[ stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28. 866.2083 ]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
It is Genar-Hofoen. I am now convinced. I am not certain why he may be important to the conspiracy, but he surely is. I have drawn up a plan to intercept him, on Tier. The plan involves Phage Rock; will you back me up if I request its aid?
oo
[ stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.866.2568 ]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
My dear old friend, of course.
oo
Thank you. I shall make the request immediately. We shall be reduced to dealing with amateurs, I’m afraid. However, I hope to find a high-profile amateur; a degree of fame may protect where SC training is not available. What of our fellow counter-conspirator?
No word. Perhaps it’s spending more time in The Land of IF.
oo
And the ship and Pittance?
oo
Arriving in eleven and a half days’ time.
oo
Hmm. Four days after the time it will take for us to get somebody to Tier.
It is within the bounds of possibility this ship will be heading into a threatening situation. Is it able to take care of itself?
oo
Oh, I think it capable of giving a good account of itself. Just because I’m Eccentric doesn’t mean I don’t know some big hitters.
oo
Let us hope such throw-weight is not required.
oo
Absolutely.
II
A Plate class General Systems Vehicle was quite a simple thing, in at least one way. It was four kilometres thick; the lowest kilometre was almost all engine, the middle two klicks were ship space – an entire enclosed system of sophisticated dockyards and quays, in effect – and the topmost thousand metres was accommodation, most of it for humans. There was, of course, a great deal more to it than that, but this covered the essentials.
Using these broad-brush figures, it was a simple matter for anybody to work out the craft’s approximate maximum speed from the cubic kilometrage of its engines, the number of ships of any given size it could contain according to the volume given over to the various sizes of bays and engineering space, and the total number of humans it could accommodate by simply adding up how many cubic kilometres were given over to their living-space.
The Sleeper Service had retained an almost pristine original specification internally, which was a rare thing in an Eccentric vessel; usually the first thing they did was drastically reconfigure their physical shape and internal lay-out according to the dictates of some private aesthetic, driving obsession or just plain whim, but the fact the Sleeper Service had stuck to its initial design and merely added its own private ocean and gas-giant environment on the outside made it relatively easy to measure its actual behaviour against what it ought to be capable of, and so ensure that it wasn’t up to any extra mischief besides being Eccentric in the first place.
In addition to such simple, arithmetical estimates of a ship’s capability, it was, of course, always a good idea when dealing with an Eccentric craft to have just that little extra bit of an edge. Intelligence, to be specific; an inside view; a spy.
As it approached the Dreve system, the Plate class GSV Sleeper Service was travelling at its usual cruising speed of about forty kilolights. It had already announced its desire to stop off in the inner system, and so duly started braking as it passed through the orbit of the system’s outer-most planet, a light week distant from the sun itself.
The Yawning Angel, the GSV which was shadowing the larger craft, decelerated at the same rate, a few billion kilometres behind. The Yawning Angel was the latest in a long line of GSVs which had agreed to take a shift as the Sleeper Service’s escort. It wasn’t a particularly demanding task (indeed, no sensible GSV would wish it to be), though there was a small amount of vicarious glamour associated with it; guarding the weirdo, letting it roam wherever it wanted, but maintaining the fraternal vigilance that such an enormously powerful craft espousing such an eccentric credo patently merited. The only qualifications for being a Sleeper Service shadow were that one was regarded as being reliable, and that one was capable of staying with the SS if it ever decided to make a dash for it; in other words, one had to be quicker than it.
The Yawning Angel had done the job for the best part of a year and found it undemanding. Naturally, it was somewhat annoying not to be able to draw up one’s own course schedule, but providing one took the right attitude and dispensed with the standard Mind conviction that held efficiency to the absolute bottom line of everything, it could be an oddly enhancing, even liberating experience. GSVs were always wanted in many more places at the same time than it was possible to be, and it was something of a relief to be able to blame somebody else when one had to frustrate people’s and other ships’ wishes and requests.
This stop at Dreve had not been anticipated, for example – the SS’s course had seemed set on a reasonably predictable path which would take it through the next month – but now it was here, the Yawning Angel would be able to drop off a few ships, take another couple on, and swap some personnel. There should be time; the SS had never acknowledged the presence of any of the vessels tailing it, and it hadn’t posted a course schedule since it had turned Eccentric forty years earlier, but it had certain obligations in terms of setting re-awakened people back in the land of the living again, and it always announced how long it would be staying in the systems it visited.
It would be here in Dreve for a week. An unusually long time; it had never stayed anywhere for longer than three days before. The implication, according to the group of ships considered experts on the behaviour of the Sleeper Service, and given what the GSV itself had been saying in its increasingly rare communications, was that it was about to off-load all its charges; all the Storees and all the big sea, air and gas-giant-dwelling creatures it had collected over the decades would be moved – physically, presumably, rather than Displaced – to compatible habitats.
Dreve would be an ideal system to do this in; it had been a Culture system for four thousand years, comprising nine more or less wilderness worlds and three Orbitals – hoops, giant bracelets of living-space only a few thousand kilometres across but ten million kilometres in diameter – calmly gyrating in their own carefully aligned orbits and housing nearly seventy billion souls. Some of those souls were far from human; one third of each of the system’s Orbitals was given over to ecosystems designed for quite different creatures; gas-giant dwellers on one, methane atmospherians on another and high temperature silicon creatures on another. The fauna the SS had picked up from other gas-giant planets would all fit comfortably into a sub-section of the Orbital designed with such animals in mind, and the sea and air creatures ought to be able to find homes on that or either of the other worlds.
A week to hang around; the Yawning Angel thought that would go down particularly well with its human crew; one of the many tiny but significant and painful ways a GSV could lose face amongst its peers was through a higher than average crew turn-over rate, and, while it had been expecting it, the Yawning Angel had found the experience most distressing when people had announced they were fed up not being able to have any reliable advance notice of where they were going from week to week and month to month and so had decided to live elsewhere; all its protestations had been to no avail. What would in effect be a week’s leave in such a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and welcoming system really should convince a whole load of those currently wavering between loyalty and ship-jumping that it was worth staying on with the good old Yawning Angel, it was sure.
The Sleeper Service came to an orbit-relative stop a quarter-turn in advance along the path of the middle Orbital, the most efficient position to assume to distribute its cargo of people and animals evenly amongst all three worlds. Permission to do so was finally received from the last of the Orbitals’ Hub Minds, and the Sleeper Service duly began getting ready to unload.
The Yawning Angel watched from afar as the larger craft detached its traction fields from the energy grid beneath real space, closed down its primary and ahead scan fields, dropped its curtain shields and generally made the many great and small adjustments a ship normally made when one was intending to stick around somewhere for a while. The Sleeper Service’s external appearance remained the same as ever; a silvery ellipsoid ninety kilometres long, sixty across the beam and twenty in height. After a few minutes, however, smaller craft began to appear from that reflective barrier, speeding towards the three Orbitals with their cargoes of Stored people and sedated animals.