KarlMrax

Cossont closed her eyes, feeling her skin crawl. She shook her head. “The … the regimental HQ vessel … the Fzan-Juym asteroid, the moon; it’s … gone?”

“Destroyed,” the android confirmed. His eyes went wide and he made a sudden flapping motion with both hands. “A very extreme simulation scenario!”

“Destroyed?” Cossont repeated, unable to take this in. “Completely?”

The android shook his head. “Not completely in the sense of annihilated, as would be the case had it >been attacked with a large amount of anti-matter, say, but completely in the sense that it was pierced by

KarlMrax

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.

• Hydrogen Sonata, Chapter Seven: (S -20)

The (S -20) in the chapter refers to days till sublimation. At most the time frame between leaving Xown and arriving at Eshri was 3 days as the character (Cossont) was still in Xown when (S -23). Thus the low end average speed for one decade in 3 days is 1200c. Peak velocity would be twice that at 2400. Acceleration would be .018 c/s. This assumes a 50:50 acceleration:decelleration flight profile.

KarlMrax

I suppose I ought to follow, it sent. Just in case, like you say.

A tiny, dark speck against the vast ocean of fire that was the star, it set a course for Gzilt space, pitching and yawing until it was pointed more or less straight there, continuing to ramp up its engines as it flew away from the light.

Race you! the Pressure Drop sent.

The Caconym could already feel drag – the effect of its velocity in real space. Observed external time was starting to drift away from what its own internal clocks were telling it, and its mass was increasing.

KarlMrax

The Gzilt were a sort of cousin species/civilisation to the Culture. Nearly founders, though not quite, they had been influential in the setting up and design of the Culture almost ten thousand years earlier, when a disparate group of humanoid species at roughly the same stage of technological and societal development had been thinking about banding together.

Amiable enough, if somewhat martially uptight due to an unusual social set-up that basically meant everybody was presumed to be in a single society-wide militia – hence everybody had a military rank, from birth – they had made significant contributions to the establishment and ethos of the Culture while it was all still at the being-talked-about phase but then, almost at the last moment, and to pretty much everyone’s surprise, in a way including their own, they had decided not to join the new confederation.

KarlMrax

The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-existence with no Off switch, to which species and civilisations had been hauling their sorry tired-with-it-all behinds off to since – the story went – the galaxy had still been in metaphorical knee socks.

The Sublime was where you went when you felt you had no more to contribute to the life of the great galactic meta-civilisation, and – sometimes more importantly, depending on the species – when in turn you felt that it had no more to offer you. It took a whole civilisation to do it properly, and it took a long, long time for most civilisations to come round to the idea, but there was never any hurry; the Sublime would always be there. Well, provided only that blind chance, your own stupidity or somebody else’s

KarlMrax

The LOU was a modern ship with an old Mind, part of an experiment of sorts to see how that would work. The theory was that pairing a capable new vessel with a wise old Mind would somehow present the best of both worlds, especially for one of the Culture’s relatively few warships, which would be fully expected to sit/drift/race around all its anticipated life doing nothing whatsoever, or at least nothing whatsoever to do with what it had been designed for. The trouble with this idea, as the Caconym had been amongst the first to point out, was that – simulations aside – you would never really know how your theory was standing up to reality until the shit hit the intractor, when it tended to be a bit too late for rethinks and refits.

Still, as one of the ship Minds that had been involved at the sharp end of the Idiran war a thousand

KarlMrax

The Caconym, a Culture Limited Offensive Unit of the Troublemaker class, spun slowly above the forest of writhing, wildly shining loops that was the surface of the orange-red star Sapanatcheon. The ship rotated gently in the midst of the blasts of radiation, charged particles and magnetic force coming swirling in from almost every direction, though mostly from below, where a sunspot the size of a gas giant planet was passing slowly beneath. The LOU was taking readings and collecting data, for what it was worth, but really it was just watching, admiring.

• Chapter Five: (S -22)

KarlMrax

“How long until I would have to make a decision?”

“The Uagren’s travel time to Izenion is between forty-six and fifty-four hours, depending on whether it flies through or comes to a local stop. Say forty-five hours to go yes/no on any pre-agreed action re the former, though if there’s no further sign of development from the Fourteenth HQ, I’d advise the local stop; that way we have a chance of dealing with any loose ends or unanticipated post-strike outcomes immediately rather than half a day later; there’s nothing else we can get to Izenion sufficiently quickly to provide immediate back-up if the Uagren commits to a fly-through mission. In that case, say fifty-three hours. To leave time to switch from one mission profile to another – fly-through to local stop – a decision would be required thirty-eight hours from now. That would be your first decision-point: in thirty-eight

KarlMrax

It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not …’s multitudinous sub-routines – this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame – flagged the tiniest of oddities.

It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose

KarlMrax

There was, as a result, a distinct chance that things might get interesting. The ship watched the Liseiden fleet crawl closer. Much further off than they’d ever have imagined possible, it had already begun to monitor some of their comms traffic.

...

Finally one of them said, “Sir, we ... may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.” >