Excession

blinded.

The Commander ordered his lieutenant to reconfigure the command desk. From here they could personally control all the systems that had been entrusted by the Culture to the Mind which the traitor ship had killed. The command desk was like an ultimate instrument of destruction; a giant keyboard to play death tunes on. Some of the keys, admittedly, had to be left to trigger themselves once set, but these controls really did control.

The holo screen projected a sphere out towards the Commander. The globe displayed the volume of real space around Pittance, with tiny green, white and gold flecks representing major components of the defence system. A dull blue dot represented the approaching warship, coasting in towards them. Another dot, bright red, on the directly opposite side of the ship store from the blue dot and much closer — though drawing quickly away — was the traitor ship Attitude Adjuster.

Another screen alongside showed an abstracted hyperspatial view of the same situation, indicating the two ships on different surfaces of the skein. A third screen showed a transparent abstract of Pittance itself, detailing its ship-filled caverns and surface and internal defence systems.

The Commander finished getting into his space suit and powering it up. He settled back into position. He reviewed the situation. He knew better than to try to conduct matters at a tactical level, but he appreciated the strategic influence he could wield here. He was dreadfully tempted, all the same, to take personal control and fire all the defence systems personally, but he was aware of the enormous responsibility he had been given in this mission and was equally conscious that he had been carefully selected for this task. He had been chosen because he knew when not to — what had the traitor ship called it? Go for glory. He knew when not to go for glory. He knew when to back off, when to take advice, when to retreat and regroup.

He flicked open the communicator channel to the traitor ship. 'Did the warship stop exactly a light month out?' he asked.

— Yes.

'That's thirty-two standard Culture days.'

— Correct.

'Thank you.' He closed the channel.

He looked at the lieutenant at his side. 'Set everything within range to open fire on the warship the instant it crosses the eight-point one days' limit.' He sat back as the lieutenant's limbs flickered over the holo displays, putting his command into effect. Only just in time, the Commander noted. He'd been longer getting into his suit than he'd thought.

'Forty seconds, sir,' the lieutenant said.

'… Give it just enough time to relax,' the Commander said, more to himself than to anybody else. 'If that is how these things work…'

Exactly eight and a tenth light days in from the position the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had held while negotiating its permission to approach, space all around the blue dot on the screen scintillated abruptly as a thousand hidden devices of a dozen different types suddenly erupted into life in a precisely ordered sequence of destruction; in the real-space holo sphere it looked like a miniaturised stellar cluster suddenly bursting into existence all around the blue dot. The trace disappeared instantly inside a brilliant sphere of light. In the hyperspace holo sphere, the dot lasted a little longer; slowed down, it could be seen firing some munitions back for a microsecond or so, then it too disappeared in the wash of energies bursting out of the real- space skein and into hyperspace in twin bulging plumes.

The lights in the accommodation space flickered and dimmed as monumental amounts of power suddenly diverted to the rock's own long-range weaponry.

The Commander left the comm channel to the traitor ship open. Its own course had altered the instant the defence weaponry had been unleashed; now its course was hooked, changing colour from red to blue and curving up and round and vectoring in hyperspace too, looping round to the point where the slowly fading and dissipating radiation shells marked the focus of the system's annihilatory power.

A flat screen to the Commander's left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it:

— Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.

'What?' the Commander said.

The display flashed once and came clear again.

— Commander; the Attitude Adjuster here again. As you may have gathered, we have failed.

'What? But..!'

— Keep all defence and sensory systems at maximum readiness; ramp the sensor arrays up to significant degradation point in a week; we shall not need them beyond then.

'But what happened? We got it!'

— I shall move to plug the gap the attack left in our defences. Ready all the cleared ships for immediate awakening; I may have to rouse them within a day or two. Complete the tests on the Displacers; use a real ship if you have to. And run a total level-zero systems check of your own equipment; if the ship was able to insert a message into your command desk it may have been able to carry out more pertinent mischief therein.

The Commander slammed a limb end down on the desk. 'What is going on?' he roared. 'We got the bastard, didn't we?'

— No, Commander. We «got» some sort of shuttle or module. Somewhat faster and better equipped than the average example such a ship would normally carry, but possibly constructed en route with such a ruse in mind. Now we know why its approach appeared so politely leisurely.

The Commander peered into the holo spheres, juggling with magnifications and field-depths. 'Then where the hell is it?'

— Give me control of the primary scanner, Commander, just for a moment, will you?

The Commander fumed in his space suit for a moment, then nodded his eye stalks at the lieutenant.

The second holo sphere became a narrow, dark cone and swung so that the wide end was directed towards the ceiling. Pittance glowed at the very point of the other end of the projection, the screen of defence devices reduced to a tiny florette of coloured light, close in to the cone's point. At the far, wide end there was a tiny, fiercely, almost painfully red dot.

— There is the good ship Killing Time, Commander. It set off at almost the same time I did. Regrettably, it is both quicker and faster than I. It has already done us the honour of copying to me the signal it sent to the rest of the Culture the moment we opened fire on its emissary. I'll transmit you a copy too, minus the various, venomous unpleasantnesses directed specifically at myself. Thank you for the use of your control desk. You can have it back now.

The cone collapsed to become a sphere again. The traitor ship's last message scrolled off the side of the flat screen. The Commander and the lieutenant looked at each other. The small screen came up with another incoming signal.

— Oh, and will you contact Affront High Command, or shall I? Somebody had better tell them we're at war with the Culture.

III

Genar-Hofoen woke up with a headache it took minutes to calm down; performing the relevant pain-management inside his head took far too much concentration for somebody feeling this bad to perform quickly. He felt like he was a child on a beach, swinging a toy spade and building a sea wall all around him as the tide rushed in; waves kept over-topping and he was constantly shovelling sand up to small breaches in his defences, and the worst of it was the more sand he piled up the deeper he dug and higher he had to throw. Eventually water started seeping in from the bottom of his sea fort, and he gave in; he just blanketed all pain. If somebody started holding flames to his feet or he jammed his fingers in a door that'd just be too bad. He knew better than to shake his head, so he imagined shaking his head; he'd never had a hangover this bad.,