It was all terribly tasteful and immaculate, and Genar-Hofoen was already starting to look forward to the evening, when he intended to dress in his best clothes and hit the town, which in this case was Night City, located one level almost straight down, where, traditionally, anything on Tier that could breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and tolerate one standard gravity - and had any sort of taste for diversion and excitement - tended to congregate.
A night in Night City would be just the thing to complete this first mad rush of fun at the onset of his short holiday. Calling ahead and ordering up a fabulously expensive erotroupe to act out his every sexual fantasy was one thing - one extremely wonderful and deeply satisfying thing, beyond all doubt, he told himself with all due solemnity - but the idea of a chance meeting with somebody else, another free, independent soul with their own desires and demands, their own reservations and requirements; that, just because it was all up to chance and up to negotiation, just because it all might end in nothing, in rejection, in the failure to impress and connect, in being found wanting rather than being wanted, that was a more valuable thing, that was an enterprise well worthy of the risk of rebuff.
He glanded charge. That ought to do it.
Seconds later, filled to bursting with the love of action, movement and the blessed need to be doing something, he was bouncing out of bed, laughing to himself and apologising to the sleepily grumbling but still palatably comely cast of the erotroupe.
He skipped to the warm waterfall and stood under it. As he showered he told a blue-furred, wise-looking little creature dressed in a dapper waistcoat and sitting on a nearby tree what clothes he wished prepared for the evening. It nodded and swung off through the branches.
VI
‘It’s nothing to worry about, Gestra,’ the drone told him as he stepped out of the bulky suit in the vestibule beyond the airlocks. Gestra Ishmethit leant against a maniple field which the drone extended for him. He looked down the corridor to the main part of the accommodation unit, but there was no sign of anybody yet. ‘The ship has come with new codes and updated security procedures,’ the drone continued. ‘It’s some years before these were due to be altered, but there has been some unusual activity in a nearby volume - nothing threatening as such, but it’s always best to be careful - so it’s been decided to move things along a bit and perform the update now rather than later.’ The drone hung the man’s suit up near the airlock doors, its surface sparkling with frost.
Gestra rubbed his hands together and accepted the trousers and jacket the drone handed him. He kept glancing down the corridor.
‘The ship has been verified and authenticated by the necessary outside referees,’ the drone told him, ‘so it’s all above-board, you see?’ The machine helped him button up the jacket and smoothed his thin, fair hair. ‘The crew have asked to come inside; just curious, really.’
Gestra stared at the drone, obviously distressed, but the machine patted him on the shoulder with a rosy field and said, ‘It’ll be all right, Gestra. I thought it only polite to grant their request, but you can stay out of their way if you like. Saying hello to them at first would probably go down well, but it isn’t compulsory.’ The Mind had its drone study the man for a moment, checking his breathing, heart rate, pupil dilation, skin response, pheromone output and brain-waves. ‘I know what,’ it said soothingly, ‘we’ll tell them you’ve taken a vow of silence, how’s that? You can greet them formally, nod, or whatever, and I’ll do the talking. Would that be all right?’
Gestra gulped and said, ‘Y-y-yes! Yes,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘That . . . that would be good . . . good idea. Thathank you!’
‘Right,’ the machine said floating at the man’s side as they headed down the corridor for the main reception area. ‘They’ll Displace over in a few minutes. Like I say; just nod to them and let me say whatever has to be said. I’ll make your excuses and you can go off to your suite if you like; I’m sure they won’t mind being shown round by this drone. Meanwhile I’ll be receiving the new ciphers and routines. There’s a lot of multiple-checking and bureaucratic book-keeping sort of stuff to be done, but even so it should only take an hour or so. We won’t offer them a meal or anything; with any luck they’ll take the hint and head off again, leave us in peace, eh?’
After a moment, Gestra nodded at this, vigorously. The drone swivelled in the air at the man’s side to show him it was looking at him. ‘Does all this sound acceptable? I mean, I could put them off completely; tell them they’re just not welcome, but it would be terribly rude, don’t you think?’
‘Y-yes,’ Gestra said, frowning and looking distinctly uncertain. ‘Rude. Suppose so. Rude. Mustn’t be rude. Probably come a long way, should think?’ A smile flickered around his lips, like a small flame in a high wind.
‘I think we can be pretty sure of that,’ the drone said with a laugh in its voice. It clapped him gently on the back with a field.
Gestra was smiling a little more confidently as he walked into the accommodation unit’s main reception area.
The reception area was a large round room full of couches and chairs. Gestra usually paid it no attention; it was just a largish space he had to walk through on his way to and back from the airlocks which led to the warship hangars. Now he looked at each of the plumply comfortable-looking seats and sofas as though they represented some terrible threat. He felt his nervousness return. He wiped his brow as the drone stopped by a couch and indicated he might like to sit.
‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ the drone said as Gestra sat. A screen appeared in the air on the far side of the room, starting as a bright dot, quickly widening to a line eight metres long then seeming to unroll so that it filled the four-metre space between floor and ceiling.
Blackness; little lights. Space. Gestra realised suddenly how long it had been since he’d seen such a view. Then, sweeping slowly into view came a long, dark grey shape, sleek, symmetrical, double-ended, reminding Gestra of the axle and hubs of a ship’s windlass.
‘The Killer class Limited Offensive Unit Attitude Adjuster,’ the drone said in a matter-of-fact, almost bored-sounding voice. ‘Not a type we have here.’
Gestra nodded. ‘No,’ he said, then stopped to clear his throat a few times. ‘No pattern . . . patterns on it . . . its hull.’
‘That’s right,’ the drone said.
The ship was stopped now, almost filling the screen. The stars wheeled slowly behind it.
‘Well, I--’ the drone said, then stopped. The screen on the far side of the room flickered.
The drone’s aura field flicked off. It fell out of the air, bouncing off the seat beside Gestra and toppling heavily, lifelessly, to the floor.
Gestra stared at it. A voice like a sigh said, ‘. . . sssave yourssselfff . . .’ then the lights dimmed, there was a buzzing noise from all around Gestra, and a tiny tendril of smoke leaked out of the top of the drone’s casing.
Gestra leapt up out of the seat, staring wildly around, then jumped up on the seat, crouching there and staring at the drone. The little wisp of smoke was dissipating. The buzzing noise faded slowly. Gestra squatted, hugging his knees with both arms and looking all about. The buzzing noise stopped; the screen collapsed to a line hanging in the air, then shrank to a dot, then winked out. After a moment, Gestra reached forward with one hand and prodded the drone’s casing with one hand. It felt warm and solid. It didn’t move.
A sequence of thuds from the far side of the room shook the air. Beyond where the screen had hung in the air, four tiny mirror spheres bloated suddenly, growing almost instantly to over three metres in diameter and hovering just above the floor. Gestra jumped off the seat and started back away from the spheres. He rubbed his hands together and glanced back at the corridor to the airlock. The mirror spheres vanished like exploding balloons to reveal complicated things like tiny space-ships, not much smaller than the mirror spheres themselves.
One of them rushed towards Gestra, who turned and ran.
He p
elted down the corridor, running as fast as he could, his eyes wide, his face distorted with fear, his fists pumping.
Something rushed up behind him, crashed into him and knocked him over, sending him sprawling and tumbling along the carpeted floor. He came to a stop. His face hurt where it had grazed along the carpet. He looked up, his heart twitching madly in his chest, his whole body shaking. Two of the miniature ship things had followed him into the corridor; each floated a couple of metres away, one on either side of him. There was a strange smell in the air. Frost had formed on various parts of the ship things. The nearer one extended a thing like a long hose and went to take him by the neck. Gestra ducked down and doubled himself up, lying on his side on the carpet, face tucked into his knees, arms hugging his shins.
Something prodded him about the shoulders and rump. He could hear muffled noises coming from the two machines. He whimpered.
Then something very hard slammed into his side; he heard a cracking noise and his arm burned with pain. He screamed, still trying to bury his face in his knees. He felt his bowels relax. Warmth flooded his pants. He was aware of something inside his head turning off the searing pain in his arm, but nothing could turn off the heat of shame and embarrassment. Tears filled his eyes.
There was a noise like, ‘Ka!’ then a whooshing noise, and a breeze touched his face and hands. After a moment he looked up and saw that the two machines had gone down to the airlock doors. There was movement in the reception area, and then another one of the machines came down the corridor; it slowed down as it approached him. He ducked his head down again. Another whoosh and another breeze.
He looked up again. The three machines were moving around near the airlock doors. Gestra sniffed back his tears. The three machines drew back from the doors, then settled down onto the ground. Gestra waited to see what would happen next.
There was a flash, and an explosion. The middle set of doors blew out in a burst of smoke that rolled up the corridor and then collapsed backwards, seemingly sucking the whole explosion back into where the doors had been. The doors had gone, leaving a dark hole.
A breeze tugged at Gestra, then the breeze turned to a wind and the wind became a storm that howled and then screamed past him and then started moving him bodily along the floor. He shouted in fear, trying to grab hold of the carpet with his one good arm; he slid down the corridor in the roar of air, his fingers scrabbling for a grip. His nails dug in, found purchase, and his fingers closed around the fibres, pulling him to a stop.
He heard thuds and looked up, gasping, towards the reception area, eyes streaming with tears as the wind whipped by him. Something moved, bouncing in the lighted doorway of the circular lounge. He saw the vague, rounded shape of a couch thudding into the floor twenty metres away and flying towards him on the howling stream of air. He heard himself shout something. The couch thudded into the floor ten metres away, tumbling end over end.
He thought it was going to miss him, but one end of it smashed into his dangling feet, tearing him away; the storm of air picked him up bodily and he screamed as he fell with it past the shapes of the three watching machines. One of his legs hit the jagged edges of the breach in the airlock doors and was torn off at the knee. He flew out into the huge space beyond, the air pulled from his mouth first by his scream and then by the vacuum of the hangar itself.
He skidded to a stop on the cold hard floor of the hangar fifty metres from the wrecked doors, blood oozing then freezing around his wounds. The cold and the utter silence closed in; he felt his lungs collapse and something bubbled in his throat; his head ached as if his brain were about to burst out of his nose, eyes and ears, and his every tissue and bone seemed to ring with brief, stunning pain before going numb.
He looked into the enveloping darkness and up at the towering, heedless heights of the bizarrely patterned ships.
Then the ice crystals forming in his eyes fractured the view and made it splinter and multiply as though seen through a prism, before it all went dim and then black. He was trying to shout, to cry out, but there was only a terrible choking coldness in his throat. In a moment, he couldn’t even move, frozen there on the floor of the vast space, immobile in his fear and confusion.
The cold killed him, finally, shutting off his brain in concentric stages, freezing the higher functions first, then the lower mammal brain, then finally the primitive, near-reptilian centre. His last thoughts were that he would never see his model sea ships again, nor know why the warships in the cold, dark halls were patterned so.
Victory! Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe nudged the suit forward, floating out through the torn doors of the airlock and into the hangar space. The ships were there. Gangster class. His gaze swept their ranks. Sixty-four of them. He had, privately, thought it might all be a hoax, some Culture trick.
At his side, his weapons officer steered his suit across the floor - over the body of the human - and up towards the nearest of the ships. The other suited figure, the Affronter Commander’s personal guard, rotated, watching.
‘If you’d waited another minute,’ the voice of the Culture ship said tiredly through the suit’s communicator, ‘I could have opened the airlock doors for you.’
‘I’m sure you could,’ the Commander said. ‘Is the Mind quite under your control?’
‘Entirely. Touchingly naïve, in the end.’
‘And the ships?’
‘Quiescent; undisturbed; asleep. They will believe whatever they are told.’
‘Good,’ the Commander said. ‘Begin the process of waking them.’
‘It is already under way.’
‘Nobody else here,’ his security officer said over the communicator. He had gone on into the rest of the human accommodation section when they had made their way to the airlock doors.
‘Anything of interest?’ the Commander asked, following his weapons officer towards the nearest warship. He had to try to keep the excitement out of his voice. They had them! They had them! He had to brake the suit hard; in his enthusiasm he almost collided with his weapons officer.
In the ruined suite that had been the place where the human had lived, the security officer swivelled in the vacuum, surveying the wreckage the evacuating whirlwind of air had left. Human coverings; clothes, items of furniture, some complicated structures; models of some sort. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing of interest.’
‘Hmm,’ the ship said. Something about the tone communicated unease to the Commander. At the same moment, his weapons officer turned his suit to him. ‘Sir,’ he said. A light flicked on, picking out a metre-diameter circle of the ship’s hull. Its surface was riotously embellished and marked, covered in strange, sweeping designs. The weapons officer swept the light over nearby sections of the vessel’s curved hull. It was all the same, all of it covered with these curious, whorled patterns and motifs.
‘What?’ the Commander said, concerned now.
‘This . . . complexity,’ the weapons officer said, sounding perplexed.
‘Internal, too,’ the Culture ship broke in.
‘It . . .’ the weapons officer said, spluttering. His suit moved closer to the warship’s hull, until it was almost touching. ‘This will take for ever to scan!’ he said. ‘It goes down to the atomic level!’
‘What does?’ the Commander said sharply.
‘The ships have been baroqued, to use the technical term,’ the Culture ship said urbanely. ‘It was always a possibility.’ It made a sighing noise. ‘The vessels have been fractally inscribed with partially random, non-predictable designs using up a little less than one per cent of the mass of each craft. There is a chance that hidden in amongst that complexity will be independent security nano-devices which will activate at the same time as each ship’s main systems and which will require some additional coded reassurance that all is well, otherwise they will attempt to disable or even destroy the ship. These will have to be looked for. As your weapons officer says, the craft will each have to be scanned at least down to
the level of individual atoms. I shall begin this task the instant I have completed the reprogramming of the base’s Mind. This will delay us, that’s all; the ships would have required scanning in any event, and in the meantime, nobody knows we’re here. You will have your war fleet in a matter of days rather than hours, Commander, but you will have it.’
The weapons officer’s space suit turned to face the Commander’s. The light illuminating the outlandish designs switched off. Somehow, from the way he performed these actions, the weapons officer conveyed a mood of scepticism and perhaps even disgust to the Commander.
‘Ka!’ the Commander said contemptuously, whirling away and heading back towards the airlock doors. He needed to wreck something. The accommodation section ought to provide articles which would be satisfying but unimportant. His personal guard swept after him, weapons ready.
Passing over the still, frozen body of the human - even that hadn’t provided any sport - Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe and the battleship Xenoclast - on secondment to the alien ship Attitude Adjuster - unholstered one of the external weapons on his own suit and blasted the small figure into a thousand pieces, scattering fragments of frosty pink and white across the cold floor of the hangar like a small, delicate fall of snow.
7
Tier
I
Such investigations took time. There was the time that even hyperspacially transmitted information took to traverse the significant percentages of the galaxy involved, there were complicated routes to arrange, other Minds to talk to, sometimes after setting up appointments because they were absent in Infinite Fun space for a while. Then the Minds had to be casualed up to, or gossip or jokes or thoughts on a mutual interest had to be exchanged before a request or a suggestion was put which re-routed and disguised an information search; sometimes these re-routes took on extra loops, detours and shuntings as the Minds concerned thought to play down their own involvement or involve somebody else on a whim, so that often wildly indirect paths resulted, branching and re-branching and doubling back on themselves until eventually the relevant question was asked and the answer, assuming it was forthcoming, started the equally tortuous route back to the original requester. Frequently simple seeker-agent programs or entire mind-state abstracts were sent off on even more complicated missions with detailed instructions on what to look for, where to find it, who to ask and how to keep their tracks covered.
Excession Page 25
