The Hydrogen Sonata

important part of its mission had already been carried out; it had transmitted the information on QiRia’s location to the other interested ships. It could afford to let her spend a while with the ancient drone and its sandstreams.

Another ship, another VFP, the Rapid Random Response Unit, had been time- closest to Cethyd and had started out for the planet within a second of the information being picked up. It had started readying one of the handful of humanoid simulacra bodies it carried aboard, instructing the creature’s physiological systems to alter the blank-basic body’s appearance so that it would resemble Tefwe. The transfer of Tefwe’s updated mind-state could wait until the last hour or so before deployment, hence the relaxed attitude the Outstanding… was able to take to Tefwe’s delaying tactics.

The Rapid Random Response Unit’s flight time to Cethyd had been two and a half days; a lucky proximity, Tefwe guessed, given that the place was, as Hassipura had suggested, kind of off the beaten track, in a system called Heluduz in one of the faint tendrils of stars that lay on the very outskirts of the galaxy, spun out from the rim like the exhaust from a spent firework.

The place itself was nothing special; just a biggish rocky world with a thick though transparent oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a small majority of land compared to deep ocean.

After her surprisingly extended jaunt to see Hassipura’s sandstreams, Tefwe had ridden off again on the aphore Yoawin. The ship had Displaced both of them as soon as they dropped more than a couple of metres beyond the pass, depositing a very confused aphore straight back into its stables in the livery at Chyan’tya.

Tefwe went back to the ship, where her mind-state was, finally, read and transmitted to the Rapid Random Response Unit half a day before it reached the planet of Cethyd, while it was still checking and re-checking its Displacer components, testing the system with dummy payloads and planning its brake points and loop-return profiles.

Tefwe shook her head. “Is this really necessary?”

“This would represent an absolute minimum,” the boxy ship drone told her.

Tefwe looked down at herself. The ship had insisted she wear what appeared to her like a grossly over- spec’d suit. She looked, she thought, like she’d been dipped in a thick layer of sticky mercury.

The suit was only about five or six millimetres thick and seemed to weigh almost nothing, plus it thinned so much over her hands and especially her fingers that she half expected to see her fingerprints through the silver covering, but it was meant to be terribly effective. Well, once the helmet component had rolled up, it was just a roll round her neck at the moment, like a thick metallic scarf. Obviously the tech had moved on since the last time she’d needed to be protected at anything like this level.

“What exactly is this?”

“That is a full-survival/light-battle suit, two layer.”

“What’s a light battle? Is that a skirmish or something?”

“It will keep you safe and well, even if the Displace is very slightly off, and protect you against unwelcome attentions, should locals take exception to you.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Who knows? Some people are just primitive.”

“This isn’t really about the locals, is it? This is in case the other lot — the Oglari — in case they spot me, or their bosses.” Tefwe had woken with a full briefing effectively downloaded and digested inside her head.

“We are trying to protect you as well as we can, Ms Tefwe,” the ship told her. “Ideally I would put you down in a more aggressively profiled suit and inside a supporting capsule — at least — with a full drone and missile screen, exactly where you need to be; however, our intelligence is that such a force, in such a location, would be very likely both to be sensed on emplacement and to give cause for severe diplomatic unpleasantness if discovered. Hence the suit.”

“Can I put ordinary clothes over it?”

“They’ll burn off if the Displace is even slightly out. The suit is able to mimic the appearance of clothing.”

“I’d prefer ordinary clothes. Can’t I carry them inside the suit or something?”

The drone made a sighing noise.

Eventually she got a kind of backpack that melded itself to the suit, containing some clothes and a few supplies.

“This increases both your mass and bulk,” the ship told her through the drone. “Now I have to re-calibrate and skim even closer to the planet.”

“How close you going?”

“Seventeen-five k.”

“Velocity?”

“Forty per cent Crashed to fifty-seven kilo-lights at closest approach; sub millisecond window.”

Tefwe whistled. “You’re going to scrunch me up into a tiny little ball, aren’t you?”

“If you were properly human, it would break every major bone in your body, and quite a lot of the others. Happily, you’re not. You won’t trauma, will you? I could put you under…”

“Not me. Tough as old space boots. Known for it.”

“Good. The suit will be trying not to use any fields, including AG, so the landing could be a little bumpy.”

“Kinetic.”

“Kinetic?”

“That’s how we used to express it in the old days.”

“Hmm. Kinetic. That too is appropriate.”

The Rapid Random Response Unit performed the start of a crash-stop, then — when it was, for a vanishingly brief moment, within less than a planetary radius of the world — used its heavy-duty Displacer to loose a balled-up Tefwe and a scatter of miniature subsidiary support components towards the planet. Then it continued on its way — slowing, in effect, more slowly — and started a wide turn that would bring it back to the system some hours later for a more stealthy approach to Cethyd.

Tefwe came hurtling out of the sky at a little under the speed of sound. The suit gauged where it was and what was happening to it, saw that it was heading for land with no large body of water available — which was sub-optimal, but never mind — and braked hard by spreading layers of itself like ribboned parachutes, scrubbing off ninety-five per cent of its speed in about half a kilometre of forty-five-degree flight. Tefwe felt herself tumbling, and the deceleration as a tremendous weight — oddly distributed due to the way she was packed, pressed into a contorted, maximally compacted ball that would have killed a basic human. The tumbling decreased. She felt her orientation steady and settle, and then the weight eased too.

She felt the impact as a dull thud on her back and knees, not sore at all, then the suit’s voice said quietly, “Landed.”

Tefwe started to un-ball as the suit unwrapped her, letting her spread herself out to lie looking up at an ochre sky visible between softly swaying stalks of some tall, bronze-coloured grass. She could feel her lungs re-inflating. They’d been collapsed to save volume.

“How we doing?” she asked when she had some breath to spare.

“We are doing well,” the suit said. “No hostile interest detected.”

“That’s nice.” Her conventional pain receptors came back on line, tingling once to confirm, then quieting down.

She sat up, dusted herself down, then, still sitting, unhitched the backpack and put on the clothes she’d had the ship make for her. They were supposed to make her look a bit like a pilgrim. A human pilgrim, specifically, because the locals here weren’t human, though there were used enough to hosting humanoid pilgrims from nearby systems. Then she let the backpack collapse itself and stow into the small of the suit’s back.

Finally, cautiously, she stood up.

Cethyd lay heavy beneath the orange-red sun called Heluduz.

“You used to look at my chest.”

“Because of what was not there. Absence can snag the gaze more effectively than presence.”

“What? Oh, breasts! Mammalian stuff. Of course. I thought you just thought I had a particularly fine and barrel chest.”