Iain Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata

Crushed, broken bodies littered the network of pipes, girders and structure beneath the stricken craft. Not all were dead; the ship Displaced what medical support drone and life-saving equipment it had to those still able to be saved.

There were a lot of drone-like military devices floating about the place — over two hundred and forty of them. They were making a nuisance of themselves; sixty-four had already tried attacking its outermost bump-field with X-ray lasers — though exactly why and with what hope of success, the ship was unable to work out; maybe they’d all gone mad — plus all of them now seemed to be working themselves up to attack it again with some other piece of seed-shootery nonsense, so, once it had despatched all its medical teams, it targeted all of the enemy drones, disabling each with a pinpoint granule of plasma fire and instantly — even before they could explode properly — wrapping them individually in Displace fields and swatting them into hyperspace, directed roughly towards where the Churkun was — it assumed they were its.

There might be more of these aggravations inside the airship, it supposed. It still couldn’t see within the vessel properly and its devices were taking their time getting inside.

Fuck this , the Mistake Not… decided, and sliced a tiny cone, less than a couple of metres deep and the same across, off the very stern of the airship with a millimetrically flourished ZPE/b-edged destabiliser field. The cone fell away in a cloud of sparkling grey. No bodies sliced in half, which was good, but there was still 4D shielding ahead. The ship cut again; three metres this time, still with no casualties, or result.

The zero-point energy/brane edging component seemed be handling the 4D shielding well; much less blow-back than it had been led to expect from the simulations. The Mistake Not… was growing more confident using the weapon. This time it cut twenty metres off the stern of the crippled airship and held the resulting hull section in a maniple field, lowering the conic section to the soaking, pooled floor of the tunnel, trying to avoid laying it on any of the bodies.

Finally.

It was past the shielding. It could see into the interior of the airship. It could already tell there were a lot more dead and dying bodies inside, though no more annoying drone military.

~Berdle? Anybody? it asked.

Ximenyr’s suite or not, the man himself wasn’t there.

“No persons present,” the suit told her.

She looked around. Some sort of sitting or reception room. The place looked banal, in a spacious, luxurious, understated sort of way. Quite different from the sumptuous, over-dressed surroundings she and Berdle had found The Master of the Revels in the last time they’d been in the airship.

“What about that… chest, thing, Berdle mentioned?” she asked.

She moved towards another set of double doors. The lights flickered in the suite, seeming almost to fail, then recovering.

“Item fitting description in adjacent cabin, facing,” the suit said helpfully just before it opened the doors for her.

Still nobody about. One giant octagonal bed; many curtained alcoves, some holding items of furniture. In one stood the big upright chest Berdle had talked about earlier.

It was about as tall as she was and maybe a metre wide and deep when closed. It had a small wheel at each corner and stood hinged open to about ninety degrees. Clothes on a rail filled most of one side; the other side was all drawers.

She opened the top drawer, going up on tiptoe to see inside. The little cylinder lay on a piece of soft, folded material along with the rest of the bits and pieces that had been on the necklace they’d seen ten days earlier.

She stared at it, picked it up.

Behind their little window of thick crystal, the pair of sea-green orbs that had looked like berries seemed to stare back at her.

“Anomalous pres—” the suit began.

Then two things happened.

She was struck — kicked, it felt like — in the back, very hard, though somehow she and the suit managed to stay standing. At the same time something burst brightly, pink and white, off the drawer-front immediately before her, about level with the middle of her chest.

She was still thinking about turning round, wondering what had happened, when she realised that whatever light had burst against the drawer-front must have come straight through her to get there.

Smoke drifted up from the exit wound in her chest. She could smell roasted meat over the cold, sharp sensation of the oxygen.

“—ence detect…” the suit said, as more, individually slightly lighter kicks struck her all over her back and rear. This time she was thrown against the drawers of the chest, and the whole thing nearly tipped over. Then it bounced off the bulkhead behind and she was thrown back again, turning woozily round as she did so — the little trails of smoke made pretty spirals in the relatively still air — before she started to slide downwards. The ruined, ragged back of the suit went stuttering down the set of drawer handles, jolting her as she slumped to the deck.

A one-armed figure was standing in the doorway looking at her, just lowering his one good arm.

“Ship… re… establish — blish — lish — ish — shh…” the suit whispered to her, and sighed to quietness. The faint draft of oxygen at her nostrils faded.

Then the one-armed figure in the doorway lit up brilliantly all down one side, from foot to scalp, and was thrown bodily, hard against the door jamb, pieces flying off it as it rebounded, lit up from the other side now, disintegrating.

What was left, reduced to something like a too-thin, charred, one-armed skeleton, fell forwards, hitting the deck at about the same time as she did.

Something.

Somebody talking to her.

Asking questions. A question:

Did she want to keep both sets of arms?

Of course she wanted to keep both sets of arms. What sort of idiotic, dumb-ass—

…back to sleep…

This would all be hurried, extemporised, done much more quickly than the normal guidelines advised, to keep to the schedule.

She didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t even know where she was, in this darkness. Once or twice she woke up — in this darkness — and wondered who she was.

But each time she remembered.

“…it was all a sociological experiment by the Zihdren. A rogue Philosophariat — the Philosophariat Apposital… I think that was their name — they, it — it was all down to one individual in the end — planted everything in the Book of Truth according to some obscure Metalogical hypothesis, to settle an argument between two groups of scholars with opposing theories. Briper Drodj, the Scribe, elab-orated on the basics as everybody pretty much knew, but the essence was always what the Zihdren had put there. Of course this whole approach was later discredited and the Philosophariat Apposital was ‘Dissolved with Moderate Disgrace’ not long after, and this particular experiment — like many similar others — was quietly forgotten. The Zihdren Sublimed a couple of centuries later, decades before the Gzilt even reached space.

“All this became known to a very few people way back at the start of the process which brought the Culture into existence. Happened following contact by Zihdren-Remnanter. They were, I suppose — so they claimed — conscience-stricken. Well, conscience-charged might be a better way of putting it. The Zihdren had felt bad taking this grubby little secret into the Enfolding so they thought they could have the best of both worlds by Subliming without mentioning it but leaving it to their Remnanters to spill the broth at a later date.