The Hydrogen Sonata

minor key herself, she realised, every time she stepped into the hollowness of the elevenstring and let that resound around her, through her.

She became slowly aware that, looking straight up, there was a sort of sparkling grey haze ahead of her, spreading to all sides. Lights. Lots of tiny lights. They started to grow brighter, everywhere overhead.

“Not far now,” Berdle’s voice said.

“Mmm,” she heard herself say, mouth still clamped round the breather.

“There’s one last turn to your left as it is at present, then straight up,” Berdle said through the earbuds. “Take it easy there, okay? Slow down. I’ll catch up and we can surface together.”

She said, “Mmm,” again, and nodded. She wondered why, as an avatar, Berdle couldn’t just power his way up to join her, but maybe he was so weakened after having to lose so much mass this wasn’t possible, or he just wanted to keep looking plausibly human. The spread of lights was close enough now for her to see the hints of some sort of framework stretched across the whole expanse above her. She thought she could see somebody walking along some sort of pierced walkway, five metres or so overhead.

The two ships faced each other. The Gzilt ship displayed as what it truly looked like inside its nest of fields: a steely clutch of blades like a hundred fat broadswords compressed into a barbed and jagged arrowhead. The Culture vessel projected no image beyond the surface view of its outermost fields. They were absurdly close, by the normal standards of conflict at their technological level, which was generally carried out from real-space light seconds away at least.

To be squaring up to an opponent from just a few kilometres off was pretty preposterous; both ships could extend their field enclosures well beyond this distance. It was a statement of relatively peaceful intent in a way — full-scale conflict was obviously not intended by either, or one of them would long since have opened fire by now — but worrying at the same time, given that both vessels knew their missions and intentions were incompatible.

Relative to Xown, the Gzilt ship had remained almost perfectly stationary throughout, parked in real space directly above the Girdlecity, moving at the same slow strolling speed as the Equatorial 353, five hundred kilometres below. The Churkun watched the Culture ship draw to a stop, relative to it, still entirely in hyperspace. It was a minor feat of field management to be able to do this so far into the gravity well of a planet, but then, according to the intelligence the Churkun had received via Marshal Chekwri, this vessel — the Mistake Not… , a Culture ship of slightly worrying indeterminate class — had proved itself something of an adept at this sort of thing, at Bokri.

The Churkun was keeled into hyperspace, its field enclosure bulging into the fourth dimension like somebody pressing an empty bowl brim-deep into a bath. This let it keep its options open and certainly it was able to watch everything that was happening there, but staying in the Real meant it could react faster to anything happening in the Girdlecity without having to worry about dislocs being intercepted.

The crew of the Gzilt ship were gauging what they could of their potential adversary, which expressed within hyperspace as the usual gauzy-looking silvery ellipsoid. Its current field enclosure topography guaranteed certain physical maxima and strongly indicated some likely limitations. So it was, certainly, categorically, no more than five kilometres in length and a third of that in diameter, and — if it followed conventional Culture field disposition — genuinely, physically, likely to be about twelve hundred metres long and maybe four hundred in diameter. This would make the vessel about fifty per cent smaller by volume than the Churkun, though the difference was not so great that it guaranteed the Gzilt ship’s superiority.

~Good day, the Culture ship sent. ~I’m the Mistake Not… I believe you are the 8*Churkun.

~Correct. And I am its captain. Might we ask what brings you here?

~Got personnel inside the Girdlecity, though I suspect you’ve already guessed that.

~We are providing support for persons in there ourselves. Further to that, this is now a zone of operational interest, so we do have to ask you to leave.

~I see. You still have my module, I believe.

~We do. Though not actually aboard, as it were. Just in case. We’re inclined to treat it as captured hostile equipment, especially given the way it was delivered. Perhaps we might return it to you, following your departure, once this is no longer a zone of operational interest, which, we repeat, we must ask you to leave. Immediately.

~Ah, keep it if you like. Not that bothered. But I do need to stick around for a bit.

~It is not going to be possible to accommodate that desire. Obviously, we have no wish to engage in any hostilities with you, but, if it comes to it, we are entirely prepared to do just that if you do not leave, immediately.

~Be a bit close-range. Like nukes in a shed.

~Well, whatever it might take. This is though, sadly, not open for negotiation. We must ask you to leave immediately. One Culture ship has already met its end within Gzilt space in the last few hours. I assume you have heard of the fate of the Beats Working.

~Yes. It’s just the kind of thing us Culture ships natter about.

~It would be unfortunate in the extreme if it were not to remain the only casualty of such status hereabouts. Please leave. And do understand that this is not a reduction in the force of our demand that you do so — which remains in force and is, as of this statement, up to its fourth re-statement. It is, rather, an additional plea from those of us aboard with some respect for Culture vessels that you accede, without delay, to our demand before anything unfortunate occurs.

~Of course… not the only casualty, hereabouts, the plucky little Beats Working.

~Indeed, twelve Ronte ships were lost as well.

~With all hands. And then, in addition to that, there was that Z-R ship out at Ablate, twenty-two days ago.

~Really?

~Really. Kind of kicked off this whole rolling unpleasantness. Everything was spinning along pretty much fine until that bit of… well, how would one characterise it? Illegality? Cowardice? Piracy? Bullying to the point of murder? Just… murder?

~How little the differences between these terms mean to those subject to the act concerned. You ought to pay heed.

~Me that spotted it, too. I was rendezvousing with our Liseiden chums out at Ry when it happened. Caught the blink of that particular little atrocity.

~Remarkable. That is some distance away. Well spotted. Now, we really must ask you to leave, for the last time. There will be no more requests, only action. Our patience is, truly, exhausted.

~We could start by sort of tussling with fields. I did that out at Bokri, in Ospin, with your pal the Uagren. That was fun. Not something you get to do every day. Bestial, nearly, like locking horns. Actually, more like naked wrestling, all oiled up. I found it quite erotic, to tell the truth. Homo-erotic, I suppose, technically, as we’re all just ships together and we’re all the same gender: neutral, or hermaphrodite or whatever, don’t you think?

The Churkun’s reply was to attempt to wrap a burst field all around the smaller Culture ship, an element of its field enclosure pulsing suddenly, nearly instantly out like a loop of a sun’s magnetic field flicking, releasing a pulse of charged particles.

~Not even a nice try, shipfucker, the Culture ship sent, already dodged before the field bubble got anywhere near it. ~And now, watch this.

It flickered, shimmering in hyperspace as it fell, powering the trivial distance from where it had been, down the curve of the planet’s gravity well, to the Girdlecity. Then it disappeared.

The first sign of alarm had been the warbling of a siren in the distance as he and the arbites had progressed along a broad, downward-slanting corridor. He hadn’t noticed at first as he was busy trying to re-establish contact with the ship.

~Marine operations officer? he sent, then waited.