~I never did tell you my whole name, did I?

~You did not. Many have remarked that your name would appear to be part of a longer one, and yet, unusually, even uniquely, nobody has heard the whole of it.

~May I tell you it now?

~Please do.

~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

~Such braggadocio. That smacks of smokescreen, not power.

~Take it as you will, chum. But how many Culture ships do you know of that exaggerate their puissance?

~None till now. You may be the first.

~Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war. Who do you think has the real martial provenance here? In a fight, you’d have no choice but to try to destroy me immediately. You’d fail. I’d have a choice of just how humiliatingly to cripple you. This is the truth; depend.

~So you say. We might beg—

~Enough. I think I know what happened out at Ablate. I owe you no respect. If you are experiencing a craving to die honourably, feel free to try to stop me when I instigate kick-away, in one millisecond from now. Otherwise, stand aside. Also? I retract my suggestion that you ought to depart. The place down here is a wreck. I’m leaving various drone teams and bits of medical gear behind, but I do intend to leave, and the locals could do with some disaster control. Stepping into that breach would be substantially more constructive than placing yourself across the cannon’s mouth. Your choice. Goodbye, one way or the other.

The Mistake Not … slipped out from under the Real. It left behind a silvery ellipsoid just to the rear of the drained ruin that was the airship Equatorial 353. The silvery ellipsoid shrank to nothing and winked out over the course of several seconds in a gentle, orderly fashion, producing no more than moderate breezes as the air flowed in to replace the volume of the departed ship.

The ship itself fell beneath the planet, where the world’s gravity distorted the skein of space into a shallow bowl shape.

Then it turned, twisted, aimed and powered away, unmolested.

She felt like shit, and great, and hopeless, and euphoric, all at the same time.

The ship had brought her back to some sort of life.

Normally, that badly injured, that close to death after such major trauma to every single major organ save her brain, she’d have been left in a therapeutic coma for nine or ten days, and even then the change, the difference between her physical state at the beginning and at the end of that time, would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to people of a past age, taking her from good-as-dead to good-as-ever.