“If the Swarmprince so desires, I shall absent myself immediately, return to my ship and depart along with it. The Swarmprince should know, however, that we have engaged in no such deception at any point, and have at all times done all we could to cooperate with and to aid the Ronte fleet and squadron. Had we been engaged in any plot to deliver the squadron to a place of jeopardy, all those complicit would surely have brought the squadron further into the Gzilt system, where the threat to it would have been by that measure enhanced, before the trap was sprung, instead of timing matters such that the squadron has — happily — had time to deflect from its earlier course and instigate its current re-disposition.”
“‘Deflect from its earlier course and instigate its current re-disposition’,” Ossebri 17 Haldesib quoted. “Does the Culture machine possess any other especially pretty ways of saying ‘run away’ or ‘escape like a shamed, pursued prey’?”
“Swarmprince, we attempt to respect your customs and protocols and the ways that you express yourselves. If I fail to do so as well as I might, I apologise. Yes, we are running away. I run with you, being determined to stay with the squadron and fleet for as long as you wish me to. The instant you wish me gone, I shall be.”
“You say you respect us, yet you ignore my earlier threat to attack you. Is that not an insult, even if disguised by ignorance?”
“It is not, Swarmprince. It reflects my belief that I personally would probably be able to frustrate any attempt by you to harm, disable or imprison me, and that the Beats Working would similarly be able to escape unharmed should any hostile act be directed at it. We could, of course, be wrong on both counts, but we think not. To accept what we regard as this truth only reinforces our desire not to dwell on the unpleasantness of threats delivered by those who were so recently friends, whom we still value, and whom we hope will swiftly accept us as true and trustworthy friends again.”
“Then kindly leave us, both personally and in the shape of your ship. We shall make our own way to a place of safety. If what you claim is true and you meant us no harm by delivering us so expeditiously into the jaws of our enemies, you may accept our apologies. If not, then know that the Ronte make implacable foes, and the memory of a betrayal against one group becomes part of the memory of all. You are dismissed.”
“May I—?”
“Whatever it is, you may not. I said you are dismissed. Go.”
The Culture machine dipped its front portion in what was supposed to be taken as a respectful bow, then the whole machine was enveloped by a silvery sphere of fields beyond the ken of the most sophisticated analytical devices the Collective Purposes vessel possessed, the sphere shrank to a point and disappeared, and the machine was gone.
The Navigation and Targeting team reported that the Culture ship began to depart in the same instant, pulling slowly away and then, effectively, disappearing.
“A signal from the Culture ship, sir,” the communications officer said. “From the drone Jonsker Ap-Candrechenat.”
“Show.”
The drone appeared on screen.
“Swarmprince,” the drone said, “my apologies for intruding again so immediately; however, what I wished to say and still have to say is important: a five-ship formation of Gzilt war-craft including one capital ship has left Zyse, heading in your direction. Our initial simulations indicate that they intend to make a show of force and be seen to be seeing you off, rather than intending to offer battle. We believe similar though smaller Gzilt formations have been disposed to carry out similar actions wherever else Ronte forces have been en route to their destinations.
“Of more concern for your own squadron are two forces of Liseiden ships, both consisting of four vessels, each at least as heavily armed as your squadron flagship. These are believed to be converging on your entry point into the Gzilt system. The Beats Working continues to pull away but remains at your disposal and will respond as quickly as possible to any signal from you. Thank you and good luck.”
The screen blanked out.
“Signal all squadrons and elements to turn about,” Swarmprince Ossebri 17 Haldesib said. “Have them find places of safety according to existing fleet orders and prioritise eluding Liseiden units over those of the Gzilt and the Culture, though all are to be avoided, in that order. Senior Navigation Officer, you and I shall submit our codes to the AI to unlock our own sealed orders.”
“Sir.”
The sealed orders indicated that in the event of an emergency of the type now facing them, the squadron should make its way to the nearby system of Vatrelles, five days distant at full speed, to await further instructions.
The Swarmprince issued the appropriate orders, then turned to his communications officer. “Signal the Culture ship that it may remain at its current distance from us if it wishes. We may have need of it yet. Convene a full consultation with all senior officers, AIs and expert systems.”
Twenty
(S -3)
The General Systems Vehicle Empiricist felt it was arriving in Gzilt at a bad time — a bad time that was meant to be the start of a (brief) good time, a momentous and celebrated time but which had somehow gone wrong. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.
The ship was about as big as standard Culture vessels ever got; a System-class that had beefed up over the decades and centuries for what had always seemed like sound operational reasons at the time until it had become one of the most impressively large, commodious and populated examples of the class that was already the most impressively large, commodious and populated the Culture possessed.
The design of the System-class made such self-augmentation easy; the ships had no single outer hull surrounding their hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures. Adding new, self-manufactured bits was so simple it was, for some ships at least, apparently, tantamount to compulsory, and it was only a sort of residual decorousness and a wish not to be seen as too self-indulgently ostentatious that prevented certain System-class vessels from going expansion-mad and growing to the size of planets, or at least moons. That sort of indulged obsessiveness was what simming and strong VR was for; you could convincingly imagine yourself being any ludicrous size without actually committing to such monomania in reality.
Doing away with a physical hull — or treating the exterior of every component as a hull, depending on how you looked at it — had been no great leap for GSVs. Ships thought of their multiple-layer field-complex enclosures as their true hulls anyway. That was where all the important stuff happened in relation to the outside: that was where the sensory fields were, where any stray impacts were absorbed, where concentric layers of shielding tuned to various parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum lurked, where holes could be opened to allow smaller units, modules and ships to enter and depart, and — especially in the case of the larger vessels — where atmospheric pressure was kept in, and sun-lines could be formed and controlled to provide light for any parkland carried on the top of the ship’s solid hull.
Frankly the material bit inside was just there to provide a sort of neat wrapping for all the truly internal bits and pieces like accommodation and social spaces.
Comfortably over two hundred kilometres long even by the most conservative of measurement regimes, fabulously, ellipsoidally rotund, dazzling with multiple sun-lines and tiny artificial stars providing illumination for motley steps and levels and layers of riotous vegetation — belonging, strictly speaking, on thousands of different worlds spread across the galaxy — boasting hundreds of contrasting landscapes from the most mathematically manicured to the most (seemingly) pristinely, savagely wild, all contained on slab-storeys of components generally kilometres high, each stratified within one of a dozen stacked atmospheric gradients, the ship’s cosseted internals were riddled, woven and saturated with domesticated, tamed and semi-wild life in hundreds of thousands of smaller enclosed habitats, while its buzzing, external, bewilderingly complex archi-geographic lines were made fuzzy, imprecisely seen by near-uncountable numbers of craft moving within that vast, elongated bubble of air — from smaller classes of GSV through other ships, modules, shuttles and aircraft all the way down to individual humans in float-harnesses, single drones and even smaller machines, as well as thousands of species of winged and lighter-than-air bio-creatures — the Empiricist was, in sum, home to hundreds of billions of animals and over thirteen billion humans and drones.