The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  She nodded. More bars of pink light filled the air in front of the alcove, creating a screaming, tearing noise as the laser light impacted the swirling smoke and dust particles. Her mouth had gone very dry.

  There was a further furious burst of cerise light and then the impression of almost invisibly quick motion high up, as though the corridor ceiling itself was rippling. Then the eSuit just turned the lights off; everything went completely dark while sound and blast-fronts seemed to detonate everywhere, pummelling her body from every side.

  “Up!” Berdle shouted through her earbud. The suit helped her stand, she gripped the avatar from behind with three arms, brought her legs round his at the knee, made sure the shoulder bag was at her hip with her remaining hand and then put that round the avatar’s body too. She could see again. The corridor was full of light, both white and pink.

  Then something seemed to erupt from Berdle’s chest and they were both flung away from the corridor and through the shallow alcove and into the lift shaft.

  Cossont experienced what felt like the start of her head getting ripped off, then somebody slammed a sledge-hammer the size of a ship into her back and she blacked out.

  * * *

  Awake again; sore-headed, sore-backed, aching all over. She seemed to be still on Berdle’s back, looking over his shoulder through a ragged, dusty gap across the elevator shaft to the doorway on the far side. Through the smoke and dust there, a thing lumbered like a bad dream of a man; massive, reverse-kneed, arms thick with weapon clusters, saucer-headed, it stood, straightening a little, seemingly looking straight at them. If the little knife missile’s frontal attack had caused it any damage, it wasn’t visible. Cossont didn’t recognise the model; frankly it looked retro. Something rotated on its chest.

  Then — silently, because her hearing didn’t seem to be working properly — another explosion seemed to go off just above the part of the shaft she could see, and debris rained down, falling past and showering into the depths. A man in a bulky glittering suit and holding a large gun, also seemingly made of mirror stuff, came floating down, as though sitting in an invisible chair. He looked very relaxed.

  Cossont looked around. She and Berdle seemed to have been blown through a wall and into a storage area; everywhere she looked in the dusty gloom she saw towering stacks of shelves full of pale boxes similar to the one that had held the glittering grey cube with QiRia’s mind-state inside. They had ended up crumpled together in the remains of a set of shelves, half lying, half held standing by the twisted debris around them.

  A couple of the pale, half-metre cube boxes came tumbling from somewhere overhead, bouncing and clattering down to join the jumble of debris already covering the floor. The combat arbite illuminated each of the falling boxes in turn with a thin beam of laser light from its weapon clusters, but let each fall and bounce without firing at them.

  Cossont looked idly, groggily down at her hip. The shoulder bag wasn’t there. It must have been ripped away.

  Shit, she thought.

  The man in the glittering suit was floating, stationary, in the middle of the elevator shaft, looking in at them. He tipped his head to one side, as though wondering what to make of them. The combat arbite shuffled to one side, to keep a clear field of fire.

  “We really are fucked, aren’t we?” Cossont said, her voice sounding odd inside her head and the helmet. She could taste what was probably her own blood in her mouth.

  “Not necessarily,” Berdle replied through the earbud, sounding, as ever, relatively unconcerned. “Still one knife missile left.”

  “But I thought it…”

  “It left. It was not destroyed,” Berdle told her. “It went the long way round the building. I suspect they assumed any combat missiles we had left would just burst through anything in their way; certainly that would be the first thing to occur to a knife missile. So — although this has taken longer, nevertheless — the element of surprise is with the missile. Here we are; that’ll be it now,” the avatar announced, as light erupted all around the combat arbite.

  The man in the glittering suit started to whirl round to where the combat arbite was throwing its arms up and disappearing and disintegrating inside a consuming torrent of white fire. Then the view went dark.

  More battering and pummelling. It was like being slung into a big metal drum with a bunch of sharp rocks and being kicked down a steep mountainside studded with boulders.

  “The knife missiles in use here are from the Miniaturised Drone Advanced Weapon System,” Berdle told her as floor, the shelves and the air itself all seemed to shake and quiver and beat. “Though it bears mention that it was ‘Advanced’ rather a long time ago. Still. And AM power is very crude, really. Raw, ragged stuff. Not really suitable for this kind of civilian-environment, in-structure work — far too battlefield — but it was all I had. Interestingly, the nanomissiles doing the damage are only a millimetre long and a tenth of that in diameter; too small to see for most unaided eyes; astonishing what you can do with anti-matter. There. Oh. Here—” Just as the battering seemed to be tailing off, there was another single, thudding, titanic impact, then Berdle said, “Ouch. Bet that hurt. Oh well, down you go…”

  The view came back. The elevator shaft and the lit corridor beyond were full of dust and smoke. The doorway where the combat arbite had been standing was no longer a neat rectangle; it was practically circular, and most of the shattered, ragged edges were glowing. One or two shattered bits of machinery lying smoking, flaming or sputtering on the floor of the corridor might have been parts of the arbite. Of the man in the glittering suit, there was no sign. Something flashed briefly in the shaft.

  “Yes, I wouldn’t go sticking your head into the lift shaft,” Berdle said, over a distant cacophony of alarm noises and some deep booming noises coming from the shaft. “Colonel Agansu is down there, largely disabled but patently still capable of firing.” Berdle stepped out of the compacted debris of the shelves they’d smashed into, taking Cossont with him. He peeled her arms away, then turned to face her as she stood, swaying slightly. She suspected the suit was doing most of the work involved in keeping her upright.

  She focused on the avatar. The whole front of his chest was a shallow silver bowl. It swam back into shape only slowly. “Hmm,” the avatar said, looking down at this as another bright flash lit up the elevator shaft behind him. “Powerful laser your man had.” He stooped, came back up holding the shoulder bag with the cube in it. “Here.” He tied a knot in the burst strap, almost too quickly for her to see. “You okay?” he asked.

  Cossont cleared her throat, nodded. “Fucking peachy.”

  Berdle looked innocently pleased. “Good. Well, there don’t appear to be any other forces wishing to engage with us, so we may be through the worst of it.” There was another flash of light in the shaft behind.

  “Shouldn’t you be finishing off this colonel guy?” Cossont asked.

  Berdle shook his head. “No need. I have a scout missile down there with him, monitoring. He shouldn’t cause us any more trouble.”

  “What about Parinherm?”

  “I’ve tried contacting; he’s powered down. We’ll try and Displace him too when the ship gets back. Walk this way.”

  Cossont, following the avatar, stepped shakily into a debris-strewn corridor between towering shelves. It seemed to stretch for ever into the distance. Something zipped past her from behind, coming through the smoke at head height and making her flinch. The thing stopped right alongside Berdle.

  It was a thin cylinder about as thick as a thumb and as long as a hand, its front end shaped like an angular, blunted arrowhead and its dull silver surface marked with hair-fine dark lines and tiny dots. Berdle cocked one silvery eyebrow at it and said, “Yes, well done. So that Ms Cossont might be included in the conversation. Oh, both our lives. Inelegant use of rather too many nanos, though. Well, so you say, but it could have been accomplished more economically. Even so; had there been a whole section of those things, could you
successfully have taken on all of them too? Well, there you are then.”

  The missile moved off so fast it was as though it was a shell in a perfectly transparent gun barrel; it just disappeared, leaving behind only an after-image and the vaguest of impressions it had headed away in the direction its sharp end had been pointing. Berdle’s head jerked back in the blast of air and Cossont was only saved from being blown off her feet by the avatar reaching back with one silvery hand and grabbing her by the bag’s strap again. The thunder-clap echoed off the surrounding shelves and the ceiling.

  Berdle shook his head as he resumed walking. “Knife missiles,” he said over his shoulder, with what sounded like affection.

  “Yeah, knife missiles,” Cossont agreed, like she knew what she was talking about. She glanced back, but could see little through the smoke. “You sure there’s nobody else coming after us?”

  “Not completely, no,” Berdle admitted, “but there doesn’t seem to be.” He sounded thoughtful. “The Gzilt ship present here is at least a sixth-level heavy cruiser, possibly a seventh-level battle-cruiser; that’d mean between one and three platoons of marines available, at least, but they aren’t being used. So that might say something about the secrecy and… well, authorisation of the mission involved.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Onwards; I should warn you there will be some tramping, and we may have to hide.”

  The ship was led a merry dance, trying to get sufficiently close to the microrbital for long enough to get its avatar and the human off. Quickly getting the measure of each other, and each correctly guessing that its opposite number had no intention of being the first to open fire, neither ship resorted to serious targeting behaviour or the sort of hair-trigger weapon-readiness status that might have led to a misunderstanding. The whole tussle was conducted without signalling, as though neither vessel wanted to admit it was actually happening.

  Eventually the Mistake Not… outwitted/out-field-managed the Gzilt ship and snapped the two humanoid figures off the habitat and back inside itself. It saw the Gzilt ship Displace/disloc one human-size entity off the little world a moment later. Having successfully retrieved its two primary Displace targets, the Mistake Not… tried to get a lock on the remains of the android Eglyle Parinherm, but found it had been beaten to it; a disloc field from the Gzilt ship was already starting to envelop the creature’s crushed and broken body at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

  Before the Gzilt vessel could complete the operation, the Mistake Not… applied a spatter of plasma fire to various parts of the android’s body, cauterising all processing and memory/data storage nodes within the machine.

  ∞

  xUe Mistake Not…

  oGSV Contents May Differ

  Right. What?… Oh; the stuff from the You Call This Clean?… Okay. The memories were in his eyes and they’ve been removed. How severe with himself. Just as well we successfully retrieved Mr Q’s mind-state, then. At no small risk to life and limb, I might add.

  ∞

  Congratulations. With what result?

  ∞

  Just about to find out…

  Cossont felt sleepy, sore, elated, all at once. Her pain-management systems were telling her to move gently, slowly, with no sudden movements. She would be bathing rather than showering, she had already decided, but first, the ship had insisted, they needed to talk to the stored mind-state inside the silvery grey cube.

  The Mistake Not… was powering away from the Ospin system on a wildly erratic course, having decided — after its jinking, ducking and diving, field-to-field tussle with the Gzilt ship — that it was the faster. So far at least, the Gzilt vessel had shown no sign of following.

  Cossont sat down in the lounge area of the shuttle that had become her home over the last few days, clad only in the eSuit with its hands and feet components retracted to cuffs again and the helmet collapsed back into its necklace form. Pyan had gone ooh and ah over her and wrapped itself round her neck, rubbing gently at her bruised skin. Berdle, back to looking like a handsome Gzilt male again, entirely gave the impression he’d just strolled out of a grooming parlour; not a hint of tiredness or a hair out of place.

  “You have been in the wars, you poor thing,” Pyan told Cossont, wrapping itself tighter.

  “Yes. No need to throttle me.”

  “Apologies. There. And where is that silly android?”

  “We had to leave him behind,” Cossont said, glancing at Berdle as she extracted the silver-grey cube from the battered shoulder bag. “Under a wrecked elevator car at the bottom of a lift shaft.”

  “The Gzilt ship disloc’d him aboard itself,” Berdle said. “It took Colonel Agansu too.”

  “Were they both still alive?” Cossont asked.

  “I think Agansu was,” the avatar said.

  “Not Parinherm?”

  “No.” Berdle shook his head, held Cossont’s gaze until she looked away.

  She put the silvery cube on the low table in front of her, then reached out, touched it on.

  “Ngaroe?” she asked.

  “Ms Cossont,” QiRia’s voice said immediately.

  Cossont realised she had been tense, hunched over the table. She relaxed a little. “Good to speak to you again,” she said, smiling.

  “How long has it been? Oh. Quite a few years, I see. And are we on… a Culture ship?”

  Cossont wasn’t sure what to say. She glanced at Berdle, who shrugged, unhelpfully.

  “Yes,” she said. “Umm… I didn’t realise you could…”

  “I’m not completely without senses in here,” QiRia’s voice said. “I may only be switched on for fractions of an hour at a time, but I can tell roughly what my circumstances are, how much time has elapsed since I was last activated, and I have sufficient appreciation of the radiative and general sensory ambience of my surroundings to tell when I am, for example, on a ship.”

  “We were on a ship the last time we spoke,” Cossont said.

  “I know. So what? Hardly remarkable. But this is a Culture ship; a GCU or a warship or something similar. That is remarkable. So I remarked upon it. That it? We done? You going to shut me off for another sixteen years?”

  “No, no,” Cossont said quickly. “Sorry. Very sorry. But… look. We need to ask you something.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Hello, Mr QiRia,” Berdle said pleasantly. “My name is Berdle. I’m the avatar of the ship you’re on, the Mistake Not… Pleased to meet you.”

  “Yes. Delighted. You sound stressed, by the way, Cossont.”

  “Do I? Well, it’s been—”

  “Yes. That’s why I said it,” the voice said, with only a touch of acid. “Berdle, I’d like to interface. May I see through your eyes, or some other visual sensor immediately hereabouts?”

  “Be my guest,” Berdle said, and looked first at Cossont, then in a steady sweep round the rest of the lounge.

  “Cossont! You have four arms,” QiRia’s voice said.

  “To play the elevenstring,” she said.

  “Ah. You weren’t put off playing it by the Warm, Considering after all. Good for you. So; what is it you want to know?”

  She took a deep breath. “Ngaroe, we need to ask you something about… long ago. Going right back. It is… it’s very important. It might affect how the Subliming goes. Our Subliming. The Gzilt Subliming.” She took another deep breath. “There was a message, a signal from the Zihdren, saying that the Book of Truth might all be a lie, and you were mentioned as—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” QiRia’s voice said. Cossont fell silent. “How far back? Are you asking me to remember things from—”

  “The time of the conference that set up the Culture, sir,” Berdle said.

  “Ah,” QiRia’s voice said. “That far back. Can’t help you.”

  “What?” Cossont said. She and the avatar exchanged looks.

  “I said,” the voice from the cube told them, slowly, “that I cannot help you. My memories only go back to… about seventy years standar
d after that time. The memories in here begin at midnight on the 44th of Pereid, 8023, Koweyn calendar. Before that, I’ve nothing.”

  “Seriously?” Cossont said. She could hear her own voice start to rise in tone and volume. “You’re missing—?”

  “Must ask you to check, sir,” Berdle said, in a pained voice.

  “Check for yourself. You’re a ship; you’ll have the ability. I’m giving you permission. I’m not a biological, not in here, so take a look for yourself. Scan all the data in this cube. Go on; feel free.”

  “You’re sure?” the avatar said. He looked at Cossont, who found it was her turn to shrug.

  “Yes!” QiRia’s voice said sharply.

  Berdle sighed. He smiled at Cossont. “This might take a moment,” the avatar told her.

  She sat back slumped in the seat, rubbed her face with two of her hands. She sighed heavily. “Take all the—”

  “Ah,” Berdle said, sounding resigned. He looked at Cossont. “I’m afraid it’s just as Mr QiRia’s mind-state has claimed.”

  “Told you,” the voice from the cube said.

  “The memories aren’t there?” Cossont felt suddenly tired, full of aches, and depressed.

  “I’m afraid not,” Berdle told her. “And even the memories of the times when Mr QiRia thought back to those times, before the source memories were edited out, have been expunged, too.” Berdle looked at the cube. “That’s quite a thorough job, Mr QiRia.”

  “Sounds like it,” the voice agreed.

  Berdle smiled faintly, shook his head as he said, “Would you have any idea why you—?”

  “No. None at all. Guess I must have thought I had something to hide. If so, glad I’ve done a good job of it, or made sure somebody else did.”

  Cossont was sitting, looking deflated, eyes closed, shaking her head gently. “They can’t just have gone,” she said, as though to herself. “They can’t just have gone.” She looked at Berdle. “What now? Can we look for… the real QiRia, for the old guy himself? He might… he should still know.” She shook her head again. “Shouldn’t he?”