The Hydrogen Sonata

into it centuries ago. That had been the first act of betrayal, the first act of something as good as outright aggression. He had had to respond, and the Fourteenth had pre-emptively signed away any right to be trusted, respected or protected by that act of ancient treachery.

Above him, Orpe raised her hands above her head, then bent back, and then further back, and then kept on going until her head eventually disappeared from view as she arched her spine and her hands clutched at, found and then gripped his ankles. It was a move she knew he liked. Beautiful, succulent Orpe. Virisse, as she wanted him to call her, though on the first few occasions like this, she had admitted that she had rather enjoyed being addressed as Orpe, or Ms Orpe.

Beyond even that, though, was the simple fact that the only thing which really mattered — well beyond who acted first or who had betrayed who — was that the Subliming took place, on time, in full.

Using some suitably enabled augmentation he’d carried since adolescence, he was able to watch her bend back like that multiple times, speeding up and slowing down. With the drug, he could synaesthesise experience too, translating it into other senses while another part of him was still in real time, as though watching all this. He enjoyed this feeling of being his own voyeur.

The knowledge of what had been in the Remnanter ship — if the message it had carried was actually true, not itself a lie — had to be kept secret, hidden away not just from the vast mass of people but from everybody else as well. It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them. Sometimes you could trust people in positions of power to understand this and even help keep things confidential — or at least muddied, so that people could self-deceive with whatever kept them best comforted — but not always. And with this, the stakes were too high. Nothing — nothing at all, in practice or in theory — mattered more than the Subliming. They were staking everything on it; he was staking everything on it, carrying the burden of the hopes of the whole Gzilt people on his shoulders.

Orpe — Virisse — moaned, panted. Not being able to see her face meant that he could let his own expression relax while he thought all this through.

And — precisely because it was so important — there was also the possibility that even somebody he’d normally have trusted, somebody from the rarefied upper echelons, would blab, just for the fame, just for the down-the-generations notoriety or supposed heroic status speaking out would bring, even if it was utterly and completely the wrong thing to do. Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people.

The girl’s grip on his ankles tightened. She shuddered.

He thought of the ship, slowing but still racing, powering down towards the planet, falling upon it.

Orpe moaned. He almost laughed. Supposedly, right now he was with the sub-committee making the decision about which Scavenger species got Preferred Partner status, making them the people who’d receive the cooperation of the Gzilt when it came to parcelling out the legacy stuff. But he didn’t need to be there, in the committee chamber; the personnel concerned had been briefed, knew what to do and which way to vote. In the end they remained frightened of him, even yet, and there was — he was entirely prepared to admit — a certain extra frisson about wielding such power without even having to be there.

Fuck the sub-committee. That would take care of itself. In the end, he’d rather be here.

With Orpe, whom he had to share with the president.

Normally he wouldn’t stand for this; he didn’t share lovers. But then Orpe’s other lover was somebody it was very useful to share her with. It was, indeed, the precise reason that he had befriended the girl, flattered her, courted her, finally bedded her. Not that it was any great sacrifice, of course; she was beautiful and attractive, after all, if a little too… assertive, equality-minded for his tastes. But no matter.

He had been very careful never to ask Orpe anything at all about President Sefoy Geljemyn’s thoughts or likely actions, content to lull her into a state where she thought he had wanted her purely for herself, not for her connection to the president, not for that access, that closeness.

For all he knew, it might never come in useful. But then that was not the point.

…And of course it had been the right thing.

“Orders, sadly, are orders.”

“Well, we’ll miss you, big guy. You really have to go right now?”

“Immediately, I’m afraid. Oh, you might register a slight tremor in your warp cores as I kick off here; not a passing gravity wave or anything — just me.”

“…No, not seeing anything this… No, wait a second, yes, engineering says yes, they did.”

The Mistake Not… felt a modicum of embarrassment. It had disengaged its own warp units without a murmur — they’d been idling, basically — and then deliberately roughened up its engine fields as it had engaged its main drive, specifically to create the skein-kick.

There was a table you looked up, basically, to see which of the less-developed civs had to be hoodwinked like this, and to what degree. It was a form of dishonesty the Mistake Not… found slightly objectionable, but it was expected. Technically indulging in such deceit wasn’t compulsory, any more than this just- received suggestion that it might like to head at the highest possible speed to a distant star system wasn’t an order, but it was expected; if you wanted to do more of this sort of stuff in the future then you’d best take the hint. Otherwise you’d be frozen out next time.

Of course, it also made such behaviour your own responsibility; it was hard to claim you had just been obeying orders when orders had officially ceased to exist the best part of ten thousand years ago.

The ship was talking directly to Ny-Xandabo Tyun, the Admiral of the Liseiden fleet. It had contacted the flagship’s AI as soon as it got the signal; the Admiral had clicked in seconds later. The little flotilla of three Liseiden ships including the fleet flagship had been puttering along towards Zyse for just a few hours now.

There had been a wait of nearly half a day spent still orbiting the cinder star while the fleet had shuffled personnel and equipment between its various ships. Quite why this had to be done at this point, wasting time, when it might have been accomplished while the ships had still been in transit had puzzled the Mistake Not… for a moment until it reviewed the specifications and capabilities of the Liseiden craft and realised that, with their level of tech, ship-to-ship transfers while under way were tricky and risky. The ship had been suitably appalled, and had felt vicariously embarrassed for the Liseiden.

“Yup, that’s me off and running. Sorry for the abrupt departure.”

“Yeah! You even took your avatoid! We’re devastated! ”

“Yup. Sorry about that too”

“Just joshing anyway.”

“I know. No, just… one of those things, you know?”

“So, you’re… just looking at the orientation of the warp skein here… looks like you’re off to… no, we can’t tell. Open space by our reckoning.”

“Heck, can’t hide much from you guys,” the Mistake Not… replied, putting some heartiness into its synthesised voice (it had, naturally, an extensive knowledge of all Liseiden languages, dialects, accents, idioms and speech patterns). It was powering away as fast as it could, already curving away towards this Izenion place (it had no idea why). The rucking it had caused in the skein of real space, pointing in a completely different direction, represented pretty much standard procedure; you didn’t let people know where you were really heading unless there was a good reason.

“I bet,” the admiral said. “Soooo… bad news?”

The delay caused by increasing distance was already such that had the Mistake Not… been talking to another Mind or even AI, it would have switched to standard messaging by now. Talking to a creature whose faculties relied on a substrate where internal signals moved at roughly the speed of sound — an ordinary bio-brain — there was no need for this yet; the ship had plenty to process and think about while it waited for the animal-slow replies to trundle across the link, and even during the individual transmission sections.

Between the phonemes associated with the end of the word “bad” and the very start of the word “news”, for example, when it was already anticipating that the whole of the next word would indeed be “news”, and — from the inflection — that it would be the end of the sentence and probably the end of the signal parcel, it had had time to thoroughly research the Izenion system, re-analyse everything it knew about Gzilt and the current situation re the countdown to Subliming and everything else, and still come up with precisely no idea why it had been asked to endure a degree of engine deg-radation — however temporary — to get to Izenion as quickly as possible.