She found herself smiling back. “One request?” she said.

“What?”

“Could you keep that look?”

“If you like.” Berdle looked puzzled. “Why?”

“It suits – well, it just looks good.”

The avatar shrugged. “Okay.”

“Are you still being affected by those sexually stimulating compounds?” Pyan asked through her earbud.

Cossont used a finger to flick one corner of the creature. It yelped and unwound itself from round her neck, flapping away from her in a flurry of melodramatic movement.

“The Culture craft continues to adhere to local legal velocity limitations but is about to leave the atmosphere,” the combat arbite Uhtryn said. “If it is to be engaged, this would be the last chance.”

Colonel Agansu felt like he was suspended in space just above the planet of Xown, staring down at its brown/green land, the white-lined coast of Hzu and the green/blue waters of the sea. The Girdlecity was a thick dark rim round the world, hazing and disappearing to the horizon in each direction. He watched the dot that was the Culture module rising quickly upwards through the atmosphere.

“Count down that time, would you, Uhtryn?” he asked the arbite. “What do we have from the Girdlecity?”

“Eight seconds. Screen just coming in.” As the combat arbite spoke the words, a virtual screen appeared in front of Agansu, showing, from above, an elegant piazza with a small Culture craft sitting on it and two people walking away from it. “Two people: male unidentified, female … Cossont, Vyr. Lieutenant Commander reserve, the Fourteenth. Seven. Additional: mattiform familiar or pet present, wrapped round the female’s neck.”

“Where did they go?”

“As projected, the airship Equatorial 353. It has shielding making it impossible to surveille from outside. They spent twenty-two minutes inside. Six. Additional: male figure negative bio. Likely avatar, type unclear. Probing resistant without sensorial aggression.”

Colonel Agansu watched the tiny Culture ship rise towards space, seemingly almost straight at him. Of course, he was not really exposed to the void; he was floating instead within his virtual environment, deep inside the 7*Uagren. He spent most of his time here now, revved up to maximum speed, absorbed by the utterly fascinating view of space ahead and around, as enhanced by the ship’s sensor arrays. The full radiation spectrum was signified by textures implicit in the spread of colours, information in every form leapt out when you inspected something, and vectors and relative speeds were displayed around every object.

When not gazing out, fascinated, at this, the colonel dived deeper into the data reservoirs, trying to find and match up any details of relevance to the mission. This contributed relatively little in absolute terms to the efforts the ship’s own subsidiary AIs and virtual-crew data-mining specialists and their sub-routines were making, but it was still worthwhile additional work, and had the effect of continually reinforcing his own understanding.