“Acknowledged,” Reikl said calmly. Then she started running. “Kick to AI!” she yelled. Cossont ran too. At her side, the android loped, barely jogging while Tech Commander Gaed stumbled behind, making an anguished wailing noise. “Immediate!” Reikl shouted.
“Upper deck, stern hangar, Regimental HQ, Fzan-Juym, Eshri, Izenion,” the android said conversationally, looking about as he loped across the deck. “General Marshal Elect Reikl, commanding, in sim.”
“Ma’am!” a male voice shouted. Cossont realised she recognised the voice without immediately knowing whose it was, then saw Etalde leaning out from the rear of a tiny four-man shuttle ten metres away. Reikl turned, ran towards it.
A small squad of troopers and a pair of combat arbites stood at the open rear ramp. Etalde dived back into the tiny craft, threw himself into a seat and held out one hand to Cossont. She could see the elevenstring’s case strapped into the seat beyond him. I cannot get rid of that damn thing, she found herself thinking as she leapt into the craft, almost banging her head.
“You briefed?” she heard Reikl demanding.
“No, ma’am,” somebody replied.
“Look after her,” Reikl said crisply, nodding at Cossont, then next thing she was in the shuttle with them, bent over, in front of Etalde. Reikl glanced at the elevenstring’s case. “What the—?” she said, then shook her head, hit a large button above Etalde’s seat and grabbed the commissar-colonel by his shirt front. “Sorry,” she said and hauled him — unprotesting but open-mouthed — up and out of his seat. She propelled Etalde out of the rear door, jumped out after him and then pushed the commanding trooper and the android inside, a hand on the back of each, sending both stumbling towards the two empty seats.
“Cossont!” Reikl said, fixing her with her gaze. “Find your friend. Find out if it’s true. Report to me or the next most senior officer in the regiment.” She turned away. “Ready! Go!” she shouted, beginning to run.
Cossont felt straps start to secure her into the seat. She looked out at Etalde’s pale, crestfallen face as the troopers and combat arbites sprinted past him. He seemed to realise he was holding something in his hand; an object like a thick necklace. There was one round his neck too.
He threw it in towards her just as the rear door started to rise. She caught the device; an emergency helmet-collar. She clamped it on.
The last thing Cossont saw of the asteroid’s interior was Reikl, running back, grabbing Etalde by his collar and pulling him away from the shuttle, limbs flailing as he tried to balance, turn and run all at the same time. The shuttle door slammed shut.
The android sat opposite her in his too-small colonel’s jacket, smiling vaguely. “Class T shuttle, four-berth,” he said, sounding calm. “AI pilot. Unidentified captain trooper commanding. In sim.”
The clanging thud of the shuttle door’s closing was still reverberating through the craft when there was the briefest of high, piercing whines and then an almighty clap of sound as though an angry god had taken a good run-up and kicked the vessel just as hard as he, she or it could.
Cossont blacked out.
On the raft, the mists rose like departing dreams.
She had never seen skies so big: pile after soft pile of pink and yellow, red and pale blue cloud, towering on into the lost depths of the green, shading-to-violet atmosphere, producing great hazy slanted spans and troughs of shade and enormous shafts of prismed light that lay strewn across this vault, seemingly balanced between the masses of cloud or resting one end on those ponderous, puffed, so slowly changing billows while their bases stood rooted within the utter vastness of the sea, the single great everywhere ocean with its planet-crossing swells, sky-spanning, light-defeating storms and forever restless waves. The ocean could be many colours, but to her — on a world that was all ocean with no beaches at all — it looked the colour of beach-washed jade.
Birds and airfish, singly and in vast flocks that dimmed the sun, filled the spaces between the ocean and the clouds, lazily trailing one long wing across the brief smooth curvings between the waves before disappearing amongst the long rolling troughs again, or weaving columnar patterns like grey, fractal shadows against the soaring architecture of cloud.
Higher — glimpsed sometimes between the clouds — the slow dark shapes of storeyblimps and torpedons sailed stately and serene, the storeys drifting with the winds, rising and lowering to find those likely to take them in whatever direction they wanted to go, while the slimmer lengths of the torpedons went tacking across the currents in the air.
“You’re still young. You suffer from the… sweet delusion that anything… really matters.”
“Were you this full of stool before you were a fish?”
Isserem/QiRia laughed. “Probably.” He seemed to think about it. “Definitely.”
“If nothing matters,” she asked him, “why are you even bothering to talk to me?”
“Well, quite,” he said, and nodded. He dipped his head beneath the surface of the water in the long tank, then resurfaced, wiping his face. He looked at her, blinking. “How… brave you are,” he told her. “For ever setting up… chances for me to dismiss… you.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I’m enjoying talking to you. Unless I’m tiring you. Wouldn’t want to tire you.”
He laughed again. “Now you appeal to… my desire not… to appear frail in front of… a youngster.”
“Do you ever think you might over-analyse trivial things, like conversations?”
“All… the time.”
He was resting in a long shallow tank open to the sea at one end, on a side-raft which was joined to the main structure by an articulated gantry. She lay almost naked on a lounger, a glass of water to hand.
The main body of the giant raft Apranipryla lay close enough to put them in shadow later; it rose and fell in sections as it rode the permanent oceanic mega-swells and slow-decaying old storm swells, its white shade canopies and billow-roofs like sails, increasing the effect of the winds on its slowly gyring passage across the face of the vast, watery globe.
“Well,” she said. “He’s remembered. That’s something.”
“It still does not… really matter.”
She shook her head. “Better to be remembered for the wrong thing than for nothing at all.”
“No. As well… not to be remembered at all as… that is the… state that will apply to all of us… in time.”
She wanted to say, “So what?” But didn’t.
“You don’t think Vilabier wanted to be remembered?”
“I don’t think it matters… either… whether… he cared or not, or is remembered… or not.”
“Mattered to him,” she said. “Probably,” she added, reminding herself that, according to the convention they were observing here, he had actually known the guy and she hadn’t. Not that she really believed him.
“Tik would have been… appalled to be known for the… Hydrogen Sonata and nothing else,” Isserem/QiRia said, gazing wistfully out to the ocean beyond the foot of the tank. “He hated it.”
“Hated it?”
Isserem/QiRia shrugged, rising and falling in the tank.
“He wrote it as a joke,” he told her, wiping his face again. The old man’s consciousness had only been removed from the leviathid — the giant sea creature he had inhabited — a few days earlier. He had been in there, been that creature, lived as that creature — swimming, mating and fighting with others of its kind — for many decades. He’d circled this vast globe five times, he claimed. He was still getting used to being a bipedal humanoid again, and — for now — found it most comfortable and comforting to lie, floating, in sea water.