~ Commander, you would be amazed and appalled at how few bright sides there are concerning the appearance and behaviour of a warship like this. The fact it’s not charging in through the defence screen and metaphorically skidding to a stop is almost certainly a bad sign; it probably means it’s one of the wily ones. I repeat; do not wait until it is most of the way into the defence system before opening fire. Assaulted so far inside the defensive field it may well figure that it has no chance of escape and so might as well continue towards you and attack, and at that sort of range it would stand a decent chance of being able to obliterate the entire store and all the ships within it.

The Commander felt almost annoyed that the ship hadn’t appealed to his own personal sense of self-preservation. ‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘Half way in; two weeks.’

~ Commander, no! That is still too close. If we cannot destroy the ship in the first instant of the engagement it must be presented with a reasonable opportunity to escape, otherwise it may go for glory rather than attempt to extricate itself.

‘But if it escapes it can alert the Culture!’

~ If our attack is not immediately successful it will signal elsewhere anyway, assuming it has not already done so. We shall not be able to stop it. In that case, we shall have been discovered

... though with any luck that will only put our plans out by a few days. Believe me, the craft’s physical escape will not bring the Culture here any quicker than a signal would. You will be putting this entire mission in jeopardy if you allow the vessel to come within more than three light weeks of the store.

‘All right!’ the Commander spat. He flicked a tentacle over the glowing board of the command desk. The communication link was cut. The Attitude Adjuster did not attempt to re-establish it.

‘Your suit, sir,’ said a voice from behind. The Commander whirled round to find the gelding midshipman - uniformed but not suited - with his space suit in his limbs.

‘Oh, at last!’ the Commander screamed; he flicked a tentacle at the creature’s eye stalks; the blow bounced them back off its casing. The gelding whimpered and fell back, gas sac deflating. The Commander grabbed his suit and pulled himself inside it. The midshipman staggered along the floor, half blinded.

The Commander ordered his lieutenant to reconfigure the command desk. From here they could personally control all the systems that had been entrusted by the Culture to the Mind which the traitor ship had killed. The command desk was like an ultimate instrument of destruction; a giant keyboard to play death tunes on. Some of the keys, admittedly, had to be left to trigger themselves once set, but these controls really did control.