The Hydrogen Sonata

There was a lot more like this, all in the Liseiden tongue, which was made up of a not inharmonious series of bubbly water-belches. The ship added the name Nyomulde to the Culture’s intelligence archive of known Liseiden officers, immediately transmitting this to a variety of its comrade craft both near and far.

The Liseiden hadn’t been forthcoming regarding the identity of the approaching fleet’s commanding officer, or even which ships would make up the fleet in the first place, but from the largest ship’s warp signature — hideously obvious from light years away — the Mistake Not… had determined hours earlier that it was the Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya, a Collective Purposes Vessel (First Class) and fleet flagship representing the last word in what the Liseiden were capable of building.

Much more satisfyingly, from the tone and word choice of one of the individuals talking — referencing earlier notes compiled by other Culture ships — the Mistake Not… was becoming increasingly certain that one of the voices it was listening to was a senior Liseiden officer called Ny-Xandabo Tyun, a male who held the rank of Salvage and Reprocessing Team Principal. Admiral, in other words.

But what babble! What to-ing and fro-ing over such simple operational matters! A bunch of dim-witted, slow-thinking bios swimming in a tub clouded with their own effluent, trying to work out what was going on around them by staring through portholes probably. It was hard for a ship, a Mind, not to feel at least a degree of contempt.

And they were still talking, out there between the stars, as the little flock of ships scraped slowly, slowly closer. (The fleet was already having to decelerate, the Mistake Not… noted, with some exasperation. This would draw the whole process out even further.) It was only a meet-and-greet anyway; almost as soon as it got here the Liseiden fleet would be breaking up again, most of the ships heading off singly or in small groups to individual places of interest within the Gzilt sphere; only the flagship and a few smaller vessels would remain as any sort of substantive unit.

This was something Admiral Tyun himself didn’t know yet; there were sealed orders in the flagship’s AI detailing all this dispositional stuff which were only to be accessed on the fleet’s arrival at the clinker star but which the Culture already knew about through a piece of deft signal interception by some other ship or ships tens of days earlier.

The Mistake Not… found knowing this — while Admiral Tyun did not — quite agreeable.

It would probably tag along with the flagship and its escorts, plus it had prepared an eel-like avatoid to represent it in person aboard the flagship. From what it had been told, the Liseiden were almost suspiciously keen to welcome this creature aboard.

It listened in to the animal chatter again.

Good grief, they were still discussing its own name!

The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless.

All these people seemed to do was talk!

It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.

Finally one of them said, “Sir, we… may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.”

“This far out?”

“–encrypted, aren’t… isn’t it?”

“Precautionary principle applies, team. Officer?”

The obvious, inter-ship comms traffic ceased. The Mistake Not… considered dedicating an effector to the lead vessel to monitor it internally, but there was a tiny chance they might spot it doing so — a tiny chance increased by the possibility the fleet carried tech filched on earlier Scavenging sorties — so it didn’t.

Hours of patient waiting later, the Liseiden fleet of large, boxy-looking ships finally dragged itself into the Ry system, hauled up into a rather quaint orbit around the clinker sun with the warp-engine equivalent of loud clanks and clouds of black smoke, and — finally — rendezvoused officially with the Culture ship Mistake Not…

Effusive greetings of great solemnity and seemingly genuine friendliness flowed in both directions.

It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not…’s multitudinous sub-routines — this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame — flagged the tiniest of oddities.

It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose real light had yet to get here. Somewhere inside the vast, escaping fires of the nebula there had been a microscopic flare of radiation displaying an unusual, even anomalous signature spectrum.

Suddenly in proper, no-nonsense combat-grade Mind-thinking time, while the transfer shuttle moved a few nanometres towards its destination, the AI cores on the Liseiden flagship slept deeply between cycles and the Liseiden themselves would have appeared frozen and silent even observing them on a scale of subjective years, the Mistake Not… watched the sub-routine’s resulting attention-cascade briefly suck in and focus other computational assetry on the data, rapidly producing all the available analysis it was presently possible to compile on the subject.

The anomaly — so faint, far away and overwhelmed by the seething turmoil of energies all around it as to be only very ambiguously weapon-blink — looked like it was centred quite precisely on the artificially maintained planetary fragment called Ablate, where the Gzilt had some sort of ceremonial facility.

…Oh-oh, thought the Culture ship.

Four (S -22)

Septame Banstegeyn went from group to group, taking part in multiple hand-shakings, everybody standing side-on and putting a single hand into a big confused but well-meaning tangle in the centre. Sometimes the resulting “shake” was a trembling muddle, sometimes the ball of grasping hands would end up going up and down quite violently, as though they were all making it happen deliberately; everybody always looked slightly surprised when that happened. Doubtless this was an example of or metaphor for something or other.

Anyway, Banstegeyn didn’t enjoy the process; in fact he hated it. He took particular care, therefore, to look entirely as though nothing he could possibly be doing right now could conceivably give him greater pleasure. He was hearty, amiable, roaring with laughter when he needed to, but he had a continuing need to wash his hand or at least wipe it on his robes, as though to decontaminate it after all this sweaty touching.

Well, this was just one of the many objectionable things that a man in his position had to do. In the end it was worth it; it would all be worth it.

“Well, Ban, it’s all yours now!”

“Folrison,” Banstegeyn said, forcing a smile as the other, junior parliamentarian shook him by the shoulders. Over-familiarly, Banstegeyn thought. Folrison looked drunk, probably was; a lot of them were, though not him — never him. And he didn’t like being called “Ban”, either. “It’s all all of ours now, I think you’ll find,” he told the other man, then gestured modestly at his own chest. “Merely a caretaker.”

“Na, you finally got your way. You’re in charge.” Folrison smiled. “Of not very much for not very long, but, if it