Iain Banks - The Algebraist

A position blinked on his field of vision, away across the cloud tops, a little off due north, some few kilo-klicks beneath where the recent activity had been. In line of sight now. He decided to treat this piece of luck as a good omen, and sent a signal saying he was back, so that, if nothing else, he’d have done what he’d said he would do. He waited a while but there was no acknowledgement, let alone a reply. He hadn’t really expected one.

He wondered what was left of the Shrievalty Ocula, and whether he should even try to report to it. He needed to do some research into exactly how much had changed since the invasion, see whether he was listed as dead, and whether he was being looked for or not. Maybe people had forgotten about him in all the excitement.

Fassin laughed again. Oh, if only.

The whole E-5 Discon invasion, so they’d been told, was happening quite specifically because of the List and the Transform. If that was even partly, even slightly true, and his mission hadn’t been hidden from the invaders, then they probably would be looking for him, and quite hard, too, given that they might not have much time before the Summed Fleet crashed the party.

In a way the zero-result equation was a relief. The information he’d brought back was such that he didn’t mind sharing it with anybody and everybody. If it had truly told the location of the wormhole portals it would have been the most crushingly awful burden he could have borne, an infinitely precious and probably infinitely deadly possession. He should be glad it was a joke. If it had been the useful truth, if it had been what they had all hoped it was going to be, then almost certainly no matter who he chose to tell would first torture him or at the very least tear his mind apart to make sure he was telling the truth, and then kill him to make sure he couldn’t tell anybody else. He’d kind of hoped that the Beyonders might be more humane than that, but it was a big risk to take.

He’d be better just broadcasting the result, then disappearing if he could. Maybe the Dwellers would let him stay.

Valseir. If nothing else, he ought to let his Dweller friend know that the information they’d all been so concerned about in fact amounted to nothing more than a piddling little zero. Then there was the matter of telling Valseir that for this nothing, his friend and colleague Leisicrofe had killed himself. Not all good news he’d arrive bearing, then.

Fassin looked up the StormSailing news service. There were fewer regattas than usual, thanks to all the interest in the war, and a lot of sailors who’d normally be on the GasClippers and StormJammers would be required to crew the Dreadnoughts and other combat craft, but there were still a dozen meetings going on at any one time throughout the planet. If he was going to go looking for Valseir at regattas, he might have a long search.

He thought about contacting the City Administrator to arrange for transport — Y’sul would most likely be transferred back home to Hauskip city in a day or two, and Fassin could probably just accompany the injured Dweller back there — then he wondered if he ought to be more careful.

Nobody seemed to have paid him much attention at all when he’d disembarked from the Protreptic, but that didn’t mean his arrival hadn’t been noticed by somebody. Were there any humans — other Seers or anybody else — present in Nasq.? Somebody — Valseir? Damn this suddenly failing memory -somebody had told him there were factions and differences of opinion within the Dwellers over the List and even the seemingly endemic, congenital disregard the Dwellers displayed towards the rest of the galaxy’s inhabitants. We are not a monoculture. That had been Valseir, hadn’t it?

Would any group of Dwellers wish him ill, or somehow be under the command of somebody who did?

He called up the usually most reliable alien-watching service and accessed the global map. It was, for the first time since he’d been looking at it, completely clear. According to the display, there was not a single alien entity alive in Nasqueron. That appeared to include him, so his return hadn’t been documented yet, at least not by the enthusiasts who ran this service.

He was being called. Quercer Janath. He put the image-leaf back in its flank locker.

— Fassin. Anywhere we can take you?

— Locally, hasten to add.

— Ship at our disposal. Favour owed.

— That sort of thing.

· I don’t know, Fassin replied. — I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know any more about what’s happening with the invasion and the Starveling Cult forces?

· Getting reports coming in just now that there’s been some sort of breakdown at some conference.

— Firefight, bluntly.

— I’d like to find my friend Valseir, Fassin said. — I’ve sent a call, but no answer’s come back. I thought I might find him at a -

As he spoke, he thought suddenly of the RushWing Sheumerith, the Dwellers hanging trailed on long lines behind the great long flexible wing forever powering its way into the high skies of Nasqueron. The RushWing. That was the other place Valseir had said he might be found.

· Yes, he told the truetwin. — I do know where you could take me.

· Be in-atmosphere, you realise. Not that quick.

— Entirely used up our luck quotient bringing the ship into Nasq. unseen in the first place. Voehn ship, see. Nervous-making sort of thing for a lot of people. Apparently.

— That’s fine, Fassin told them.

They were scudding through the cloud stems under the topmost haze layer less than an hour later when the AM warheads went off. One was directly above them.

“Oh, wow!”

“Look at our shadow!”

A minute later, what they would later discover had been the destruction of the great ship Luseferous VII cast part of a giant halo of light all over the western sky. Quercer Janath freely confessed to being terribly impressed.

The Protreptic tore serenely on.

The first twelve ships of the Summed Fleet streaked across the inner system of Ulubis at just a per cent below light speed. Kilometre-long black minarets girdled by fast-spinning sections loosing missile clusters, pack munitions, scatter mines, stealth drones and suicide launchers, they lanced across the whole system in less than four hours, Nasqueron’s orbit in less than one and Sepekte’s in fifteen minutes.

Billions of kilometres behind them, on the same course and decelerating hard, lay the Mannlicher-Carcano and the main body of the Summed Fleet. Taince Yarabokin floated in her pod. In the VR command space of the battleship, there was something approaching total silence as the entire command crew lay quietly listening to the sparse exchanges beaming back from the twelve advance units darting across the system dead ahead.

Taince was amazed at how nervous she felt. She could feel her body trying to exhibit all the classic signs of the fight-or-flight response, and the pod’s bio systems doggedly countering each one. There was no doubt that this was an important mission. It would, arguably, be the most crucial one she’d ever been a part of. She was of sufficiently senior rank to have been briefed at the start on the strategic momentousness of what they were being sent to do, but even so she was surprised how similar she felt now to the way she’d felt on her first few combat missions. You never fully shook off the adrenalin rush no matter how many missions you undertook — the consensus was that the day you felt completely blase about a forthcoming engage-ment was either the day you were going to die or the day you should resign your commission forthwith — but the way she felt now was worryingly similar to how she’d felt before those early missions.