The Hydrogen Sonata c-10
Page 43
“Sir.”
The sealed orders indicated that in the event of an emergency of the type now facing them, the squadron should make its way to the nearby system of Vatrelles, five days distant at full speed, to await further instructions.
The Swarmprince issued the appropriate orders, then turned to his communications officer. “Signal the Culture ship that it may remain at its current distance from us if it wishes. We may have need of it yet. Convene a full consultation with all senior officers, AIs and expert systems.”
Twenty
(S -3)
The General Systems Vehicle Empiricist felt it was arriving in Gzilt at a bad time — a bad time that was meant to be the start of a (brief) good time, a momentous and celebrated time but which had somehow gone wrong. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.
The ship was about as big as standard Culture vessels ever got; a System-class that had beefed up over the decades and centuries for what had always seemed like sound operational reasons at the time until it had become one of the most impressively large, commodious and populated examples of the class that was already the most impressively large, commodious and populated the Culture possessed.
The design of the System-class made such self-augmentation easy; the ships had no single outer hull surrounding their hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures. Adding new, self-manufactured bits was so simple it was, for some ships at least, apparently, tantamount to compulsory, and it was only a sort of residual decorousness and a wish not to be seen as too self-indulgently ostentatious that prevented certain System-class vessels from going expansion-mad and growing to the size of planets, or at least moons. That sort of indulged obsessiveness was what simming and strong VR was for; you could convincingly imagine yourself being any ludicrous size without actually committing to such monomania in reality.
Doing away with a physical hull — or treating the exterior of every component as a hull, depending on how you looked at it — had been no great leap for GSVs. Ships thought of their multiple-layer field-complex enclosures as their true hulls anyway. That was where all the important stuff happened in relation to the outside: that was where the sensory fields were, where any stray impacts were absorbed, where concentric layers of shielding tuned to various parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum lurked, where holes could be opened to allow smaller units, modules and ships to enter and depart, and — especially in the case of the larger vessels — where atmospheric pressure was kept in, and sun-lines could be formed and controlled to provide light for any parkland carried on the top of the ship’s solid hull.
Frankly the material bit inside was just there to provide a sort of neat wrapping for all the truly internal bits and pieces like accommodation and social spaces.
Comfortably over two hundred kilometres long even by the most conservative of measurement regimes, fabulously, ellipsoidally rotund, dazzling with multiple sun-lines and tiny artificial stars providing illumination for motley steps and levels and layers of riotous vegetation — belonging, strictly speaking, on thousands of different worlds spread across the galaxy — boasting hundreds of contrasting landscapes from the most mathematically manicured to the most (seemingly) pristinely, savagely wild, all contained on slab-storeys of components generally kilometres high, each stratified within one of a dozen stacked atmospheric gradients, the ship’s cosseted internals were riddled, woven and saturated with domesticated, tamed and semi-wild life in hundreds of thousands of smaller enclosed habitats, while its buzzing, external, bewilderingly complex archi-geographic lines were made fuzzy, imprecisely seen by near-uncountable numbers of craft moving within that vast, elongated bubble of air — from smaller classes of GSV through other ships, modules, shuttles and aircraft all the way down to individual humans in float-harnesses, single drones and even smaller machines, as well as thousands of species of winged and lighter-than-air bio-creatures — the Empiricist was, in sum, home to hundreds of billions of animals and over thirteen billion humans and drones.
The people of the Culture, better than ninety-five per cent of them housed across the vast, distributed bucolic hinterland of the Orbitals, scattered throughout the civilised galaxy like a million glowing bracelets, were used to thinking of the GSVs as being their true mega-cities — albeit determinedly highly mobile, high-speed mega-cities — but GSVs like the Empiricist were on another level and of another order entirely; they held the populations of worlds, of entire inhabited stellar systems. Zyse, the Gzilt home planet and the giant GSV’s destination, held over three billion people. The whole of the Gzilt system added another twenty billion, in part-habiformed worlds and moons, microrbitals and other habitats. The Empiricist arriving was like another half a solar system of people being added, like another four mature, substantial planets’ worth of souls suddenly coming to visit.
Preceded by a ceremonial screen of smaller craft — including a couple of GSVs, each home to many millions — the gradually slowing Empiricist first met with a couple of Gzilt navy ships — effectively sweeping the two cruisers up with it as it proceeded resplendently past the rendezvous point — then, as it slowed still further, gradually attracted hundreds of civilian welcoming craft too.
Had not so many locals been Stored — and had all been well within the Gzilt body politic — it supposed it might have attracted thousands. The ship’s septet of semi-independent Minds became graciously, easily busy with welcoming signals and media requests.
The Empiricist approached and then inserted itself into a specially cleared orbital band high over Zyse. It had started slowing almost a day earlier; now it was down to the sort of velocity required for a stately orbit of the world every couple of hours, allowing plenty of time for people on the ground to look up and see it gliding smoothly, glitteringly, statuesquely overhead, and reducing the time it would take to ferry people to and from the planetary surface.
∞
xGSV Empiricist
oLOU Caconym
oGSV Contents May Differ
oGCU Displacement Activity
oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
oUe Mistake Not…
oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
oMSV Pressure Drop
oLSV You Call This Clean?
Arrived over Zyse. Good to be here, finally. Mostly. Been thinking; going to keep my two Delinquents, Headcrash and Xenocrat, close by. They are conveniently hereabouts, after all, and the political atmosphere locally does seem a little… odd. Well, poisonous, to be blunt. How was this allowed to develop?
∞
xMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In
Welcome. Yes, we might have wished for better. Everything’s in the signal streams, of course, but soaking in all the local comms and media traffic of the last twenty-few days is definitely recommended. Worth setting one Mind on that alone, if I may make so bold. My network of sats and such is at your disposal, though of course you may wish to emplace your own. I’d be as happy to advise as to leave you to your own devices.
Are you really so worried regarding the current situation to feel the Delinquents must remain as close guards? I think I speak for the group when I say we were hoping those and more might be available for further use in the current emergency while your own safety might be ensured with your doubtless many other assets.
∞
Let’s see how things develop over the next couple of days. For now I’d feel safer with the Delinquents as part of my general defensive mix. I did have to leave some offensive units behind to mop up at Loliscombana. I’m building to replace, but that’ll take time.
∞
xLOU Caconym
oMSV Pressure Drop
What’s that big fuck playing at? The next few days are the crucial ones; the only ones. We might need those ships now.
∞
It’s being cautious and protecting a pop of umpteen bill. When
you carry around that sort of responsibility you can’t help but become ultra careful. Mostly these big ships pursue a no-risks-whatever policy; I’m mildly surprised it deigned to visit Gzilt at all given the recent excitements.
∞
That’s the trouble with ships that size; too big to risk, and also, therefore, to be effective. Terribly impressive, and if all the bios plonk down to Zyse and walk around they can surely make the place look busy for the first time in years, but so what? Couldn’t be more of a liability if it had hauled a train of Orbitals behind it and parked them in the local asteroid belt. Anyway, what does that leave us with? The Mistake Not… is about to hit Xown — again — and the Passing By…’s two Thugs are keeping remarkably quiet. Wasn’t one meant to be shadowing the Liseiden?
∞
Allegedly. Sending a private request for a public statement; we do kind of need a general update now the big-but-plugged gun has arrived… nope; the Passing By… wishes to remain reticent on the subject. Bet the new boy asks. Anyway, back to listening. Worshipful listening, as I don’t doubt it will be interpreted…
The reception was muted due to the recent death of the president, but was, nevertheless, still quite entirely splendid. The enormous central Receiving Hall of the parliament’s Upper Chamber had been trimmed everywhere in mourning red, the towering mirror panels reflecting a seeming infinitude of scarlet corridors leading in every horizontal direction.
“Place looks rather good like this,” Yegres said, nodding over his glass at the huge central scoop of red marking the covered chandelier cluster hanging from the centre of the space. “We should have lost presidents more often.”
“It’s a little late, though, isn’t it?” Banstegeyn replied.
“Everything is,” Yegres agreed. “Oh,” he said, catching sight of seven tall figures moving liquidly through the crowd on the main floor. “Oh well, here come the relations. I’d better leave you to your ceremonial solitariness.” He chucked back his drink, hitched up his long robes and stepped down from the dais.
The septame watched the arrow-shaped mass of avatars and their hangers-on move towards him, like something aimed. “Solitude,” he said, to himself rather than really to Yegres, who was too far away and submerged in the crowd of people behind. “Solitude, not solitariness.” Of course, he was careful not to move his lips, in case.
Banstegeyn greeted the seven tall, silver-skinned creatures with all the dignity and politeness he could muster. Solemnity, too, though really it was easy to be solemn; it was the dignity and politeness he was having problems with.
Having dreamt of Orpe on consecutive nights, he’d used the relevant implants to stop himself dreaming over the last two, and had slept well, but now he was starting to feel that he had only displaced the problem, for he had the annoying, irrational and even very slightly frightening feeling– even though he was entirely awake and apparently well rested — that Orpe was just out of sight, just beyond the corner of his eye. It was disconcerting, troubling.
He most certainly did not believe in ghosts or any such nonsense, but — when it happened, catching him out, when he thought he glimpsed her, or thought he’d just missed seeing her, a moment earlier, just as he turned his head or blinked — he felt as terrified as he imagined people must have felt in the old days, when they had been superstitious. He knew it was his own mind, his own brain, acting against him, betraying him, deliberately troubling him, but it felt like something other, something supernatural, uncanny.
On a few occasions over the last few days he’d wanted just to scream, for no good reason. Especially at formal ceremonial events when it would have been absolutely the worst, most shocking and disrespectful thing to do. So many aliens arriving, so many different forms and types of creature, so many in exo-suits or things like tiny spacecraft it was like welcoming the contents of a toy cupboard, scaled for giants. How were you supposed to keep a straight face? That was when he most wanted to do it: to laugh hysterically in their faces or scream and shout and swear and thrash about on the floor and tear his hair out…
But: just a few more days. A few more days and it would all be over. They could all go to the happy land of good and plenty and never need to bother with horrible, messy, painful real life again.
He couldn’t wait. It was the only thing keeping him together.
“Please,” he said, smiling too broadly as he half turned to indicate the way through the variously smiling, grinning, tight-faced dignitaries behind him to the scarcely smaller and even more sumptuous room where President Int’yom waited — enthroned, enrobed, befuddled. “This way, please. The president is impatient to meet you.”
“Thank you,” the leading avatar said. The seven looked identical: tall, straight, dressed plainly but elegantly and their expressions radiating a kind of severe serenity. At their rear, Ziborlun, the Culture avatar the court had become used to, looked small, plain and homely in comparison.
Just as Banstegeyn turned more fully, to walk ahead of the Culture avatars, he caught a glimpse of — but, no, of course, it wasn’t really her at all.
A civilian, she hadn’t been backed-up; one of those who believed life was lived all the more sweetly and more sensibly for knowing there was no second chance, while understanding, without ever really needing to think about it, that a society as sophisticated and mature as that of Gzilt made sudden accidental death almost unheard of anyway. So, it wasn’t her, and it would never be her.
And only three days to go anyway, he told himself again, so it didn’t really matter. He stumbled slightly as he walked in front of the silver creatures to the opening doors of the presidential chamber. He wondered who would have noticed.
Only three more days.
He walked into the hundreds-strong swirl of bizarrely accoutred aliens and milling, red-clad people thronging the presidential chamber.
“Septame, a word?” Marshal Chekwri said, touching him on one elbow to draw him slightly aside from the crowds surrounding the dais where the acting president was greeting the avatars.
“Of course, Chekwri, but I am busy.”
“As ever. However. Two things. First: the ships we had see off the Ronte reckon they’re heading for Vatrelles. I thought we might let that leak to our new allies the Liseiden.”
“What? Why?”
“Distraction. Something to fill the news, and, if they quarrel, then perhaps another reason to leave this squabbling reality behind, no? Reinforcement.”
“Yes, yes, all right. Is that all?”
“No. I did say two things. Some pleasant news.”
“Always welcome. What is it?” The marshal’s staffers and his own, headed by Solbli and Jevan, had created a space around them so they could talk with a degree of privacy.
Chekwri brought her mouth close to his ear. “We have a major asset in place somewhere it might come in useful.”
“Do we? That’s good. What, and where?”
“Where, is Xown. What, is the returned Churkun. It was off for a while there, thinking about Subliming early following the event at Ablate, but in the end it didn’t make the leap; wants to go with everybody else — isn’t that nice? — so reported to me, happily — always worth covering such possibilities in standing orders — and asked if it could be of use. So I sent it to Xown, because that was the last place the Culture ship and the absconded Ms Cossont seemed to be interested in.” The marshal drew back a little, winked at him. Winked! Had she done this before? Was this some new thing, some fresh loosening of behaviour and discipline ahead of the so-near-now Subliming? “The simulations backed me up, but it was my idea first. Always good to be proved right. Isn’t it, Septame?”
“Always,” he agreed.
“And I think this time we go in full force, gloves off, maximum strength, if called for, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, whatever you think fit.”
“Splendid. So we have a fully equipped, committedly one-of-us combat-hardened battleship ready and waiting at Xown, and that is a ver
y good, a particularly good thing, Septame. May I tell you why?”
“Yes, Chekwri, why don’t you tell me why?”
“Because it has just reported that something fast — both coming in quick and braking very hard indeed — has just about hauled to a stop at Xown, and it’s almost certainly going to be the Culture ship.”
Colonel Agansu, still undergoing treatments he had come to regard as meaning he was under repair — rather than representing anything as biological as healing — had a dilemma.
“Colonel, the regs are clear. You need to update your avatar down on Xown. It’s been plugging along there patiently keeping pace with the airship for nearly ten days but now there’s a distinct likelihood it’s going to be put in harm’s way and it needs to have every advantage we can give it.”
“I am aware of that, Captain,” Agansu said. “Thank you.”
The colonel had been badly injured in the battle at the Incast facility on the Bokri Orbital. The Culture creature — the ship’s avatar — had succeeded not only in destroying the combat arbite Uhtryn through the illegal use of anti-matter weaponry within an enclosed civilian space, but had then somehow turned his own weaponry against him, turning a large portion of its own body into a perfectly reflective dish that had bounced his laser pulse straight back at him, crippling both his suit and his body, sending him plunging down the elevator shaft with little or no AG left.
He could still hear his own screams, loud inside his helmet, as he fell, blinded, burning, baked, both legs and one arm shattered, into the shaft, to land with a terrible crushing crash on top of the already wrecked elevator car at the bottom. He’d blacked out then, or the suit helmet’s remaining medical functions had put him mercifully under, but he could still hear that raw, inhuman scream in his ears and feel the awful smacking thud of impact, cracking open the suit, splintering his bones and breaking his back.
The suit — its helmet — had saved him. Then the Uagren had, too: bringing him back on board, placing him in its medical facility, gently peeling away and removing the blackened, bubbled remains of the suit and slicing away the burned, roasted skin and flesh where it was beyond reusing before it had — coaxingly, almost lovingly — started to knit his bones, repair and regrow his torn, battered organs, and nurture where possible and replace where necessary his bruised, assaulted flesh.