Consider Phlebas

ship, even on normal sight — Yalson came to his cabin.

He hadn't expected it, and the tap at the door brought him from a state between waking and sleep with a jarring coldness which left him disorientated for a few moments. He saw her on the door-screen and let her in. She came in quickly, closing the door after her and hugging him, holding him tight, soundless. He stood there, trying to wake up and work out how this had happened. There seemed to be no reason for it, no build-up of tension of any sort between them, no signs, no hints: nothing.

Yalson had spent that day in the hangar, wired up with small sensors and exercising. He had seen her there, working away, sweating, exhausting herself, peering at readouts and screens with her critical eyes, as though her body was a machine like the ship and she was testing it almost to destruction.

They slept together. But as though to confirm the exertions she had put herself through during the day, Yalson fell asleep almost as soon as they lay down; in his arms, while he was kissing and nuzzling her, breathing in the scent of her body again after what seemed like months. He lay awake and listened to her breathe, felt her move very slightly in his arms, and sensed her blood beat slower and slower as she fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning they made love, and afterwards he asked her, while he held her and their sweat dried, 'Why?' as their hearts slowed. 'What changed your mind?' The ship hummed distantly around them.

She gripped him, hugging tighter still, and shook her head.

'Nothing,' she said, 'nothing in particular, nothing important.' He felt her shrug, and she turned her head away from his face, into his arm, towards the humming bulkhead. In a small voice she said, 'Everything; Schar's World.'

Three days out, in the hangar, he watched the members of the Free Company work out and practise firing their guns at the screen. Neisin couldn't practise because he still refused to use lasers after what had happened in the Temple of Light. He had stocked up on magazines of micro projectiles during his few sober moments in Evanauth.

After firing practice, Horza had each of the mercenaries test their AG harnesses. Kraiklyn had purchased a cheap batch of them and insisted that the Free Company members who didn't already have an anti-gravity unit in their suit buy a harness from him, at what he claimed was cost price. Horza had been dubious at first, but the AG units seemed serviceable enough, and certainly might be useful for searching the Command System's deeper shafts.

Horza was satisfied that the mercenaries would follow him in if they had to, down into the Command System. The long delay since the excitement of Vavatch, and the boring routine of the life on the Clear Air Turbulence, had made them hanker after something more interesting. As Horza had — honestly — described it, Schar's World didn't sound too bad. At least it was unlikely they would find themselves in a fire-fight, and nobody, including the Mind they might end up helping Horza search for, was going to start blowing things up, not with a Dra'Azon to reckon with.

The sun of the Schar's World system shone brightly ahead of them now, the brightest thing in the sky. The Glittercliff was not a visible feature of the sky ahead, because they were still inside the spiral limb and looking out, but it was noticeable that all the stars ahead were either quite close or very far away, with none in the gap between.

Horza had changed the CAT's course several times, but kept it on a general heading which, unless they turned, wouldn't take it closer than two light-years from the planet. He would turn the craft and head in the following day. So far the journey had been uneventful. They had flown through the scattered stars without encountering anything out of the ordinary: no messages or signals, no distant flashes from battles, no warp wakes. The area around them seemed calm and undisturbed, as though all that was happening was what always happened: just the stars being born and dying, the galaxy revolving, the holes twisting, the gases swirling. The war, in that hurried silence, in their false rhythm of day and night, seemed like something they had all imagined, an inexplicable nightmare they had somehow shared, even escaped.

Horza had the ship watching, though, ready to alarm at the first hint of trouble. They were unlikely to find out anything before they got to the Quiet Barrier, but if everything was as peaceful and serene as that name implied, he thought he might not go arrowing straight in. Ideally he would like to rendezvous with the Idiran fleet units which were supposed to be waiting near by. That would solve most of his problems. He would hand Balveda over, make sure Yalson and the rest of the mercenaries were safe — let them have the CAT — and pick up the specialised equipment Xoralundra had promised him.

That scenario would also let him meet Kierachell alone, without the distraction of the others being there. He would be able to be his old self without making any concessions to the self the Free Company and Yalson knew.

Two days out, the ship's alarm went off. Horza was dozing in his bed; he raced out of the cabin and forward to the bridge.

In the volume of space before them, all hell seemed to have been let loose. Annihilation light washed over them; it was the radiation from weapon explosions, registering pure and mixed on the vessel's sensors, indicating where warheads had gone off totally by themselves or in contact with something else. The fabric of three- dimensional space bucked and juddered with the blast from warp charges, forcing the CAT's automatics to disengage its engines every few seconds to prevent them being damaged on the shock waves. Horza strapped in and brought all the subsidiary systems up. Wubslin came through the door from the mess.

'What is it?'

'Battle of some sort,' Horza said, watching the screens. The volume of affected space was more or less directly on the inward side of Schar's World; the direct route from Vavatch passed that way. The CAT was one and a half light-years away from the disturbance, too far away to be spotted on anything except the narrow beam of a track scanner and therefore almost certainly safe; but Horza watched the distant blasts of radiation, and felt the CAT ride the ripples of disturbed space with a sensation of nausea, even defeat.

'Message shell,' Wubslin said, nodding at a screen. There, sorting itself out from the noise of radiation, a signal gradually appeared, the words forming a few letters at a time like a field of plants growing and flowering. After a few repetitions of the signal — and it was being jammed, not simple interfered with by the battle's background noise — it was complete enough to read.

VESSEL CLEAR AIR TURBULENCE. MEET UNITS

NINETY — THIRD FLEET

DESTINATION/S.591134.45 MID. ALL SAFE.

'Damn,' breathed Horza.

'What's that mean?' Wubslin said. He punched the figures on the screen into the CAT's navigational computer. 'Oh,' the engineer said, sitting back, 'it's one of the stars near by. I guess they mean to rendezvous halfway between it and…' He looked at the main screen.

'Yes,' Horza said, looking unhappily at the signal. It had to be a fake. There was nothing to prove it was from the Idirans: no message number, code class, ship originator, signatory; nothing genuine at all.

'That from the guys with three legs?' Wubslin said. He brought a holo display onto another screen, showing stars surrounded by spherical grids of thin green lines. 'Hey, we're not all that far away from there.'

'Is that right?' Horza said. He watched the continuing blasts of battle-light. He entered some figures into the CAT's control systems. The vessel brought its nose round, angling it further over towards the Schar's World system. Wubslin looked at Horza.

'You don't think it is from them?'

'I don't,' Horza said. The radiation was fading. The engagement appeared to be over, or the action broken off. 'I think we might turn up there and find a GCU waiting for us. Or a cloud of CAM.'

'CAM? What — that stuff they dusted Vavatch with?' Wubslin said, and whistled. 'No thanks.'

Horza switched the screen with the message off.

Less than an hour later it all happened again: shells of radiation, warp disturbance, and this time two