‘But why--?’ Genar-Hofoen started to ask.

‘There’s more,’ Tishlin said, holding up one hand. ‘Even if she won’t play, even if she refuses to come back, you’re to be equipped with a method of retrieving her through the link you’ll forge when you talk to the Mimage, without the GSV knowing. Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be accomplished, but I think it’s got something to do with the ship they’re going to give you to get you to the Sleeper Service, after the Affronter ship they’re going to hire for you has rendezvoused with it at Tier.’

Genar-Hofoen did his best to look sceptical. ‘Is that possible?’ he asked. ‘Retrieving her like that, I mean. Against the wishes of the Sleeper.’

‘Apparently,’ Tishlin said, shrugging. ‘SC thinks they’ve got a way of doing it. But you see what I mean when I said they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman . . .’

Genar-Hofoen thought for a moment. ‘Do you know what ship this might be? The one to get me to the Sleeper?’

‘They haven’t--’ began the image, then paused and looked amused. ‘They just told me; it’s a GCU called the Grey Area.’ The image smiled. ‘Ah; I see you’ve heard of it, too.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it,’ the man said.

The Grey Area. The ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people, using its Electro Magnetic Effectors - in a sense the very, very distant descendants of electronic countermeasures equipment from your average stage three civilisation, and the most sophisticated, powerful but also precisely controllable weaponry the average Culture ship possessed - to burrow into the grisly cellular substrate of an animal consciousness and try to make sense of what it found there for its own - usually vengeful - purposes. A pariah craft; the one the other Minds called Meatfucker because of its revolting hobby (though not, as it were, to its face). A ship that still wanted to be part of the Culture proper and nominally still was, but which was shunned by almost all its peers; a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact.

Genar-Hofoen had heard about the Grey Area all right. It was starting to make sense now. If there was one vessel that might be capable of plundering - and, more importantly, that might be willing to plunder - a Stored soul from under the nose of the Sleeper, the Grey Area was probably it. Assuming what he’d heard about the ship was true, it had spent the last decade perfecting its techniques of teasing dreams and memories out of a variety of animal species, while the Sleeper Service had by all accounts been technologically stagnant for the last forty years, its time taken up with the indulgence of its own scarcely less eccentric pastime.