The Hydrogen Sonata

Twenty (S -3)

The General Systems Vehicle Empiricist felt it was arriving in Gzilt at a bad time — a bad time that was meant to be the start of a (brief) good time, a momentous and celebrated time but which had somehow gone wrong. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.

The ship was about as big as standard Culture vessels ever got; a System-class that had beefed up over the decades and centuries for what had always seemed like sound operational reasons at the time until it had become one of the most impressively large, commodious and populated examples of the class that was already the most impressively large, commodious and populated the Culture possessed.

The design of the System-class made such self-augmentation easy; the ships had no single outer hull surrounding their hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures. Adding new, self-manufactured bits was so simple it was, for some ships at least, apparently, tantamount to compulsory, and it was only a sort of residual decorousness and a wish not to be seen as too self-indulgently ostentatious that prevented certain System-class vessels from going expansion-mad and growing to the size of planets, or at least moons. That sort of indulged obsessiveness was what simming and strong VR was for; you could convincingly imagine yourself being any ludicrous size without actually committing to such monomania in reality.

Doing away with a physical hull — or treating the exterior of every component as a hull, depending on how you looked at it — had been no great leap for GSVs. Ships thought of their multiple-layer field-complex enclosures as their true hulls anyway. That was where all the important stuff happened in relation to the outside: that was where the sensory fields were, where any stray impacts were absorbed, where concentric layers of shielding tuned to various parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum lurked, where holes could be opened to allow smaller units, modules and ships to enter and depart, and — especially in the case of the larger vessels — where atmospheric pressure was kept in, and sun-lines could be formed and controlled to provide light for any parkland carried on the top of the ship’s solid hull.

Frankly the material bit inside was just there to provide a sort of neat wrapping for all the truly internal bits and pieces like accommodation and social spaces.

Comfortably over two hundred kilometres long even by the most conservative of measurement regimes, fabulously, ellipsoidally rotund, dazzling with multiple sun-lines and tiny artificial stars providing illumination for motley steps and levels and layers of riotous vegetation — belonging, strictly speaking, on thousands of different worlds spread across the galaxy — boasting hundreds of contrasting landscapes from the most mathematically manicured to the most (seemingly) pristinely, savagely wild, all contained on slab-storeys of components generally kilometres high, each stratified within one of a dozen stacked atmospheric gradients, the ship’s cosseted internals were riddled, woven and saturated with domesticated, tamed and semi-wild life in hundreds of thousands of smaller enclosed habitats, while its buzzing, external, bewilderingly complex archi-geographic lines were made fuzzy, imprecisely seen by near-uncountable numbers of craft moving within that vast, elongated bubble of air — from smaller classes of GSV through other ships, modules, shuttles and aircraft all the way down to individual humans in float-harnesses, single drones and even smaller machines, as well as thousands of species of winged and lighter-than-air bio-creatures — the Empiricist was, in sum, home to hundreds of billions of animals and over thirteen billion humans and drones.

The people of the Culture, better than ninety-five per cent of them housed across the vast, distributed bucolic hinterland of the Orbitals, scattered throughout the civilised galaxy like a million glowing bracelets, were used to thinking of the GSVs as being their true mega-cities — albeit determinedly highly mobile, high-speed mega-cities — but GSVs like the Empiricist were on another level and of another order entirely; they held the populations of worlds, of entire inhabited stellar systems. Zyse, the Gzilt home planet and the giant GSV’s destination, held over three billion people. The whole of the Gzilt system added another twenty billion, in part-habiformed worlds and moons, microrbitals and other habitats. The Empiricist arriving was like another half a solar system of people being added, like another four mature, substantial planets’ worth of souls suddenly coming to visit.

Preceded by a ceremonial screen of smaller craft — including a couple of GSVs, each home to many millions — the gradually slowing Empiricist first met with a couple of Gzilt navy ships — effectively sweeping the two cruisers up with it as it proceeded resplendently past the rendezvous point — then, as it slowed still further, gradually attracted hundreds of civilian welcoming craft too.

Had not so many locals been Stored — and had all been well within the Gzilt body politic — it supposed it might have attracted thousands. The ship’s septet of semi-independent Minds became graciously, easily busy with welcoming signals and media requests.

The Empiricist approached and then inserted itself into a specially cleared orbital band high over Zyse. It had started slowing almost a day earlier; now it was down to the sort of velocity required for a stately orbit of the world every couple of hours, allowing plenty of time for people on the ground to look up and see it gliding smoothly, glitteringly, statuesquely overhead, and reducing the time it would take to ferry people to and from the planetary surface.

∞

xGSV Empiricist

oLOU Caconym

oGSV Contents May Differ

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oUe Mistake Not…

oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

oMSV Pressure Drop

oLSV You Call This Clean?

Arrived over Zyse. Good to be here, finally. Mostly. Been thinking; going to keep my two Delinquents, Headcrash and Xenocrat, close by. They are conveniently hereabouts, after all, and the political atmosphere locally does seem a little… odd. Well, poisonous, to be blunt. How was this allowed to develop?

∞

xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

Welcome. Yes, we might have wished for better. Everything’s in the signal streams, of course, but soaking in all the local comms and media traffic of the last twenty-few days is definitely recommended. Worth setting one Mind on that alone, if I may make so bold. My network of sats and such is at your disposal, though of course you may wish to emplace your own. I’d be as happy to advise as to leave you to your own devices.

Are you really so worried regarding the current situation to feel the Delinquents must remain as close guards? I think I speak for the group when I say we were hoping those and more might be available for further use in the current emergency while your own safety might be ensured with your doubtless many other assets.

∞

Let’s see how things develop over the next couple of days. For now I’d feel safer with the Delinquents as part of my general defensive mix. I did have to leave some offensive units behind to mop up at Loliscombana. I’m building to replace, but that’ll take time.

∞

xLOU Caconym

oMSV Pressure Drop

What’s that big fuck playing at? The next few days are the crucial ones; the only ones. We might need those ships now.

∞

It’s being cautious and protecting a pop of umpteen bill. When you carry around that sort of responsibility you can’t help but become ultra careful. Mostly these big ships pursue a no-risks-whatever policy; I’m mildly surprised it deigned to visit Gzilt at all given the recent excitements.

∞

That’s the trouble with ships that size; too big to risk, and also, therefore, to be effective. Terribly impressive, and if all the bios plonk down to Zyse and walk around they can surely make the place look busy for the first time in years, but so what? Couldn’t be more of a liability if it had hauled a train of Orbitals behind it and parked them in the local asteroid belt. Anyway, what does that leave us with? The Mistake Not… is about to hit Xown — again — and the Passing By…’s two Thugs are keeping remarkably quiet. Wasn’t one meant to be shadowing the Liseiden?

∞

Allegedly. Sending a private request for a public statement; we do kind of need a general update now the big-but-plugged gun has arrived… nope; the Passing By… wishes to remain reticent on the subject. Bet the new boy asks. Anyway, back to listening. Worshipful listening, as I don’t doubt it will be interpreted…

The reception was muted due to the recent death of the president, but was, nevertheless, still quite entirely splendid. The enormous central Receiving Hall of the parliament’s Upper Chamber had been trimmed everywhere in mourning red, the towering mirror panels reflecting a seeming infinitude of scarlet corridors leading in every horizontal direction.

“Place looks rather good like this,” Yegres said, nodding over his glass at the huge central scoop of red marking the covered chandelier cluster hanging from the centre of the space. “We should have lost presidents more often.”

“It’s a little late, though, isn’t it?” Banstegeyn replied.

“Everything is,” Yegres agreed. “Oh,” he said, catching sight of seven tall figures moving liquidly through the crowd on the main floor. “Oh well, here come the relations. I’d better leave you to your ceremonial solitariness.” He chucked back his drink, hitched up his long robes and stepped down from the dais.

The septame watched the arrow-shaped mass of avatars and their hangers-on move towards him, like something aimed. “Solitude,” he said, to himself rather than really to Yegres, who was too far away and submerged in the crowd of people behind. “Solitude, not solitariness.” Of course, he was careful not to move his lips, in case.

Banstegeyn greeted the seven tall, silver-skinned creatures with all the dignity and politeness he could muster. Solemnity, too, though really it was easy to be solemn; it was the dignity and politeness he was having problems with.

Having dreamt of Orpe on consecutive nights, he’d used the relevant implants to stop himself dreaming over the last two, and had slept well, but now he was starting to feel that he had only displaced the problem, for he had the annoying, irrational and even very slightly frightening feeling– even though he was entirely awake and apparently well rested — that Orpe was just out of sight, just beyond the corner of his eye. It was disconcerting, troubling.

He most certainly did not believe in ghosts or any such nonsense, but — when it happened, catching him out, when he thought he glimpsed her, or thought he’d just missed seeing her, a moment earlier, just as he turned his head or blinked — he felt as terrified as he imagined people must have felt in the old days, when they had been superstitious. He knew it was his own mind, his own brain, acting against him, betraying him, deliberately troubling him, but it felt like something other, something supernatural, uncanny.

On a few occasions over the last few days he’d wanted just to scream, for no good reason. Especially at formal ceremonial events when it would have been absolutely the worst, most shocking and disrespectful thing to do. So many aliens arriving, so many different forms and types of creature, so many in exo-suits or things like tiny spacecraft it was like welcoming the contents of a toy cupboard, scaled for giants. How were you supposed to keep a straight face? That was when he most wanted to do it: to laugh hysterically in their faces or scream and shout and swear and thrash about on the floor and tear his hair out…

But: just a few more days. A few more days and it would all be over. They could all go to the happy land of good and plenty and never need to bother with horrible, messy, painful real life again.

He couldn’t wait. It was the only thing keeping him together.

“Please,” he said, smiling too broadly as he half turned to indicate the way through the variously smiling, grinning, tight-faced dignitaries behind him to the scarcely smaller and even more sumptuous room where President Int’yom waited — enthroned, enrobed, befuddled. “This way, please. The president is impatient to meet you.”

“Thank you,” the leading avatar said. The seven looked identical: tall, straight, dressed plainly but elegantly and their expressions radiating a kind of severe serenity. At their rear, Ziborlun, the Culture avatar the court had become used to, looked small, plain and homely in comparison.

Just as Banstegeyn turned more fully, to walk ahead of the Culture avatars, he caught a glimpse of — but, no, of course, it wasn’t really her at all.

A civilian, she hadn’t been backed-up; one of those who believed life was lived all the more sweetly and more sensibly for knowing there was no second chance, while understanding, without ever really needing to think about it, that a society as sophisticated and mature as that of Gzilt made sudden accidental death almost unheard of anyway. So, it wasn’t her, and it would never be her.

And only three days to go anyway, he told himself again, so it didn’t really matter. He stumbled slightly as he walked in front of the silver creatures to the opening doors of the presidential chamber. He wondered who would have noticed.

Only three more days.

He walked into the hundreds-strong swirl of bizarrely accoutred aliens and milling, red-clad people thronging the presidential chamber.

“Septame, a word?” Marshal Chekwri said, touching him on one elbow to draw him slightly aside from the crowds surrounding the dais where the acting president was greeting the avatars.

“Of course, Chekwri, but I am busy.”

“As ever. However. Two things. First: the ships we had see off the Ronte reckon they’re heading for Vatrelles. I thought we might let that leak to our new allies the Liseiden.”

“What? Why?”

“Distraction. Something to fill the news, and, if they quarrel, then perhaps another reason to leave this squabbling reality behind, no? Reinforcement.”

“Yes, yes, all right. Is that all?”

“No. I did say two things. Some pleasant news.”

“Always welcome. What is it?” The marshal’s staffers and his own, headed by Solbli and Jevan, had created a space around them so they could talk with a degree of privacy.

Chekwri brought her mouth close to his ear. “We have a major asset in place somewhere it might come in useful.”

“Do we? That’s good. What, and where?”

“Where, is Xown. What, is the returned Churkun. It was off for a while there, thinking about Subliming early following the event at Ablate, but in the end it didn’t make the leap; wants to go with everybody else — isn’t that nice? — so reported to me, happily — always worth covering such possibilities in standing orders — and asked if it could be of use. So I sent it to Xown, because that was the last place the Culture ship and the absconded Ms Cossont seemed to be interested in.” The marshal drew back a little, winked at him. Winked! Had she done this before? Was this some new thing, some fresh loosening of behaviour and discipline ahead of the so-near-now Subliming? “The simulations backed me up, but it was my idea first. Always good to be proved right. Isn’t it, Septame?”

“Always,” he agreed.

“And I think this time we go in full force, gloves off, maximum strength, if called for, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes, whatever you think fit.”

“Splendid. So we have a fully equipped, committedly one-of-us combat-hardened battleship ready and waiting at Xown, and that is a very good, a particularly good thing, Septame. May I tell you why?”

“Yes, Chekwri, why don’t you tell me why?”

“Because it has just reported that something fast — both coming in quick and braking very hard indeed — has just about hauled to a stop at Xown, and it’s almost certainly going to be the Culture ship.”

Colonel Agansu, still undergoing treatments he had come to regard as meaning he was under repair — rather than representing anything as biological as healing — had a dilemma.

“Colonel, the regs are clear. You need to update your avatar down on Xown. It’s been plugging along there patiently keeping pace with the airship for nearly ten days but now there’s a distinct likelihood it’s going to be put in harm’s way and it needs to have every advantage we can give it.”

“I am aware of that, Captain,” Agansu said. “Thank you.”

The colonel had been badly injured in the battle at the Incast facility on the Bokri Orbital. The Culture creature — the ship’s avatar — had succeeded not only in destroying the combat arbite Uhtryn through the illegal use of anti-matter weaponry within an enclosed civilian space, but had then somehow turned his own weaponry against him, turning a large portion of its own body into a perfectly reflective dish that had bounced his laser pulse straight back at him, crippling both his suit and his body, sending him plunging down the elevator shaft with little or no AG left.

He could still hear his own screams, loud inside his helmet, as he fell, blinded, burning, baked, both legs and one arm shattered, into the shaft, to land with a terrible crushing crash on top of the already wrecked elevator car at the bottom. He’d blacked out then, or the suit helmet’s remaining medical functions had put him mercifully under, but he could still hear that raw, inhuman scream in his ears and feel the awful smacking thud of impact, cracking open the suit, splintering his bones and breaking his back.

The suit — its helmet — had saved him. Then the Uagren had, too: bringing him back on board, placing him in its medical facility, gently peeling away and removing the blackened, bubbled remains of the suit and slicing away the burned, roasted skin and flesh where it was beyond reusing before it had — coaxingly, almost lovingly — started to knit his bones, repair and regrow his torn, battered organs, and nurture where possible and replace where necessary his bruised, assaulted flesh.

It was a process that was still ongoing. Agansu was many days away from being physically whole again, and would still be largely dependent on the ship when the Subliming happened in three days’ time — assuming, of course, that it was still going to take place on schedule.

In its own way, though, even knowing that this body’s part in matters was over was itself a kind of comfort. It meant that — having given his all, having been so nearly killed in honourable combat — now he didn’t have to leave the healing comfort of the ship again, and could decide at the time whether to Sublime with the Uagren and its crew, or not. If not, then he would be left by himself in a medically enabled minor craft, to be delivered to whatever might be left of his regiment, or indeed his civilisation, after the Instigation and the great Enfolding.

But he might go, with everybody, after all. He was thinking of changing his mind, of Subliming despite his earlier decision and still-existing fears. Coming so close to death on Bokri — even while knowing that an earlier, backed-up version of him might be re-wakened somewhere — had been salutary, and had made him think again about his attitude to death, oblivion and the whole issue of Subliming. Also, he had in some way come to feel part of the Uagren, and at one with its crew. He liked the idea of Outloading with these already semi-virtualised people. Assuming, of course, that they felt the same way. He worried that he still seemed like an interloper to them; perhaps even a foreign body, an irritant. He was nervous about broaching the subject.

In the meantime, there was the issue of having to update the customised bio-plausible android which the ship had left inside the Girdlecity of Xown when it had set off in pursuit of the Culture ship, nearly ten days earlier. The Uagren was on its way back to Xown, but — unable to maintain the kind of speeds it had on that dash, due to engine field degradation — it was doing so at a comfortable cruise rather than a sprint, and would arrive at Xown a full day after the Culture vessel.

It could still transmit the colonel’s mind-state ahead and have this new, post-Bokri version integrated into the one that had been left behind, but Agansu had to admit he had been resisting the process, using as his excuse the idea that the longer they waited, the longer he would have to think about what had happened within the Incast facility and learn whatever lessons could be learned from the experience, before transmitting.

The truth was that he was reluctant to hand over to the android left behind on Xown because he was jealous; the android would become the new him, and it — not he — would have the next set of experiences. It would be the one, the version of him that would have the opportunity to engage with the enemy and defeat the Culture ship’s avatar. It did not seem fair; he wanted to be the victor; this version, the original, from-birth Cagad Agansu, colonel of the First, the Home System regiment, and not some quickly customised android formed from a blank the ship had been holding probably since it was first built.

He knew — of course he did — that the android represented a version of him, that it would think of itself as fully being him, but that was beside the point. The action would all happen away from him, and the person, the entity involved, would not be him; he would be lying here, still being carried towards whatever would happen in the Girdlecity, on Xown. Perhaps the experiences the android had could be re-integrated back into his own memory. That was possible, but it didn’t always work — it seemed to depend on how extreme and traumatic the experiences had been — but even then, he would always know that in a sense it hadn’t really been him there, at the front, at the tip of the spear.

“Colonel?” the captain said, talking to him across the virtual bridge of the ship, where he sat to one side of the arc of officers arranged around their welter of screens, read-outs and controls.

“Yes, Captain,” he said. “I think I’m ready. There are no more lessons to be drawn. Please carry out the procedure.”

The captain nodded to the data/comms officers. “Proceed.”

Agansu seemed to fade away for a moment, and was briefly aware of not being on any sort of virtual bridge at all, but being a broken body, still under repair, held deep in the bowels of the ship, as it read his mind, sorted and arranged the resulting data and encrypted it for transmission ahead to the android waiting on Xown.

“Welcome back,” the captain said, smiling, as though, Agansu felt, he was a lone bio who had needed to leave the bridge to obey a call of nature. “And to good news.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We have big guns at Xown,” the captain announced. “A capital ship, also reporting to Marshal Chekwri, so on our side no matter how narrowly that’s defined.” The captain smiled thinly. “And it’s already dealing with some of the shit the Culture craft left behind.”

The suite of materiel and general sensory assetry the Mistake Not… had left behind at Xown mostly reported back to a satellite which stowed to about the size of a human fist. Fully deployed, with finer-than-hair-thin tendrils extending tens of kilometres away from it in its geosynchronous orbit, it watched something big and probably military approaching Xown across the skein of space. It was also aware of every piece of free-floating hardware in the system being pinged with signals asking them to identify themselves. This was a bad sign.

It reported this to the also approaching but more distant Mistake Not… and was told to shut down to passive-minimum awareness. It did so, but it was still found, jolted with a tiny but abrupt gravity gradient that first illuminated it in passing and swept on, then returned, pulsed, and almost immediately plunged it into its own steep, sharp hole in space-time. Its last act was to destruct as chaotically and messily as possible, depriving any focused analytical equipment of the chance to determine much about it at all.

On Xown, scattered about the part of Girdlecity where the airship Equatorial 353 was moving slowly towards the place it had set off from five years earlier, dozens of tiny bits and pieces of Culture hardware started dropping out of the sky, falling to the floor or tumbling clicking and clacking through the vast piped spaces of the construction. Some burned, or fused, or just glowed, destructing as best they could. Some just had to accept deactivation and likely capture.

A very small number, where able, closed down, closed off or better still ejected all their conventionally discoverable hardware processing and shifted down to back-up bio or atomechanical systems. Even those were vulnerable, through basic triangulation on their last recorded position in the network, as recorded by the compromised components unable to wipe their memories in time, and most succumbed; snapped away by disloc, knocked out of the air with close-range effector weapons or frazzled in mid-flight as they tried to escape by pinpoint bursts of plasma fire like miniature daytime fireworks.

The airship Equatorial 353, home of the Last Party, had built up a following of several hundred people over the last few days as it and Gzilt society in general approached the culmination of their respective journeys; however, only a few people noticed any of this small-scale destructive activity, and even they dismissed it as just more random chaotic irrelevance, symptomatic of these final days.

One small device, which had looked like a four-winged insect from the start, suddenly realised that it was probably all that remained of the components the ship had left behind. It sat on the snout of the airship, perched clinging to a thin stanchion supporting a long, dangling, trailing banner, and watched through impersonated compound eyes as another component, a thumb-sized scout missile, plummeted from on high, falling minutely past the bulbous nose of the slowly advancing airship, unwinding a twisting thread of grey smoke as it fell, unseen by any human eye. It disappeared into the dark depths of the huge open-work tunnel beneath.

Some seconds later the giant airship bulged its way through the volume of air the little device had fallen through. The artificial insect detected a faint, disappearing trace-scent of the scout missile’s descent.

The insect considered its instructions in the event of such eventualities, waited for a time, then lifted off, buzzing away on a long falling curve, building in just enough erraticism into its course to look convincing as it headed for the nearest point of entry into the body of the airship.

“That’s not good,” Berdle said.

“What’s not good?” Cossont asked.

“Something big and powerful just rolled up at Xown and started blighting all my gear,” the avatar told her. They were sitting in the shuttle’s compact command space, watching the planet approach as they decelerated from the system edge.

“What gear?”

“The bits and pieces I left behind to keep an eye on whatever’s happening there.”

Cossont frowned at the avatar. “Do you leave stuff behind everywhere you’ve been?”

“Pretty much.” Berdle looked at her with an expression indistinguishable from genuine incomprehension. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Never mind. This big and powerful something; bigger and more powerful than you?”

“Definitely bigger.”

“We still going in?”

“Even less choice now.”

“We couldn’t just… call Ximenyr?” Cossont said. “Could we? You know; just say, Hi, we need them eyes you’ve got?”

Berdle smiled briefly. “I have been trying to contact the gentleman. I asked Mr QiRia’s mind-state if it would cooperate and it said it would, but Ximenyr’s been impossible to contact. A direct appeal to him, from Mr QiRia, ought to be our first course of action when we do gain access to him.”

“Oh. You might have told me.”

“I might.” Berdle agreed, looking unconcerned. “I would have, had we been successful.”

“Huh. Okay. So: this ship the same one as at Bokri?”

“No,” the avatar said. “Can’t be. Registering all different anyway. Battleship rather than battle-cruiser; I can outrun it, but that’s not much use when we both want to be in the same place at the same time.” Berdle shook his head. “Shit in a slather. Pretty much everything’s gone or going. I’m losing all my senses down there.”

“Think they’ll be putting their surveillance in, instead?”

“I suppose. Though, being Gzilt navy rather than special forces or anything, I bet their stuff isn’t as sneaky as my stuff.”

“What was the last you heard through all this sneaky stuff?”

“Ximenyr was still there on the airship, getting prepared for the latest bout of ceremonial partying. Apparently; that’s all according to the airship’s own channels. I don’t have direct access to him, and he hasn’t been heard of for at least seven days. I have — had — stuff inside the airship but nothing in the guy’s own quarters after he found that scout missile. Pretty sure he’s still there, but not certain. I’ve found some incidental recording of him still wearing the container round his neck, from the day after we visited him, so — at least initially — we didn’t spook him. Also, the whole layout of the airship’s been changing, since a couple of days after we were here before; they’ve created a big new space inside. And they’ve been bringing in a lot of extra tech, including new field projectors. And water; that thing must weigh a lot more than it used to, but they seem to have balanced it all out with extra AG. None of which would matter if we could see inside it properly, but we can’t. Plus now we’ve got competition, and they know where our attention’s been focused, if they didn’t before. Not to mention,” he said, turning to her, “there’s been a guy, walking or jogging ahead of the airship, since we left.”

“I thought there were various people doing that?”

“Oh, it’s collected lots of people keeping pace with it recently, in air-cars, travel-tube carriages, special trains and ground vehicles, plus there are people keeping pace with it on foot for half a day or so at a time, but there was only one guy who just kept it up all the way through. I had an insectile watching him the whole time and he just never stopped; he hardly even varied his pace. All he did was switch what level and which side he was on, and keep level with different parts of the airship, I suppose so he wasn’t too conspicuous. He’s got some sort of camo or adaptive clothing on that changes every day, but that didn’t throw the bug off; it was still the same guy, walking or jogging day and night.”

“Probably not human then.”

“Probably not human,” Berdle agreed. “Though of course you never know; there are some very odd humans.” He frowned at the screen and the giant red-brown, green and blue ball of Xown, as though the planet itself had been responsible for this upset. “Trouble is, he’s disappeared now, too.”

He awoke.

He was in a military medical facility aboard a regimental fleet ground liaison craft, flying within a subsidiary tunnel space of the Girdlecity of Xown. It was late afternoon on this part of Xown; five minutes off midnight, back on Zyse.

He was lying on a couch, blinking at the ceiling light panels. He was a customised bio-plausible android, waking after having had the latest version of his guest implanted.

He was Colonel Agansu, translated and transplanted into this fresh, tireless, highly capable and perfectly unharmed new body.

It made no difference.

He knew that he had been worried about having his consciousness duplicated in this way, but he had been a fool to torment himself with such concerns. Of course the original of him, lying being put back together and regrown in the bowels of the Uagren, would always think of itself as the “real” him — he accepted this without emotion — but he knew who he was, within this body, here, now, and that there was work to be done.

Knowing that there was another iteration of himself elsewhere was mildly comforting, like having another layer of protection wrapped around him, but made little real difference.

A screen on a flex-arm swung over to inspect him. A woman’s face looked at him from somewhere remote. The doctor’s gaze flicked to one side then the other, doubtless studying read-outs. Then she said, “Well, whoever you are, whatever it is they want you to do, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be to do it. Good luck and good Subliming, brother.”

Agansu swung out of the couch. The screen seemed to flinch, withdrawing towards the ceiling as he did so.

“Thank you,” he said.

He felt the aircraft settle on a solid surface; interfaced with the craft’s systems, he knew he would be three hundred and ten metres ahead, two hundred and twenty metres away laterally and zero metres vertically from the nose of the airship when he exited. He checked his camouflage clothing, got it to impersonate something civilian and nondescript.

He remembered days of jogging and walking, climbing steps and ramps, descending steps and ramps, in filtered daylight and lamplight and ghostly sat-light and no light, the airship filling his view ahead or a presence at his back or a steady shape at one side or the other or above him or through gratings beneath him as he paced. Sometimes fireworks, lasers and holographic images burst from, lanced out, or enveloped/preceded/trailed the airship, especially at night, and sometimes loud music could be heard playing. Floodlights and running lights lit it every night. Sometimes when he ran behind and above it he could smell food and fumes and detect the spoor of bio-drugs.

He recalled the feeling of being swaddled and protected, within the 7*Uagren, and remembered talking to the avatar of the Culture ship, and thinking that he had the creature and Vyr Cossont where he wanted them, at his mercy… then hurtling broken and screaming down the lift shaft, like a burned insect falling flaming down a tall chimney. He remembered lying broken and burned and taken apart within the ship again, then beginning to be made whole again, while he contemplated how close to death he had come and how the prospect of oblivion within the Subliming had started to seem less terrifying.

Two sets of memories had been formed at the same time, but this made no difference either.

The ground liaison craft carried little weaponry and was only able to equip him with a kin-ex side-arm, but that would not matter for too long. The android body had what was effectively a laser carbine embedded in each forearm, the beams exiting through a skin-disguised muzzle in the heel of each hand.

He jumped easily, seemingly lightly, from the lowered door of the stealth-black craft, then — as it closed itself, flipped over and powered off down the fifty-metre-diameter tunnel — he turned and jogged down a broad, cross-corridor of soaring lattice girders and overarching pipes that led directly to the giant basket-weave of tunnel where the Equatorial 353 moved. There was an area of open balcony deck ahead. The airship would be just about to pass it by the time he got there.

The 8*Churkun established contact.

~Colonel Agansu.

~In translation, yes.

~I am captain of the 8*Churkun. The marshal sends regards.

~Please thank the marshal.

~We have completed the scour of Culture devices from the immediate volume and beyond, though a vessel — I would guess the Culture ship that you encountered at Ospin — is approaching. It was slowing but is now re-accelerating. We are going to attempt to intercept or disrupt any attempt it makes to disloc materiel or personnel into or near the Girdlecity; however, we cannot be certain of success.

~It would help to know the intended location of any such attempted disloc, to help confirm the nature of enemy intentions, Agansu sent, approaching the great open balcony that gave out onto the tunnel which held the approaching airship.

~That is entirely compatible with our own intentions. We’ll let you know where any disloc was targeted, whether successful or not.

~Thank you.

There were people ahead. The spaces around the airship Equatorial 353 had been becoming more populated over the days he had been keeping pace with it. Ground vehicles rumbled slowly past ahead on a broad roadway; they were gaudy, booming with music. Across the gulf of the tunnel he could see a train, trundling, keeping pace, searchlights on it pointing back at the airship, flicking slowly off and on again as they passed behind supporting struts. A smaller airship, like a tiny white cloud made solid, appeared from a side tunnel and drew slowly ahead of the Equatorial 353, scattering clouds of sparkling, coloured dust which a rear-facing laser lit up in gyrating abstract patterns.

The skin of the Equatorial 353 exhibited a series of large moving images, as though projected onto its smooth curvature. There appeared to be seven or eight of these distorted displays covering the airship’s surface at any one time. Some of the photographs were stills, most moved, and they sometimes fused together to provide larger images. Some appeared only to make any sort of sense considering the airship as a whole, in other words imagining the form of the display on the other side of the craft. The most common themes appeared to be records of earlier art installations aboard the craft over the last few years, nature in the form of plants and animals, historical and presently existing forms of transport, and pornography.

~We carry four sixty-four-unit platoons of marine combat arbites, the 8*Churkun’s captain told him. ~They are at your disposal, Colonel. Shall I have my tactical engagements officer ready some or all of them for deployment?

~Please do.

He had to push through a small parade of people — dressed in motley, many dancing as they moved, some singing, some chanting — to get to the edge of the space where the balcony gave out onto the open tunnel of curving ribs and spiralling pipes. There he found the Equatorial 353, filling the monstrous tube like a comically slow shell in the biggest, least efficient gun ever made.

Then Colonel Agansu had a sudden, literal flash of memory, and remembered the magnified shadow of his own suited form being thrown out across the elevator shaft within the Incast facility on Bokri as the combat arbite Uhtryn, behind him, was dissolved in a pointillist spray of tiny, fierce anti-matter explosions, blasting a blindingly intense sleet of radiation past him, through him.

~How many of the combat arbites do you need, Colonel?

A chorus of beeps, trills, clangs and musical phrases — followed by some cheers and the start of a fireworks display from the top of the giant airship — announced that it was midnight on Zyse, and the Instigation was only two days away.

~All of them.