“Have we eighty seconds to spare before having to move off? Including move then disloc under acceleration, increasing distance?” the captain said. “Nav. Disloc?”
“Talked,” said the navigation officer. “No. Not even twenty.”
“Disloc agrees.”
“Already starting to lose the quarry’s track,” the targeting officer said. “Ninety per cent we can take same general heading and still find, but no guarantees.”
“Track still fading,” the navigation officer said. “It’s building in more random.”
“Eighty-nine per cent.”
“Colonel,” the captain said, “we can’t program the android and be sure we can still follow the ship.”
“Eighty-seven per cent.”
Agansu thought. “Percentage likelihood of reacquiring the Culture ship if we stay to the eighty-second mark?”
“Less than one.”
“Program android,” Agansu said, “despatch back to Xown in small craft?”
“That works. Back here in a few hours.”
“Let’s do that. Please move off immediately, Captain.”
“Moving.”
“Could still plonk the oid now, zap the col’s m-s to it after,” the special tactics officer said. He was, Agansu had noticed, prone to such compressive communication.
“I realise,” Agansu said. “I am unwilling to do that.”
“Your choice.”
“Captain,” Agansu said. “Do you think the Culture vessel has seen us?”
“Too early to tell. It moved off in a hurry, and it did Displace — disloc — the module rather than wait for it, so either it did or thinks it might have, or it’s suddenly in a real hurry.”
“It’d have disloc’d the craft in-atmosphere if it had been in a
“Or mo’ff, remote-dee’d the individs, left the mod,” the special tactics officer contributed opaquely.
“All true,” the captain said. “Or fresh news just came in, or it half suspected it had a tail and wanted to catch us off guard. Drives, how smooth was our move-off?”
“Pretty good. In our top centile.”
“Good as theirs?”
“Not quite. That was tight. As efficient a kick-away as I’ve seen.”
“Think we have to assume it might have seen us,” the captain announced. “Suggest we follow anyway, act as though not. Colonel?”
“I agree,” Agansu said, then shifted to a one-to-one private channel. “But, Captain, if it is the case that we have been discovered, was it anyone aboard’s fault?”
“No, not in my opinion, Colonel.”
“Really?”
“Really. We are carving right up hard against the operational envelope of this ship, Colonel, fractions away from our never-exceeds and even a little over the factory settings in some cases where we know she can take it. And the crew are better than the ship; they always are. If our crash-stop alerted the Culture ship this time then you could replay it a million times over with other crews or fresher crews or more experienced crews and it always would; that’s just how the physics works.”
“I take comfort in the loyalty and faith you display towards your crew, Captain.”
“My crew are loyal to me, Colonel; I am only loyal to the regiment and Gzilt. Also, faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.”
“Hmm. That is well said. I happily withdraw any suggestion that part of your crew might have been at fault, and I am happy to match and share that confidence.”
“Glad to hear it. Shall we rejoin the congregation?”
“Amusing. Let’s.”
Thirteen
(S -15)
xGSV
oLSV
Hello. Ms Tefwe is en route?
?
Yes. Transmitted, received and being re-embodied.
?
And are we any further forward regarding whatever ship or ships might have been helping Mr QiRia in the past?
?
Barely. I have contacted the
?
I’ll pass the word along. May I allow your identity to be known by the others?
?
I suppose so. Sooner or later somebody would have collated my search requests with those doubtless soon to be forthcoming from others and made the connection.
?
Welcome to the club.
He was always surprised how hard it was to see cities from space. You worked out where they must be from knowing how they looked on maps, but they never leapt out at you in reality the way they did in diagrammatic form. Even when you could make out the city and it was one that you knew well, you sometimes needed help to find where important buildings and landmarks were, even though they ought to be obvious.
Septame Banstegeyn gazed down at what his implants assured him was the location of the parliament complex in M’yon, but without the overlay he’d have struggled to identify it. How important it had always seemed, how important it genuinely was, to the lives of so many, and yet how tiny, how insignificant. He sighed, looked away, took in the whole sweep of the planet of Zyse — well, as much as he could see from the orbital base, which was only a few hundred kilometres up, so incapable of providing a view of the entire globe. Ah, the fabulous solidity of a planet.
