ALL CRAFT AND MATERIAL FOUND TO BE WITHIN THIS VOLUME WILL BE DEEMED TO BE IN CONTRAVENTION OF AFFRONT LAW AND IN CONTEMPT OF THE AFFRONT SUPREME COMMITTEE THUS SUBJECTING THEMSELVES TO THE FULL PUNITIVE MIGHT OF THE AFFRONT MILITARY.
TO ENFORCE SAID ORDINANCE A HUNDREDS-STRONG WAR FLEET OF EX-CULTURE CRAFT WHICH HAVE CHOSEN TO RENOUNCE THEIR PREVIOUS ALLEGIANCE TO THE ENEMY HAVE BEEN DISPATCHED TO THE ABOVE-MENTIONED LOCATION WITH INSTRUCTIONS RUTHLESSLY TO ENFORCE THIS ORDER.
GLORY TO THE AFFRONT!
~ So there, the Sober Counsel communicated. ~ That’s us told.
~ And they can be here in a week, added the Appeal To Reason.
~ Hmm. That location they gave, the Fate sent. ~ Look where it’s centred.
~ Ah-hah, replied the Sober Counsel.
~ Ah-hah what? asked the Appeal To Reason.
~ It’s not centred on the entity itself, the other Elench ship pointed out. ~ It’s just off-centre where whatever happened to that little-drone took place.
~ The Furious Purpose is one of a couple of Affronter craft that left Tier at the same time the fleet did; it could have been following the Peace Makes Plenty, the Sober Counsel told the Culture ship. ~ It is certainly the ship that returned to Tier . . . thirty-six days after whatever happened here.
~ That’s a little slow, the Fate sent. ~ According to my records a meteorite-class light cruiser should have been able to do it in . . . oh, wait a moment; it had an engine fault. And then while it was on Tier it suffered some sort of . . . hmm. Oh; look!
The Excession was doing something.
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883 .1344]
xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The
oGSV Sabbaticaler No Fixed Abode
Right. I have thought about this. No, I will not help in trapping the Serious Callers Only or the Shoot Them Later. I reported my previous misgivings and the fact that I had shared them with the other two craft because in the course of my investigations into what I perceived as a dangerous conspiracy I became convinced of the need to deal decisively with the Affront. I still do not approve of the way this has been done, but by the time your plans became uncovered it would arguably have caused more damage attempting to arrest them than letting them go ahead. I still find it hard to believe that the rogue ship which tricked the ship store at Pittance was acting alone and that you merely took advantage of the ruse, despite your assurances. However, I have no evidence to the contrary. I have given my word and I will not go public with all this, but I will consider that agreement dependent on the continued well-being and freedom from persecution of both the Serious Callers Only and the Shoot Them Later, as well, of course, as being contingent upon my own continued integrity. I don’t doubt you will think me either paranoid or ridiculous for systematising this arrangement with various other friends and colleagues, particularly given the hostilities which commenced yesterday. I am thinking of taking some sabbatical time myself soon, and going off course-schedule. I shall, in any event, be quitting the Group. ∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883 .2182]
xGSV Sabbaticaler No Fixed Abode
oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The
I understand completely. There is, you must, must believe, no desire on our part to cause any harm to you or the two craft you mention. We have been concerned purely to expedite the resolution of this unfortunate state of affairs; there will be no recriminations, no witch-hunts, no pogroms or purges on our behalf. With your assurance that this ends here, we are perfectly, quintessentially content. A great relief!
Let me add that it is hard for me to find the words to communicate to you the depth of my - our - gratitude in this matter. You have shown irreproachable moral integrity combined with a truly objective open-mindedness; virtues that all too often are regarded as being as tragically incompatible as they are infinitely desirable. You are an example to all of us. I beg you not to leave the Group. We would lose too much. Please; reconsider. No one would deny that you have earned a thousand rests, but please take pity on those who would dare ask you to forgo one, for their own selfish benefit.
∞
Thank you. However, my decision is irrevocable. Should I still be welcome, I may hope for a request to rejoin you at some point in the future should some exceptional situation stimulate the thought that I might again be of service. ∞
My dear, dear ship. If you really must go, please do so with our fondest regards, so long as you swear never to forget that your invitation to restore your wisdom and probity to our small team stands in perpetuity!
VI
Genar-Hofoen spent quite a lot of time on the toilet. Ulver Seich was hell when she was cross and she had been in a state of virtually permanent crossness ever since he’d properly woken up; in fact, since well before. She’d been cross - cross with him - while he’d been unconscious, which seemed unfair somehow.
If he slept too long or day-dozed she got even crosser, so he went to the toilet for fairly long intervals. The toilet in a nine-person module consisted of a sort of thick flap that hinged down from a recess in the back wall of the small craft’s single cabin. A semi-cylindrical field popped into being when the flap was in place, isolating the enclosed space from the rest of the cabin, and there was just enough room to make the necessary adjustments to one’s clothing and stand or sit in comfort; usually some pleasantly bland music played, but Genar-Hofoen preferred the perfect silence the field enclosure produced. He sat there in the gentle, pleasantly perfumed downward breeze, not, as a rule, actually doing anything, but content to have some time to himself.
Stuck on a tiny but perfectly comfortable module with a beautiful, intelligent young woman. It ought to be a recipe for unbridled bliss; it was practically a fantasy. In fact, it was sheer hell. He’d felt trapped before, but never like this, never so completely, never so helplessly, never with somebody who seemed to find him quite so annoying just to be in the presence of. He couldn’t even blame the drone. The drone was, in a sense, in the way, but he didn’t mind. Just as well it was, in fact; he didn’t know what Ulver Seich might have done to him if it hadn’t been in the way. Hell, he quite liked the drone. The girl he could easily fall in love with, and in the right circumstances certainly admire and be impressed by and, yes, perfectly possibly like, even be friends with . . . but right now he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she really didn’t like him a lot.
He supposed these just were not the right circumstances. The right circumstances would involve them both being somewhere extremely civilised and cultured with lots of other people around and things happening and stuff to do and opportunities to choose when and where to get to know each other, not cooped up - grief, and it was only for two days so far but it felt more like a month - in a small module in the middle of a war with no apparent idea where they were supposed to go and all their plans seemingly thwarted. It probably didn’t help that he was effectively their prisoner, either.
‘So who was the first girl?’ he asked her. ‘The one outside the Sublimers’ place?’
‘Probably SC,’ Ulver Seich told him grumpily. She glared back at the drone. The two humans were in the same seats they’d been in when he’d first woken up. The floor of the cabin area behind them could contort and produce various combinations of seats, couches, tables and so on, but every now and again they just sat in the forward-facing seats, looking at the screen and the stars. The drone Churt Lyne sat oblivious on the floor of the cabin, taking no apparent notice of the girl’s glare. The drone seemed to be glare-proof. Somehow it was allowed to get away with being uncommunicative.
Genar-Hofoen sat back in the seat. The stars ahead looked the same as they had a few minutes ago. The module wasn’t really heading anywhere purposefully; it was just moving away from Tier, down one of the many corridors approved by Tier traffic control as free from warships and/or volume warnings or restrictions. The girl and the drone hadn’t allowed him to contact Tier or anybody else. They
had been in touch with what sounded like a ship Mind, communicating by screen-written messages he wasn’t allowed to see. Once or twice the girl and the drone had gone quiet and still together, obviously in touch through its communicator and a neural lace.
In theory he might have been able to wrest control of the module from them at such a point, but in practice it would have been futile; the module had its own semi-sentient systems which he had no way of subverting and little chance of arguing round even if he had somehow got the better of the girl and the drone, and anyway, where was he supposed to go? Tier was out, he had no idea where the Grey Area or the Sleeper Service were and suspected that probably nobody else knew where the two ships were either. He assumed SC would be looking for him. Better to let himself be found.
Besides, when they’d finally released him from the chair he’d been secured to while he’d been unconscious, the drone had shown him an old but shinily mean-looking knife missile it contained within its casing and given him a brief but nasty stinging sensation in his left little finger that it assured him was about a thousandth of the pain its effector was capable of inflicting on him if he tried anything silly. He had assured the machine that he was no warrior and that any martial skills he might have been born with had entirely atrophied at the expense of an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation.
So he was content to let them get on with it when they communicated silently. Made a welcome change, in fact. Anyway, whatever it was they had discovered through all this communicating, they didn’t seem terribly happy with it. The girl in particular seemed upset. He got the impression she felt cheated, that she’d discovered she’d been lied to. Perhaps because of that she was telling him things she wouldn’t have told him otherwise. He tried to put together what she’d just said about Special Circumstances with what she’d already let him know.
His head ached briefly with the effort. He’d hit it when he’d fallen out of the trap, in Night City. He was still trying to work out what happened there.
‘But I thought you said you were with SC?’ he said. He couldn’t help it; he knew it would just annoy her again, but he was still confused.
‘I said,’ she hissed, through gritted teeth, ‘that I thought I was working for SC.’ She looked to one side and sighed heavily, then turned back to him. ‘Maybe I am, maybe I was, maybe there’s different bits of SC, maybe something else entirely, I just don’t know, don’t you understand?’
‘So who sent you?’ he asked, crossing his arms. The ownskin jacket slid round his torso; the module’s bio unit was cleaning his shirt. The suit still looked pretty good, he thought. The girl hadn’t changed out of her jewelled space suit (though she had used the module’s toilet, rather than whatever built-in units the suit had). She looked less and less like Dajeil Gelian every hour, he thought, her face becoming younger and finer and more beautiful all the time. It was a fascinating transformation to watch and if the circumstances had been different he’d have been aching at least to test the waters with her to see if there was any sort of mutuality of attraction here . . . but the circumstances were as they were, and right now the last thing he wanted to do was give her any impression he was ogling her.
‘I told you who sent me,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘A Mind. With the help . . . well, it looks more like collusion now, actually,’ she said with an insincere smile, ‘of my home world’s Mind.’ She took a deep breath, then set her lips in as tight a line as their fullness would permit. ‘I had my own warship for grief’s sake,’ she said bitterly, addressing the stars on the screen ahead of them. ‘Is it any wonder I thought it was all SC-arranged?’
She glanced back at the silent drone, then looked at him again.
‘Now we’re told our ship’s fucked off and we’ve to keep quiet about where we are. And the sort of trouble we had getting you off Tier . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Looked like SC to me . . . not that I know that much, but the machine thinks so too,’ she said, jerking her head to indicate the drone again. She looked him down and up. ‘Wish we’d left you there now.’
‘Well, so do I,’ he said, trying to sound reasonable.
She’d got to Tier a few days before him, sent to look for him, in effect given a blank cheque and yet not able to find out where he was the easy way, through just asking; hence the business with the pondrosaur. Which made sense if it wasn’t Special Circumstances which had sent her, because it was SC who had been looking after him on Tier, and why would they be trying to kidnap him from themselves? And yet she’d had her own warship, apparently, and been given the intelligence that had led her to Tier to intercept him in the first place; information SC would naturally restrict to a small number of trusted Minds. Mystifying.
‘So,’ she said. ‘What exactly were you supposed to be doing after you left Tier, or was this rather pathetic attempt to reclaim your lost youth by trying to seduce women who looked like an old flame the totality of your mission?’
He smiled as tolerantly as he could. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you.’
Her eyes narrowed further. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘they might just ask us to throw you outboard.’
He allowed himself to sit back, looking surprised and hurt. A little shiver of real fear did make itself felt in his guts. ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ he asked.
She looked forward at the stars again, eyebrows gathered, mouth set in a down-turned line. ‘No,’ she admitted, ‘but I’d enjoy thinking about it.’
There was silence for a while. He was conscious of her breathing, though he looked in vain at the attractively sculpted chest of her suit for any sign of movement. Suddenly, her foot clunked down on the carpet beneath her jewel-encrusted boot. ‘What were you supposed to be doing?’ she demanded angrily, turning to face him. ‘Why did they want you? Fuck it, I’ve told you why I was there.
Come on; tell me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed. She was already starting to blush with anger. Oh no, here we go, he thought. Tantrum time again.
Then the drone jerked up into the air behind them and something flashed round the edges of the module’s screen.
‘Hello in there,’ said a large, deep voice, all around them.
VII
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883.4700]
xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The
oLSV Serious Callers Only
I regret to inform you that I have changed my position concerning the so-called conspiracy concerning the Esperi Excession and the Affront. It is now my judgement that while there may have been certain irregularities of jurisdiction and of operational ethics involved, these were of an opportunistic rather than a conspiratorial nature. Further, I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
There are inevitably occasions when such - if I may characterise them so - civilian considerations must be set aside (and indeed, is this not what the very phrase and title Special Circumstances implies?) the better to facilitate actions which, while distasteful and regrettable perhaps in themselves, might reasonably be seen as reliably leading to some strategically desirable state or outcome no rational person would argue against.
It is my profoundly held conviction that the situation regarding the Affront is of this highly specialised and rare nature and therefore merits the measures and policy currently being employed by the Minds you and I had previously suspected of indulging in some sort of grand conspiracy.
I call upon you to talk with our fellows in the Interesting Times Gang whom you have - unjustly, I now believe - distrusted, with a view to facilitating an accord which will allow all parties to work together towards a satisfactory outcome both to this regrettable and unnecessary misunderstanding and, perhaps, to the conflict that has now been initiated by the Affront.
For myself, I intend to go into a retreat for some time, starting immediately from the end of this signal. I shall no longer be in a position to correspond
; however, messages may be left for me with the Independent Retreats Council (ex-Culture section) and will be reviewed every hundred days (or thereabouts).
I wish you well and hope that my decision might help precipitate a reconciliation I devoutly wish will happen.
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.883.6723]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
Meat. Take a look at the enclosed bullshit from the AOANL’sA
(signal enclosed). I almost hope it’s been taken over. If this is
the way it really feels, I’d feel slightly worse.
∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.883 .6920]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
Oh dear. Now we’re both really under threat. I’m heading into the Homomdan Fleet Base at Ara. I suggest you seek sanctuary as well. As a precaution, I am distributing locked copies of all our signals, researches and suspicions to a variety of trustworthy Minds with instructions that they only be opened on the event of my demise. This I also urge you to do. Our only alternative is to go public, and I am not convinced we have sufficient evidence of a non-circumstantial nature.
∞
This is despicable. To be on the run from our own kind, our own peer Minds. Meat, am I miffed. Personally I’m running for a nice sunny Orbital (DiaGlyph enclosed). I too have deposited all the facts on this matter with friends, Minds specialising in archiving and the more reliable news services (I agree we cannot yet bruit our suspicions abroad; there probably never was a proper moment for that, but if there was, the war has negated its relevance), as well as the Sleeper Service, in what has become my daily attempt to contact it. Who knows? Another opportunity may present itself once the dust has cleared from around the Excession - if it ever does; if there is anyone left to witness it.
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