Instead, she tried to imagine the ship as a whole in that same, trained mind’s eye, remembering the occasions when she had viewed the vessel from its remote machines or gone flying around it, attempting to imagine the changes it was already preparing itself for. She supposed they would be unglimpsable from the sort of distance that would let you see the whole craft.
She looked around, taking in the great cliff, the clouds and the sea, the darkness of sky. Her gaze swept round the waves, the sea-marsh, and the water meadows beneath the scree and the cliff. She rubbed her belly without thinking, as she had done for nearly forty years, and pondered on the marginality of things, and how quickly change could come, even to something that had seemed set to continue as it was in perpetuity.
But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.
She became suddenly very aware of her place here, her position. She saw herself and the tower, both within and outside the ship; outside its main hull – distinct, discrete, straight-sided and measured exactly in kilometres – but within the huge envelope of water, air and gas it encompassed within the manifold layers of its fields (she imagined the force fields sometimes as like the hooped slips, underskirts, skirts, flounces and lace of some ancient formal gown). A slab of power and substance floating in a giant spoonful of sea, most of its vast bulk exposed to the air and clouds that formed its middle layer and around which the sun-line curved each day, and all domed with the long, field-contained pressure vessel of ferocious heat, colossal pressure and crushing gravity that simulated the conditions of a gas-giant planet. A room, a cave, a hollow husk a hundred kilometres long, hurrying through space, with the ship as its vast, flattened kernel. A kernel – an enclosed world inside this world – within which she had not set foot for thirty-nine of these forty unchanging years, having no desire ever again to see that infinite catacomb of the silent undead.
All to change, Dajeil Gelian thought; all to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, or steel…
The black bird Gravious settled by her hand on the stone parapet of the tower.
‘What’s going on?’ it croaked. ‘There’s something going on. I can tell. What is it, then? What’s it all about?’
‘Oh, ask the ship,’ she told it.
‘Already asked it. All it’ll say is there’s changes coming, like as not.’ The bird shook its head once, as if trying to dislodge something distasteful from its beak. ‘Don’t like changes,’ it said. It swivelled its head, fixing its beady gaze upon the woman. ‘What sort of changes, then, eh? What we got to expect? What we got to look forward to, eh? It tell you?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, not looking at the bird. ‘No, not really.’
‘Huh.’ The bird continued to look at her for a moment, then pivoted its head back to look out across the salt marsh. It ruffled its feathers and rose up on its thin black legs. ‘Well,’ it said, ‘Winter’s coming. Can’t delay. Best prepare.’ The bird dropped into the air. ‘Fat lot of use…’ she heard it mutter. It opened its wings and flew away on an involute course.
Dajeil Gelian looked up to the clouds again, and the sky beyond. All to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, or steel… She shook her head again, and wondered what extremity of circumstance could possibly have so galvanised the great craft that had been her home, her refuge for so long.
Whatever; after four decades in its state of self-imposed internal exile, navigating its own wayward course within its sought-out wilderness as part of the civilisation’s Ulterior and functioning most famously as a repository for quiescent souls and very large animals, it sounded like the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service was again starting to think and behave a little more like a ship which belonged to the Culture.
1. Outside Context Problem
I
(GCU Grey Area signal sequence file #n428857/119)
.
[swept-to-tightbeam, M16.4, received@n4.28.857.3644]
xGSV Honest Mistake
oGCU Grey Area
Take a look at this:
oo
(Signal sequence #n428855/1446, relay:)
oo
1) [skein broadcast, Mclear, received @ n4.28.855.0065+]:
*!c11505*
oo
2) [swept beam Ml, received @ n4.28.855.0066-]:
SDA.
C2314992+52
xFATC @ n4.28.855.
oo
3) [swept beam, M2, relay, received@ n4.28.855.0079-]:
xGCU Fate Amenable To Change.
oGSV Ethics Gradient
as requested:
Significant developmental anomaly.
C4629984+523
(@n28.855.0065.43392).
oo
4) [tight beam, M16, relay, received @ n4.28.855.0085]:
xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,
oGSV Ethics Gradient
only as required:
Developmental anomaly provisionally rated EqT, potentially jeopardising, found here C9259969+5331.
My Status: L5 secure, moving to L6^.
Instigating all other Extreme precautions.
oo
5) [broadcast Mclear, received @ n4.28. 855.01. ]:
*xGCU Fate Amenable To Change,
oGSV Ethics Gradient
*broadcast*:
Ref. 3 previous compacs precursor broadcast.
Panic over.
I misinterpreted.
It’s a Scapsile Vault Craft.
Ho hum.
Sorry.
Full Internal Report to follow immediately in High Embarrassment Factor code.
BSTS. H H. BTB.
oo
(End Signal Sequence.)
oo
xGCU Grey Area
oGSV Honest Mistake
Yes. So?
oo
There is more. The ship lied.
oo
Let me guess; the ship was in fact subverted.
It is no longer one of ours.
oo
No, it is believed its integrity is intact.
But it lied in that last signal, and with good reason.
We may have an OCP.
They may want your help, at any price.
Are you interested?
oo
An Outside Context Problem? Really? Very well. Keep me informed, do.
oo
No.
This is serious.
I know no more yet, but they are worried about something.
Your presence will be required, urgently.
oo
I dare say. However I have business to complete here first.
oo
Foolish child!
Make all haste.
oo
Mm-hmm. If I did agree, where might I be required?
oo
Here.
(glyphseq. file appended.)
As you will have gathered, it is from the ITG and concerns our old friend.
oo
Indeed.
Now that is interesting.
I shall be there directly.
oo
(End signal file.)
II
The ship shuddered; the few remaining lights flickered, dimmed and went out. The alarms dopplered down to silence. A series of sharp impacts registered through the companionway shell walls with resonations in the craft’s secondary and primary structure. The atmosphere pulsed with impact echoes; a breeze picked up, then disappeared. The shifting air brought with it a smell of burning and vaporisation; aluminium, polymers associated with carbon fibre and diamond film, superconductor cabling.
Somewhere, the drone Sisela Ytheleus could hear a human, shouting; then, radiating wildly over the electromagnetic bands came a voice signal similar to that carried by the air. It became garbled almost immediately then degraded quickly into meaningless static. The human shout changed to a scream, then the EM signal cut off; so did the sound.
Pulses of radiation blasted in from various directions, virtually information-free. The ship’s inertial field wobbled uncertainly, then drew steady and settled again. A shell of neutrinos swept through the space around the companionway. Noises faded. EM signatures murmured to silence; the ship’s engines and main life support systems were off-line. The whole EM spectrum was empty of meaning. Probably the battle had now switched to the ship’s AI core and back-up photonic nuclei.
Then a pulse of energy shot through a multi-purpose cable buried in the wall behind, oscillating wildly then settling back to a steady, utterly unrecognisable pattern. An internal camera patch on a structural beam nearby awakened and started scanning.
It can’t be over that quickly, can it?
Hiding in the darkness, the drone suspected it was already too late. It was supposed to wait until the attack had reached a plateau phase and the aggressor thought that it was just a matter of mopping up the last dregs of opposition before it made its move, but the attack had been too sudden, too extreme, too capable. The plans the ship had made, of which it was such an important part, could only anticipate so much, only allow for so proportionally greater a technical capability on the part of the attacker. Beyond a certain point, there was simply nothing you could do; there was no brilliant plan you could draw up or cunning stratagem you could employ that would not seem laughably simple and unsophisticated to a profoundly more developed enemy. In this instance they were not perhaps quite at the juncture where resistance became genuinely without point, but – from the ease with which the Elencher ship was being taken over – they were not that far away from it, either.
Remain calm, the machine told itself. Look at the overview; place this and yourself in context. You are prepared, you are hardened, you are proof. You will do all that you can to survive as you are or at the very least to prevail. There is a plan to be put into effect here. Play your part with skill, courage and honour and no ill will be thought of you by those who survive and succeed.