Look to Windward

I might as well hear it now as later. Making myself clear here?

~ Very, sir. Sister technician; please replay the message from Estodien Visquile to Hadesh Huyler.

~ Proceeding, said the female.

Quilan was left alone with his thoughts. He realised how tense he had become communicating with the ghost of Hadesh Huyler, and deliberately relaxed his body, easing his muscles and straightening his back. Again, his gaze swept over the gleaming surfaces of the medical facility, but what he was seeing was the interior of the hull of the ship they were floating alongside, the privateer cruiser Winter Storm.

He had been aboard the wreck once so far, while they were still trying to locate and extract Huyler’s soul from the thousand or so others stored within the rescued substrate, which they’d located in the wreck with a specially adapted Navy drone. He had been promised that later, if there was time, he would be allowed to go back to the wreck with that drone and attempt to discover any other souls the original sweeps had missed.

Time was running out, though. It had taken time to get permission for what he wanted to do, and it was taking time for the Navy technical people to adjust the machine. Meanwhile they’d been told that the Culture warship was on its way, just a few days out. At the moment the techs were pessimistic that they’d get the drone finished in time.

The image of the wrecked ship’s scooped-out hull seemed fixed in his brain.

~ Major Quilan?

~ Sir?

~ Reporting for duty, Major. Permission to come aboard.

~ Just so, sir. Sister technician? Transfer Hadesh Huyler into the substrate within my body.

~ Directly, the female said. ~ Proceeding.

He had wondered if he’d feel anything. He did: a tingling, then a warmth in a small area on the nape of his neck. The sister technician kept him informed; the transfer went well and took about two minutes. Checking it had gone perfectly took twice that time.

What bizarre fates our technologies dream up for us, he thought as he lay there. Here I am, a male, becoming pregnant with the ghost of an old dead soldier, to travel beyond the bounds of light older than our civilisation and carry out some task I have spent the best part of a year training for but of which I presently have no real knowledge whatsoever.

The spot on his neck was cooling. He thought his head felt very slightly warmer than it had before. He might have been imagining it.

You lose your love, your heart, your very soul, he thought, and gain—”a land destroyer!” he heard her say, so falsely, bravely cheerful in his mind, while the rain-filled sky flashed above her and the vast weight pinned him utterly. Some memory of that pain and despair squeezed tears from his eyes.

~ Complete.

~ Testing, testing, said the dry, laconic voice of Hadesh Huyler.

~ Hello, sir.

~ You okay, son?

~ I’m fine, sir.

~ Did that hurt you there, Major? You seem a little… distressed.

~ No, sir. Just an old memory. How do you feel?

~ Pretty damn strange. I dare say I’ll get used to it. Looks like everything checks out. Shit, that female techie doesn’t look any better through a male’s eyes than she does through a camera. Of course; what he could see, Huyler could see. Before he could reply, Huyler added, You sure you’re okay?

~ Positive, sir. I’m fine.

He stood within the hulk of the Winter Storm. The Navy drone went back and forth across the strange, almost flat floor of the wreck, searching in a grid pattern. It passed the hole in the floor where the substrate from Aorme had been wrenched out.

In the two days since they’d found the substrate, Quilan had persuaded the techs that it was worth recalibrating the drone to look for substrates much smaller than the one Huyler had been in, substrates the size of a Soulkeeper, in fact. They had already performed a standard search, but he got them at least to try and look more closely. The Mendicant Sisters on the temple ship had helped with the persuading; any chance to rescue a soul had to be pursued to the utmost.

By the time the drone was ready, though, the Culture ship which would take him on the first leg of his journey was already starting to decelerate. The Navy drone would have time for one sweep and one sweep only.

He watched it make its passes, following its own unseen grid across the flat floor. He looked up and round the gaping shell of the ship’s hull.

He tried to recreate in his mind the interior of the vessel as it had been when it had been intact, and wondered in what part of it she had stayed, where she had moved and where she had lain her head to sleep in the ship’s false night.

The main drive units might be up there, filling half the ship, the flyer hangar was there, in the stern, the decks would spread here and here; individual cabins would have been over there, or over there.

Maybe, he thought, maybe there was still a chance, maybe the techs had been wrong and there was still something left to find. The hull only held because it was energised somehow. They still didn’t understand everything about these great, gifted ships. Perhaps somewhere within the hull itself…

The machine floated up to him, clicking, ceiling lights glittering across its metallic carapace. He looked at it.

~ Sorry to break in, Quil, but it wants you to get the hell out the way.

~ Of course. Sorry. Quilan stepped to one side. Not too clumsily, he hoped. It had been a while since he’d worn a suit.

~ I’ll leave you alone again.

~ No, it’s all right. Talk if you want to talk.

~ Hmm. Okay. I’ve been wondering.

~ What?

~ We’ve spent so much time doing technical, calibrating stuff, but we haven’t touched on some of the basic assumptions being made here, like is it really true we can hear each other when we talk like this but not when we think? Seems a damn fine distinction to me.

~ Well, that’s what we’ve been told. Why, have you had any hint of-?

~ No, it’s just that when you look at something through another person’s eyes and you think something, after a while you start to wonder if it’s really what you think or some sort of bleed-over from what they’re thinking.

~ I think I see what you mean.

~ So, think we should test it out?

~ I suppose we could, sir.

~ All right. See if you can catch what I’m thinking.

~ Sir, I don’t think… he thought, but there was silence, even as his own thoughts tailed off. He waited a few more moments. Then a few more. The drone continued on its search pattern, each time passing by further and further away.

~ Well? Catch anything?

~ No, sir. Sir, I-

~ You don’t know what you missed, Major. Okay, your turn. Go on. Think of something. Anything.

He sighed. The enemy ship—no, he shouldn’t think of them that way… The ship could be here by now. He felt that what he and Huyler were doing right now was a waste of time, but on the other hand there was nothing they could do to make the drone carry out its task any faster, so they weren’t really wasting any time at all. All the same, it felt like it.

What a strange interval, he thought, to be here in this hermetic mausoleum, standing in the midst of such forlorn desolation with another mind inside his own, trading absences in the face of a task he knew nothing