The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'But you did attack us.' Fassin had seen and heard and read too much about the Machine War not to protest at such crude revisionism.

  'Nope: stooges, Al-impersonating implants, machine puppets; they attacked you. Not us. Old trick. Agent provoca­teurs. Casus belli.'

  Leave it, Fassin told himself. Just leave it.

  'So the Dwellers took you in?' he asked.

  'So the Dwellers took us in.'

  'Everywhere? Not just in Nasqueron?'

  'Everywhere.'

  'Does any part of the Mercatoria know anything about this?'

  'Not that we're aware. If they do they're keeping very quiet about it. Which is presumably what they'd keep on doing if they did hear about it through you. Too horrible to contem­plate. And the unfortunate events during the recent GasClipper meet on Nasq. only reinforce that horribleness.'

  'And there is a secret wormhole network.'

  'Well, obviously.'

  'To which the AIs have access.'

  'Correct. Though to avoid antagonising our Dweller hosts and abusing their hospitality, we forbear from using it to work against the Mercatoria. In a sense we have even more freedom than we did before. Certainly the network we have access to now is bigger than the one we felt we had to destroy.'

  'The one you had to destroy?'

  'The Arteria Collapse: that was us. Last desperate attempt by in-the-know AIs to prevent the spread of anti-AI measures. All too late, of course. The Culmina had already seeded GalCiv with millions of the false AIs. Which was why the whole Collapse was so paranoid in concept and so poorly executed in practice. The conspirators were hopelessly afraid of the plans leaking to a traitor. Total botch.'

  Fassin felt like his brain was detaching from his body, as though his body and the gascraft were parting company the way Quercer & Janath had taken their own shared shell apart to prove they were not a biological Dweller. What he'd just heard was the most outrageous recasting of - by galactic standards - recent history that he'd ever encountered. It could not be true.

  'So ... the Dweller List is based in fact.'

  'That old thing? Yes, it's based in fact. Old fact, admittedly, but yes.'

  'Is there a Transform?'

  'Some secret which magically reveals how to access the network?'

  'Yes.'

  A laugh. 'I suppose there is, in a sense, yes.'

  'What is it?'

  'That I am not going to tell you, Seer Taak.' The AI sounded amused. 'There are secrets and then there are profound secrets. Is that what you were looking for? Is that why we came all this way?'

  'No comment.'

  'My, this must all be frustrating for you. Well, sorry.'

  The blur of images in front of the AIs ceased. 'Ready to fly.'

  'Restraint cradles?'

  'Patched, physiologytechnology profiles amended, buffer­ing re-parametered.'

  'Well, then, let us—' 'Oh! Oh!'

  'What?'

  'I just had a thought!'

  'What?'

  'We can do this; watch.'

  Quercer & Janath used the Protreptic's magnetic-field convolver system to gently shift the remains of the dead Voehn into a very close, very slow set of orbits around the Velpin and the still-attached Dweller SoloShip. 'There. Isn't that better?'

  'Mad as a ghoul,' Y'sul said. 'I'm injured badly. Get me home.' 'Wow, that was quick; look!'

  'That is fast. I thought it would take them a lot longer to override the ship.'

  Close-up on a screen, they saw a Voehn warrior appear from a suddenly open lock door on the surface of the Velpin. He raised a handgun and started firing at them. Another screen registered the Protreptic's reactive snarl-space armour fields soaking up the beam. A pea-shooter against a battleship.

  'Time to go if we're going.'

  'Definite target for something. I say we shoot that smart-arse bastard with the handgun.'

  'No.'

  'Oh, come on!’

  'Mistake to rely on software.' (Both bits of Quercer & Janath laughed uproariously at this.) 'Shoot the Velpin's main drive engines instead.'

  'More like it! Targeted. Firing.' The ship buzzed briefly around them. On several screens, including the main wall screen beyond the spine-seats, they watched the Velpin flare through violently pink into stellar white around its ring of engine pods. The ship broke in two and started to drift apart in a bright cloud of glittering metals. 'Oops.'

  'Ah, they're Voehn. They'll probably have it stuck back together in an hour and set off to hijack the Sepulcraft or some­thing. Let's go.'

  The twin AI half-turned to look at the Dweller and the human in the gascraft.

  'We're putting your seat restraints on now. Shout if anything feels wrong.'

  The great skeletal spines around him whined. Fassin felt the gas around him seem to set like treacle. 'Everybody all right?'

  They agreed they were all right. 'Off we go!'

  The stars swung around them, the ship hummed deep and loud, then leapt away. The shattered remains of the Velpin vanished.

  They threaded the giant 'O' of the Sepulcraft with their stolen needle ship, just to show they could, and ignored the sorrowful, chiding signals that followed them on their way back to the Direaliete system and its hidden wormhole.

  *

  If they had been expecting some sort of ultimatum or an attempt to agree a surrender, however humiliating and abject, however calculated and designed only to be refused, they were to be disappointed. The Starveling invasion hit Ulubis system like a tsunami slamming into a beach full of sandcastles.

  Captain Oon Dicogra, newly promoted to the command of the needle ship NMS 3304 which had taken Fassin Taak from 'glan-tine to Sepekte more than half a year earlier - she had been promoted when Captain Pasisa, the whule who'd been in charge of the ship at the time, had been given a newer ship - found herself and her rearmed craft forming part of the Ulubine Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons. The title was more impressive than the reality: a hodgepodge of mostly small and under-armed craft thrown across the peripheral skies of the system in the general direction of the invasion force behind a too-thin cloud of what was rather grandly called interceptor material but was basically a spray of rubble, and a few mines, mostly immobile. They were to sit here, waiting behind this so-called curtain wall of first defence.

  Dicogra, along with a lot of the captains - at least at this level - thought they'd have been better going out to meet the invaders rather than sitting here waiting for them to come to them, but that wasn't how the top brass wanted to play it. Attacks on the invading fleet outside the system had been dismissed as being wasteful distractions, and too risky. Sitting here in the line of advance felt to Dicogra about as risky as it was possible to get but she kept telling herself that her superiors knew what they were doing. Even if they were being asked to make a sacrifice, it would not be in vain.

  Their wing of twelve ships was arranged in a wavy line thou­sands of klicks long across the likely tactical-level course of the invasion-fleet components, half a million klicks beyond the last-orbit limit of the outer system. Other thin lines were deployed almost all around them, though not in front. NMS 3304 was seventh in the wing's battle order, beside the wing commander's ship in the centre of the line. Dicogra was third in overall command after the captain of the ship that was fifth in line. She had, naively, been flattered at first to have been advanced so quickly. Then she was frightened. They were under-equipped, poorly armed, too slow and far too few, little more than sacrificial pieces put in the way of the invasion to show that the Ulubine forces meant some sort of business, even if it was a fairly miserable affair in the face of the Starveling Cult's preponderance of power.

  The deep-space tracking systems which might have directed the Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons better had been high-priority targets for the Beyonder and Starveling advance forces over the last few months, and were mostly gone. What was left of them had almost entirely lost track of the exact disposition of the oncoming fleet when its
drives had shut down and it had carried out a burst manoeuvre not far inside the Oort shell, virtually all the thousand-plus craft firing their thrust units at the same time and then effectively disappearing, heading their separate ways in a web of directions and vectors too tangled and complicated to follow.

  The still-functioning long-range passive warning systems spent most of their remaining time looking hopefully for occlu­sions of distant stars, trying to see the weave of approaching ships through nothing more sophisticated than watching out for them getting in the way of ancient natural sunlight.

  Dicogra lay semi-curled in one of the ship's command pods, hard-synched in to the ship, her attention everywhere. She was distantly aware of her crew on either side of her. Counting her, there were only the three of them aboard, the rest of the small ship running on automatics. One whule, one jajuejein, her crew were both new, not just to her and the ship itself but to the Navarchy. They were still learning, more alien to her in their relative ignorance than in their species-difference. She'd have wanted another few months' intensive training together before she'd have called them remotely combat-ready, but these were desperate times.

  A sparkle of hard, high-wavelength radiation from a few light seconds ahead announced something - in fact, lots of things -hitting the cloud of interceptor material between them and the invaders, though nothing of any significant size seemed to be impacting.

  'That's a load of their shit hitting a load of ours,' Dicogra's wing commander said over the open line-of-sight comms link.

  Her own ship's close-range collision-warning systems started chirping and flashing at her. Nutche, her first officer, was in charge of this side of events. She kept half her attention on him as he tried to oversee the automatics and keep them focused. Contacts like very small pieces of shrapnel travelling at signif­icant percentages of light speed were flicking past them, all around. Nothing to do, nothing to attack, she thought. Just sit here and wait.

  The bitty, distributed sparkle became a bright glitter spread across their forward view, like a shining curtain of light.

  'And a lot of—' somebody else started to say. Then the link hissed and clicked off.

  Two of the line of ships disappeared in violent bursts of light: one at the far end, maybe one or two, and—

  The next explosion filled her senses, seemingly right beside her. The wing commander's ship. Hundreds of klicks away but filling the sky with light. Another flurry of silent explosions within and around the first one, spreading outwards like fierce blossoms of fiery white. One massive explosion, at the far, high-numbers end of the line of ships. Distant, tiny but intense erup­tions of light all around them announced other wings suffering attrition too.

  'We're just getting wasted sitting here,' Dicogra said, trying to keep her voice level. She was really only talking to her own crew; the comms to the rest of the wing and beyond were wild with interference or jamming. 'Nutche, anything on long range?' she asked. There was nothing she could see, but her displays were slightly more abstract and less raw than the data the jajue-jein would be looking at. There might be a hint of a target in there that she wasn't seeing to pick up on.

  'Nothing,' Nutche said. 'Can't see anything past this wall of collision light.'

  Another ship gone, matter blasting into radiation half a thou­sand klicks away. She tried contacting any of the other ships, but failed.

  "We're starting engines,' she announced. 'We might as well die charging at the bastards as sitting here like civilians.'

  'Ma'am!' Mahil shouted. 'We're supposed to hold here!' The whule was the one she'd have expected to be shocked at disobeying orders.

  'Ready your weapons, Mr Mahil. We're going to find you something to shoot at.'

  ‘Iprotest. However, weapons are ready.'

  'Here we go.' Dicogra let the main drive rip, sending the ship darting forward, exhaust bright, throwing the craft at the wall of light ahead.

  Grape-sized elements of a sensor group, tearing past with the rest of the hyper-velocity munitions, picked out the drive signa­ture immediately and plipped to a following suicide launcher.

  The one-shot destroyed itself blasting a fan of high-X-ray fila­ments at the target.

  Drilled by just three finger-thin beams, run through for long enough for the summed velocities and vectors of the ship and brief-lived beams that penetrated it to cause the holes to elon­gate by a few radii, the NMS 3304 took an unlucky hit and erupted in a wild spray of radiation as its antimatter power core burst and blew out, flicking the torn and tumbling remains forward across the scintillating skies ahead and causing the bright hailstorm of collision light to bud briefly with a slow wave of debris hitting from behind.

  Dicogra was barely able to think anything beyond experi­encing a dawning feeling of horror.

  Nutche, the jajuejein, had time to start the first syllable of the Song of Surrender Unto Death.

  The whule Mahil was able to begin a scream of fear and rage directed at his captain, though the three predeceased the rest of those in their wing still alive at the time by only a matter of minutes.

  *

  Jaal Tonderon watched the war begin on one of the official news channels. She was with the rest of her immediate family, in a lodge in the Elcuathuyne Mountains in the far south of 'glan-tine's Trunk continent. The remainder of Sept Tonderon - those who weren't more directly involved in the war itself - were scattered throughout and around the town of Oburine, a modest resort filling the alluvial floor of the steep-sided valley below the house.

  'Everyone all right? Are you sure?' Jaal's mother asked. A muttered chorus assured her that nobody needed anything else to eat or drink. They were down to a bare minimum of servants here. They were all having to do things for themselves and for others. The consensus was that this was good for them all in an unironic, camaraderie-heavy, mucking-in-together kind of way, but would swiftly become tedious.

  'Mum, please sit down,' Jaal told her. Jaal's mother, fashion-gaunt in the latest war-chic after decades of at the time equally fashionable Rubensism, sat down, squeezing easily between her husband and one of his sisters. All ten of them were crowded into a windowless basement room at the back of the lodge. This was reckoned to be the safest place in the house, just in case anything happened outside. If there was significant fighting in space around 'glantine, debris could fall anywhere.

  Venn Hariage, the new Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon who had replaced the still-mourned Braam Ganscerel, had decreed that, especially as they represented the most senior Sept, and given the unfortunate fate of Sept Bantrabal, they could afford to lose no more of their people. They had broken the predictable sequence of processing round their seasonal Houses and left the usual stamping grounds of all the Septs far behind, retreating to the high hills bordering the Great Southern Plateau. In a war of the scale being threatened, there were no completely safe refuges, but here was significantly safer than most places. Only deep under­ground was much safer, and all those shelters were pretty much full of the military, the Omnocracy and the Administrata.

  Some people and organisations had entrusted themselves to space, fleeing to small habitats and especially to little civilian ships, hoping to hide in the volumes of space throughout the inner system, though the official line was that to do so might be to get oneself mistaken for a military ship or munition and was therefore riskier than staying put on a planet. The disap­pearance of the industrialist Saluus Kehar in one of his own ships had been used as a warning in this regard, though there were bizarre rumours that he had either been sent on a failed peace mission to the invaders or - surely even more unlikely -that he had turned traitor and joined the enemy.

  The holo-screen display was flat, just two-dimensional. Apparently this was to allow more signal space for the mili­tary's transmissions. The uninvolving image, from a camera plat­form somewhere beyond the orbit of Nasqueron, showed space, on the outskirts of the outer planetary system. It was lit up with a speckled cloud of light, lots of little winking, twin
kling glints, flaring up and dying down, each tiny spark instantly replaced by one or two others.

  'So what are we seeing here, Jee?' said a disembodied, profes­sional-sounding voice.

  'Well, Fard,' more slow, competent tones replied, 'this looks like a barrage of gunfire, being laid down by the defending forces, ahm, discouraging any incursion or infraction by the invaders.'

  '. . . Right . . .'

  Larger blotches of bright white explosions started to spit and spot across the screen. The camera jerked from one to another, then the view switched to another theatre of operations, still backed by the all-pervasive faraway stars.

  Jaal bent to her younger brother, sitting cross-legged on the floor by her seat. 'They're never going to tell us the truth, are they?' she said quietly.

  Leax, thin and angular after what was hoped would be his last surge of growth, looked uncomfortable. 'You shouldn't say that. We're all on the same side, we've all got to support each other.'

  'Yes, of course.' Jaal patted him, feeling the boy's shoulder stiffen as she touched him. No more the days of wrestling and tickling. She guessed he'd pass through this stage of embar­rassment and awkwardness soon enough. She wanted somehow to reassure him and nearly patted him again, but stopped herself.

  The screen cut to another mini-feature on the splendid morale on board the battlecruiser Carronade.