It didn't. Instead it accelerated harder; that.54 figure zoomed quickly to.72, the Plate class's normal design maximum.
The Charitable View communicated this turn of events back to the Yawning Angel, which went into shock for about a millisecond.
It rechecked all its in-system ships, drones, sensors and external reports. There was no sign that the Sleeper Service had dumped its extra mass anywhere within range of the Yawning Angel's sensors.
Yet it was behaving as though it had. Where had it done it? Could it have secretly built longer-range Displacers? (No; half its mass would have been required to construct a Displacer capable of dumping so much volume beyond the range of the Yawning Angel's sensors, and that included all the extra mass it had taken on board over the years in the form of the extraneous environments in the first place… though — now that it was thinking in such outrageous terms — there was another, associated possibility that just might… but no; that couldn't be. There had been no intelligence, no hint… no, it didn't even want to think about that…)
The Yawning Angel rescheduled everything it had already arranged in a flurry of re-drafted apologies, pleas for understanding and truncated journeys. It halved the departure warning time it had given. Thirty-three minutes to departure, now. The situation, it tried to explain to everybody, was becoming more urgent.
The Sleeper Service's acceleration figures remained steady at their design maxima for another twenty minutes, though the Charitable View — keeping a careful watch on every aspect of the GSV's performance from its station a few real-space light days behind — reported some odd events at the junctions of the Sleeper Service's traction fields with the energy grid.
By now the Yawning Angel was existing in a state of quiveringly ghastly tension; it was thinking at maximum capacity, worrying at full speed, suddenly and appallingly aware how long things took to happen; a human in the same state would have been clutching a churning stomach, tearing their hair out and gibbering incoherently.
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Ships, even ships; they were restricted to speeds below the speed of sound in the bubble of air around the ship and the docks it was joined to. It reviewed how practicable it would be to just let the air go and move everything in vacuum. It made sense. Thankfully, it had already shifted all vulnerable pleasure craft out of the way and sealed and secured its unconnected hull apertures. It told the Hub what it was doing; the Hub objected because it was losing some of its air. The GSV dumped the air anyway. Everything started moving a little faster. The Hub screamed in protest but it ignored it.
Calm; calm; it had to remain calm. Stay focused, keep the most important objectives in mind.
A wave of what would have been nausea in a human swept through the Yawning Angel's Mind as a signal came in from the Charitable View. Now what?
Whatever it might have feared, this was worse.
The Sleeper Service's acceleration factor had started to increase. Almost at the same time, it had exceeded its normal maximum sustainable velocity.
Fascinated, appalled, terrified, the Yawning Angel listened to a running commentary on the other GSV's progress from its increasingly distant child, even as it started the sequence of actions and commands that would lead to its own near-instant departure. Twelve minutes early, but that couldn't be helped, and if people were pissed off, too bad.
Still increasing. Time to go. Disconnect. There.
The Charitable View signalled that the Sleeper Service's outermost field extent had shrunk to within a kilometre of naked-hull minima.
The Yawning Angel dropped away from the orbital, twisting and aiming and punching away into hyperspace only a few kilometres away from the world's undersurface, ignoring incandescent howls of protest from the Hub over such impolite and feasibly dangerous behaviour and the astonished — but slow, so slow — yelps from people who an instant earlier had been walking down a transit corridor towards a welcoming foyer in the GSV and now found themselves bumping into emergency seal-fields and staring at nothing but blackness and stars.
The superlifter's continuous report went on: the Sleeper Service's acceleration kept on increasing slowly but steadily, then it paused, dropping to zero; the craft's velocity remained constant. Could that be it? It was still catchable. Panic over?
Then the fleeing ship's velocity increased again; as did its rate of acceleration. Impossible!
The horrific thought which had briefly crossed the Yawning Angel's mind moments earlier settled down to stay with all the gruesome deliberation of a self-invited house guest.
It did the arithmetic.
Take a Plate class GSV's locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value… make that thirty-two at a time… and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service's acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.
The Charitable View reported another smooth increase in the Sleeper Service's rate of progress leading to another step, another pause. It was increasing its own acceleration to match.
The Yawning Angel sped after the two of them, already fearing the worst. Do the sums, do the sums. The Sleeper Service had filled at least four of its General bays with extra engine, bringing-them on line two at a time, balancing the additional impetus…
Another increase.
Six. Probably all eight, then. What about the engineering space behind? Had that gone too?
Sums, sums. How much mass had there been aboard the damn thing? Water; gas-giant atmosphere, highly pressurised. About four thousand cubic kilometres of water alone; four gigatonnes. Compress it, alter it, transmute it, convert it into the ultra dense exotic materials that comprised an engine capable of reaching out and down to the energy grid that underlay the universe and pushing against it… ample, ample, more than enough. It would take months, even years to build that sort of extra engine capacity… or only days, if you'd spent, say, the last few decades preparing the ground.
Dear holy shit, if it was all engine even the superlifter wouldn't be able to keep up with it. The average Plate class could sustain about one hundred and four kilolights more or less indefinitely; a good Range class, which was what the Yawning Angel had always been proud to count itself as, could easily beat that by forty kilolights. A Cliff class superlifter was ninety per cent engine; faster even than a Rapid Offensive Unit in short bursts. The Charitable View could hit two-twenty-one flat out, but that was only supposed to be for an hour or two at a time; that was chase speed, catch-up speed, not something it could maintain for long.
The figure the Yawning Angel was looking at was the thick end of two-thirty-three, if the Sleeper Service's engineering space had been packed with engine too.
The Charitable View's tone had already turned from one of amusement to amazement, then bewilderment. Now it was plain peevish. The Sleeper Service was topping the two-fifteen mark and showing no signs of slowing down. The superlifter would have to break away within minutes if it didn't top-out soon. It asked for instructions.
The Yawning Angel, still accelerating for all its worth, determined to track and follow for as long as it could or until it was asked to give up the chase, told its offspring craft not to exceed its design parameters, not to risk damage.
The Sleeper Service went on accelerating. The superlifter Charitable View gave up the chase at two-twenty. It settled back to a less frenetic two hundred, dropping back all the time; even so it was still not a speed it could maintain for more than a few hours.
The Yawning Angel topped out at one forty-six.
The Sleeper Service finally hit cruise at around two-thirty-three and a half, disappearing ahead into the depths of galactic space. The superlifter reported this but sounded like it couldn't believe it.
The Yawning Angel watched the
other GSV race away into the everlasting night between the stars, a sense of hopelessness, of defeat, settled over it.
Now it knew it had shaken off its pursuers the Sleeper Service's course was starting to curve gently, no doubt the first of many ducks and weaves it would carry out, if it was trying to conceal its eventual goal, and assuming that it had a goal other than simply giving the slip to its minders… Somehow, the Yawning Angel suspected its Eccentric charge — or ex-charge — did have a definite goal; a place, a location it was headed for.
Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit. The Yawning Angel thought there was something almost vulgar about such a velocity. Where the hell was it heading for? Andromeda?
The Yawning Angel drew a course-probability cone through the galactic model it kept in its mind.
It supposed it all depended how devious the Sleeper Service was being, but it looked like it might be headed for the Upper Leaf Swirl. If it was, it would be there within three weeks.
The Yawning Angel signalled ahead. Look on the bright side; at least the problem was out of its fields now.
The avatar Amorphia stood — arms crossed, thin, black-gloved hands grasping at bony elbows — gaze fastened intently upon the screen on the far side of the lounge. It showed a compensated view of hyperspace, vastly magnified.
Looking into the screen was like peering into some vast planetary airscape. Far below was a layer of glowing mist representing the energy grid; above was an identical layer of bright cloud. The skein of real space lay in between both of these; a two-dimensional layer, a simple transparent plane which the GSV went flickering through like a weaving shuttle across an infinite loom. Far, far behind it, the tiny dot that was the superlifter shrank still further. It too had been bobbing up and down through the skein on a sine wave whose length was measured in light minutes, but now it had stopped oscillating, settling into the lower level of hyperspace.
The magnification jumped; the superlifter was a larger dot now, but still dropping back all the time. A light-point tracing its own once wavy now straight course even further behind was the pursuing GSV. The star of the Dreve system was a bright spot back beyond that, stationary in the skein.
The Sleeper Service reached its maximum velocity and also ceased to oscillate between the two regions of hyperspace, settling into the larger of the two infinities that was ultraspace. The two following ships did the same, increasing their speed fractionally but briefly. A purist would call the place where they now existed ultraspace one positive, though as nobody had ever had access to ultraspace one negative — or infraspace one positive, for that matter — it was a redundant, even pedantic distinction. Or it had been until now. That might be about to change, if the Excession could deliver what it appeared to promise… Amorphia took a deep breath and then let it go.
The view clicked off and the screen disappeared.
The avatar turned to look at the woman Dajeil Gelian and the black bird Gravious. They were in a recreation area on the Ridge class GCU Jaundiced Outlook, housed in a bay in one of the Sleeper Service's mid-top strakes. The lounge was pretty well standard Contact issue; deceptively spacious, stylishly comfortable, punctuated by plants and subdued lighting.
This ship was to be the woman's home for the rest of the journey; a life boat ready to quit the larger craft at a moment's notice and take her to safety if anything went wrong. She sat on a white recliner chair, dressed in a long red dress, calm but wide-eyed, one hand cupped upon her swollen belly, the black bird perched on one arm of the seat near her hand.
The avatar smiled down at the woman. "There," it said. It made a show of looking around. "Alone at last." It laughed lightly, then looked down at the black bird, its smile disappearing. "Whereas you," it said, "will not be again."
Gravious jerked upright, neck stretching. 'What?" it asked. Gelian looked surprised, then concerned.
Amorphia glanced to one side. A small device like a stubby pen floated out of the shadows cast by a small tree. It coasted up to the bird, which shrank back and back from the small, silent missile until it almost fell off the arm of the chair, its blue-black beak centimetres from the nose cone of the tiny, intricate machine.
"This is a scout missile, bird," Amorphia told it. "Do not be deceived by its innocent title. If you so much as think of committing another act of treachery, it will happily reduce you to hot gas. It is going to follow you everywhere. Don't do as I have done; do as I say and don't try to shake it off; there is a tracer nanotech on you — in you — which will make it a simple matter to follow you. It should be correctly embedded by now, replacing the original tissue."
'What?" the bird screeched again, head jerking up and back.
"If you want to remove it," Amorphia continued smoothly, "you may, of course. You'll find it in your heart; primary aortic valve."
The bird made a screaming noise and thrashed vertically into the air. Dajeil flinched, covering her face with her hands. Gravious wheeled in the air and beat hard for the nearest corridor. Amorphia watched it go from beneath cold, lid-hooded eyes. Dajeil put both her hands on her abdomen. She swallowed. Something black drifted down past her face and she picked it out of the air. A feather.
"Sorry about that," Amorphia said.
"What… what was all that about?" Gelian asked.
Amorphia shrugged. "The bird is a spy," it said flatly. "Has been from the first. It got its reports to the outside by encoding them on a bacterium and depositing them on the bodies of people about to be returned for re-awakening. I knew about it twenty years ago but let it pass after checking each signal; it was never allowed to know anything the disclosure of which could pose a threat. Its last message was the only one I ever altered. It helped facilitate our escape from the attentions of the Yawning Angel. Amorphia grinned, almost childishly. "There's nothing further it can do; I set the scout missile on it to punish it, really. If it distresses you, I'll call it off."
Dajeil Gelian looked up into the steady grey eyes of the cadaverous, dark-clad creature for some time, quite as if she hadn't even heard the question.
"Amorphia," she said. "Please; what is going on? What is really going on?"
The ship's avatar looked pained for a moment. It looked away, towards the plant the scout missile had been hiding underneath. "Whatever else," it said awkwardly, formally, "always remember that you are free to leave me at any time; this GCU is entirely at your disposal and no order or request of mine will affect its actions." It looked back at her. It shook its head, but its voice sounded kinder when it spoke again; "I'm sorry, Gelian; I still can't tell you very much. We are going to a place near a star called Esperi." The creature hesitated, as though unsure, gaze roaming the floor and the nearby seats. "Because I want to," it said eventually, as though only realising this itself for the first time. "Because there may be something I can do there." It raised its arms out from its body, let them fall again. "And in the meantime, we await a guest. Or at any rate, I await a guest. You may not care to."
"Who?" the woman asked.
"Haven't you guessed?" the avatar said softly. "Byr Genar-Hofoen."
The woman looked down then, and her brows slowly creased, and the dark feather she had caught fell from her fingers.
III
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28. 867.4406]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
Have you heard? Was I not right about Genar-Hofoen? Do the times not now start to tally?
oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.4886]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
Yes. Two three three. What's it doing — going for some kind of record? Yes yes yes all right you were correct about the human. But why didn't you have any warning of this?
oo
I don't know. Two decades of reliable but totally boring reports and then just when it might have been handy to know what the big
bugger was really up to, the intelligence conduit caves in. All I can think of is that our mutual friend… oh, hell, might as well call it by its real name now I suppose… is that the Sleeper Service discovered the link — we don't know when — and waited until it had something to hide before it started messing with our intelligence.
oo
Yes, but what's it doing? We thought it was Just being invited to join the Group out of politeness, didn't we? Suddenly it's acting like a fucking missile. What is it up to?
oo
This may seem rather obvious, but we could always just ask it.
oo
Tried that. Still waiting.
Well you could have said…
oo
I beg your pardon. So now what?
oo
Now I get a load of bullshit from the Steely Glint. Excuse me.
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868.8243]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oGCV Steely Glint
Our mutual friend with the velocity obsession. This wouldn't be what we really expected, would it? Some private deal, by any chance?
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868. 8499]
xGCV Steely Glint
oLSV Serious Callers Only
No it isn't! I'm getting fed up repeating this; I should have posted a general notice. No; we wanted the damn thing's views, some sort of entirely outside viewpoint, not it tearing off to anywhere near the Excession itself.
It was part of the Gang before, you know. We owed it that, no matter that it is now Eccentric. Would that we had known how much…
Now we've got another horrendous variable screwing up our plans.
If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8978]
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