The ship itself, though much slowed for its erratic transit of the system, hadn’t paused as it passed Bokri. It had already taken a wild, almost jagged route through the cloud of habitats and dataversities, pinging from one to another like a ball down a nail-board, just to confuse anybody following; having got Cossont and the others to their destination, and feeling fairly sure that it had indeed shaken off any pursuing craft, it raced off to continue its eccentric join-the-dots loop through the system.
It had promised to be back within the hour; that ought to be long enough.
“Still not getting anything?” Cossont asked the avatar.
Berdle shook his head. “Pinging away merrily,” he said quietly, “but nothing’s answering.”
The avatar and the various pieces of gear the ship had Displaced into and around the facility were trying to locate the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside it by sending out signals it might respond to, assuming it possessed any normal Culture processing. The Mistake Not… had tried to contact the Warm, Considering — the ship believed to have helped QiRia encode his mind-state within the cube — to get whatever technical details about the device it could, but the other ship had yet to reply. From what it could gather, nobody willing to tell even knew where the Warm, Considering was.
“Why exactly are we here?” the android Parinherm asked, looking round the pleasantly wide, softly carpeted and very slightly curving corridor they’d found on exiting the lift. The corridor’s white-with-a-hint-of-blue walls glowed very gently with the fake daylight of a lightly overcast day and were covered in thin grooves, some of which indicated doorways with hermetic-quality shut-lines.
“You are here to protect Ms Cossont,” the ship’s avatar explained, also looking round. “She is here because she is looking for something.”
“May I help?” the android asked brightly. Like Cossont and Berdle, it wore well-cut if nondescript civilian clothes. Cossont wore a thick necklace of what looked like brushed silver.
“Just be prepared to step in to protect Ms Cossont,” Berdle told it patiently, “in case I am unable to.”
Parinherm stared at the avatar. “You are remarkably opaque to my senses,” he remarked. “What are you?”
“An avatar, Parinherm,” Berdle said, smiling. “Surely you guessed that?”
“Yes,” Parinherm said, nodding. “Good to have it confirmed. Would this be a joint Culture–Gzilt scenario?”
Berdle nodded. “Feel free to treat it as such.”
“And I,” Cossont said, “am a human. With a low boredom threshold. I’m almost starting to regret leaving Pyan back on the ship.” She spread all four arms. “Can we… do something?”
Berdle nodded. “We’re going to have to,” it said. “There’s nothing coming back.” He smiled at Cossont. “This will require you to make an official request to locate and retrieve your property from the facility.”
“Yippee. Do I have to fill out a form?”
“You have to submit a formal application five days in advance,” Berdle told her.
She stared at him. “Five days? I assume you have some clever—”
“The formal application was emplaced two seconds ago,” the avatar told her. “Suitably, if illegally, back-dated.” Berdle bowed. “Please follow me,” he said, turning on his heel.
“Ms Cossont,” the Executive Recoupments Officer said, coming to stand before them. He nodded at her companions, bowed to her. The waiting area was extensive, pale, lush with potted plants, filled with the sound of water trilling in fountains and pools and dotted with very comfortable seating. Cossont lounged in what she trusted was a suitably proprietorial fashion, upper arms spread, her lower set concealed by her formal jacket, legs crossed, a small shoulder bag lying on her lap. Berdle and the android had chosen to remain standing, looking slowly about all the time. “May we offer you a beverage?”
“No, thank you.”
“I wasn’t even aware there were any arrivals today,” the Incast officer said, glancing at a projected screen hanging in mid-air down and to one side of his straight-ahead sight-line.
“Ms Cossont arrived by private craft,” Berdle said smoothly.
“Ah, I see,” the officer said. “And you’ve come in from…?” he continued, looking at Cossont, who was listening on her earbud as Berdle said,“Please, let me,” to her at the same time as he said, to the officer, “Ms Cossont’s application to retrieve her property is in order, I take it?”
The officer was dressed in vaguely ecclesiastic-looking pale robes. He looked from Cossont’s stony expression to Berdle’s agreeably open one. He checked his screen, one hand moving and his eyes flicking. “… Yes, yes, it’s all in order.” He smiled emptily at Berdle. “The object has been located and is being retrieved as we speak.”
“Splendid,” Berdle said quietly.
The officer looked back to Cossont. “We usually ask our clients if there is a particular reason for them wishing to recoup an object.”
“Again, allow me,” Berdle said to Cossont as he said, “How commendable,” to the Incast officer. “What is the most common reason given?”
“Ah,” the officer said, distracted again. “Sadly, due to client confidentiality strictures, we are unable to share that information.”
“What a terrible pity,” Berdle said, looking sympathetic. He put one hand gently on the officer’s forearm and said, “I am sure then that you will fully understand that Ms Cossont has equally valid reasons for being unable to share with you her reasons for being unable to share with you the information that you seek and request. I trust I am not mistaken in proceeding on the assumption that this request is of a non-compulsory, voluntary opt-in nature?”
The Executive Recoupments Officer looked like he was processing this. After a moment he said, “Well, indeed.” He glanced at his screen. “Excuse me; the requested object is in transit.” He smiled at the unresponsive Cossont. “I’ll fetch it. One moment.” He turned and walked back to the curved sweep of desks where they’d found him earlier, sitting with his feet up, listening to music.
Berdle watched him go, then turned back to Cossont, who raised her eyebrows.
“All going smoothly,” Berdle told her through the earbud.
Parinherm was staring intently at a water feature ten metres away. The feature’s central fountain closed down suddenly, collapsing with a sort of relaxed decorum; the watery tinkling sounds filling the reception and waiting space quietened very slightly.
~Parinherm… Berdle sent.
The android turned to look at the ship’s avatar. ~Just testing, he replied.
~I trust the test has been completed to your satisfaction.
~It has.
~Then, if you’d be so kind…
~Certainly.
The fountain burst into life again, leaping higher into the air than it had before and causing some water to go splashing over the edge of the pool and onto the carpet.
~Oops.
The fountain settled back to normal.
The Executive Recoupments Officer returned holding a white half-metre cube. “Here we are,” he said, presenting it to Cossont with a bow.
“Thank you,” she told him, glancing at Berdle, who came forward and accepted the box as Cossont rose to her feet.
“Ms Cossont herself will need to open the…” the officer said, as Cossont opened the box, looked inside and lifted out a silver-grey cube.
“Also, the storage container remains our…” the officer said, as Berdle handed the white box back to the officer and Cossont slipped the cube into her shoulder bag.
“Thank you for your help,” Berdle told the officer. “We’ll be on our way.”
“My pleasure,” the Executive Recoupments Officer said, as the three walked towards the elevators.
“We still have two-thirds of an hour before the ship returns,” Berdle said through Cossont’s earbud as they stepped into the lift. “I thought we might leave the facility and find a hostelry of some sort on the lak
e shore, to wait there.”
Cossont nodded as the doors closed.
The car started its descent, then its soft lighting seemed to flicker delicately. It drew smoothly to a stop, settling, finally, with what Cossont heard as a single click and the two non-humans present both heard as three distinct snicking noises. A background susurrus Cossont had hardly noticed consciously ceased, suddenly.
The android and the avatar exchanged looks.
“Ah-hah!” Parinherm said, with a smile.
“This is,” Berdle said aloud, and then seemed to think about what it was, “un-promising,” he concluded.
~Is that you? he was asking the android at the same time.
~Facility mainframe / material systems / motile systems / general elevator control suite / basement-to-mid-section shaft complex / core-central / faults / fault notification / fault confirmation / fault over-ride / safe fault work-arounds…?
~Yes, all that. Please leave that to me. You’re getting in the way. And stop trying to remove the block on the car’s external AV feed; I did that nearly a quarter of a second ago.
~Very well. What may I do?
~Please remain/be on full alert within the immediate physical environment with particular regard to extraneous anomalous audible and general vibration signals, extending your sensor/effector abilities no further than the elevator car’s and the shaft’s own monitoring and activation circuits. I’ll continue monitoring and trying to affect further afield.
~My on-board expert systems precedents set indicates strongly we might be in a definitional pre-attack phase and so close to the point at which some sort of physical measure may become advisable.
~Agreed. Currently eliminating all chances this could be happenstance before taking any irretrievably physical action.
~We should warn/prepare Ms Cossont.
~Also agreed. I am in the process of interrupting her.
“‘Un-promis—’?” Cossont was saying as Berdle talked over her, saying,
“Strong likelihood this is hostile. I’m activating your eSuit and neck-helmet. Please do not be alarmed and remember to put all your weight first on one foot and then the other.”
“‘—ing’?” Cossont finished, as something happened all over her body.
Her underwear consisted of a millimetre-thin body suit which only left her feet, hands and head uncovered. The ship had insisted she wear it, and that they perform a drill before she left to see what would happen if it deployed. Before her eyes, even before she’d put it on, the eSuit had grown an extra set of arms as easily as though it was a big complicated balloon the ship was blowing up, and these had been the last bits to unstick themselves and inflate.
As it had during the practice on the ship, the suit puffed up a little all over, while the thick hems at ankles and wrists unrolled, the suit quickly covering all her hands and fingers in thin gloves and slipping between her feet and shoes in turn as she did as she’d been told and performed a side-to-side stepping motion to allow this to happen; what felt like thin bootees now enveloped her feet.
The thick necklace had unrolled at the same time, extending quickly downward to bond with the collar of the suit while blossoming and closing round her head before shrinking back again to rest lightly on her scalp and most of her face, leaving her eyes, nostrils and lips free under small bulges in the material; the bulges over her eyes were transparent. The first thing she did was tear off the restrictive formal jacket, freeing her lower set of arms. She got tangled in the strap of the shoulder bag, finally setting it securely back in place over her head.
~The problem is located in the primary shaft control node, Berdle told Parinherm. ~It is under continual and dynamic effector load from apparatus it is beyond the abilities of our local assets to counter. I am sending a missile component to the location to attempt some sort of intervention.
~A missile? Are we escalating to—?
~Your pardon. Missile as in, for example, scout missile. Decimetre-scale, field-powered, non-expendable.
One hundred metres away horizontally from the arrested lift and fifty metres higher, within a service space in a suspended ceiling over a dark, unoccupied lecture theatre, a stubby cylinder the size of a fat pen jerked into motion. It lifted and stabbed forward, flourishing an angstrom-fine cutting field that sank into and peeled back the thin metal covering of an air duct.
The missile was one of three Displaced into the spherical Incast facility by the Mistake Not…, along with various other bits and pieces of potentially useful equipment, almost all of which were rapidly redeploying to suit the current situation.
The missile slipped into the duct and accelerated hard, within metres achieving speeds which caused a wave of expansion and compression to travel down the ducting with it, making the duct’s metal creak and its supports groan. Razor-sharp grilles inside the ducting, stationed every few tens of metres to stop animal pests using the ducts as runs, were despatched in field-sliced showers of glittering shards, barely slowing the device at all.
“Fuck,” Cossont breathed, looking from Parinherm to Berdle. “This isn’t good, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” the avatar agreed, then its head flicked — impossibly fast for a real human — towards the lift’s manual control panel, an instant before a gentle beeping noise came from the speaker grille.
Parinherm seemed to be about to speak, but Berdle held up one finger. In a neutral voice, he said, “Yes?”
The missile came to the end of the useful part of the air duct in a last burst of grille components, exiting into a parallel elevator shaft, flying straight across as it twisted and slowed, bouncing off the shaft’s ceramic surface hard enough to leave a crush-indentation then pulsing up the shaft at maximum acceleration, towards the under-surface of an ascending elevator car. It adjusted its course, jolting across the shaft, aiming for near one corner of the car and bursting through it.
It had time to register three humans present in the lift through the shower of debris, then it was bursting out through the roof. It used its already deployed cutting field like an air-screw to provide a tiny amount of extra lift, then as a fender to cushion the next blow on the roof of the shaft as it twisted and turned again and darted down an access tunnel to the next shaft, braking hard at the last moment as it neared the offending control unit. Below, in the shaft it had just left, it could hear screams. These would likely be associated with its incursion into the elevator car two seconds earlier and probably indicated extreme surprise as well as some shrapnel injuries.
“Is that Ms Cossont, Vyr, Lieutenant Commander, Reserve?” a male voice asked from the grille in a conversational tone.
~Getting some air movement, compression, in the shaft out there, Parinherm sent.
~That’s my missile, Berdle sent back at the same time as he said, “It is not,” to the grille. “Why has this lift stopped?”
“Ah. Then I must be addressing one of the two gentlemen who accompanied the lady. My name is Colonel Agansu, of the Home System Regiment, on special secondment, unspecified. I’d like to talk to Ms Cossont.”
“Did you stop this lift?” Berdle said, voice clipped and severe. “Set in motion again immediately.”
Fifty metres over Berdle’s head, the missile floated in mid-air in front of a control unit barely bigger than itself, inspecting the quivering cage of bizarrely spectrumed energies enclosing the unit and the cables leading to and from it.
~Effector-targeted component and ancillaries highly ext-shielded, it reported to the avatar. ~Actions to control/defeat unclear.
Berdle briefly reviewed the poor-quality video the device was sending, and the missile’s available weaponry. It was the least well armed of the three that had been Displaced, reducing the options. ~Close-entrain all 2-mm mini-rounds, the avatar sent. Set for point, centred, kinetic assist.
~Copy, the missile sent, and squirted all its tiny shells at the field-wrapped control unit at once, far too close together to work properly had they been travelling further
than a few tens of metres; as they were travelling less than a metre before impact and detonation, this didn’t matter. It used its maniple and cutting fields to kick them forward at the same time, imparting a little extra kinetic energy and throwing itself backwards as a result. Light erupted around the control unit, temporarily blinding the missile as it extended its forward fields to fend off the blast wave and pieces of debris and used its rear field components to help cushion it against the blow as it hit the far side of the shaft it had flown up seconds earlier.
“First I need to talk to—” the voice from the grille was saying.
~Wow! Parinherm sent. ~Sub-gramme AM explosion fifty up! Correction; series of same but smaller.
The air in the lift seemed to pulse gently as the shock wave travelled down the shaft’s structure. Berdle put his hand out and took hold of Cossont’s elbow. She appeared to have noticed the pulse of infra sound and was opening her mouth to speak as the thud from above came. The blast wave slammed down onto the roof of the car, sending the human, avatar and android briefly up into the air as the whole lift was rammed down a notch on its trio of side ratchets; the three dropped to the floor again, steadied themselves.
~Debris approaching you, the missile sent. ~Medium sub-sonic. It sidled back through the dust and smoke choking the debris-littered access tunnel to inspect the control unit. ~Target unharmed.
It’s a ship, Berdle thought. The unit’s being effectorised by a ship, or a unit as strong as one a warship would carry.
~Pause, he told the missile. ~Prepare full personal destruct, immediately under unit.
“Wh—?” Cossont had time to say, before a series of titanic claps shook the elevator car from above. Her helmet had inflated itself and gone to triple layer above the crown of her head. Berdle watched the lift’s ceiling dent in a couple of places.
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