It looped high out across the four-dimensional range of infraspace, sweeping its sensors across the skein and readying its weapon systems. Its colossal speed was bringing the war fleet closer faster than anything it had ever seen before save in its most wildly indulged simulations. It zoomed high above them in hyperspace, still, it seemed, undetected. A pulse of sheer pleasure swept its Mind. It had never felt so good. Soon, very soon, it would die, but it would die gloriously, and its reputation pass on to the new ship born with its memories and personality, transmitted in its mind-state to the Shoot Them Later.

It fell upon the third wave of oncoming ships like a raptor upon a flock.

VI

VI

Byr stood on the circular stone platform at the top of the tower, looking out to the ocean where two lines of moonlight traced narrow silver lines across the restless waters. Behind her, the tower’s crystal dome was dark. She had gone to bed at the same time as Dajeil, who tired more quickly these days. They had made their apologies and left the others to fend for themselves. Kran, Aist and Tulyi were all friends from the GCU Unacceptable Behaviour, another of the Quietly Confident’s daughter ships. They had known Dajeil for twenty years; the three had been aboard the Quietly Confident four years earlier and were some of the last people Byr and Dajeil had seen before they’d left for Telaturier.

The Unacceptable Behaviour was looping through this volume and they’d persuaded it to let them stop off here for a couple of days and see their old friend.

The moons glittered their stolen light across the fretful dance of waves, and Byr too reflected, glanding a little Diffuse and thinking that the moons’ V of light, forever converging on the observer, encouraged a kind of egocentricity, an overly romantic idea of one’s own centrality to things, an illusory belief in personal precedence. She remembered the first time she had stood here and thought something along these lines, when she had been a man and he and Dajeil had not long arrived here.

It had been the first night he and Dajeil had - finally, at last, after all that fuss - lain together. Then he had come up here in the middle of the night while she’d slept on, and gazed out over these waters. It had been almost calm, then, and the moons’ tracks (when they rose, and quite as though they rose and did not rise for him) lay shimmering slow and near unbroken on the untroubled face of the ocean’s slack waters.