He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.

Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.

The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft - the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here - convinced them in every case.

Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.

It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.

In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.