The Hydrogen Sonata Read online

  The drug made everything slow down, spread out, become part of a spectrum of observed existence that the user, the practitioner, could dip into, magnify, ignore, enhance and exalt within, according to choice.

  A ship – a regimental capital ship, no less – had been corrupted, its AIs duped, a viral presence inserted into it centuries ago. That had been the first act of betrayal, the first act of something as good as outright aggression. He had had to respond, and the Fourteenth had pre-emptively signed away any right to be trusted, respected or protected by that act of ancient treachery.

  Above him, Orpe raised her hands above her head, then bent back, and then further back, and then kept on going until her head eventually disappeared from view as she arched her spine and her hands clutched at, found and then gripped his ankles. It was a move she knew he liked. Beautiful, succulent Orpe. Virisse, as she wanted him to call her, though on the first few occasions like this, she had admitted that she had rather enjoyed being addressed as Orpe, or Ms Orpe.

  Beyond even that, though, was the simple fact that the only thing which really mattered – well beyond who acted first or who had betrayed who – was that the Subliming took place, on time, in full.

  Using some suitably enabled augmentation he’d carried since adolescence, he was able to watch her bend back like that multiple times, speeding up and slowing down. With the drug, he could synaesthesise experience too, translating it into other senses while another part of him was still in real time, as though watching all this. He enjoyed this feeling of being his own voyeur.

  The knowledge of what had been in the Remnanter ship – if the message it had carried was actually true, not itself a lie – had to be kept secret, hidden away not just from the vast mass of people but from everybody else as well. It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them. Sometimes you could trust people in positions of power to understand this and even help keep things confidential – or at least muddied, so that people could self-deceive with whatever kept them best comforted – but not always. And with this, the stakes were too high. Nothing – nothing at all, in practice or in theory – mattered more than the Subliming. They were staking everything on it; he was staking everything on it, carrying the burden of the hopes of the whole Gzilt people on his shoulders.

  Orpe – Virisse – moaned, panted. Not being able to see her face meant that he could let his own expression relax while he thought all this through.

  And – precisely because it was so important – there was also the possibility that even somebody he’d normally have trusted, somebody from the rarefied upper echelons, would blab, just for the fame, just for the down-the-generations notoriety or supposed heroic status speaking out would bring, even if it was utterly and completely the wrong thing to do. Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people.

  The girl’s grip on his ankles tightened. She shuddered.

  He thought of the ship, slowing but still racing, powering down towards the planet, falling upon it.

  Orpe moaned. He almost laughed. Supposedly, right now he was with the sub-committee making the decision about which Scavenger species got Preferred Partner status, making them the people who’d receive the cooperation of the Gzilt when it came to parcelling out the legacy stuff. But he didn’t need to be there, in the committee chamber; the personnel concerned had been briefed, knew what to do and which way to vote. In the end they remained frightened of him, even yet, and there was – he was entirely prepared to admit – a certain extra frisson about wielding such power without even having to be there.

  Fuck the sub-committee. That would take care of itself. In the end, he’d rather be here.

  With Orpe, whom he had to share with the president.

  Normally he wouldn’t stand for this; he didn’t share lovers. But then Orpe’s other lover was somebody it was very useful to share her with. It was, indeed, the precise reason that he had befriended the girl, flattered her, courted her, finally bedded her. Not that it was any great sacrifice, of course; she was beautiful and attractive, after all, if a little too … assertive, equality-minded for his tastes. But no matter.

  He had been very careful never to ask Orpe anything at all about President Sefoy Geljemyn’s thoughts or likely actions, content to lull her into a state where she thought he had wanted her purely for herself, not for her connection to the president, not for that access, that closeness.

  For all he knew, it might never come in useful. But then that was not the point.

  … And of course it had been the right thing.

  “Orders, sadly, are orders.”

  “Well, we’ll miss you, big guy. You really have to go right now?”

  “Immediately, I’m afraid. Oh, you might register a slight tremor in your warp cores as I kick off here; not a passing gravity wave or anything – just me.”

  “… No, not seeing anything this … No, wait a second, yes, engineering says yes, they did.”

  The Mistake Not … felt a modicum of embarrassment. It had disengaged its own warp units without a murmur – they’d been idling, basically – and then deliberately roughened up its engine fields as it had engaged its main drive, specifically to create the skein-kick.

  There was a table you looked up, basically, to see which of the less-developed civs had to be hoodwinked like this, and to what degree. It was a form of dishonesty the Mistake Not … found slightly objectionable, but it was expected. Technically indulging in such deceit wasn’t compulsory, any more than this just-received suggestion that it might like to head at the highest possible speed to a distant star system wasn’t an order, but it was expected; if you wanted to do more of this sort of stuff in the future then you’d best take the hint. Otherwise you’d be frozen out next time.

  Of course, it also made such behaviour your own responsibility; it was hard to claim you had just been obeying orders when orders had officially ceased to exist the best part of ten thousand years ago.

  The ship was talking directly to Ny-Xandabo Tyun, the Admiral of the Liseiden fleet. It had contacted the flagship’s AI as soon as it got the signal; the Admiral had clicked in seconds later. The little flotilla of three Liseiden ships including the fleet flagship had been puttering along towards Zyse for just a few hours now.

  There had been a wait of nearly half a day spent still orbiting the cinder star while the fleet had shuffled personnel and equipment between its various ships. Quite why this had to be done at this point, wasting time, when it might have been accomplished while the ships had still been in transit had puzzled the Mistake Not … for a moment until it reviewed the specifications and capabilities of the Liseiden craft and realised that, with their level of tech, ship-to-ship transfers while under way were tricky and risky. The ship had been suitably appalled, and had felt vicariously embarrassed for the Liseiden.

  “Yup, that’s me off and running. Sorry for the abrupt departure.”

  “Yeah! You even took your avatoid! We’re devastated! ”

  “Yup. Sorry about that too”

  “Just joshing anyway.”

  “I know. No, just … one of those things, you know?”

  “So, you’re … just looking at the orientation of the warp skein here … looks like you’re off to … no, we can’t tell. Open space by our reckoning.”

  “Heck, can’t hide much from you guys,” the Mistake Not … replied, putting some heartiness into its synthesised voice (it had, naturally, an extensive knowledge of all Liseiden languages, dialects, accents, idioms and speech patterns). It was powering away as fast as it could, already curving away towards this Izenion place (it had no idea why). The rucking it had caused in the skein of real space, pointing in a completely different direction, represented pretty much standard procedure; you didn’t let people know where you were really heading unless there was a good reason.

  “I bet,” the admiral said. “Soooo … bad news?”

  The delay caused by increasing distance was already such that had the Mis
take Not … been talking to another Mind or even AI, it would have switched to standard messaging by now. Talking to a creature whose faculties relied on a substrate where internal signals moved at roughly the speed of sound – an ordinary bio-brain – there was no need for this yet; the ship had plenty to process and think about while it waited for the animal-slow replies to trundle across the link, and even during the individual transmission sections.

  Between the phonemes associated with the end of the word “bad” and the very start of the word “news”, for example, when it was already anticipating that the whole of the next word would indeed be “news”, and – from the inflection – that it would be the end of the sentence and probably the end of the signal parcel, it had had time to thoroughly research the Izenion system, re-analyse everything it knew about Gzilt and the current situation re the countdown to Subliming and everything else, and still come up with precisely no idea why it had been asked to endure a degree of engine deg-radation – however temporary – to get to Izenion as quickly as possible.

  The request had come from its principal contact and old friend, the Kakistocrat, which had wanted to know if it would do this purely out of regard for it. The Kakistocrat had admitted that it had been given further detail regarding whatever situation was thought so important that a ship should be asked to do such a thing, but wanted to know more still before involving the Mistake Not … fully. It had also asked the Mistake Not … if it would agree to its specs being forwarded to the group dealing with whatever might be going on.

  The Mistake Not … had seriously considered saying no to both, but then decided this was unlikely to be a drill or some sort of bizarre test of loyalty. That said, the Kakistocrat was eccentric, even if it wasn’t officially Eccentric, and so it still might be some sort of weird drill of the Kak’s own devising. In the end it agreed to go but vetoed the other vessel passing on its specifications beyond being allowed to say that they would likely prove sufficient.

  “No idea if it’s bad news, good news or even no news, Xan,” the ship sent back to the Liseiden admiral. “Just orders.”

  “That’s too bad; it was good having you around,” Ny-Xandabo said. He meant to sound sincere, and, to some degree, did. “You take care. We hope we see you again.”

  “Same here. Mind how you go. We’ll talk again. Out.”

  Seven

  (S -20)

  Fzan-Juym was a sub-summit-orbit satellite of the Sculpt planet Eshri, making it one of a very small sub-category of moons; only its military nature and natural/artificial status – it was, arguably, a ship – stopped it being regarded as a genuine wonder.

  The Werpesh, the people who had constructed the Girdlecity on Xown, had turned their attentions to Eshri at about the same time they’d begun building on Xown, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. By then Eshri had been dead for well over a billion years. It was small, dry, frozen and stony, with a thin atmosphere and a solidified core that registered as barely warm; most of the heat from its formation had been convected and then radiated away, and what little radioactivity the core had possessed had since decayed almost to nothing.

  Thanks to little tectonic activity of its own but a lot of early asteroid-battering that had produced lava outflows covering large parts of the world, it had been a fairly smooth little globe to start with. The Werpesh had decided to improve – as they saw it – upon this promising start, and used planiforming techniques to turn Eshri into one of their Sculpt worlds; a flat-surfaced planet of polished rock with a network of encircling trenches – steep sided, kilometres deep and tens of kilometres wide – incised into and right around it. From space the planet looked like a colossal ball-bearing etched with ball-races for thousands of smaller spheres.

  Scholars of the Werpesh and their works reckoned Eshri was the most extreme of all the Sculpt worlds; on no other had the ground been so thoroughly levelled, the remaining atmosphere so assiduously removed, the canyon-trenches etched so deep or so wide or attained such a bewildering complexity.

  Like all the few dozen or so Sculpt worlds, there had been no utility to the project. As far as could be discerned – the Werpesh had been a reticent species, unable or unwilling to explain themselves to the extent that other, more nosy species thought they ought – the Sculpt worlds were basically a series of titanic works of art.

  That they also functioned as highly visible expressions of sheer power and a certain willingness to ignore galactic etiquette (most species/civs had long since agreed to leave “wild” worlds like Eshri untouched), well, that was probably just an added bonus. Nevertheless, although the Werpesh had not been a particularly aggressive or expansive people, it would be fair to say that their contemporaries had been less than heartbroken when they’d opted for Subliming and stopped building such impressive vulgarities as the Girdlecity of Xown and the Sculpt planets.

  The Gzilt, by luck and the good grace of at least one Elder species in nominal control of the Werpesh legacy, had fallen heir to most of the Sublimed species’ abandoned systems in their immediate vicinity, and had quickly and enthusiastically got on with the business of – for example – colonising and rebuilding on and within Xown’s great Girdlecity. They were less sure what to do with the brace of Sculpt worlds they had inherited; neglected if never quite abandoned, these had by default become no more than occasional if rather one-trick tourist stopover sites.

  Then the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14 – which was all and none of the adjectives in its name – had chosen to make Eshri its home. Or at least the home of its home.

  Fzan-Juym had been the Regiment’s headquarters for nearly a millennium by then. Roughly spherical and a couple of kilometres in diameter, the satellite had started out life as an asteroid of the Izenion system; just another tumbling rock amongst tens of millions of others. Initially, after being hollowed out to become the regimental HQ, it had been left in a close-to-original orbit within the Izenion system’s inner asteroid belt, theoretically gaining from being just one of a bewildering array of potential targets, should anyone ever be foolish enough to wish it harm. Later, with improvements in weapon and sensor technology, the natural camouflage effect of being part of a mass of other asteroids had been negated. Happily, the likelihood of any realistic threat had receded at the same time, so the placement of the regiment’s HQ became more about statement – prestige, even – than about operational survivability.

  So Fzan-Juym had been appropriately refitted, refurbished and improved, towed to Eshri, slung into a low orbit around it and then carefully lowered still further – kilometre by kilometre, metre by metre, eventually millimetre by millimetre, speeding up all the time – until its orbit now lay a kilometre beneath the planet’s surface, darting along one of the widest and deepest canyons of all in a blur of planet-girdling movement, its course held steady by a network of hermetically isolated AIs and multiply redundant thruster systems dedicated to doing nothing else.

  Its own engines had done almost all the work at every stage, though various other craft had helped and been there to step in had anything started to go wrong, but a modest degree of seeming helplessness was deemed to be useful in providing a sort of camouflage of its own.

  Fzan-Juym, headquarters of the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14, had been in sub-surface equatorial orbit of Eshri ever since, zipping along like a super-fast bullet in a slab-sided groove open to the pitch-black sky, orbiting the planet in less than an hour and covering over two hundred million kilometres every year – nearly half a trillion altogether by now – while never coming closer than fifteen hundred metres to either the flat canyon floor or its sheer, polished sides.

  You approached Fzan-Juym carefully, from astern. Approaching it any other way meant its hair-trigger defensive systems would blow you out of the sky. Coming in from astern meant that even if you collided with it, approaching too fast, the extra impetus would, in theory, merely boost its orbit a fraction, sending it higher, away from danger. It a
lso meant that as well as the arrays, batteries and multiple turrets of emission, kinetic and missile weapon system sites pointing at you, you got to contemplate the impressive collection of variegated main drive units and crater-wide thruster nozzles pointing straight at you, each of them guaranteed to be usefully and reliably – and terminally – weapon-like in their effect should they be turned on even for a microsecond while you approached.

  The principal hangar entrance lay nestled in the centre of a quartet of main drive units; the transfer pinnace slipped towards it, shadows wheeling about it as it gently outpaced the asteroid, approaching at about humanoid running speed, a little faster than was normally allowed. The little twelve-seat vessel disappeared, pitching nose-down for a moment and trembling as it encountered the asteroid’s own internal gravity field.

  The view behind cut off as a field and then a real, physical door blocked the view of the deep, sunlit trench whipping past outside, and lights came on in the hangar as the pinnace settled to the floor. Somewhere, a system would be compensating for the small amount of downward impetus caused by the tiny craft transferring its weight to the hangar deck.

  Commissar-Colonel Etalde looked at Vyr Cossont and smiled. “Home at last!” he said, possibly a little too heartily.

  Cossont just smiled.

  They had crossed the few decades from Xown in the Mureite system to Eshri in Izenion within the 5*Gelish-Oplule, a regimental cruiser about as fast as anything the fleet possessed. Tired, and with nothing seemingly expected of her after they’d transferred to the ship above Xown, she’d slept aboard in a cabin of a size significantly above that her reactivated rank would normally have called for and wondered if she had the bulk of the elevenstring to thank for this; they’d quartered it with her.