He calmed his breathing down gradually; it had been very fast and hard for a while, but he slowed it and his heart deliberately.

He

accustomed himself to the suit, testing its functions and powers. It smelled and felt new, and looked like a Rairch-built

device. Rairch suits were

meant to be among the best. People said the Culture made better ones, but people said the Culture

made better everything, and they were still

losing the war. Horza checked out the lasers the suit had built in and searched

for the concealed pistol he knew it ought to carry. He found it at

last, disguised as part of the left forearm casing, a small

plasma hand gun. He felt like shooting it at something, but there was nothing to aim at.

He put it back.

He folded his arms across his bulky chest and looked around. Stars were everywhere. He had no idea which one was Sorpen’s.

So the

Culture ships could hide in the photospheres of stars, could they. And a Mind—even if it was desperate and on the run—could

jump through the

bottom of a gravity well, could it. Maybe the Idirans would have a tougher job than they expected. They were

the natural warriors, they had the

experience and the guts, and their whole society was geared for continual conflict. But

the Culture, that seemingly disunited, anarchic,

hedonistic, decadent mélange of more or less human species, forever hiving

off or absorbing different groups of people, had fought for almost

four years without showing any sign of giving up or even

coming to a compromise.

What everybody had expected to be at best a brief, limited stand, lasting just long enough to make a point, had developed

into a

wholehearted war effort. The early reverses and first few megadeaths had not, as the pundits and experts had predicted,

shocked the Culture

into retiring, horrified at the brutalities of war but proud to have put its collective life where usually

only its collective mouth was. Instead it had

just kept on retreating and retreating, preparing, gearing up and planning.

Horza was convinced the Minds were behind it all.

He could not believe the ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their

communist

Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their

consciencesalving good

works. What more could they want. The war had to be the Minds’ idea; it was part of their clinical

drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on

nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the

Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how

wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves

were.

Horza used the suit’s internal gyros to steer himself, letting him look at every part of the sky, wondering where, in that

light-flecked

emptiness, battles raged and billions died, where the Culture still held and the Idiran battle fleets pressed.

The suit hummed and clicked and

hissed very quietly around him: precise, obedient, reassuring.

Suddenly it jolted, steadying him without warning and jarring his teeth. A noise uncomfortably like a collision alarm trilled

violently in one ear,

and out of the corner of his eye Horza could see a microscreen set inside the helmet near his left cheek

light up with a holo red graph display.

“Target/acquisition/radar," the suit said. “Incoming/in creasing."