The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  The Archimandrite would have preferred more obviously senior people - if such a thing existed in Dweller society - and more of them, but he had to work with what was to hand, espe­cially given the time constraints. They did have other Dwellers on the Luseferous VII, however - over three hundred of them. Two whole shiploads of adolescents and young adults had been welcomed aboard for an extended tour as part of what sounded like a school trip for grown-ups. An alien-ship enthusiasts club, apparently. He would never have allowed this normally.

  Luseferous was fairly certain that he didn't really have the Dwellers' full attention. His alien-watching experts advised him that the majority of the population of Nasqueron was uncon­cerned about the small war that had just taken place and the presence of the invasion fleet. In fact, the majority didn't even know what had happened and would be unlikely to care. The planet's news services, such as they were, were full of reports concerning something called a Formal War taking place between two of the atmospheric bands. This appeared to be a form of extreme sport played out on a vast scale, rather than what Luseferous would regard as a proper war. They were playing.

  Well, he would just have to see what he could do to make them take proper notice of him.

  Suspended over the vast view, the attendees seemed to hang as though about to fall. Above them, on a network of gantries, Luseferous's personal guard stalked in exoskels, the pads of their claw-feet stalking with a steady, silent precision.

  'Let's get to the point,' Luseferous said after some desultory inconsequentialities had gone on far too long. 'We want the Seer Fassin Taak,' he told the Dwellers. 'Even more to the point, we want certain information he's supposed to have been looking for.'

  'What information?' Chintsion asked. The 'clubs' chief was proving the most voluble of the three Dwellers so far. His huge

  esuit sat cradled in a sling-seat poised over the shallow concavity of diamond film beneath, the planet's bilious reflected light shining faintly up from underneath him. His esuit was grey, with garish pink chevrons.

  'We are not at liberty to divulge that,' Luseferous told the Dweller.

  'Why not?' asked the scholar, Feurish. His esuit was a kind of dirty white.

  'I can't tell you,' Luseferous said. He held up a gloved, ringed hand. 'And please don't ask why. Just accept this.'

  The Dwellers were silent. They were probably signalling to each other. His tech people had warned him of this and had attempted to design the sling-seats so that the creatures couldn't communicate like that. But as soon as the Dwellers had seen the seating arrangements they'd protested and fussed and started pulling and prodding and attempting to reconfigure their seats and even began rearranging them so that they were in positions relative to each other which they liked better. Luseferous had ground his diamond teeth, signalled to the tech people to help, and waited for the Dwellers to declare themselves happy.

  Finally they were all sitting in a great circle, the Dwellers and the Hierchon and his handful of advisers forming most of one half of the circumference, the humans and others, including the Archimandrite, making up the other half.

  'We don't know where Seer Fassin Taak is,' Chintsion told Luseferous. 'Last heard of, he was making for a city in the northern polar region called Eponia. Though that is just a rumour.'

  'Eponia?' the third Dweller, Peripule, said. His esuit was deep, gleaming brown, frilled like seaweed. ‘I heard he was seen in Deilte.'

  'Deilte?' Chintsion said scornfully. 'At this time of year?'

  'He is an alien,' Peripule said. 'He knows nothing of fashion.'

  'Well, first of all,' Chintsion began, 'he has a minder, and—'

  'Gentlemen,' Luseferous said. The three Dwellers all rocked back as though shocked.

  'The Archimandrite Luseferous is a busy man,' the Hierchon Ormilla boomed. 'Discussions regarding the seasonal fashion-ability of cities in Nasqueron might be best conducted between sessions, not during.'

  'Little dweller,' Chintsion said to the Hierchon, 'we are, as a favour to your latest batch of masters, and notwithstanding the likely and faintly hilarious brevity of their precedence, attempting to establish the whereabouts of this Taak fellow. The . . .'

  Luseferous stopped listening. He turned to Tuhluer, who sat just behind and to the side of him. He looked the other man in the eye. Tuhluer held his gaze. Luseferous saw the other man swallow. Still his gaze was held. Tuhluer had never dared to do that before. Luseferous bent fractionally towards him and said quietly, 'Desperate times require desperate solutions, Tuhluer.'

  The other man looked down, then nodded and started finger-tapping signals into his glove. The Archimandrite turned to the front again.

  A distant thud sounded, followed a second later by another, then another, like a great clock ticking.

  Luseferous listened to the two Ulubine Peregals, old men called Tlipeyn and Emoerte, trying to wheedle the Dwellers into being more cooperative. The Dwellers gave every indication of being sincerely unable even to understand what the word meant.

  Out of the corner of his eye, minutely silhouetted against the filthy yellow-brown clouds of the planet beneath them, the Archimandrite could see a line of tiny specks drifting off to one side, heading towards the passing cloud tops thousands of kilo­metres below.

  '. . . Believe us when we say that we are serious,' Commander Binstey, his C-in-C of ground forces was saying to the three Dwellers.

  'Oh, I'm sure you are,' Chintsion said airily. 'That does not alter the fact that we may be entirely unable to help you.'

  Commander Binstey started to speak again but then Luseferous interrupted him. 'Gentlemen,' he said quietly, and Binstey fell silent. 'If I may direct your attention to the view over to one side there.' He waved one ringed hand over to the side where the stippled line of specks was moving slowly across the gasily distorted face of the planet.

  Everybody looked. The Dwellers twisted slightly in their seats. Those present in the chamber with especially good eyesight were already reacting. He could hear mutters, gasps, all the usual expressions of shock.

  'We are serious,' Luseferous told the Dwellers. He stood. 'Do you hear that noise?' He turned his head, as though listening.

  The dull ticking noise went on; steady, remorseless. 'That is a drop-bomb chute, firing once a second. Only in this case it is firing people, not warheads. Unprotected human beings are being thrown into space towards your planet at a rate of over three thousand per hour. They are men, women and children, old and young adults, people from all walks of life, mostly captured from surrendered ships and damaged habitats. We have over twenty thousand of them aboard. They will continue to be fired at this rate until we make some sort of progress here.' He waited for some sort of reaction from the three Dwellers, but they just kept on looking at the view. 'Now,' he continued, 'do any of us here present think we might have just remem­bered anything useful?'

  He watched the people and the aliens staring at the stippled line of black dots moving slowly away from the great ship. A few people turned to look at him, then looked away when he met their gaze, trying to hide hatred and fear and horror. Odd how people reacted so severely to something unpleasant happening right in front of them but were prepared to ignore much worse horrors taking place elsewhere.

  He nodded to Tuhluer, and a great screen lit up across one side of the chamber, showing the process. People - humans of all sorts, as he'd said - were shown being loaded into a number of huge circular magazines. The humans were almost all strug­gling, but they were each constrained by a tight wrapping like an elastic sleeping bag which covered every bit of them except for their faces and prevented them from doing anything but squirm like maggots and spit at and try to bite the exoskel-wearing soldiers loading them into the launcher magazines. The floor of the vast hold was covered in wriggling, struggling bodies. The sound turned up, and those present in the confer­ence chamber could hear the humans screaming and crying and shouting and begging.

  'Archimandrite!' the Hierchon shouted. 'I
have to protest at this! I didn't—'

  'Shut up!' the Archimandrite bellowed at him. He looked round the others. 'All of you! Not a fucking word!' For a while the only sound was the muffled thud, thud, thud of the launcher.

  The scene switched to the muzzle of the launcher on the exte­rior of the ship, firing - very gently, for a gun - the people into space. Their wrapping came off as they were expelled, snapping back around their ankles so that they could writhe and jerk and spasm satisfactorily as they met the vacuum naked, and suffo­cated. Some tried to hold their breaths, and bulged fit to explode. Blood specked from ears and eyes and mouths and anuses. The cameras followed them. The people usually moved for about a couple of minutes before they stopped. Then they just assumed the one frozen pose - some curled foetal, some spreadeagled -and tumbled slowly, part of an invisible conveyor belt, towards the faraway cloud tops.

  'Exactly why are you doing this?' the Dweller Feurish asked the Archimandrite. He sounded merely puzzled.

  'To concentrate minds,' Luseferous said coldly. He could hear somebody being sick in the chamber. Not many people were meeting his gaze. The gantries above were thick with immobile guards, weapons already trained on the people below.

  'Well, my mind was perfectly concentrated,' Feurish said, with what sounded like a sigh. 'We still can't help you.'

  'Give me Seer Fassin Taak,' Luseferous said, feeling some sweat - what? - start to break out on his forehead. He put a stop to that at once.

  'We haven't got this Taak fellow,' the City Administrator Peripule said reasonably.

  'Tell me where he is,' Luseferous demanded. 'Sorry,' Chintsion said. 'Can't help.' 'Fucking tell me!' Luseferous roared.

  'How can we—?' Feurish began. Then Chintsion broke in. 'Perhaps we can ask the people who claim to have seen Seer Taak last where they think he might be.'

  'There were people from the Embassy who were reported to be looking for him,' Feurish pointed out. 'Perhaps they found something.'

  'I thought they were all killed when the Embassy ships were destroyed,' Chintsion said. 'Weren't they?'

  'Look,' Peripule said reasonably to the Archimandrite. 'Why don't we just sleep on it, eh?'

  Luseferous pointed furiously at the line of bodies heading slowly towards the planet. 'Don't you fuckwits understand? That doesn't stop until I get what I want!'

  The three Dwellers twisted to look as one. 'Hmm,' Peripule said thoughtfully. ‘I do hope you have enough people.'

  Luseferous's fists clenched. He felt close to exploding, as though he was one of the people in the little production line of death sliding past the bowed diamond window. He struggled to keep his voice icily calm as he said, 'There are three hundred Dweller youngsters aboard this ship. Perhaps if we used them instead? Or for target practice. What do you think?'

  'I think you'll annoy people,' Chintsion said, and laughed.

  'You're not seriously trying to use threats against us, are you?' Feurish asked.

  'I had better point out, Mr Luseferous,' Chintsion said with what sounded almost like humour, 'that some of the clubs I represent are of a military bent. Wonderfully enthusiastic, of course, proud to personify them, naturally, but sometimes - I don't know, perhaps through boredom - they display charac­teristics which might almost be said to be bordering on those one would expect to be evinced by fellows of a "shoot-first" mentality. Ah. If you know what I mean.'

  Luseferous stared at this cretinous float. The plodding, thud, thud, thud sound went on. The line of tiny dark shapes continued to move across the tortured, livid face of the gas-giant. He turned to Tuhluer. 'Go to full action stations,' he said. 'Dark the view.'

  The vast face of Nasqueron disappeared as the diamond bubble went obsidian black. The whole great chamber grew still darker and seemed to shrink. The thudding noise sounded louder.

  'You three are to be held hostage,' Luseferous told the three Dwellers. 'As will the young of your kind currently aboard this ship. If there is any attempt to rescue you or them, or any assault on this ship or on any of my ships or assets, you will all be killed. If I don't get something provably useful on Seer Fassin Taak or whatever it was he was looking for in the next six hours standard, I'm going to start killing you anyway, starting with you three. Understand?'

  'Really, Mr Luseferous,' Feurish said, 'this is no way to run a conference.'

  'I have to say that I have to agree,' Chintsion said.

  'Shut up,' Luseferous told them. ‘I also have numerous ships with multi-real-tonne antimatter warheads stationed right round this gas-giant. Planet-busters. If there's still nothing happening after you're all dead, I start detonating them in your precious fucking atmosphere. What passes for the authorities on your giant rotten fart of a planet will be informed of the above in due course.' The Archimandrite looked up at the guards poised on the gantries above. 'Take them away. Get them out of those esuits. By cutting if necessary.'

  A dozen giant black figures like suits of ancient armour encrusted with huge dark jewels sailed down, landing on the black diamond film on great talon-spread legs. Four surrounded each of the three esuited Dwellers.

  'Well, gentlemen,' the Dweller called Peripule said ruefully to the other two, 'I suppose it is not open to us to claim we went unwarned.'

  An instant later, three violet circular curtains of light blazed out within the dark chamber, one encircling each Dweller. The exoskel guards were either rocked right back or physically blown over. Those unprotected people standing or sitting further away were picked up and thrown towards the walls. The shock wave hit Luseferous's tall seat a fraction after the safety shield deployed, so that he watched the resulting chaos through a clinker of half-silvered diamond shutters.

  The blast shook his seat, shook him and then reflected and echoed back off the distant walls. The three violet cylinders disappeared and left three huge neatly circular holes in the black diamond film beneath. The sickly light of Nasqueron's yellow-brown cloud tops shone through. The air in the chamber was whirling and screaming out through the apertures. Blinks of white light flickered outside. Two of the exoskel guards were tumbled across the floor, scrabbling for grip, and were sucked out of the holes. Luseferous just stood staring. People, mostly unconscious and badly injured, started to slide in from the edges of the chamber where they'd been deposited by the triple blasts towards the three shining holes. A third exoskeleton-clad figure was being pulled, giant hands scraping and scrabbling franti­cally at the smooth diamond surface, towards the nearest hole and the whirling vortex forming above it. Then the ship's systems finally woke up to what was happening and a dark shape flicked across the three puncture wounds in the vessel's skin, sealing off the light and keeping what remained of the atmosphere within.

  Relative calm returned. The thud, thud, thud noise continued. A rushing sound signalled replacement air being pumped back into the chamber. The exoskel guards got to their feet, looked around, then ran over to form a protective shield about the Archimandrite. More black shapes came plummeting from the gantries. Luseferous could hear people in the chamber moaning. He turned to look at Tuhluer, who was limping up to him through the phalanx of exoskel guards, his own emergency esuit and helmet deployed, the shiny bulge of faceplate reflecting the silvery diamond bubble that enclosed the Archimandrite and his chair.

  'Kill the other Dwellers,' Luseferous told him. Tuhluer leaned in, hand to the side of his head, seemingly not hearing. 'KILL THE OTHER DWELLERS!' Luseferous shouted. He clicked a stud on the arm of the seat and the diamond shuttering fell away. 'Get us away from here,' he told the other man. 'Warn the planet the AM warheads launch in three hours if they don't start cooperating.' He looked at where the three Dweller repre­sentatives had made their sudden exit. 'And make sure the Rapacious wasted those three comedians.'

  'Sir!' Tuhluer said. 'And what about the . . . chute supply?'

  It took a moment before Luseferous realised that he meant the people being launched towards the planet. He waved one hand. 'Oh, dump the lot.'
/>   The Archimandrite Luseferous clicked the esuit's communi­cator and told the Rapacious he was on his way. He marched through the moaning wounded towards the ship-to-ship and the waiting vessel beneath. The exoskel guards fell in around him, forming a giant hedge of armoured limbs and menacingly jagged torsos. He was almost at the ship-to-ship entrance when he was thrown off his feet. The exoskels staggered as the whole vast ship shook. One of the giant guards nearly fell on him, regaining his balance only at the last moment, servos whining.

  'Now what?' Luseferous demanded.

  'Damage control here, sir,' a voice said from the esuit. 'Energy bolt straight through the whole ship, dead amidships. About two metres diameter. Plus ... the bows have been shot off, back ... to ... about . . . the eighty-metre mark. Just gone. Same novel energy profile as the midships beam. Light speed; zero warning. Reactive defence systems still looking for a counter-measure against any subsequent usage . . . nothing coming up so far, sir.'

  'Comms, sir,' another voice said, 'Dwellers, demanding return of their people aboard. Apparently those were just warning shots.'

  Tuhluer came striding up.

  Luseferous looked at him. 'Hand the Dwellers back,' he told the ADC. 'Then get this thing away from here.' He strode towards the ship-to-ship.

  'And the AM ships, sir?'

  'Leave them where they are. Delay the ultimatum until the Luseferous VII is clear.'

  'Sir.'

  This time the Archimandrite made it all the way to the waiting flagship.

  An hour later the Luseferous VII was still making its lumbering, injured way out of the planet's gravity well. The Rapacious was already half a million klicks away and still accel­erating. The Archimandrite - still shaking with rage even in his acceleration couch, the full awfulness and sheer insult of what had happened at last sinking in, his patience finally exhausted (those three facetious shithead Dwellers had even escaped, esuits reflecting or deflecting everything the Rapacious had thrown at them after they'd exited the Luseferous VII, disappearing, apparently unharmed, into the cloud tops) -ordered that the ultimatum be made to the Dwellers immedi­ately, and that one of the ships carrying an AM warhead should drop its weapon into the planet's atmosphere, just to show that they were serious.