“Of more concern for your own squadron are two forces of Liseiden ships, both consisting of four vessels, each at least as heavily armed as your squadron flagship. These are believed to be converging on your entry point into the Gzilt system. The Beats Working continues to pull away but remains at your disposal and will respond as quickly as possible to any signal from you. Thank you and good luck.”

The screen blanked out.

“Signal all squadrons and elements to turn about,” Swarmprince Ossebri 17 Haldesib said. “Have them find places of safety according to existing fleet orders and prioritise eluding Liseiden units over those of the Gzilt and the Culture, though all are to be avoided, in that order. Senior Navigation Officer, you and I shall submit our codes to the AI to unlock our own sealed orders.”

“Sir.”

The sealed orders indicated that in the event of an emergency of the type now facing them, the squadron should make its way to the nearby system of Vatrelles, five days distant at full speed, to await further instructions.

The Swarmprince issued the appropriate orders, then turned to his communications officer. “Signal the Culture ship that it may remain at its current distance from us if it wishes. We may have need of it yet. Convene a full consultation with all senior officers, AIs and expert systems.”

Twenty

(S -3)

The General Systems Vehicle Empiricist felt it was arriving in Gzilt at a bad time – a bad time that was meant to be the start of a (brief) good time, a momentous and celebrated time but which had somehow gone wrong. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.

The ship was about as big as standard Culture vessels ever got; a System-class that had beefed up over the decades and centuries for what had always seemed like sound operational reasons at the time until it had become one of the most impressively large, commodious and populated examples of the class that was already the most impressively large, commodious and populated the Culture possessed.

The design of the System-class made such self-augmentation easy; the ships had no single outer hull surrounding their hundreds of individual components, just colossal bubbles of air held in place by field enclosures. Adding new, self-manufactured bits was so simple it was, for some ships at least, apparently, tantamount to compulsory, and it was only a sort of residual decorousness and a wish not to be seen as too self-indulgently ostentatious that prevented certain System-class vessels from going expansion-mad and growing to the size of planets, or at least moons. That sort of indulged obsessiveness was what simming and strong VR was for; you could convincingly imagine yourself being any ludicrous size without actually committing to such monomania in reality.