A week to hang around; the Yawning Angel thought that would go down particularly well with its human crew; one of the many tiny but significant and painful ways a GSV could lose face amongst its peers was through a higher than average crew turn-over rate, and, while it had been expecting it, the Yawning Angel had found the experience most distressing when people had announced they were fed up not being able to have any reliable advance notice of where they were going from week to week and month to month and so had decided to live elsewhere; all its protestations had been to no avail. What would in effect be a week’s leave in such a cosmopolitan, sophisticated and welcoming system really should convince a whole load of those currently wavering between loyalty and ship-jumping that it was worth staying on with the good old Yawning Angel, it was sure.
The Sleeper Service came to an orbit-relative stop a quarter-turn in advance along the path of the middle Orbital, the most efficient position to assume to distribute its cargo of people and animals evenly amongst all three worlds. Permission to do so was finally received from the last of the Orbitals’ Hub Minds, and the Sleeper Service duly began getting ready to unload.
The Yawning Angel watched from afar as the larger craft detached its traction fields from the energy grid beneath real space, closed down its primary and ahead scan fields, dropped its curtain shields and generally made the many great and small adjustments a ship normally made when one was intending to stick around somewhere for a while. The Sleeper Service’s external appearance remained the same as ever; a silvery ellipsoid ninety kilometres long, sixty across the beam and twenty in height. After a few minutes, however, smaller craft began to appear from that reflective barrier, speeding towards the three Orbitals with their cargoes of Stored people and sedated animals.
All this matched with the intelligence the Yawning Angel had already received regarding the set-up and intentions of the Eccentric GSV. So far so good, then.
Content that all was well, the Yawning Angel drifted in to match velocities with Teriocre, the middle Orbital and the one with the gas-giant environments. It docked underneath the Orbital’s most populous section and drew up a variety of travel and leave arrangements for its own inhabitants while setting up a schedule of visits, events and parties aboard to thank its hosts for their hospitality.
Everything went swimmingly until the second day.
Then, without warning, just after dawn had broken over the part of the Orbital the Yawning Angel had docked beneath, Stored bodies and giant animals started popping into existence all over Teriocre.
Posed people, some still in the clothes or uniforms of the tableaux they had been part of on board the Sleeper Service, suddenly appeared inside sports halls, on beaches, terraces, boardwalks and pavements, in parks, plazas, deserted stadia and every other sort of public space the Orbital had to offer. To the few people who witnessed these events, it was obvious the bodies had been Displaced; the appearance of each was signalled by a tiny point of light blinking into existence just above waist level; this expanded rapidly to a two-metre grey sphere which promptly popped and disappeared, leaving behind the immobile Storee.
Unmoving people were left lying on dewy grass or sitting on park benches or scattered by the hundred across the patterned mosaic of squares and piazzas as though after some terrible disaster or a particularly assertive public sculpture exhibition; dim cleaning machines spiralling methodically within such spaces were left bemused, picking erratic courses amongst the rash of new and unexpected obstructions.
In the seas, the surface swelled and bulged in hundreds of different places as whole globes of water were carefully Displaced just beneath the surface; the sea creatures contained within were still gently sedated and moved sluggishly in their giant fish bowls, each of which retained its separation from the surrounding water for a few hours, osmosing fields gradually adjusting the conditions within to those in the sea outside.
In the air, similar gauzy fields surrounded whole flocks of buoyant atmosphere fauna, bobbing groggily in the breeze.
Further along the vast shallow sweep of the Orbital, the gas-giant environments were witness to equivalent scenes of near-instant immigration followed by gradual integration.
The Yawning Angel’s own drones — its ambassadors on the Orbital — were witness to a handful of these sudden manifestations. After a nanosecond’s delay to ask permission, the GSV clicked into the Orbital’s own monitoring systems, and so watched with growing horror as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more Stored bodies and animals came thumping into existence all over the surface and all through the air, water and gas-ecologies of Teriocre.
The Yawning Angel flash-woke all its systems and switched its attention to the Sleeper Service.
The big GSV was already moving, rolling and twisting to point directly upwards out of the system. Its engine fields reconnected with the energy grid, its scanners were all already back on line and the rest of its multi-layered field complex was rapidly configuring itself for sustained deep-space travel.
It moved off, not especially quickly. Its Displacers had switched to pick rather than put now; in a matter of seconds they had snapped almost its entire fleet of smaller ships out of the system, their genuine yet deceptive delivery missions completed. Only the furthest, most massive vessels were left behind.
The Yawning Angel was already frantically making its own preparations to depart in pursuit, closing off most of its transit corridors, snap-Displacing drones from the Orbital, hurrying through a permission-to-depart request to the world’s Hub and drawing up schedules for ferrying people back to the Orbital on smaller craft once it had got under way while at the same time bringing other personnel back before its own velocity grew too great.
It knew it was wasting its energy, but it signalled the Sleeper Service anyway. Meanwhile, it watched intently as the departing ship accelerated away.
The Yawning Angel was gauging, judging, calibrating.
It was looking for a figure, comparing an aspect of the reality that was the absconding craft with the abstraction that was a simple but crucial equation. If the Sleeper Service’s velocity could at any point over time be described by a value greater than .54 x ns2, the Yawning Angel might be in trouble.
It might be in trouble anyway, but if the larger vessel was accelerating significantly quicker than its normal design parameters implied — allowing for the extra mass of the craft’s extraneous environments — then that trouble started right now.
As it was, the Yawning Angel was relieved to see, the Sleeper Service was moving away at exactly that rate; the ship was still perfectly apprehendable, and even if the Yawning Angel waited for another day without doing anything it would still be able to track the larger craft with ease and catch up with it within two days. Still suspecting some sort of trick, the Yawning Angel started an observation routine throughout the system for unexpected Displacings of gigatonnes of water and gas-giant atmosphere; suddenly dumping all that extra volume and mass now would be one way the Sleeper Service could put on an extra burst of speed, even if it would still be significantly slower than the Yawning Angel.