Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

insufficiently patriotic females, Quil. They could always tell my first love was the Army, not them, and not one of those heartless bitches was prepared to put her male and her people before her own selfish interests. If I’d only had the basic common sense to have been taken with airheads I’d have been happily married with—and probably even more happily survived by—a doting wife and several grown-up children by now.
    ~ Sounds like a narrow escape.
    ~ I notice you’re not specifying who for.
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    The General Systems Vehicle
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appeared on the screen in the Superlifter’s lounge as another point of light in the starfield. It became a silver dot and grew quickly to fill the screen, though there was no sign of detail on the shining surface.
    ~ That’ll be it.
    ~ I suppose so.
    ~ We’ve probably passed near several escort craft, though they wouldn’t be making their presence so obvious. What the Navy calls a High Value Unit; you never send them out alone.
    ~ I thought it might look a little more grand.
    ~ They always look pretty unimposing from the outside.
    The Superlifter plunged into the center of the silver surface. Within it was like looking from an aircraft inside a cloud, then there was the impression of plunging through another surface, then another, then dozens more in quick succession, flicking past like thumbed paper pages in an antique book.
    They burst from the last membrane into a great hazy space lit by a yellow-white line burning high above, beyond layers of wispy cloud. They were above and aft of the craft’s stern. The ship was twenty-five kilometers long and ten wide. The top surface was parkland; wooded hills and ridges separated by and studded with rivers and lakes.
    Bracketed by colossal ribbed and buttressed outriggers chevroned in red and blue, the GSV’s sheer sides were a golden, tawny color, scattered with a motley confusion of foliage-covered platforms and balconies and punctured by a bewildering variety of brightly lit openings, like a glowing vertical city set into sandstone cliffs three kilometers high. The air swarmed with thousands of craft of every type Quilan had ever seen or heard of, and more besides. Some were tiny, some were the size of the Superlifter. Still smaller dots were individual people, floating in the air.
    Two other giant vessels, each barely an eighth of the size of the
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shared the envelope of the GSV’s surrounding field enclosure. Riding a few kilometers off each side, plainer and more dense-looking, they were surrounded with their own concentrations of smaller flying craft.
    ~ It is a little more impressive on the inside, isn’t it?
    Hadesh Huyler remained silent.
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    He was made welcome by an avatar of the ship and a handful of humans. His quarters were generous to the point of extravagance; he had a swimming pool to himself and the side of one cabin looked out into the chasm of air whose far wall, a kilometer distant, was the GSV’s starboard outrigger. Another self-effacing drone played the part of servant.
    He was invited to so many meals, parties, ceremonies, festivals, openings, celebrations and other events and gatherings that the suite’s engagement-managing ware filled two screens just listing the variety of different ways of sorting all his invitations. He accepted a few, mostly those featuring live music. People were polite. He was polite back. Some expressed regret about the war. He was dignified, placatory. Huyler fumed in his mind, spitting invective.
    He walked and traveled through the vast ship, attracting glances everywhere—in a ship of thirty million people, not all of them human or drone, he was the only Chelgrian—but was only rarely forced into conversation.
    The avatar had warned him that some of the people who would want to talk to him would