The Mistake Not… found knowing this — while Admiral Tyun did not — quite agreeable.
It would probably tag along with the flagship and its escorts, plus it had prepared an eel-like avatoid to represent it in person aboard the flagship. From what it had been told, the Liseiden were almost suspiciously keen to welcome this creature aboard.
It listened in to the animal chatter again.
Good grief, they were still discussing its own name!
The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless.
All these people seemed to do was talk!
It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.
Finally one of them said, “Sir, we… may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.”
“This far out?”
“–encrypted, aren’t… isn’t it?”
“Precautionary principle applies, team. Officer?”
The obvious, inter-ship comms traffic ceased. The Mistake Not… considered dedicating an effector to the lead vessel to monitor it internally, but there was a tiny chance they might spot it doing so — a tiny chance increased by the possibility the fleet carried tech filched on earlier Scavenging sorties — so it didn’t.
Hours of patient waiting later, the Liseiden fleet of large, boxy-looking ships finally dragged itself into the Ry system, hauled up into a rather quaint orbit around the clinker sun with the warp-engine equivalent of loud clanks and clouds of black smoke, and — finally — rendezvoused officially with the Culture ship Mistake Not…
Effusive greetings of great solemnity and seemingly genuine friendliness flowed in both directions.
It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not…’s multitudinous sub-routines — this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame — flagged the tiniest of oddities.
It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose real light had yet to get here. Somewhere inside the vast, escaping fires of the nebula there had been a microscopic flare of radiation displaying an unusual, even anomalous signature spectrum.
Suddenly in proper, no-nonsense combat-grade Mind-thinking time, while the transfer shuttle moved a few nanometres towards its destination, the AI cores on the Liseiden flagship slept deeply between cycles and the Liseiden themselves would have appeared frozen and silent even observing them on a scale of subjective years, the Mistake Not… watched the sub-routine’s resulting attention-cascade briefly suck in and focus other computational assetry on the data, rapidly producing all the available analysis it was presently possible to compile on the subject.
The anomaly — so faint, far away and overwhelmed by the seething turmoil of energies all around it as to be only very ambiguously weapon-blink — looked like it was centred quite precisely on the artificially maintained planetary fragment called Ablate, where the Gzilt had some sort of ceremonial facility.
…Oh-oh, thought the Culture ship.
Four
(S -22)
Septame Banstegeyn went from group to group, taking part in multiple hand-shakings, everybody standing side-on and putting a single hand into a big confused but well-meaning tangle in the centre. Sometimes the resulting “shake” was a trembling muddle, sometimes the ball of grasping hands would end up going up and down quite violently, as though they were all making it happen deliberately; everybody always looked slightly surprised when that happened. Doubtless this was an example of or metaphor for something or other.
Anyway, Banstegeyn didn’t enjoy the process; in fact he hated it. He took particular care, therefore, to look entirely as though nothing he could possibly be doing right now could conceivably give him greater pleasure. He was hearty, amiable, roaring with laughter when he needed to, but he had a continuing need to wash his hand or at least wipe it on his robes, as though to decontaminate it after all this sweaty touching.
Well, this was just one of the many objectionable things that a man in his position had to do. In the end it was worth it; it would all be worth it.
“Well, Ban, it’s all yours now!”
“Folrison,” Banstegeyn said, forcing a smile as the other, junior parliamentarian shook him by the shoulders. Over-familiarly, Banstegeyn thought. Folrison looked drunk, probably was; a lot of them were, though not him — never him. And he didn’t like being called “Ban”, either. “It’s all all of ours now, I think you’ll find,” he told the other man, then gestured modestly at his own chest. “Merely a caretaker.”
“Na, you finally got your way. You’re in charge.” Folrison smiled. “Of not very much for not very long, but, if it makes you happy…” He looked away as though distracted, seemed to catch somebody else’s gaze. “Excuse me,” he said, and wandered off.
Banstegeyn smiled at Folrison’s retreating back, in case anybody was looking, though what he was thinking was, Yes, just fuck off.
“Sir.”
“Septame.” His chief secretary and aide-de-camp both appeared out of the mêlée.
“Where were you two when I needed you?” he demanded.
Jevan, his chief secretary, looked dismayed. “But, sir,” he said, “you said—”
“Would you like a wipe, Septame?” Solbli said quietly, smiling as she pulled a moist square from her satchel and offering it to him discreetly.
Banstegeyn nodded, quickly wiped his hands and gave the towel back to Solbli. “Let’s go,” he said.
Eventually, shaking off the last overly effusive well-wisher from the lower ranks, they were able to make it to the doors leading from the still-crowded main assembly chamber to the Senior Levels and the terrace overlooking the darkened gardens and the near-deserted city.
Banstegeyn nodded to the parliamentary constable who’d opened the door, then, at the top of the steps leading down to the terrace, while Jevan and Solbli stood respectfully a couple of steps behind, had a brief moment to himself before anybody else rushed up to tell him what a historic day it had been. His earbud, released from the rule-imposed no-personal-comms restriction of the parliament interior, started to wake up, but he clicked it off again; Jevan and Solbli would be catching up and would let him know about anything urgent.
The gardens — roundels of paving and splashing pools surrounded by maze-like blocks of black hedges within which it had always been easy to find nooks where quiet words might be had — were just starting to look neglected, even under the soft, subdued lights shining from antique lampposts; the city — a quaint jumble of low domes and soaring spires, gently floodlit but looking empty as a stage set — lay quiet and still under a dark, clouded sky.