The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  He wondered what was left of the Shrievalty Ocula, and whether he should even try to report to it. He needed to do some research into exactly how much had changed since the invasion, see whether he was listed as dead, and whether he was being looked for or not. Maybe people had forgotten about him in all the excitement.

  Fassin laughed again. Oh, if only.

  The whole E-5 Discon invasion, so they'd been told, was

  happening quite specifically because of the List and the Transform. If that was even partly, even slightly true, and his mission hadn't been hidden from the invaders, then they prob­ably would be looking for him, and quite hard, too, given that they might not have much time before the Summed Fleet crashed the party.

  In a way the zero-result equation was a relief. The informa­tion he'd brought back was such that he didn't mind sharing it with anybody and everybody. If it had truly told the location of the wormhole portals it would have been the most crush­ingly awful burden he could have borne, an infinitely precious and probably infinitely deadly possession. He should be glad it was a joke. If it had been the useful truth, if it had been what they had all hoped it was going to be, then almost certainly no matter who he chose to tell would first torture him or at the very least tear his mind apart to make sure he was telling the truth, and then kill him to make sure he couldn't tell anybody else. He'd kind of hoped that the Beyonders might be more humane than that, but it was a big risk to take.

  He'd be better just broadcasting the result, then disappearing if he could. Maybe the Dwellers would let him stay.

  Valseir. If nothing else, he ought to let his Dweller friend know that the information they'd all been so concerned about in fact amounted to nothing more than a piddling little zero. Then there was the matter of telling Valseir that for this nothing, his friend and colleague Leisicrofe had killed himself. Not all good news he'd arrive bearing, then.

  Fassin looked up the StormSailing news service. There were fewer regattas than usual, thanks to all the interest in the war, and a lot of sailors who'd normally be on the GasClippers and StormJammers would be required to crew the Dreadnoughts and other combat craft, but there were still a dozen meetings going on at any one time throughout the planet. If he was going to go looking for Valseir at regattas, he might have a long search.

  He thought about contacting the City Administrator to arrange for transport - Y'sul would most likely be transferred back home to Hauskip city in a day or two, and Fassin could probably just accompany the injured Dweller back there - then he wondered if he ought to be more careful.

  Nobody seemed to have paid him much attention at all when he'd disembarked from the Protreptic, but that didn't mean his arrival hadn't been noticed by somebody. Were there any humans - other Seers or anybody else - present in Nasq.? Somebody - Valseir? Damn this suddenly failing memory -somebody had told him there were factions and differences of opinion within the Dwellers over the List and even the seem­ingly endemic, congenital disregard the Dwellers displayed towards the rest of the galaxy's inhabitants. We are not a mono­culture. That had been Valseir, hadn't it?

  Would any group of Dwellers wish him ill, or somehow be under the command of somebody who did?

  He called up the usually most reliable alien-watching service and accessed the global map. It was, for the first time since he'd been looking at it, completely clear. According to the display, there was not a single alien entity alive in Nasqueron. That appeared to include him, so his return hadn't been documented yet, at least not by the enthusiasts who ran this service.

  He was being called. Quercer & Janath. He put the image-leaf back in its flank locker.

  - Fassin. Anywhere we can take you?

  - Locally, hasten to add.

  - Ship at our disposal. Favour owed.

  - That sort of thing.

  - I don't know, Fassin replied. - I've been thinking about that. Do you know any more about what's happening with the invasion and the Starveling Cult forces?

  - Getting reports coming in just now that there's been some sort of breakdown at some conference.

  - Firefight, bluntly.

  - I'd like to find my friend Valseir, Fassin said. - I've sent a call, but no answer's come back. I thought I might find him at a—

  As he spoke, he thought suddenly of the RushWing Sheumerith, the Dwellers hanging trailed on long lines behind the great long flexible wing forever powering its way into the high skies of Nasqueron. The RushWing. That was the other place Valseir had said he might be found.

  - Yes, he told the truetwin. - I do know where you could take me.

  - Be in-atmosphere, you realise. Not that quick.

  - Entirely used up our luck quotient bringing the ship into

  Nasq. unseen in the first place. Voehn ship, see. Nervous-making sort of thing for a lot of people. Apparently.

  - That's fine, Fassin told them.

  They were scudding through the cloud stems under the topmost haze layer less than an hour later when the AM warheads went off. One was directly above them.

  'Oh, wow!'

  'Look at our shadow!'

  A minute later, what they would later discover had been the destruction of the great ship Luseferous VII cast part of a giant halo of light all over the western sky. Quercer & Janath freely confessed to being terribly impressed.

  The Protreptic tore serenely on.

  *

  The first twelve ships of the Summed Fleet streaked across the inner system of Ulubis at just a per cent below light speed. Kilometre-long black minarets girdled by fast-spinning sections loosing missile clusters, pack munitions, scatter mines, stealth drones and suicide launchers, they lanced across the whole system in less than four hours, Nasqueron's orbit in less than one and Sepekte's in fifteen minutes.

  Billions of kilometres behind them, on the same course and decelerating hard, lay the Mannlicher-Carcano and the main body of the Summed Fleet. Taince Yarabokin floated in her pod. In the VR command space of the battleship, there was some­thing approaching total silence as the entire command crew lay quietly listening to the sparse exchanges beaming back from the twelve advance units darting across the system dead ahead.

  Taince was amazed at how nervous she felt. She could feel her body trying to exhibit all the classic signs of the fight-or-flight response, and the pod's bio systems doggedly countering each one. There was no doubt that this was an important mission. It would, arguably, be the most crucial one she'd ever been a part of. She was of sufficiently senior rank to have been briefed at the start on the strategic momentousness of what they were being sent to do, but even so she was surprised how similar she felt now to the way she'd felt on her first few combat missions. You never fully shook off the adrenalin rush no matter how many missions you undertook - the consensus was that the day you felt completely blase about a forthcoming engage-ment was either the day you were going to die or the day you should resign your commission forthwith - but the way she felt now was worryingly similar to how she'd felt before those early missions.

  Somewhere, her nervousness would be being noted, too. Even if a live human medical officer wasn't watching her life signs now, a program would be flagging her current state of anxiety as worth further investigation later. No privacy. Well, she'd known that when she joined up.

  Taince took her mind away from these perplexing, almost embarrassing feelings and watched the data coming back from the lead ships.

  What happened now, what these twelve craft discovered or didn't discover as they crossed the system at accelerated particle speeds, would determine how the next part of her life was lived out.

  There had been some odd energy and drive signatures from the system over the last few days, though nothing as bizarre as the sudden commotion around Nasqueron a few days ago. Twenty-plus antimatter explosions. All but one, it looked like, spread around the planet in a neat if wavy circle. They'd deto­nated too far out to do any great damage to the gas-giant itself or to its inhabitants, and the explosions had been very me
ssy, almost as if they hadn't been functioning warheads detonating efficiently but rather twenty - very big - ships losing MAM containment at exactly the same time. Then, a minute or two later, an even bigger AM burst less than a light second out from Nasqueron, with the profile of something the size of the behe­moth ship they'd identified earlier getting thoroughly blasted.

  Then nothing, apart from the ambiguous maybe-leaving indi­cations.

  Because one plausible explanation that fitted most of the signs - no explanation anyone had come up with so far fitted all of them - was that the bad guys were pulling out. Nobody in fleet command really believed this was what could be happening -the Starveling Cult force had crossed decades of space to get to Ulubis: they wouldn't turn tail and face the equally long trek back after just a few weeks, would they? - but it looked like one of the more likely explanations.

  The data about to arrive would decide it one way or the other.

  The battlecruiser 88, the advance squadron's flagship, collating the real-time intelligence of the spearhead-shaped force and signalling it back to the main fleet, reported three heavy craft within detection though not attack range of the first, point destroyer. It signalled two of the following cruisers to adjust their trajectories and prepare remote munitions, guided and dumb. Little comms bleed. Possibly this was just good discipline or marginally better tech than they'd antici­pated. Flank cruisers and destroyers reported a few missile platforms, firing at them, futilely, given their speed. A lot of mines, well spread. Evidence of AM material still floating free near the planet Nasqueron, in a debris profile that fitted exactly twenty ships having blown up at the same time eight days earlier. One big debris field, still heading outwards from the gas-giant, spreading, consistent with a very large ship having been destroyed.

  A few other small enemy ships showing, the closest responding to their passing, firing beam weapons. No hits. The destroyer Bofors passed within a kilo-klick of a vessel of about the same size as it, identified it as a hostile before the other ship had even registered the craft hurtling past and hit and destroyed it with a high-X-ray laser from its phase-modulation collar turret before the hostile had time to react.

  Halfway across the system now. Still just the three big targets. There should be hundreds.

  The four craft at the trailing end of the advance squadron's spear-point had time to spare while they nudge-deflected and picked off some of the targets that the point and mid-body ships had identified. They turned long-range sensors on the outer system and beyond, in the general direction of the E-5 Discon, getting a straight-down look along that track which the main fleet had only ever been able to view at a ninety-degree angle.

  Drive signatures. Hundreds of them. Most of a thousand ships, all heading for home, taking a slightly acutely angled route that had hidden their drives from the main body of the fleet for the last six or seven days.

  Half an hour later, it was like party time. The advance squadron was almost all the way through the system, braking hard to return in a few dozen days, and the small formations of ships between them and the main body of the fleet had been ordered to forget about follow-up high-speed passes and start decelerating at their individual safe maxima.

  All the signs were that the system was almost clear of enemy ships and the Starveling Cult's main fleet was in high-speed retreat back along roughly the course it had approached on. Even the three big targets were powering up now and heading in the same direction as the decamping invasion force. A few dozen smaller drives lit up as smaller, lighter craft got set to bail out too. There would be some clearing-up to do, and no doubt various mines and automatic munitions to try and keep them occupied while the enemy fleet made its escape, but there would be no main fleet engagement in Ulubis system, no mega-battle.

  Their orders were to retake Ulubis system at any cost and hold it. A fast, light force of a dozen or so ships might be sent to harry the tardier fringes of the retreating fleet and provide continuing incentivisation for their speedy withdrawal, but they were specifically not to risk chasing en masse for some decisive battle. They had already achieved victory. They were expressly forbidden from taking the slightest risk of throwing it all away.

  The command staff were celebrating. Taince lay curled in her pod, listening to her colleagues babbling with happiness and obvious relief. Various people talked to her, gabbing away about how the mere threat of their arrival could turn away a fleet three times the size of theirs, how they wished now they'd been with the advance squadron, just to have seen some action, dammit, and how they were probably going to get a heroes' welcome when they got to Ulubis. She tried to respond in kind, mustering expres­sions of tension released and fears assuaged and all the time pretending to pretend that she'd have preferred a proper fight.

  - Vice Admiral?

  The image of Admiral Kisipt appeared in front of her, auto­matically displacing all the other images of celebrating crew.

  - Sir. She tried to pull her thoughts away from the sick feeling inside.

  - You must be pleased. We won't have to turn your home system into too much of a battleground.

  - Of course, sir. Though there will be mines, booby traps, no doubt.

  - No doubt. And I'm keeping a full sweep alert in operation

  between here and the system, just in case. Kisipt paused. The old Voehn's head tipped to one side as he regarded her. -1 think it has been very stressful for you, anticipating what might happen when we got to Ulubis, yes?

  - I suppose so, sir. Taince wondered if he'd already been alerted to her earlier nervousness, if this was a conversation - even a kind of evaluation - inspired by that.

  - Hmm. Well, the place doesn't look too badly shot up, judging from the advance results. You ought to be able to relax soon. We'll need you for liaison and ceremonial duties mostly, I should think. The Admiral made a smile. - That will be all right?

  - Of course, sir. Thank you.

  - Good. The Admiral made a show of looking around at the other images distributed about his own icon. - Well, I'd better talk to a few more people, calm them down, remind them there's still a job to be done. As you were, Vice.

  -Sir.

  The Admiral's image disappeared. Taince didn't bring any of the others to the fore, but turned away from the social space altogether for Tacspace.

  What have I become? she thought, staring into the dark volumes of Tacspace, watching and not watching coloured lines move and slowly extend, groups of figures, groups of ships tracing their way through the deep space skies bordering Ulubis system. I wanted a proper battle. Death and destruction. I wanted death and destruction. I wanted the chance to die, the chance to kill, the chance to die . . .

  She stared into the awful emptiness as people celebrated around her.

  What have I become?

  *

  Fassin felt restless as the Protreptic powered its way through the belts and zones of Nasqueron, heading for the RushWing Sheumerith, riding high in the clear gas spaces between two haze layers in Band A. The ex-Voehn ship shredded clouds as it sped through the atmosphere, keeping just under the median cloud level. Quercer & Janath amused themselves by taking turns to pilot in real-time and see by how little they could miss shaving the edges of PlungeStems. This involved quite a lot of whooping and the occasional softish collision, making the whole ship shudder.

  Fassin left them to it and floated away back through the ship, ending up in the chamber where their interrogation and the fight had taken place. He looked round it, at the dent-seats and restraints, at the scars and burn marks on the floor, ceilings and walls, and could remember nothing about what had happened. He felt frustrated, even depressed. He floated back towards the command space, stopping just before he got there to look inside what appeared to be the commander's cabin, close to the flight deck.

  The cabin was sparsely furnished and decorated. Fassin suspected that it had lost a few bits and pieces to some of the more acquisitive alien-ship enthusiasts back at Quaibrai. He looked at a squar
e on the wall where something had been removed. The Protreptic shook very slightly. A distant whoop sounded from the command space, a couple of open doors and a short corridor away. Fassin experienced a shudder of his own, and a feeling of something like deja vu, or Swim.

  I was born in a water moon, he thought to himself, knowing he was quoting something or somebody but not knowing what or who.

  Another shudder ran through the ship. High-pitched giggles rang from the flight deck.

  Zero.

  - Hey! Fassin! Quercer & Janath sent. - Call for you. Patch through?

  - Who is it? he asked.

  - No ident.

  - Human female voice. Hold on, we'll ask.

  Zero, Fassin thought. Zero. It was a fucking answer.

  - Aun Liss, name given.

  - Any bells rung?

  *

  The RushWing Sheumerith, a thin blade across the dun sky, held no sign of Valseir. The Protreptic went off to bag more PlungeStems, promising to return. Fassin flew the little gascraft wearily along the line of tethered, oblivious, wing-hanging Dwellers, waiting for a sign.

  In the end, the other gascraft was obvious. He spotted it from a couple of thousand metres away. The other device saw him at the same time and sent,

  - Fassin?

  - No, I'm a warhead. Who are you?

  - Aun. See you've brought a gun.

  He'd taken a Voehn hand-weapon from the Protreptic, once he'd found an armoury that hadn't been raided for souvenirs by the ship enthusiasts of Quaibrai. Quercer & Janath hadn't objected. On the contrary, they'd advised him in rather too much detail on the differing capabilities and skill profiles of the various guns on offer when all he wanted was something robust, reliable and powerful that he could use to defend or kill himself with.

  So in his good manipulator Fassin now toted a chunky device of what Quercer & Janath had termed the CBE persuasion — Crude But Effective.

  He made a show of holding the charged weapon in front of his primary sensing band as he approached. - Yes, he sent. - It's a souvenir.