With Orpe, whom he had to share with the president.
Normally he wouldn’t stand for this; he didn’t share lovers. But then Orpe’s other lover was somebody it was very useful to share her with. It was, indeed, the precise reason that he had befriended the girl, flattered her, courted her, finally bedded her. Not that it was any great sacrifice, of course; she was beautiful and attractive, after all, if a little too… assertive, equality-minded for his tastes. But no matter.
He had been very careful never to ask Orpe anything at all about President Sefoy Geljemyn’s thoughts or likely actions, content to lull her into a state where she thought he had wanted her purely for herself, not for her connection to the president, not for that access, that closeness.
For all he knew, it might never come in useful. But then that was not the point.
…And of course it had been the right thing.
“Orders, sadly, are orders.”
“Well, we’ll miss you, big guy. You really have to go right now?”
“Immediately, I’m afraid. Oh, you might register a slight tremor in your warp cores as I kick off here; not a passing gravity wave or anything — just me.”
“…No, not seeing anything this… No, wait a second, yes, engineering says yes, they did.”
The Mistake Not… felt a modicum of embarrassment. It had disengaged its own warp units without a murmur — they’d been idling, basically — and then deliberately roughened up its engine fields as it had engaged its main drive, specifically to create the skein-kick.
There was a table you looked up, basically, to see which of the less-developed civs had to be hoodwinked like this, and to what degree. It was a form of dishonesty the Mistake Not… found slightly objectionable, but it was expected. Technically indulging in such deceit wasn’t compulsory, any more than this just-received suggestion that it might like to head at the highest possible speed to a distant star system wasn’t an order, but it was expected; if you wanted to do more of this sort of stuff in the future then you’d best take the hint. Otherwise you’d be frozen out next time.
Of course, it also made such behaviour your own responsibility; it was hard to claim you had just been obeying orders when orders had officially ceased to exist the best part of ten thousand years ago.
The ship was talking directly to Ny-Xandabo Tyun, the Admiral of the Liseiden fleet. It had contacted the flagship’s AI as soon as it got the signal; the Admiral had clicked in seconds later. The little flotilla of three Liseiden ships including the fleet flagship had been puttering along towards Zyse for just a few hours now.
There had been a wait of nearly half a day spent still orbiting the cinder star while the fleet had shuffled personnel and equipment between its various ships. Quite why this had to be done at this point, wasting time, when it might have been accomplished while the ships had still been in transit had puzzled the Mistake Not… for a moment until it reviewed the specifications and capabilities of the Liseiden craft and realised that, with their level of tech, ship-to-ship transfers while under way were tricky and risky. The ship had been suitably appalled, and had felt vicariously embarrassed for the Liseiden.
“Yup, that’s me off and running. Sorry for the abrupt departure.”
“Yeah! You even took your avatoid! We’re devastated! ”
“Yup. Sorry about that too”
“Just joshing anyway.”
“I know. No, just… one of those things, you know?”
“So, you’re… just looking at the orientation of the warp skein here… looks like you’re off to… no, we can’t tell. Open space by our reckoning.”
“Heck, can’t hide much from you guys,” the Mistake Not… replied, putting some heartiness into its synthesised voice (it had, naturally, an extensive knowledge of all Liseiden languages, dialects, accents, idioms and speech patterns). It was powering away as fast as it could, already curving away towards this Izenion place (it had no idea why). The rucking it had caused in the skein of real space, pointing in a completely different direction, represented pretty much standard procedure; you didn’t let people know where you were really heading unless there was a good reason.
“I bet,” the admiral said. “Soooo… bad news?”
The delay caused by increasing distance was already such that had the Mistake Not… been talking to another Mind or even AI, it would have switched to standard messaging by now. Talking to a creature whose faculties relied on a substrate where internal signals moved at roughly the speed of sound — an ordinary bio-brain — there was no need for this yet; the ship had plenty to process and think about while it waited for the animal-slow replies to trundle across the link, and even during the individual transmission sections.
Between the phonemes associated with the end of the word “bad” and the very start of the word “news”, for example, when it was already anticipating that the whole of the next word would indeed be “news”, and — from the inflection — that it would be the end of the sentence and probably the end of the signal parcel, it had had time to thoroughly research the Izenion system, re-analyse everything it knew about Gzilt and the current situation re the countdown to Subliming and everything else, and still come up with precisely no idea why it had been asked to endure a degree of engine deg-radation — however temporary — to get to Izenion as quickly as possible.
The request had come from its principal contact and old friend, the Kakistocrat, which had wanted to know if it would do this purely out of regard for it. The Kakistocrat had admitted that it had been given further detail regarding whatever situation was thought so important that a ship should be asked to do such a thing, but wanted to know more still before involving the Mistake Not… fully. It had also asked the Mistake Not… if it would agree to its specs being forwarded to the group dealing with whatever might be going on.
The Mistake Not… had seriously considered saying no to both, but then decided this was unlikely to be a drill or some sort of bizarre test of loyalty. That said, the Kakistocrat was eccentric, even if it wasn’t officially Eccentric, and so it still might be some sort of weird drill of the Kak’s own devising. In the end it agreed to go but vetoed the other vessel passing on its specifications beyond being allowed to say that they would likely prove sufficient.
“No idea if it’s bad news, good news or even no news, Xan,” the ship sent back to the Liseiden admiral. “Just orders.”
“That’s too bad; it was good having you around,” Ny-Xandabo said. He meant to sound sincere, and, to some degree, did. “You take care. We hope we see you again.”
“Same here. Mind how you go. We’ll talk again. Out.”
Seven
(S -20)
Fzan-Juym was a sub-summit-orbit satellite of the Sculpt planet Eshri, making it one of a very small sub-category of moons; only its military nature and natural/artificial status — it was, arguably, a ship — stopped it being regarded as a genuine wonder.
The Werpesh, the people who had constructed the Girdlecity on Xown, had turned their attentions to Eshri at about the same time they’d begun building on Xown, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. By then Eshri had been dead for well over a billion years. It was small, dry, frozen and stony, with a thin atmosphere and a solidified core that registered as barely warm; most of the heat from its formation had been convected and then radiated away, and what little radioactivity the core had possessed had since decayed almost to nothing.