"Anything of interest?" the Commander asked, following his weapons officer towards the nearest warship. He had to try to keep the excitement out of his voice. They had them! They had them! He had to brake the suit hard; in his enthusiasm he almost collided with his weapons officer.

In the ruined suite that had been the place where the human had lived, the security officer swivelled in the vacuum, surveying the wreckage the evacuating whirlwind of air had left. Human coverings; clothes, items of furniture, some complicated structures; models of some sort. "No," he said. "Nothing of interest."

"Hmm," the ship said. Something about the tone communicated unease to the Commander. At the same moment, his weapons officer turned his suit to him. "Sir," he said. A light flicked on, picking out a metre-diameter circle of the ship's hull. Its surface was riotously embellished and marked, covered in strange, sweeping designs. The weapons officer swept the light over nearby sections of the vessel's curved hull. It was all the same, all of it covered with these curious, whorled patterns and motifs.

"What?" the Commander said, concerned now.

"This… complexity," the weapons officer said, sounding perplexed.

"Internal, too," the Culture ship broke iri.

"It…" the weapons officer said, spluttering. His suit moved closer to the warship's hull, until it was almost touching. "This will take for ever to scan!" he said. "It goes down to the atomic level!"

'What does?" the Commander said sharply.

"The ships have been baroqued, to use the technical term," the Culture ship said urbanely. "It was always a possibility." It made a sighing noise. The vessels have been fractally inscribed with partially random, non-predictable designs using up a little less than one per cent of the mass of each craft. There is a chance that hidden in amongst that complexity will be independent security nano-devices which will activate at the same time as each ship's main systems and which will require some additional coded reassurance that all is well, otherwise they will attempt to disable or even destroy the ship. These will have to be looked for. As your weapons officer says, the craft will each have to be scanned at least down to the level of individual atoms. I shall begin this task the instant I have completed the reprogramming of the base's Mind. This will delay us, that's all; the ships would have required scanning in any event, and in the meantime, nobody knows we're here. You will have your war fleet in a matter of days rather than hours, Commander, but you will have it."

The weapons officer's space suit turned to face the Commander's. The light illuminating the outlandish designs switched off. Somehow, from the way he performed these actions, the weapons officer conveyed a mood of scepticism and perhaps even disgust to the Commander.

"Ka!" the Commander said contemptuously, whirling away and heading back towards the airlock doors. He needed to wreck something. The accommodation section ought to provide articles which would be satisfying but unimportant. His personal guard swept after him, weapons ready.

Passing over the still, frozen body of the human — even that hadn't provided any sport — Commander Risingmoon Parchseason IV of the Farsight tribe and the battleship Xenoclast — on secondment to the alien ship Attitude Adjuster — unholstered one of the external weapons on his own suit and blasted the small figure into a thousand pieces, scattering fragments of frosty pink and white across the cold floor of the hangar like a small, delicate fall of snow.

7. Tier

I

Such investigations took time. There was the time that even hyperspacially transmitted information took to traverse the significant percentages of the galaxy involved, there were complicated routes to arrange, other Minds to talk to, sometimes after setting up appointments because they were absent in Infinite Fun space for a while. Then the Minds had to be casualed up to, or gossip or jokes or thoughts on a mutual interest had to be exchanged before a request or a suggestion was put which re-routed and disguised an information search; sometimes these re-routes took on extra loops, detours and shuntings as the Minds concerned thought to play down their own involvement or involve somebody else on a whim, so that often wildly indirect paths resulted, branching and re-branching and doubling back on themselves until eventually the relevant question was asked and the answer, assuming it was forthcoming, started the equally tortuous route back to the original requester. Frequently simple seeker-agent programs or entire mind-state abstracts were sent off on even more complicated missions with detailed instructions on what to look for, where to find it, who to ask and how to keep their tracks covered.

Mostly it was done like that; through Minds, AI core memories and innumerable public storage systems, information reservoirs and databases containing schedules, itineraries, lists, plans, catalogues, registers, rosters and agenda.

Sometimes, though, when that way — the relatively easy, quick and simple way — was closed to the inquirer for some reason, usually to do with keeping the inquiry secret, things had to be done the slow way, the messy way, the physical way. Sometimes there was no alternative.

The vacuum dirigible approached the floating island under a brilliantly clear night sky awash with moon and star light. The main body of the airship was a giant fat disk half a kilometre across with a finish like brushed aluminium; it glinted in the blue-grey light as if frosted, though the night was warm, balmy and scented with the heady perfume of wineplant and sierra creeper. The craft's two gondolas — one on top, one suspended underneath — were smaller, thinner disks only three storeys in height, each slowly revolving in different directions, their edges glowing with lights.

The sea beneath the airship was mostly black-dark, but in places it glowed dimly in giant, slowly fading Vs as giant sea creatures surfaced to breathe or to sieve new levels of the waters for their tiny prey, and so disturbed the light-emitting plankton near the surface.

The island floated high in the breeze-ruffled waters, its base a steeply fluted pillar that extended a kilometre down into the sea's salty depths, its thin, spire-like mountains thrusting a similar distance into the cloudless air. It too was scattered with lights; of small towns, villages, individual houses, lanterns on beaches and smaller aircraft, most of them come out to welcome the vacuum dirigible.

The two slowly revolving gondola sections slid gradually to a halt, preparatory to docking. People in both segments congregated on the sides nearest the island, for the view. The airship's system registered the imbalance building up and pumped bubblecarbon spheres full of vacuum from one lot of tanks to another, so maintaining a suitably even keel.

The island's main town drifted slowly closer, the docking tower bright with lights. Lasers, fireworks and searchlights all fought for attention.

"I really should go, Tish," the drone Gruda Aplam said. "I didn't promise, but I did kind of say I'd probably stop by…"

"Ah, stop by on the way back," Tishlin said, waving his glass. "Let them wait."

He stood on the balcony outside one of the lower gondola's mid-level bars. The drone — a very old thing, like two grey-brown rounded cubes one on top of the other and three-quarters the size of a human — floated beside him. They'd only met that day, four days into the cruise over the Orbital's floating islands and they'd got on famously, quite as though they'd been friends for a century or more. The drone was much older than the man but they found they had the same attitudes, the same beliefs and the same sense of humour. They both liked telling stories, too. Tishlin had the impression he hadn't yet scratched the veneer off the old machine's tales of when it had been in Contact — a millennium before he had, and goodness knew he was considered an old codger these days.