By all means.
Listen to this.
There followed a compressed version of the message sent by the Now We Try It My Way to its old home MSV, the Qualifier, describing its odd encounter with what had appeared to be an Oct ship above the planet Zaranche, but hadn’t been.
Very well. This was only mildly interesting and Batra did not see how it might involve him. And?
It is believed that the whole Oct fleet above Zaranche, save for one Primarian-class ship, probably the first arrived, was not really there. It was a ghost fleet.
The Oct are at that stage, though, aren’t they? Batra sent. They’re still trying to puff themselves up, still trying on parents’ shoes, making themselves look bigger.
Batra immediately knew somebody somewhere in SC was going to be reading all sorts of paranoid nonsense into something like this. Ghost ships; pretend fleets. Scary! Except it wasn’t, it couldn’t be. The Oct were an irrelevance. Better still, they were the Morthanveld’s irrelevance, or the Nariscene’s irrelevance, depending on where you chose to draw the line. An equiv-tech Involved getting up to this sort of misdirection might mean something significant. The Oct doing the same thing was profoundly so-whattish. They were probably just trying to impress their Nariscene mentors or had left a switch on they shouldn’t or something.
But SC took this sort of random dross terribly seriously. The finest Minds in the Culture had an almost chronic need for serious stuff to involve them, and this, patently, was their latest dose. We make our own problems, Batra thought. We’ve seeded the fucking galaxy with travellers, wanderers, students, reporters, practical ethnologists, peripatetic philosophers, hands-on ex-sociologists, footloose retirees, freelance ambassadors or whatever they’re called this season and a hundred other categories of far too easily amazed amateur and they’re all forever reporting back stuff that looks like deeply weird shit to them that wouldn’t pass the first filter of even the least experienced Contact Unit’s data intake systems.
We’ve filled the known universe with credulous idiots and we think we’ve sneakily contributed to our own safety by making it hard for anything untoward to creep in under our sensor coverage whereas in fact we’ve just made sure we harvest zillions of false positives and probably made the really serious shit harder to spot when it does eventually come flying.
No, the GCU’s construct sent. We don’t think the Oct are trying to look more impressive than they are, not in this case.
Wind moved through Batra’s bushy body like a sigh. What happened after the close encounter? he asked, dutifully.
We don’t know. Haven’t been able to contact the Erratic since. Could have been captured. Conceivably, even, destroyed. A ship — a warship, no less — has been sent to investigate, though it’s still eight days away.
Destroyed? Batra suppressed a laugh. Seriously? Are we within capabilities here?
The Oct Primarian-class has the weaponry and other systems to overwhelm a cobbled-together ex-GTC mongrel, yes.
But are we within likelihood? Batra asked. Are we even still within the realm of anything other than paranoid lunacy? What is imagined to be their motive in doing whatever might have been done to this Erratic?
To stop this getting out.
But why? To what end? What’s so important about this Zaranche place they’d even try to kidnap any Culture ship, hopeless old junkyard oddball or not?
Nothing about Zaranche; rather what this has led to.
Which would be what?
A subtle but thorough investigation into Oct ship movements and placements over the last fifty days or so. Which has involved quite a few Contact, SC and even VFP/warships dropping everything and hightailing off to a variety of obscure backwood destinations, many well within the Morthanveld sphere.
I am suitably impressed. It must be regarded as awfully important for us to risk annoying our so-sensitive co-Involveds at such an allegedly delicate time. And what was the result of all this high-speed, high- value-asset sleuthing?
There are lots of ghost fleets.
What? For the first time, Batra felt something other than a sort of amused, studied disdain. Some legacy of his human form, buried in the transcribed systems that held his personality, made him suddenly feel the coldness of the air up here. Just for an instant he was fully aware that a naked human exposed to this temperature would have hairs standing up on their skin now.
The ghost fleet above Zaranche is one of eleven, the ship continued. The others are here. A glyph of a portion of the galaxy perhaps three thousand light years in diameter displayed itself in Batra’s mind. He swam into the image, looked around, pulled back, played around with a few settings. That’s quite a large part of what one might call Oct Space, he sent.
Indeed. Approximately seventy-three per cent of the entire Oct Prime Fleet would seem not to be where it appears to be.
Why are they bunched like that? Why those places? All the locations, all the places where these ghost fleets had drawn up were out of the way: isolated planets, backwater habitats and seldom- frequented deep-space structures.
It is believed they are grouped where they are to avoid detection.
But they’re being open about it; they’re telling people where they are.
I mean detection of the fact they are ghosts. The cover story, as it were, is that a series of special convocations is taking place which will lead to some profound new departure for the Oct; some new civilisational goal, perhaps. Possibly one linked to their continuing attempts at betterment and advancement upon the galactic stage. We suspect, however, that this is only partially true. The convocations are a ruse to excuse the departure of so many front-line ships.
Had they better technology, the GCU’s personality construct continued, the Oct would, one imagines, have kept their ghost ships appearing to carry out normal duties while the real ones left for wherever it is they have in fact left for. Their ability so to deceive is limited, however. Any high-Involved ship — certainly one of ours or the Morthanveld, for example, and possibly most Nariscene craft — would be able to tell that what they were looking at was not a real Oct ship. So the genuine craft left the normal intercourse of galactic ship life and these rather crude representations were assembled in locations specifically chosen so that the ships’ lack of authenticity would most likely go unnoticed.
Had he still inhabited human form Batra would, at this point, have frowned and scratched his head. But why? To what end? Are these maniacs going to war?
We don’t know. They have outstanding disputes with a few species and there is a particular and recently inflamed gripe with the Aultridia, but the whole of Oct society does not appear to be presently configured for hostilities. It is configured for something unusual, certainly (Batra could hear puzzlement expressed in the ship’s voice), possibly including some sort of hostile or at least dynamic action, but not all-out war. The Aultridia are taken to be their most pressing potential adversaries but they would almost certainly defeat the Oct as matters stand at present. The models show ninety-plus per cent likelihood, very consistently.
So where are the real ships?
That, old chum, is very much the question.
Batra had been thinking. And why am I being included here?
More modelling. Using the pattern of affected snuck-away ships and a pre-existing profile of Oct interests, we have drawn up a list of likely destinations for the real craft.
Another layered diaglyph blossomed in Batra’s mind. Ah-ha, he thought.
The marginally most likely disposition is a distributed one, or rather one of two not dissimilar choices: in each, the Primarians and other strategic craft take up various different positions, either defensive or
