Matter

her cabin, and then monitored her brother closely, listening to his heartbeat, sensing his skin conductivity, his blood pressure, implied core temperature and temperature distribution as well as the state of his slightly tense, tautened muscles. He was grinding his teeth, though he probably wasn’t aware of it himself.

She felt she ought to jolly Ferbin out of what might be a dark mood, but was not sure she herself was in the mood to do so. She glanded sperk, and soon was.

* * *

“Is Director General Shoum still on Sursamen?” Anaplian asked.

“No,” Hippinse said. “Left forty-plus days ago. Continuing her tour of Morthanveld possessions and protectorates in the Lesser Spine.”

“But she is contactable once we’re down there?”

“Definitely. At the moment she’s here, in transit between Asulious IV and Grahy on the Cat.4 CleaveHull “On First Seeing Jhiriit”. Due to arrive Grahy fourteen hours after we make Sursamen. Without the crash-stop,” Hippinse added archly. The avatoid had changed further just in the last day and was now positively muscular. He still looked burly compared to the two Sarl men, but he appeared far fitter and athletic than he had when they’d first met him a few days earlier. Even his blond hair was cropped and businesslike, similar to Djan Seriy’s.

The central holo-display they were seated around spun to show where Shoum’s ship was now, then rotated smoothly back to where it had been (Holse remembered the display of the dreadful planet Bulthmaas, and Xide Hyrlis’ face, lit from below). The display was false-coloured; all the stars were white. Sursamen was a gently blinking red dot hard by its star, Meseriphine. The Liveware Problem was an even tinier strobing blue point trailing a fading aquamarine wake. The positions of other major ships, where known, were also shown, colour-coded; Morthanveld craft were green. The Oct colour was blue; their possible presence was implied by a faint tinge all around Sursamen.

Djan Seriy looked at Ferbin. “You think Shoum will facilitate our travel to the Eighth if we have any problems with the Nariscene or the Oct?”

“She took some considerable interest in our plight,” Ferbin said. “It was she who arranged our conveyance to Xide Hyrlis, for all that that proved a futile expedition.” Ferbin did not try to suppress a sneer. “She found my quest for justice ‘romantic’, I recall.” He looked at his sister and shook his head. “She might be termed sympathetic; however, it could be just a passing sympathy. I cannot say.”

Djan Seriy shrugged. “Still, this is worth keeping in mind, I think,” she said.

“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Hippinse said. “With luck the Oct systems will be breezeable and the Nariscene won’t be alerted. I should be able to drop you straight into a lift. Maybe even a scendship.”

“That, as you say, is with luck,” Anaplian said. “I am thinking about if luck is not with us.” She looked quizzically at Hippinse. “Oramen is still at the Falls, is that correct?”

“Last we heard, yes,” the ship said through its avatoid. “Though the information is eight days old at least. The Oct/Aultridia tussling between levels is making communications unreliable.”

“How bad is this so-called ‘tussling’?” Anaplian asked.

“About as bad as it can get before the Nariscene would be obliged to step in.” The avatoid paused. “I’m a little surprised they haven’t already.”

Anaplian frowned. “Do they shoot at each other?”

“No,” Hippinse said. “They’re not supposed to within the Towers or near any secondary structure. Mostly the dispute involves taking over Towers using blocking scendships and remote reconfiguring of door-control fidelities.”

“Is this going to help or hinder us?”

“Could go either way. Multiplier rather than a valuer.”

Djan Seriy sat back. “Very well,” she said. “This is what will happen: we four descend together to Sursamen Surface. We have to try and get down through the levels before anybody works out we shouldn’t have got to the Meseriphine system so quickly and starts asking what ship brought us.” She nodded at Hippinse. “The Liveware Problem believes it can get us down and inserted into the Nariscene travel- admin system without anybody noticing, but short of trying to take over the whole Nariscene AI matrix on Sursamen — arguably an act of war in itself — it cannot stop us getting spotted as anomalous eventually. So; we attain the level of the Hyeng-zhar, expeditiously. We find Oramen; at the Falls, hopefully. We tell him he is in danger if he does not know already. We also get a message to him while we’re on our way, if possible. We do what we can to make him safe, or at least safer, if necessary, then we deal with tyl Loesp.”

“‘Deal with’?” the ship asked, through Hippinse.

Anaplian looked levelly at the avatoid. “Deal with as in apprehend. Capture. Hold, or ensure is held until a properly formulated court can decide his fate.”

“I would not anticipate a royal pardon,” Ferbin said icily.

“Meanwhile,” Djan Seriy continued, “the ship will be attempting to find out what the Oct are up to by seeing if all these missing ships really are turning up around Sursamen. Though of course by then the Morthanveld and Nariscene will have been informed of our suspicions regarding the Oct ship concentration and will doubtless be formulating their own responses. We can but hope these will complement the Liveware Problem’s, though it is not impossible they will be antagonistic.” Anaplian looked at Ferbin and Holse. “If the Oct are there in force then both Hippinse and I may have to leave you alone on minimal notice. I’m sorry, brother, but that is how it has to be. We must all hope it doesn’t come to that but if it does we’ll leave you with what advantage we can.”

“And what would that be?” Ferbin asked, looking from Anaplian to Hippinse.

“Intelligence,” said Djan Seriy.

“Better weaponry,” the ship told them.

* * *

They popped into existence within a vacant Oct scendship; its doors had just closed — unexpectedly, as far as the cloudily aware brain of the Tower Traffic Control was concerned. Then it rechecked, and found that the door closure was not unexpected after all; an instruction demanding just such an action had been there for some time. So that was all right. A very short time later there was no longer memory or record of it having found anything unexpected in the first place. That was even better.

The scendship was one of over twenty attached to a great carousel device which hung directly above the gaping fourteen-hundred-metre-diameter mouth that was the top of the Pandil-fwa Tower. The carousel was designed to load the selected scendship, like a shell into an immense gun, into one of the secondary tubes bundled within the main Tower which would allow the vessel to drop to any of the available levels.

The Oct’s Tower Traffic Control computer executed a variety of instructions it was under the completely erroneous impression had been properly authorised and the carousel machine ninety metres beneath it duly dropped the scendship from the access ring above to another ring below; this swung the ship over one of the tubes. The capsule craft was lowered, fitted, and then grasped by what were basically two gigantic, if sophisticated, washers. Fluids drained and were pumped away. Lock-rotates opened and closed and the ship shuffled down until it hung in vacuum, dripping, directly above a dark shaft fourteen hundred kilometres deep and full of almost nothing at all. The ship announced it was ready to travel. The Tower Traffic Control machine gave it permission. The scendship released its hold on the side of the tube and started to fall, powered by nothing more than Sursamen’s own gravity.

That had been, as Anaplian had warned Ferbin and Holse, the easy bit. The Oerten Crater on Sursamen’s Surface stood directly over the fluted mouth of the Pandil-fwa Tower and was separated from it only by Secondary structure; the ship had had no difficulty — once it had checked its co-ordinates several thousand times and Displaced a few hundred microscopic scout motes — placing them straight into the scendship. Co-opting the Oct’s computer matrices — they barely merited the term AIs — had been, for the Mind of the Liveware Problem, a trivial matter.