‘Yes, I know all that, but I’d like you to tell the story.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.
‘Oh, all right then.’
The avatar and the Chelgrian stood in a little eight-person module, underneath the outer-facing surface of the Orbital. The craft was an all-media general run-about, capable of travelling under water, flying in atmosphere or, as now, voyaging in space, albeit at purely relativistic speeds. The two of them stood facing forward; the screen started at their feet ~nd swept above their heads. It was like standing in the nose of a glass-nosed spaceship, except that no glass ever made could have transmitted such a faithful representation of the view ahead and around.
It was two days after the death of Ibm Dolince, three before the concert in the Stullien Bowl. ziller, his symphony completed and rehearsals under way, felt consumed by a familiar restless- ness. Trying to think of sights on Masaq’ he hadn’t yet seen, he’d asked to be shown what the Orbital looked like from underneath as it sped by, and so he and the avatar had descended by sub-Plate access to the small space port deep under Aquime.
The plateau Aquime sat on was mostly hollow, the space inside taken up by old ship stores and mostly mothballed general-product factories. Sub-Plate access over the majority of the Orbital’s area was a matter of descending a hundred metres or less; from Aquime there was a good kilometre straight down to open space.
The eight-person module was slowing now, relative to the world above them. It was facing spinwards, so the effect was of the Orbital fifty metres above their heads starting to move past overhead, slowly at first but gradually more and more quickly, while the stars beneath their feet and to either side, which had been slowly wheeling, appeared now to be slowing down to a stop.
The undersurface of the world was a greyly shining expanse of what looked like metal, lit dimly by the starlight and the sunlight reflected from some of the system’s nearer planets. There was something intimidatingly flat and perfect about the vast plain hanging above their heads, ziller thought, for all that it was dotted with masts and access points and woven by the underground car tracks.
The tracks rose slowly in places to cross other routes which sank halfway into the fabric of the under-surface before return- ing to the vast and level plain. In other places the tracks swung round in vast loops that were tens or even hundreds of kilo- metres across, creating a vastly complicated lacework of grooves and lines etched into the under-surface of the world like a fabu- lously intricate inscription upon a bracelet. ziller watched some of the cars zip across the under-surface, in ones or twos or longer trains.
The tracks provided the best gauge of their relative speed; they had moved above them languidly at first, seeming to slide gradually away or come curving smoothly back. Now, as the module slowed, using its engines to brake, and the Orbital appeared to speed up, the lines started to flow and then race by above.
They went under a Bulkhead Range, still seeming to gather speed. The ceiling of greyness above them raced away, disap- pearing into a darkness hundreds of kibometres in height, strung with microscopic lights way above. The car tracks here rested on impossibly slender sling-bridges; they flashed past, perfectly straight thin lines of dim light, their supporting monofils invis- ible at the relative speed the module had built up.
Then the far slope of the Bulkhead Range came swooping down to meet them, flashing towards the module’s nose. ziller tried not to duck. He failed. The avatar said nothing, but the module moved further out, so that they were half a kilometre away from the under-surface. This had the temporary effect of seeming to slow the Orbital down.
The avatar started to tell ziller its story.
Once, the Mind that had become Masaq’ Hub – replacing the original incumbent, who had chosen to Sublime not long after the end of the Idiran War – had been the mind in the body of a ship called the Lasting Damage. It was a Culture General Systems Vehicle, built towards the end of the three uneasy decades when it gradually became clear that a war between the Idirans and the Culture was more likely to occur than not.
It had been constructed to fulfil the role of a civilian ship if that conflict somehow didn’t happen, but it had also been designed to play a full part in the war if it did come, ready to continually construct smaller warships, transport personnel and mat6riel and – packed with its own weaponry – become directly involved in battle.
During the first phase of the conflict, when the Idirans were pressing the Culture on every front and the Culture was doing little more than falling further and further back and mounting only very occasional holding actions where time had to be bought to carry out an evacuation, the number of genuine war- ships ready to fight was still small. The slack was mostly taken up by General Contacts Vehicles, but the few war-prep~ed GSVs took their share of the burden as well.
There were frequent occasions and battles when military prudence would have dictated the dispatch of a fleet of smaller war craft, the non-return of some – even most – of which would be deplorable but not a disaster, but which, while the Culture was still completing its preparations for full-scale war production, could only be dealt with by the commitment of a combat-ready GSV.
A tooled-up General Systems Vehicle was a supremely powerful fighting machine, easily outgunning any single unit on the Idiran side, but it was not just inherently less flexible as an instrument of war compared to a fleet of smaller craft, it was also unique in the binary nature of its survivability. If a fleet ran into serious trouble usually some of its ships could run away to fight another day, but a similarly beset GSV either triumphed or suffered total destruction – at its own behest if not because of the actions of the enemy.
Just the contemplation of a loss on such a magnitude was sufficient to give the strategic planning Minds of the Culture’s war command the equivalent of ulcers, sleepless nights and general conniptions.
In one of the more desperate of those engagements, buying time while a group of Culture Orbitals was readied for flight and slowly accelerated to a velocity sufficient to ensure the worlds’ escape from the volume of space under threat, the Lasting Damage had thrown itself into a particularly wild and dangerous environment deep inside the blossoming sphere of Idiran hegemony.
Before it had departed on what most concerned, including itself, thought would be its last mission, it had, as a matter of course, transmitted its mind-state – effectively its soul – to another GSV which then sent the recording onwards to another Culture Mind on the far side of the galaxy, where it might be held, dormant and safe. Then, along with a few subsidiary units barely meriting the name warships, more like semi-devolved powered weapon pods – it set off on its raid, climbing up and out above the lens of the galaxy on a high, curving course, hooked above the swell of stars like a claw.
The Lasting Damage plunged into the web of Idiran supply, logistic support and reinforcement routes like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens, devastating and disrupting all it could find in an erratic series of pulverisingly murderous full-speed attacks spread throughout centuries of space the Idirans had thought long since swept free of Cul- ture ships.
It had been agreed that there would be no communication from the GSV unless by some miracle it made it back into the rapidly withdrawing sphere of Culture influence; the only sign that reached its comrade craft that it had escaped immediate detection and destruction was that the pressure on the units remaining behind to resist the direct thrust of the Idiran battle fleets lessened appreciably, as enemy vessels were either inter- cepted before they reached the front or diverted from it to deal with the emerging threat.
Then there came rumours, through some of the refugee craft of neutrals fleeing the hostilities, of a knot of Idiran fleets swarming round a volume of space near a recent raid location on the very outskirts of the galaxy, followed by a furious battle culminating in a gigantic annihilatory explosion, whose signature, when it was finally picked up and analysed, was exactly that produced when a beleaguered military GSV of the Culture had had time to orchestrate a maximally extraneously damaging destruct sequence.
News of the battle and the GSV’s martial success and final sacrifice was headlining, main-menu stuff for less than a day. The war, like the Idiran battle fleets, swept onwards, burgeoning with distraction and ruse, incident and havoc, horror and spectacle.