“So I became the man who lived for ever, more or less, because I’d once held a secret I didn’t care about any more.

“Well, didn’t care about until I heard about the Gzilt Subliming, and, in time, decided that what I knew about them might be dangerous to me. Living for a long time can make you very cautious, cautious to the point of something close to cowardice, frankly … and so, anyway, I got rid of the information, had it excised and put it away from me, even though I put it somewhere in Gzilt space, somewhere pointed; with the Last Party, and Ximenyr, where it seemed to me it belonged.

“This amused me at the time. It amuses me still.

“I’d asked Ximenyr to look after what I’d left with him, and keep it – keep them – close. I didn’t tell him what they held, or how important that information might be. I didn’t imagine he would wear them, in full view and plain sight. But then, why not?

“That amuses me too.”

Berdle had perished protecting her, attacking the android that had held Colonel Agansu’s personality before it could target Cossont, who had been running along the gantry above. That had let the arbite accompanying Agansu get in a kill-shot on the avatar. The arbite had then been destroyed by the already half-crippled remains of the outer suit they had left behind earlier, operating, as Berdle had said it would, as a drone.

Ximenyr was dead – he’d been in the tank when it was attacked, helping people confused by the watery maze – but he was being brought back from a Stored version made ten days earlier; he’d always been backed-up.

Hundreds had died in the airship and beneath it: drowned, crushed, torn apart.

The ship had killed Agansu itself, using a Displaced sleet of MDAWS nanomissiles, slaved.

~Your forces have been routed, despatched, the Culture ship had sent to the Gzilt ship. ~No need for you to hang about here now. I’ll be going myself, shortly. Probably best you don’t try to stop me.

~I have a regimental marshal talking to me – slowly, of course – on another channel. She wishes me to engage you in combat.

~Yes, but I already have what we came here to look for. Unless you withdraw to the system outskirts and make no sudden moves, I’ll broadcast the results to the whole of Xown, and packet it all up to spread through the whole of Gzilt. Let me go without resistance and there’s still – I’m guessing – a significantly better than even chance that nothing will come of this, and what I now know will remain buried.

~So all this, so much death, has been for nothing?