“Whoa!”
“Hey, what—?” voices said, inside.
~Stun, Agansu sent, as he looked within.
Two more bodies were folding into unconsciousness, a couple of metres inside the door. Agansu turned and looked back at the faces of the people crowding the boarding gantry. They were all looking either at the two fallen security guards outside, or at him. He smiled. The other two arbites made shimmering shapes in the air and landed in the doorway, slipping inside like shadows, only half seen.
~Close and lock the door, he said, over the channel to the arbite marines. The door swung to, then made clunking, locking noises. The space he was in now was perhaps twenty metres long but only five deep. Various fixtures and fittings, none of them relevant, save that there seemed to be a large number of white tabards or shifts, neatly wrapped and stacked. Another open doorway led into the rest of the ship.
~Show yourselves, please, Agansu said over the marines’ channel.
The four marine arbites dropped their camouflage, revealing them as stocky, metallic, vaguely humanoid shapes, crouched on pairs of zigzag legs. Each looked like something crayoned by a child then rendered in gun-metal. Their heads were long, flat, featureless.
~You will be arbites one through four, from lowest to highest serial number, Agansu told them. ~Understood?
~Understood, the arbites said in unison. They even sounded metallic.
She swam up through the layers and corridors of dark, warm water. The suit spoke to her in Berdle’s voice now and again, directing her — or Berdle spoke to her, it was hard to tell.
She looked about as she swam, and noticed that some of the tiny, dim lights visible through the fluid had been arranged so as to look like the most familiar constellations visible from Xown. This made the experience like swimming through space. She wondered if the avatar would feel this. She saw only one other person, briefly, some distance off, and below.
She and Berdle had joined the unhurried groups of people heading towards the access spheres from the rest of the airship near the start of the whole process; fewer than fifty people had preceded them into the giant tank. Most of the Last Party-goers would ascend before anybody from outside, though a few would hold back to help guide any stragglers, and there were some who just wanted to be last, or amongst the last, to make the journey.
The other person swam off, away from her, and disappeared. She felt oddly abandoned, almost sad. She hoped the other swimmer would make it to the top of the tank without incident. There were, Berdle had assured her, various viable routes to the top of the tank; she and the avatar were taking the shortest and quickest.
The skin-contact hallucinogens in the water were diluted to deliver a modest dose to somebody swimming completely naked, so they were having no discernible effect on her at all. Still, there was a dreaminess and unreality to the dark swim that — along with the relative simplicity of only having to think to the extent of following an instruction every half minute or so, and the pleasant glow of continuous but unstressed physical effort — allowed her mind to wander, allowed her to think.
What a strange way to be approaching the end of one’s life, she thought. Swimming through a vast tank of water and Scribe-knew-what towards a little artificial heaven with no escape, or only one. In search of a man’s discarded eyes. With the avatar of a Culture ship following, swimming. And one of her own people’s ships seemingly intent on stopping them. She had done a few strange things in her life, she supposed; why not leave one of the weirdest of all till last? To be topped only by the Subliming itself, she guessed.
Her breathing went on, like something apart from her, the whole sound-scape to her steady, paced exertion. Save that, the silence was entire, and she had started to understand something of QiRia’s slow-building obsession with immersion, both literal and in sound. Especially in sound; in the waves of compression that took and flowed through the body rather than — like light, like sight — stopping at the surface. She had done something similar in a minor key herself, she realised, every time she stepped into the hollowness of the elevenstring and let that resound around her, through her.
She became slowly aware that, looking straight up, there was a sort of sparkling grey haze ahead of her, spreading to all sides. Lights. Lots of tiny lights. They started to grow brighter, everywhere overhead.
“Not far now,” Berdle’s voice said.
“Mmm,” she heard herself say, mouth still clamped round the breather.
“There’s one last turn to your left as it is at present, then straight up,” Berdle said through the earbuds. “Take it easy there, okay? Slow down. I’ll catch up and we can surface together.”
She said, “Mmm,” again, and nodded. She wondered why, as an avatar, Berdle couldn’t just power his way up to join her, but maybe he was so weakened after having to lose so much mass this wasn’t possible, or he just wanted to keep looking plausibly human. The spread of lights was close enough now for her to see the hints of some sort of framework stretched across the whole expanse above her. She thought she could see somebody walking along some sort of pierced walkway, five metres or so overhead.
The two ships faced each other. The Gzilt ship displayed as what it truly looked like inside its nest of fields: a steely clutch of blades like a hundred fat broadswords compressed into a barbed and jagged arrowhead. The Culture vessel projected no image beyond the surface view of its outermost fields. They were absurdly close, by the normal standards of conflict at their technological level, which was generally carried out from real-space light seconds away at least.
To be squaring up to an opponent from just a few kilometres off was pretty preposterous; both ships could extend their field enclosures well beyond this distance. It was a statement of relatively peaceful intent in a way — full-scale conflict was obviously not intended by either, or one of them would long since have opened fire by now — but worrying at the same time, given that both vessels knew their missions and intentions were incompatible.
Relative to Xown, the Gzilt ship had remained almost perfectly stationary throughout, parked in real space directly above the Girdlecity, moving at the same slow strolling speed as the Equatorial 353, five hundred kilometres below. The Churkun watched the Culture ship draw to a stop, relative to it, still entirely in hyperspace. It was a minor feat of field management to be able to do this so far into the gravity well of a planet, but then, according to the intelligence the Churkun had received via Marshal Chekwri, this vessel — the Mistake Not…, a Culture ship of slightly worrying indeterminate class — had proved itself something of an adept at this sort of thing, at Bokri.
The Churkun was keeled into hyperspace, its field enclosure bulging into the fourth dimension like somebody pressing an empty bowl brim-deep into a bath. This let it keep its options open and certainly it was able to watch everything that was happening there, but staying in the Real meant it could react faster to anything happening in the Girdlecity without having to worry about dislocs being intercepted.
The crew of the Gzilt ship were gauging what they could of their potential adversary, which expressed within hyperspace as the usual gauzy-looking silvery ellipsoid. Its current field enclosure topography guaranteed certain physical maxima and strongly indicated some likely limitations. So it was, certainly, categorically, no more than five kilometres in length and a third of that in diameter, and — if it followed conventional Culture field disposition — genuinely, physically, likely to be about twelve hundred metres long and maybe four hundred in diameter. This would make the vessel about fifty per cent smaller by volume than the Churkun, though the difference was not so great that it guaranteed the Gzilt ship’s superiority.