The Hydrogen Sonata

Twenty-two (S -2)

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?

This is all very sad. I especially regret that my own vessels were unable to help in time.

∞

xMSV Pressure Drop

I trust the lead ship of your “string” formation, the ROU Learned Response, has no thought of revenging the destruction of the Beats Working. Our comrade brought its end upon itself. The Liseiden are hardly to be commended, but their principal crime was not offing a semi-civilian craft of ours intent on making amends for earlier over-enthusiasm, but destroying the Ronte ships with all their crews. And even that they had an excuse for, miserable and legalistic though it may have been.

∞

xGSV Empiricist

Indeed. I think no immediate action need or should be taken against the Liseiden. Our long-term disapproval, and the implications that this will have for their reputation, might prove most effective. The ROU will continue to the combat volume to retrieve the Beats Working’s shuttle with the humans aboard, and check whether any other remains are recoverable, but will not pursue the Liseiden ships.

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

A sealed sub-packet that came with the Beats Working’s mind-state just popped. Seems it was so troubled by its own earlier actions that it’s requesting that it not be reactivated, save for second-party study, comparative or research purposes. Poor lame bastard doesn’t even want to be a ship again.

∞

xLOU Caconym

oMSV Pressure Drop

Told you. Five humans: too few.

∞

xLOU Caconym

Meanwhile, on Xown?… Reality calling Mistake Not…, yes; we’re talking about you.

∞

xUe Mistake Not…

Yes, hi. It’s all getting terribly interesting.

Colonel?

~Ma’am? Agansu replied. The signal-adjunct protocols indicated he was addressing Marshal Chekwri.

~This is Marshal Chekwri.

~I am aware. An honour.

~Your current status?

~I am walking alongside the airship Equatorial 353 awaiting confirmation from the Churkun regarding the disposition of its forces and that of the other side. Media reports indicate that those in charge of the airship have undertaken to open the vessel to the public sometime in the next few minutes. I intend to board then. Or before, should we find our adversaries are already aboard.

~Permit me awareness through your own senses.

~Of course.

The sensation of manipulating aspects of his sensorium was a new one for Agansu, and yet one which felt perfectly natural. He briefly marvelled at all the thought and careful design that must have gone into making it seem routine for something like himself — something which felt like a human — to delve into what was basically its own being and adjust the settings it found there so that a live link of what it was experiencing through its senses was now being sent to another person.

At the same time, Agansu was becoming aware of how many differences there were between his own, biological body and this one. With the possible exception of being considerably heavier than the bio version — despite being precisely the same volume — all the differences were positive.

How much more powerful, capable and sophisticated this new form was. How much more sensitive where it needed to be — his own bio-body held many augmentations and desirable amendments over the human-basic standard, yet in this new one, for example, he could see in much greater detail and over a far greater spread of the electro-magnetic spectrum than the old version was able to — yet how much less vulnerable it was where it didn’t require such sensitivity (this android body felt no pain at all; one’s motivation for avoiding harm was knowing that harm reduced one’s ability to function, while the indication that harm had been inflicted was no more than that — a sign; something to be noted, taken into account and acted upon, but no more).

~Thank you, the marshal sent.

There had been almost no delay between him agreeing to let the marshal see through his eyes and generally sense through his senses, him setting this up and her beginning to receive the data, and yet he had had time to take a look round inside himself as it were and start to appreciate all the differences between his bio-body and this one, and then to think about all this, all before the marshal had thanked him.

Agansu marvelled at how little time it had all taken. His bio-self would hardly have had time for one completed thought in that half-second or so.

~Right, Colonel, the marshal sent, ~we think the Culture people are trying to get to this Ximenyr guy, because of something he has or something he knows about this QiRia person. You have to stop them. That done, you get Ximenyr. Find out what he has, or knows. You may be as brusque as you like.

~I understand, ma’am, Agansu sent, as he looked about the crowds of chanting, singing, dancing people and gaudily painted, bannered and holo’d machines keeping pace with the giant airship.

~Sounds loud, Colonel.

~Yes ma’am.

He was aware of many different sound streams around him, principally dance music emanating from the various vehicles around him on the broad balcony roadway. More seemed to be joining the throng all the time.

~Kind of crowded there, too.

A burst of fireworks lit up the open-work tunnel around the nose of the Equatorial 353. Some set of automatic reactions built into the android he inhabited seemed to be reacting to the fireworks, clenching instinctively as it witnessed nearby mortars firing — nearby mortars which were not flagged as friendly — and their payloads — unguided, highly inaccurately aimed payloads — detonating. Bursts of light were followed by booms, thuds and crackles. A few echoes came back, but most of the sound was swallowed by the huge spaces of the Girdlecity and absorbed within the surrounding patchwork of musics.

Knowing the speed of sound in Xown’s atmosphere and the altitude here, he was able to tell exactly how far away he was from each exploding mortar shell.

~Yes, it is, ma’am. Quite crowded.

~Uh-huh. You know, if anything serious does kick off there, Colonel, you will need to limit civilian casualties as far as possible.

~I am aware of that, ma’am, Agansu sent, thinking how typical — and shameful — it was that a superior tried to cover themselves against any unfortunate outcome by re-stating something that was already entirely and properly covered in ambient standing orders and by military rules of engagement. At the same time, if he failed to do as he was required to do by those same superiors because, anxious to avoid collateral civilian damage, he pulled back from using the most destructive weaponry he might have been able to deploy, he’d be blamed for that, too. He had, thanks to her reputation, thought better of Marshal Chekwri, but obviously he’d been wrong to think her any different.

~Marshal, Colonel, the Churkun’s captain sent. ~Further on the current situation. We intercepted and re-disloc’d a relatively massive Displace by the Culture vessel and captured what is probably its principal auxiliary craft; however, it was unoccupied and unarmed and probably constituted a diversion. A number of further Displaces occurred almost immediately thereafter, centred on the volume immediately around the airship, but we were unable to intercept or disrupt them. Neither are we able to pin down their destinations further. We are confident they are not actually inside the ship due to the four-dimensional aspect of its construction. It is, effectively, shielded against disloc. This means that the other side must achieve entry to the airship by conventional means. As we have had sensors watching the craft for some time, and discerned no suspicious activity, we are confident that this has not thus far been achieved. Further, the full force of all four of this ships’ marine platoons are now available for disloc at instant notice on the colonel’s order.

~I see, Captain, Agansu sent. He might have said more, but there would be time later for pinning down the responsibility for the Churkun being unable to do more regarding the Culture ship’s Displaces. Now was not the time for that. ~So, our adversaries are here, but we don’t know where?

~Indeed, Colonel.

~In that case I suggest that you bring in all the marine arbite platoons immediately. Place some ahead of the ship, some behind — say half a platoon in each position — but most in a couple of concentric shells of arbites entirely surrounding the vessel, keeping within tens out to a hundred metres of it but distributed within the structure, with only a squad-level force stationed on the outside of the Girdlecity. Order all of them to keep pace with the airship. Have them stealthed as far as possible, or camo’d to resemble camera drones or other civilian devices.

At that moment, a woman danced out of the crowd of people around him and started trying to get him to dance with her. He shook his head and drew back his hands as she tried to grab them. She persisted, trying to again get hold of his hands, so he turned quickly and walked off, towards the wire parapet at the edge of the roadway, pushing between a couple of people, apologising as he went.

~Suggest we stagger their arrival, Colonel, the Churkun’s captain sent, ~or it’ll be kind of obvious, popping in that many; you’re liable to hear them as well as maybe see them. A second or two between each arrival ought to be okay.

~If you think so, Captain, Agansu replied as another flicker of mortar fire presaged yet more smokey, low-explosive detonations in the tunnel ahead of the airship.

~Captain, Marshal Chekwri sent, ~might I suggest you time more intense disloc bursts to coincide with barrages of fireworks?

~Good idea, ma’am.

Seconds later, Agansu heard a series of additional, dulled crackles sounding all around him, just as the next fusillade of fireworks detonated. He looked around and saw a couple more of what looked like media-cam platforms than had been there before. A few hazy disturbances in the air high over and ahead of the airship — easily missable by the normal human eye — were probably the marine arbites too, camouflaged.

He called up confirmation. Immediately, a picture began to build up inside his mind: a schematic of the Girdlecity around him, showing the tube that the airship Equatorial 353 moved through at its centre and all the structure around it, along with the positions of all the arbite marines popping into existence.

All that was missing from the picture was any sign of where his adversaries might be.

~Okay, Marshal Chekwri sent, ~I’m at a reception, with stuff that needs to be done. I’ll check in later. But let me know if anything dramatic happens, Captain, Colonel.

“You are fucking joking me. We’re where?”

“We’re in the stern ventral waste disposal semi-solids holding tank,” Berdle said through the suit. His voice in her ears sounded perfectly unconcerned. She couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see anything, basically, or touch anything solid.

Cossont was aware of floating in something thick and warm, in complete darkness at normal wavelengths. Her augmented eyes, working in unison with the combat suit’s sensors, were happy to relay the fact that the stuff she was surrounded by and floating within was just a little beneath normal Gzilt body core temperature.

“You have literally landed us in the fucking shit?” she said, trying not to sound panicked. Not being able to touch, see or really sense anything very much was, she told herself, worse than knowing what she was submerged within.

“It’s ideal,” Berdle told her. “This bit of the airship’s not shielded with 4D because, I imagine, it gets emptied rather than recycled. Very old-fashioned. Anyway, it means we were able to blat right in. Of course, it’s well sensored-up to look out for this sort of intrusion, but the clever bit was Displacing out an exactly similar volume just before dropping us in. Don’t think we troubled the header tank or the relief valves at all… or caused any blow-back anywhere for that matter. That might have been really messy.”

“Thank goodness for that. But, in other business, how the fuck do we get out?”

“Very easily.”

“Back to that later, but here’s another one; how the fuck do we get clean?”

“Also very easily. I’m switching you to sonar. Follow me. Swim.”

Cossont suddenly had a view to look at. It was like a drawing rather than a proper picture — everything was white, with fuzzy blue lines delineating edges and a sort of background green wash indicating surfaces.

She could, thankfully, see nothing of what actually surrounded her, but she could see a suited, streamlined version of Berdle a couple of metres away, turning away from her to swim towards the top of the large, cylindrical tank they were in. Beneath and to the side there were hints of tapered supports holding the tank, with further structure sketched in above and below showing where the decks were; these vanished into the distance. Cossont twisted, began to swim after Berdle.

She could feel her hands and limbs contacting semi-solids as she swam. It was like swimming through thick soup. She tried not to think about it. She was doing okay until she remembered the last time she and Berdle had been here on the airship, when they had been met by the strange person with the bowl-of-soup face.

Suddenly, she nearly threw up. Would have thrown up, but something inside her seemed to intervene at the last moment.

“Hey; calm,” Berdle said easily as he arrived at the top of the tank. “You’re triggering the suit’s medical unit.” He reached out to something on the under-surface that formed the ceiling.

“You be calm,” she told the avatar. “I’m swimming through shit here. You’re a fucking android, but this stuff is personal to us biologicals.”

“Fair enough. But… out in a trice,” Berdle said, both hands on a circular structure that Cossont sincerely hoped was a hatch. “One more sensor to fool… done. And a couple of little expander spheres to emplace, to take up our volume when we get out… There.” His arms twirled. The circular object swung up and away, hinging. She reached a surface she’d not even been aware was there, her top set of arms and her head suddenly in air. Or at least gas.

She was half a metre below the opened hatch. Berdle pulled himself up through it as easily as though they were in zero-G. Beside Cossont, as Berdle exited the tank, a tiny floating sphere expanded smoothly to over a metre in diameter, pressing against the surface of the tank and then down into the liquid.

Then a hand came down and pulled her up, though the suit made it feel like there was no weight or effort involved anyway. Having four arms probably helped too.

Once she was on her feet, the view switched. Conventional sight again. She was standing under a low, dark ceiling, on a dimly lit gantry facing Berdle — a spotless, conventionally clothed Berdle — across a side-hinged hatchway at their feet. She looked down. Her suit was also spotless, though it had gone back to looking like it was made of liquid mirror and soot again. She heard a tiny plopping noise in the tank beneath and then the suit snapped back to impersonating a normal-enough-looking pants and jacket combo.

“Oh,” she said, as Berdle lowered the hatch closed with his foot. Her voice sounded just as it had in the tank, which meant slightly odd. The suit’s helmet unit was still covering her face. This doubtless explained why she was being spared any smells she might not have cared for, and why she was still listening to her own voice as relayed through the suit’s earbuds.

Berdle nodded. “There you are; clean,” he said. “Happy now?” Though that was weird too, because his mouth didn’t move as she heard him say this.

“Ecstatic. Thanks.”

“Welcome. Suit-surface nanofields, Vyr,” the avatar said, turning and walking away from her towards a low doorway at the far end of the gantry, where it met a bulkhead. “Zero friction unsticky,” she heard him say. He shook his head. “Really.”

“Yeah,” Cossont said, following him. “Hey, I don’t want to disturb you but you were just starting to sound a bit dismissive there.”

Berdle was bent down, poking seemingly randomly at the area around the mechanical handle on the door, as though expecting to find a finger-sized keyhole. “Sorry.”

She joined him at the door. “Do you think there’s any field or area where I could make you feel small and a bit slow compared to me, Berdle? Ever?”

The avatar kept poking at the door with his finger. “Well, of course not,” he said patiently, his mouth still not moving. “I’m not a person, Vyr; I’m the walking, talking figurehead of a ship.” He squatted, staring at the door. “A Culture ship,” he added, sticking his finger out and poking again. “A Culture ship,” he muttered, “of some intellectual distinction and martial wherewithal… moreover.” His finger seemed to slip into the surface of the door as though it — or his finger — was a hologram.

Berdle withdrew his finger and stood up. Something clicked and the door swung open towards them. “Me first,” he said, conversationally. There was a pause. “Oh,” Berdle said. “They really have changed the place.”

“Well, we’ve changed the place a bit,” Ximenyr said, walking in front of the reporter arbite with its camera eyes. He was granting an exclusive interview, letting just one media representative in initially before the airship was opened up to everybody else. “The last eight days have been very busy with restructuring. Quite radical restructuring, involving pretty much everybody on board, which has been one reason for keeping people away, though mostly it’s just to make it a more exciting reveal.” He smiled at the arbite. Ximenyr was dressed in a plain white shift. Five of his fellow party-goers, similarly clad, accompanied him and the arbite along the dark, broad, gently downward-curving corridor. “Many of us have been doing our own personal restructuring too,” he said. Ximenyr waved one hand. “I had all sorts of weird shit going on with my body, but I’ve brought myself back to something much more standard, much more pure, even.”

“Do you regret your early excesses?” the arbite asked. It was taking instructions from a panel of bio-journalists spread across Xown and beyond. An AI was collating their queries and producing representative questions.

“Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”

“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?”

“No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts. And most of them had to remain dry, or produce only, well, sort of sweat-gland quantities of ejaculate. Though it was very nice ejaculate; sort of slightly oily perfume, and not in the least icky. Unless you thought about it, of course.”

“Do you feel you are a more serious artist now?”

“No. I have claimed to be an artist in the past, but really all I’ve ever been is a sort of glorified surgeon. I would like to think I’ve been artistic at times and shown artistic flare and so on, but I think that, especially now that we’re nearly at the end of things, it’s all right to abandon claims and pretensions and just relax a bit. Maybe I’ve inspired artistry and artisticness in others; that’d be a happy assessment.”

“What is the greatest number of people you’ve had sex with at the same time?”

“About forty-four, forty-five, forty-six? It was hard to be sure, in the heat of the moment. We tried to get to the maximum, of fifty-three, obviously, but even in effective zero-G, all oiled up and most people just sticking their hands in from the outside of this heaving mass of bodies, we just couldn’t make it. Too close together. And also, frankly, I think some people got too excited and interested in each other rather than going for this record with me, you know? Still, it was a lot of fun trying. On the other hand, it was an effort, too, you know? So much preparation and set-up and planning and briefing. Sex should be about spontaneous fun, don’t you think? Anyway, here we are.”

Their little party had arrived at the bottom of the gently bowed corridor, where it briefly levelled out and then started to rise again, heading aft. A small crowd of people — mostly dressed in plain white shifts like the one Ximenyr wore, so that they looked vaguely like they belonged to a religious order — were busy gathering up pieces of complicated-looking equipment and wrapping foam and loading everything onto a series of little flat-topped wheeled vehicles; one, fully loaded, was making its own way up the slope beyond, just about to disappear under the curve of ceiling.

Directly above where Ximenyr, his followers and the reporter arbite now stood there was a wide, new-looking circular staircase leading up to a cake-slice-shaped hole in the ceiling, where there was darkness punctured by a few tiny lights.

“Come on up,” Ximenyr said, leading the way. He started ascending the fan of stairway, followed by the arbite and the five people who’d accompanied them.

“Lights, please, and enhance,” Ximenyr said as he walked out into the space above. The reporter arbite arrived, looked up. The space above was a single enormous space which almost filled the remainder of the airship, right to the top. It was mostly dark, but lit by thousands of small lights pointing inwards at a vast, hazy, cylindrical space perhaps five hundred metres long and four hundred metres across. What looked like a small globular galaxy lay directly overhead, shining. The way the light moved within the space overhead suggested that it was full of water, or some sort of transparent liquid.

The space immediately round the stair-head held stacks and racks of lockers and shelves; beyond, shadows hid any walls. For all its obvious extent, the low ceiling, the darkness and the sensation of a great mass hanging immediately above made the place feel oddly oppressive.

Right in front of them there was one of six small, translucent spheres, each about three metres in diameter, all arranged around the very bottom of the vast container above and looking like hopelessly inadequate supports for its bulk. The dark walls around the vast lit space showed no other form of support, just the tiny floodlights.

“Now, we’re playing around with image a bit here,” Ximenyr said, reaching up and patting the surface of one of the small translucent spheres, “because you couldn’t see through that much of even the purest water, but this is a sort-of-true representation of what you’d see if the water wasn’t there.”

“So,” the arbite said, “what is this?”

“This is a giant water pool; you climb up those steps, get naked, stick one of these breathers in your gob…” Ximenyr picked up a stubby tube from one of the nearby shelves and waved it in front of his mouth, “…pass through one of these spheres and then float up to the bright lights up there at the top. That’s the ultimate party area; that’s like heaven, like our own little mini-Subliming. I mean, it’s just the usual stuff up there: comfy furniture, drink, drugs and lots of images and music — and dancing, and fucking, you’d imagine — but all a bit more quiet and contemplative, I guess, and all under this lovely clear dome under the top of the ship, and the whole point is this is the only way to get there, and — once you’re there — there’s no way out… but it doesn’t matter, because then comes the Subliming.” Ximenyr grinned at the arbite’s camera eyes. “This was my plan from the start of the Last Party and my original idea was to spend a year or years sort of milking myself for the fluids to go in here, but that proved impractical. Water it is. Perfumed water.” He winked at the arbite’s eye cameras.

“Fucking typical man,” Cossont muttered. “You know what he’s done in that water, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s art,” Berdle said, looking serious.

He and Cossont were holed up behind some lightweight furniture in a disused storage space one deck below the curving corridor Ximenyr and the reporter arbite had just walked down. They were watching the arbite’s feed along with who-knew-how-many people across Xown and the Gzilt domain; there was no shortage of fascinating screen to watch from all over the Gzilt hegemony in these end-days, for those with time to spare from their own preparations for the Subliming, but the Last Party had achieved a modest level of fame over the years, and allegedly many millions of people were watching.

“Lovely warm perfumed water,” Ximenyr was saying, “dosed with cutaneous-contact-hallucinogens, so it’ll be quite a crazy ride just getting to the top, and you can’t just float straight up either; there are baffles. So it’s more of a 3D maze, really.”

“So, is this symbolic of our struggle towards enlightenment, or a comment on our tortuous route to Subliming?”

Ximenyr shrugged. “Yeah, if you like. I just thought it’d be neat.”

“What about pressure?”

Ximenyr snapped his fingers. “Good question. You know, I didn’t think of that at first either? Just not of a practical or engineering turn of mind, I guess. But it’s much smarter than that; there are field projectors and AG units studded all around the cylinder; there are all these exotic matter particles or something dissolved into the water — whatever; don’t ask me the technical details — and you pass through these levels of pressure.” He slapped the taut-sounding surface of the nearest small sphere again. “The pressure is highest down here, but it’s only like being about eight metres down, not four hundred.”

“So, Ximenyr, anyone may join you in this?”

“Anyone but not everyone. We’ll have to be selective, let just a few people aboard at a time. We need to balance the extra weight of people coming in with our positive buoyancy… factor, or something. Anyway, there’s refuse we’ve got stored up and long-term supplies we’re not going to be using, all of which we’ll be dumping gradually as we take people on, so we’re going to have room for lots more people.” He looked up, nodding at the circular patch of bright lights directly overhead. “A few brave guys and gals are already up there, after doing the testing. Couple of panickers when it all took too long and they couldn’t work out the maze, but they’re fine by now and we’ve made it all a lot easier, with cheats and guidance available.” He smiled dazzlingly at the arbite’s camera eyes. “Should be a cool last ride.”

“That’s annoying,” Berdle said.

“Why?” Cossont asked. “Compared to the last tank of warm liquid we were in…”

“Yes, but if we have to get through that one, I’m going to show up. I’m too dense. If I support myself with AG or even field, they’ll spot me.”

Cossont was squatting beside him in her double-layer suit. She had watched the feed from the arbite on a wrist screen after deciding to risk rolling down the helmet parts of both suits. The air, she had been pleased to discover, smelled perfectly nice, though somehow you could sort of tell there had been construction work going on recently.

“Too dense? Like, too heavy?” she asked.

“Yes.” Berdle looked at Cossont, nodding at her suit. “And you’ll be, too. Those suits mass a lot more than they feel. Outer one especially. Inner might expand enough, though you might look a bit fat.”

Cossont shrugged. “I’m not my mother; I don’t care. More to the point, though, did you spot that our man doesn’t seem to have his necklace on any more?”

“Yes.” The avatar nodded. “That could be a problem.”

“We don’t even know how personal that stuff is for him,” Cossont said. “Might have just abandoned it; left it in a bedside cabinet or something. God, he might have thrown it out!”

“Maybe we should look back in the sewage tank,” Berdle suggested. Cossont looked at him. The avatar shrugged. “Just kidding; I checked it out as a matter of course when we were in there. Nothing.”

“Maybe it’s up at his… bedroom suite. Where we were when we saw him before,” Cossont suggested.

“That’s not there any more,” Berdle said. “I’ve found the remodelling plans in one of the airship’s data banks, such as they are. Whole volume was ripped out.” The avatar shook his head. “Their internal video monitoring is so patchy. There might be some record in here of what happened to all that stuff, but… found it. Ah.”

“Is that a good ‘Ah’?” Cossont asked.

“Partially,” Berdle told her. “All his personal effects are more or less where they were; in some sort of chest or locker… yes, a big sort of upright wheeled chest thing, in this ‘heaven’ space, at the top of the giant liquid tank.”

“Think Mr Q’s missing bits are there?”

“Maybe. Ximenyr’s… had a temporary cabin near the main medical suite for the last eight days,” Berdle reported, still quizzing the airship’s systems.

“Probably having all his extra cocks removed,” Cossont muttered.

Berdle shook his head. “Very suspicious AIs on this thing. I am having to do so much track-covering-up as I go along here… Yes, he had a locker or something of some sort there too. Going to check that first.”

Cossont started to stand up but he pulled her back down again. “I’ve an insectile on that particular job.”

“If they’re not there, think we’ll have to swim through the big tank?”

“Perhaps.”

“Can’t we just come in from the top?”

“No. It’s all shielded. It looks transparent up there, like a big glass dome, but it isn’t; it’s a two-way screen, metres thick. Once the ship’s back, in about twelve minutes, we have the option of blasting the shielding out of the way and Displacing in, but that’s a last resort; wasting 4D without causing horrendous collateral in the associate flat-space is almost impossible. In 4D you think all you’ve done is kick down a door, and imagine you’ve done it really neatly, minimum force, but then you look back into 3D and realise you’ve blown down the whole building. Sometimes the whole block.”

“Twelve minutes till the ship’s back?”

“Just under. Though how easy the Gzilt battleship will make it for me to do anything as delicate as targeting bits of 4D shielding in the first place is very much open to question.”

“Is there going to be a fight?”

“Yeah, could be,” Berdle said. “There goes our boy,” he added.

Cossont switched her wrist screen on again to see Ximenyr placing his white shift on a shelf and then walking into a vaginal-looking vertical aperture in one of the translucent spheres, a breather tube gripped in his mouth. He was quite naked. Only one penis, as far as Cossont could see. And he didn’t seem to have anything else with him that might have contained the pair of eyes.

Some sort of double liquid-lock had allowed Ximenyr to enter the sphere without any fluid spilling. There was a pause while he stood and fluid swirled up around him, then a sphincter valve at the top of the sphere opened and he rose quickly and easily up, out of the sphere and into the liquid-filled tank above.

“…And so,” the reporter arbite began to intone, gravely.

Cossont switched the sound off and just watched Ximenyr’s pale-looking body as he swam out at an angle into the darkness. The extra lights he’d asked for earlier, or the enhancement, had been switched off, so his shape disappeared into the watery shadows after barely half a minute; the vast tank was now an almost entirely dark megatonne presence hanging over the scene below. The view switched to the other party-goers taking off their own shifts and preparing to step naked into the translucent spheres to follow Ximenyr.

“The locker in the medical suite’s got nothing,” Berdle said quietly, shaking his head.

“Can I see?” she asked.

“Need a helmet to see properly,” the avatar told her. “Use the inner suit.” She brought the hood-helmet up. The view darkened, stabilised. A space like a small dark room, one wall edged all round with dim light; quilts on the floor, a small rug, rolled, and a couple of ancient-looking flat screens. “A pair of pants,” Berdle announced. “A single sock. The end of a roll of antiseptic splint-bandage patches. A tooth plectrum. A pair of time-to devices. That’s all.”

“Sure this isn’t art too?”

“Fairly certain.”

“We’re going to have to go up through that fucking tank, aren’t we?”

“Looking like it.”

Cossont redirected her attention to local reality in time to watch Berdle stand, and then saw what looked like his skin and flesh just falling away, under his clothes, exactly as if his flesh had turned to jelly. She felt her mouth open, had time to wonder if they were under attack from some sort of flesh-melting weapon, then noticed that the avatar was watching this whole process with nothing more than interest.

“Shedding excess weight,” Berdle said through her helmet.

He stood in a neatly circular pool of fleshy stuff, reduced to something not far off a skeleton, though one with what still looked like a covering of skin; clothes hanging off him, face like a skull, his knees the widest part of his legs and his elbows the widest part of his arms above his wire-thin wrists, wrinkled skin covering all exposed surfaces.

Then he filled slowly out again, as though his still-skin-covered bones — or what passed for bones — were themselves expanding. His skin became smooth again, his face filled out. Then his clothes fell away too, joining the thick puddle at his feet, all of which turned white and developed folds. The avatar — equipped with a perfectly respectable-looking penis, Cossont was pleased, in a general kind of way, to see — stooped and picked up the stuff that had recently been the equivalent of skin, flesh and muscle and which was now a convincing, if quite thick, white robe, which he let drop on from above. There was another one, still round his feet. He lifted it with one foot, handed it to her.

“Best I can do,” he said.

“No, no; bravo.”

“You’ll need to lose the outer suit; sorry.”

“That’s okay.” The suit split down the front and she stepped out of it. It collapsed and compressed into something that looked like a sort of flattened, elongated black crash helmet.

“We won’t have to go out the same way we came in, will we?” she asked.

Berdle shook his head. “Highly unlikely. Just the under-suit would keep you safe, anyway.”

The under-suit was changing too; expanding slightly, so that, in most places, its surface was about a centimetre or so out from her own skin. It was changing colour and texture too, coming to look convincingly like skin. A thin layer crept over her face, making her skin feel tight.

“That feels weird.”

“Yes, but you’re unrecognisable,” the avatar told her. Berdle’s face had changed too; he looked nothing like he had the last time they’d been here. Still good-looking, but less striking.

Cossont looked down at herself. “Weird,” she said. “I feel more naked now than I do when I’m naked.” She pulled the thick, heavy shift on over her head. It lay, weighty, on her shoulders. “There’s only one set of arm holes!”

Her lower arms had to hang down inside the pale shift.

“Those extra arms are the one thing about you it’s hard to disguise,” Berdle said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Yeah, I suppose it is better if we don’t advertise those.”

“Take the shift off as late as you can,” Berdle suggested.

“Okay. What about Mr Q?” Cossont asked, She recalled the avatar telling her while they’d still been on the Mistake Not… that QiRia’s mind-state had been put into the outer suit.

“I’ve already transferred him to the inner suit,” Berdle told her. “He’ll run slower but feel free to wake him up and talk to him if you want; he’s functional.”

“Maybe later.” Cossont used one foot, toeing the compacted outer suit. “This?”

“Stays here unless we need it, when it becomes a drone. Though it’ll blow its cover the instant it switches on its AG or a lift-field.” Berdle straightened, flexed, looked at her. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be. Let’s go.”

~We are quite certain there is no way they could already be aboard? Colonel Agansu asked the Churkun’s captain.

~We are reasonably certain, the captain replied. ~Not absolutely certain.

Agansu found this reply inadequate, but chose not to say anything. People were cheering all around him. He looked at the airship. The Equatorial 353 was displaying a countdown on its hull now; giant numbers three hundred metres high were clicking down the time to zero. There was half a minute to go.

Boarding gantries had swung out from various opened galleries and balconies dotted along the side of the airship, where crew could be seen opening doors and preparing to extend the gantries the last few metres that would let people use them to board. The gantries ended in complicated-looking up-and-over constructions that let them extend over the roadway parapet. Agansu watched the nearest one lower slowly towards the roadway surface, just ahead. A crew-person from the airship stood on the bottom step of the lowering gantry, holding a flimsy-looking gate closed, preparing to open it.

People were already jostling to get close to the steps. Agansu, simply massing much more than any human of his size, had no difficulty in shouldering people out of the way and making his way quickly to the front. He made suitably placatory gestures and muttered, “Excuse me,” several times, to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness, though he did hear some complaints. Soon he was walking at a slow stroll with the gated steps facing him and various people jostling him ineffectually at his sides and back.

~Colonel, I’m going to hand you over to our marine operations officer now, the captain sent. ~The Culture ship is returning and showing every indication it intends to pull to a stop here in about ten minutes, and my full attention is required to be focused on this development.

~I see, Agansu replied.

~Marine operations here, Colonel. I’ve had all units looking for anything remotely like a ship avatar and so far nothing’s registering. With this many units in a minimum double-shell configuration we’ve got really good triangulation and background grain size, so something ought to have shown up by now. I think the person or people you’re looking for is/are already aboard. Also, a closer inspection of the airship has identified a few spaces that are not fully shielded. Our surveillance specialist has started putting equipment in there, though it’s not proving easy to gain access to the rest of the vessel. Do you want us to look for a place to disloc you aboard?

~That will not be necessary, Agansu replied, looking across to the giant figures displayed on the airship’s skin. Just a few seconds left. He could see more galleries appearing on the side of the vessel as portions of the hull folded inwards. Doors were opening. ~I am about to board now, conventionally. Inform Marshal Chekwri.

~Acknowledged, sir. Will do. We’ve got insect-plausible surveillance devices entering the apertures opening in the airship, though the shielding is going to make keeping in touch with them difficult; we’ll need a lot to keep a comms chain open. Also, I’m just getting some civilian feed here from the airship; public channel. Seems this Ximenyr person is heading… for the top of the ship, but the only way in is through some big water tank, from the bottom.

~Thank you, Agansu sent, as the countdown shown on the side of the airship reached zero. A great ragged cheer went up all around and the crew-person on the steps just ahead of him opened the boarding gate.

Agansu stepped onto the gantry, feeling it dip under his weight. ~Continue to monitor me, he sent, ~and have arbites near, ready to lend close support.

~Sir.

He smiled at the crew-person.

Cossont was letting the shift drop from round her shoulders, with Berdle just behind her, sheltering her — “The lady is modest,” he’d told the people helping. Just then, right at the entrance to one of the translucent spheres, something happened to several of the lights shining into the giant tank. One in particular, off to the side, flared brightly, then seemed to go out entirely. Most of the rest kept on flickering as they dimmed.

Everybody in the space under the tank was looking at the lights. Cossont, forewarned by Berdle, was almost the only person not distracted. She stepped quickly out of the fallen shift and into the glutinously resisting field protecting the entrance to the sphere. Warm water swirled rapidly up round her almost immediately; she was raised off her feet a little as it reached her neck. She lifted her head, with the breather device clamped in her mouth and over her nose, as the waters closed over her and the valve above opened. She was borne up anyway, but kicked as well, catching a hazy, distorted glimpse of Berdle picking up her shift and walking across the space — beneath her, now — to deposit it on a shelf. The lights seemed to return to normal as the view below disappeared.

“The maze is fairly simple,” Berdle said through the suit’s earbuds as she bumped head-first into what felt like a ceiling of something elastic and giving, but strong. “The suit will tell you the direction to head in, using this voice. For now, turn ninety degrees to your left, follow the ceiling until you feel a downward current and then swim to your right.”

She did as she was told. She could see a couple of other people exiting from other spheres and striking out into the darkness: shadowy forms moving slowly in the darkness like smooth and liquid flames of flesh. She kept her lower set of arms tight against her body as she swam with the upper set until the other people had faded into the darkness, taking different routes. Then she pulled hard with all four arms, and kicked.

She felt a current heading down, and so turned right. “Straight up now,” the voice said, and she zoomed, passing into a strange gel-like region in the water where it seemed to grow thicker and press in against her from all sides. Through it, she felt the water pressure change a little, decreasing. The temperature was a little cooler, too. “Just entering the tank now,” Berdle told her. “Keep going. I’ll stay behind you.”

Prevented from speaking by the breather in her mouth, and unable to just think-send speech the way the avatar could, she found herself nodding, and wondered if the suit would transmit the action to Berdle.

She swam on up through the darkness, alone save for the sound of her own breathing and a few dim, wavering lights.

“Firearms are not permitted on board, sir,” the crew-person told Agansu. “We’re showing that you have a side-arm secreted by your lower back. That will have to be left here, with us.”

He had been stopped at the far end of the boarding gantry, on a sort of gallery set into the side of the airship. Two people, both large and dressed in standard-looking private security garb, barred his way. The woman who was talking was in front, her male colleague behind, standing in the open doorway in the hull of the Equatorial 353.

“I am a colonel in the Home System Regiment on a special assignment,” Agansu said quietly to the woman, aware of people starting to queue up behind him on the narrow gantry. “I appreciate and commend your alertness, however I do require entry to the vessel and I may well have need of my side-arm.”

~Marine operations officer, Agansu sent, ~are you reading all this?

~Yes, sir.

~Kindly bring one of your units to bear here, would you? Prepare to stun to temporary unconsciousness the two people blocking my way. Ten minutes should be sufficient. And have… four units ready to accompany me inside the vessel.

~Sir. Using AG inside the vessel is likely to make the units obvious to the airship’s systems.

~Have them switch to limbed locomotion on entry.

~Sir. Five units switched to your immediate control, now.

~I have them, Agansu confirmed, aware, in a virtual space behind his eyes, of exactly where the five marine arbites were in relation to him and his immediate surroundings.

“I’m afraid our orders make no allowance for that, sir, the security officer was telling him.

~Sir? the marine operations officer sent. ~Getting some data on a person of interest — the Cossont, Vyr, woman — entering the water tank in the airship, sir. Not a definite ID though; small bug, a distance off, and comms link unsteady.

“Hey!” somebody shouted in the queue behind Agansu. “Get moving!”

The security officer glanced behind him, then frowned at him. “Also, sir,” she said, “I’m just hearing from our colleagues on board that you are showing as very non-standard physiologically. There is a new policy in force aboard which means that if you’re an android or avatar you will need special permission to board.”

The man behind her had stepped back a pace and one hand had fallen to a holstered side-arm.

~Stun both, now.

~Sir.

The woman’s eyes closed. She collapsed, her knees giving way first so that she just seemed to sit heavily. Then she fell over backwards. The man behind performed the same actions a half-second later, as though in impersonation.

Agansu stepped over the two inert bodies and into the doorway; two marine arbites, visible more as disturbances in the air than as anything physical, darted in before him. They landed on the threshold with audible thumps, the air shimmering as they entered.

“Whoa!”

“Hey, what—?” voices said, inside.

~Stun, Agansu sent, as he looked within.

Two more bodies were folding into unconsciousness, a couple of metres inside the door. Agansu turned and looked back at the faces of the people crowding the boarding gantry. They were all looking either at the two fallen security guards outside, or at him. He smiled. The other two arbites made shimmering shapes in the air and landed in the doorway, slipping inside like shadows, only half seen.

~Close and lock the door, he said, over the channel to the arbite marines. The door swung to, then made clunking, locking noises. The space he was in now was perhaps twenty metres long but only five deep. Various fixtures and fittings, none of them relevant, save that there seemed to be a large number of white tabards or shifts, neatly wrapped and stacked. Another open doorway led into the rest of the ship.

~Show yourselves, please, Agansu said over the marines’ channel.

The four marine arbites dropped their camouflage, revealing them as stocky, metallic, vaguely humanoid shapes, crouched on pairs of zigzag legs. Each looked like something crayoned by a child then rendered in gun-metal. Their heads were long, flat, featureless.

~You will be arbites one through four, from lowest to highest serial number, Agansu told them. ~Understood?

~Understood, the arbites said in unison. They even sounded metallic.

She swam up through the layers and corridors of dark, warm water. The suit spoke to her in Berdle’s voice now and again, directing her — or Berdle spoke to her, it was hard to tell.

She looked about as she swam, and noticed that some of the tiny, dim lights visible through the fluid had been arranged so as to look like the most familiar constellations visible from Xown. This made the experience like swimming through space. She wondered if the avatar would feel this. She saw only one other person, briefly, some distance off, and below.

She and Berdle had joined the unhurried groups of people heading towards the access spheres from the rest of the airship near the start of the whole process; fewer than fifty people had preceded them into the giant tank. Most of the Last Party-goers would ascend before anybody from outside, though a few would hold back to help guide any stragglers, and there were some who just wanted to be last, or amongst the last, to make the journey.

The other person swam off, away from her, and disappeared. She felt oddly abandoned, almost sad. She hoped the other swimmer would make it to the top of the tank without incident. There were, Berdle had assured her, various viable routes to the top of the tank; she and the avatar were taking the shortest and quickest.

The skin-contact hallucinogens in the water were diluted to deliver a modest dose to somebody swimming completely naked, so they were having no discernible effect on her at all. Still, there was a dreaminess and unreality to the dark swim that — along with the relative simplicity of only having to think to the extent of following an instruction every half minute or so, and the pleasant glow of continuous but unstressed physical effort — allowed her mind to wander, allowed her to think.

What a strange way to be approaching the end of one’s life, she thought. Swimming through a vast tank of water and Scribe-knew-what towards a little artificial heaven with no escape, or only one. In search of a man’s discarded eyes. With the avatar of a Culture ship following, swimming. And one of her own people’s ships seemingly intent on stopping them. She had done a few strange things in her life, she supposed; why not leave one of the weirdest of all till last? To be topped only by the Subliming itself, she guessed.

Her breathing went on, like something apart from her, the whole sound-scape to her steady, paced exertion. Save that, the silence was entire, and she had started to understand something of QiRia’s slow-building obsession with immersion, both literal and in sound. Especially in sound; in the waves of compression that took and flowed through the body rather than — like light, like sight — stopping at the surface. She had done something similar in a minor key herself, she realised, every time she stepped into the hollowness of the elevenstring and let that resound around her, through her.

She became slowly aware that, looking straight up, there was a sort of sparkling grey haze ahead of her, spreading to all sides. Lights. Lots of tiny lights. They started to grow brighter, everywhere overhead.

“Not far now,” Berdle’s voice said.

“Mmm,” she heard herself say, mouth still clamped round the breather.

“There’s one last turn to your left as it is at present, then straight up,” Berdle said through the earbuds. “Take it easy there, okay? Slow down. I’ll catch up and we can surface together.”

She said, “Mmm,” again, and nodded. She wondered why, as an avatar, Berdle couldn’t just power his way up to join her, but maybe he was so weakened after having to lose so much mass this wasn’t possible, or he just wanted to keep looking plausibly human. The spread of lights was close enough now for her to see the hints of some sort of framework stretched across the whole expanse above her. She thought she could see somebody walking along some sort of pierced walkway, five metres or so overhead.

The two ships faced each other. The Gzilt ship displayed as what it truly looked like inside its nest of fields: a steely clutch of blades like a hundred fat broadswords compressed into a barbed and jagged arrowhead. The Culture vessel projected no image beyond the surface view of its outermost fields. They were absurdly close, by the normal standards of conflict at their technological level, which was generally carried out from real-space light seconds away at least.

To be squaring up to an opponent from just a few kilometres off was pretty preposterous; both ships could extend their field enclosures well beyond this distance. It was a statement of relatively peaceful intent in a way — full-scale conflict was obviously not intended by either, or one of them would long since have opened fire by now — but worrying at the same time, given that both vessels knew their missions and intentions were incompatible.

Relative to Xown, the Gzilt ship had remained almost perfectly stationary throughout, parked in real space directly above the Girdlecity, moving at the same slow strolling speed as the Equatorial 353, five hundred kilometres below. The Churkun watched the Culture ship draw to a stop, relative to it, still entirely in hyperspace. It was a minor feat of field management to be able to do this so far into the gravity well of a planet, but then, according to the intelligence the Churkun had received via Marshal Chekwri, this vessel — the Mistake Not…, a Culture ship of slightly worrying indeterminate class — had proved itself something of an adept at this sort of thing, at Bokri.

The Churkun was keeled into hyperspace, its field enclosure bulging into the fourth dimension like somebody pressing an empty bowl brim-deep into a bath. This let it keep its options open and certainly it was able to watch everything that was happening there, but staying in the Real meant it could react faster to anything happening in the Girdlecity without having to worry about dislocs being intercepted.

The crew of the Gzilt ship were gauging what they could of their potential adversary, which expressed within hyperspace as the usual gauzy-looking silvery ellipsoid. Its current field enclosure topography guaranteed certain physical maxima and strongly indicated some likely limitations. So it was, certainly, categorically, no more than five kilometres in length and a third of that in diameter, and — if it followed conventional Culture field disposition — genuinely, physically, likely to be about twelve hundred metres long and maybe four hundred in diameter. This would make the vessel about fifty per cent smaller by volume than the Churkun, though the difference was not so great that it guaranteed the Gzilt ship’s superiority.

~Good day, the Culture ship sent. ~I’m the Mistake Not… I believe you are the 8*Churkun.

~Correct. And I am its captain. Might we ask what brings you here?

~Got personnel inside the Girdlecity, though I suspect you’ve already guessed that.

~We are providing support for persons in there ourselves. Further to that, this is now a zone of operational interest, so we do have to ask you to leave.

~I see. You still have my module, I believe.

~We do. Though not actually aboard, as it were. Just in case. We’re inclined to treat it as captured hostile equipment, especially given the way it was delivered. Perhaps we might return it to you, following your departure, once this is no longer a zone of operational interest, which, we repeat, we must ask you to leave. Immediately.

~Ah, keep it if you like. Not that bothered. But I do need to stick around for a bit.

~It is not going to be possible to accommodate that desire. Obviously, we have no wish to engage in any hostilities with you, but, if it comes to it, we are entirely prepared to do just that if you do not leave, immediately.

~Be a bit close-range. Like nukes in a shed.

~Well, whatever it might take. This is though, sadly, not open for negotiation. We must ask you to leave immediately. One Culture ship has already met its end within Gzilt space in the last few hours. I assume you have heard of the fate of the Beats Working.

~Yes. It’s just the kind of thing us Culture ships natter about.

~It would be unfortunate in the extreme if it were not to remain the only casualty of such status hereabouts. Please leave. And do understand that this is not a reduction in the force of our demand that you do so — which remains in force and is, as of this statement, up to its fourth re-statement. It is, rather, an additional plea from those of us aboard with some respect for Culture vessels that you accede, without delay, to our demand before anything unfortunate occurs.

~Of course… not the only casualty, hereabouts, the plucky little Beats Working.

~Indeed, twelve Ronte ships were lost as well.

~With all hands. And then, in addition to that, there was that Z-R ship out at Ablate, twenty-two days ago.

~Really?

~Really. Kind of kicked off this whole rolling unpleasantness. Everything was spinning along pretty much fine until that bit of… well, how would one characterise it? Illegality? Cowardice? Piracy? Bullying to the point of murder? Just… murder?

~How little the differences between these terms mean to those subject to the act concerned. You ought to pay heed.

~Me that spotted it, too. I was rendezvousing with our Liseiden chums out at Ry when it happened. Caught the blink of that particular little atrocity.

~Remarkable. That is some distance away. Well spotted. Now, we really must ask you to leave, for the last time. There will be no more requests, only action. Our patience is, truly, exhausted.

~We could start by sort of tussling with fields. I did that out at Bokri, in Ospin, with your pal the Uagren. That was fun. Not something you get to do every day. Bestial, nearly, like locking horns. Actually, more like naked wrestling, all oiled up. I found it quite erotic, to tell the truth. Homo-erotic, I suppose, technically, as we’re all just ships together and we’re all the same gender: neutral, or hermaphrodite or whatever, don’t you think?

The Churkun’s reply was to attempt to wrap a burst field all around the smaller Culture ship, an element of its field enclosure pulsing suddenly, nearly instantly out like a loop of a sun’s magnetic field flicking, releasing a pulse of charged particles.

~Not even a nice try, shipfucker, the Culture ship sent, already dodged before the field bubble got anywhere near it. ~And now, watch this.

It flickered, shimmering in hyperspace as it fell, powering the trivial distance from where it had been, down the curve of the planet’s gravity well, to the Girdlecity. Then it disappeared.

The first sign of alarm had been the warbling of a siren in the distance as he and the arbites had progressed along a broad, downward-slanting corridor. He hadn’t noticed at first as he was busy trying to re-establish contact with the ship.

~Marine operations officer? he sent, then waited.

A few civilians walked in the distance. Many were dressed in white shifts similar to those he had seen earlier.

~Captain?

Some more white-clad civilians appeared from an elevator, just ahead; they stopped and stared when they saw Agansu and the disturbance in the air caused by the arbites’ camouflage; effectively invisible to the naked eye from as little as ten metres away, the machines weren’t fooling anybody this close, not when they moved. Even the blind would know they were there; the machines were marching carefully out of step and treading as delicately as they were able, but there was still a noticeable vibration shuddering along the wide floor of the corridor.

~Captain? Still no answer. ~Communications officer?

~Communication with the ship is not possible within this shielded environment, Arbite One told him.

~We have no link to other assets aboard? he asked.

~None at present, the arbite replied.

“Hey!” somebody shouted behind them. “Stop! On the floor, now!”

Agansu turned round to see a helmeted security person, armed with what was probably a stun rifle, running down the corridor towards them. ~Stun, he said to One.

The security guard staggered but didn’t collapse.

~Stunning ineffective, Arbite One said.

The guard dropped to one knee and raised the gun.

Light flared, the guard’s head flicked backwards and the figure collapsed.

~Weapon aimed, action taken, Arbite One sent, when Agansu looked at it. ~Standing orders.

Now people were screaming; the group at the open elevator were crowding back in. In the direction they had been heading, those who had been walking in front of them were stationary, looking back.

Lights — red, situated every fifteen metres along the corner the walls made with the ceiling — started to flash. Another siren had joined the first.

~I think, to put it in the vernacular idiom, our cover is blown, Agansu told the marine arbites. ~Resume full capacity including AG and field.

The arbites seemed to collapse in on themselves, compacting to the size of bulky backpacks, and hovering.

Agansu thought his own AG on. It was as though an invisible seat rose beneath him, bringing his legs up as he lay back. He had flown like this before in training and simulations; a familiar-feeling virtual glove-control seemed to fill his hand. He held the kin-ex side-arm in the other hand.

~Follow me, he sent to the four arbites. He raced down the corridor, a metre and a half off the floor, feet first. This was the luge configuration; others preferred the toboggan, though Agansu had always thought such head-first antics both intrinsically more dangerous and a little showy.

The arbites flew in a horizontal square formation around him. They rose very close to the ceiling as they tore over the crowd of people they’d been following earlier, passing overhead without incident, though he heard somebody screaming. They had all dropped to the floor anyway. The piercing sound of the scream dopplered oddly as they swept past above, still following the downward curve of the corridor.

Seconds later, some distance ahead, he could see a crowd of white-clad people clustered around a broad circular staircase leading upwards.

~Insect-plausible device ahead reports person of interest passed this way, up steps ahead, into tank, earlier, Arbite One sent.

There were hundreds there; the steps were packed with people dressed in white.

~Deploy there, he sent. ~Make some noise now; get those people out of the way. Laser area denial bursts too, civilian warning grade.

The two lead arbites deployed tiny blast grenades, producing sudden flickers of light twenty metres in front of the crowd of people. The noise was very loud indeed. More light strobed, turning the whole scene ahead into a bright flare. People dropped, covered their ears, their eyes.

~Make for the aperture, he sent, spotting the large triangular piercing in the ceiling where the steps led.

The two leading arbites zoomed, disappeared. More flashes of light. ~Weapon aimed, action taken, he heard again as he curved up and through to land on the deck above.

It was generally dark. People were scattering. Two guards lay dead, faces gone, stun guns at their sides. This was a dark, very large space, almost entirely filled with a vast tank that looked like water; lights pointed inwards from every side around the enormous space. His enhanced senses mapped out what could be mapped out. One of the insect-plausible devices registered as nearby.

~olonel? somebody sent. The signal protocols were missing. ~Colonel Agansu? It was the marine operations officer.

~Here, beneath this large tank, Agansu replied.

~We’re having some problems with the Culture ship supporting… The voice crackled, disappeared, came back on another crackle. ~ersons of interest would appear to be up inside… It was gone again.

~Units present undergoing effector attack, internal, airship own, Arbite One reported. ~Defending actions deployed.

Agansu was experiencing some problems of his own: the view was hazing over.

~Insect-plau— Arbite Three began.

~Hostile insect-plausible device attached to Arbite Three, Arbite One sent.

Something was glowing brightly on the upper surface of the arbite nearest the triangular hole in the floor.

~Hostile insect-plausible device attached to Arbite Three, Arbite Two confirmed.

~Our insect-plausible device immediately external reports hostile device app— There was a flash outside, where the stairs led down. ~Our insect-plausible device destroyed, Arbite One reported. ~Hostile device approaching registering as knife missile or similar.

~Marine operations officer! Agansu sent. ~Reinforcements, immediately! Use any means—

Something punched through the floor, beneath Arbite One, spearing it and throwing it upwards to impact against the underside of the giant transparent tank. The glowing thing on the top surface of Arbite Three detonated at the same moment, blinding.

~Destroy the tank! Agansu sent, raising the kin-ex gun. He was able to fire once before he was blown off his feet by the blast from the erupted arbite.

~Destroy tank.

~Destroy tank, the two remaining arbites replied, and began firing upwards and around the walls, filling the darkness with insane, stuttering, flares of light.

She was treading water, revolving slowly and looking down between her slow, weed-waving legs, trying to see Berdle, when he said, “On second thoughts, just get to the surface. I’ll join you shortly.”

“Mmm,” she said, and, after a quick look round, struck out.

“Wrong way, turn about,” the suit told her in Berdle’s voice.

She stopped. This was the way she’d been heading, wasn’t it? Could the suit have got it wrong?

“Wrong way, turn about,” the suit repeated.

“Hnnh,” she said, then realised she had been twisting round while she’d been looking down to see the avatar. That was why she’d taken the wrong direction initially.

“You’re heading the wrong way,” Berdle told her. “There’s some sort of emergency down there; just turn round, get out as quickly as you can. I’ll be there very shortly.”

She did a forward roll, started back the way she’d come. “Mmm,” she said again, swimming hard now. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable, suit or no suit.

Something flickered deep below, as though from right at the bottom of the tank. Something very bright. She knew she had seen light that white and intense recently. Her stomach lurched like she’d been punched. She got to where she’d been treading water moments earlier. The light flickered again, brighter still, seeming to reflect off the distant sides of the vast tank.

“Swim up fast now!” Berdle shouted.

She was already kicking out as hard as she could when it felt like the whole tank shuddered.

The first kin-ex round from his pistol had hit the lower surface of the great transparent tank and caused a single great torus of white to flash away from the point of impact. Then he’d been knocked off his feet despite the best efforts of the android body to stay upright. Further blindingly bright flashes filled the space as he struggled to kneel, firing upwards. The air shook like jelly around him.

~… onel! the marine operations officer was screaming at him.

~Unit Four destroyed by enemy action, Arbite Two sent.

The tank burst. It burst raggedly, in many different places; parts and levels of it seeming to stay where they were while other sections tore and fell and the released waters came crashing, hurtling down onto the space beneath. He threw himself to the floor. ~Hold where you are! he was able to send to the remaining arbite before the waters slammed into his back.

Light burst out everywhere below. A series of pulses shivered through the water and through her as Cossont kicked for the silvery, light-flecked surface above.

She had grasped the lowest step of a small ladder extending from the surface-level walkway above and was just starting to pull herself up when the water began to fall away around her. She spat the breather away and yelled, “Berdle?” as she hauled herself up and out, needing all four arms to pull her own weight and resist the sucking drag of the descending water. A great roaring noise seemed to come partly from below and partly from above, sounding more like a powerful wind than water. The sound from above rose swiftly to a shriek.

Somebody — small, female, wearing a plain dark tunic — was running along the walkway towards her. The water beneath the dripping walkway, no longer lit by the bright pulses of light from below, was five metres down now, swirling in different directions, thrashing like something alive, and lowering everywhere, leaving behind an entire dripping web of walkways a hundred metres across, suspended on swaying chains from a dark ceiling just a couple of metres above, where panels were being torn away and sent spinning, whirling downwards.

“Still making upward progress,” Berdle said calmly through the suit’s earbuds. “Relatively and… now absolutely.”

The girl running towards Cossont looked shocked, her mouth hanging open as she glanced over the side. “You all right?” she asked as she knelt by Cossont, having to raise her voice over the screaming wind.

Something burst from the surface of the waters, ten metres beneath, and rose towards them. It was vaguely human-shaped, but too big to be Berdle.

“What the fuck?” the girl said.

The whole airship seemed to shudder; the girl reached out to grab hold of a stanchion. The figure rising from the still falling waters — fifteen metres down now - rotated a little. It was Berdle, holding a naked man, supporting him with his own feet and an arm under his chest.

“Reckoned the time for a stealthy approach was gone,” Cossont heard the avatar say as he landed beside her and the girl. “Barely had the AG to rescue this poor fellow.” The man he was holding had wide, terrified-looking eyes. He didn’t have a breather device in his mouth; he was coughing a lot. Berdle lowered him to the deck and the man clung to it, coughing up water. The girl patted his back.

“Good day,” Berdle said to her, loudly, then held a hand out to Cossont. “Shall we?”

Cossont got to her feet. “What’s happ—?”

The whole fabric of the airship shuddered once more. Beneath, where the waters roared, fifty metres down, two explosions burst from the swirling waves.

“Time to run!” Berdle said, turning and sprinting off along the walkway for a distant patch of light. “Follow me!”

She raced off after him, vaulting the naked, coughing man and hammering down the walkway behind the avatar. Thin pillars of cerise light flicked into existence, splashing fire from the ceiling. One lanced through the walkway a metre behind Berdle’s flying feet; she jumped the resulting fist-sized hole.

“One right turn at the next junction, steps up dead ahead,” she heard his voice tell her. “I’ll join you momentarily.”

Then the avatar put out a hand, caught hold of one of the walkway’s supporting chains and was lifted off his feet and spun round, just as another pink bolt pierced the walkway immediately ahead of him. He dropped over the side of the walkway, at first falling, then curving away through the darkness and the everywhere roar of water. Light glittered again inside the tank as two shapes rose twisting though the air beneath, filling the space with hair-thin shining filaments.

She put her head down, pounded along the wildly swinging gantry, skidded round the corner at the junction and saw a short flight of steps leading up through the ceiling.

The storm of air howling down through the hole in the ceiling made it almost impossible to make any headway. She needed all four arms to pull herself upwards on the chain bannister rails, and all the strength in her own legs and the suit’s to force her way up the metal steps. Small pieces of debris came hurtling down from above and hit her shoulders or bounced off her head, hurting her even through the thin covering of suit-helmet.

“Ow! Fuck!” she said, though the scream of air tearing around her was so loud she couldn’t actually hear anything else.

She made the deck above, threw herself onto the soft, carpeted floor under subdued lighting and rolled away from the torrent of air being sucked howling into the emptying cavern beneath. Around her — in what looked like a very large, complicated, low-ceilinged room — terrified-looking people were staring wide-eyed at her over the top of luxuriously sculpted pieces of pale furniture. A man and a woman were sitting on a nearby couch, feet braced against the floor, causing rumples in the carpet, their fingers clawing into the soft material of the cushions they sat on. The couch itself was jerking and sliding across the floor, towards the hole. The woman closed her eyes. The man opened his mouth in what was probably a scream but there was too much other noise to tell.

Cossont used all four hands to claw her way across the floor. Something white came whirling towards her; she ducked instinctively as a fat square pillow bounced over her and disappeared into the maelstrom around the aperture in the floor. Where it had come from, twenty metres away, part of the floor gave way and a set of couches and chairs holding maybe a half dozen people disappeared, sucked downwards into the darkness.

“Berdle?” she yelled. But she didn’t even know if he’d be able to hear her — she couldn’t hear herself.

The first problem was getting all the bits and pieces out of the way, so there would be room for itself.

Actually, who was it kidding? The first problem was all about not blowing up the world, or at the very least not annihilating both itself, fifty horizontal kilometres of Girdlecity, who-knew-how-many lives locally and immediately, and then an additional who-knew-how-sizable number over a significant proportion of the rest of the planet with the resulting fireball, blast front, secondary debris impact events and all the resulting ancillary fire, tertiary impact and ground-shock effects.

Another fucking day at the office, the ship thought, putting all such thoughts to one side and cascade-checking all the available variables, before just doing it.

There were fourteen craft and over eighty individuals in the fifteen hundred metres of tunnel which started one hundred metres behind the stern of the Equatorial 353. The first task was Displacing them safely. Or at least quickly. The quickly mattered more than the safely, and one of the larger craft, containing nine or ten people, picked up rather more relative velocity at the far end of the Displace than the Mistake Not… would have liked, sending the flier flicking forward by a couple of extra metres per second as it bounced in. That might mean broken limbs if the occupants weren’t restrained, but that was the worst of it; everything else transitioned relatively smoothly.

The space was clear. The ship went for it, jumping across into real space in a single vast snap, as precisely aligned as possible in the circumstances and the time available, its enclosure fields shrunk, sucked, wrapped as tight as they would go about itself, leaving it with maybe fifty metres all around it between the outermost of those tightly compressed fields and the nearest bit of Girdlecity solidity. There was an important part of the whole process that depended on something called — only slightly misleadingly — the singularity-expansor transfer component. The ship finessed that as well as it could, but this time its own safety — not to mention the safety of the Girdlecity, millions of people, the planet, etc. — trumped technical perfection, so the expansion ended up being relatively rough and ready, and undeniably abrupt.

The ship blew into existence almost explosion-fast, creating a vast pulse of air that tore out through the fortunately dispersed structure of the open-work tunnel and the surrounding architecture of the Girdlecity, bowling people over, sending nearby aircraft tumbling, shattering antique windows and denting cladding panels for hundreds of metres about it.

Messy, the Mistake Not… would be entirely prepared to concede, but never mind. In the end it had worked and it was where it had wanted to be; in the same huge basket-weave tunnel as the airship Equatorial 353, just a hundred metres behind it.

~What idiocy is this? the captain of the Churkun sent.

~A fitting idiocy, the ship replied. ~I fit. You won’t. And if I need to I can put my enclosure right around the airship from here, so I suggest you leave me be. Out.

The blast of air seemed to have relented a little, if only because more floor panels had given way, providing additional routes for the air to escape through. The two people on the couch that had been slipping towards the hole in the floor had scrambled up and over the back of it, crawling away; the couch itself had stopped moving.

“Berdle!” Cossont screamed. No reply. It was still bedlam but at least now she could hear herself. She saw another stairway, spiralling upwards ten metres away, behind the nearest semi-circle of chairs. She got onto one knee, heaved herself upright and leaned into the still-furious gale, forcing herself forward, straining to see any more debris coming her way.

Another shudder ran through the whole airship, sending her flying. She heard herself yelp as she fell, being blown backwards, caught in the lacerating torrent of air; she dropped to the floor and held on again, cursing.

Agansu pushed himself up against the pummelling force of the water, finally getting to all fours. The android body was gauging, calibrating, allowing for the vast pressing weight surging across it. It could still function, and its AG should still be effective. Walls burst, the floor gave way in a variety of places nearby, letting in a little more light, allowing the surging fall of water to escape.

The remaining arbite reported when Agansu pinged it.

~Holding approximately steady in downward course of water, it told him.

~Attempt to rise, he told it. ~Head for the top of the tank. I shall too.

The suit let him stand, unsteady, shuddering, in the torrent. Agansu saw two broken-looking bodies being swept past, naked.

He activated the AG, lifted off the floor, and began to make his way, quivering, battered from all sides, up through the chaotic swirl of the descending column of water.

He and the remaining arbite burst from the surface of the water into a great dark space more than sixty metres high and hundreds across, buffeted by swirling winds.

High above, just beneath a randomly pierced ceiling, a rig of metalwork gantries hung suspended. Some figures moved up there.

~Avatar-android identified, the arbite told him as they rose, accelerating, together.

~Fire, destroy it, he told the arbite.

Violet bolts seared through the air, sparking explosions from the ceiling; sparks and pieces of glowing debris fell towards them. Two figures were running, overhead.

~Target employing visual camouflage fields, the arbite reported, still firing as they rose. Next thing, the leading figure — a composite haze of images, like a stacked pack of ghosts — fell or threw itself from the gantry and came whirling down through the turmoil of air and falling debris towards them, light glittering from it.

The colonel realised suddenly, only at this point, that he had lost the kin-ex side-arm. He had no idea exactly when or where. This was upsetting. The android body had its pair of forearm-mounted lasers — but he doubted they would prove especially effective after what had happened at Bokri. The arbite fired at the falling figure, seeming to hit it. Agansu raised his arms, aiming at the other running figure, then, in a single staggering impact and a wash of white, was hit by something, and sent tumbling.

He was aware of falling, somersaulting. He steadied himself, or the suit did. He didn’t know. When he was floating in mid-air, he looked around and could see nothing of the last arbite or the figure that had dropped from the gantry. Below, in the great swirl of water and dashing, chaotic waves, there were the fading remains of what might have been two large splashes on the dark waters.

~Arbite, report, he said.

“Comms internal only,” the android body told him. Agansu felt groggy. And odd: strange, unbalanced. He looked at his right arm, which was not there. He stared. The arm ended at about midway on the upper part. The stump was still smoking.

~Arbite… marine oper— he started to say, still unsure regarding what had happened.

“Comms internal only,” the android body repeated.

“Yes, of course,” Agansu said, looking inside himself to monitor the body’s operational state. Severely compromised. AI substrate intact, obviously: AG, conventional locomotion and one arm and one laser left.

~Upwards, he thought, and ascended through the bruising cataract of air.

“Ximenyr? Where’s Ximenyr?” she yelled, crouched down by the frightened-looking man in front of her He was clad in one of the dark tunics, and holding grimly on to a desk as the air rushed past. This level, one up, looked like the foyer of some exclusive hotel. Getting up here had been a little easier than her last ascent as the storm of air gradually lessened. It was still fierce enough.

“Where’s Ximenyr?” she shouted again over the roaring. The man just shook his head.

She turned away, muttered, “Suit, any idea?”

“Interrogating local systems,” the suit said, still in Berdle’s voice. “Mr Ximenyr’s suite is this way; please follow.”

The suit seemed to raise itself. It faced a broad, well-lit corridor. She walked with the suit, then started to jog through the noticeably thinner air. “Switching to supplemental oxygen supply, ten per cent,” the suit announced. She felt something connect delicately with her nostrils; a cool draught hit the skin there.

“Still trying Berdle?” she asked the suit.

“Constantly,” it told her, in his voice. “Here,” the suit said, drawing them both to a stop at a double doorway. “Open?” it asked.

“Yes!”

“Opening,” the suit said, and the doors slid apart.

Oh shit, the ship thought to itself.

The Mistake Not… had lost contact with all of its devices on and in the airship, including its own avatar. It was busily scattering new surveillance stuff all over the place now, as fast as it could, but it might already be too late.

The airship Equatorial 353 was riding as high as it could go, tearing its upper surfaces to shreds along the giant grater that was the ceiling of the huge open tunnel, shedding panels and pieces of equipment as it ground slowly to a stop, all the while dropping what looked like megatonnes of water from its lower reaches: whole falls, giant cascades of water were issuing from its sides, while further sheets and folds of water fell straight down from its ventral line, taking bulkhead panels and entire sections of hull with them, falling, spinning slowly away in the colossal squall of rain. The airship ground to a stop, trapped against the ceiling of the tunnel. Water continued to gush from its lower hull.

Crushed, broken bodies littered the network of pipes, girders and structure beneath the stricken craft. Not all were dead; the ship Displaced what medical support drone and life-saving equipment it had to those still able to be saved.

There were a lot of drone-like military devices floating about the place — over two hundred and forty of them. They were making a nuisance of themselves; sixty-four had already tried attacking its outermost bump-field with X-ray lasers — though exactly why and with what hope of success, the ship was unable to work out; maybe they’d all gone mad — plus all of them now seemed to be working themselves up to attack it again with some other piece of seed-shootery nonsense, so, once it had despatched all its medical teams, it targeted all of the enemy drones, disabling each with a pinpoint granule of plasma fire and instantly — even before they could explode properly — wrapping them individually in Displace fields and swatting them into hyperspace, directed roughly towards where the Churkun was — it assumed they were its.

There might be more of these aggravations inside the airship, it supposed. It still couldn’t see within the vessel properly and its devices were taking their time getting inside.

Fuck this, the Mistake Not… decided, and sliced a tiny cone, less than a couple of metres deep and the same across, off the very stern of the airship with a millimetrically flourished ZPE/b-edged destabiliser field. The cone fell away in a cloud of sparkling grey. No bodies sliced in half, which was good, but there was still 4D shielding ahead. The ship cut again; three metres this time, still with no casualties, or result.

The zero-point energy/brane edging component seemed be handling the 4D shielding well; much less blow-back than it had been led to expect from the simulations. The Mistake Not… was growing more confident using the weapon. This time it cut twenty metres off the stern of the crippled airship and held the resulting hull section in a maniple field, lowering the conic section to the soaking, pooled floor of the tunnel, trying to avoid laying it on any of the bodies.

Finally.

It was past the shielding. It could see into the interior of the airship. It could already tell there were a lot more dead and dying bodies inside, though no more annoying drone military.

~Berdle? Anybody? it asked.

Ximenyr’s suite or not, the man himself wasn’t there.

“No persons present,” the suit told her.

She looked around. Some sort of sitting or reception room. The place looked banal, in a spacious, luxurious, understated sort of way. Quite different from the sumptuous, over-dressed surroundings she and Berdle had found The Master of the Revels in the last time they’d been in the airship.

“What about that… chest, thing, Berdle mentioned?” she asked.

She moved towards another set of double doors. The lights flickered in the suite, seeming almost to fail, then recovering.

“Item fitting description in adjacent cabin, facing,” the suit said helpfully just before it opened the doors for her.

Still nobody about. One giant octagonal bed; many curtained alcoves, some holding items of furniture. In one stood the big upright chest Berdle had talked about earlier.

It was about as tall as she was and maybe a metre wide and deep when closed. It had a small wheel at each corner and stood hinged open to about ninety degrees. Clothes on a rail filled most of one side; the other side was all drawers.

She opened the top drawer, going up on tiptoe to see inside. The little cylinder lay on a piece of soft, folded material along with the rest of the bits and pieces that had been on the necklace they’d seen ten days earlier.

She stared at it, picked it up.

Behind their little window of thick crystal, the pair of sea-green orbs that had looked like berries seemed to stare back at her.

“Anomalous pres—” the suit began.

Then two things happened.

She was struck — kicked, it felt like — in the back, very hard, though somehow she and the suit managed to stay standing. At the same time something burst brightly, pink and white, off the drawer-front immediately before her, about level with the middle of her chest.

She was still thinking about turning round, wondering what had happened, when she realised that whatever light had burst against the drawer-front must have come straight through her to get there.

Smoke drifted up from the exit wound in her chest. She could smell roasted meat over the cold, sharp sensation of the oxygen.

“—ence detect…” the suit said, as more, individually slightly lighter kicks struck her all over her back and rear. This time she was thrown against the drawers of the chest, and the whole thing nearly tipped over. Then it bounced off the bulkhead behind and she was thrown back again, turning woozily round as she did so — the little trails of smoke made pretty spirals in the relatively still air — before she started to slide downwards. The ruined, ragged back of the suit went stuttering down the set of drawer handles, jolting her as she slumped to the deck.

A one-armed figure was standing in the doorway looking at her, just lowering his one good arm.

“Ship… re… establish — blish — lish — ish — shh…” the suit whispered to her, and sighed to quietness. The faint draft of oxygen at her nostrils faded.

Then the one-armed figure in the doorway lit up brilliantly all down one side, from foot to scalp, and was thrown bodily, hard against the door jamb, pieces flying off it as it rebounded, lit up from the other side now, disintegrating.

What was left, reduced to something like a too-thin, charred, one-armed skeleton, fell forwards, hitting the deck at about the same time as she did.