Cossont was about to say something like, Okay, now I’m worried … when her eyes narrowed and she looked at Berdle. “Did you put it up to that?”

Berdle shrugged. “Also worth a try.”

“But I do!” Pyan exclaimed, twisting to face Berdle, then back to Cossont. “But I do!”

“Yeah,” Cossont said.

“Twenty seconds.”

The ship sent a tiny update of its mind-state to its home GSV, mostly just so there would be a record of Cossont insisting on going with its avatar and other on-planet forces into the Girdlecity.

The ship was a constrained shell of force hurtling across the system now, re-accelerating hard, packaged within its wrapping of concentric fields like something cocooned, engines howling in frequencies no biological living thing would ever sense, a kilometre-long projectile submerged beneath the skein of real space, components of three outer fields lasing in hyperspace to direct the signal to its distant ship-mother, then clicking off again after a nanosecond, while other configurations of fields slid and flicked, stacked and snicked, readying for a series of multiple high-speed, high-accuracy Displaces to a complex-topography target deep in a gravity well; probably opposed.

This was, the ship knew, going to be challenging.

Most serious Culture ships, and all with any pretensions to being warships, possessed burst units: specialised engine components like motive power capacitors capable of providing sudden, brief flares of energy and movement. The Mistake Not …’s were more powerful and capable than most craft its size, which was kind of a game-giving-away liability if you actually had to use them in the presence of somebody able to spot such shenanigans, but – on the other hand – this was exactly the situation where they might help save the day, so …

The ship was already heading dangerously close to Xown’s gravity well, having to adjust its course in hyperspace to avoid crashing into the downward curve of skein. It jinked closer still at the last moment, using up all its burst unit energies both to swerve and slow, then focused in on the relatively tiny part of itself that held the module where its avatar and the humanoid were, snapping the two human-shaped forms and the woman’s pet away and then the module separately. It loosed the module first, targeting the Displace at a spot just outside the Girdlecity twelve hundred metres above local ground level and ten kilometres back from the current location of the airship Equatorial 353.

It was, given the relative velocities involved, one of the most accurate and precisely located Flying Displaces it had ever heard of, snapping the module into the air within an elegantly aligned pocket of vacuum that collapsed at just the right rate to allow the craft to continue on its way – under its own power, now – so smoothly that the ship doubted somebody standing inside the module – had there been anybody – would even have wobbled as the transition was completed.