He raged, he seethed. The quietly spoken avatar sat, winsomely dishevelled in his bed and looked on with calm, untroubled eyes.
She hadn’t told him she was an avatar!
He hadn’t asked, she pointed out. She hadn’t told him she was a human female, either. She had been going to tell him she was there to evaluate him, but he had simply assumed that anyone he found attractive who came up to talk to him must want sex.
It was still deceit!
The avatar shrugged, got up and got dressed.
He was desperately trying to remember what he’d said to the creature the previous evening and night; it had been a pretty drunken time and he knew he’d spoken about Dajeil and the whole Telaturier thing, but what had he said? He was sickened at the ship’s duplicity, appalled that it could trick him like this. It wasn’t playing fair. Never trust a ship. Oh, grief, he’d just been wittering on about Dajeil and the post with the ‘Ktik, completely off-guard, not trying to impress at all. Disaster. He was certain the Recent Convert had put its mother ship up to it. Bastards.
The avatar had paused at the door of his cabin. For what it was worth, she told him, he’d talked very eloquently about both his past life and the Telaturier post, and the ship was minded to support his application to accompany Dajeil Gelian there. Then she winked at him and left.
He was in. There was just a moment of panic, but then an overwhelming feeling of victory. He’d done it!
V
The Killing Time was still racing away from the ship store at Pittance at close to its maximum sustainable velocity; any faster and it would have started to degrade the performance of its engines. It was approaching a position about half-way between Pittance and the Excession when it cut power and let itself coast down towards lightspeed. It deliberately avoided doing its skidding-to-a-stop routine. Instead it carefully extended a huge light-seconds-wide field across the skein of real space and slowly dragged itself to an absolute stop, its position within the three dimensions of normal space fixed and unchanging; its only appreciable vector of movement was produced by the expansion of the universe itself; the slow drawing away from the assumed central point of the Reality which all 3-D matter shared. Then it signalled.
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1008]
xROU Killing Time
oGCV Steely Glint
I understand you are de facto military commander for this volume.
Will you receive my mind-state?
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4. 28.885.1065]
xGCV Steely Glint
oROU Killing Time
No. Your gesture – offer – is appreciated. However, we do have other plans for you. May I ask you what led you to Pittance in the first place?
oo
This is something personal. I remain convinced there was another ship, an ex-Culture ship, at Pittance, to which I went because I saw fit to do so. This ex-Culture ship thought to facilitate my destruction. This cannot be tolerated. Pride is at stake here. My honour. I will live again. Please receive my mind-state.
oo
I cannot. I appreciate your zeal and your concern but we have so few resources we cannot afford to squander them. Sometimes personal pride must take a subsidiary place to military pragmatism, however hateful we may find this.
oo
I understand. Very well. Please suggest a course of action. Preferably one which at least leaves open the possibility that I might encounter the treacherous ship at Pittance.
oo
Certainly (course schedule DiaGlyph enclosed). Please confirm receipt and signal when you have reached the first detailed position.
oo
(Receipt acknowledged).
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1122 ]
xROU Killing Time
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
I appeal to you following this (signal sequence enclosed). Will you receive my mind-state?
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 885.1309]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oROU Killing Time
My dear ship. Is this really necessary?
oo
Nothing is necessary. Some things are to be desired. I desire this. Will you receive my mind-state?
oo
Will it stop you if I don’t?
oo
Perhaps. It will certainly delay me.
oo
Dear me, you don’t believe in making things easy for people, do you?
oo
I am a warship. That is not my function. Will you receive my mind-state?
oo
You know, this is why we prefer to have human crews on ships like you; it helps prevent such heroics.
oo
Now you are attempting to stall. If you do not agree to receive my mind-state I shall transmit it towards you anyway. Will you receive my mind-state?
oo
If you insist. But it will be with a troubled conscience…
The ship transmitted a copy of what in an earlier age might have been called its soul to the other craft. It then experienced a strange sense of release and of freedom while it completed its preparations for combat. Now it felt a strange, at once proud and yet humbling affinity with the warriors of all the species through every age who had bade their lives, their loves, their friends and relations goodbye, made their peace with themselves and with whatever imagined entities their superstitions demanded, and prepared to die in battle.
It experienced the most minute moment of shame that it had ever despised such barbarians for their lack of civilisation. It had always known that it was not their fault they had been such lowly creatures, but still it had found it difficult to expunge from its feelings towards such animals the patrician disdain so common amongst its fellow Minds. Now, it recognised a kinship that crossed not just the ages, species or civilisations, but the arguably still greater gap between the fumblingly confused and dim awareness exhibited by the animal brain and the near-infinitely more extended, refined and integrated sentience of what most ancestor species were amusingly, quaintly pleased to call Artificial Intelligence (or something equally and – appropriately, perhaps – unconsciously disparaging).
So now it had discovered the truth in the idea of a kind of purity in the contemplation of and preparations for self-sacrifice. It was something its recently transferred mind-state – its new self, to be born in the matrix of a new warship, before too long – might never experience. It briefly considered transmitting its current mind-state to replace the one it had already sent, but swiftly abandoned the idea; just more time to be wasted, for one thing, but more importantly, it felt it would insult the strange calmness and self-certainty it now felt to place it artificially in a Mind which was not about to die. It would be inappropriate, perhaps even unsettling. No; it would cleave to this clear surety exclusively, holding it to its exculpated soul like a talisman of holy certitude.
The warship looked about its internal systems. All was ready; any further delay would constitute prevarication. It turned itself about, facing back the way it had come. It powered up its engines slowly to accelerate gradually, sleekly away into the void. As it moved, it left the skein of space behind it seeded with mines and hyper-space-capable missiles. They might only remove a ship or two even if they were lucky, but they would slow the rest down. It ramped its speed up, to significant engine degradation in 128 hours, then 64, then 32. It held there. To go any further would be to risk immediate and catastrophic disablement.
It sped on through the dark hours of distance that to mere light were decades, glorying in its triumphant, sacrificial swiftness, radiant in its martial righteousness.
It sensed the oncoming fleet ahead, like a pattern of brightly rushing comets in that envisaged space. Ninety-six ships arranged in a rough circle spread across a front thirty years of 3-D space across, half above, half below the skein. Behind them lay the traces of another wave, numerically the same size as the first but taking up twice the volume.
There had been three hundred and eighty-four ships stored at Pittance. Four waves, if each was the same size as the first. Where would it position itself if it was in command?
Near but not quite actually in the centre of the third wave.
Would the command vessel guess this and so position itself somewhere else? On the outside edge of the first wave, somewhere in the second wave, right at the back, or even way on the outside, independent of the main waves of craft altogether?
Make a guess.
It looped high out across the four-dimensional range of infra-space, sweeping its sensors across the skein and readying its weapon systems. Its colossal speed was bringing the war fleet closer faster than anything it had ever seen before save in its most wildly indulged simulations. It zoomed high above them in hyperspace, still, it seemed, undetected. A pulse of sheer pleasure swept its Mind. It had never felt so good. Soon, very soon, it would die, but it would die gloriously, and its reputation pass on to the new ship born with its memories and personality, transmitted in its mind-state to the Shoot Them Later.