In addition to such simple, arithmetical estimates of a ship's capability, it was, of course, always a good idea when dealing with an Eccentric craft to have just that little extra bit of an edge. Intelligence, to be specific; an inside view; a spy.
As it approached the Dreve system, the Plate class GSV Sleeper Service was travelling at its usual cruising speed of about forty kilolights. It had already announced its desire to stop off in the inner system, and so duly started braking as it passed through the orbit of the system's outer-most planet, a light week distant from the sun itself.
The Yawning Angel, the GSV which was shadowing the larger craft, decelerated at the same rate, a few billion kilometres behind. The Yawning Angel was the latest in a long line of GSVs which had agreed to take a shift as the Sleeper Service's escort. It wasn't a particularly demanding task (indeed, no sensible GSV would wish it to be), though there was a small amount of vicarious glamour associated with it; guarding the weirdo, letting it roam wherever it wanted, but maintaining the fraternal vigilance that such an enormously powerful craft espousing such an eccentric credo patently merited. The only qualifications for being a Sleeper Service shadow were that one was regarded as being reliable, and that one was capable of staying with the SS if it ever decided to make a dash for it; in other words, one had to be quicker than it.
The Yawning Angel had done the job for the best part of a year and found it undemanding. Naturally, it was somewhat annoying not to be able to draw up one's own course schedule, but providing one took the right attitude and dispensed with the standard Mind conviction that held efficiency to the absolute bottom line of everything, it could be an oddly enhancing, even liberating experience. GSVs were always wanted in many more places at the same time than it was possible to be, and it was something of a relief to be able to blame somebody else when one had to frustrate people's and other ships' wishes and requests.
This stop at Dreve had not been anticipated, for example — the SS's course had seemed set on a reasonably predictable path which would take it through the next month — but now it was here, the Yawning Angel would be able to drop off a few ships, take another couple on, and swap some personnel. There should be time; the SS had never acknowledged the presence of any of the vessels tailing it, and it hadn't posted a course schedule since it had turned Eccentric forty years earlier, but it had certain obligations in terms of setting re-awakened people back in the land of the living again, and it always announced how long it would be staying in the systems it visited.
It would be here in Dreve for a week. An unusually long time; it had never stayed anywhere for longer than three days before. The implication, according to the group of ships considered experts on the behaviour of the Sleeper Service, and given what the GSV itself had been saying in its increasingly rare communications, was that it was about to off-load all its charges; all the Storees and all the big sea, air and gas- giant-dwelling creatures it had collected over the decades would be moved — physically, presumably, rather than Displaced — to compatible habitats.
Dreve would be an ideal system to do this in; it had been a Culture system for four thousand years, comprising nine more or less wilderness worlds and three Orbitals — hoops, giant bracelets of living-space only a few thousand kilometres across but ten million kilometres in diameter — calmly gyrating in their own carefully aligned orbits and housing nearly seventy billion souls. Some of those souls were far from human; one third of each of the system's Orbitals was given over to ecosystems designed for quite different creatures; gas-giant dwellers on one, methane atmospherians on another and high temperature silicon creatures on another. The fauna the SS had picked up from other gas-giant planets would all fit comfortably into a sub-section of the Orbital designed with such animals in mind, and the sea and air creatures ought to be able to find homes on that or either of the other worlds.
A week to hang around; the Yawning Angel thought that would go down particularly well with its human crew; one of the many tiny but significant and painful ways a GSV could lose face amongst its peers was through a higher than average crew turn-over rate, and, while it had been expecting it, the Yawning Angel had found the experience most distressing when people had announced they were fed up not being able to have any reliable advance notice of where they were going from week to week and month to month and so had decided to live elsewhere; all its protestations had been to no avail. What would in effect be a week's leave in such a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and welcoming system really should convince a whole load of those currently wavering between loyalty and ship-jumping that it was worth staying on with the good old Yawning Angel, it was sure.
The Sleeper Service came to an orbit-relative stop a quarter-turn in advance along the path of the middle Orbital, the most efficient position to assume to distribute its cargo of people and animals evenly amongst all three worlds. Permission to do so was finally received from the last of the Orbitals' Hub Minds, and the Sleeper Service duly began getting ready to unload.
The Yawning Angel watched from afar as the larger craft detached its traction fields from the energy grid beneath real space, closed down its primary and ahead scan fields, dropped its curtain shields and generally made the many great and small adjustments a ship normally made when one was intending to stick around somewhere for a while. The Sleeper Service's external appearance remained the same as ever; a silvery ellipsoid ninety kilometres long, sixty across the beam and twenty in height. After a few minutes, however, smaller craft began to appear from that reflective barrier, speeding towards the three Orbitals with their cargoes of Stored people and sedated animals.
All this matched with the intelligence the Yawning Angel had already received regarding the set-up and intentions of the Eccentric GSV. So far so good, then.
Content that all was well, the Yawning Angel drifted in to match velocities with Teriocre, the middle Orbital and the one with the gas-giant environments. It docked underneath the Orbital's most populous section and drew up a variety of travel and leave arrangements for its own inhabitants while setting up a schedule of visits, events and parties aboard to thank its hosts for their hospitality.
Everything went swimmingly until the second day.
Then, without warning, just after dawn had broken over the part of the Orbital the yawning Angel had docked beneath, Stored bodies and giant animals started popping into existence all over Teriocre.
Posed people, some still in the clothes or uniforms of the tableaux they had been part of on board the Sleeper Service, suddenly appeared inside sports halls, on beaches, terraces, boardwalks and pavements, in parks, plazas, deserted stadia and every other sort of public space the Orbital had to offer. To the few people who witnessed these events, it was obvious the bodies had been Displaced; the appearance of each was signalled by a tiny point of light blinking into existence just above waist level; this expanded rapidly to a two- metre grey sphere which promptly popped and disappeared, leaving behind the immobile Storee.
Unmoving people were left lying on dewy grass or sitting on park benches or scattered by the hundred across the patterned mosaic of squares and piazzas as though after some terrible disaster or a particularly assertive public sculpture exhibition; dim cleaning machines spiralling methodically within such spaces were left bemused, picking erratic courses amongst the rash of new and unexpected obstructions.
In the seas, the surface swelled and bulged in hundreds of different places as whole globes of water were carefully Displaced just beneath the surface; the sea creatures contained within were still gently sedated and moved sluggishly in their giant fish bowls, each of which retained its separation from the surrounding water for a few hours, osmosing fields gradually adjusting the conditions within to those in the sea outside.
In the air, similar gauzy fields surrounded whole flocks of buoyant atmosphere fauna, bobbing groggily in the breeze.
Further along the vast shallow sweep of the Orbital, the gas-giant environments were witness to equivalent scenes of near-instant immigration followed by gradual integration.
The Yawning Angel's own drones — its ambassadors on the Orbital — were witness to a handful of these sudden manifestations. After a nanosecond's delay to ask permission, the GSV clicked into the Orbital's own monitoring systems, and so watched with growing horror as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more Stored bodies and animals came thumping into existence all over the surface and all through the air, water and gas-ecologies of Teriocre.
The Yawning Angel flash-woke all its systems and switched its attention to the Sleeper Service.
