"Balveda," he said, laughing lightly, "don't disappoint me. I prefer a fight… You almost sound as though you're coming round to my point of view."

"No," she sighed. "I'm not. Blame it on my Special Circumstances training. We try to think of everything. I was being pessimistic."

"I'd got the impression SC didn't allow such thoughts."

"Then think again, Mr Changer," Balveda said, arching one eyebrow. "SC allows all thoughts. That's what some people find so frightening about it."

Horza thought he knew what the woman meant. Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section's moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture's interfering diplomatic policy, the elite of the elite, in a society which abhorred elitism. Even before the war, its standing and its image within the Culture had been ambiguous. It was glamorous but dangerous, possessed of an aura of roguish sexiness — there was no other word for it — which implied predation, seduction, even violation.

It had about it too an atmosphere of secrecy (in a society that virtually worshipped openness) which hinted at unpleasant, shaming deeds, and an ambience of moral relativity (in a society which clung to its absolutes: life/good, death/bad; pleasure/good, pain/bad) which attracted and repulsed at once, but anyway excited.

No other part of the Culture more exactly represented what the society as a whole really stood for, or was more militant in the application of the Culture's fundamental beliefs. Yet no other part embodied less of the society's day-to-day character.

With war, Contact had become the Culture's military, and Special Circumstances its intelligence and espionage section (the euphemism became only a little more obvious, that was all). And with war, SC's position within the Culture changed, for the worse. It became the repository for the guilt the people in the Culture experienced because they had agreed to go to war in the first place: despised as a necessary evil, reviled as an unpleasant moral compromise, dismissed as something people preferred not to think about.

SC really did try to think of everything, though, and its Minds were reputedly even more cynical, amoral and downright sneaky than those which made up Contact; machines without illusions which prided themselves on thinking the thinkable to its ultimate extremities. So it had been wearily predicted that just this would happen. SC would become a pariah, a whipping-child, and its reputation a gland to absorb the poison in the Culture's conscience. But Horza guessed that knowing all this didn't make it any easier for somebody like Balveda. Culture people had little stomach for being disliked by anybody, least of all their fellow citizens, and the woman's task was difficult enough without the added burden of knowing she was even greater anathema to most of her own side than she was to the enemy.

"Well, whatever, Balveda," he said, stretching. He flexed his stiff shoulders within the suit, pulled his fingers through his thin, yellow-white hair. "I guess it'll work itself out."

Balveda laughed mirthlessly. "Never a truer word…" She shook her head.

"Thanks, anyway," he told her.

"For what?"

"I think you just reinforced my faith in the ultimate outcome of this war."

"Oh, just go away, Horza." Balveda sighed and looked down to the floor.

Horza wanted to touch her, to ruffle her short black hair or pinch her pale cheek, but guessed it would only upset her more. He knew too well the bitterness of defeat to want to aggravate the experience for somebody who was, in the end, a fair and honourable adversary. He went to the door, and after a word with the guard outside he was let out.

"Ah, Bora Horza," Xoralundra said as the human appeared out of the cell doorway. The Querl came striding along the companionway. The guard outside the cell straightened visibly and blew some imaginary dust off his carbine. "How is our guest?"

"Not very happy. We were trading justifications and I think I won on points." Horza grinned. Xoralundra stopped by the man and looked down.

"Hmm. Well, unless you prefer to relish your victories in a vacuum, I suggest that the next time you leave my cabin while we are at battle stations you take your-"

Horza didn't hear the next word. The ship's alarm erupted.

The Idiran alarm signal, on a warship as elsewhere, consists of what sounds like a series of very sharp explosions. It is the amplified version of the Idiran chest-boom, an evolved signal the Idirans had been using to warn others in their herd or clan for several hundred thousand years before they became civilised, and produced by the chest-flap which is the Idiran vestigial third arm.

Horza clapped his hands to his ears, trying to shut out the awful noise. He could feel the shock waves on his chest, through the open neck of the suit. He felt himself being picked up and forced against the bulkhead. It was only then that he realised he had shut his eyes. For a second he thought he had never been rescued, never left the wall of the sewercell, that this was the moment of his death and all the rest had been a strange and vivid dream. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into the keratinous snout of the Querl Xoralundra, who shook him furiously and, just as the ship alarm cut off and was replaced by a merely painfully intense whine, said very loudly into Horza's face, "HELMET!"

"Oh shit!" said Horza.

He was dropped to the deck as Xoralundra let him go, turned quickly, and scooped a running medjel off the floor as it tried to get past him. "You!" Xoralundra bellowed. "I am the spy-father Querl of the fleet," he shouted into its face and shook the six-limbed creature by the front of its suit. "You will go to my cabin immediately and bring the small space helmet lying there to the port-side stem emergency lock. As fast as possible. This order supersedes all others and cannot be countermanded. Go!" He threw the medjel in the right direction. It landed running.

Xoralundra flipped his own helmet over from its back-hinged position, then opened the visor. He looked as though he was about to say something to Horza, but the helmet speaker crackled and spoke, and the Querl's expression changed. The small noise stopped and only the continuing wail of the cruiser's alarm was left. "The Culture craft was hiding in the surface layers of the system sun," Xoralundra said bitterly, more to himself than to Horza.

"In the sun?" Horza was incredulous. He looked back at the cell door, as though somehow it was Balveda's fault. "Those bastards are getting smarter all the time."

"Yes," snapped the Querl, then turned quickly on one foot. "Follow me, human." Horza obeyed, starting after the old Idiran at a run, then bumping into him as the huge figure stopped in its tracks. Horza watched the broad, dark, alien face as it swivelled round to look over his head at the Idiran trooper still standing stiffly at the cell door. An expression Horza could not read passed over Xoralundra's face. "Guard," the Querl said, not loudly. The trooper with the laser carbine turned. "Kill the woman."

Xoralundra stamped off down the corridor. Horza stood for a moment, looking first at the rapidly receding Querl, then at the guard as he checked his carbine, ordered the cell door to open, and stepped inside. Then the man ran down the corridor after the old Idiran.

"Querl!" gasped the medjel as it skidded to a stop by the airlock, the suit helmet held in front of it. Xoralundra swept the helmet from its grasp and fitted it quickly over Horza's head.

"You will find a warp attachment in the lock," the Idiran told Horza. "Get as far away as possible. The fleet will be here in about nine standard hours. You shouldn't have to do anything; the suit will summon help on a coded IFF response. I, too-" Xoralundra broke off as the cruiser lurched. There was a loud bang and Horza was blown off his feet by a shock wave, while the Idiran on his tripod of legs hardly moved. The medjel which had gone for the helmet yelped as it was blown under Xoralundra's legs. The Idiran swore and kicked at it; it ran off; The cruiser lurched again as other alarms started. Horza could smell burning. A confused medley of noises that might have been Idiran voices or muffled explosions came from somewhere overhead. "I too shall try to escape," Xoralundra continued. "God be with you, human."