Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Why not?” Fassin asked. “Olmey’s here. And I rather wanted Uncle Slovius to be able to look in as well.”

“That won’t be possible either,” Verpych told Fassin. “You and you alone have to talk to this thing.”

“I have no choice in this?” Fassin asked. “Correct,” the major-domo said. “None.” He returned his attention to the milling techs. One of the senior ones had approached to within a couple of metres, waiting for an opportunity to speak.

“But why not?” Fassin repeated, aware as soon as he said it that he was sounding like a small child.

Verpych shook his head. “I don’t know. To the best of my knowledge there is no technical reason. Perhaps whatever is to be discussed is too sensitive for other ears.” He looked at the red-uniformed man waiting nearby. “Master Technician Imming,” he said brightly. “Working on the principle that whatever can go wrong will, I have been weighing up the possibilities that our house automatics have rusted into a single unusable mass, crumbled to a fine powder or unexpectedly declared themselves sentient, necessitating the destruction by fusion warheads of our entire house, Sept and possibly planet. Which is it to be?”

“Sir, we have encountered several problems,” the technician said slowly, his gaze flicking from Fassin to Verpych.

“I do so hope the next word is ‘But’ or ‘However’,” Verpych said. He glanced at Fassin. “A ‘Happily’ would be too much to ask for, of course.”

The technician continued. “Thanks to our considerable efforts, sir, we believe we have the situation in hand. I would hope that we ought to be ready by the appointed hour.”

“We have the capacity to absorb all that is being transmitted?”

“Just, sir.” Master Technician Imming gestured to the equipment on the pallet being manoeuvred through the double doors. “We are using some spare capacity from the utility systems.”

“Is there any indication of the nature of the subject contained within the signal?”

“No, sir. It will remain in code until activated.”

“Could we find out?”

Imming looked pained. “Not really, sir.”

“Could we not try?”

“That would be nearly impossible, in the time frame, major-domo. And illegal. Possibly dangerous.”

“Seer Taak here is wondering what he is to be faced with. You can give him no clues?”

Master Technician Imming made a small bow to Fassin. “I’m afraid not, sir. Wish it were otherwise.”

Verpych turned to Fassin. “We seem unable to help you, Seer Taak. I am so sorry.”

“Whose was this, anyway?” Ilen asked, keeping her voice down. She looked up into the shadows high above. “Who did it belong to?”

They had swung in through the single great jagged fissure in the ship’s left flank, flying up between two massively curved rib-struts, the sky above framed by the twisted, buckled ribs, the sections of the hull they had supported turned to dissociated molecules and atoms seven millennia earlier. Sal had let the flier slip four hundred metres or so into the shadows under the intact forward portion of the hull — climbing gently all the time, following the mangled, buckled floors and collapsed bulkheads forming the terrain beneath them — until they could see only the slimmest sliver of violet, star-spattered sky outside and felt they ought to be safe from whatever spaceborne craft — presumably a Beyonder — had been attacking anything that moved or had recently been moving on the surface.

Sal had set the little craft down. The flier came to rest in a slight hollow on a relatively level patch of blackened, minutely rippled material, behind what might have been the remains of a crumpled bulkhead. The way ahead into the rest of the ship’s forward section was blocked fifty metres further in by the hanging, frozen-looking tatters of some twisted, iridescent material. Saluus had thought aloud about trying to nudge the flier through this suspended debris, but had been dissuaded.

The flier’s comms reception — even the distorted, jammed signal that they’d experienced outside — had just faded away almost as soon as they’d entered the wreck. For something supposed to pull in a signal through tens of klicks of solid rock, this was remarkable. The air inside the vast cave of the ruined craft felt cold and smelled of nothing. Knowing they were inside, the fact that their voices did not echo in the huge space was oddly disturbing, giving the sound a strange, hollow quality. The interior and running lights of the flier put them in a tiny pool of luminescence, emphasising their insignificance within the ancient fallen ship.

“Some dispute about exactly whose it might be,” Saluus said, also quietly, and also gazing upwards at the smoothly ribbed ceiling of the vessel, arching a third of a kilometre above them and still just visible in the gloaming. “Marked down as a Sceuri wreck — they sent their War Graves people to clean it out — but if it was then it must have been requisitioned or captured. And they reckon it had a highly mixed crew, though mostly swimmers: waterworlders. Could be Oerileithe originally, oddly enough. Has the design of a dweller-with-a-small-d ship. But some sort of war craft, certainly.”

Taince snorted. Sal looked at her. “Yes?”

“What it isn’t,” she said, “is a needle ship.”

“Did I say it was?” Sal asked.

“Rather a fat needle, if it was,” Fassin said, swivelling on his heel to follow the downward curve of the wrecked ship’s interior towards its crumpled, partially buried nose, over a kilometre away in the darkness.

“It’s not a needle ship,” Sal protested. “I didn’t call it a needle ship.”

“See?” Taince said. “Now you’ve confused people.”

“Anyway,” Sal said, ignoring this, “there’s a rumour they pulled a couple of Voehn bodies out of here, and that really does make it more interesting.”

“Voehn?” Taince burst out laughing. “ Spiner stiffs?” Her voice dripped scorn. She was even smiling, which Fassin knew wasn’t something you saw every day. Pity, because her smooth, slightly square face — under a regulation military bald — looked kind of impishly attractive when she smiled. Come to think of it, that was probably why she didn’t do it often. Actually Fassin thought Taince looked pretty good anyway, in her off-duty fatigues. (The rest of them just wore standard hiking\outdoorsy gear, though naturally Sal’s was subtly but noticeably superior and doubtless wildly more expensive.) Tain’s fatigues kind of bagged out in odd locations but came back in at the right places to leave no doubt that she was definitely a milgirl, not a milboy.

They’d turned shadow-matt and dark in the surrounding gloom, too. Apparently even the NavMil’s off-duty fatigues for trainees came with active camo.

She was shaking her head, as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even Fassin, who’d pretty much shucked off the whole boy thing of obsessive interest in all things military and alien not long after the onset of puberty, knew about the Voehn. They were usually described in the media as living legends or near-mythical warriors, which kind of blanded what they really were; the crack troops and personal guards of the new galactic masters.

The Voehn were the calmly relentless, highly intelligent, omni-competent, near-indestructible, all-environments-capable, undefeated uber- soldiers of the last nine or so millennia. They were the martial pin-ups of the age, the speckless species peak of military perfection, but they were rare, few and far between. Where the new masters, the Culmina, were, the Voehn were too, but not in all that many other places, and — as far as anybody knew, Fassin had been given to understand — in all those millennia not one had even entered the Ulubis system to visit Sepekte, the principal planet, let alone come near Nasqueron, or deigned to have anything to do with its little planet-moon ’glantine, even in death.