There were people ahead. The spaces around the airship Equatorial 353 had been becoming more populated over the days he had been keeping pace with it. Ground vehicles rumbled slowly past ahead on a broad roadway; they were gaudy, booming with music. Across the gulf of the tunnel he could see a train, trundling, keeping pace, searchlights on it pointing back at the airship, flicking slowly off and on again as they passed behind supporting struts. A smaller airship, like a tiny white cloud made solid, appeared from a side tunnel and drew slowly ahead of the Equatorial 353, scattering clouds of sparkling, coloured dust which a rear-facing laser lit up in gyrating abstract patterns.

The skin of the Equatorial 353 exhibited a series of large moving images, as though projected onto its smooth curvature. There appeared to be seven or eight of these distorted displays covering the airship’s surface at any one time. Some of the photographs were stills, most moved, and they sometimes fused together to provide larger images. Some appeared only to make any sort of sense considering the airship as a whole, in other words imagining the form of the display on the other side of the craft. The most common themes appeared to be records of earlier art installations aboard the craft over the last few years, nature in the form of plants and animals, historical and presently existing forms of transport, and pornography.

~We carry four sixty-four-unit platoons of marine combat arbites, the 8*Churkun’s captain told him. ~They are at your disposal, Colonel. Shall I have my tactical engagements officer ready some or all of them for deployment?

~Please do.

He had to push through a small parade of people – dressed in motley, many dancing as they moved, some singing, some chanting – to get to the edge of the space where the balcony gave out onto the open tunnel of curving ribs and spiralling pipes. There he found the Equatorial 353, filling the monstrous tube like a comically slow shell in the biggest, least efficient gun ever made.

Then Colonel Agansu had a sudden, literal flash of memory, and remembered the magnified shadow of his own suited form being thrown out across the elevator shaft within the Incast facility on Bokri as the combat arbite Uhtryn, behind him, was dissolved in a pointillist spray of tiny, fierce anti-matter explosions, blasting a blindingly intense sleet of radiation past him, through him.

~How many of the combat arbites do you need, Colonel?

A chorus of beeps, trills, clangs and musical phrases – followed by some cheers and the start of a fireworks display from the top of the giant airship – announced that it was midnight on Zyse, and the Instigation was only two days away.

~All of them.

Twenty-one

(S -2)

“Because you’re liable to get killed.”

“That doesn’t seem to be stopping you.”