The other two craft – the GSVs What Is The Answer And Why? and Use Psychology – were manoeuvring a half a day and a full day further out respectively. A faint layered smudge in the distance, about three quarters of the way round an imaginary sphere drawn around the Excession, was almost certainly the approaching Affronter war fleet. Around the Excession itself, no sign whatsoever of the vanished Stargazer fleet of the Zetetic Elench.
The Sleeper Service readied itself for the fray. Maybe, in a sense, two frays. There was every chance that its own engines would fail the same way the Fate Amenable To Change’s had when it had moved towards the Excession, but given the speed the Sleeper Service was travelling at it could coast in towards the thing; it wouldn’t have any directional control, it wouldn’t be able to maintain its present speed, or brake, but it could get there.
If it ought to.
Ought it? It checked its signal log, as if it might have missed an incoming message.
Still nothing from those who had sent it here. The Interesting Times Gang seemed to have been observing comm silence for days. Just the usual daily plea from the LSV Serious Callers Only; the equivalent of an unopened letter and just the latest in a series.
The Sleeper watched events on the Jaundiced Outlook, even as it prepared itself for the coming encounter near Esperi, like a military commander drawing up war plans and issuing hundreds of preparatory orders who cannot keep his or her attention from flicking to a microscopic drama being played out amongst a group of insects clinging to the wall above the table. The ship felt foolish, voyeuristic, and yet fascinated.
Its thoughts were interrupted by the Grey Area, sending from its Mainbay in the nose of the GSV.
~ I’ll be on my way then, if you don’t need me any more.
~ I’d rather you stuck around, the Sleeper Service replied.
~ Not when you’re heading for that thing, and the Affronters.
~ You might be surprised.
~ I’m sure. However, I want to leave.
~ Farewell, then, the GSV sent, opening the bay door.
~ I suppose this means another Displace.
~ If you don’t mind.
~ And if I do?
~ There is an alternative, but I’d rather not use it.
~ Well, if there is one, I want to use it!
~ The Jaundiced Outlook declined, and it had humans aboard.
~ Bugger the humans, and bugger the Jaundiced Outlook, too. What’s the alternative? Have you got superlifters capable of this sort of speed?
~ No.
~ What then… ?
~ Just get to the rear of my field envelope.
~ Whatever you say.
The GCU quit its berth, easing out into the confined space between the GSVs hull and the craft’s innermost field layer. It took a few minutes for it to manoeuvre itself down the side of the giant ship and round the corner to the flat rear of the craft. When it got there it found three other ships waiting for it.
~ Who the hell are they? the GCU asked the larger ship. ~ In fact, what the hell are they?
It was something of a rhetorical question. The three craft were unambiguously warships; slightly longer and fatter than the Grey Area itself but tapering at either end to points surmounted with large spheres. Spheres which could logically only contain weaponry. Quite a lot of weaponry, judging by the size of the globes.
~ My own design. Their names are T3OUs 4, 118 and 736.
~ Oh, witty.
~ You won’t find them terribly good company; AI cores only, semi-slaved to me. But they can operate together as a super lifter to get you down to manageable speeds.
The GCU was silent for a moment. It moved in to take up position in the centre of the triangle the three ships had formed. ~ T3OUs? it asked. Type Three Offensive Units, by any chance?
~ Correct.
~ Many more like these hidden away?
~ Enough.
~ You have been busy all these years.
~ Yes I have. I trust I can rely on your absolute discretion, for the next few hours at any rate.
~ You certainly have that.
~ Good. Farewell. Thank you for your help.
~ Glad to be of the small amount of service I was. Best of luck. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough how things pan out.
~ I imagine so.
III
The avatar returned the main focus of its attention to the three humans on the Jaundiced Outlook. The two old lovers had moved from small talk to a post mortem on their relationship, still without coming up with anything particularly interesting.
‘… We wanted different things,’ Dajeil said to Genar-Hofoen. ‘That’s usually enough.’
‘I wanted what you wanted, for a long time,’ the man said, swirling some wine round in a crystal goblet.
‘The funny thing was,’ Dajeil said, ‘we were all right while it was just the two of us, remember?’
The man smiled sadly. ‘I remember.’
‘You two sure you want me here?’ asked Ulver.
Dajeil looked at her. ‘If you feel embarrassed…’ she said.
‘No; I just thought…’ Ulver’s voice trailed off. They were both looking at her. She frowned. ‘Okay; now I feel embarrassed.’
‘What about you two?’ Dajeil asked evenly, looking from Ulver to Genar-Hofoen.
They exchanged looks. Each shrugged at the same time, then laughed, then looked guiltily at her. If they had rehearsed it it could hardly have been more synchronised. Dajeil felt a pang of jealousy, then forced herself to smile, as graciously as she could. Somehow the act helped produce the emotion.
IV
Something was wrong.
The avatar’s principal attention snapped back to its home ship. The Grey Area and the three warships were free of the GSV’s envelope now, dropping back in their own web of fields and decelerating to velocities the GCU’s engine could accommodate. Ahead lay the Excession; the Sleeper Service had just carried out its first close track-scan look at it. But the Excession had changed; it had re-established its links with the energy grids and then it had grown; then it had erupted.
It wasn’t the sort of enlargement the Fate Amenable To Change had witnessed and seemingly been transported by; that had been something based on the skein or on some novel formulation of fields. This was something incarnated in the ultimate fire of the energy grid itself, spilling across the whole sweep of Infraspace and Ultraspace and invading the skein as well, creating an immense spherical wave-front of grid-fire boiling across three-dimensional space.
It was expanding, quickly. Impossibly quickly; sky-fillingly, explosively quickly; almost too quickly to measure, certainly too quickly for its true shape and form to be gauged. So quickly that there could only be minutes before the Sleeper Service ran into it and far too quickly for the GSV to brake or turn and avoid the conflagration.
Suddenly the avatar was on its own; the Sleeper briefly severed all connection with it while it concentrated on dispersing its own war fleet all about it.
Some of the ships were Displaced from deep inside its interior, snapping out of existence from within the thousands of evacuated bays where they had been quietly manufactured over the decades and reappearing in hyperspace, powered up and already heading outwards. Others – the vast majority – were revealed as the giant ship peeled back some of the outer layers of its field structures to reveal the craft it had hidden there over the past few weeks, loosing entire fleets of smaller ships like seeds disseminating from a colossal pod.
When the avatar was reconnected to the GSV, most of the ships had been distributed, scattered to the hypervolume in a series of explosive flurries; bombardments of ships, layers and blossoms of vessels like a whole deployed hierarchy of cluster munitions, every warhead a warcraft. A cloud of vessels; a wall of ships rushing towards the blooming hypersphere of the Excession.
V
The Grey Area watched it all happen, carried in its cradle of fields by the three silent warships. Part of it wanted to whoop and cry hurrah, seeing this detonation of materiel, sufficient to smash a war machine ten times – a hundred times – the size of the approaching Affronter fleet; ah the things you could do if you had the time and patience and no treaties to adhere to or agreements to uphold!
Another part of it watched with horror as the Excession swelled, obliterating the view ahead, rampaging out like an explosion still greater than that of ships the Sleeper Service had just produced. It was like the energy grid itself had been turned inside out, as though the most massive black hole in the universe had suddenly turned white and bloated into some big-bang eruption of fury between the universes; a forest-levelling storm capable of devouring the Sleeper Service and all its ships as though it were a tree and they mere leaves.