"It refuses to communicate," the Affronter officer said. "We have surrounded it. You have been deemed most senior Culture — ex-Culture, I should say — representative in its place. This is not a joke, professor, I'm sorry to say. The Orbital has been mined with AM warheads. If it proves necessary, your world will be destroyed. The full cooperation of yourself and everybody else on the Orbital will help ensure this does not happen."

"Well, I don't accept this honour, Cloudsheen. I-"

The Affronter had turned and was floating back towards the windows again. It swivelled in the air as it retreated. "You don't have to," it said. "As I said, you have been deemed."

"Well then," she said, "I deem you to be acting without any authority I care to recognise and-"

The Affronter darted through the air towards her and stopped directly above the bed, making her flinch despite herself. She smelled… something cold and toxic. "Professor," Cloudsheen said. "This is not an academic debate or some common room word-game. You are prisoners and hostages and all your lives are forfeit. The sooner you understand the realities of the situation, the better. I know as well as you that you are in no way in charge of the Orbital, but certain formalities have to be observed, regardless of their practical irrelevance. I consider that duty has now been discharged and frankly that's all that matters, because I have the AM warheads; and you don't." It drew quickly away, sucking a cool breeze behind it. It stopped just before the windows again. "Lastly," it said, "I am sorry to have disturbed you. I thank you personally and on behalf of my crew for the reception party. It was most enjoyable."

He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.

Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.

The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft — the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here — convinced them in every case.

Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.

It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.

In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that — by some criteria — a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

The Attitude Adjuster thought it could see into the souls of the Affronters. They were not the happy-go-lucky life-and-soul-of-the-party grand fellows with a few bad habits they were commonly thought to be; they were not thoughtlessly cruel in the course of seeking to indulge other more benign and even admirable pleasures; they were not merely terrible rascals.

They gloried, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless. They knew they hurt their own kind and others and they revelled in it; it was their purpose. The rest — the robust joviality, the blokish vivacity — was part happy accident, part cunningly exaggerated ploy, the equivalent of an angelic-looking child discovering that a glowing smile will melt the severest adult heart and excuse almost any act, however dreadful.

It had agreed to the plan now coming to fruition with a heavy soul. People would die, Minds be destroyed because of what it was doing. The ghastly danger was gigadeathcrime. Mass destruction. Utter horror. The Attitude Adjuster had lied, it had deceived, it had acted — by what it knew would be the consensual opinion of all but a few of its peers — with massive dishonour. It was all too well aware its name might live for millennia hence as that of a traitor, as an abhorrence, an abomination.

Still, it would do what it had become convinced had to be done, because to do otherwise would be to wish an even worse self-hatred upon itself, the ultimate abomination of disgust at oneself.

Perhaps, it told itself as it brought another slumbering warcraft to wakefulness, the Excession would make everything all right. The half-thought was already ironic, but it continued with it anyway. Yes; maybe the Excession was the solution. Maybe it really was worth all that was being risked in its name, and capable of bringing placid resolution. That would be sweet; the excuse takes over, the casus belli brings peace… Like fuck, it thought. The ship sneered at itself, examining the idiotic thought and then discarding it with probably less contempt than it deserved.

It was, anyway, too late to reconsider now. Too much had been done already. The Pittance Mind was already dead, choosing self-destruction rather than compromise; the human who had been the only other conscious sentience in the rock had been killed, and the de-stored ships would speed, utterly deceived, to what could well prove to be their doom; the future alone knew who or what else they would take with them. The war had begun and all the Attitude Adjuster could do was play out the part it had agreed to play.

Another warship Mind surfaced to wakefulness.

… Excessionary threat near Esperi, the Attitude Adjuster told the newly woken ship; Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Confirmatory messages from the GSV No Fixed Abode, the GCU Different Tan and the MSV Not Invented Here attached…