The Algebraist (8 page)

Fassin thought back, desperately trying to fit all that had happened to him today, with Slovius, with Verpych, with everybody who would have to be in on the joke, into a scenario more plausible than the one he was apparently faced with: an appallingly high-level projection from a portal-carrying Eship still a dozen light years away ordering him to join an allegedly no-holds-barred intelligence unit answering to an Order and a discipline he knew no more about than any other lay person, and with the force of the Administrata and the Engineers behind it.

‘Do you find the above-mentioned secondment details acceptable?’ the orb repeated.

Or maybe, Fassin thought, Sept Bantrabal as a whole was being made fun of here. Maybe nobody here knew this was a practical joke. Would somebody go to all this trouble just to make him look foolish, to frighten him? Had he ever antagonised anybody with the resources to set something like this up? Well…

‘Do you find the above-mentioned secondment details acceptable?’ the orb said again.

Fassin gave in. If he was lucky this was a joke. If not, it might be very stupid and even dangerous to treat it as such when it wasn’t.

‘Given your crude and objectionable threats, I don’t really have much choice, do I?’

‘Is that an answer in the affirmative?’

‘I suppose so. Yes.’

‘Good. You may ask questions, Seer Fassin Taak.’

‘Why am I being seconded?’

‘To facilitate the actions you will be asked to perform and to help achieve whatever goals you will be requested to pursue.’

‘What would those be?’

‘Initially, you are commanded to travel to Pirrintipiti, capital city of ‘glantine planet-moon, there to take ship for Borquille, capital of Sepekte, principal planet of the Ulubis system for further briefing.’

‘And after that?’

‘You will be expected to carry out actions and pursue goals as detailed in said briefing.’

‘But why? What’s behind all this? What’s this all about?’

‘Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.’

‘Why the Shrievalty Ocula, specifically?’

‘Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.’

‘Who has ordered this?’

‘Information regarding what you ask is not--’

‘All right!’ Fassin drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat. Still, this projection had to have authority from somebody, it would have to know where it stood in the vast web of Mercatorial rank and seniority. ‘What rank was the person who ordered this?’

‘Administrata: Shrievalty Army-Group Chief of Staff,’ the orb said. (Well, that went right to the top, Fassin thought. Whatever piece of nonsense, military bullshittery or wild-goose chase this was all about, it was one being authorised by somebody with no excuses for not knowing better.) ‘Ascendancy: Senior Engineer,’ the projection continued. (Ditto; Senior Engineer didn’t sound as Grand-High-Everything-Else impressive as Army-Group Chief of Staff, for example, but it was the highest rank in the Engineers, the people who made, transported and emplaced the wormholes that stitched the whole galactic meta-civilisation together. In terms of ultimate power, and regardless of species, an SE probably way out-wielded a CoS.) ‘Omnocracy:’ the orb said, with what sounded like a note of finality, ‘Complector.’

Fassin sat and stared. He blinked a few times. He was aware that his mouth was open, so he closed it. His skin had seemed to tighten, all over his body. A fucking
Complector!
he thought, already wondering if he hadn’t misheard. One of the
Culmina
ordered this?

A Complector sat at the clear undisputed pinnacle of the Mercatoria’s civil command structure. Each one held absolute power over a significant galactic volume, usually with a definable locus, like a stellar cluster or a minor or even a major galactic arm. The least senior of them would be in charge of hundreds of thousands of stars, millions of planets, billions of habitats and trillions of souls. As well as their subject Administrata, they commanded the chiefs of all the other Ascendancy divisions within their jurisdiction - Engineers, Propylaea, Navarchy and Summed Fleet - and they were always Culmina. The only thing which outranked a Complector was a bigger bunch of Complectors.

Fassin thought for a moment, trying to calm himself down. Remember this could be a joke. The very fact that a Complector’s authority had been invoked almost made it more likely that it was, it was just so preposterous.

On the other hand, he had the disquieting feeling, prompted by a half-remembered school lesson he probably ought to have been paying more attention to, that falsely invoking a Complector’s authority was potentially a capital offence.

Think, think. Forget the Complector; back to the moment. What assumptions might he be making here? Any of the ego? (He’d had this psychological check-sum routine drilled into him at college, where he’d scored high on what was usually called the
Me-me-me!
scale. Though not as high as Saluus Kehar.) Well, he could think of one egotistical assumption he might be making immediately.

‘How many other people are being similarly summoned?’ he asked.

‘By emissarial projection, only yourself.’

Fassin sat back. Well, that certainly felt pleasing, but he suspected it was probably a much worse sign than it appeared.

‘And by other means?’

‘You will be joining a group of senior officials in Borquille, capital city of Sepekte, for further briefing. This group will number approximately thirty.’

‘And what will be the subject of this briefing?’

‘Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.’

‘How long am I likely to be away from home? Do I just go to Sepekte, get "briefed" and come back? What?’

‘Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice.’

‘So I should expect to be away a while?’

‘Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice. Further information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.’

Fassin sighed. ‘So is that it? You’ve been sent to tell me to go to Sepekte? All this… kerfuffle, for that?’

‘No. You are to be informed that this is a matter of the utmost consequence and gravity, in which you may be asked to play a significant part. Also that information has come to light which indicates that there is a profound and imminent threat to Ulubis system. No further details concerning this are carried by this construct. You are commanded to report to the palace of the Hierchon in Borquille, capital of Sepekte, principal planet of the Ulubis system, for further briefing, no later than hour Fifteen tomorrow evening, the ninth of Duty, Borquille-Sepekte local time. Gchron, 6.61…’ The sphere started to restate the time of Fassin’s appointment at the Hierchon’s palace the following day in a variety of different formats, as if to remove any last excuse for him not getting there on time. Fassin sat, staring at a beige-blank section of polarised window on the far side of the chamber, trying to decide what the hell to make of all this.

Oh, fuck
was the best he could come up with.

‘… The eighteenth of November, AD 4034, rHuman,’ the glowing orb concluded. ‘Transport will be provided. Baggage allowance is one large bag, carryable, plus luggage required to transport full formal court dress for your presentation to the Hierchon. A gee-suit should be worn for the outgoing journey. Any further questions?’

Verpych thought for a moment. ‘Military-grade hysteria.’

Slovius shifted in his tub-chair. ‘Explain, please?’

‘They are likely over-correcting for earlier dismissiveness, sir.’

‘Somebody’s been telling them there’s a problem, they’ve been pooh-poohing it, then suddenly woken up to the threat and panicked?’ Fassin suggested. Verpych nodded once.

‘The decisional dynamics of highly rigid power structures make an interesting study subject,’ Tchayan Olmey said. Fassin’s old tutor and mentor smiled across at him, a calm, gauntly grey presence. The four of them sat at a large round table in Slovius’s old study, Slovius himself supported in a large semi-enclosed device that looked like a cross between an ancient hip bath and a small flier. Fassin thought his uncle’s tusked, whiskered face looked more animated, and even more human, than it had for years. Slovius had announced at the start of the meeting that for the duration of whatever emergency they might be involved in, his slow demise was being halted; he was fully back in charge of Sept Bantrabal. Fassin had been appalled to find that there was some small, mean, self-aggrandising part of him which felt disappointed and even slightly angry that his uncle wasn’t going to keep slipping into the hazy, woozily uncaring senility that led to death.

‘The phrase the projection used was "profound and imminent threat",’ Fassin reminded them. That was what had spooked him, he supposed, that was why he’d suggested this meeting, told them what he had. If there really was a threat to Ulubis system, he wanted, at the very least, Sept Bantrabal’s senior people to know about it. The only person missing from the conference was Fassin’s mother, who was on a year-long retreat in a Cessorian habitat somewhere in the system’s Kuiper belt, ten light days away and therefore profoundly out of the discussion. They had discussed whether she should be contacted and warned that there was some sort of system-wide threat, but without details this seemed premature and possibly even counter-productive.

Olmey shrugged. ‘The overreaction might well extend to the language used to describe the perceived problem,’ she said.

‘There has been a recent increase in Beyonder attacks,’ Verpych said thoughtfully.

For the two centuries after the loss of its portal, the sporadic Beyonder assaults on Ulubis - as a rule against the system’s outskirts and military targets - had declined to such an extent they were barely even of nuisance value. Certainly there were far fewer attacks than there had been in the years before the wormhole’s destruction. For millennia, almost every system in the Mercatoria had been getting used to these generally irritating, rarely devastating raids - they tied up ships and materiel and kept the whole meta-civilisation slightly on edge but they had yet to produce any real atrocities - and it had come as something of a relief to the people of Ulubis, a kind of unlooked-for bonus, that for some perverse reason the system’s temporary isolation had so far been a time when the direct military pressure on it had seemed to decrease rather than been cranked up.

Over the last year or so, however, there had been a slight increase in the number of attacks - the first time in two centuries that the yearly number had risen rather than fallen - and those assaults had been of a slightly different nature compared to those that people had more or less got used to. The targets had not all been military units or items of infrastructure, for one thing: a comet-cloud mining co-op had been destroyed, some belt and cloud ships had disappeared or been discovered drifting, empty or slagged, one small cruise liner had just disappeared between Nasqueron and the system’s outermost gas-giant, and a single heavy-missile ship had appeared suddenly in the mid-system half a year ago, travelling at eighty per cent light speed and targeted straight at Borquille. It had been picked off with ease, but it had been an alarming development.

Slovius wobbled in his tub-chair again, slopping a little water onto the wooden floor. ‘Is there anything that you are
not
allowed to tell us, nephew?’ he asked, then made a sound that sounded disturbingly like a chortle.

‘Nothing specific, sir. I’m not supposed to talk to anybody about any part of this except to… further my mission, which at the moment consists of getting to Borquille by Fifteen tomorrow. Obviously, I’ve chosen to interpret this as allowing me to talk to you three. Though I would ask that it goes no further.’

‘Well,’ Slovius said, with a noise like a gargle in his throat, ‘you shall have my own suborbship to take you to Pirrintipiti for transfer.’

‘Thank you, sir. However, they did say that transport was being provided.’

‘Navarchy’s filed an outgoing from here for half-Four tomorrow morning,’ Verpych confirmed. ‘Going to have to shift if they’re getting you to Sepekte for Fifteen tomorrow,’ he added, with a sniff. ‘You’ll need to suffer five or six gees the whole way, Fassin Taak.’ Major-Domo Verpych smiled. ‘I suggest you start adjusting your water and solids intake accordingly now.’

‘We shall have my vessel standing by in any case,’ Slovius said, ‘should this transport fail to turn up, or be overly crude in form. See to this, major-domo.’

Verpych nodded. ‘Sir.’

‘Uncle, may I have a word?’ Fassin asked as the meeting broke up. He’d hoped to catch Slovius before they’d begun, but his uncle had arrived with Verpych, Slovius looking energised and triumphant, Verpych appearing troubled, even worried.

Slovius nodded to his major-domo and Olmey. In a few moments Fassin and his uncle were left alone in the study.

‘Nephew?’

‘This morning, sir, when you were asking me about my most recent delves, while the emissarial projection was being downloaded--’

‘How much did I know of the matter?’