“What’s going—?” Yime began, as a silvery ellipsoid flickered into existence around the statue, obscuring it. When the ellipsoid vanished with a small “pop”, the statue was gone and where it had stood there was a fresh-looking patch of rug.
“What’s happening?” Yime said, just starting to feel worried and looking from the humanoid avatar to the ship-drone.
The two machines seemed to hesitate, then the little drone said, “Uh-oh.”
Himerance turned to Yime. “That was the ship attempting a Displace, back to it.”
“The micro-singularity didn’t arrive,” the drone told her.
“What?” Yime said. “How—?”
Himerance stepped forward, took Yime by the elbow. “We need to go,” he said, moving Yime towards the suite’s entrance.
“Checking that tunnel again,” the drone said, and flew quickly across the room, disappearing into the hole the circular bed had left.
“The ship’s being instructed to quit the system by an NR vessel,” Himerance told Yime as he hustled her into the suite’s main drawing room. “In no uncertain terms. The NR think we’re up to something and seem, by Reliquarian standards, extremely upset. They’re intercepting any Displaces. The drone—” Then Himerance made a noise that was almost a yelp, and covered Yime’s ears with his hands so fast it hurt. The explosion from the depths of the bedroom blew them both over, thudding into the floor. Himerance managed to twist in the air as they fell so that Yime landed on top of him. It still hurt and Yime’s nose, which had thudded into his chin, started to bleed immediately. Every just-healed bone in her body ached in protest.
The avatar dragged her to her feet as clouds of smoke, dust and small floating scraps of debris came rolling out of the bedroom.
Yime started to cough. “—the fuck is going on?” she managed as Himerance walked her smartly towards the suite’s vestibule.
“That was the tunnel being collapsed and sealed by the NR ship,” Himerance said.
“What about the drone?” Yime asked, sniffing back blood as they approached the suite’s double doors.
“Gone,” Himerance told her.
“Can’t we reason with the—?”
“The ship is reasoning as fast as it machinely can with the NR vessel,” Himerance said. “To little avail thus far. It will have to flee or fight very soon. We are already effectively on our own.” The avatar looked at the doors for a moment. They swung open to reveal a broad, plushly decorated corridor, a small man with a furious look on his face and three large men dressed in uniforms of what appeared to be a semi-military nature. The rolling cloud of smoke and dust flowed gently past Himerance and Yime, towards the people in the corridor. The small, furious-looking man stared in utter horror at the dust.
One of the large men levelled a thick-barrelled weapon of some sort at Himerance, who said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have no time for this right now,” and — moving more quickly than Yime would have believed possible — was suddenly, smoothly, after a sort of liquidic, ducking motion, in the midst of the three large men, flicking the weapon out of the hand of the one pointing it while simultaneously, and — almost accidentally, it appeared — stabbing one elbow into the midriff of one of the other men, whose eyes nearly popped from his head as he collapsed with a whooshing noise of rapidly expelled air.
Yime barely had time to register this happening before the other two men went down too, one felled after the avatar pointed the weapon at him — there was a click and a hum, no more — while the other, who’d been holding the weapon, was sent flying backwards into the wall behind by a single thrust from Himerance’s now-outstretched palm.
“Ah,” Himerance said, taking the small man by the throat and pressing the gun against his temple. The small man looked more stunned and terrified than furious now. “Some sort of neural blaster.” This remark seemed addressed to nobody in particular. His next was as squarely aimed at the hotel’s general manager as the neural blaster. “Good day, sir. You will kindly help us to escape.”
Himerance obviously took the man’s subsequent strangled gurgle as indicating assent, because he smiled, relaxed his grip a fraction and, looking at Yime, nodded down the corridor. “This way, I think.”
“What happens now?” Yime asked as they frog-marched the manager down the corridor. “How do we get off the planet?” She stopped and stared at the avatar. “Do we get off the planet?”
“No, we’ll be safer here, just for now,” Himerance told her, stopping at the lift doors and suggesting to the manager that he use his pass-key to priority-order an elevator car.
“We will?” Yime said.
The lift arrived; the avatar took the pass-keys off the manager, inserted them into the elevator car’s control panel, pushed the manager out of the car and stunned him with the neural blaster as the doors closed. Himerance looked round the elevator car as they descended towards a sub-basement not usually accessible to non-staff. A small puff of smoke came out of the control panel through the grille of the emergency speaker. “Actually, no, we won’t be safer here,” Himerance said. “The ship will snap-Displace us off.”
“‘Snap-Displace’? That sounds—”
“Dangerous. Yes, I know. And it is, though we are assuming it’ll be less dangerous than staying here.”
“But if the ship can’t Displace us now—?”
“It can’t Displace us now because it and we are both effectively static, giving the NR time to intercept the Displacement. Whereas later it’ll be coming through at very high speed, passing dangerously close to the planet, grazing its gravity well at high translight and attempting to fit the Displacement event into an ungenerous handful of pico-seconds.”
The avatar sounded remarkably casual about all this, Yime thought. It watched the screen indicating the floors as it counted slowly down. The lift car’s lighting, close overhead, made Himerance’s bald head gleam. “Providing it’s done at sufficiently high speed, that should leave the NR with insufficient time to arrange any interception of the Displacement singularity.” The avatar smiled at her. “That’s the real reason the ship is doing as the NR have demanded, and leaving; it’ll power up the whole way out, execute a minimum-radius-to-power turn and come straight back in, still accelerating, snapping us off and then heading for Sichult. The whole procedure will take some hours, however, as the ship gathers speed, both to make it look like it really is leaving and to make sure that when it passes us it’s going fast enough to confound the NR vessel or vessels. During that time we need to remain hidden from the NR.”
“Will it work?”
“Probably. Ah.” The car drew to a stop.
“‘Probably’?” Yime found herself saying to an empty lift as the avatar moved swiftly between the opening doors.
She followed, to find they were in a deserted basement car park full of wheeled ground vehicles. Yime opened her mouth to speak but the avatar pirouetted, one finger to his lips as he moved towards a bulky-looking vehicle with six wheels and a body that appeared to be made from a single billet of black glass. “This’ll do,” he said. A gull-wing door sighed open. “Though…” he said, as they settled into their seats. “Oh, do put your seat-belt on, won’t you? Thank you… Though the NR may well guess that the ship will attempt this manoeuvre and so either try to prevent or interfere with the Displacement. Or they might attack the ship itself, of course, though that would be rather extreme.”
“They just destroyed the ship’s drone and seem to be trying to kill us — isn’t that fairly extreme already?”
“It is, rather,” the avatar agreed reasonably, looking at the vehicle’s controls until lights came on. “Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.” A screen flashed on, filled with what looked like a city road map.