Mieli is perched on Hektor’s surface, watching the battle. It unfolds before her, dream-like, through the viscous lenses of quicktime and combat autism. The Liquorice-zoku’s passive sensors – barely more than flakes of condensed matter with topological quantum logic – intercept fragments of the pellegrini fleet’s signals and tightbeam them to her. She feels strangely vulnerable: even though the Sobornost ships are thousands of kilometres away, through the sensor network, her presence and self-image extend right into the heart of the battle itself.
The combatants are the smallest class of common Sobornost vessel, diamonoid wedges barely a metre long, housing computronium cores and millions of gogols. Yet their surfaces are carved with intricate detail. Tetrahedral prows decorated by vasilev and hsien-ku images, a smiling handsome man and a studious, serious woman. The chilling beautiful visage of the pellegrini multiplied thousandfold, both as a proud figurehead and repeated all over the ships’ pearly skin across all length scales, down to the atomic level.
The fleets pass through each other again, and this time, antimatter novae bloom at the point of contact, staccato notes of searing light. Her armour complains at the sudden gamma ray bombardment. She tells the spimescape to filter out as much noise as it can. Her gogols fill in missing data and plot likely trajectories. They seek matches to the mission constraints and direct her attention to an optimal target.
There: a pellegrini raion, severely damaged, hurtling away from the main spear of the fleet. Diamonoid fragments float around it in a halo, extruding filaments in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the main hull whose perfect symmetry has been ruined by a deep crater on the port side. But the damage is not only physicaclass="underline" the smartmatter surface boils with the waste heat of a software conflict. Ghostgun bullets have embedded themselves in the ship’s white flesh, flooding its virs with invader gogols. In seconds, the raion will be enveloped by the next thrust of the joint fleet of hsien-kus and vasilevs.
Mieli takes a deep breath, and sends the raion the message she has checked and re-checked against her Sobornost protocol gogols during the last few days, a coded burst of wartime code.
To Elixir-4711. This is Balsamo-334. Your sacrifice for the Great Common Task will be complete in four point three seconds in your frame. You are requested to transmit us a gogol of your observer chen.
The tenth of a second that sluggish light takes to travel to the raion gives her a moment to reflect while waiting for the response, truly alone for the first time since the beginning of the journey, with the radio silence between her and the Zweihänder isolating her from her zoku companions. She casts a quick glance at the elongated shape of Hektor. The zoku ship is hidden behind the bulk of the asteroid, along with its own metacloak, and even at this distance she can’t detect any signs of it – except the faint pulsing of her Liquorice jewel.
There is something she has been wondering about the mission ever since Zinda described it. Given the intensity of the Great Game intelligence operations elsewhere, is she really that important?
Or is this a test, designed to probe her loyalty? And if that is the case, does she dare to fail? She has to remain useful to the Great Game, has to win entanglement, to get closer to the Kaminari jewel.
The response from Elixir comes, preceded by a rapid burst of protocol. Mieli sighs with relief. At least her Protocol War codes are still approximately up to date. But the message itself makes her grit her teeth.
Founder code authorisation required.
Mieli whispers a fervent prayer, first to Kuutar and Ilmatar, and then to the pellegrini.
‘What a waste of gogols this is.’
Mieli blinks. The Sobornost goddess is standing next to her on some invisible surface. She checks her metacortex, to make sure none of her perceptions will filter through to the rest of the zoku.
‘Oh, stop fretting, dear,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Please give me more credit than that. Once we are done, I will edit your memories to make sure it looks like your old Protocol War codes still worked. But first, let me send a confirmation to my sisters.’
With disturbing ease, the pellegrini takes over Mieli’s systems and answers the Elixir’s message with a quick, coded burst.
‘There. All done. Now we just have to enjoy the show. I would dearly like to exchange a few words with my sisters, to get an update on the situation in the Inner System, but you are right, the zoku is testing you. In all honesty, I am surprised that things have not escalated faster. I would have expected the All-Defector to move against my brothers and sisters by now, and that should have made Anton and Hsien give up on petty squabbles such as this. But then they were always too blind to see what was right in front of them.’
The sensor data from the zoku nodes reaches Mieli just before the confirmation that the thoughtwisp containing the ship’s political officer chen has been launched. There is a flash on the Elixir’s prow as the ship burns a portion of its antimatter to propel a tiny thoughtwisp towards Hektor at an impressive fraction of lightspeed.
‘See?’ the pellegrini says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
Mieli sends a brief qupt to the Zweihänder to alert them to the success of the first part of the mission, and to get ready for pickup. Everything is in the timing: if they perform the grab fast enough, the Sobornost fleets will still be too involved in their battle to do anything about it. Even the will of the Founders must bow to Newton.
We’re ready, comes an answer, tinged with the mingled presences of her zoku, the austere calm of Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, the fiery enthusiasm of Sir Mik, and a warm touch from Zinda. The pellegrini gives Mieli a faint smile, but says nothing.
Mieli tracks the thoughtwisp with her lasers, ready to fire them to decelerate it for the grab. As soon as she has it, Zweihänder will swing past at full blast of her antimatter engines, and grab her with a q-dot field. She is so focused on the tiny reflective disc, its colours warped by blueshift, that the details of the battle are lost to her for a moment. But the pellegrini is still watching it through her eyes.
‘Curious,’ the goddess says. ‘That is not what I would have done. You never know with these high-generation branches, fallen so far from the original. But still—’
The thoughtwisp is within a millisecond of Hektor. Mieli fires the armour’s lasers at it in short bursts: it dances from side to side in the coherent light like a feather in the wind, reflections decelerating it rapidly. That’s it: I’ve given away my position if they are suspicious.
‘Mieli,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Something is wrong. The Elixir just sent a communication burst to the hsien-ku/vasilev fleet. It doesn’t make sense. Are they negotiating? Why would I do that? No tactical advantage whatsoever!’
Something tickles at the back of Mieli’s mind. Spooky-zoku’s quantum oracles found anomalies. But the razor focus of combat autism washes it away. The wisp is almost within range now, and she starts launching a volley of q-dots to grab it.