All six Ronte were present too, their bulky, insectile exo-suits all huddled together in one corner, bumping into each other and gently leaking fumes. They looked slightly more abject than usual, the avatar thought.
“Long-range monitoring equipment?” the marshal said as they joined everybody else filing into the committee chamber.
Ziborlun nodded again. “Yes,” the avatar said. In the chamber, the last three un-Stored trimes and a handful of septames, including Banstegeyn, were already seated round the raised table at the far end. “Long-range monitoring equipment.”
Technically this was true, if you defined the coaxial targeting components of multi-suite weapon clusters as such.
The two ships hadn’t got the same equipment refitted, either; their weapon mix was different, the Value Judgement having chosen an array designed primarily for tech-superiority situations where effectors worked best and were the most humane choice (Scavenger-compatible, in other words) while the Refreshingly… had gone for a more equiv-tech ordnance mixture, leading with the sort of gear that could take on ships of its own level.
Ziborlun and Chekwri sat, near the back. On the dais, some boring people began talking boringly.
The silver-skinned avatar frowned. “Septame Banstegeyn looks like he’s eaten something that disagrees with him, don’t you think?” it observed.
The marshal barely glanced. “Hmm. Monitoring seems to have been on your mind recently,” she said quietly, her head angled towards the avatar. “Our Near-Approaches AIs seem to think you’ve been showing increased interest in what little comings and goings we still have around here in these reduced times.”
“This is true,” the avatar conceded. Back aboard the Passing By…, the Mind controlling both the Systems Vehicle and the avatar was doing the hyper-AI equivalent of grimacing and mouthing the word shit. “We feel there is a need for a more robust system, given the general attrition of informational flow recently. So little coming in from so many places.”
“Most people have had themselves Stored,” the marshal said. “And many of the ships have already gone into the Sublime. So of course there is less to report.”
“Yes.” The avatar frowned. “Do you really think that was wise? Sending so many of the ships ahead, I mean?”
Such behaviour was not unknown when a society was preparing to Sublime, but it was unusual. It felt like scouting out unknown terrain, like an insurance policy, to make sure your own people were truly compatible with the whole process, even though a copious and exhaustively annotated and referenced history had built up over the aeons indicating that there was absolutely no need to do so. Also, the way the Gzilt configured the AIs in their capital ships — a whole crew of once-human personalities, uploaded, vastly speeded up and sharing a multiply partitioned but at root single computational matrix — meant that the vessels were already a kind of image of a population in an Enfolded state, so the step to true Subliming would have seemed easy enough to make for them, as a kind of easily digestible precursor to the main event.
“Of course we thought it was wise,” Marshal Chekwri said. “Or we would not have permitted it.”
“Hmm,” the avatar said. “But less power, and more concentrated… However, you are quite right; not for me to tell you your job. However, all that said, and even so, there are odd… lacunae — one might call them — in the comms these days — nothing at all from the Izenion system for a whole day, for example — and so we thought to improve our own monitoring and comms network. Not at the expense of yours, of course. And we are happy to share, naturally.”
“And all these new measures you’re taking,” the marshal said as the voices on the dais droned on. “These are your own initiatives?”
“Indeed not,” the avatar said, smiling. Sometimes it was best to tell part of the truth the better to conceal the rest. “I was asked to do so. I am not entirely sure why.”
“Asked to do so by whom?” the marshal asked.
“Other Culture ships,” the avatar said innocently.
“How odd,” the marshal said.
“I know!” The avatar nodded vigorously and extended one slender silver finger to tap Chekwri on her epaulette. The ship had a feeling it was already starting to overdo the guileless dingbat shtick, but reckoned it ought to carry it through nevertheless. Besides, there was a certain pleasure to be had, twanging the metaphorical rod extending from the marshal’s behind. “That’s what I thought!”
Chekwri looked sourly at the Culture creature and opened her mouth to say something. However, the avatar nodded towards the dais and said, “Ah! Here we go.”
“…has been awarded to the Ronte,” Trime Quvarond announced, with a quick, triumphant glance at Banstegeyn, who sat, stony faced, at the far end of the long table. “Preferred partner status being duly accorded forthwith to the genus Ronte civilisation, further detail to be released this day by committal decree. Business session hereby closed.”
The committee chamber was suddenly full of individually quiet but taken together surprisingly loud mutterings. The two spherical Liseiden float-suits had risen an extra metre into the air. Ambassador Mierbeunes was standing, looking genuinely shocked. The six Ronte in their exo-suits were all bobbing up and down and making clicking noises. They appeared to be vibrating.
Even Marshal Chekwri had looked briefly surprised. The avatar nudged her and said, “There — nobody saw that coming!”
There was a certain very definite satisfaction in feeling so perfectly contained, surrounded and protected by something so powerful, obedient and… determined.
Colonel Cagad Agansu, originally of the Home System Regiment — the First, as it was sometimes known — though now under the direct command of Septame Banstegeyn for jurisdictional purposes (Marshal Chekwri liaising) lay deep in the heart of the Gzilt ship 7*Uagren, swaddled in concentric layers of protection and processing; compressed, cushioned, shielded, penetrated, sealed within and grafted into the systems and beyond-lightning-quick operationality of the ship.
A person subject to the weakness of claustrophobia would be screaming in such a situation. This had occurred to the colonel when he had first lain down on the couch in his armoured survival suit and the jaw-like secondary personnel containment machinery had closed around him, clamping him in place. The thought had caused the colonel to smile a little.
Even the minimal facial disturbance of smiling required some accommodation by the gels and foams between his skin and the interior of his armoured helmet, but the colonel found this reassuring. His breathing was similarly constrained, accommodated and allowed for, his suit’s armoured chest and the containment beyond flexing with him, as though breathing with him; as though the ship was breathing with him.
Another, independent system stood ready to flood his lungs with foam and brace them with whatever pressure it took while his blood was oxygenated by machine, should the ship ever need to accelerate, decelerate or manoeuvre so violently that even the current arrangements protecting him might prove insufficient.
Alongside the colonel, less than a metre away — unseen while the colonel stared out through the potentially sense-shattering richness of the ship’s sensor arrays towards the star Izenion — was the combat arbite Uhtryn, the colonel’s sole comrade on this mission, excluding only the 7*Uagren itself.
The arbite’s parallel degree of containment was less necessary than his own; as a pure machine that merely vaguely resembled the human form it required less of the cushioning and protection Agansu did to keep him from excessive harm when the ship changed speed or direction. The arbite could have been welded to a bulkhead inside the ship and survived just as well. Still, the space had been there and the arbite had to be contained somewhere within the vessel, so there it had been placed.