kilometre ahead, and closing quickly. Wubslin was staring at the screen, waving his hand at the people. “Get out the way! Get out the way!” he was shouting.

Horza couldn’t see a way round, over or beneath the mass of flying people. Whether they were playing some curious mass aerial game or were just enjoying themselves, they were too many, too close, too widespread. “Shit!” Horza said. He got ready to cut the rear plasma motors before the Clear Air Turbulence went into the cloud of humans. With luck they might make it through before they had to relight them, and so not incinerate too many people.

“No!” Wubslin screamed. He threw the restraining straps off, leapt across towards Horza and dived at the controls. Horza tried to fend the bulky engineer off, but failed. The controls were wrenched from his hands, and the view on the main screen tipped and swirled, pointing the nose of the speeding ship away from the black square of the GSV exit, away from the huge cloud of airborne people, and towards the cliff of brightly lit Mainbay entrances. Horza clouted Wubslin across the head with his arm, sending the man falling to the floor, stunned. He grabbed the controls back from the relaxing fingers of the engineer, but it was too late to turn away. Horza steadied and aimed. The Clear Air Turbulence darted for an open Mainbay; it flashed through the open entrance and swept over the skeleton of a starship being rebuilt in the bay, the light from the CAT’s motors starting fires, singeing hair, smouldering clothes and blinding unprotected eyes.

Horza saw Wubslin lying unconscious on the floor out of the corner of his eye, rocking gently as the CAT careered through the half kilometre length of Mainbay. The doors to the next bay were open, and the next and the next. They were flying through a two kilometre tunnel, racing over the repair and docking facilities of one of Evanauth’s displaced shipbuilders. Horza didn’t know what was at the far end, but he could see that before they got there they would have to fly over the top of a large spaceship which almost filled the third bay along. Horza vectored the fusion fire ahead so that they started to slow. Twin beams of fire flashed on either side of the main screen as the fusion power kicked forward. Wubslin’s unrestrained body slid forward on the floor of the bridge, wedging under the console and his own seat. Horza lifted the CAT’s nose as the blunt snout of the parked spacecraft sitting in the bay ahead approached.

The Clear Air Turbulence zoomed towards the ceiling of the Mainbay, flashed between it and the top surface of the ship, then fell on the other side and, although still slowing, shot through the final Mainbay and into another corridor of free air space. It was too narrow. Horza dived the craft again, saw the floor coming up and fired the lasers. The CAT burst through a rising cloud of glowing wreckage, bumping and shaking, Wubslin’s squat frame sliding out from under the console and floating back up towards the rear door of the bridge.

At first Horza thought they were out at last, but they weren’t; they were in what the Culture called a General bay.

The CAT fell once more, then levelled out again. It was in a space which seemed even larger than the main interior of the GSV. It was flying through the bay they had stored the Megaship in: the same Megaship Horza had seen on the screen earlier being lifted out of the water by a hundred or so ancient Culture lifter craft.

Horza had time to look around. There was plenty of space, lots of room and time. The Megaship lay on the floor of the giant bay, looking for all the world like a small city sitting on a great slab of metal. The Clear Air Turbulence flew past the stern of the Megaship, past tunnels full of propeller blades tens of metres across, round the side of its rearmost outrigger, where beached pleasure craft waited for a return to water, over the towers and spires of its superstructure, then out over its bows. Horza looked forward. The doors, if they were doors, of the General bay faced him, two kilometres away. They were that same distance from top to bottom, and twice that across. Horza shrugged and checked the laser again. He was becoming, he realised, almost blasé about the whole thing. What the hell? he thought.

The lasers picked a hole in the wall of material ahead, punching a slowly widening gap which Horza aimed straight for. A vortex of swirling air was starting to form around the hole; as the CAT rushed closer, it was caught in a small horizontal cyclone of air and started to twist. Then it was through, and in space.

In a quickly dispersing bubble of air and crystals of ice, the craft burst from the body of the General Systems Vehicle, swooping into vacuum and star-washed darkness at last. Behind it, a force field slammed across the hole its passage had created in the doors of the General bay. Horza felt the plasma motors stutter as their supply of outside air disappeared, then the internal tanks took up the slack. He was about to cut them and slide gently into the start-up procedure for the craft’s warp engines when the speakers in his headrest crackled.

“This is Evanauth port police. All right, you son of a bitch, just keep on that heading and slow right down. Evanauth port police to rogue craft: halt on that heading. A—”

Horza pulled on the controls, taking the CAT on a huge accelerating arc up over the stern of the GSV, flashing past the outside of the kilometre-square exit he had been heading for earlier. Wubslin, moaning now, bumped around the inside of the bridge as the CAT lifted its nose to head straight up, towards the maze of abandoned docks and gantries that was Evanauth port. As it went it turned, still twisting slightly from the spin it had picked up from the vortex of air bursting from the General bay. Horza let it twist, steadying it only as they approached the top of the loop, the port facilities coming up fast then sliding underneath as the craft levelled out.

“Rogue ship! This is your last warning!” the speakers blared. “Stop now or we’ll blow you out of the sky! God, he’s heading for—” The transmission cut off. Horza grinned to himself. He was indeed heading for the gap between the underside of the port and the top of the GSV. The Clear Air Turbulence flashed through spaces between traveltube connections, elevator shafts, graving dock gantries, transit areas, arriving shuttle craft and crane towers. Horza guided the ship through the maze with the fusion motors still blazing at maximum boost, throwing the small craft through the few hundred metres of crowded space between the Orbital and the General Systems Vehicle. The rear radar pinged, picking up following echoes.

Two towers, hanging under the Orbital like upside-down sky-scrapers, between which Horza was aiming the CAT, suddenly blossomed with light, scattering wreckage. Horza cringed in his seat as he corkscrewed the ship into the space between the two clouds of debris.

“Those were across the bows,” crackled the speakers again. “The next ones will be straight up your ass, boy racer.” The CAT shot out over the dull grey plain of slanting material that was the start of the Ends’ nose. Horza turned the CAT over and dived down, following the slope of the vast craft’s bows. The rear radar signal stopped briefly, then reappeared.

He flipped the ship over again. Wubslin, his arms and legs waving weakly, was dumped onto the CAT’s bridge ceiling and stuck there like a fly while Horza did a section of an outside loop.

The ship was racing, powering away from the Orbital port area and the big GSV, heading for space. Horza remembered about Balveda’s gear, and quickly reached over to the console, closing the vactube circuit from there. A screen showed that all the vactubes had been rotated. The rear screen showed something flame inside the twin plumes of plasma fire. The rear radar pinged insistently.

“Goodbye, stupid!” the voice in the headrest speakers said. Horza threw the ship to one side.

The rear screen went white, then black. The main screen pulsated with colours and broken lines. The speakers in Horza’s helmet, as well as the speakers set into the seat, howled. Every instrument on the console flashed and wavered.

Horza thought for a second they had been hit, but the motors were still blasting, the main screen was starting to clear, and the other instruments were recovering, too. The radiation meters were bleeping and flashing. The rear screen stayed blank. A damage monitor indicated that the sensors had been knocked out by a very strong pulse of radiation.

Horza started to realise what had happened when the rear radar didn’t start pinging again after it recovered. He threw back his head and laughed.

There had indeed been a bomb in Balveda’s kitbag. Whether it had gone off because it was caught in the CAT’s plasma exhaust or because somebody — whoever had been trying to keep the ship on board the GSV in the first place — had detonated it remotely the instant the fleeing craft was far enough away from the Ends not to cause too much damage, Horza didn’t know. Whatever; the explosion seemed to have caught the pursuing police vessels.

Laughing uproariously, Horza angled the CAT further away from the great circle of brilliantly lit Orbital, heading straight out towards the stars and readying the warp engines to take over from the plasma motors. Wubslin, back on the deck, one leg caught on the arm of his own chair, moaned distantly.

“Mother,” he said. “Mother, say it’s only a dream…”

Horza laughed louder.

“You lunatic,” breathed Yalson, shaking her head. Her eyes were wide. “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You’re mad, Kraiklyn. I’m leaving. I resign as of now… Shit! I wish I’d gone with Jandraligeli, to Ghalssel… You can just drop me off first place we get to.”

Horza sat down wearily in the seat at the head of the mess-room table. Yalson was at the far end, under the screen, which was switched into the bridge main screen. The CAT was proceeding under full warp, two hours out on its journey from Vavatch. There had been no further pursuit following the destruction of the police craft, and now the CAT was gradually coming round to the course Horza had set, into the war zone, towards the edge of the Glittercliff, towards Schar’s World.

Dorolow and Aviger were sitting, plainly still shaken, to one side of Yalson. The woman and the elderly man were both staring at Horza as though he was pointing a gun at them. Their mouths were open, their eyes were glazed. On the other side of Yalson the slack form of Perosteck Balveda was leaning forward, head down, her body pulling against the restraining straps of the seat.

The mess room was chaotic. The CAT hadn’t been readied for violent manoeuvring, and nothing had been stowed away. Plates and containers, a couple of shoes, a glove, some half-unravelled tapes and spools and various other bits and pieces now lay strewn about the floor of the mess. Yalson had been hit by something, and a small trickle of blood had dried on her forehead. Horza hadn’t let anybody move, apart from brief visits to the heads, for the last two hours; he’d told everybody to stay where they were over the ship PA while the CAT headed away from Vavatch on a twisting, erratic course. He had kept the plasma motors and laser warm and ready, but no further pursuit came. Now he reckoned they were safe and far enough away to warp straight.

He had left Wubslin on the bridge, nursing the battered and abused systems of the Clear Air Turbulence as best he could. The engineer had apologised for grabbing at the controls and had become very subdued, not meeting Horza’s eyes but tidying up one or two bits of loose debris on the bridge and stuffing some of the loose wires back under the console. Horza told Wubslin he had nearly killed them all, but on the other hand so had he, so they would forget it this time; they’d escaped intact. Wubslin nodded and said he didn’t know how; he couldn’t believe the ship was virtually undamaged. Wubslin wasn’t undamaged; he had bruises everywhere.

“I’m afraid,” Horza said to Yalson once he had sat down and put his feet up, “our first port of call is rather bleak and underpopulated. I’m not sure you’ll want to be dropped off there.”

Yalson put the heavy stun pistol down onto the table surface. “And just where the hell are we going? What’s going on, Kraiklyn? What was all that craziness back on the GSV? What’s she doing here? Why is the Culture involved?” Yalson nodded at Balveda during this speech, and Horza kept looking at the unconscious Culture agent when Yalson stopped, waiting for an answer. Aviger and Dorolow were looking at him expectantly, too.

Before Horza could answer, the small drone appeared from the corridor leading from the accommodation section. It floated in, looked round the mess room, then sat itself bodily on the table in the middle. “Did I hear something about it being explanation time?” it said. It was facing Horza.

Horza looked away from Balveda, to Aviger and Dorolow, then to Yalson and the drone. “Well, you might as well all know that we are now heading for a place called Schar’s World. It’s a Planet of the Dead.”

Yalson looked puzzled. Aviger said, “I’ve heard of those. But we won’t be allowed in.”

“This is getting worse,” the drone said. “If I were you, Captain Kraiklyn, I would turn back to The Ends of Invention and surrender yourself there. I’m sure you’d get a fair trial.”

Horza ignored the machine. He sighed, looking round at the mess, stretched his legs and yawned. “I’m sorry you’re all being taken, perhaps against your will, but I’ve got to get there, and I can’t afford to stop anywhere to let you off. You’ve all got to come.”

“Oh we do, do we?” said the small drone.

“Yes,” Horza said, looking at it, “I’m afraid so.”

“But we won’t be able to get anywhere near this place,” Aviger protested. “They don’t let anybody in. There’s some sort of zone around them they don’t let people into.”

“We’ll see about that when we get there.” Horza smiled.

“You’re not answering my questions,” Yalson said. She looked at Balveda again, then down at the gun lying on the table. “I’ve been zapping this poor bitch every time she flicks an eyelid, and I want to know why I’ve been doing it.”

“It’ll take a while to explain it all, but what it boils down to is there’s something on Schar’s World which both the Culture and the Idirans want. I have… a contract, a commission from the Idirans, to get there and find this thing.”

“You really are a paranoid,” the drone said incredulously. It rose off the table and turned round to look at the others. “He really is a lunatic!”

“The Idirans are hiring us — you — to go after something?” Yalson’s voice was full of disbelief. Horza looked at her and smiled.

“You mean this woman,” Dorolow said, pointing at Balveda, “was sent by the Culture to join us, infiltrate… Are you serious?”

“I’m serious. Balveda was looking for me. Also for Horza Gobuchul. She wanted to get to Schar’s World, or to stop us from getting there.” Horza looked at Aviger. “There was a bomb in amongst her gear, by the way; it went off just after I rotated it out the tubes. It blew the police ships away. We all got a blast of radiation, but nothing lethal.”

“And what about Horza?” Yalson said, looking grimly at him. “Was that just some trick, or did you really meet him?”

“He is alive, Yalson, and as safe as any of us.”

Wubslin appeared through the door from the bridge, still with an apologetic look on his face. He nodded at Horza and sat down near by. “All looking fine, Kraiklyn.”

“Good,” Horza said. “I was just explaining to everybody else about our journey to Schar’s World.”

“Oh,” Wubslin said. “Yeah.” He shrugged at the others.

“Kraiklyn,” Yalson said, leaning forward on the table and looking intently at Horza, “you just about got us all killed fuck knows how many times back there. You probably did kill quite a few people during those… in-door aerobatics. You’ve saddled us with some secret agent from the Culture. You’re practically kidnapping us to take us towards a planet in the middle of a war zone where nobody’s even allowed in, to look for something both sides want enough to… Well, if the Idirans are hiring a decimated bunch of second-rate mercenaries, they must be pretty desperate; and if the Culture really was behind the attempt to keep us in that bay, they must be scared stiff to risk violating the neutrality of the Ends and breaking some of their precious rules of war.

“You may think you know what’s going on and think the risk is worth it, but I don’t, and I don’t like this feeling of being kept in the dark at all, either. Your track record recently’s been crap; let’s face it. Risk your own life if you want to, but you don’t have any right to risk ours, too. Not any more. Maybe we don’t all want to side with the Idirans, but even if we did prefer them to the Culture, none of us signed up to start fighting in the middle of the war. Shit, Kraiklyn, we’re neither… equipped nor trained well enough to go up against those guys.”

“I know all that,” Horza said. “But we shouldn’t be encountering any battle forces. The Quiet Barrier round Schar’s World extends far enough out so that it’s impossible to watch it all. We go in from a randomly picked direction, and by the time we’re spotted, there’s nothing anybody could do about it, no matter what sort of ship they have. A Main Battle Fleet couldn’t keep us out. When we leave it’ll be the same.”

“What you’re trying to say is,” Yalson said, sitting back in her seat, “ ‘Easy in, easy out’.”

“Maybe I am,” laughed Horza.

“Hey,” Wubslin said suddenly, looking at his terminal screen, which he had just taken from his pocket. “It’s nearly time!” He got up and disappeared through the doors leading to the bridge. In a few seconds the screen in the mess changed, the view swivelling round until it showed Vavatch. The great Orbital hung in space, dark and brilliant, full of night and day, blue and white and black. They all looked up at the screen.

Wubslin came back in and sat in his seat again. Horza felt tired. His body wanted rest, and lots of it. His brain was still buzzing from the concentration and the amount of adrenalin it had required to pilot the CAT through and out of The Ends of Invention, but he couldn’t rest yet. He couldn’t decide what was the best thing to do. Should he tell them who he was, tell them the truth, that he was a Changer, that he had killed Kraiklyn? How loyal were any of them to the leader they didn’t yet know was dead? Yalson the most, perhaps; but surely she would be glad to know that he was alive… Yet she was the one who had said that perhaps they weren’t all on the Idirans’ side… She had never shown any sympathy for the Culture before when he had known her, but perhaps she had changed her mind.

He could even Change back; there was a fairly long journey now during which it shouldn’t be beyond him, perhaps with the help of Wubslin, to change the fidelities in the CAT’s computer. But should he tell them — should he let them know? And Balveda: what was he going to do with her? He had had some idea of using her to bargain with the Culture, but it looked as though they had escaped now, and next stop was Schar’s World, where she would at best be a liability. He ought to kill her now, but he knew, first of all, that that might not go down well with the others, especially Yalson. He also knew, although he didn’t like to admit it, that he would find it personally painful to kill the Culture agent. They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.

Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. He opened his mouth to ask Yalson to stun the Culture agent again.

“Now,” Wubslin said.

With that, Vavatch Orbital started to disintegrate.

The view of it on the mess-room screen was a compensated hyperspace version, so that, although they were already outside the Vavatch system, they were watching it virtually in real time. Right at the appointed hour the unseen, unnamed, very much still militarised General Systems Vehicle which was somewhere in the vicinity of the Vavatch planetary system started its bombardment. It was almost certainly an Ocean class GSV, the same one which had sent the message that they had all watched some days ago on the mess screen, heading in towards Vavatch. That would make the warcraft very much smaller than the behemoth of The Ends of Invention, which was — for war purposes — obsolete. One Ocean class could fit inside either of the Ends’ General bays, but while the larger craft — by that time an hour out from the Orbital — was full of people, the Ocean class would be packed with other warships, and weaponry.

Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn’t do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth.

Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.

There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.

The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air.

Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.

The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light — light from outside the normal fabric of reality.

Horza remembered what Jandraligeli had called it, back when Lenipobra had been enthusing about the destruction.

“The weaponry of the end of the universe,” the Mondlidician had said. Horza watched the screen and knew what the man had meant.

It was all going. All of it. The wreck of the Olmedreca, the tabular berg it had collided with, the wreck of the CAT’s shuttle, Mipp’s body, Lenipobra’s, whatever was left of Fwi-Song’s corpse, Mr First’s… the living bodies of the other Eaters — if they hadn’t been rescued, or had still refused… the Damage game arena, the docks and Kraiklyn’s dead body, the hovercraft… animals and fishes, birds, germs, all of it: everything flash-burned or flash-frozen, suddenly weightless, spinning into space, going, dying.

The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other towards the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system’s planets like flat square worlds themselves.

There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary, blazing splendour. Then at its dark centre, another blazing star patch rose, bursting white as the Hub was struck with the same terrible energy which had smashed the world itself.

Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.

Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece.

The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.

Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out.

Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.

The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world.

On other wavelengths there would probably be a lot still to see, but the mess-room screen was on normal light. Only the Minds, only the starships, would see the whole destruction perfectly; only they would be able to appreciate it for all that it had to offer. Of the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one per cent: a single octave of radiation out of an immense long keyboard of tones. The sensors on a starship would see everything, right across that spectrum, in far greater detail and at a much slower apparent speed. The whole display that was the Orbital’s destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.

“Chicel…” Dorolow said. Wubslin exhaled loudly and shook his head. Yalson turned and looked at Horza. Aviger stayed with his head turned to the screen.

“Amazing what one can accomplish when one puts one’s mind to it, eh… Horza?”

At first, stupidly, he thought that Yalson had said it, but of course it was Balveda.

She brought her head up slowly. Her deep, dark eyes were open; she looked groggy, and her body still sagged against the webbing of the seat straps. The voice had been clear and steady, though.

Horza saw Yalson reaching for the stun gun on the table. She reached out and brought the gun closer to her but left it lying on the table. She was looking suspiciously at the Culture agent. Aviger and Dorolow and Wubslin were staring at her, too.

“Are the batteries on that stun gun running down?” Wubslin said. Yalson was still looking at Balveda, her eyes narrowed.

“You’re a little confused, Gravant, or whoever you are,” Yalson said. “That’s Kraiklyn.”

Balveda smiled at Horza. He left his face blank. He didn’t know what to do. He was exhausted, worn out. It was too much of an effort. Let what was going to happen, happen. He’d had enough of deciding. “Well,” Balveda said to him, “are you going to tell them, or shall I?”

He said nothing. He watched Balveda’s face. The woman drew a deep breath and said, “Oh all right, I’ll tell them.” She turned to Yalson. “His name is Bora Horza Gobuchul, and he’s impersonating Kraiklyn. Horza’s a Changer from Heibohre and he works for the Idirans. Has done for the last six years. He’s Changed to become Kraiklyn. I imagine your real leader is dead. Horza probably killed him, or at least left him somewhere in or around Evanauth.

“I’m very sorry.” She looked around the others, including the small drone. “But unless I’m much mistaken we’re all taking a little trip to a place called Schar’s World. Well, you are, anyway. I have a feeling my own journey might be a little shorter — and infinitely longer.” Balveda smiled ironically at Horza.

“Two?” the drone on the table said to nobody in particular. “I’m stuck in a leaky museum-piece with two paranoid lunatics?”

“You’re not,” Yalson was saying, ignoring the machine and gazing at Horza. “You’re not, are you? She’s lying.”

Wubslin turned and looked at him. Aviger and Dorolow exchanged glances. Horza sighed and took his feet off the table, sitting a little straighter in his seat. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He was watching, feeling, trying to gauge the mood of the various people in the room. He was aware of their distances, the tension in their bodies, and how much time he would need to get to the plasma pistol on his right hip. He raised his head and looked at all of them, settling his gaze on Yalson. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

Silence filled the mess room. Horza waited for a reaction. Instead the sound of a door opening came from down the corridor through the accommodation section. They all looked at the doorway.

Neisin appeared, wearing only a pair of grubby, stained shorts. His hair was sticking out in every direction, his eyes were slits, his skin was patchy with dry and moist areas, and his face was very pale. A smell of drink gradually worked its way through the mess. He looked round the room, yawned, nodded at them, pointed vaguely at some of the still uncleared debris lying around and said, “This place is nearly in as big a mess as my cabin. You’d think we’d been manoeuvring or something. Sorry. Thought it was time to eat. Think I’ll go back to bed.” He yawned again and left. The door closed.

Balveda was laughing quietly. Horza could see some tears in her eyes. The others just looked confused. The drone said:

“Well, Mr Observant there is probably the only person on this mobile asylum with an untroubled mind at the moment.” The machine turned on the table, scratching the surface as it faced Horza. “Are you really claiming to be one of these fabled human impersonators?” it asked with a sneer in its voice.

Horza looked down the table, then into Yalson’s wary, frowning eyes. “That’s what I am.”

“They’re extinct,” Aviger said, shaking his head.

“They’re not extinct,” Balveda told him, her thin, finely moulded head turning briefly to the old man. “But they’re part of the Idiran sphere now; absorbed. Some of them always did support the Idirans, the rest either left or decided they might as well throw in their lot with them. Horza’s one of the first lot. Can’t stand the Culture. He’s taking you all to Schar’s World to kidnap a shipwrecked Mind for his Idiran masters. A Culture Mind. So that the galaxy will be free from human interference and the Idirans can have a free run at—”

“All right, Balveda,” Horza said. She shrugged.

“You’re Horza,” Yalson said, pointing at him. He nodded. She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. I’m starting to come round to the drone’s way of thinking; you’re both crazy. You took a nasty blow to the head, Kraiklyn, and you, lady” — she looked at Balveda — “have had your brains scrambled by this thing.” Yalson picked up the stun gun and then put it down again.

“I don’t know,” Wubslin said, scratching his head and looking at Horza as though he was some sort of exhibit. “I thought the captain seemed a bit strange. I couldn’t imagine him doing what he just did in the GSV.”

“What did you do, Horza?” Balveda said. “I seem to have missed something. How did you get away?”

“I flew out, Balveda. Used the fusion motors and the laser and blasted out.”

“Really?” Balveda laughed again, throwing her head back. She went on laughing, but her laughter was a little too loud, and the tears were coming too quickly to her eyes. “Ho ho. Well, I am impressed. I thought we had you.”

“When did you find out?” he asked her quietly. She sniffed and tried to wipe her nose on her shoulder.

“What? That you weren’t Kraiklyn?” She played her tongue along her top lip. “Oh, just before you came aboard. We had a microdrone pretending to be a fly. It was programmed to land on anybody approaching the ship while it was in the Smallbay and take a skin cell or hair or something away with it. We identified you from your own chromosomes. There was another agent outside; he must have used his effector on the bay controls when he monitored you starting to get ready to leave. I was supposed to… do whatever I could if you appeared. Kill you, capture you, disable the ship: anything. But they didn’t tell me until too late. They knew somebody might overhear if they warned me, but they must have started to get worried.”

“That was the noise you heard from her kitbag,” Horza told Yalson, “just before I zapped her.” He looked back at Balveda. “I got rid of the gear, by the way, Balveda. Dumped it all through the vactubes. Your bomb went off.”

Balveda seemed to sag a little further in her seat. He guessed that she had been hoping her gear was on board. At the very least she might have been hoping the bomb had still to be triggered and that, while she would die, she would not die in vain, or alone.

“Oh yes,” she said, looking down at the table, “the vactubes.”

“What about Kraiklyn?” Yalson asked.

“He’s dead,” Horza said. “I killed him.”

“Oh well,” Yalson tutted, and rapped her fingers on the table surface. “That’s that. I don’t know if you two really are mad or if you’re telling the truth; both possibilities are pretty awful.” She looked from Balveda to Horza, raising her eyebrows at the man and saying, “By the way, if you really are Horza, it’s a lot less pleasant to see you back than I thought it was going to be.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. She turned her head away from him.

“I still think the best thing to do is to head back for The Ends of Invention and lay the whole thing before the authorities.” The drone rose fractionally above the surface of the table and looked round at them all. Horza leant forward and tapped its casing. It faced him.

“Machine,” he said, “we’re going to Schar’s World. If you want to go back to the GSV I’ll gladly put you in a vactube and let you make your own way back. But you mention returning and getting a fair trial one more time and I’m going to blast your synthetic fucking brains out, understand?”

“How dare you speak to me like that!” the drone bellowed. “I’ll have you know I am an Accredited Free Construct, certified sentient under the Free Will Acts by the Greater Vavatch United Moral Standards Administration and with full citizenship of the Vavatch Heterocracy. I am near to paying off my Incurred Generation Debt, when I’ll be free to do exactly what I like, and have already been accepted for a degree course in applied paratheology at the University of—”

“Will you shut your goddamn… speaker and listen?” Horza shouted, breaking into the machine’s breathless monologue. “We’re not on Vavatch, and I don’t care how god-damn smart you are, or how many qualifications you’ve got. You’re on this ship and you do as I say. You want to get off? Get off now and float back to whatever’s left of your precious fucking Orbital. Stay, and you obey orders. Or get junked.”

“Those are my choices?”

“Yes. Use some of your accredited free will and decide right now.”

“I…” The drone rose from the table, then sank again. “Hmm,” it said. “Very well. I shall stay.”

“And obey all orders.”

“And obey all orders…”

“Good, at—”

“…within reason.”

“Machine,” Horza said, reaching for the plasma pistol.

“Oh good grief, man!” the drone exclaimed. “What do you want? A robot?” Its voice sneered. “I don’t have an Off button on my reasoning functions; I can’t choose not to have free will. I could quite easily swear to obey all orders regardless of the consequences; I could vow to sacrifice my life for you if you asked me to; but I’d be lying, so that I could live.

“I swear to be as obedient and faithful as any of your human crew… in fact as the most obedient and faithful of them. For pity’s sake, man, in the name of all reason, what more can you ask?”

Sneaky bastard, Horza thought. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that will just have to do. Now, can—”

“But I am obliged to serve immediate notice on you that under the terms of my Retrospective Construction Agreement, my Incurred Generation Debt Loan Agreement and my Employment Contract, your forcible removal of myself from my place of work makes you liable for the servicing of said debt until my return, as well as risking civil and criminal proceedings—”

“Fucking hell, drone,” Yalson interrupted. “Sure it wasn’t law you were going to study?”

“I take full responsibility, machine,” Horza told it. “Now, shut—”

“Well, I hope you’re properly insured,” the drone muttered.

“— up!”

“Horza?” Balveda said.

“Yes, Perosteck?” He turned to her with a sense of relief. Her eyes were glittering. She licked her top lip again, then looked back at the surface of the table, her head down. “What about me?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “it did cross my mind to blow you out a vactube…” He saw her tense. Yalson, too: she turned in her seat to face him, clenching her fists and opening her mouth. Horza went on, “…But you may be of some use yet, and… oh, call it sentiment.” He smiled. “You’ll have to behave, of course.”

Balveda looked up at him. There was hope in her eyes, but also the piteousness of those who don’t want to hope too soon. “You mean that, I hope,” she said quietly. Horza nodded.

“I mean it. I couldn’t possibly get rid of you anyway, before I find out how the hell you got off The Hand of God.”

Balveda relaxed, breathing deeply. When she laughed it was softly. Yalson was looking with a jaundiced expression at Horza and still rapping her fingers on the table. “Yalson,” Horza said, “I’d like you and Dorolow to take Balveda and… strip her. Take her suit and everything else off.” He was aware of them all looking at him. Balveda was arching her eyebrows with faked shock. He went on, “I want you to take the surgery equipment and run every sort of test you can on her once she’s naked to make sure she hasn’t got any skin pouches, implants or prosthetics; use the ultrasound and the X-ray gear and the NMR and anything else we’ve got. Once you’ve done that you can find something for her to wear. Put her suit in a vactube and dump it. Also any jewellery or other personal possessions of any sort or size, regardless of how innocent they may look.”

“You want her washed and anointed, put in a white robe and placed on a stone altar, too?” Yalson said acidly. Horza shook his head.

“I want her clean of anything, anything at all that could be used as a weapon or that could turn into one. The Culture’s latest gadgetry for the Special Circumstancers includes things called memoryforms; they might looked like a badge, or a medallion…” He smiled at Balveda, who nodded back wryly, “…or anything else. But do a certain something to them — touch them in the right place, make them wet, speak a certain word — and they become a communicator, a gun or a bomb. I don’t want to risk there being anything more dangerous than Ms Balveda herself on board.”

“What about when we get to Schar’s World?” Balveda said.

“We’ll give you some warm clothes. If you wrap up well, you’ll be all right. No suit, no weapons.”

“And the rest of us?” asked Aviger. “What are we supposed to do when you get to this place? Assuming they’ll let you in, which I doubt.”

“I’m not sure yet,” Horza said truthfully. “Maybe you’ll have to come with me. I’ll have to see what I can do about the ship’s fidelities. Possibly you’ll all be able to stay on board; perhaps you’ll all have to hit dirt with me. However, there are some other Changers there, people like myself but not working for the Idirans. They should be able to look after you if I’m to be gone for any amount of time. Of course,” he said, looking at Yalson, “if any of you want to come along with me, I’m sure that we can treat this as a normal operation in terms of share-outs and so forth. Once I’m finished with the CAT, those of you who so desire may want to take it over for yourselves, run it any way you like; sell it if you want; it’s up to you. At any rate, you’ll all be free to do as you wish, once I’ve accomplished my mission on Schar’s World — or done my best to, at least.”

Yalson had been looking at him, but now she turned away, shaking her head. Wubslin was looking at the deck. Aviger and Dorolow stared at each other. The drone was silent.

“Now,” Horza said, rising stiffly, “Yalson and Dorolow, if you wouldn’t mind seeing to Ms Balveda…” With a show of some reluctance, Yalson sighed and got up. Dorolow started to undo some of the restraining straps around the Culture agent’s body. “And do be very careful with her,” Horza continued. “Keep one person well away from her with the gun pointed in her direction the whole time, while the other does the work.”

Yalson muttered something under her breath and leaned to pick up the stun gun from the table. Horza turned to Aviger. “I think somebody should tell Neisin about all the excitement he’s missed, don’t you?” Aviger hesitated, then nodded.

“Yes, Kraik—” He stopped, spluttered, then said no more. He got up from his seat and went quickly down the corridor towards the cabins.

“I think I’ll open up the forward compartments and have a look at the laser, Kraiklyn, if that’s all right with you,” Wubslin said. “Oh, I mean Horza.” The engineer stood, frowning and scratching his head. Horza nodded. Wubslin found a clean undamaged beaker and took a cold drink from the dispenser, then went down the corridor through the accommodation section.

Dorolow and Yalson had freed Balveda. The tall, pale-skinned Culture woman stretched, closing her eyes and arching her neck. She ran a hand through her short red hair. Dorolow watched warily. Yalson held the stun gun. Balveda flexed her shoulders, then indicated she was ready.

“Right,” Yalson said, waving Balveda forward with the gun. “We’ll do this in my cabin.”

Horza stood up to let the three women by. As Balveda passed, her long, easy stride unencumbered by the light suit, he said, “How did you get off The Hand of God, Balveda?”

She stopped and said, “I killed the guard and then sat and waited, Horza. The GCU managed to take the cruiser intact. Eventually some nice soldier drones came and rescued me.” She shrugged.

“Unarmed, you killed an Idiran in full battle armour and toting a laser?” Horza said sceptically. Balveda shrugged again.

“Horza, I didn’t say it was easy.”

“What about Xoralundra?” Horza asked through a grin.

“Your old Idiran friend? Must have escaped. A few of them did. At any rate, he wasn’t among the dead or captured.”

Horza nodded and waved her by. Followed by Yalson and Dorolow, Perosteck Balveda went down the corridor to Yalson’s cabin. Horza looked at the drone sitting on the table.

“Think you can make yourself useful, machine?”

“I suppose, as you obviously intend to keep us all here and take us to this unattractive-sounding rockball on the edge of nowhere, I might as well do what I can to make the journey as safe as possible. I’ll help with the vessel’s maintenance, if you like. I would prefer, though, if you called me by my name, and not just by that word you manage to make sound like an expletive: ‘machine’. I am called Unaha-Closp. Is it asking too much for you to address me as such?”

“Why, certainly not, Unaha-Closp,” Horza said, trying to look and sound sufficiently bogus in his abjection. “I shall most assuredly ensure that I call you that in future.”

“It might,” the drone said, rising from the table to the level of Horza’s eyes, “seem amusing to you, but it matters to me. I am not just a computer, I am a drone. I am conscious and I have an individual identity. Therefore I have a name.”

“I told you I’d use it,” Horza said.

“Thank you. I shall go and see if your engineer needs any help inspecting the laser housing.” It floated to the door. Horza watched it go.

He was alone. He sat down and looked at the screen, down at the far end of the mess. The debris that had been Vavatch glowed with a barren glare; that vast cloud of matter was still visible. But it was cooling, dead and spinning away; becoming less real, more ghostly, less substantial all the time.

He sat back and closed his eyes. He would wait a while before going to sleep. He wanted to give the others time to think about what they had found out. They would be easier to read then; he would know if he was safe for the moment or whether he would have to watch them all. He also wanted to wait until Yalson and Dorolow had finished with Balveda. The Culture agent might be biding her time, now she thought she had longer to live, but she might still try something. He wanted to be awake in case she did. He still hadn’t decided whether to kill her now or not, but at least he, too, now had time to think.

The Clear Air Turbulence completed its last programmed course correction, swinging its nose towards the Glittercliff face; not in the precise direction of the Schar’s World star, but onto the general bearing.

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out towards the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world’s destruction.

Horza sat alone in the mess room a little longer, watching the remnants dissipate.

Light against the darkness, a fat torus of nothing, just debris. An entire world just wiped out. Not merely destroyed — the very first cut of the Grid energies would have been enough to do that — but obliterated, taken carefully, precisely, artistically apart; annihilation made into an aesthetic experience. The arrogant grace of it, the absolute-zero coldness of that sophisticated viciousness… it impressed almost as much as it appalled. Even he would admit to a certain reluctant admiration.

The Culture had not wasted its lesson to the Idirans and the rest of the galactic community. It had turned even that ghastly waste of effort and skill into a thing of beauty… But it was a message it would regret, Horza thought, as the hyper-light sped and the ordinary light crawled through the galaxy.

This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its advertisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from construction, death from life.

Vavatch would be more than its own monument; it would commemorate, too, the final, grisly manifestation of the Culture’s lethal idealism, the overdue acknowledgement that not only was it no better than any other society, it was much, much worse.

They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement (a memory of darkness swept through him, and he shivered)… But theirs was the ultimate mistake, the final error, and it would be their undoing.

Horza considered going to the bridge to switch the view on the screen to real space, and so see the Orbital intact again, as it had been a few weeks before when the real light the CAT was now travelling through had left the place. But he shook his head slowly, though there was nobody there to see, and watched the quiet screen at the far end of the disordered and deserted room instead.