The Algebraist

by Iain M. Banks

  'Feel so useless, don't you?' Jaal's uncle Ghevi said. He was only about forty but looked older, almost an accomplishment in an age when people with the right money could be eighty and look ten. 'You really want to be out there, doing some­thing.'

  'Like surrendering,' Jaal's father suggested, to various tuts and hisses and a loud, affronted gasp from Leax. 'Well,' he said, suddenly defensive. Jaal's father had been increasingly cynical about the whole war since the attack on Third Fury. He was a Seer too and had been due to carry out a sequence of delves in Nasqueron a few weeks after the moon had been attacked. The destruction of the Shared Facility and the increasing pace of the preparations for war had put all that on hold, and he hadn't been chosen as one of the advisory Seers for the Dweller Embassy. Jaal smiled over at him. Tall, well built, blond, he was still the dad she'd always loved. He smiled awkwardly back.

  'Modern war,' Ghevi said. 'Even without AIs, it's mostly machines and a few highly trained individuals, you see. Not much we can really do.' The men mostly nodded wisely. The screen showed familiar stock images of the Carronade firing beam weapons into a group of asteroids, pulverising them. 'Excuse me,' Jaal said. She left the room, having suddenly found it claustrophobic and too warm. She went upstairs and out onto the balcony beyond the sitting room they'd usually have been sitting in to watch screen together.

  Street lights were starting to come on across the straggled town and the surrounding villages and houses as the light faded from the sky. Some cities, especially on Sepekte, were observing a blackout, though everybody said there was no real point.

  The air was cold and smelled of trees and dampness. Jaal shiv­ered in her thin clothes and thought suddenly of Fassin. She'd been feeling guilty lately because sometimes now a whole day could go by when she didn't think about him in the least, and that seemed disloyal. She wondered where he was, whether he was still alive, and if he ever thought of her.

  She looked up above the town and the lines of lights studded across the hillsides opposite, gazing over the trees and the dusting of snow on the higher peaks against the darkening purple sky, and saw the steady stars, and lots of tiny, brief-lived flashing lights, sprinkled across the heavens like glittering confetti.

  She looked away and went back in, suddenly terrified beyond telling that one of the little lights would swell and be a nuclear explosion or antimatter or one of those things, and blind her.

  Afraid of the sky, afraid to look up, she thought as she went back down to rejoin the others.

  *

  Fleet Admiral Brimiaice had been able to watch his own death, that of his crew and the destruction of his once fine ship, coming at him in exquisite detail and slow motion.

  Alarms and a sound like a high, strong wind filled the thin air. Smoke had hazed the view in front of the main forward screen for a while but it had cleared. Wreckage, some of it still creaking and groaning as it cooled, filled about a quarter of the command deck. Limbs and tatters of flesh of a variety of species-types lay strewn around the spherical space. He looked around as best he could. He had a serious puncture wound on his lower left flank, too large for his sap-blood to seal. The armoured esuit, which made him look so much like a little spaceship, had saved his life, or at least delayed his dying.

  Hiss, went the air around him.

  Just like the ship, he thought. Punctured, life leaking out of it, self-sealing overwhelmed. He tried to see somebody, anybody else left alive in the command deck, but all he could see were bodies.

  They should have been podded up, of course, but there had been last-minute problems with the ship's shock-gel pods -possibly the result of sabotage, possibly not - and so the command crew had had to resort to sitting or lying or floating within high-gee chairs. It would have been a fairly hopeless battle anyway, but the fact that they were more limited in their manoeuvring capabilities than they would have been otherwise had made it all the more forlorn.

  The invader fleet was well within the inner system now, the most obvious sign of their presence a great splayed, curving collection of filaments shown on the Carronade's main screen. The enemy ships themselves were still mostly unseen, conducting their commerce of destruction and death with the defending forces at removes of rarely less than ten kilo-klicks, and sometimes from mega-klicks off.

  They'd knocked out most of the long-range sensors long before, or their Beyonder allies had. Now the defenders just had glorified telescopes. Faced with camouflaged ships and the tiny, fast-moving specks of the smaller stuff, they had little hope of seeing very much of who and what was attacking them. This seemed a terrible shame to the Fleet Admiral. Losing, and dying, was bad enough, but to be swept aside and not even properly to see what and who was doing it was somehow much worse.

  Out of the dark skies had sailed or sliced missiles tipped with nuclear and AM warheads, one-shot hyper-velocity launchers and beam weapons, sleet clouds of near-light-speed micro-muni­tions, high-energy lasers and a dozen other types of ordnance, loosed from a variety of distant ships, nearer small craft and uncrewed platforms, fighter vehicles, weapon-carrying drones and clustered sub-munitions.

  They had been a decent fleet, the Carronade and its screen of twelve destroyers. They had been charged with making an audacious attack on the heart of the enemy fleet, aiming straight for the great mega-ship which the tacticians said was at its core. They had left the inner system weeks before the invasion hit, departing the dockyard hub in Sepekte orbit in secrecy and climbing high up out of the plane of the system, taking much longer to complete this part of the journey than might have seemed necessary, to keep their drive signatures hidden from the invaders. Once under way, they hadn't signalled at all, not even to each other, not until the lead destroyer had fixed the position of the enemy fleet's core.

  They had hoped to dive in, taking the Starveling invaders by surprise, but they'd been spotted hours out. A detachment of ships rose to meet them: eight or nine, each one more than a match for the Carronade, all with a handful of smaller craft in attendance. They had burst formation, spreading themselves so as not to create too compressed a target for high-velocity muni­tions, but it had made no difference. The destroyers were destroyed and the battlecruiser embattled, dying last only because it was slower, lumbering to its inevitable fate rather than racing for it.

  Brimiaice had known it would end something like this. They all had. All this had been his idea and he had insisted on leading the mission just because he knew how unlikely it was to succeed. He'd have preferred the crews to have been all volunteer, but the need for secrecy had made that impossible. He'd anticipated a few problems but there had been no cowards. And if it had somehow, miraculously, worked, why, then they and he would have been numbered amongst the greatest heroes of the Mercatorial Age. That wasn't why he had done it, or why any of them had, but it was true all the same. And even if this wild, doomed attempt at striking the heart of the invaders only gave them pause for a few seconds, it had been worth doing. At least they had displayed some audacity, some ferocity, shown they were not cowed or frozen into immobility or gutless surrender.

  Another explosion shook the ship, and the seat he was contained within. The wreckage to his left shifted and some twisted bit of metal like a great curled leaf sailed past, just missing him. This explosion felt more powerful but sounded much quieter than all those that had gone before, maybe because the air was mostly gone from the control space now. More felt than heard.

  Darkness. All lights out, screen fading away, image burned into the eyes but now no longer there in reality, the ghost of it jumping around in front of him as he looked about, trying to spot a light, a console or sub-screen or anything still functioning.

  But nothing.

  And with the darkness, silence, as the last of the air went, both from the control space and the esuit.

  Brimiaice felt something give way inside him. He heard his insides bubbling out into the cavity between his body and the interior surface of the suit. He'd thought it would hurt, and it did.<
br />
  He caught a glimpse of light off to one side, and looked up, realising, as the light flared all over one flank of the control space, that he was seeing the framework of the battlecruiser's hull structure, silhouetted from outside by some astoundingly bright—

  *

  Lieutenant Inesiji of the Borquille palace guard lay outstretched in a little crater-like nest within the wreckage of one of the fallen atmospheric power columns, its fawn and red debris lying tubed, slabbed and powdered across the plaza leading to the Hierchon's Palace. The klicks-high column had taken a direct hit at the plinth from something in the first attack earlier that morning, and tumbled base-first, collapsing with an astounding slowness along a course about half its height, finally creating from its circular summit - as it lowered mightily, thunderously, shaking the plaza, the palace, every nearby part of the city - a sudden great torus of dust and vapour, a huge coiling 'O' a hundred metres wide that floated up into the sky, rolling round and round under and over itself as the massive tower hammered into the lower-rise buildings surrounding the plaza.

  Inesiji had watched it happen from near the top of the palace itself, crammed in behind the controls of a pulse gun hidden behind camo net hundreds of metres above where the great cloud of wreckage fell. His human and whule comrades lay around him, fallen around the three long, tensioned legs of the gun. The invaders had used neutron weapons, bombs and beams, killing almost all the other biologicals in the vicinity. Jajuejein were not so easy to kill. Not that quickly, anyway. Inesiji was suffering and seizing up, and would die within a few days no matter what, but he could still function.

  The Starvelings wanted the palace intact, hence the weapon choice. They would have to touch ground, send in the troops, to accomplish their symbolic goal. At last some vulnerability, a chance to inflict some real casualties, restore honour.

  When the first gun platforms buzzed through, the lieutenant had ignored them. One drone machine had hummed right past his position, hesitated, then moved on. Spotting the dead, senses not calibrated for jajuejein. When the first landers had arrived, setting down in the rubble- and corpse-strewn plaza, still Inesiji held off. Four, five, six machines landed, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troops, many made huge in exoskeletons.

  When a larger, grander-looking machine landed behind the first wave, Inesiji had set the pulse gun to max, disabled the safety buffers and let rip, pouring fire down into the large craft, spreading it to the smaller landers and then setting the gun to movement-automatic and scrambling and rolling away down the long curved gallery with just his hand weapon before the returning fire had sliced into the position seconds later, ripping a twenty-metre hole out of the side of the great spherical building.

  He could see the hole from here, down amongst the wreckage of the fallen atmospheric power column. It had not long since stopped smoking. Hours had passed. He'd killed another dozen or so, shot down two landers, firing once from each position in the wreckage and the surrounding buildings, then quickly moving. Their problem was that they thought they were looking for a human. A jajuejein, especially one out of uniform or clothing, spreading himself out across some debris, didn't look to them like a soldier ought to look; he looked like a bunch of fallen metallic twigs, or a tangle of electrical cabling. One trooper in an exoskeleton had died when he walked right up to Inesiji to take the gun he could see lying in the wreckage, tangled in some sort of netting, not realising that the netting was Inesiji. The gun must have seemed alive, rising up of its own accord to shoot the astonished trooper in the head.

  But now Inesiji wasn't feeling too good. The radiation damage was getting through to him. He was starting to seize up. Night was coming down and he didn't think he'd see the morning. Smoke drifted from the city, and there were flashes overhead and at ground level. Gunfire, booms, all hollow, rolling and empty-sounding.

  He heard the heavy tramp-tramp-tramp of another exoskeleton nearby, over the lip of the little crater-nest. Getting closer.

  He looked one last time at the hole in the vast, sunset-tinged face of the spherical palace, raised himself slowly to see where the exoskeleton was, and died in a lancework of laser filaments fired from a gun platform a hundred metres above.

  *

  The great glittering ship, skinned in gold and platinum, was half a kilometre across, a slightly smaller - and mobile - version of the Hierchon's Palace in Borquille. It sank slowly down through the first high haze layer and the cloud tops beneath like some vast and shining seed. The small, sharp, dartlike shapes of its escort vessels carved courses around it, swinging to and fro, insectile.

  A craft like a silvery Dreadnought rose out of the cloud layers beneath, a kilometre off, and held altitude. The descending golden ship drew slowly to a stop level with the smaller vessel.

  The silver ship signalled the golden one, asking it to identify itself.

  The Dweller craft's crew heard an obviously synthesised but powerful voice say, ‘Iam the Hierchon Ormilla, ruler of the Ulubine Mercatoria and leader of the Ulubine Mercatorial Government in Exile. This is my ship, the State Barge Creumel. Myself, my staff and family seek temporary sanctuary and shelter here.'

  'Welcome to Nasqueron, Hierchon Ormilla.'

  *

  'How they treating you, Sal?'

  Liss had come to visit Saluus in his cell, deep in the bowels of the Luseferous VII. A thin, tough, transparent membrane extended from the door surround like a bubble and preceded her into the cell, where Sal sat at a small wall-moulded desk, reading from a screen.

  'They're treating me well enough,' he told her. The membrane gave their voices, as heard by the other, an oddly distant quality. Sal stood up. 'You?'

  'Me? I'm a fucking hero, Sal.' She shrugged. 'Heroine.' She nodded at the screen. 'What you watching?'

  'Reading up on the glorious history of the Starveling Cult under its illustrious leader, the Archimandrite Luseferous.'

  'Uh-huh.'

  'Tell me it wasn't all planned out, Liss.'

  'It wasn't all planned out, Saluus.'

  'Liss your real name?'

  'What's real?'

  'It wasn't planned out, was it? I mean, kidnapping me.'

  "Course not.' Liss dropped into a small seat moulded into the wall by the door. 'Spur of the moment.'

  Sal waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't. She just slumped there, looking at him. 'Gave you the idea myself, didn't I?' Sal said. 'I told you Thovin good as accused me of getting ready to run.'

  'Been thinking how best to use you for a while,' she told him. 'But it was last-minute, in the end. We were there, the ship was ready to go, I'd seen you pilot it, knew it wasn't hard.' Liss shrugged. 'They'd only have requisitioned it and put a warhead in it, used it as a missile.'

  'That really the best you could think to do with me?'

  'We might have been able to do more, but I didn't think so. Just unsettle everybody by taking you out of the equation. A morale blow, you seeming to go off and join the invaders. Worked, too. Confusion duly visited.'

  'So it was opportunistic'

  'I'm a Beyonder. We're brought up to think for ourselves.'

  'So were you always after me? Was I some sort of target?'

  'No. Opportunism again. Great thing.'

  'And Fassin?'

  'Useful guy to know. Never much use for real spy stuff, but worth keeping in touch with. Led me to you, so it was worth it. Probably dead now, but you never know. Still disappeared in Nasq.'

  'What's happening? In the system, I mean. The war has started, hasn't it? They won't tell me anything, and the screen only accesses library stuff.'

  'Oh, the war's started all right.'

  'And?'

  Liss shook her head, whistled. 'Woucha. Some of those ships you built? Taking a terrible pasting. All very unequal. All that stuff about fighting to the last ship? Bullshit, in the end. Space war's almost over. Hierchon's disappeared.'

  'Is it all just military? Any cities or habs being targeted?' Sal held her gaze f
or a moment, then looked down. 'I have a lot of people there, Liss.'

  'Yeah, you're only human, Saluus, I know. No need to act.'

  He looked up sharply at her, but met an unforgiving gaze. She was still dressed in her slim esuit, coloured a pastel blue today to match her eyes. The thick helm-collar round her neck formed an odd-looking ruff, making her small head, dark hair gathered tightly back, look as though it was on a plate. 'Borquille's the only bit of ground been taken over so far,' she told him, relenting. 'That got messy. No particularly news­worthy atrocities yet though.'

  He sighed and sat back in the little seat by the screen. 'Why are you - the Beyonders - cooperating with these . . . these guys?'

  'Keeps you people out of our hair.'

  'Us people? The Mercatoria?'

  'Of course the fucking Mercatoria.'

  'Is that really it?'

  'The more other stuff you bastards have to deal with, the less free time you have for killing us. Really a very simple equation, Sal.'

  'We attack you because you attack us.'

  Liss slumped in her seat, legs slightly splayed. She rolled her eyes. 'Oh, learn, man,' she breathed. She shook her head, sat up again. 'No, Saluus,' she said. 'You attack us because we won't sign up for your precious fucking Mercatoria. Can't even let us live in peace in case we're seen as a good example. You target our habs and lifeships, you slaughter us in our millions. We attack your military and infrastructure. And you call us the terrorists.' She shook her head, stood. 'Fuck you, Sal,' she said gently. 'Fuck you for your arrogance and easy selfishness. Fuck you for being smart but not bothering to think.' She turned to go.

  Sal jumped to his feet, nearly colliding with the transparent membrane. 'Did you ever feel anything for me?' he blurted.

  Liss stopped, turned. 'Apart from contempt?' She smiled when he looked away then, biting his lip. She shook her head while he couldn't see. 'You could be fun to be with, Sal,' she said, hoping this didn't sound too patronising. Or maybe that it did.