The Hydrogen Sonata

our lives. Inelegant use of rather too many nanos, though. Well, so you say, but it could have been accomplished more economically. Even so; had there been a whole section of those things, could you successfully have taken on all of them too? Well, there you are then.”

The missile moved off so fast it was as though it was a shell in a perfectly transparent gun barrel; it just disappeared, leaving behind only an after-image and the vaguest of impressions it had headed away in the direction its sharp end had been pointing. Berdle’s head jerked back in the blast of air and Cossont was only saved from being blown off her feet by the avatar reaching back with one silvery hand and grabbing her by the bag’s strap again. The thunder-clap echoed off the surrounding shelves and the ceiling.

Berdle shook his head as he resumed walking. “Knife missiles,” he said over his shoulder, with what sounded like affection.

“Yeah, knife missiles,” Cossont agreed, like she knew what she was talking about. She glanced back, but could see little through the smoke. “You sure there’s nobody else coming after us?”

“Not completely, no,” Berdle admitted, “but there doesn’t seem to be.” He sounded thoughtful. “The Gzilt ship present here is at least a sixth-level heavy cruiser, possibly a seventh-level battle-cruiser; that’d mean between one and three platoons of marines available, at least, but they aren’t being used. So that might say something about the secrecy and… well, authorisation of the mission involved.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Onwards; I should warn you there will be some tramping, and we may have to hide.”

The ship was led a merry dance, trying to get sufficiently close to the microrbital for long enough to get its avatar and the human off. Quickly getting the measure of each other, and each correctly guessing that its opposite number had no intention of being the first to open fire, neither ship resorted to serious targeting behaviour or the sort of hair-trigger weapon-readiness status that might have led to a misunderstanding. The whole tussle was conducted without signalling, as though neither vessel wanted to admit it was actually happening.

Eventually the Mistake Not… outwitted/out-field-managed the Gzilt ship and snapped the two humanoid figures off the habitat and back inside itself. It saw the Gzilt ship Displace/disloc one human-size entity off the little world a moment later. Having successfully retrieved its two primary Displace targets, the Mistake Not… tried to get a lock on the remains of the android Eglyle Parinherm, but found it had been beaten to it; a disloc field from the Gzilt ship was already starting to envelop the creature’s crushed and broken body at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Before the Gzilt vessel could complete the operation, the Mistake Not… applied a spatter of plasma fire to various parts of the android’s body, cauterising all processing and memory/data storage nodes within the machine.

?

xUe Mistake Not…

oGSV Contents May Differ

Right. What?… Oh; the stuff from the You Call This Clean?… Okay. The memories were in his eyes and they’ve been removed. How severe with himself. Just as well we successfully retrieved Mr Q’s mind-state, then. At no small risk to life and limb, I might add.

?

Congratulations. With what result?

?

Just about to find out…

Cossont felt sleepy, sore, elated, all at once. Her pain-management systems were telling her to move gently, slowly, with no sudden movements. She would be bathing rather than showering, she had already decided, but first, the ship had insisted, they needed to talk to the stored mind-state inside the silvery grey cube.

The Mistake Not… was powering away from the Ospin system on a wildly erratic course, having decided — after its jinking, ducking and diving, field-to-field tussle with the Gzilt ship — that it was the faster. So far at least, the Gzilt vessel had shown no sign of following.

Cossont sat down in the lounge area of the shuttle that had become her home over the last few days, clad only in the eSuit with its hands and feet components retracted to cuffs again and the helmet collapsed back into its necklace form. Pyan had gone ooh and ah over her and wrapped itself round her neck, rubbing gently at her bruised skin. Berdle, back to looking like a handsome Gzilt male again, entirely gave the impression he’d just strolled out of a grooming parlour; not a hint of tiredness or a hair out of place.

“You have been in the wars, you poor thing,” Pyan told Cossont, wrapping itself tighter.

“Yes. No need to throttle me.”

“Apologies. There. And where is that silly android?”

“We had to leave him behind,” Cossont said, glancing at Berdle as she extracted the silver-grey cube from the battered shoulder bag. “Under a wrecked elevator car at the bottom of a lift shaft.”

“The Gzilt ship disloc’d him aboard itself,” Berdle said. “It took Colonel Agansu too.”

“Were they both still alive?” Cossont asked.

“I think Agansu was,” the avatar said.

“Not Parinherm?”

“No.” Berdle shook his head, held Cossont’s gaze until she looked away.

She put the silvery cube on the low table in front of her, then reached out, touched it on.

“Ngaroe?” she asked.

“Ms Cossont,” QiRia’s voice said immediately.

Cossont realised she had been tense, hunched over the table. She relaxed a little. “Good to speak to you again,” she said, smiling.

“How long has it been? Oh. Quite a few years, I see. And are we on… a Culture ship?”

Cossont wasn’t sure what to say. She glanced at Berdle, who shrugged, unhelpfully.

“Yes,” she said. “Umm… I didn’t realise you could…”

“I’m not completely without senses in here,” QiRia’s voice said. “I may only be switched on for fractions of an hour at a time, but I can tell roughly what my circumstances are, how much time has elapsed since I was last activated, and I have sufficient appreciation of the radiative and general sensory ambience of my surroundings to tell when I am, for example, on a ship.”

“We were on a ship the last time we spoke,” Cossont said.

“I know. So what? Hardly remarkable. But this is a Culture ship; a GCU or a warship or something similar. That is remarkable. So I remarked upon it. That it? We done? You going to shut me off for another sixteen years?”

“No, no,” Cossont said quickly. “Sorry. Very sorry. But… look. We need to ask you something.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Hello, Mr QiRia,” Berdle said pleasantly. “My name is Berdle. I’m the avatar of the ship you’re on, the Mistake Not… Pleased to meet you.”

“Yes. Delighted. You sound stressed, by the way, Cossont.”

“Do I? Well, it’s been—”

“Yes. That’s why I said it,” the voice said, with only a touch of acid. “Berdle, I’d like to interface. May I see through your eyes, or some other visual sensor immediately hereabouts?”

“Be my guest,” Berdle said, and looked first at Cossont, then in a steady sweep round the rest of the lounge.

“Cossont! You have four arms,” QiRia’s voice said.

“To play the elevenstring,” she said.

“Ah. You weren’t put off playing it by the Warm, Considering after all. Good for you. So; what is it you want to know?”

She took a deep breath. “Ngaroe, we need to ask you something about… long ago. Going right back. It is… it’s very important. It might affect how the Subliming goes. Our Subliming. The Gzilt Subliming.” She took another deep breath. “There was a message, a signal from the Zihdren, saying that the Book of Truth might all be a lie, and you were mentioned as—”