oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.866.2568]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
My dear old friend, of course.
oo
Thank you. I shall make the request immediately. We shall be reduced to dealing with amateurs, I'm afraid. However, I hope to find a high-profile amateur; a degree of fame may protect where SC training is not available. What of our fellow counter-conspirator?
No word. Perhaps it's spending more time in The Land of IF.
oo
And the ship and Pittance?
oo
Arriving in eleven and a half days" time.
oo
Hmm. Four days after the time it will take for us to get somebody to Tier.
It is within the bounds of possibility this ship will be heading into a threatening situation. Is it able to take care of itself?
oo
Oh, I think it capable of giving a good account of itself. Just because I'm Eccentric doesn't mean I don't know some big hitters.
oo
Let us hope such throw-weight is not required.
oo
Absolutely.
II
A Plate class General Systems Vehicle was quite a simple thing, in at least one way. It was four kilometres thick; the lowest kilometre was almost all engine, the middle two klicks were ship space — an entire enclosed system of sophisticated dockyards and quays, in effect — and the topmost thousand metres was accommodation, most of it for humans. There was, of course, a great deal more to it than that, but this covered the essentials.
Using these broad-brush figures, it was a simple matter for anybody to work out the craft's approximate maximum speed from the cubic kilometrage of its engines, the number of ships of any given size it could contain according to the volume given over to the various sizes of bays and engineering space, and the total number of humans it could accommodate by simply adding up how many cubic kilometres were given over to their living-space.
The Sleeper Service had retained an almost pristine original specification internally, which was a rare thing in an Eccentric vessel; usually the first thing they did was drastically reconfigure their physical shape and internal lay-out according to the dictates of some private aesthetic, driving obsession or just plain whim, but the fact the Sleeper Service had stuck to its initial design and merely added its own private ocean and gas-giant environment on the outside made it relatively easy to measure its actual behaviour against what it ought to be capable of, and so ensure that it wasn't up to any extra mischief besides being Eccentric in the first place.
In addition to such simple, arithmetical estimates of a ship's capability, it was, of course, always a good idea when dealing with an Eccentric craft to have just that little extra bit of an edge. Intelligence, to be specific; an inside view; a spy.
As it approached the Dreve system, the Plate class GSV Sleeper Service was travelling at its usual cruising speed of about forty kilolights. It had already announced its desire to stop off in the inner system, and so duly started braking as it passed through the orbit of the system's outer-most planet, a light week distant from the sun itself.
The Yawning Angel, the GSV which was shadowing the larger craft, decelerated at the same rate, a few billion kilometres behind. The Yawning Angel was the latest in a long line of GSVs which had agreed to take a shift as the Sleeper Service's escort. It wasn't a particularly demanding task (indeed, no sensible GSV would wish it to be), though there was a small amount of vicarious glamour associated with it; guarding the weirdo, letting it roam wherever it wanted, but maintaining the fraternal vigilance that such an enormously powerful craft espousing such an eccentric credo patently merited. The only qualifications for being a Sleeper Service shadow were that one was regarded as being reliable, and that one was capable of staying with the SS if it ever decided to make a dash for it; in other words, one had to be quicker than it.
The Yawning Angel had done the job for the best part of a year and found it undemanding. Naturally, it was somewhat annoying not to be able to draw up one's own course schedule, but providing one took the right attitude and dispensed with the standard Mind conviction that held efficiency to the absolute bottom line of everything, it could be an oddly enhancing, even liberating experience. GSVs were always wanted in many more places at the same time than it was possible to be, and it was something of a relief to be able to blame somebody else when one had to frustrate people's and other ships" wishes and requests.
This stop at Dreve had not been anticipated, for example — the SS's course had seemed set on a reasonably predictable path which would take it through the next month — but now it was here, the Yawning Angel would be able to drop off a few ships, take another couple on, and swap some personnel. There should be time; the SS had never acknowledged the presence of any of the vessels tailing it, and it hadn't posted a course schedule since it had turned Eccentric forty years earlier, but it had certain obligations in terms of setting re-awakened people back in the land of the living again, and it always announced how long it would be staying in the systems it visited.
It would be here in Dreve for a week. An unusually long time; it had never stayed anywhere for longer than three days before. The implication, according to the group of ships considered experts on the behaviour of the Sleeper Service, and given what the GSV itself had been saying in its increasingly rare communications, was that it was about to off-load all its charges; all the Storees and all the big sea, air and gas-giant-dwelling creatures it had collected over the decades would be moved — physically, presumably, rather than Displaced — to compatible habitats.
Dreve would be an ideal system to do this in; it had been a Culture system for four thousand years, comprising nine more or less wilderness worlds and three Orbitals — hoops, giant bracelets of living-space only a few thousand kilometres across but ten million kilometres in diameter — calmly gyrating in their own carefully aligned orbits and housing nearly seventy billion souls. Some of those souls were far from human; one third of each of the system's Orbitals was given over to ecosystems designed for quite different creatures; gas-giant dwellers on one, methane atmospherians on another and high temperature silicon creatures on another. The fauna the SS had picked up from other gas-giant planets would all fit comfortably into a sub-section of the Orbital designed with such animals in mind, and the sea and air creatures ought to be able to find homes on that or either of the other worlds.
A week to hang around; the Yawning Angel thought that would go down particularly well with its human crew; one of the many tiny but significant and painful ways a GSV could lose face amongst its peers was through a higher than average crew turn-over rate, and, while it had been expecting it, the Yawning Angel had found the experience most distressing when people had announced they were fed up not being able to have any reliable advance notice of where they were going from week to week and month to month and so had decided to live elsewhere; all its protestations had been to no avail. What would in effect be a week's leave in such a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and welcoming system really should convince a whole load of those currently wavering between loyalty and ship-jumping that it was worth staying on with the good old Yawning Angel, it was sure.
The Sleeper Service came to an orbit-relative stop a quarter-turn in advance along the path of the middle Orbital, the most efficient position to assume to distribute its cargo of people and animals evenly amongst all three worlds. Permission to do so was finally received from the last of the Orbitals" Hub Minds, and the Sleeper Service duly began getting ready to unload.
The Yawning Angel watched from afar as the larger craft detached its traction fields from the energy grid beneath real space, closed down its primary and ahead scan fields, dropped its curtain shields and generally made the many great and small adjustments a ship normally made when one was intending to stick around somewhere for a while. The Sleeper Service's external appearance remaine
d the same as ever; a silvery ellipsoid ninety kilometres long, sixty across the beam and twenty in height. After a few minutes, however, smaller craft began to appear from that reflective barrier, speeding towards the three Orbitals with their cargoes of Stored people and sedated animals.
All this matched with the intelligence the Yawning Angel had already received regarding the set-up and intentions of the Eccentric GSV. So far so good, then.
Content that all was well, the Yawning Angel drifted in to match velocities with Teriocre, the middle Orbital and the one with the gas-giant environments. It docked underneath the Orbital's most populous section and drew up a variety of travel and leave arrangements for its own inhabitants while setting up a schedule of visits, events and parties aboard to thank its hosts for their hospitality.
Everything went swimmingly until the second day.
Then, without warning, just after dawn had broken over the part of the Orbital the yawning Angel had docked beneath, Stored bodies and giant animals started popping into existence all over Teriocre.
Posed people, some still in the clothes or uniforms of the tableaux they had been part of on board the Sleeper Service, suddenly appeared inside sports halls, on beaches, terraces, boardwalks and pavements, in parks, plazas, deserted stadia and every other sort of public space the Orbital had to offer. To the few people who witnessed these events, it was obvious the bodies had been Displaced; the appearance of each was signalled by a tiny point of light blinking into existence just above waist level; this expanded rapidly to a two-metre grey sphere which promptly popped and disappeared, leaving behind the immobile Storee.
Unmoving people were left lying on dewy grass or sitting on park benches or scattered by the hundred across the patterned mosaic of squares and piazzas as though after some terrible disaster or a particularly assertive public sculpture exhibition; dim cleaning machines spiralling methodically within such spaces were left bemused, picking erratic courses amongst the rash of new and unexpected obstructions.
In the seas, the surface swelled and bulged in hundreds of different places as whole globes of water were carefully Displaced just beneath the surface; the sea creatures contained within were still gently sedated and moved sluggishly in their giant fish bowls, each of which retained its separation from the surrounding water for a few hours, osmosing fields gradually adjusting the conditions within to those in the sea outside.
In the air, similar gauzy fields surrounded whole flocks of buoyant atmosphere fauna, bobbing groggily in the breeze.
Further along the vast shallow sweep of the Orbital, the gas-giant environments were witness to equivalent scenes of near-instant immigration followed by gradual integration.
The Yawning Angel's own drones — its ambassadors on the Orbital — were witness to a handful of these sudden manifestations. After a nanosecond's delay to ask permission, the GSV clicked into the Orbital's own monitoring systems, and so watched with growing horror as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more Stored bodies and animals came thumping into existence all over the surface and all through the air, water and gas-ecologies of Teriocre.
The Yawning Angel flash-woke all its systems and switched its attention to the Sleeper Service.
The big GSV was already moving, rolling and twisting to point directly upwards out of the system. Its engine fields reconnected with the energy grid, its scanners were all already back on line and the rest of its multi-layered field complex was rapidly configuring itself for sustained deep-space travel.
It moved off, not especially quickly. Its Displacers had switched to pick rather than put now; in a matter of seconds they had snapped almost its entire fleet of smaller ships out of the system, their genuine yet deceptive delivery missions completed. Only the furthest, most massive vessels were left behind.
The Yawning Angel was already frantically making its own preparations to depart in pursuit, closing off most of its transit corridors, snap-Displacing drones from the Orbital, hurrying through a permission-to-depart request to the world's Hub and drawing up schedules for ferrying people back to the Orbital on smaller craft once it had got under way while at the same time bringing other personnel back before its own velocity grew too great.
It knew it was wasting its energy, but it signalled the Sleeper Service anyway. Meanwhile, it watched intently as the departing ship accelerated away.
The Yawning Angel was gauging, judging, calibrating.
It was looking for a figure, comparing an aspect of the reality that was the absconding craft with the abstraction that was a simple but crucial equation. If the Sleeper Service's velocity could at any point over time be described by a value greater than.54 x ns2, the Yawning Angel might be in trouble.
It might be in trouble anyway, but if the larger vessel was accelerating significantly quicker than its normal design parameters implied — allowing for the extra mass of the craft's extraneous environments — then that trouble started right now.
As it was, the Yawning Angel was relieved to see, the Sleeper Service was moving away at exactly that rate; the ship was still perfectly apprehendable, and even if the Yawning Angel waited for another day without doing anything it would still be able to track the larger craft with ease and catch up with it within two days. Still suspecting some sort of trick, the Yawning Angel started an observation routine throughout the system for unexpected Displacings of gigatonnes of water and gas-giant atmosphere; suddenly dumping all that extra volume and mass now would be one way the Sleeper Service could put on an extra burst of speed, even if it would still be significantly slower than the Yawning Angel.
The smaller GSV retransmitted its polite but insistent signal. Still no reply from the Sleeper Service. No surprise there then.
The Yawning Angel signalled to tell other Contact craft what was happening and sent one of its fastest ships — a Cliff class superlifter stationed in space outside the GSV's own fields for exactly this sort of eventuality — in pursuit of the escaping GSV, just so it would know this precocious, irksome action was being taken seriously.
Probably the Sleeper Service was simply being awkward rather than up to something more momentous, but the Yawning Angel couldn't ignore the fact the larger craft was abandoning a significant proportion of its smaller ships, and had resorted to Displacing people and animals. Displacing was — especially at such speed — inherently and unfinessably dangerous; the risk of something going horribly, terminally wrong was only about one in eighty million for any single Displacement event, but that was still enough to put the average, fussily perfectionist ship Mind off using the process for anything alive except in the direst of emergencies, and the Sleeper Service — assuming it had rid itself of its entire complement of souls — must have carried out thirty-thousand plus Displacements in a minute or less, nudging the odds up well into the sort of likelihood-of-fuck-up range any sane Mind would normally recoil from in utter horror. Even allowing for the Sleeper Service's Eccentricity, that did tend to indicate that there was something more than usually urgent or significant about its current actions.
The Yawning Angel looked up what was in effect an annoyance chart; it could leave right now — within a hundred seconds — and aggravate lots of people because they were on board itself instead of the Orbital, or vice-versa… or it could depart within twenty hours and leave everybody back where they ought to be, even if they were irritated at their plans being upset.
Compromise; it set an eight-hour departure time. Terminals in the shape of rings, pens, earrings, brooches, articles of clothing — and the in-built versions, neural laces — woke startled Culture personnel all over the Orbital and the wider system, insisting on relaying their urgent message. So much for keeping everybody happy with a week's leave…
The Sleeper Service accelerated smoothly away into the darkness, already well clear of the system. It began to Induct, flittering between inferior and superior hyperspace. Its apparent real-space velocity jumped almost instantly by a factor of exactly twenty-three. Again, the Yawnin
g Angel was comforted to see, spot on. No unpleasant surprises. The superlifter Charitable View raced after the fleeing craft, its engines unstressed, energy expenditure throttled well back, also threading its way between the layers of four-dimensional space. The process had been compared to a flying fish zipping from water to air and back again, except that every second air-jump was into a layer of air beneath the water, not above it, which was where the analogy did rather break down.
The Yawning Angel was quickly customising thousands of carefully composed, exquisitely phrased apologies to its personnel and hosts. Its schedule of ship returns, varied to reflect the different courses the Sleeper Service might take if it didn't remain on its present heading, didn't look too problematic; it had delayed letting people venture far away until the Sleeper Service had sent most of its own fleet out, an action even it had thought over-cautious at the time but which now seemed almost prescient. It delegated part of its intellectual resources to drawing up a list of treats and blandishments with which to mollify its own people when they returned, and planned for a two-week return to Dreve, packed with festivities and celebrations, to say sorry when it was free of the obligation to follow this accursed machine and was able to draw up its own course schedule again.
The Charitable View reported that the Sleeper Service was still proceeding as could be expected.
The situation, it appeared, was in hand.
The Yawning Angel reviewed its own actions so far, and found them exemplary. This was all very vexing, but it was responding well, playing it by the book where possible and extemporising sensibly but with all due urgency where it had to. Good, good. It could well come out of this shining.
Three hours, twenty-six minutes and seventeen seconds after setting off, the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service reached its nominal Terminal Acceleration Point. This was where it ought to stop gaining speed, plump for one of the two hyperspatial volumes and just cruise along at a nice steady velocity.
Excession c-5 Page 26
