“And what would that be?” Ferbin asked, looking from Anaplian to Hippinse.
“Intelligence,” said Djan Seriy.
“Better weaponry,” the ship told them.
They popped into existence within a vacant Oct scendship; its doors had just closed — unexpectedly, as far as the cloudily aware brain of the Tower Traffic Control was concerned. Then it rechecked, and found that the door closure was not unexpected after all; an instruction demanding just such an action had been there for some time. So that was all right. A very short time later there was no longer memory or record of it having found anything unexpected in the first place. That was even better.
The scendship was one of over twenty attached to a great carousel device which hung directly above the gaping fourteen-hundred-metre-diameter mouth that was the top of the Pandil-fwa Tower. The carousel was designed to load the selected scendship, like a shell into an immense gun, into one of the secondary tubes bundled within the main Tower which would allow the vessel to drop to any of the available levels.
The Oct’s Tower Traffic Control computer executed a variety of instructions it was under the completely erroneous impression had been properly authorised and the carousel machine ninety metres beneath it duly dropped the scendship from the access ring above to another ring below; this swung the ship over one of the tubes. The capsule craft was lowered, fitted, and then grasped by what were basically two gigantic, if sophisticated, washers. Fluids drained and were pumped away. Lock-rotates opened and closed and the ship shuffled down until it hung in vacuum, dripping, directly above a dark shaft fourteen hundred kilometres deep and full of almost nothing at all. The ship announced it was ready to travel. The Tower Traffic Control machine gave it permission. The scendship released its hold on the side of the tube and started to fall, powered by nothing more than Sursamen’s own gravity.
That had been, as Anaplian had warned Ferbin and Holse, the easy bit. The Oerten Crater on Sursamen’s Surface stood directly over the fluted mouth of the Pandil-fwa Tower and was separated from it only by Secondary structure; the ship had had no difficulty — once it had checked its co-ordinates several thousand times and Displaced a few hundred microscopic scout motes — placing them straight into the scendship. Co-opting the Oct’s computer matrices — they barely merited the term AIs — had been, for the Mind of the Liveware Problem, a trivial matter.
They had chosen a stealthy approach, arriving without fanfare or — as far as they were aware — detection above Sursamen less than half an hour earlier. The Liveware Problem had spent the days of their approach modelling and rehearsing its tactics using the highly detailed knowledge of Nariscene and Oct systems it already had. It had grown confident it could put them straight into a scendship and remove the need for any exposure to the Surface itself. Arriving, it found pretty much what it had expected and sent them straight in.
Djan Seriy had spent the same time giving Ferbin and Holse a crash course in the use of certain Culture defensive and offensive technologies, up to the level she thought they could handle. It was a truism that some of the more rarefied Culture personal weapon systems were far more likely to kill an untrained user than anybody they were ostensibly aimed at, but even the defensive systems, while they were never going to kill you — that was, rather obviously, the one thing they were designed above all else to prevent — could give you a bowel-loosening fright, too, just due to the speed and seeming violence with which they could react when under threat.
The two men quickly got used to the suits they’d be wearing. The suits were default soot-black, their surfaces basically smooth once on but much straked and be-lumped with units, accoutrements and sub-systems not all of which Ferbin and Holse were even allowed to know about. The face sections could divide into lower mask and upper visor parts and defaulted clear so that facial expressions were readable.
“What if we get an itch?” Holse had asked Hippinse. “I got an itch wearing a Morthanveld swimming suit when we were being shown round one of their ships and it was disproportionately annoying.” They were on the hangar deck. It was crowded even by hangar deck standards but it still provided the largest open space the ship had for them to gather in.
“You won’t itch,” the avatoid told him and Ferbin. “The suit deadens that sort of sensation on interior contact. You can sense touch and temperature and so on, but not to the point of pain. It’s partly about damping distractive itching, partly about preemptive first-level damage control.”
“How clever,” Ferbin said.
“These are very clever suits,” Hippinse said with a smile.
“Not sure I like being so swaddled, sir,” Holse said.
Hippinse shrugged. “You become a new, hybrid entity in such a suit. There is a certain loss of absolute control, or at least absolute exposure, but the recompense is vastly heightened operational capability and survivability.”
Anaplian, standing nearby, looked thoughtful.
Ferbin and Holse had been willing and attentive pupils, though Ferbin had been just a little niggled at something he would not specify and his sister could not determine until the ship suggested she equip him with one more weapon, or perhaps a bigger one, than his servant. She asked Ferbin to carry the smaller of the two hypervelocity kinetic rifles the ship just happened to have in its armoury (she had the larger one). After that all had been well.
She’d been impressed with the quality of the suits.
“Very advanced,” she commented, frowning.
Hippinse beamed. “Thank you.”
“It seems to me,” Anaplian said slowly, scanning the suits with her re-enhanced senses, “that a ship would either have to have these suits physically aboard, or, if it was going to make them itself from scratch, have access to the most sophisticated and — dare I say it — most severely restricted patterns known only to some very small and unusual bits of the Culture. You know; the bits generally called Special Circumstances.”
“Really?” Hippinse said brightly. “That’s interesting.”
They floated over the floor of the scendship. The water started to fall away about them as the ship descended, draining to tanks beneath the floor. Within a couple of minutes they were in a dry, if still damp-smelling, near semi-spherical space fifteen metres across. Ferbin and Holse pushed the mask and visor sections of their suits away.
“Well, sir,” Holse said cheerily, “we’re home.” He looked round the scendship’s interior. “After a fashion.”
Djan Seriy and Hippinse hadn’t bothered with masks. They were dressed, like the two Sarl men, in the same dark, close-fitting suits each of which, Djan Seriy had claimed in all seriousness, was several times more intelligent than the entire Oct computational matrix on Sursamen. As well as sporting all those odd lumps and bumps, the suits each carried small, streamlined chest and back pouches and both Hippinse and Djan Seriy’s suits held long straked bulges on their backs which turned into long, dark weapons it was hard even to identify as guns. Ferbin and Holse each had things half the size of a rifle called CREWs which fired light, and a disappointingly small handgun. Ferbin had been hoping for something rather more impressive; however, he’d been mollified by being given the hypervelocity rifle, which was satisfyingly chunky.
Their suits also had their own embedded weapon and defensive systems which were apparently far too complicated to leave to the whims of mere men. Ferbin found this somewhat disturbing but had been informed it was for his own good. That, too, had not been the most reassuring thing he had ever heard.