Shit, thought the Killing Time. It scanned the hyper volumes around itself.
Nothing threatening.
Well, damn me, it thought, as it slowed. I’m still alive.
This was the one outcome it hadn’t anticipated.
It ran a systems check. Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines. It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours. Not too bad. Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop. Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose. Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs. Self-repair mechanisms champing the bit. It looked around, concentrating on the view astern. No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers. Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds.
Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds. Hmm; it had felt longer. But then that was only natural.
Should it make a second pass? It pondered this while it signalled the Shoot Them Later and a couple of other distant Minds with details of the engagement. Then it copied to the Steely Glint, without leaving the comm channels open. It needed time to think.
It felt excited, energised, re-purified by the engagement it had undergone. Its appetite was whetted. A further pass would be no-holds-barred multi-destructional, not a series of semi-defensive side-actions while it concentrated on searching for one individual ship. This next time it could really get nasty…
On the other hand, it had inflicted a more than reasonable amount of damage on the fleet for no ship-loss whatsoever and a barely significant degradation to its operational capacity. It had ignored the advice of a superior Mind in wartime but it had triumphed. It had gambled and won and there was a kind of unexpected elegance in cashing in its gains now. To pursue the matter further might look like obsessive self-regard, like ultra-militarism, especially now that the original object of its ire had been bested. Perhaps it would be better to accept whatever praise and/or calumny might now be heaped upon it and re-submit itself to the jurisdiction of the Culture’s war-command structure (though it was starting to have its doubts about the part of the Steely Glint in all this).
It drew level with the debris clouds left by the two ships destroyed in the final wave of the war fleet. It let them drop astern.
The wreck of the Attitude Adjuster came tumbling slowly towards it in hyperspace; coasting, slowing, drifting gradually back up towards the skein. Externally, it looked unharmed.
The Killing Time slowed to keep pace with the slackly somersaulting craft. It probed the Attitude Adjuster carefully with its senses, its effector targeted on the other ship’s Mind, ready on the instant. In human terms, this was like taking somebody’s pulse while keeping a gun stuck in their mouth.
The Attitude Adjuster’s weakened engine fields were still tearing at what was left of its Mind, teasing and plucking and forcing it apart strand by strand, demolishing and shredding and cauterising the last remaining quanta of its personality and senses. It looked like there had been a dozen or so Affronters aboard. They were dead too, killed by stray radiations from the Mind’s self-destruction.
The Killing Time felt a modicum of guilt, even self-disgust at what it had forced upon what was still, in a sense, a sister ship, even while another part of its selfhood relished and gloried in the dying craft’s agonies.
The sentimental side won out; it blitzed the stricken vessel with a profusion of plasma fire from its two operational chambers, and kept station with the expanding shell of radiation for a few moments, paying what little respect the traitor ship might be due.
The Killing Time came to its decision. It signalled the Steely Glint, informing the GCV that it would accept suggestions from now on. It would harry the war fleet if that was required, or it would join in whatever stand was to be made near Esperi if that was thought the best use that could be made of it.
It would probably still die, but it would meet its fate as a loyal and obedient component of the Culture, not some sort of rogue ship pursuing a private feud.
Then it slowly ramped its engines back to normal full power, pulling itself forward to a vanishingly brief moment of rest before powering onwards, accelerating hard and setting a hyperbolic course skirting around the fleet’s more direct route, heading for the location of the Excession.
It should still get there before the war fleet.
XII
‘What?’
‘I said I’ve made up my mind. I won’t talk to him. I won’t see him. I don’t even want to be on the same ship with him. Take me away. I want to leave- Now.’ Dajeil Gelian gathered her skirts about her and sat heavily on the seat in the circular room under translucent dome.
‘Dajeil!’ exclaimed Amorphia, going down on its knees in front of her, eyes wide and shining. It made to take her hands in its but she pulled them away. ‘Please! See him! He has agreed to see you!’
‘Oh, has he?’ she said scornfully. ‘How magnanimous of him!’
The avatar sat back on its haunches. It looked at the woman, then it sighed and said, ‘Dajeil, I’ve never asked anything of you before. Please just see him. For me.’
‘I never asked anything of you, the woman said. ‘What you gave me you gave unasked. Some of it was unwanted,’ she said coldly. ‘All those animals, those other lives, those eternal births and childhoods; mocking me.’
‘Mocking you!’ the avatar exclaimed. ‘But-!’
Dajeil sat forward, shaking her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, that was wrong of me.’ Now she reached out and took Amorphia’s hands. ‘I’m truly grateful for all you’ve done for me, ship. I am. But I don’t want to see him. Please take me away.’
The avatar tried to argue on for a while longer, but to no avail.
The ship considered a lot of things. It considered asking the Grey Area – still in its forward Mainbay – to dip inside the woman’s brain the way it had insinuated its way into Genar-Hofoen’s to discover the truth of the events on Telaturier (and to implant the dream of the long-dead captain Zreyn Enhoff Tramow, not that that had proved either required or particularly well done). It considered requesting that the GCU used its effectors to make her want to have the child. It considered Displacing chemicals or biotechs which would force Dajeil’s body to have the child. It considered using one of its own effectors to do the same thing. It considered just Displacing her into Genar-Hofoen’s proximity, or he into hers.
Then it came up with a new plan.
‘Very well,’ the avatar said eventually. It stood. ‘He will stay. You may go. Do you wish to take the bird Gravious with you?’
The woman looked perplexed, even confused. I -‘ she began. ‘Yes, yes, why not? It can’t do any harm, can it?’
‘No,’ the avatar said. ‘No, it cannot.’ It bowed its head to her.
‘Goodbye.’
Dajeil opened her mouth to speak, but the avatar was Displaced away at the same instant; the sound it left behind was like a pair of hands giving a single, gentle clap. Dajeil closed her mouth, then put both her hands over her eyes and lowered her head, doubling up as well as she was able to. Next moment there was another, distant noise and from down the winding stairs she heard a thin, hoarse voice cry out.
‘Waa! Shit! Grief, where-?’ Then there was a confused flutter of wings.
Dajeil closed her eyes. Then there was another, closer-sounding pop. Her eyes flicked open.
A young woman, slim and black haired, was sitting looking surprised in the middle of the floor, dressed in black pyjamas and reading a small, old-fashioned book. Between her bottom and the room’s carpet there was a neat circle of pink material, still in the process of collapsing, air expelling flutteringly round the edges. Around her floated a small snow-storm of white particles, settling with a feather-like slowness. She jerked once, as though she had been leaning back on something which had just been removed.
‘What… the… fuck… ?’ she said softly. She looked slowly around, from side to side.
Her gaze settled on Dajeil. She frowned for a moment, then some kind of understanding imposed itself. She quickly completed her review of her surroundings, then pointed at the other woman. ‘Dajeil,’ she said. ‘Dajeil Gelian, right?’
Dajeil nodded.
XIII
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.885.3553]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
It was the Attitude Adjuster. It is dead now (signal + DiaGlyphs enclosed).
oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.3740] xLSV Serious Callers Only