“They say it’s like the most brilliant lucid dream, for ever.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do you dream, in there?”
“No. Being switched off is exactly like going to sleep — you’re not really aware of it happening, only of waking up again. But you wake after a dreamless sleep.”
“I’m sleepy now,” Cossont said, yawning involuntarily just at the thought. “I’m going to switch you off. That definitely okay? You sure?”
“Entirely. Sweet dreams, Ms Cossont.”
“Sleep well, Mr QiRia.”
…She woke up. Still aboard the Mistake Not…
They’d be at Ospin in a couple of hours, bouncing into the microrbital belonging to the Incast Secular Collectionary order she’d donated the device to.
She remembered that evening aboard the clipper, umpteen years ago, and remembered a surprising amount of that conversation with QiRia’s stored mind-state. She remembered lying with just two hands clasped behind her neck, travelling with the sensibly sized volupt — as elegant in form as it was in tone — rather than the hulking lump of half-unplayable preposterousness that was the twenty-four-string elevenstring.
She remembered fretting over things like pleasing her mother without giving in to her, and whether she’d find somebody as cute as that serving captain in the cocktail bar — though single.
This time, she was wondering whether a pursuing ship might be just about to blow them out of the skies, or whether some pre-alerted special forces ultra-commandos would be waiting for them at the Bokri microrbital to slice or blast them to pieces. Also, whether she’d live to see the Subliming, and whether she would, in the end, go along with everybody else into it.
Vyr lay in the darkness, top hands clasped behind her neck, lower hands clasped over her belly, thinking that, sometimes, not all change was for the better.
The image — of a tearful woman sitting with her back to a view of clouds and sea — was shown as though on a conventional screen hanging in front of him.
“…and then she just seemed to disappear, from the face of the planet, and apparently her bed hasn’t been even slept in for days — many, I mean several days — and then, of course, she is in the Fourteenth, the regiment the Fourteenth, and she was always very active in the Reserve, very respected, and of course there’s been this terrible, terrible—”
“Madame—”
“—terrible explosion on this planet and for all I know — well, I thought, I assumed the worst, naturally, as any mother would. I wondered, ‘Could she have been there, was that where she went? Did she know something?’ as soon as I heard about, about the thing, but then there was nothing…”
The screen went blank. Colonel Agansu nodded. “I see. And this lady is…?”
“She is Warib Cossont, mother of Vyr Cossont, Reserve Lieutenant Commander in the Fourteenth, the female her mother is referring to,” the intelligence officer of the 7*Uagren said. The IO, the colonel and the ship’s captain were the only presences within the virtual command space.
“This may tie in with the unexpected presence of the 5*Gelish-Oplule at Eshri,” the captain told Agansu. “The ship’s last known location was near Xown, and the last known location of Vyr Cossont was in the Girdlecity of Xown. If the ship made full speed from Xown to Eshri there would have been time for it to deliver Vyr Cossont to the Fourteenth’s HQ anything up to two or three hours before our arrival and the attack.”
“Was Vyr Cossont listed as one of those aboard the Fzan-Juym satellite?” the colonel asked.
“No,” the IO said.
“However, that means nothing,” the captain said. “There was barely time for her to be registered and besides, if she was being summoned for some sort of secret mission she would never have been added to the official complement anyway.”
“Where did this information come from?” Agansu asked.
“The screen clip came medium-ranks secret from Regimental Central Intelligence, flagged low probable relevance,” the IO officer said. “But we then added it to a review of our own multiple-remotes sensor data following the destruction of the HQ, which indicated there’s a fifty per cent chance that one of the larger medium-sized pieces of wreckage was a mostly intact though largely disabled four-berth shuttle. That being the case, there is then a sixty per cent chance that one or more viable biologicals could have been Displaced from the wreck to the Mistake Not…, the Culture ship we’re following.”
“Why was this information not extracted from the data at the time?” Agansu asked.
“The data from remotes,” the captain said, “especially in a combat volume, is received erratically, sporadically and late. Real-time data has to be prioritised, Colonel.”
“I see. This Lieutenant Commander Cossont; I can see no mention of her in any special forces or intelligence lists.”
“We don’t believe she is special forces or on a military intelligence secondment,” the captain said. “We believe her semi-civilian status was not cover, but the truth. Her value to the Fourteenth’s high command may have been opportunistic and sudden; the likelihood is it would only just have come to light before she was summoned.”
“And what might the nature of that value have been?” Agansu asked.
“We don’t know yet,” the IO admitted. “Best guess is possibly related to the Culture individual Ngaroe QiRia, who is mentioned in the message from the Zihdren recovered at Ablate.”
“There is record of an individual or individuals of that name having visited Gzilt several times in the past,” the captain added, “though not for several centuries.”
“And all this tells us what?” Agansu asked.
“Perhaps where Lieutenant Commander Cossont is heading,” the captain said. “Until now the Culture ship has pursued a course which has made its final destination difficult to predict, even at a system level. However, within the last half-day, it has become almost certain that it’s aiming for somewhere within the Ospin system. There is a record of Vyr Cossont travelling to the habitat of Bokri, within the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin.”
“When?” Agansu asked.
“Sixteen years ago, three and a half years after she returned from a student exchange trip within the Culture. Her most likely destination within Bokri, we believe, would have been the Incast order. It is possible she deposited an article of some sort with them, possibly a mind-state; the cargo manifest for the vessel she travelled on is a little ambiguous on the exact nature of whatever she might have left there, though some sort of article classified as a ‘self-powered general storage device, alien, vouched, sophisticated, capacity unknown’ is mentioned as forming part of her luggage on the way there but not on the way back.”
“We’ve started trying to get some answers out of the Incast order on this,” the IO said. “Nothing so far; there are confidentiality issues. Also, they’re just under-staffed.” The image of the intelligence officer looked at the captain and the colonel. “With cooperative assets in place we could just hack them but as we’re on our own with this there won’t be much we can do until we physically get there.”
“This is, anyway, all conjecture,” the colonel pointed out.
“It is,” the captain agreed.
“But it’s the best conjecture we’ve got,” the IO officer said. “Nothing else is flagging connections.”
“The Culture ship is already running us about as fast as we can go, Colonel,” the captain said. “If it starts bouncing around inside the Ospin system there’s every chance it can either lose us, put somebody or something down anywhere it wants to without us being able to spot it happening, or both. I think the concatenation of this Cossont person and the Bokri habitat represents a serious lead and that it’s worth following. I propose we try to follow the ship round Ospin if it does start dodging, but rather than lose it while we try to find out what it’s been doing where, we assume it’s heading for Ospin, and act accordingly.”