“First of all, on that last point, I don’t believe you. I think you’re just trying to protect me, being all male-gallant. I’m flattered but there’s no need.”
“I’m a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I’m not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don’t give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.”
“Anyway. You can’t keep me prisoner on the ship. You’re Culture and I’m a free agent. I demand to be set down in the Girdlecity.”
“They are looking for you, remember? They think you trashed Fzan-Juym with your bare hands or whatever the fuck.”
“So you’d better look after me then.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you! I don’t need that extra workload! And if you insist on quitting the ship I’ll put you down wherever I damn well please, not where you specifically demand, so there you are; you can’t win.”
Cossont, already dressed in the same figure-hugging under-suit she’d worn at Bokri, stood looking levelly at the avatar across the module’s lounge. “If you don’t give a fuck about flattering me,” she said slowly, “and if you can just switch off any sentiments you have concerning me, you can do that down there, on the planet, in the Girdlecity, in the airship. So you don’t have to worry about me, and I will help, not hinder.”
Berdle stared at her. Then he smiled, and relaxed. His tone of voice changed. “I don’t know about you, Vyr,” he said, conversationally, “but I’m sort of posturing here.” He shrugged. “If you insist on coming, you can, though it’s your funeral and I won’t risk any part of what I’m supposed to be doing to keep you safe at all, not if it’s a trade-off; just nothing.” He shook his head. “I thought maybe you were just putting on a sort of good-enough show. You know; so you could feel okay about yourself even though you didn’t want to go, or expect to. So, one last chance, in all seriousness: please don’t come.”
“One last time: I want to. Take me with you.”
Berdle sighed. “Okay. You can’t say you weren’t warned. Put that on.” He nodded behind Cossont. She turned round to see a bizarre vision of a man in close-fitting armour — half mirror, half soot-black, headless — marching out of an alcove, growing an extra pair of arms and peeling itself open as it approached her.
“What’s that?”
“A better suit. I’m downloading a copy of QiRia’s mind-state to it now, so we can access the old geezer’s memories direct if we get hold of his eyes without the ship around. Go on; just step in as you are. We’ve ninety seconds before we snap aboard, so don’t take too long.”
“I thought we had ten minutes!”
“Not any more; the ship’s powering back out again, hoping to lure the battleship away from Xown.”
“Shit.” Cossont stepped over to the suit and then into it; it flowed closed around her, leaving the helmet component down. “Think that’ll work?” she asked.
“Doubt it,” the avatar admitted. “Assuming the battleship’s been talking to the battle-cruiser, it’ll know I’ve already been moving faster than it can, but it might factor in too much main traction stress degradation after all the dashing about I’ve been doing lately and think it has a chance. Assuming its engines aren’t slightly fucked too, of course. Worth a try.”
Pyan, sprawled loosely on a couch all this time, came flapping over and stood on a seat-back, facing her like a small, stiff flag. “Well done you!” it said. “I think you’re being terribly brave but I’m sure it’ll all work out splendidly! And just remember: I’ve always loved you!”
Cossont was about to say something like, Okay, now I’m worried… when her eyes narrowed and she looked at Berdle. “Did you put it up to that?”
Berdle shrugged. “Also worth a try.”
“But I do!” Pyan exclaimed, twisting to face Berdle, then back to Cossont. “But I do!”
“Yeah,” Cossont said.
“Twenty seconds.”
The ship sent a tiny update of its mind-state to its home GSV, mostly just so there would be a record of Cossont insisting on going with its avatar and other on-planet forces into the Girdlecity.
The ship was a constrained shell of force hurtling across the system now, re-accelerating hard, packaged within its wrapping of concentric fields like something cocooned, engines howling in frequencies no biological living thing would ever sense, a kilometre-long projectile submerged beneath the skein of real space, components of three outer fields lasing in hyperspace to direct the signal to its distant ship-mother, then clicking off again after a nanosecond, while other configurations of fields slid and flicked, stacked and snicked, readying for a series of multiple high-speed, high-accuracy Displaces to a complex-topography target deep in a gravity well; probably opposed.
This was, the ship knew, going to be challenging.
Most serious Culture ships, and all with any pretensions to being warships, possessed burst units: specialised engine components like motive power capacitors capable of providing sudden, brief flares of energy and movement. The Mistake Not…’s were more powerful and capable than most craft its size, which was kind of a game-giving-away liability if you actually had to use them in the presence of somebody able to spot such shenanigans, but — on the other hand — this was exactly the situation where they might help save the day, so…
The ship was already heading dangerously close to Xown’s gravity well, having to adjust its course in hyperspace to avoid crashing into the downward curve of skein. It jinked closer still at the last moment, using up all its burst unit energies both to swerve and slow, then focused in on the relatively tiny part of itself that held the module where its avatar and the humanoid were, snapping the two human-shaped forms and the woman’s pet away and then the module separately. It loosed the module first, targeting the Displace at a spot just outside the Girdlecity twelve hundred metres above local ground level and ten kilometres back from the current location of the airship Equatorial 353.
It was, given the relative velocities involved, one of the most accurate and precisely located Flying Displaces it had ever heard of, snapping the module into the air within an elegantly aligned pocket of vacuum that collapsed at just the right rate to allow the craft to continue on its way — under its own power, now — so smoothly that the ship doubted somebody standing inside the module — had there been anybody — would even have wobbled as the transition was completed.
That the whole craft was almost immediately snatched away again by an almost equally heavy-duty disloc facility — with a most inelegant bang like a sonic boom, caused by the caisson-field collapsing uncontrolled — was, happily, quite beside the point. While the Gzilt ship was busy doing this the Mistake Not… was merrily zapping all its real payloads — its avatar and Cossont included — into the places it had wanted to in the first place.
That done, within the same millisecond, it was off again, spiralling down under even fiercer acceleration as though intent on diving right under the planet’s depression in the skein and aiming for the energy grid far beneath. It steadied, zoomed, sped off, tracked but not targeted by the Gzilt war-craft, which remained stationary, hugging close to the planet.
Pyan was dumped into the ship’s last remaining human habitable space, a six-person shuttle.
~Where’s this? the creature said.
~New home, the ship sent.
~It’s small and boring!
~So are you.
~What! How dare you!
~Would you rather be on the planet?