The Hydrogen Sonata

discomfited at being demoted from General to Medium and — like myself — the Mind in the Passing By… is old. Also, the Thug de-weaponing was done aboard it.

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Keep going.

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Old equals sneaky. And prideful, sometimes. Tell the Passing By… what has happened. Suggest to it that if it did just happen to have the weapon clusters taken out of its escorting Thugs to hand, it should get both ships back aboard and fully re-tooled immediately.

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Just checked. That stuff’s not aboard the Desert; absent from both the relevant cargo manifests and registered materiel declarations.

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Ask it all the same. It might be hiding the gear.

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That’d be a bit cheeky. And anyway, on a Desert class? They’re tiny! That’s why they got demoted.

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They’re over three klicks long and boxy, and the principal weapon cluster on a Thug is less than thirty metres in diameter. Also, there isn’t a Desert class extant that hasn’t altered its internal layout umpteen times, over the millennia, just to suit operational happenstance or to amuse itself. I bet most of them could find places aboard themselves to hide sufficient ordnance to equip a fleet, if they looked hard enough or could be bothered.

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Signal duly sent.

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The Beats Working, with the Ronte; genuinely civilian?

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Completely. And genuinely tiny. Eighty metres. We had missiles bigger, back in ye olden days.

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And this Eccentric-erratic, the Mistake Not…; is there any data on its throw-weight? I can’t find anything official.

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Seemingly not. That’s sort of the idea, apparently.

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Estimates of its puissance by enthusiastic amateurs vary wildly, but indicate something close to my own disclosed capabilities. (The Caconym had resorted to consulting documentation drawn up by the sort of people who took an informed interest in Culture ships.)

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I’m sure one of you ought to be flattered.

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Hmm. I think even by our relaxed standards it is a little absurd that one warship needs to look up what are essentially fan-sites for an estimate of a comrade vessel’s clobbering capacity. Think it could be SC?

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Possibly Special Circumstances, possibly just congenitally inscrutable. SC’s ongoing attempts to corner the market in deviousness have yet to come to fruition.

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Let’s try to find out how on board it is, and ask what it’s toting.

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Agreed. Its contact is the GSV Kakistocrat, which certainly used to be SC, though it claims it long since settled for a quieter and more contemplative life. Signal sent.

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There are these Delinquent-class GOU twins, the Headcrash and the Xenocrat, aboard the Empiricist; let’s give them a sniff of potential action in Gzilt and suggest it might be worth a little engine degradation to get there asap.

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They’re engaged with this smatter outbreak at Loliscombana. It’s all gone a bit target-rich. Could be hard dragging them away from the fun.

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Target-rich but challenge-light. They’ll be bored by now. Swear them to secrecy and tell them somebody’s seen fit to waste a Remnanter ship. That should get their attention.

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And hint the situation is unlikely to stop there?

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No need; they’ll draw their own conclusions. Better to let them persuade themselves than feel they’re being manipulated. Copy in the Empiricist; can’t have it getting upset.

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Contacting. We do, ah, seem to be concentrating very much on the military side of things thus far.

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I’m a warship. I always was. Why, what else did you have in mind?

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Talking to somebody relevant might be a good idea.

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This Banstegeyn fellow looks to be the player with the power at the moment. The regiments would appear to contain almost all the potential energy, with the politicians providing the dynamic.

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Gzilt society had cohered millennia ago into a stable democratic system that formalised a purely ceremonial president at the top with no real power, a few almost equally figurehead people immediately beneath him or her, then successive layers of exponentially greater numbers and increasing political power until you reached the general mass of the population — individual people.

This power structure lay alongside the Gzilt’s universal militia, a-rank-for-all military structure without apparent discord. Commentators and analysts, especially in the Culture, seemed to find this mystifying but pleasing; the consensus was that the ubiquitous military had no problem always conceding to civilian command because in a sense there were no civilians. It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millennia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had, within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation.

Military aside, in practice, over time, the balance of effective political power had settled somewhere between the one hundred and twenty-eight septames, the third level down, and the four-thousand-plus degans immediately beneath them, with the balance tipping towards the septames over the last few generations as the idea of Subliming had taken hold.

No machines involved in all this nominal, rather limited democracy, the ship noted. Minds and AIs in the Gzilt dominion were regarded either as mere tools, without rights, or as housing for the uploaded personalities of ex- humans. Even their warships were commanded not by true individual Minds but by virtual crews of deceased or copied bio-personalities running on highly sophisticated and very fast substrates.

It seemed to work, and Gzilt ships were highly regarded — approximately equiv-tech by Culture standards — but it was a roundabout way to get to a desired state of ability, and if there was ever a proper fight between