Excession Read online

  ‘What?’ she shouted, spreading her arms.

  ‘Will you do this or not?’ it asked her.

  She closed one eye and wobbled her head from side to side. ‘Maybe,’ she slurred.

  ‘It means a trip,’ the drone said. ‘Leaving tonight--’

  ‘Pah!’ She sat back, crossing her arms and looking up at the ceiling. ‘Out of the question. Forget it.’

  ‘All right; tomorrow.’

  She turned to the drone. ‘After lunch.’

  ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Late breakfast.’

  ‘Oh,’ the machine said, aura field briefly grey with frustration. ‘All right. Late breakfast. But before noon, in any event.’

  Ulver opened her mouth to protest, then gave a tiny shrug and settled for scowling. ‘Okay. How long for?’

  ‘You’ll be back in a month, if all goes well.’

  She tipped her head back, narrowed her eyes again and said quite soberly and precisely, ‘Where?’

  The drone said, ‘Tier.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said, tossing her head.

  A sore point; Phage had been heading to Tier specifically for that year’s Festival but had been diverted off course to help build an Orbital after the part-evacuation of some stupid planet; it had taken forever. The Festival only lasted a month and was now almost over; the Rock was still heading that way but wouldn’t arrive for two hundred days or so.

  She frowned. ‘But that’s a couple of months away even on a fast ship.’

  ‘Special Circumstances has its own ships and they’re faster; ten days to get there on the one they’re giving you.’

  ‘My own ship?’ Ulver asked, eyes flashing.

  ‘All yours; not even any human crew.’

  ‘Wow!’ she said, sitting back and looking pleased with herself. ‘Aloof!’

  4

  Dependency Principle

  I

  [tight beam, M16.4, [email protected]]

  xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

  oEccentric Shoot Them Later

  Is it just me, or does something smell suspicious about all this?

  ∞

  [tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28.856.6883]

  xEccentric Shoot Them Later

  oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

  Oh good, an easy one; it’s you.

  ∞

  I’m serious. This feels . . . strange.

  ∞

  How dare you imply I’m not serious.

  Anyway; what’s the problem?

  This is the most important thing ever, by our understanding.

  Naturally everything and everybody will seem a little odd after

  such a realisation.

  We cannot help but be affected.

  ∞

  You’re right, I’m sure, but I just have this niggling feeling.

  No; the more I think about it the more I’m convinced you are right

  and I am worrying over nothing.

  I’ll do a little checking for my own peace of mind, but I’m sure it

  will only help lay my fears to rest.

  ∞

  You should spend more time in Infinite Fun Space, you know.

  ∞

  You’re probably right. Oh well.

  ∞

  Still, keep in touch.

  Just in case anything does turn up.

  Of course.

  Take care.

  ∞

  Good checking, my friend.

  You take care, too.

  II

  The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 drifted, waiting. Several seconds had passed since the skein pulse had resonated around it and it was still trying to decide what to do. It had passed the time by throwing together the anti-matter reaction chamber as best it could in the short time available, instead of painstakingly putting it together bit by delicate bit. As an after-thought, it released all but one of its nanomissiles and stuck two hundred of them around its heat-scarred rear panel in two groups on either side of the reaction chamber; fortuitously, the panel’s damaged surface made it easy for it to embed the tiny missiles so that only the last third of their millimetre-long bodies protruded from the panel. It kept the other thirty-nine missiles ready to fire, for all the good that would do against whatever it was stalking it.

  The gentle, buzzing vibrations in the skein had taken on a distinctive signature; something was coming towards it in hyperspace, with a sensory keel in real space, trawling slowly, well below lightspeed. Whatever it was, it was not the Peace Makes Plenty; the timbral characteristics were all wrong.

  A wash of wide-band radiation, like a sourceless light, a final pulse of maser energies, in real space this time, and then something shimmering away to one side; a ship surfacing into the three-dimensional void, image flickering once then snapping steady.

  Ten kilometres away; one klick long. Matched velocity. A fat, grey-black ellipsoid shape, covered with sharp spines, barbs and blades . . .

  An Affronter ship!

  The drone hesitated. Could this have been the ship that had been following the Peace Makes Plenty? Probably. Had it been taken over by the artifact/excession? Possibly. Not that it mattered in the end. Shit.

  The Affront; no friends of the Elench. Or anybody else, for that matter. I’ve failed. They’ll reel me in, gobble me up.

  The drone tried desperately to work out what it could do. Did the fact it was an Affronter ship make any real difference? Doubtful. Should it signal it, try to get it to help? It could try; the Affront were signatories to the standard conventions on ships and individuals in distress and in theory they ought to take the drone aboard, help repair it and broadcast a warning about the artifact to the rest of the galaxy.

  In practice they would take the drone to bits to find out how it worked, drain it of all its information, ransom it if they hadn’t destroyed it in the process of investigation and inquisition, probably try to put a spy-program into it so that it would report back to them once it was back amongst the Elench, and meanwhile try to work out how they could use the artifact/excession, perhaps being foolhardy enough to attempt investigating it in the same final, fatal way the Peace Makes Plenty had, or perhaps keeping it secret for now and bringing more ships and technology to bear upon it. Almost certainly the one thing they wouldn’t do was play the situation by the book.

  EM effector; communicating. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 readied its shields, for as much as that was worth; probably delay proceedings by, oh, a good nanosecond if the Affronter ship decided to attack it . . .

  ~ Machine! What are you?

  (Well, that was spoken like an Affronter, certainly; it’d bet they hadn’t tangled with the artifact/excession yet. Oh well. Play it by the conventions:)

  ~ I am Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, and in distress, it communicated. ~ And you?

  ~ You are ours now. Surrender or take flight!

  (Definitely still 100% Affront.)

  ~ Sorry, I missed that. What did you say your name was again?

  ~ Surrender at once or take flight, wretch!

  ~ Let me think about that.

  (And thinking was exactly what it was doing; thinking hard, thinking feverishly. Stalling for time, but thinking.)

  ~ No!

  The effector signal strength started to soar exponentially. It had plenty of time to slam down its shields.

  Bastards, it thought. Of course; they like a chase . . .

  The drone fired the missiles embedded in its rear panel; the two hundred tiny engines brought unequal amounts of matter and anti-matter together and threw the resulting blast of plasma boiling into the vacuum, careening the machine away across space directly away from the Affronter craft. The acceleration was relatively mild. The drone had no time to test the anti-matter reaction chamber it had constructed; it threw a few particles of each sort into the chamber and hoped. The chamber blew up. Shit
; back to the drawing board.

  Not much damage - not much extra damage, anyway - but not much extra impetus either, and it wouldn’t be using the chamber again. The acceleration went on, building slowly. What else? Think!

  The Affronter ship didn’t bother to set off in pursuit of the drone; Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 dropped its plan of leaving a few nanomissiles scattered like mines behind it. (Who am I trying to kid, anyway? Think; think!)

  Space seemed to buckle and twist in front of it, and suddenly it was no longer heading straight away from the Affronter ship; it was parallel to it again. Those animal pus-bags are playing with me!

  A flicker from near the Affronter ship’s nose. A centimetre-diameter circle of laser light blinked onto the drone’s casing and wavered there. The drone instructed the nanomissile engines to shut off and flicked on its mirror shields; the laser beam tracked it unsteadily and narrowed until it was a millimetre in diameter, then its power suddenly leapt by seven orders of magnitude. The drone coned its protesting mirrorfield and turned rear-on to the ship again, presenting the smallest possible target. The laser modulated, stepping up to the ultraviolet. It started strobing.

  Playing with me, just fucking playing with me . . . (Think! Think!)

  Well, first . . .

  It popped the clamps around its two upper-level minds and raised the bit of its casing that would let the two components - AI core and photonic nucleus - free. The casing shuddered and grated, but it moved. Once it was clear of the main casing, the drone nudged the two mind components with its maniple field. Nothing happened. They were stuck.

  Panic! If they remained intact and the Affronters captured them and weren’t a great deal more careful than they were notorious for being . . . It pushed harder; the components duly drifted out, losing power the instant contact lapsed with the drone’s body. Whatever was inside them should be dead or dying now. It blasted them with its laser anyway, turning them into hot dust, then vented the powder behind it round the edge of the mirrorshield, where it might interfere with the laser a little. A very little.

  It readied the core inside its present substrate; that would have to be dumped and lasered too.

  Then the drone had an idea.

  It thought about it. If it had been a human, its mouth would have gone dry.

  It turned round inside the tight confines of its pummelled shield and fired all two hundred of the nanomissile engines. It shook off the remaining loose nanomissiles and fired thirty of them straight at the Affronter ship. The other nine it left tumbling behind it like a handful of tiny black-body needle-tips, with their own instructions and the small amount of spare capacity in their microscopic brains packed with coded nonsense.

  The nanomissiles fired at the Affronter ship accelerated towards it in a cloud of sparkling light ahead of the drone; they were picked off, one by one, over the course of a millisecond, in a dizzy flaring scatter of light-blossoms, their tiny warheads and the remains of their anti-matter fuel erupting together; the last one to be targeted by the Affronter’s effector and forced to self-destruct had closed the range to the ship by less than a kilometre.

  Behind, all nine of the tumbling nanomissiles must have been picked out by the effector as well, because they detonated too.

  And with any luck you’ll think those were my messages in bottles and that was my neat idea, Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 thought, decoupling the core with its twin’s mind-state in it. The core de-powered. Whatever was in there died. It had no time to mourn; it rearranged its internal state to shunt the core to the outside, then let its body settle back to normal. It pushed the core back down over its blistered, cracked casing, to the top of the rear panel, near where the wreckage of the cobbled-together and blown-apart reaction chamber hung, then it let the core fall into the livid plasma and sleeting radiation of the nanomissiles’ exhausts; it flared and disintegrated, falling astern in a bright trail of fire.

  The laser targeted on the drone was heading into the X-ray part of the spectrum; it would break through the mirror shield in a second and a half. It would take the drone four and a half seconds to get within range of the ship.

  Shit. It waited until the mirrorshield was a couple of tenths of a second from failing, then signalled: ~ I surrender!, and hoped that it was talking to another machine; if it was relying on Affronter reactions it’d be fried before the message got through to their stupid animal brains.

  The laser flicked off. The drone kept its EM shields up.

  It was heading towards the Affronter vessel at about half a klick a second; the ship’s be-bladed, swollen-looking bulk drifted closer.

  ~ Turn off your shields!

  ~ I can’t! It put expression into the signal, so that it came across as a wail.

  ~ Now!

  ~ I’m trying! I’m trying! You damaged me! Damaged me even more! Such weaponry! What chance have I, a mere drone, something smaller than an Affronter’s beak, against such power?

  Nearly in range. Not far. Not far now. Another two seconds.

  ~ Drop your shields instantly and allow yourself to be taken over or suffer instant destruction.

  Still nearly two seconds. It would never keep them talking long enough . . .

  ~ Please don’t! I’m attempting to shut off the shield projector, but it’s in fail-safe mode; it won’t let itself be shut off. It’s arguing; can you believe that? But, honestly; I am doing my best. Please believe me. Please don’t kill me. I’m the only survivor, you know; our ship was attacked! I was lucky to get away. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it either.

  A pause. A pause of animal dimensions. Time for animal thoughts. Loads of time.

  ~ Final chance; turn off--

  ~ There; turning shields off now. I’m all yours.

  The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 turned off its electromagnetic mirrorshield. In the same instant, it fired its laser straight at the Affronter ship.

  An instant later it released the containment around its remaining stock of anti-matter, detonated its in-built self-destruct charge and instructed the single nanomissile it still carried within its body to explode too.

  ~ Fuck you! were its final words.

  Its last emotion was a mixture of sorrow, elation, and a kind of desperate pride that its plan might have worked . . . Then it died, instantly and forever, in its own small fireball of heat and light.

  To the Affronter ship, the effect of the tiny drone’s laser was rather less than a tickle; it flickered across its hull and barely singed it.

  The cloud of glowing wreckage the drone’s self-destruction had caused passed over the Affronter ship, and was duly swept by analysing sensors. Plasma. Atoms. Nothing as big as a molecule. Likewise the slowly expanding debris from the two groups of nanomissiles.

  Disappointment, then; that had been a particularly sophisticated model of Elencher drone, not far behind the leading-edge of Culture drone technology. Capturing one would have been a good prize. Still, it had put up a reasonable fight considering, and provided a morsel of unexpected sport.

  The Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose came about and headed slowly away from the scene of its miniature battle, carefully scanning for more nanomissiles. They posed no threat to the cruiser, of course, but the small drone appeared to have tried to use some of the tiny weapons to place information in, and it might have left others behind which were not inclined to self-destruct when effector-targeted. None showed up. The cruiser back-tracked along the course the drifting drone appeared to have taken. It discovered a small cooling cloud of matter at one point, the remnants of some sort of explosion apparently, but that was all. Beyond that; nothing. Nothing everywhere one looked. Most dissatisfying.

  The Furious Purpose’s restless officers debated how much more time they should spend looking for this lost Elencher ship. Had something happened to it? Had the small drone been lying? Might there be a more interesting opponent floating around out here somewhere?

  Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture - the
real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with their miserable hankering to be somebody else - had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on - or away - with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.

  How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU - trailing them as they had been trailing the Elench craft - had slipped in to take its place. Might this not be true?

  No, argued some of the officers, because the Culture would never sacrifice a drone it considered sentient.

  The rest thought about this, considered the Culture’s bizarrely sentimental attitude to life, and were forced to concede the point.

  The cruiser spent another two days around the Esperi system and then broke away. It returned to the habitat called Tier with a trivial but niggling engine fault.

  III

  Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.

  Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined.

  It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better ... and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you . . . so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.