He looked up again. The three machines were moving around near the airlock doors. Gestra sniffed back his tears. The three machines drew back from the doors, then settled down onto the ground. Gestra waited to see what would happen next.
There was a flash, and an explosion. The middle set of doors blew out in a burst of smoke that rolled up the corridor and then collapsed backwards, seemingly sucking the whole explosion back into where the doors had been. The doors had gone, leaving a dark hole.
A breeze tugged at Gestra, then the breeze turned to a wind and the wind became a storm that howled and then screamed past him and then started moving him bodily along the floor. He shouted in fear, trying to grab hold of the carpet with his one good arm; he slid down the corridor in the roar of air, his fingers scrabbling for a grip. His nails dug in, found purchase, and his fingers closed around the fibres, pulling him to a stop.
He heard thuds and looked up, gasping, towards the reception area, eyes streaming with tears as the wind whipped by him. Something moved, bouncing in the lighted doorway of the circular lounge. He saw the vague, rounded shape of a couch thudding into the floor twenty metres away and flying towards him on the howling stream of air. He heard himself shout something. The couch thudded into the floor ten metres away, tumbling end over end.
He thought it was going to miss him, but one end of it smashed into his dangling feet, tearing him away; the storm of air picked him up bodily and he screamed as he fell with it past the shapes of the three watching machines. One of his legs hit the jagged edges of the breach in the airlock doors and was torn off at the knee. He flew out into the huge space beyond, the air pulled from his mouth first by his scream and then by the vacuum of the hangar itself.
He skidded to a stop on the cold hard floor of the hangar fifty metres from the wrecked doors, blood oozing then freezing around his wounds. The cold and the utter silence closed in; he felt his lungs collapse and something bubbled in his throat; his head ached as if his brain were about to burst out of his nose, eyes and ears, and his every tissue and bone seemed to ring with brief, stunning pain before going numb.
He looked into the enveloping darkness and up at the towering, heedless heights of the bizarrely patterned ships.
Then the ice crystals forming in his eyes fractured the view and made it splinter and multiply as though seen through a prism, before it all went dim and then black. He was trying to shout, to cry out, but there was only a terrible choking coldness in his throat. In a moment, he couldn’t even move, frozen there on the floor of the vast space, immobile in his fear and confusion.
The cold killed him, finally, shutting off his brain in concentric stages, freezing the higher functions first, then the lower mammal brain, then finally the primitive, near-reptilian centre. His last thoughts were that he would never see his model sea ships again, nor know why the warships in the cold, dark halls were patterned so.
Victory! Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe nudged the suit forward, floating out through the torn doors of the airlock and into the hangar space. The ships were there. Gangster class. His gaze swept their ranks. Sixty-four of them. He had, privately, thought it might all be a hoax, some Culture trick.
At his side, his weapons officer steered his suit across the floor – over the body of the human – and up towards the nearest of the ships. The other suited figure, the Affronter Commander’s personal guard, rotated, watching.
‘If you’d waited another minute,’ the voice of the Culture ship said tiredly through the suit’s communicator, ‘I could have opened the airlock doors for you.’
‘I’m sure you could,’ the Commander said. ‘Is the Mind quite under your control?’
‘Entirely. Touchingly naive, in the end.’
‘And the ships?’
‘Quiescent; undisturbed; asleep. They will believe whatever they are told.’
‘Good,’ the Commander said. ‘Begin the process of waking them.’
‘It is already under way.’
‘Nobody else here,’ his security officer said over the communicator. He had gone on into the rest of the human accommodation section when they had made their way to the airlock doors.
‘Anything of interest?’ the Commander asked, following his weapons officer towards the nearest warship. He had to try to keep the excitement out of his voice. They had them! They had them! He had to brake the suit hard; in his enthusiasm he almost collided with his weapons officer.
In the ruined suite that had been the place where the human had lived, the security officer swivelled in the vacuum, surveying the wreckage the evacuating whirlwind of air had left. Human coverings; clothes, items of furniture, some complicated structures; models of some sort. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing of interest.’
‘Hmm,’ the ship said. Something about the tone communicated unease to the Commander. At the same moment, his weapons officer turned his suit to him. ‘Sir,’ he said. A light flicked on, picking out a metre-diameter circle of the ship’s hull. Its surface was riotously embellished and marked, covered in strange, sweeping designs. The weapons officer swept the light over nearby sections of the vessel’s curved hull. It was all the same, all of it covered with these curious, whorled patterns and motifs.
‘What?’ the Commander said, concerned now.
‘This… complexity,’ the weapons officer said, sounding perplexed.
‘Internal, too,’ the Culture ship broke iri.
‘It…’ the weapons officer said, spluttering. His suit moved closer to the warship’s hull, until it was almost touching. ‘This will take for ever to scan!’ he said. ‘It goes down to the atomic level!’
‘What does?’ the Commander said sharply.
‘The ships have been baroqued, to use the technical term,’ the Culture ship said urbanely. ‘It was always a possibility.’ It made a sighing noise. The vessels have been fractally inscribed with partially random, non-predictable designs using up a little less than one per cent of the mass of each craft. There is a chance that hidden in amongst that complexity will be independent security nano-devices which will activate at the same time as each ship’s main systems and which will require some additional coded reassurance that all is well, otherwise they will attempt to disable or even destroy the ship. These will have to be looked for. As your weapons officer says, the craft will each have to be scanned at least down to the level of individual atoms. I shall begin this task the instant I have completed the reprogramming of the base’s Mind. This will delay us, that’s all; the ships would have required scanning in any event, and in the meantime, nobody knows we’re here. You will have your war fleet in a matter of days rather than hours, Commander, but you will have it.’
The weapons officer’s space suit turned to face the Commander’s. The light illuminating the outlandish designs switched off. Somehow, from the way he performed these actions, the weapons officer conveyed a mood of scepticism and perhaps even disgust to the Commander.
‘Ka!’ the Commander said contemptuously, whirling away and heading back towards the airlock doors. He needed to wreck something. The accommodation section ought to provide articles which would be satisfying but unimportant. His personal guard swept after him, weapons ready.
Passing over the still, frozen body of the human – even that hadn’t provided any sport – Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe and the battleship Xenoclast – on secondment to the alien ship Attitude Adjuster – unholstered one of the external weapons on his own suit and blasted the small figure into a thousand pieces, scattering fragments of frosty pink and white across the cold floor of the hangar like a small, delicate fall of snow.
7. Tier
I
Such investigations took time. There was the time that even hyperspacially transmitted information took to traverse the significant percentages of the galaxy involved, there were complicated routes to arrange, other Minds to talk to, sometimes after setting up appointments because they were absent in Infinite Fun space for a while. Then the Minds had to be casualed up to, or gossip or jokes or thoughts on a mutual interest had to be exchanged before a request or a suggestion was put which re-routed and disguised an information search; sometimes these re-routes took on extra loops, detours and shuntings as the Minds concerned thought to play down their own involvement or involve somebody else on a whim, so that often wildly indirect paths resulted, branching and re-branching and doubling back on themselves until eventually the relevant question was asked and the answer, assuming it was forthcoming, started the equally tortuous route back to the original requester. Frequently simple seeker-agent programs or entire mind-state abstracts were sent off on even more complicated missions with detailed instructions on what to look for, where to find it, who to ask and how to keep their tracks covered.