Either way, he was being cautious; he had asked around. He still had some replies to receive - they should be waiting for him when he arrived at Tier - but so far everything seemed to tally. He had also asked to speak to a representation of the Desert Class MSV Not Invented Here, the ship acting as incident coordinator for all this - again, this ought to happen on Tier - and he’d looked up the craft’s own history in the module’s archives and transferred the results to the suit’s own AI.

The Desert Class had been the first type of General Systems Vehicle the Culture had constructed, providing the original template for the Very Large Fast Self-Sufficient Ship concept. At three-and-a-bit klicks in length it was tiny by today’s standards - ships twice its length and eight times its volume were routinely constructed inside GSVs the size of the Sleeper Service and the whole class had been demoted to Medium Systems Vehicle status - but it certainly had the distinction of age; the Not Invented Here had been around for nearly two millennia and boasted a long and interesting career, coming as close as the Culture’s distributed and democratic military command structure had allowed to being in advisory control of several fleets in the course of the Idiran War. It was now in that equivalent of serenely glorious senescence that affected some ancient Minds; no longer producing many smaller ships, taking relatively little to do with Contact’s normal business, and keeping itself relatively sparsely populated.

It remained, nevertheless, a full Culture ship; it hadn’t taken a sabbatical, gone into a retreat or become an Eccentric, nor had it joined the Culture Ulterior - the fairly recently fashionable name for the bits of the Culture that had split away and weren’t really fully paid-up members any more. All the same, and despite the fact that the archive entry on the old ship was huge (as well as all the naked factual stuff, it contained one hundred and three different full-length biographies of the craft which it would have taken him a couple of years to read), Genar-Hofoen couldn’t help feeling that there was a slight air of mystery about the old ship.

It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.