of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. He opened his mouth to ask Yalson

to stun the Culture agent again.

“Now," Wubslin said.

With that, Vavatch Orbital started to disintegrate.

The view of it on the mess-room screen was a compensated hyperspace version, so that, although they were already outside the

Vavatch

system, they were watching it virtually in real time. Right at the appointed hour the unseen, unnamed, very much still

militarized General Systems

Vehicle which was somewhere in the vicinity of the Vavatch planetary system started its bombardment.

It was almost certainly an Ocean class

GSV, the same one which had sent the message that they had all watched some days ago

on the mess screen, heading in toward Vavatch.

That would make the warcraft very much smaller than the behemoth of

The Ends of Invention,

which was—for war purposes—obsolete. One

Ocean class could fit inside either of the

Ends’

General bays, but while the larger craft—by that time an hour out from the Orbital—was full of

people, the Ocean class would

be packed with other warships, and weaponry.

Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface

until the sensors

coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture

would just splash the gridfire

all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn’t do that;

instead a single narrow line of blinding white light

appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin

fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the

duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds.

That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire

universe, separating

this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now

partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy,

plucked from nowhere

and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital,

boiling the Circlesea, melting the two

thousand kilometers of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight

across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometer breadth.

Vavatch, that fourteen-million-kilometer hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.

There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity,

was now the very

force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometers per second, Vavatch was throwing itself

into outer space, unwinding like a

released spring.

The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the

original burst had

struck, neatly parceling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometers to a side, each

containing a sandwich of trillions upon

trillions of tons of ultradense base material, water, land and air.

Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling

from each immense flat

square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapor to ice. The ocean itself, no longer

held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling

with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material,

becoming ice and swirling away into space.

The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reversespin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still

spinning sections of

the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light—light from outside the normal fabric of reality.

Horza remembered what Jandraligeli had called it, back when Lenipobra had been enthusing about the destruction.

“The weaponry of the end of the universe," the Mondlidician had said. Horza watched the screen and knew what the man had meant.

It was all going. All of it. The wreck of the

Olmedreca,

the tabular berg it had collided with, the wreck of the

CAT

’s shuttle, Mipp’s body,

Lenipobra’s, whatever was left of Fwi-Song’s corpse, Mr. First’s… the living bodies of the other

Eaters—if they hadn’t been rescued, or had still

refused… the Damage game arena, the docks and Kraiklyn’s dead body, the hovercraft…

animals and fishes, birds, germs, all of it: everything

flash-burned or flash-frozen, suddenly weightless, spinning into space,

going, dying.

The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now

a rosette of white flat

squares backing slowly away from each other toward the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly

freezing water, silt, land and base

material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system’s planets like flat

square worlds themselves.

There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary, blazing splendor. Then at its dark center, another blazing

star patch rose,

bursting white as the Hub was struck with the same terrible energy which had smashed the world itself.

Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.

Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Every one of those flat cards,

and the Hub, of

the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were

shining through each shattered piece.

The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their center Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced

shapes, each

exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.

Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too

small to make out.

Vavatch was now a swollen and spiraled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars

like a ring of

bright dust. The glinting, sparkling center made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.

The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague

but bloated

image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a

halo of white light with a fading

iris at its center. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming

nimbus of the annihilated world.

On other wavelengths there would probably be a lot still to see, but the mess-room screen was on normal light. Only the Minds,

only the

starships, would see the whole destruction perfectly; only they would be able to appreciate it for all that it had

to offer. Of the entire range of the

electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one percent:

a single octave of radiation out of an immense long

keyboard of tones. The sensors on a starship would see everything, right

across that spectrum, in far greater detail and at a much slower

apparent speed. The whole display that was the Orbital’s

destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal

eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought

Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.

“Chicel…" Dorolow said. Wubslin exhaled loudly and shook his head. Yalson turned and looked at Horza. Aviger stayed with his

head

turned to the screen.

“Amazing what one can accomplish when one puts one’s mind to it, eh… Horza."

At first, stupidly, he thought that Yalson had said it, but of course it was Balveda.

She brought her head up slowly. Her deep, dark eyes were open; she looked groggy, and her body still sagged against the webbing

of the

seat straps. The voice had been clear and steady, though.

Horza saw Yalson reaching for the stun gun on the table. She reached out and brought the gun closer to her but left it lying

on the table. She

was looking suspiciously at the Culture agent. Aviger and Dorolow and Wubslin were staring at her, too.

“Are the batteries on that stun gun running down." Wubslin said. Yalson was still looking at Balveda, her eyes narrowed.

“You’re a little confused, Gravant, or whoever you are," Yalson said. “That’s Kraiklyn."

Balveda smiled at Horza. He left his face blank. He didn’t know what to do. He was exhausted, worn out. It was too much of

an effort. Let

what was going to happen, happen. He’d had enough of deciding. “Well," Balveda said to him, “are you going

to tell them, or shall I."

He said nothing. He watched Balveda’s face. The woman drew a deep breath and said, “Oh all right, I’ll tell them." She turned

to Yalson.

“His name is Bora Horza Gobuchul, and he’s impersonating Kraiklyn. Horza’s a Changer from Heibohre and he works

for the Idirans. Has done