Anyway, more help is on the way.”
“It is? Well, hippety-hey for us. What is it? Who are they?”
“Some old Torturer class.”
“What, a proper ship?”
“A proper warship. Though old, like I say. Here in a couple of hours.”
“So soon. That’s unannounced.”
“That’s old warships for you. Tramp around, don’t tell anybody where they are or what they’re up to for years, decades or longer, but then every now and again one of them finds itself in the right place at the right time to do something useful. Breaks the monotony, I suppose.”
“Well, it’s come to the right fucking place to do that.”
“Woh. Getting frazzled, are we?”
“No more than you, coll.”
“That’s estcoll to you.”
“Blit a few kilo more of these little graveller fucks and you might just pretend to the level of esteemed colleague. Until then you’re only provisionally even a colleague, coll.”
“Golly. Terrible how we flirt, isn’t it?”
“Oh my, yes,” Auppi Unstril said, grinning, even though this was a sound-only comm. “Gets me all-scale flushed up. Any other news?”
“Our ever-helpful estcolls in the GFCF report they’re just about containing the outbreaks they’ve come across,” Lanyares Tersetier
– colleague and lover – told her. “Like us, they keep thinking that’s it, dealt with, under control, then another bit flares up. Mostly, though, they seem to be spending their time like they said: checking out all the other fabricaria.”
“I suppose we should be grateful they seem to be coping so well.”
“And that they had so many ships that close.”
“Yeah. Makes you wonder what they were all doing hereabouts in the first place.”
“You really have it in for the little cute guys, don’t you?”
“Is that how it sounds?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I don’t trust those little fucks.”
“They speak very well of you.”
“They speak very well of everybody.”
“That so bad?”
“Yes; it means you can’t trust them.”
“You’re so cynical.”
“And paranoid. Don’t forget paranoid.”
“You sure you wouldn’t have done better in SC?”
“No, I’m not. What about the Hylo?” The Fast Picket
Hylozoist was on the far side of the Disk from where they were. Bamboozlingly, an almost simultaneous eruption of smatter had taken place alarmingly near to the Disk’s Initial Contact Facility, the principal – indeed, by treaty terms, mandatory – base for all the species currently taking an active interest in the Tsungarial Disk. If anything, that infection was worse than this one, with fewer but more sophisticated machines emerging like hatching larvae from a scatter of fabricaria clustered about the Facility itself and taxing the long-disarmed Hylozoist severely. It was just about coping in its own theatre, but it had no more resources to spare for the outbreaks Auppi and her friends were trying to handle.
“Same; still struggling to cope with its share of the fun.”
The GFCF were already talking darkly about some sort of plot; these two outbreaks, so close together in time but far apart in terms of Disk geometry, looked suspicious, they reckoned. They suspected dastardly outside interference and would not rest until the culprits were unmasked. In the meantime they would fight valiantly alongside their esteemed Culture comrades to contain, roll back and ultimately extinguish the smatter outbreak. They were sending their ships all over the Disk, ensuring that the infection was spreading no further while leaving their more martially oriented Culture cousins to do the equivalent of the hand-to-hand stuff. (Play to one’s strengths, and all that.) Even trying to avoid the truly vicious stuff, they were still stumbling across bits of it now and again. They were doing their best to smite with the best of them (which meant the Culture, obviously), even though this was not really in their nature.
“Okay. So what’s the news with you personally, lover?”
“Missing you. Otherwise okay. Keeping busy.”
“Oh, aren’t we all? Well, I’d better go. More swarmers to waste. Got another cloud coming out of one of the mid L-Sevens. Off I go to blit.”
“Blit away. Don’t get blitted.”
“Ditto to you. Till next-”
“You forgot to say, ‘Missing you too.’”
“Wha-? I did, didn’t I? What a crap girlfriend. Miss you; love you.”
“Love you too. Back to the fray, I guess.”
“Hold on. We have a name for that Torturer class?”
“Oddly, no. Probably means it’s one of the particularly weird ones. Want to bet it’s a vet of the I-war still troubled and trying to deal with its issues after a millennium and a half?”
“Oh, fuck. A weirded-up geriatric warship getting piled into the current mix. With our luck it’ll have come to join the fucking outbreak, not help us jump up and down on it.”
“There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll use at least part of the next four hours thinking up fresh negativities to display for you. Good hunting.”
“Spoiled for choice out here. You too. Off.”
“Later. Off.”
Auppi Unstril muted comms, glanded a little more edge and took a deep breath as the drug coursed through her. The displays seemed to sharpen and brighten, their 3D qualities appeared enhanced and all the other signals coming into her sort of freshened, whether they were auditory, tactile or anything else – and there was a lot else. She felt very alert, and raring to go.
“Junkie,” said the ship.
“Yep,” she said. “Enjoying it, too.”
“You worry me sometimes.”
“When I worry you all the time we may have started to reach equilibrium,” she told it, though it was more just the sort of thing you felt you had to say when you were riding an edge buzz than what she actually felt. The ship didn’t really worry her at all. She worried it. Just as it should be; she enjoyed that feeling too.
The ship wasn’t really a ship (too small) and so didn’t have a proper name; it was a Fast Fleet Liaison Module with emergency weaponisationability (or something) and all it had was a number. Well, it had been thoroughly weaponisationed all right and it had room inside for a human pilot so, like the dashingly gorgeous Mr. Lanyares Tersetier – colleague and lover – she’d been determined not to let the machines have all the fun dealing with the unexpected, semi-widespread and bizarrely uncontainable smatter outbreak. She’d decided to call the ship The Bliterator, which smacked even her as a bit childish, but never mind.
Auppi and the ship blitted the fuck out of whatever elements of the hegswarm outbreak they got to point themselves at; just blowing the Selfish Dust out of the skies. She was genuinely in mortal danger, hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time for
– well, off-hand, she couldn’t remember how many days – and she was starting to feel more like a machine than a fully functioning and quite attractive human female. Didn’t matter; she was loving it.
There were immersive shoot-games as good – arguably better in some ways – than this, and she had played them all, but this had an advantage over all of them: it was real.
One unlucky collision with a boulder, stone, gravel granule, or maybe even sand-grain-size bit of the current infection and she’d be lucky to live. Same applied to the weapons that some of these later outbreakians were coming equipped with. (That was worrying in itself – the hegswarm getting gunned-up too; developing.) So far the weapons themselves were nothing to worry a properly prepared tooled-up piece of Culture offensive kit, like the one she was in, humble civilian transport origins or not, but
– again – an unlucky combination of events and she’d be plasma, meat-dust; a highly distributed red smear.
She, Lanyares and the others had agreed that knowing that fact added something to the whole experience. Terror, mostly. But also an extra level of excitement, of exultation when you came out the other side of an encounter still alive, plus a feeling after each engagement that you never really got in a sim: that of having genuinely done something, of accomplishment.
There had been over sixty humans in the Restoria mission to the Tsungarial Disk when the outbreak began. They’d all volunteered to get involved. They’d drawn lots for who got to pilot the twenty-four microships they could field. So far, two of the drone ships had been damaged but had managed to get back to base for repair. None of the humans had ended up dead/missing/ injured.
The humans had all run their own sims and looked at old scenarios and reckoned that they had about a four-to-one chance of getting through this unscathed, if the outbreak ran the way it had been expected to.
Only it hadn’t; they didn’t even think to report it immediately because the original little smatter burstlet had been interesting, something worth studying. Then, a day later, when they’d realised it was the real thing, they’d still confidently assured superiors and distant offers of help that they could handle it; it’d be over before anybody more than a day away got there, and there was nobody anywhere near a day away.
It went over that first one-day prediction, but by then they were even more confident they had worked it out and knew how to deal with it; it’d be over in a couple of days. Well, four. Okay; definitely six. Now they were on day eight or nine, the fucking outbreak wasn’t letting up, in fact it was showing signs of developing – those weapons, crude or not – and they were all starting to get, as Lan had put it, frazzled.
Plus their pooled, averaged, constantly updated should-be-fairly-reliable sims had, over the last few days, gone from giving them a four out of five chance of surviving without casualties to odds of three out of four, then to a two out of three chance and then – inevitably, it felt like – to a one-to-one likelihood. That had been sobering. It was only a sim, only a prediction, but it was still worrying. That last estimate had been good up to about five hours ago. By now they must be well into negative odds. Unless the outbreak just stopped or even just tailed away unfeasibly rapidly, or they were ridiculously lucky, they were going to lose somebody.
Well, maybe they were. But she wasn’t going to be the one. They might lose more than one. She wasn’t going to be the first. Fuck it, maybe they’d all die. She wanted to be the one survivor, or the last to go down. A ferocity Auppi would never have guessed resided in her rose and burned in her chest and behind her eyes when she thought about this sort of stuff. Yeah, natural warrior, that was her. She could hear Lanyares laughing at her already. Glanded too much edge, sperk, quicken, focal, drill and gung, young lady.
Still, though. That lust for destruction, glory – even glorious death – was a sort of extra, emergent drug in itself; a meta-hit that spoke to something deep-buried, long veneered over but never entirely expunged in the pan-human bio-heritage.
She was armour-suited, plugged into a gel-foamed brace couch with at least four metres of high-density gunned-up much-beweaponed Fast Fleet Liaison Module between her and the vacuum
– twelve metres of pointy, armoured ditto measuring from the front – and she had an arsenal of weaponry: one main laser, four secondaries, eight tertiaries, six point-defence high-repeat shrapnel laser cells, a couple of nanogun pods – currently seven-eighths depleted, so it would soon be time to get back to base to re-arm – and a heavy, slowing, bulky but useful hullslung missile container with an assortment of sleekly deadly lovelies inside. That was only half depleted, which the ship still maintained meant she was being too miserly with the missiles. She saw it as just being careful. Be tight with the stuff that could get depleted and extravagant with what seemed never-ending: her own desire to fight and destroy.
She was almost ashamed to be backed up. A real warrior shouldn’t be. A real warrior should face the certainty of death and oblivion and still be fearless, still treat their life as just something to be gambled with against the odds of fate, as effectively as possible.
Fuck it, though; the warriors of old had thought they were effectively backed up too, sure in themselves that they were bound for some glorious martial heaven. That it was nonsense wasn’t the point. Some of them must have had their doubts but they had still behaved as though they didn’t. That was fucking bravery. (Or stupidity. Or gullibility. Or a kind of narcissism – what you thought it was depended on what sort of person you were, what you might have felt and done in the same situation.) Would theyhave taken the offer of being truly backed up, had they been able? Leapt at it, she’d have bet. And never forget they would be killing other people, not dumb matter smartened up a couple of notches to the point it became annoying. That was where the analogy with game-playing became something even closer; you could waste smatter with exactly the same moral abandon as something whacked in a shoot-up game.
Anyway, she was backed up, and popped out of the fray every four hours or so like the others to draw breath, find out what was happening and transmit the latest version of her all-too-mortal soul to the Restoria mission control hab on the inner fringe of the Disk, only a thousand klicks above the cloud tops of the gas giant Razhir – where she’d be heading shortly, to re-arm. Doubtless extra copies of her mind-state would then be passed on to whatever the nearest Restoria ship was, and beyond that, probably, to other substrates overseen by different Minds quite possibly on the other side of the big G, or even further afield.
Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something.
She used the stare-focus function to zoom in on the cloud of boulders coming out of the mid-Disk Level-Seven fabricary. The front of the cloud was less than a minute old; most of it was still bursting out of the ancient space factory through round ports in the fabricary’s dark surface. It looked a lot like a giant seed pod releasing spores, which was fairly appropriate, she supposed.
“Two point eight minutes away,” she said. She took a sweep about, scanning right around right to left and back to forward and then looking everywhere at once just to get the local feel. (She could just about remember how that had felt the first time it had been demonstrated to her. She’d almost thrown up. Looking in two contra-rotating directions at once, and then in all directions at the same time, just wasn’t stuff the ancient human brain systems were able to cope with; processing the results kind of confused the frontal cortex, too. She’d thought she’d never get the hang of it, but she had. It was routine, now.) “Anything closer smaller nastier? Or further but worse? If there is, I’m not seeing it.”
“Agree,” the ship said. It had already started powering up its engines and pointed them at the offending fabricary and the cloud of smart boulders pouring out of it.
“Numbers?”
“Twenty-six K and counting; better than 400 per second from about as many ports. Stable issue rate. Just over a hundred thousand by the time we get there and estimating as many to come.”
“Where are the fucking GFCF and their in-fab intervention teams?”
“Not in that one, at a guess,” the ship said. “I’m sending its ident to the Initial Contact Facility so they can come sanitise it later.”
“Never mind. Let’s go get the fuckers.”
The ship hummed around her, she felt it accelerate and felt, too, her body adjust to the force. Most of the Gs they were pulling were being cancelled but they could go faster if they let some leak through. The ship went tearing through the field of Disk components, heading inward for the middle of the torus, flashing past the dark shapes of the fabricaria. She wondered how many more held infestations of the smatter, how much longer they could keep whacking everything that appeared.
There was another way, of course, for her, Lan and the others not to get killed: they could just stop fighting and leave it all to the machines. There were another twenty drone-or self-controlled microships similar to the one she was in, all desperately trying to contain the outbreak. If the humans just stopped taking part in the fight the ships they were in would keep on operating regardless, once they’d off-loaded their single crew person.
They’d be able to accelerate and turn faster without their biological component aboard and they would hardly suffer in the heat of battle; the ships took advantage of useful aspects of the human brain’s behaviour – like its intrinsic pattern recognition, on-target concentration and flinch responses – so their wired-in human charges genuinely did some useful work alongside the AIs, but in the end everybody knew this was really just one set of machines against another and the humans were only along for the ride. Participant observers; taking part because not to do so would be dishonourable, ignominious. In the big, long picture, this was just another tiny instance that told anybody who was interested that the Culture was not just its machines.
Auppi didn’t care. Useful, useless, big help or hindrance, she was having the time of her life. She hoped she’d have great-great-grandchildren to dandle on her knee one day so she could tell them about the time she’d fought the nasty cancerous breeding machines of the Tsungarial Disk armed only with a highly sophisticated little weaponified microship, an on-board brain-linked AI and more exotic weaponry than you could shake a space-stick at, but that was for another time, what would feel, no doubt, like another life altogether.
For now she was a warrior and she had stuff to blit.
She wondered what the incoming Torturer-class ship would bring to the fray, and almost wished it hadn’t come at all.
They came for him, as he’d known they would. He’d expected they’d find a way, eventually. Representative Filhyn, her aide Kemracht and the others – many others; it had turned into quite a big operation – had done all they could to keep him safe, away from interference and temptation. They had spirited him away from the parliament building after the hearing where he had spoken out and they had kept him mobile, moving him from place to place almost every day over the ensuing weeks; he rarely slept in the same place twice.
He had stayed in vast skyscraper apartments belonging to sympathisers, budget hotels off buzzing superhighways, house-boats on shallow lagoons near the sea, and, for the last two nights, in an old hill station in the mountains, a leafy summer retreat for the upper and upper-middle classes of centuries ago, before anybody had invented air conditioning. A little narrow-gauge railway had brought them up here, him and his two immediate companions and the small team of less obvious helpers and guards that nowadays always travelled with him.
The lodge sat on a shallow ridge, looking out over unbroken slopes of trees stretching to the gently undulating horizon. On a clear day, they said, you could see the plains and some of the great ziggurats of the nearest big city. Not this weather, though; it was cloudy, misty, humid, and great snagging strands of clouds drifted above and around the lodge, sometimes wrapping themselves about the ridge like insubstantial, too-easily torn veils.
They had been due to move to a different travellers’ lodge that morning, but there had been a mud slide overnight and the road was blocked. They’d move tomorrow.
However reluctantly, Prin had become a star. It was not something he was comfortable with. People wanted him; they wanted to interview him, they wanted to change his mind or show him the error of his ways, they wanted to support him, they wanted to condemn him, they wanted to save him, they wanted to destroy him, they wanted to help him and they wanted to obstruct and hinder him. Mostly they wanted access to him to accomplish all these things.
Prin was an academic, a law professor who had devoted his life to the theory and the practice of justice. The theoretical side was his professional life, the practical part had drawn him into worthy causes, campus protests, underground semi-legal net-publishing and, finally, into the scheme to infiltrate the Hell that everybody either denied existed outright or sort of knew was there but liked to pretend wasn’t because they sort of half agreed with the idea behind it, to punish those who deserved punishment. Hell was always for other people.
He’d known something of the grisly reality of it from officially published and illegally disseminated accounts, and he and one of his junior colleagues had taken the decision to be the ones who went into Hell to experience it first hand and bring back the truth. The very fact he and Chay wouldn’t have been anybody’s first choice for such a bizarre and frightening mission they hoped would make them more credible witnesses if and when they returned. They were not fame-obsessed attention-seekers, not journalists trying to make a reputation, not people who had ever had much obvious interest in doing anything which would bring them the amount of attention such an undertaking might result in.
Then, when they were doing what training they could for their undercover mission – training that to them just meant doing lots of reading about the subject, though others in their little cell of subversives had insisted include psychological “hardening” that had involved experiences a lot like the sort of stuff they were going in there to denounce – they had become lovers. That had complicated things a little, but they had discussed it and decided that if anything it would be an advantage; they would be more committed to each other as a team when they were in the Hell, now that they were something more than colleagues and friends.
He looked back on their pathetic preparations and their terribly earnest discussions with a mixture of embarrassment, fondness and bitterness. What could prepare you for such horror? Not all their days of “hardening” – enduring small electric shocks, the start of suffocation and a lot of being shouted at and verbally abused by the ex-army guys who’d agreed to help – had amounted to a minute’s worth of what they had experienced in Hell right from the start, from day one.
Nevertheless, despite being caught up in the horrifying vortex of violence and sheer hatred that had enveloped them instantly on their arrival, they had stayed together and they had, in some sense, accomplished their mission. He had got out, even if Chay had lost her mind. He had been able to be the sober, sensible, unrufflable witness that he had meant to be right from the start, when they had first started talking about the mission with the relevant programmers, hackers and ex-government agency whistle-blowers who’d originally been put in touch with their little underground organisation.
But he had had to leave Chay behind. He’d done what he could to get her through as well, but he hadn’t made her his first priority. At the last moment, as they’d hurtled through the air towards the glowing gate that led back to reality and a relief from pain, he had twisted, led with his own back rather than with her, held in his limbs, literally putting himself first.
He had hoped they would both make it through, but he had known that it was unlikely.
And what he had to ask himself – what he had been asking himself, ever since – was this: if Chay had been of sound mind at the time, would he have acted any differently?
He thought – he hoped – he would have.
That being the case, he was sure she would have made just as good a witness as he had. Then he could have done the decent, chivalrous, masculine thing and saved the girl, got her to safety and taken whatever extra punishment the mephitic bureaucracy of Hell decreed. But he could only have done that if he’d thought that she would get back to the Real as anything other than a broken, weeping wreck.
She had denied the Real while she’d been in Hell, to preserve what was left of her disintegrating sanity; how could he be sure she wouldn’t have denied the reality of Hell once she was back in the Real? Even that presupposed that she’d have made a considerable recovery from the pathetic state she’d been in towards the end.
Well, the end for him, because he got out. Probably just the start of fresh torment and horror for her.
Of course he had nightmares and of course he tried not to think of what might be happening to her back in the Hell. The pro-Hell parts of Pavulean society, headed by people like Representative Errun, had been doing everything they could to destroy his reputation and make his testimony look like a lie, or grossly exaggerated. Everything from a schooldays girlfriend who felt she’d been dumped too harshly to a fine for being disruptive in a university bar when he was a first-year student had been dragged out to make him look unreliable. That such trivial misdemeanours were the best the other side could do had been treated as a great and unexpected victory by Rep. Filhyn, who had become a trusted friend over the months since he’d first testified at her side.
They saw each other only rarely now; it would have made him too easy to trace. Instead they talked on the phone, left messages. He could watch her on the screen most evenings too, on news coverage, magazine programmes, documentaries or specialist feeds; denouncing the Hells and defending him, mostly. He liked her and could even imagine something happening between them – if that idea wasn’t in itself a wild fantasy – if things had been different, if he wasn’t for ever thinking of Chay.
It was assumed that the Pavulean Hell was running on a substrate far away from Pavul itself; for decades people had been searching for any sign of it being in any sense physically on the planet itself, or even anywhere near – the relatively anarchic habitats of the planet’s inner system were particularly favoured as locations – but without having found any evidence at all. Most likely, Chay’s being resided tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away, deep-buried inside the substrate of some unknowably alien society.
He looked up at the stars some nights, wondering where she was.
Don’t you feel guilty about leaving her? Do you feel guilty that you left her? How guilty do you feel, abandoning her there? Do you sleep well, with all that guilt? Do you dream about her? You must feel so guilty – would you do the same thing again? Would she have abandoned you there? He had been asked the same question in many slightly different guises many times and answered it as honestly as he could, each time.
They had tried to get at him through her, tried to get her – the Chay who had been woken up on the houseboat, the Chay who would never have the memories of their time together in Hell – to denounce him for abandoning her. But she hadn’t let them use her. She said she’d felt hurt initially but thought he’d done the right thing. She still completely believed in what they’d done. She supported him fully.
She wasn’t saying the things the media – especially the hostile, pro-Hell media – wanted her to say so they quickly stopped asking her how she felt.
And the pro-Hell side – the Erruns of their world, the people who would keep Hell – had started trying to reach him through their public pronouncements, hinting at a deal that would let Chay go, if he would retract his earlier testimony and agree not to testify again. Prin had given Filhyn and Kemracht permission to try to shield him from this sort of temptation, but there was only so much he could do, especially when journalists – granted interviews and calling in remotely – asked him for his response to such vicariously delivered overtures.
And now, a week before he was due to testify before the Galactic Council, the pro-Hell people had tracked him down.
He knew something was wrong even before he fully woke up. The sensation was like knowing you had gone to sleep on a narrow ledge high on a cliff and woken in darkness to find there was the hint of an edge under your back and nothing there when you stretched out to one side.
His heart thumped, his mouth felt dry. He felt he was about to fall. He struggled to consciousness.
“Prin, son, are you all right?”
It was Representative Errun, the old pro-Hell campaigner who had tried to stop him giving any evidence at all in the parliament two long months earlier. Of course now it felt like he’d known from the start it would be Errun they’d send, but he told himself it was just a lucky guess, a coincidence.
Prin woke up, looked around. He was in a fairly grand, rather cluttered, comfortable-looking room that might have been modelled on Representative Errun’s own study for all he knew.
So, he had not really woken up at all, was not really looking round. They had found a way into his dreams. They would tempt him here, then. He wondered how they’d accomplished this. May as well just ask. “How are you doing this?” he asked.
Errun shook his head. “I don’t know the technical details, son.”
“Please do not call me ‘son’.”
Errun sighed, “Prin, I just need to talk to you.”
Prin got up, walked to the door of the room. The door was locked. Where windows might have been there were mirrors. Errun was watching him. Prin nodded at the desk. “I intend to pick up that antique lamp and attempt to strike you across the head with it, representative. What do you think will happen?”
“I think you should sit down and let us talk, Prin,” Errun said.
Prin said nothing. He went to the desk, picked up the heavy oil lamp, gripped it in both trunks so that its weighted base was upright and walked towards the older male, who was now looking alarmed.
He was back in the seat, sitting facing Errun again. He looked at the desk. The lamp was where it had been. The representative appeared unruffled.
“That is what will happen, Prin,” Errun told him.
“Say what you have to say,” Prin said.
The older male hesitated, wore an expression of concern. “Prin,” he said, “I can’t claim to know everything you’ve been through, but…”
Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.
When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.
So Representative Errun had been blathering on with some homely, folksy little speech about a childhood experience that had left him convinced of the need for useful lies, pretend worlds and keeping those that made up the lumpen herd in their place. He was coming to the end of his rather obvious and graceless summing-up now. Reviewing it with his academic hat on, Prin thought it had been a rather pedestrian presentation; capable but unimaginative. It might have merited a C. A C+ if one was being generous.
Sometimes you didn’t want to re-engage quickly and seamlessly; sometimes you wanted the student, post-grad, colleague or official to know that they had been boring you. He gazed expression lessly at Errun for a moment too long to be entirely polite before saying, “Hmm. I see. Anyway, representative; I assume you’re here to offer a deal. Why don’t you just make your offer?”
Errun looked annoyed, but – with an obvious effort – controlled himself. “She’s still alive in there, Prin. Chay; she’s still in there. She hasn’t suffered, and she’s proved stronger than people in there thought she was, so you can still save her. But their patience is running out, both with her and you.”
“I see,” Prin said, nodding. “Go on.”
“Do you want to see?”
“See what?”
“See what has happened to her since you left her there.”
Prin felt the words like a blow, but tried not to show it. “I’m not sure that I do.”
“It’s not… it’s not that unpleasant, Prin. The first, longest part isn’t even Hell at all.”
“No? Where, then?”
“In a place they sent her to recover,” Errun said.
“To recover?” Prin was not especially surprised. “Because she’d lost her mind, and the mad don’t suffer properly?”
“Something like that, I suppose. Though they didn’t punish her after she seemed to get it back, either. Let me show you.”
“I don’t-”
But they showed him anyway. It was like being strapped into a chair in front of a wrap-around screen, unable to move your eyes or even blink.
He watched her arrive at a place called the Refuge, in some medieval place and time, copying manuscripts in an era before moveable type and printing. He heard her voice, saw her threatened with punishment for voicing doubts about religion and faith, saw her acquiesce and conform, saw her work diligently through the following years and watched her work her way up the shallow, arthritic hierarchy of the place, always keeping a journal, until she became its chief. He saw her sing their chants and take comfort in the rituals of their faith, saw her admonish a noviciate for lack of faith, just as she had been admonished years earlier, and thought he could see where this was going.
But then on her death bed she revealed she had not changed, had not let the behaviour of piety become the reality of internalised faith. He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself. But still.
Then he watched her become an angel in Hell. One who delivered sufferers from their suffering, ending their torment – one per day, no more – and taking on a fraction of their pain with every merciful snuffing-out, so that to the extent that she suffered, she did so of her own volition, and meanwhile became an object of veneration, the centre of a death cult within Hell, the miracle-working messiah of a new faith. So she was being used to bring a little extra hope to Hell, removing one lucky winner per day as though in some fatal state lottery of release, to increase the suffering of the vast majority left behind.
Prin was moderately impressed. What an inspired, diabolical way to use one who had lost their mind, to stop others losing theirs, the better to torment them more efficiently.
A blink, and he was back in Errun’s study.
“Taking that all at face value,” Prin said, “it provides a fascinating insight into the thought processes of those concerned. And so; this deal?”
The old male stared at him for a moment, as though nonplussed, before he seemed to gather himself. “Don’t go humiliating your own society at that hearing, Prin,” he said. “Don’t presume to know better than so many generations of your ancestors; don’t give in to that desire to posture. Don’t testify, that’s all we ask… and she will be released.”
“Released? In what sense?”
“She can come back, Prin. Back to the Real.”
“There already is a Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter here in the Real, representative.”
“I know.” Errun nodded. “And I understand there is probably no way of re-integrating the two. However, there would be nothing to stop her from living on in an entirely pleasant Afterlife. I understand there are hundreds of different Heavens, enough to suit every taste. There is, however, another possibility. A new body could be found for her. Grown for her, indeed; created specially just for Chay.”
“I thought we had laws about that sort of thing.” Prin said, smiling.
“We do, Prin. But laws can be amended.” It was Errun’s turn to smile. “That’s what those of us lucky enough to serve as representatives do.” He looked serious again. “I can assure you there will be no obstacle to Chay being re-embodied. Absolutely none.”
Prin nodded, and hoped that he looked thoughtful. “And, either way,” he said, “whether she ends up in a Heaven or a new body, there will be no trace left of her being, her consciousness, left in Hell?” Prin asked. Immediately, he felt guilty. He, not the senator, already knew how this was going to play out, and giving the old male false hope was a little cruel. Only a little cruel, of course; within the context they were talking about, it was trivial to the point of irrelevance.
“Yes,” Errun agreed. “There will be no trace of her consciousness left in Hell whatsoever.”
“And all I have to do is not testify.”
“Yes.” The old male looked avuncular, encouraging. He sighed, made a tired-looking gesture with both trunks. “Oh, in time, you might be expected to take back some of what you’ve already said in the past, but we’d leave that for the moment.”
“On pain of what?” Prin asked, trying to sound merely reasonable, pragmatic. “If I didn’t, what then?”
Representative Errun sighed, looked sad. “Son – Prin – you’re smart and you’re principled. You could be set to do very well within the academic community, with the right people taking an interest in your advancement. Very well. Very well indeed. But if you insist on being awkward… well, the same trunks that can help lift you up can keep you pressed down, keep you in your place.” He held up both trunks in a defensive gesture, as though fending off an objection Prin had not voiced. “It’s no great conspiracy, it’s just nature; people are liable to help out people who’ve helped them. Make life difficult for them and they’ll just do the same for you. No need to invoke secret societies or sinister cabals.”
Prin looked away for a moment, taking in the view of the carved wood desk and the highly patterned carpet, wondering idly how deep the level of detail went in such dream-realities. Would a microscope reveal further intricacy, or a blurred pixel?
“Representative,” he said, and both hoped and suspected he sounded tired, “let me be frank. I had thought to string you along, tell you that I’d think about it, that I’d let you know my answer in a few days.”
Errun was shaking his head. “I’m afraid I need your-” he began, but Prin just held one trunk up and talked over him.
“But I’m not going to. The answer is no. I will not deal with you. I intend to make my statement before Council,”
“Prin, no,” the old male said, sitting forward in his seat. “Don’t do this! If you say no to this there’ll be nothing I can do to hold them back. They’ll do whatever they want to do to her. You’ve seen what they do to people, to females in particular. You can’t condemn her to that! For God’s sake! Think what you’re saying! I’ve already asked if there’s any leniency I can ask for, but-”
“Shut up you foul, corrupt, cruel old male,” Prin said, keeping his voice level. “There is no ‘they’; there is only you. You are one of them, you help control them; don’t pretend they are somehow separate from you.”
“Prin! I’m not in Hell; I don’t control what happens there!”
“You’re on the same side, representative. And you must have some control over Hell or you couldn’t offer this deal in the first place.” Prin waved one trunk. “But in any event, let’s not distract ourselves. The answer is no. Now, may I resume my sleep, do I get to wake up screaming or do you intend to subject me to some further punishment in this strange little virtual dream environment we’re inhabiting?”
Errun stared at him wide-eyed. “Do you have any idea what they’ll do to her?” he said, voice raised, hoarse. “What sort of barbarian are you that you can condemn somebody you purport to love to that?”
Prin shook his head. “You really can’t see that you’ve made a monster of yourself, can you, representative? You threaten to do these things, or – if we are to accept your naive attempt to distance yourself from the grisly realties of the environment you so readily support – to let these things happen to another being unless I lie in a manner that suits you, and then you accuse me of being the monster. Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute.”
“You cold-hearted bastard!” The representative seemed genuinely upset. Prin got the impression the old male would be out of his seat and attacking him if he’d been younger, or shaking him by the shoulders at the very least. “How can you leave her there? How can you just abandon her?”
“Because if I save her I condemn all the others, representative. Whereas, if I tell you to lift your tail and insert your deal where only a loved one will ever get wind of it, perhaps I can do something to end the obscenity of the Hells, for Chay and all the others.”
“You conceited, presumptuous little shit-head! Who the fuck are you to decide how we run our fucking society?”
“All I can do is tell the-”
“We need the Hells! We’re fallen, evil creatures!”
“Nothing that requires torture for its continuance is worth-”
“You live on your fucking campuses with your heads in the fucking clouds and think everything’s as nice as it is there and everybody as civilised and reasonable and polite and noble and intellectual and as cooperative as they are there and you think that’s the way it is everywhere and how everybody is! You’ve no fucking idea what would happen if we didn’t have the threat of Hell to hold people back!”
“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm. Noble? Civilised? Reasonable? Clearly Errun had never sat in on a faculty annual performance, remuneration, seniority and self-criticism meeting. “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”
“You pompous, egotistical little cunt!” the representative screeched.
“And you, representative, are typical of those with ethical myopia, who feel only for those nearest them. You would save a friend or loved one and feel a glow of self-satisfaction at the act, no matter to what torment that same act condemned countless others.”
“… You self-important little fuck…” Errun growled, talking at the same time as Prin.
“You expect everybody else to feel the same way and deeply resent the fact that some might feel differently.”
“… I’ll make sure they tell her it’s all your fault when they’re fucking her to death every night, a hundred at a time…”
“You are the barbarian, representative; you are the one who thinks so highly of himself he assumes everybody who means something to him ought to be elevated above all others.” Prin took a breath. “And, really, listen to yourself; threatening such depravity just because I won’t do as you demand. How good do you expect to feel about yourself at the end of this, representative?”
“Fuck you, you ice-livered, self-satisfied intellectual shit. Your moral fucking high ground won’t be high enough to escape her screams every night for the rest of your life.”
“You’re just embarrassing yourself now, representative,” Prin told him. “That’s no way for an elderly and respected elected officer of the state to talk. I think we ought to conclude this here, don’t you?”
“This does not end here,” the old male told him, in a voice dripping with hatred and contempt.
But end it did, and Prin woke sweating – but not jerking upright screaming, which was something – with a sort of cold dread in his belly. He hesitated, then reached out, tugging on the antique bell-pull for help.
They found something called a thin-band cerebral induction generator. It had been stuck – a little lop-sided, as though it had been done very hastily – to the back of the bed’s headboard. A shielded cable ran from it through the wall to the roof and a satellite dish disguised as a tile patch. This was what had allowed them to take over his dreams. None of it had been there the day before.
Kemracht, Representative Filhyn’s aide, looked him in the eye as the all-wheel-drive bumped down the road in the darkness, taking them to the next hideout. The lights of the second vehicle, following behind, cast wildly waving shadows about the passenger compartment.
“You still going to testify, Prin?”
Prin, who could not be sure that Kemracht was not the traitor in their midst (those faculty committee meetings also taught you to trust no one), said, “I’ll be saying what I was always going to be saying, Kem,” and left it at that.
Kemracht looked at him for a little while, then patted him on the shoulder with one trunk.
It was like diving into a blizzard of multi-coloured sleet, a disturbed, whirling maelstrom of tens of thousands of barely glimpsed light-points all tearing turmoiled towards you against the darkness.
Auppi Unstril had glanded everything there was worth glanding, slipping into the zoned-out state of steady, unremitting concentration such engagements called for. She was entirely part of the machine, feeling its sensory, power and weapon systems as perfect extensions of herself and connecting with the little ship’s AI as though it was another higher, quicker layer of tissue laid across her own brain, tightly bundled, penetrated and penetrating via her neural lace and the network of human-mind-attuned filaments within the ship’s dedicated pilot interface suite.
At such moments she felt she was the very heart and soul of the ship; the tiny animal kernel of its being, with every other part, from her own drug-jazzed body out, like force-multiplying layers of martial ability and destructive sophistication, each concentricity of level adding, extrapolating, intensifying.
She plunged into the storm of swirling motes. Coloured sparks against the black, each was a single truck-sized boulder of not-quite-mindless smatter; a mixture of crude, rocket-powered ballistic javelins, moderately manoeuvrable explosive cluster munitions, chemical laser-armed microships and the mirrored, ablation-armoured but unarmed breeder machines that were the real prize here; the entities amongst the lethal debris that could start other smatter infections elsewhere.
At the start of the outbreak, all those days earlier, the breeders had made up nineteen out of twenty of the swarming machines. Immediately swept and evaluated by the ships’ sensors, they had shown up as a cloud of tiny blue dots, speckling the dark skies around the gas giant Razhir as though the great planet had birthed a million tiny water moons, with only a few of the other types of swarmers dotting the outpouring clouds of smatter.
In retrospect, those first few days, when the blue dots made up vast near-monochrome fields of easily tracked targets, had been the days of happy hunting. Then, however, the machines – the infection – had learned. It was getting nowhere with its original mix of production; signals coming back to where the machines originated, in the infected manufacturies, told it that nothing was surviving. So it had switched its priorities. For five or six days now the blue dots had been steadily reducing in number until for the last day or so they had become lost in the billowing masses of green, yellow, orange and red points, all indicating swarmers with offensive abilities.
Gazing into the cloud around her, Auppi could see that this latest outbreak was composed mostly of red dots, indicating these were the laser-armed variety. Red mist, she thought distantly as she and the good ship Bliterator plummeted further into them. Like a spray of blood. Good sign, natty omen. Here we go…
Together she and the ship registered the near ninety thousand contacts and prioritised by type, designating the one-in-a-hundred blue contacts as their initial targets. This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp, neural-laced-brain running at as near to AI-speed as beyond-humanly possible, targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look.
Only ninety thousand, though. Odd, she thought. They’d been estimating more. Usually the estimate was easy to make and reliable. Why’d they got it wrong? She ought to feel glad there were ten kilos fewer to blit, but she didn’t; instead she got a feeling something was wrong. Combat superstition, maybe.
Embedded in the cloud of red dots – still naively ignoring the Bliterator because it hadn’t shown itself as hostile yet – the few blue dots were all located some way in, with none towards the surface of the emerging cloud.
The ship wove a suggested route for them to the best place – deep inside the cloud – to start firing.
∼Let’s bend past those two blues and mine them with missiles, dormanted till we open, Auppi sent to the ship, reaching out with a sort of ghost-limb sense to adjust the ship’s sketched-in course.
∼Okay, the ship sent. They swung, curving round to take in the two blue contacts she’d outlined, jinking this way and that to avoid running into the swarmers. She still found this bit weird. Tactically, logically, this made sense; get to the centre and start laying waste from there, but even though the sims said this was the most destructively efficient approach, she still yearned to be firing now, in fact to have started firing as soon as they’d come into range of the first swarmers.
But then another of her instincts just wanted to blow the fabricaria out of the sky; why treat the symptoms when you could attack the disease at the source? But the Disk, the fabricaria that made it up, was what they were all there to protect. Ancient fucking monument, wasn’t it? Couldn’t touch that. That’d be uncivilised.
It was right, she agreed with this, of course she did – she hadn’t joined Restoria to blast smatter, she’d joined because she was fascin ated in ancient tech, and especially ancient tech that had this rather childish desire to turn everything about it into little copies of itself – but after a nine-day haul with almost no breaks pounding the only-arguably-living crap out of any glowing blue dot that presented itself in her ship-shared sensorium, you kind of got to thinking like a weapon. To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at. The fabricaria were the source of all this hassle, ergo… but no. Aside from the small matter of not getting one’s own self blitted, preserving the fabricaria and the Disk was what mattered most here.
She felt the missiles go, programmed to initiate when the ship started brightening up its own immediate whereabouts. The missiles would prioritise the blue-echo breeder machines and then start setting about the rest.
∼There’s a lot of these red-echo laser fuckers, Auppi sent to the ship. ∼Let’s loose all the missiles, get this over fast and jump to the re-arm immediately after, yes?
∼Yes, agreed. Suggest missiles to these locations. Leaves half.
∼Okay. Gone?
∼Gone.
∼Beautiful spread.
∼Thank you.
∼Right, we’re about there, yes?
∼Centred in one tenth…
∼Warm them up, get spinning and a-tumbling and let’s light the fuckers up.
∼Nearly there…
∼Come on come on come on!
∼Oh, close enough, I suppose. On yours.
∼Whoop-de-doop!
Auppi felt like she had a trigger beneath more digits than she possessed, as though each finger and toe was somehow curled round a little grouping of firing filaments, every one individually launchable according to the amount of squeeze she applied. She double-swept her gaze around the feast of targets, gloried in the sheer luxuriousness of it, and clutched the triggers smoothly to her, firing everything, loosing everything, lighting up every priority-one target in view at once.
The space she lay in sparkled all around like a diamond-ball bathysphere lowered into the sort of planetary depths where every organism made its own light. Rosettes, florets, side-slanted bursts, little spears and dirty flurries of light erupted on every side, filling her eyes with sparks. Whirling within the seen cacophony, the spinning, tumbling ship was already flagging up the next array of targets. She swung and spun with it, untroubled by gyrations that would have had her throwing up, pre-training.
∼What’re the grey blobs? she asked the ship as the lasers and their collimators locked into the aiming grids of the ship’s primary sensors.
∼Indicates swarmer type unclear, the ship told her.
∼Fuck, she sent, before loosing another fusillade to strew another hundred-plus bright scratches across the sky. Unclear? They hadn’t had any “unclear” before. What the fuck was this?
She could see the missiles popping open their own little pockets of destruction, two behind them, down the course the ship had taken towards the centre of the cloud, and others further away, some still just starting to fire. Meanwhile the smatter had woken up to the fact that this racing, wildly tumbling thing in its midst did not wish it well and some of the truck-size laser swarmers were starting to turn their single-mouth long-axes towards them. The ship took a hit almost immediately as one swarmer found itself fortuitously pointing right at them and at the right stage in its charging cycle. The beam struck, slid off, bounced away by the little craft’s mirror field.
∼Proportion unclear? she sent as the next layer of targets snicked into the aiming grids.
∼About one per cent. Hitting some with-
She/it/they fired, flicking destruction across the darkness.
∼this salvo, the ship continued. ∼Devoting sensory resources to analyse debris result.
They were close enough to the fabricary now to have to take it into account when they targeted; this close to what they were aiming at, and with such relatively slow-moving targets, there was almost zero chance of just plain missing and a stray shot heading straight at the fabricary, but it was possible for a blast from the main laser to go straight through one of the swarmers, and some of the latest versions had semi-serviceable laser coatings capable of deflecting at least part of a bolt from one of the secondary or tertiaries. Plus you – well, the ship, thankfully – had to think about post-destruction main-remaining-body direction vectors and shrapnel-debris-scatter profiles.
Auppi was glad she didn’t have to think about that sort of house-keeping crap; let her concentrate on just blasting stuff. They swung again, re-targeted. A few more incoming hits registered, small calibre nuisance against the heavy armour of the ship’s reactive mirror field.
∼So? she sent. The latest targets had blossomed so the ship would have had time to analyse the relevant debris signatures.
∼Zip, the ship sent. ∼All still there. Hitting nearest grey/unclear with full main.
As the ship sent this, over twenty of the contacts they’d been aiming at suddenly weren’t being targeted any more, just blinking out.
∼Fuck.
Such was the weapon’s power – and the swarmers’ relative vulnerability – the ship’s main laser usually got multiply-collimated into anything up to twenty-four separate, independently aimed beams. Devoting the whole beam on full power to a single object had been unheard-of overkill until now.
∼Nanoguns exhausted, the ship told her, confirming something she could already see from her own displays.
She squeezed off another salvo at the truncated target list. The main’s was obvious, the impacting bolt lighting up whatever was around the target itself with splash-out, freeze-framing the pelting swarmers nearby as though in a flash photograph. The ship would be watching in greater detail than Auppi, but even she could see umpteen tiny glowing traces burst glinting from the aim-point.
∼That got it, the ship sent.
Everything wheeled again, the ship continuing to gyrate wildly, carving a gradually increasing hollow space of smatter debris out of the centre of the cloud of swarmers. Multiple incoming registered as pops and clicks, ringing the mirror field. Meanwhile Auppi had been loosing missiles into the depths of the swarm, sending them off to start their own spreading blossoms of destruction.
∼Two grey on half-main each? she suggested.
∼Doing, the ship agreed, and the depleted grids lit up, firmed again. She flexed, distributing unseen rays like benedictions. She concentrated on the two foci of the main armament. A single unsullied brightness flicked on in each, then faded neatly. The other swarmers being engulfed in glowing debris clouds all happened elsewhere, unworthy of notice. Further afield still, the missiles careened about their own little patches of sky, dispatching all they could.
∼No? she asked
∼No! the ship said.
Another wild twisting about the skies, and Razhir the gas giant was suddenly there, filling the view, its banded face instantly rashed with the aim points. The ship’s main armament had resumed targeting a full-power blast on individual grey targets.
∼Motherfucker. Analysis?
∼Bigger than average, non-ablating reflectivity, moving quicker. Complicated. Lot of wreckage. Accounting for fewer total targets.
There, she thought; she’d known there was something wrong about their being only ninety K swarmers when they’d been expecting more. The fucking outbreak was switching production mix again, going for complex survivability rather than sheer numbers.
∼Grown-up power signatures, the ship continued, as Auppi unleashed another salvo. The incoming laser hits sounded like hail on a glass roof.
Another hurried tumble, one more array of targets snapping into focus, caught and steadied in the aiming grids. Even as she readied to fire, Auppi was scanning for the grey contacts preferentially now, picking out where they lurked in the red sleet-storm of other contacts.
Tiny patches of the sensor view were outing briefly now as the sheer weight of laser bursts incoming forced the mirror field to occlude the sensors, producing little hexagonal pixilations like clutter; they came and went almost before she had time to register them.
She flung out the latest manic light-burst, like shaking water droplets from her fingers.
With the main armament taking one target at a time it was possible to up the collimation on the secondaries for short- and medium-range targets, bringing their salvo total back up again. There might be a few more wounds rather than outright kills, but that was acceptable.
∼That one just took off, the ship said, indicating one of the two grey targets they’d tried to waste two salvoes earlier. ∼And there goes the other one.
∼See them, Auppi sent. ∼They’re fast! She had another reduced set of targets sliding across the view; she let fly at them. The two fleeing grey contacts would be out of range in seconds. ∼Any missiles we can put in their way?
∼Not the first one. Second, yes.
∼Get the other missiles to concentrate on the greys, she suggested. She wanted to fire a lot more missiles, everywhere, but they were out of missiles now too.
∼Shit, we powered them, the ship sounded upset.
∼Didn’t know you swore, ship.
∼I didn’t know swarmers could use incoming laser to power them to that sort of speed, the ship replied, fixing an unlikely-looking vector line across the points representing where one of the grey contacts had been when they’d hit it and where it was now, still accelerating.
∼We need to chase those, she sent.
∼You think so.
∼It’s prioritising them.
Another small set of targets, swiftly dispatched, while another slotted instantly into view. The weaponry was falling out of phase now as the differences between the varying re-charging intervals started to add up and the additional collimating on the secondaries introduced its own slight delay.
∼Maybe it wants us to do the same, the ship suggested.
The incoming sounded like drumming, heavy rain now. The pixilation outings were spattering across the view like manically invasive subtitles in an unknown language.
∼I don’t think it’s that smart.
∼You want to chase?
∼Yes. That one. She indicated the first one to set off out of the cloud of contacts at the same time as loosing another half-salvo and marking a swathe of fresh targets across the red cloud around them.
∼Okay.
The view tumbled one more time, another set of targets highlighted across the wash of contact-strewn space, then even as she triggered the weaponry again they set off, their slow, near-centred drift composed of many lightning-fast tumbles and gyrations turning into a single darting vector aimed at where they reckoned the grey they were targeting would be. She kept on firing microsalvo after micro-salvo at the sleet-echoes of red targets as they pursued, triggerings becoming almost continuous as the firing patterns diverged. Red sleet, red sleet turning fire bright; they must be leaving a tunnel of ravaged, fading debris behind them through the swarmer cloud, the ship itself a sleek spear-point glittering with reflected light as the red-flagged laser elements swivelled, following it and firing. So many reds, so many…
∼It’s accelerating hard, the ship sent.
Shit, she thought.
∼We powered it by hitting it, she sent to the ship.
∼Yes.
∼With the laser.
∼Yes. Oh.
∼They’re not all just to hit us with.
∼They’re there…
∼To power the greys.
∼That’s a departure.
∼That could be a lot of fucking departures. Those grey fuckers are ships; microships.
∼The outburst has halted, the ship told her. ∼The last swarmer just exited the infected fabricary.
Auppi and the ship were picking out double-handfuls of targets constantly now as they charged through the mist of contacts becoming targets, delegating the fire commands to the sub-AIs, effectively letting the weaponry make up its own mind when to initiate.
∼Hundreds of the laser swarmers are firing at the grey we’re pursuing, the ship sent. ∼I can see the back-scatter. Other laser swarmers starting to pattern themselves around each of the greys. They’re going to power them up too.
∼We aren’t going to be able to cope, she sent. ∼This needs mayhem weaponry; what we’ve got’s far too polite and pinpoint.
∼Or a serious Effector.
∼Job for our in-bound Torturer class.
∼I think we should suggest just that. Okay, we’re in range.
Auppi squeezed off the single main-armament shot at the fleeing swarmer, blasting it across the skies in a pulsating detonation of light, fragments incandescing in the pulses of laser still coming in from the swarmers which had been helping to power it.
Their own incoming increased again as the swarmers switched from powering the now destroyed microship to just plain shooting at the Bliterator and Auppi. The ship was swinging, powering away, curving round, lifting away from the debris field it had just created.
∼How many more greys? Auppi asked.
∼Thirty-eight.
∼We’ll never get them all.
∼As many as we can, then.
∼Any heading for the planet?
That had always been one of the nightmare scenarios: the swarmers turning properly feral and plunging into the gas giant to start trying to tear it apart. So far they hadn’t shown any desire to do this.
∼None. Mostly sticking to the system plane; few straight up and down.
∼Nearest?
∼This one, The ship highlighted one of the microships seemingly headed straight for another fabricary, its rear end lit up by the laser swarmers helping to propel it.
∼Signal Lan and the others, she sent. ∼Get Base to contact the Torturer class and suggest it gets stuck straight in with its Effector. Only way we’re going to cope here is by turning these fuckers on themselves.
∼Agree. Done.
They left the missiles to deal with the blue-tagged breeder swarmers while they went after the microship. This one loosed its own tail laser at them, re-directing some of its vicarious propellant laser fire back at its pursuer. The Bliterator’s mirror field blanked their sensors for an instant to cope.
∼Oh, that’s not funny, she sent.
∼Range, the ship replied.
∼Take that with your fucking arse-light, Auppi sent as she triggered their main armament. The weapon was wound up to frequencies there was no way the target ship’s own mirror armour could counter; the swarmer erupted brightly, way in the distance; the Bliterator was already curving away hard, picking out their next target.
They ran down ten more, the intervals between growing greater as the fleeing swarmer ships moved quickly away from the initial outbreak point. They passed the time frazzling as many of the cloud of laser swarmers as they could get near, dipping into the still-slowly expanding cloud of contacts like a predatory fish into a bait-ball.
The next grey was taking them way out of the original infection outbreak volume, zipping past other dormant fabricaria as they tore after the rear-lit microship.
∼This one’s accelerating harder than the others, given its distance
from the laser swarmers powering it, the ship told her. ∼Thought it was taking a while. ∼May mean it’s learned something about using that rear absorp-
tion/deflector set. ∼We in any danger? ∼Shouldn’t be. Mirror field’s been unstressed so far. The ship
sounded unworried. ∼Range. She fired. The resulting explosion didn’t look right. Too small,
for a start. ∼A partial, the ship sent. ∼Just wounded. ∼Wow, our first partial. ∼Still accelerating, though slower. Seventy per cent. Course
change, too. Heading straight for that fabricary. Collisionary. The ship highlighted one of the great dark slowly orbiting
shapes, sitting less than a thousand kilometres ahead. ∼Collisionary? Auppi sent. Oh, fuck, she thought; just what they needed. High-speed
swarmer/fabricary collisions. ∼Ready, the ship told her. ∼Hit it again. She did. Still too small a result. The swarmer had got harder,
smaller, more reflective. ∼Forty-five per cent of original acceleration, the ship reported.
∼Still picking up speed though. ∼Come on, you fucker, fucking die! They whizzed through the debris field from their first partial
hit. The ship scanned the still hot cloud as they flashed through
it, shields taking tiny impacts that made the ship judder. ∼Interesting materials profile, the ship said. ∼Definitely learning. ∼Same course? ∼Yes; swerved back to it after we knocked it off. ∼Impact? ∼Three seconds.
They had time to hit the swarmer twice more.
By the time it collided with the fabricary it had stopped accelerating and been reduced to the status of something more like a tight cloud of debris all travelling in the same direction rather than a ship, though it was still making sufficient speed to create a substantial flash when it hit the dark, three-kilometre-long lump of the fabricary.
∼Fuck, Auppi sent, watching the debris bloom and expand.
∼Agree, the ship replied.
They cruised in after it, already turned about and decelerating hard as the engines readied them to go back the way they’d come, still heading backwards on their earlier course through sheer momentum.
∼Unexpected impact signature. The ship sounded puzzled.
∼Oh, fuck; has it broken it? she asked. The debris had hit at over thirty klicks a second. It had ended up being a glancing blow rather than head-on, but it had blasted a hole in the fabricary and set it spinning and tumbling. It was already spiralling out of its orbit and drifting fractionally inwards towards Razhir. Uncorrected it would eventually head right down, into the gas giant’s atmosphere, to burn up.
In theory the Disk ought to remain stable for ever; in practice passing comets and even near-passing stars could disrupt it, and the fabricaria each had automatic systems that could vent gas to keep them on station. It was one of the responsibilities of whatever species was in charge of the Disk to keep those automatics charged and working. The systems were designed to nudge the fabricaria back into place when their orbits were ruffled by tiny fractions though; even if they’d survived the impact undamaged, the gross effect of the swarmer remains slamming into it would be orders of magnitude beyond anything the automatics could deal with.
∼It’s as though, the ship said, sounding hesitant, probably waiting for additional detail to accrue via its sensors, ∼the surface had been hollowed out. The outer shell should be solid; protecting the fabricary itself and providing raw material for when it’s producing something, but instead it’s like the debris hit a thin outer crust and then partly went through, partly collided with some sort of minimal structure underneath.
They had almost drawn to a stop now, still approaching the damaged fabricary but increasingly slowly as the engines, still at full power, cancelled their earlier vector.
∼Cut engines, she sent. ∼Back flip. Take us in for a look.
∼You sure?
The ship cut its engines, a half-second or so before they would have started pulling away from the holed, slowly cartwheeling fabricary. They were nearly stationary, still drifting slowly towards the impact site.
∼No, not sure, she admitted. ∼But…
∼Okay. The ship turned about, fired its engines briefly, turned, fired them again and, with a little finessing, got them locally stationary relative to the hundred-metre-long, raggedly ellipsoid breach in the giant slowly tumbling fabricary.
Auppi and the Bliterator found themselves looking straight into the torn-open interior of the thing. The view was edged all around with sections of its still-glowing outer surface, which must have been largely hollowed out to leave only a thin outer skin supported by a fragile-looking network of skinny girders, cables and beams that lay between that impromptu hull and the wall of the fabricary proper, about twenty metres deeper inside. That too had been breached by part of the swarmer’s wreckage cascade, so they could see all the way inside to where the ancient stuff-making machinery and associated paraphernalia lay.
This was the antique alien apparatus that was not meant to have been touched or used for a couple of million years. It was supposed to be lying there, metaphorically cobwebbed, in a cavern which was otherwise completely empty.
Unasked, the Bliterator described a small circle around the main breach so that they could see into different parts of the fabricary interior through the smaller secondary hole in its hull, so building up a larger picture.
The ship displayed the results. Some bits were blurred because, despite the damage, there was some sort of movement taking place inside the fabricary, but the main image was clear.
∼What, Auppi sent slowly, ∼the holy fuck… is that?
Twenty-three
She woke up. She looked around.
She was in a standard-looking medium-dependency medical pod in a standard-looking medical facility. Could be anywhere; ship-board, on an Orbital – anywhere. She felt okay. She was physically whole, wrapped in light compression foam over almost her entire body and she had some sort of movement-restricting bandages round her head. Pain indicators minimal; bodily damage assessment said she was recovering fast from multiple fractures of most major bones. No brain damage, little major organ damage. Widespread tissue damage, healing fast. She should be on her feet in two days, in fragile good health the following day and back to normal a day or two after that.
She could flex her toes and move her arms. Both her hands were free of the recovery foam; she could waggle them, and feel the liquidic texture of the pod covering. Raising her right arm, she could sense the compression foam taking the physical strain, letting her muscles flex but leaving her knitting bones unstressed.
“Okay,” she said, “now where are we?”
“Ms. Nsokyi,” a voice said. It sounded like the ship. Or a ship. Or at least like something non-human trying to be reassuring. A ship-drone, bulbous and smooth, like a giant pebble, swung into view. “Welcome aboard. I am the Culture vessel Me, I’m Counting.”
“Oh,” Yime said. “Well, I was looking for you, but now you’ve found me. What of the Bodhisattva?”
“Severely damaged. Its remains are being held within my own field structure. I intend to leave it with the first GSV we encounter. The extent of the damage it sustained is such I suspect it will make more sense to re-house the Mind in a new ship. Frankly, the main fabric is mostly fit for recycling. In any event, a point may come shortly when I may have to suggest that the Mind of the Bodhisattva abandon ship and throw in its lot with me, allowing me to abandon the rest of the remains and so resume my habitual field structure and hence operational fitness.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because, Ms. Nsokyi, we appear to be heading into what will shortly become, if it is not already, a war zone.”
Over the many, many years of his sexually active life, Veppers had worked out how to manage the rhythms and stages of a sexual encounter, all with a view to maximising his own pleasure. It was definitely a skill worth having. He thought of mundane, nonsexual things when he wanted to hold himself back, and of particularly exciting moments from earlier sexual escapades when he wanted to bring on his orgasm. One of the downsides of becoming very old was that the remembered stuff was generally always better than the sex you were actually having right there and then, but that was a small price to pay, he reckoned.
That evening, he was fucking Diamle, another of his fabulous Harem Troupe girls, in the master bedroom of the Ubruater town house, while Sohne looked on. Sohne was the other girl besides Pleur who was an Impressionist, able to take on any appearance. Currently, she looked like a very famous actress. He was already looking forward to fucking her next. Right now though – sweating a little, his long blond-white hair tied back in a pony tail – he was concentrating on holding back, aiming for an orgasm in about a minute’s time that ought to be a good one. This was no more than he deserved, he thought; he’d only arrived back that morning from his trip to Vebezua and beyond and was intent on making up for lost fucking time.
The air in the room changed, there was a massive “Bang!” and he was stopped in mid-stroke, still holding Diamle’s perfectly formed hips while the girl herself – until that point yelping and moaning with possibly pretended pleasure – stared straight ahead at a small, rather beautiful-looking alien creature with large eyes and milky, slightly pink-tinged skin, most of it hidden by a slim-fitting grey uniform. The creature had materialised where some of the great bed’s plumper pillows and cushions had been, and had caused several of them either to split or to disintegrate, either way spilling bounteous amounts of feathers and almost air-light stuffing into the air. The alien looked like it was emerging from its own small snowstorm. It flapped ineffectually at the feathers and stuffing, gaze darting this way and that.
Diamle screamed.
Internally, as it were, this was quite a pleasurable experience for Veppers, not that it made the slightest bit of difference to his sense of shock, violation and even betrayal. Sohne fell forward, fainting on the bed in a dead weight, her forehead thudding into one of Diamle’s splayed calves. Diamle was whimpering now. Veppers let her go; she pulled a deflated cushion cover around her and jumped off the bed, stood there quivering, staring at the little alien. She coughed suddenly, spitting out feathers.
The creature wobbled in the midst of the slowly falling debris, then seemed to find its balance, composing itself. It was one of Bettlescroy’s immediate underlings. “Mr. Veppers,” it said. It looked first at his face, then down at his engorged penis. “Gracious,” it said. It looked back at his face. “Over-Lieutenant Vrept,” it told him, nodding once. “Answering directly to the honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III himself.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Veppers said. This was not funny, not forgivable.
“I have information. We must talk,” the GFCFian said. It glanced at the sprawled, still-fainted form of Sohne, and the no-longer-quivering, merely gulping Diamle. “Send these persons away.”
“Sir?” Jasken’s voice came distantly from the bedroom’s main doors. The locked handles were turned from outside, then released. The door thudded to knocks. “Sir?”
Veppers pointed back towards the doors. “Just before I have my chief of security take you away for-”
“Information. Talk. Immediately,” the little alien said. “No further delay. I have orders.”
“Sir?” Jasken shouted from beyond the doors again. “Are you all right? It’s Jasken, with two Zei.”
“Yes!” Veppers shouted. “Wait there!” He turned to Diamle.
“My robe.”
The girl twirled, scooped his robe from the floor. Veppers lifted Sohne’s head up by her long golden hair and slapped her across the face a couple of times, bringing her round. She sat back, looking woozy, cheeks reddened.
“Both of you, out,” Veppers told the women as he wrapped his robe around himself. “Leave the door unlocked and tell Jasken and the Zei to wait where they are. Let him know what’s happened here, but nobody else.”
Diamle wrapped herself and Sohne in sheets and helped the other girl to the doors. Veppers heard Diamle saying something to Jasken, then the doors thudded shut again.
Veppers turned to the small creature. “Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘This had better be good,’ Over-Lieutenant Vrept?” he asked, knee-walking his way up the bed towards the sitting alien, then looking down, towering over it.
“I am,” it told him. “This is not good though; this is bad. Hence the urgency. My commander, the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III, bids me inform you that there has been a security breach in the Tsungarial Disk; one of the currently ship-constructing fabricaria was damaged during the ongoing diversionary smatter outbreak containment action and a light space craft belonging to the Culture Restoria mission caught recorded sight of the extemporised ship being built within said fabricary, signalling this information to the rest of the Culture mission within the Disk, which has concomitantly relayed said information beyond to other Culture units while at the same time investigating other fabricaria to discover whether others amongst them are also building ships, the results of this investigation being positive, of course, though steps have been and are being taken to neutralise the Culture mission’s abilities.
“In sum: it is now known within the Culture, and feasibly beyond, that certain of the Disk elements are manufacturing a war fleet. The fleet is still a day and a half from earliest completion, excluding AM-fuelling. Several Culture ships are approaching the Disk. The NR seem not to have been informed of the full substance of the aforesaid intelligence, however they have expressed strong interest in knowing what precisely is going on in the matter of the Tsungarial Disk, and unconfirmed reports suggest they may be moving militarily relevant assets into position.
“That is the initial substance of my message. Any questions, good sir? Or, and also, you may wish to enlighten the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III regarding the previously discussed but still unspecified targets pertaining to the still-being-built ships. That would be appreciated.”
Veppers stared open-mouthed at the little alien for at least two heartbeats, then wondered if he too was about to faint.
“Well, happy fucking day!” Demeisen said. He turned to Lededje with a grin that extended into a broad smile.
She looked at him. “I have the feeling that what you think of as good news might not strike everybody else as being quite so smashing.”
“Some nutter’s building a bunch of ships in the Tsungarial Disk!” Demeisen sat back in the seat, staring at the module’s screen, still smiling.
“How is that good news?”
“It’s not, it’s a fucking disaster,” Demeisen said, waving his arms.
“This’ll end in tears, mark my words.”
“So stop smiling.”
“I can’t! There are natural… Okay, I can,”‘ the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. “I can help it,” he admitted, “I just don’t want to help it.” He waved his arms again. “Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I’m deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?”
“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?”
“Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it’s looking clearer and clearer there’s going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that’s precisely what I’m built for. I’m going to get to strut my stuff, I’m going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can’t fucking wait.”
“We are talking about a shooting war?” she said.
“Well, yes!” Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.
“And people are going to die.”
“People? Very likely even ships!”
She just looked at him.
“Lededje,” the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. “I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!”
On the word “shine”, Demeisen’s eyebrows shot up, his voice rose a tone or two and increased markedly in volume. Even through the armoured glove, she could feel the pressure of his hands squeezing hers.
Lededje had never seen anybody look so happy.
“And what happens to me?” she asked quietly.
“You should get back home,” the avatar told her. It glanced at the screen, where the black snowflake with too many limbs still filled the centre of the image. “I’d chuck you overboard in this shuttle right now and let you head for Sichult, but whatever the fuck that is might mistake you for a munition or just waste you for the target practice so I’d better deal with it first.” The avatar looked at her with a strange, intense expression. “Necessarily dangerous, I’m afraid. No getting away from it.” Demeisen took a deep breath. “You afraid to die, Lededje Y’breq?”
“I’ve already died,” she told him.
He spread his hands, looked genuinely interested. “And?”
“It’s shit.”
“Fair enough,” he said, turning to face the screen and sitting back properly in the shuttle command seat. “Let’s put that one down as a mistake and try to stop it turning into a habit.”
Lededje watched the seat contort itself around the avatar, securing his body in place with padded extensions of the chair’s own legs, arms, seat and back. She felt movement around and beneath her and realised her seat was doing the same thing, enclosing her one more time; another layer of confinement beyond the gel suit and the armoured outer suit. She was pressed and shuffled backwards until everything fitted snugly against the contours of the seat.
“Now we get foamed,” Demeisen told her.
“What?” she said, alarmed, as the suit’s visor swung smoothly down over her face. The shuttle’s interior went dark, but the visor showed some sort of compensated image that gave her a very clear view of what looked like red-glowing bubbling liquid filling up the space she’d been living in for the last twenty-plus days, rising quickly in a dark red tide around the base of the chair, flowing up and over her armoured body and then foaming all about her, rapidly covering the visor and leaving her briefly blind in the darkness before she heard the avatar speak again.
“Space view? Or some screen entertainment to while away the time?” Suddenly the visor was showing her the same view the screen had, but wrap-around. The wrong-looking, eight-limbed black snowflake was still centre-image.
“You might have done better to ask whether I was afraid of forced immobility and confined spaces,” Lededje told the avatar.
“I forgot. Of course, the suit can just put you under for the duration of… well, whatever.”
“No, thanks.”
“So, make you mind up. Real space view with potential scariness, or some screen; gentle feel-good, wistful comedy, razor-sharp witterage, outright slapstick hilarity, engrossing human drama, historical epic, educational documentary, ambient meanderance, pure art appreciation, porn, horror, sport or news?”
“Real space view, thanks.”
“I’ll do my best. Might all happen too quickly if anything happens at all. Though prepare for disappointment and anti-climax; chances are still that this particular encounter will be resolved peacefully. Bastarding things usually are.”
“You are astoundingly bad at hiding your feelings in such matters,” she told the ship. “I hope your space-battle tactics are more subtle.”
The avatar just laughed.
Then everything went quiet for a moment. She could hear her own heart beat distantly. There was a noise just like a single in drawn breath and then the avatar’s voice said quietly, “Okay…”
On the screen before her eyes, the black snowflake image flickered.
There came a time when she found the shallow valley with the iron cages where the acid rain fell to torment the howling inmates, and each day the demons dragged them screaming to the canted slabs where their blood was spilled to form the gurgling stream at the valley’s foot which flowed glutinously into the header pond just upstream from the little mill.
She beat her great dark wings over the scene, watching as a giant flying beetle machine arrived to disgorge the latest batch of the badly behaved who’d been appropriately terrified by their tour round Hell. The beetle landed in a storm of dust, caking the mill and adding to the patina on the black-dark blood pond.
On the side of the mill, the wheel revolved ponderously, eliciting screams and groans from the still-living tissues, sinews and bones from which it was made.
Every beat of her wings caused her a tiny twinge of pain.
Chay had killed her thousand souls, enveloping them to release them into oblivion. This had happened some time ago. She still had no idea how quickly time moved within the virtual environment of the Hell. For her, it had been over thirteen hundred days; nearly three years in Pavulean terms, back in the Real.
With every death she took on a little more pain; the lantern-headed uber-demon had not lied. An aching tooth here, a stabbing feeling in her gut there, a persistent headache, what felt like a trapped nerve in one hip, a twinge every time she clenched her talons, a cramp when she flexed her wings in a certain way… a thousand almost infinitesimal little pangs and stings and sprains and strains and ulcers and chafings, either adding incrementally to some established hurt or starting a fresh site. She had long since stopped assuming that there were no bits of her great dark body left to experience pain; there always were. She remembered being the old Superior, near the end of her life in the Refuge; filled with aches and pains. At least there, death was always on its way, a release from suffering.
No single ache dominated, and even when taken together the sum of them was not utterly debilitating, but they all nagged, all had their effect, filling her days with the grumbling torment of continual, grinding misery; all the worse, on those days when she was feeling sorry for herself, for being self-inflicted.
Still she beat on though, still she flew across the calamitous geographies of Hell; watching, witnessing, and worshipped. She didn’t wonder that she had become part of this constructed world’s emergent mythology. Had she still been a lost soul wandering these reeking morasses, denuded, fire-blacked forests, crater-pitted concrete aprons and blasted, cinder-strewn hillsides, so traumatised she had started to believe there never had been a Real in which she’d lived… she too might have worshipped something like herself, praying to the half-fabled, occasionally glimpsed angel of death for a release from her torments.
She had toured the Hell to its limits, many tens of days flight away, and, beating upright by those iron walls, talons scrabbling at their vast, unyielding extent, accepted that this was indeed not an infinite space. It had its boundaries, distant though they may be.
She established a sort of mental map of the place. Here were the scorched plains, the poisoned marshes, the arid badlands, the steaming swamps, the bleached salt pans, the alkali lakes, acid ponds, bubbling mud craters and sintered lava flows amongst all the other bewilderingly varied wastelands of the place; here were the tremendous peaks of iron-frozen mountains, their glaciers red with blood, here the encircling sea of Hell, which lapped at the foot of the boundary wall and teemed with voracious monsters.
Here were the great valved doors that admitted the newly condemned; here were the roads the towering juggernauts of dead and dying trundled down, delivering their grisly cargoes to the vast prisons, camps, factories and barracks of the place; here the damned were set to their slave labour within the munitions factories or condemned to wander the ruins and the wilderness, or were chosen to fight in the everlasting war that consumed, recycled and re-consumed lives by the thousands and tens of thousands each and every day by, both sides.
Because there were two sides to Hell, though you’d have struggled to spot the slightest difference if you’d simply found yourself set down in the midst of either. The unfortunates delivered into Hell were allocated sides before they even entered the place, generally half going to one and half to the other.
There were two sets of the great valved doors – only admitting, impossible to exit through – two vast sets of boulevards paved with wracked backs and splintered bones, two whole sets and systems of prisons and factories and camps and barracks, two hier-archies of demons and – she’d been surprised to find – two of the colossal king-demons. They fought over the centre ground of Hell, throwing forces into the fray with a sort of manic relish, uncaring how many fell because they would always be resurrected again within days for fresh punishment.
In the rare event that one side established military superiority over the other, through simple luck or an accident of good leadership – threatening the balance of territory and forces and so the continuance of the war – extra recruits would be funnelled to the temporarily losing side by the simple expedient of shutting down one of the sets of gates, channelling all the new arrivals to the disadvantaged side, gradually restoring balance through sheer weight of numbers.
She thought of the gates she and Prin had entered through as the Eastern gate, for no particularly good reason. So they had been on the East side, but basically every aspect of the East side in this vast dispute was replicated in the West as well, and the two appeared identical in their gruesomeness. From a distance, anyway. She was not welcome in the West; smaller winged demons came up to mob her when she overflew too far beyond the front of the everlasting war, so she had to keep away entirely, or fly so high that the detail of what went on was denied her.
Still, she had flown to see the opposing Western gates, soared above the scattered dark clouds of the Western hinterland and even landed on occasion – usually only for a few minutes at a time – on certain jagged, frozen peaks, well away from the most intense fighting and the greatest numbers of enemy demons.
Whether in the West or the East, she looked down from such high crags, wrapped from the cold in her own gale-fluttering wings, and watched the scudding shreds of bruise-coloured clouds move over the distant landscapes of terror and pain with a sort of horrified amusement.
When she had killed the thousandth soul, she had taken the half-eaten body and dropped it at the feet of the great lantern-headed demon sitting in his red-glowing iron throne looking out over the vast reeking valley of smokes and fumes and screams.
“What?” the colossal creature boomed. With one enormous foot it kicked aside the husk of body she’d deposited in front of it.
“A thousand souls,” she told it, treading the air with deep, easy sweeps of air, keeping herself level with its face but too far away for it to swipe at her easily. “A thousand days since you told me that once I’d released ten times one hundred souls you’d tell me what happened to my love, the male I first came here with: Prin.”
“I said I’d think about it,” the great voice thundered.
She stayed where she was, the black, leathery wings fanning some of the valley’s noxious fumes towards the uber-demon’s face. She gazed into the gaseous impression of a face writhing and billowing behind the house-sized pane of glass, trying to ignore the four fat, dripping candles at each of the lantern’s four corners, their carbuncled surfaces veined with a hundred screaming nerve clusters. The creature stared back at her. She kept station, refused to move.
“Please,” she said, at last.
“Long dead,” the vast voice burst out across her. She heard the words with her wings. “Time moves more slowly in here, not faster. He is barely a memory. He died by his own hand, ashamed, penurious, disgraced and alone. There is no record of whether he remembered you at the end. He escaped being sent here, more’s the pity. Satisfied?”
She stayed where she was a while longer, upright in the air before it, beating her cloak wings like slow, mocking applause.
“Huh,” she said at last, and turned, dropping, swooping only to zoom again, beating away up and across the valley’s slope to its furthest ridge.
“How are the pains, bitchlet?” she heard the demon shout after her. “Do they grow?” She ignored it.
She waited until they came back out of the mill: the three demons and the one sad, screaming soul who had not been released after his tour of Hell. The demons held the howling, frantically struggling male between them; one holding both front feet, one each at the rear legs. They laughed and talked, taunting the screeching male as they carried him back to the beetle-shaped flier.
She stooped upon them, slaughtering the three demons easily; the two at the rear with a single pinch of one of her great talons. The unfortunate male lay quivering on the scaly ground, watching the demons’ blood pool dustily in towards him from three different directions. The beetle tried to take off; she screamed at it and with a two-legged blow ripped one of its wings right off and then tipped it over onto its back. It lay making clicking, chirring noises. When the pilot crawled out she wanted to rip him apart too, but instead she let him go.
She picked the trembling male up with one talon and stared into his petrified face while he voided his bowels noisily on the ground beneath.
“When you left the Real,” she said to him, “what date was it?”
“Eh?”
She repeated the question. He told her.
She asked him a couple of other questions about banal things like current affairs and civilisational status, then she let him go; he scurried away along the road leading from the mill. She might have killed him, she supposed, but she had already released one soul from its torments that day; all this had been a sudden inspiration, brought on for some reason when she’d come upon the mill.
She trashed the building too, scattering its screaming, protesting components across the valley’s slope, throwing wreckage splashing into the mill race and the header pond, displacing sloshing tons of blood while the building’s operators ran scampering for their lives. The blue-glowing door was not glowing at all, of course. It was just a plain, rough wooden door, now hanging off its hinges; a doorway to nowhere.
Oddly satisfied, she swept back into the grim skies with a single great clap of her wings, then beat off across the valley. She dropped the massive lump of wood that had been the door’s lintel towards the fleeing figures of the mill operators as they ran away, missing them by less than a metre.
She wheeled once above the valley, just a collection of pains and sundered lives, then struck out, cloudward, rising all the time, heading for her roost.
Always assuming the hapless male had been telling the truth, the uber-demon had lied.
Barely a quarter of a year had passed in the Real.
Vatueil was hanging upside down. He wondered absently if there were any circumstances when this could be a good sign.
He appeared to be inhabiting a physical body. Hard to tell whether he’d actually been embodied in a real one or this was just a full-sensory-spectrum virtuality. He was in no pain, but the blood roared in his ears due to the gravitational inversion and he felt distinctly disoriented, beyond the obvious fact that he was the wrong way up.
He opened his eyes to see a creature like a giant flying something-or-other staring straight back at him. It was also hanging upside down, though unlike him it appeared to be entirely happy with the situation. It was human-size, had a long, intelligent-looking face with large bright yellow eyes. Its body was covered in soft folds of golden-grey fur. It had four long limbs with what looked like thick membranes of the same soft fur linking the limbs on each side of its body to each other.
It opened its mouth. It had a lot of very small very sharp teeth.
“You are… Vatch-oy?” it said in a thick accent.
“Vatueil,” he corrected it. Looking away from the creature, he seemed to be hanging in the blue-green foliage of a great, tall tree. Further away, he could glimpse the trunks of other tall trees. The tree he was in was nothing like the size of the impossible tree, where he had spent many a happy holiday, winged and flying, but it was still too big for him to be able to see the ground. The branches and trunks he could see looked substantial. His feet, he noticed, were tied together with what looked like rope, while another length of rope ran through the noose his feet were in and then right round the metre-broad branch he was hanging from.
“Vatoy,” the creature said.
“Close enough,” he conceded. He felt he ought to know what this creature was, what species it was part of, but he had no internal access to any remote networks here; he was effectively just human, just meat, hanging here. All he had to rely on was his own all-too-fallible memories, such as they’d survived all the transcriptions they’d had to undergo over the years and regenerations, plus whatever unexpected intervention had led to him being here. His memories were anyway suspect, jumbled by a hundred different reincarnations in as many different environments, the vast majority virtual, unreal, militarily metaphorical.
“Lagoarn-na,” the creature beside him said, thumping itself on the chest.
“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.
Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in… had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or… his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.
It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering – a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been… read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory – all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards – that had felt like something triggered, something called up.
Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.
He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim… no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.
Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?
He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.
He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.
He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.
“How did you… get me?”
“Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”
He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.
“No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”
“GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.
Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set – thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery – wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.
“The GFCF?” Vatueil said. A feeling that was equal parts dread and sadness seemed to settle over him. He struggled not to show it.
“Protocols in messagery,” Lagoarn-na told him. “Gifts of knowledge, from high to low, not always maximally one-way. That which is given may give back, in time, where time is potentially quite long time. Still less so in cases of knowledge gained by chicanery, thefting. And so, resultingly, to this, and here. Plainly? Plainly: ancient code, buried; consequencing trapdoors therefore. Their ignorance thereof.”
The GFCF. And the NR. The Nauptre Reliquaria. That was the name of the species Lagoarn-na belonged to. The Nauptre, anyway. The Reliquaria bit usually referred to the machines that had taken over from them while the Nauptre themselves, the biological part of the super-species, prepared – everyone assumed – for Sublimation. That’s what had thrown him: the NR always presented as machines. You never saw the original bio species except in historical, contextual stuff.
They must have intercepted him. He’d been taken in some handover the GFCF had made of his personality construct, his mind-state, while attempting to transmit his updated, downloaded soul back to the war sim.
He wondered how bad this was, because it could be very bad. If he hadn’t made it back at all, at least people would know there had been a problem. He might only have been copied, though; maybe an identical copy had got back, and nobody had any suspicions.
He tried to recall what the latest tech implied; could comms be made completely proof against interception? It kept changing. One time they told you it was impossible to read a signal without it being obvious to whoever it had been sent to, another time they seemed to have changed their minds, and it was possible again; even easy. Trivial, frankly.
Then it would go back to being impossible, for a while.
Whatever; he was here when he shouldn’t be, and the NR – or just the N, just the bio Nauptre, though he doubted that – could intercept GFCF comms, because some of the code the GFCF used in their comms protocols had been given by the Nauptre – or stolen from them by the GFCF – and it had come with holes in it, ways the NR or the Nauptre could listen in when they wanted to.
Not as smart as they thought they were.
Guff-Fuff-fucking-Kuff-Fuff.
Shit.
He wondered why they were bothering to embody him, either in the Real or in a decent sim. But then even when you had all the information, sometimes it could be difficult to find the bit you really wanted. Embodying helped. Especially when you looked upon what you had downloaded as some sort of strange alien.
That was what he was to them. An alien. An alien they had refashioned from comms-code-information into something at least resembling what resulted from genetic information; a creature of flesh and blood. Him. And now they would want the truth.
“Meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, with what might have been a smile.
“GFCF. Pan-hu-man Vipperz. Scheme. War in afterlife. Tsung Disk? Tsung Disk.” The creature nodded.
Shit; it already knew too much of it. Had he told them that already, inadvertently? What more would they ask? He couldn’t see any obvious torture instruments about the creature’s webbing and pouches, but who knew?
Please not torture. Why did so much of everything have to come down to pain? We are creatures of pain, creatures of suffering. He had been through this, done this. Not more, please not more.
“You not to worry,” the creature told him. It gestured encompassingly. “Is one of trillions scarnations,” it told him. “Quantum stuff. In one you bound to tell trute. Maybes this one.”
The creature tipped its head to one side and Vatueil felt a feeling of utter relief and almost boundless pleasure wash through him. He knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t care.
Lagoarn-na didn’t want to hurt him, had no intention of hurting him. The Nauptre had every right to the information he had. All they wanted was the truth.
The truth. All so simple. Just stick to the truth and it made life so much simpler. Just the one set of facts or assertions to remember. The force of this simple truth – the truth about truth! – hit him like a cannon shell.
He really was experiencing bliss. This was only just short of sexual.
“What do you want to know?” he heard himself say, dreamily.
“Relate meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, and crossed its long, furmembraned arms across its chest, its wide unblinking yellow eyes seeming to stare into his soul.
“All right,” he heard himself say. He marvelled at how relaxed and unconcerned he sounded. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Vatueil; Gyorni Vatueil, my most recent rank – that I recall – being that of Space Marshal…”
He had never enjoyed relating anything more. Lagoarn-na proved to be a very good listener.
Twenty-four
Atdministrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali, commander of the GFCF Minor Destructor Vessel Fractious Person, took the priority call from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III in his cabin, as ordered. The Legislator-Admiral was shown sitting at his private desk, a roller keyboard displayed on the surface in front of him. As Quar watched, Bettlescroy snicked a couple of keys into place, then folded his elegant hands under his chin, elbows on desk, leaving the keyboard’s Commit key winking.
He looked up at Quar, smiled.
“Sir!” Quar sat as upright in his seat as he could.
“Quar, good day.”
“Thank you, sir! To what do I owe the honour?”
“Quar, we have never really got on, have we?”
“No, sir! My apologies for that, sir. I have always hoped-”
“Accepted. Anyway, I thought that we might enter into a new phase in our professional relationship, and to that end I believe I need to divulge to you something of our plans regarding the Culture ship Hylozoist.”
“Sir, this is an honour, sir!”
“I’m sure. The thing is, the Hylozoist has just been informed that there are unauthorised ships being constructed in the fabri-caria of the Disk.”
“I had no idea, sir!”
“I know you didn’t, Quar. That was deliberate.”
“Sir?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be blunt, Quar. We need to take action against the Culture ship; disable it at the very least, if not actually destroy it.”
“Sir? You mean, attack it?”
“As ever, your perspicacity and tactical awareness astonishes me, Quar. Yes, I mean attack it.”
“A… Culture ship, sir? Are we sure?”
“We are perfectly sure, Quar.”
Quar swallowed, gulped. “Sir,” he said, sitting even more upright in his seat, “I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal, sir; however I understood the Culture ship was most lately returned to the vicinity of the Disk Initial Contact Facility.”
“It still is, Quar; we have succeeded in detaining it there with administrational drivel until now, but it is about to depart again, and it is as it departs that we intend to attack it.”
“Sir! As I say, sir, I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal. However, we are – as I’m sure sir is aware – stationed with our sister ship the Rubric Of Ruin, on the far side of the Disk from the Facility. It will take-”
“Of course I’m aware of that, Quar. Unlike you I am not a complete idiot. And I might inform you there is another of our ships in your vicinity, standing some distance off, just beyond your scanner range.”
“There is, sir?”
“There is, Quar.”
“But I thought I was aware of our full fleet disposition, sir.”
“I know. But there are two GFCF fleets here, Quar, and the ship near you that you didn’t know about is part of the hidden one, our war fleet.”
“Our war fleet,” Quar repeated.
“Our war fleet. And when we attack the Culture ship we need to make it look as though somebody else attacked it, not us, and one of the best ways of making that appear plausible is to have one of our own ships attacked – indeed, preferably completely destroyed – at the same time. You see, war means sacrifice, some-times, Quar; that’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. We need to destroy one of our own ships.”
“We do, sir?”
“We do, Quar.”
“The… the Rubric Of Ruin, sir?”
“No, not the Rubric Of Ruin, Quar. But close.”
“Sir?”
“Goodbye, Quar; this pleases me much more than it will hurt you.” Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III unclasped his hands and brought one dainty, exquisitely manicured finger down onto the winking Commit key.
Administrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali was very briefly aware of an extremely bright light shining from all around him, and a sensation of great warmth.
The broad, sleek aircraft dived, side-slipped one way then the other before roaring over a broad, shallow river, making animals on the river bank and fish in the shallows between the gravel beds all scatter. The flier settled into a ground-hugging, low-altitude cruise, only metres above the tops of the trees on the trackway, which stretched all the ninety kilometres from here, the borders of the Espersium estate, to the great torus-shaped mansion house at its centre.
The trackway cast a long, thick shadow over the rolling pasture land to one side and the treetops were lit by a ruddy sun rising through layers of misty cloud above the horizon.
Veppers sat in one of the hunting seats in the back of the craft, looking out through the invisible barrier at the late autumn sunrise. Some high towers in Ubruater were reflecting the first direct light of the day, winking pinkly.
He looked at the laser rifle, which was lying, switched on but still stowed in front of him. He was alone in the shooting gallery; he didn’t want anybody else around him right now. Even Jasken was inside with the rest of the entourage, in the main passenger compartment. Some large bird was startled out of the canopy beneath in a chaos of twigs and feathers and Veppers went to grasp the laser rifle on its stand, then just let his hand drop again as the bird flapped frantically away.
It was a bad sign, he knew, when he lost his appetite for hunting. Well, shooting. You could hardly dignify it with the term hunting. It was an affectation, he felt now. Using a low-flying aircraft to throw up birds to shoot at. Still, it had been a useful affectation. He’d needed this excuse. He’d needed the trackways to be there. He felt heavy as the flier zoomed to follow the slope of a hill.
All about to end, now. Still, he’d always known it might have to end, one day.
He watched the landscape unwind behind the aircraft; and felt it, too, experiencing something close to weightlessness as the flier crested the hill and then followed the down-slope. Then he was heavy again, as they levelled out. The hill had hidden any sight of Ubruater, and the sunrise had been removed by a ridge to the east.
Veppers felt tired, unsettled. Maybe he just needed a fuck. He remembered Sapultride’s girl, Crederre, straddling him, bucking enthusiastically up and down, in this very seat, only – what, ten or eleven days earlier? Pleur, maybe? Or one of the other girls? Or just get a couple of them to fuck each other, in front of him. That could be oddly calming.
But he felt somehow impatient with the whole idea of sex right now. That was a bad sign too.
Maybe just a massage; he could call Herrit through, get him to pummel and smooth his tensions and worries away. Except he knew that wouldn’t work either. He thought about consulting Scefron, his Substance Use Mediator. No, not drugs either. Holy fuck, he really was out of sorts today. Was there nothing?
Nothing except all this being over, he guessed. This was nerves. He was the richest, most powerful man in the entire fucking civil-isation, way more monied and influential than anybody had ever been, ever, by orders of magnitude, but he was still suffering from nerves. Because what he was involved in now might make him much, much wealthier and more powerful than even he had ever been, or – just possibly – finish him, kill him, pauperise him, disgrace him.
He had always been like this before a big deal, when things were reaching a point of culmination. Been a while, though.
This was crazy. What was he doing, risking everything? You never risked everything; you risked as little as possible. You sold the idea of risking everything to the sort of idiot who thought that was how you got rich, but you kept your own risks to an absolute minimum. That way if you did make a mistake – and everybody made mistakes, or they weren’t really trying – it didn‘t finish you. Let others ruin themselves – there were always rich pickings in the wreckage – but don’t ever risk too much yourself.
Except now he was.
Well, he sort of had before, he supposed; the space mirror deal he’d gone into along with Grautze could have bankrupted him and the whole family if it had unravelled at the wrong time. That was why he’d had to set Grautze up, so that if it did go badly Grautze and his family would catch the blame and the shame, not he and his.
Originally he hadn’t even meant for Grautze to suffer if it did go well, but then he’d realised that the same mechanisms he’d set up to protect himself if it went sour could equally easily double his payoff if all went according to plan, so that he would come out of it with all the money, all the shares, all the companies and instruments and power. It had just been too good a trick to resist. Grautze should have seen it, but he hadn’t. Too trusting. Too gullible. Too blinded by loyalties he thought were shared, or at least mutual. Mug.
Poor fucker’s daughter had been more properly ruthless than her father had been. Veppers stroked his nose; the tip was almost grown back now, though it was still a little thin and red-looking and tender to the touch. He could still feel the little bitch’s teeth closing round it, biting. It made him shiver. He hadn’t been back to the opera house since. He’d need to get back, appear fully in public again, before it became some sort of ridiculous phobia. As soon as his nose was fully healed.
The deal would complete, all would go well and he’d end up with even more than he already had. Because he was who he was. A winner. The fucking winner. It had always worked out in the past; it would work out this time. Okay, so the war fleet had been discovered a few days early; that wasn’t such a disaster. And he’d been right still to stall. He hadn’t told Bettlescroy’s message boy where to attack yet. And he wouldn’t; not until the ships were genuinely ready to go. And they would be ready. They were too close to completion for anybody to stop them now. The Culture mission in the Disk was being dealt with and apparently even the incoming Culture warship could be taken on and neutralised. He just hoped the GFCF knew what the fuck they were doing. But then they probably felt the same way about him.
So don’t worry, don’t panic and just keep your fucking head. Get everything ready at this end and have the courage to see it through to the end, no matter what the cost. Cost didn’t matter if you could afford it and the reward was going to be inestimably greater.
He reached up, switched the laser rifle off and sat back. No, he didn’t want to hunt, or fuck, or get stoned or anything else.
Really, he supposed, he just wanted to be back at the house. Well, he could do something about that.
He clicked a seat control.
“Sir?” the pilot said.
“Never mind terrain-hugging,” he told her. “Just get us there as fast as you can.”
“Sir.”
The aircraft started to rise immediately, pulling up from the trackway beneath. He felt heavy again for a moment, but then the ride started to smooth out.
The flash came first. He saw it light up the landscape underneath the aircraft, and wondered momentarily if some coincidence of a gap in the clouds and a gap in the ridge to the east was letting a single strong beam of sunlight through to shine so brightly on the trees and low hills beneath. The light seemed to blink, then get brighter and brighter, all in less than a second.
“Radiation aler-” a synthesised voice started to say.
Radiation? What was-?
The aircraft bucked like a dinghy thrown by a tsunami. Veppers was crushed down into his seat so hard he felt and heard himself make a sort of involuntary grunting, groaning noise as the air was forced out of his compressing lungs. The view – wildly, insanely bright – started to spin like emptied buckets of fluorescent paint swirling round a plug hole. A titanic bang resounded, seeming to come from somewhere inside his head. He glimpsed clouded sky, the clouds’ under-surfaces garishly lit from below, then distant, too-brightly shining hills and forests, then – just for an instant – a vast boiling cloud of fire and smoke, rising on a thick dark stem above a mass of darkness shot through with flame.
He heard what might have been screams, and tearing, cracking, buckling noises. The view through the ultraclear glass suddenly hazed all at once, as though a thin-veined white mesh had been hurled across the material. He felt weightless again and then seemed to be about to be thrown against the ceiling, or into the crazed ultraclear, but the seat seemed to hold onto him.
A roaring noise threw a deep red haze across his eyes and he blacked out.
Yime Nsokyi took her first few unaided steps. Even dressed in loose-fitting fatigues, she felt oddly naked without the supporting net of foam she’d been swaddled in for the last couple of days.
The bones in her legs felt delicate and a little achey. It hurt to take a deep breath and her spine felt oddly inflexible. Only her arms felt pretty much like normal, though the muscles were weak. She’d instructed her body to hold back on all the pain-cancelling mechanisms, to feel how bad things really were. Not too bad, was the answer. She should be able to get through without any more anti-pain secretions.
Walking at her side as she padded up and down the gently lit lounge inside the Me, I’m Counting, one arm extended to cup one of her elbows, was Himerance, the ship’s avatar, a tall, thin crea-ture with a very deep voice and a quite hairless head.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told him.
“I disagree,” he said. “I feel I do. This is at least partly my responsibility. I’ll do what I can to make amends.”
The Me, I’m Counting had been the nearest ship to the Bodhisattva when it had been attacked by the Unfallen Bulbitian, coasting in towards the entity for the semi-regular pick-up and set-down of those going to and coming from the Forgotten GSV Total Internal Reflection. It had been coincidence that it, rather than one of the other ships associated with the GSV, had been allocated the role of shuttle bus this time; three other craft shared the rota. On this occasion, with nobody to drop off, the ship had been coming in only to pick up. When the distress call and Plume event had signalled there was a vessel in distress nearby, it had diverted to investigate and offer help.
“Do you still have the image of Lededje Y’breq?” Yime had asked the ship as soon as she’d been able to. The ship had replaced the pebble-smooth drone with Himerance, a humanoid avatar it had been storing, unused, for over a decade. She’d half expected dust to float from Himerance’s head when he’d nodded.
“Yes,” he’d told her. “In image form only.”
“May I see it?”
The avatar had frowned. “I did promise not to share her full image with anybody else without her express permission,” he’d told her. “I’d prefer to keep to that promise unless there is some circumstance that is so… operationally urgent I felt compelled to break it. Do you especially need to see it? There are plenty of high-quality images of Ms. Y’breq available from Sichultian media and other easily accessible sources. Would you like to see some of them?”
She’d smiled. “No need. I’ve seen them. I was just curious. I appreciate that you want to keep your word.”
“Why are you interested in her?” the ship had asked.
Yime had stared at it. But of course, it would have known nothing of what had happened to Lededje. Servant – acolyte – to a dedicatedly hermit-like GSV, one of the Forgotten, naturally it would be out of any loop that would include detailed knowledge of events in Sichult.
“The Bodhisattva hasn’t briefed you?”
“Immediately after I rescued it, it asked me to make all speed towards the Sichultian Enablement, which I am doing, though with reservations given the situation that appears to be developing there. The Bodhisattva then said that you might provide the reason for all this alacrity.” The avatar had smiled. “I seem to have such a reputation for eccentricity the ship thinks I am more likely to accede to a request from a human than I am to one emanating from a fellow ship. I have no idea why.”
She’d explained that Lededje had been murdered by Joiler Veppers and then revented aboard the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly before being spirited away by the Abominator-class ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints. It was assumed she was making her way back to Sichult, quite possibly with thoughts of revenge and murder.
“It was you who put the lace inside her, wasn’t it?” Yime had asked. Himerance had been looking bemused.
“Yes,” the avatar had said. “Yes, that was me.” He’d shrugged. “She said to surprise her, and I couldn’t think of anything else that would materially improve her life that was within my gift. I had no idea it would lead to events of such moment. I assume Mr. Veppers still holds the position of great power he did before.”
“Even greater power.” She’d explained about the Tsungarial Disk and the coming culmination of the confliction over the Hells.
Now, stricken with a feeling of responsibility for all this, the Me, I’m Counting had decided to complete the mission Yime and the Bodhisattva had undertaken. It would take her wherever she wanted to go in pursuit of Lededje Y’breq. The Mind of the Bodhisattva would come too, as a part of the Me, I’m Counting. Rather than waste time trying to rendezvous with another ship the two Minds had determined to salvage all they could from the wreck of the Bodhisattva and junk the rest. The boxy ship-drone from the Bodhisattva floated by Yime’s other elbow, ready to help if she wobbled in its direction.
“In the circumstances, and at the moment,” the drone said, “it is anyway preferable to be contemplating an incursion into the Sichultian Enablement within a warship rather than a humble General Contact Unit.” It came forward a little and dipped, as though peeking round Yime to the humanoid avatar. “Our friend here will have the undying gratitude of the Quietus Section for its action.”
“Don’t exalt me overmuch,” the avatar rumbled. “I am still a warship after a fashion, but an old and avowedly eccentric one. Compared to the thing Ms. Y’breq seemingly finds herself on, I am small beer indeed.”
“Ah, yes, the picket ship,” Yime said. “It must be nearly there by now.”
“Very nearly,” Himerance told her. “Hours out from Enablement space, and the Tsungarial Disk, if that’s where it’s headed.”
“Just in time for the smatter outbreak,” the ship’s drone said. “That is almost too convenient. I do hope we had nothing to do with that.”
“‘We’ being the Culture, Restoria, or SC?” Yime asked, wobbling a little as she reached the limit of the lounge area and turned. Avatar and drone both helped steady her.
“Good question,” the drone said. It seemed content to judge the question without hazarding an answer.
“And what about the Bulbitian?” she asked.
The drone said nothing. After a moment, the avatar said, “A Fast Picket, the No One Knows What The Dead Think, paid a call on the Bulbitian some eight hours ago, respectfully asking for an explanation for what happened to the Bodhisattva and your-self. The Bulbitian denied all knowledge not only of any attack on you, but also of your visit. Worryingly, it also denies that there ever was a Culture Restoria or Numina mission aboard it. In fact it claims to have been completely without any alien visitors for as long as it can remember.
“The Fast Picket begged to differ and requested leave to contact the Culture personnel it knew had been on the Bulbitian as recently as a couple of days earlier. When that was refused it asked to be allowed to send a representative aboard to check. That too was rejected. No signals had emanated from the Bulbitian since very shortly after the attack on the Bodhisattva and no signals from the Fast Picket elicited any response at all.”
They’re all going to be dead; Yime thought. I know it. I brought death to them.
“The No One Knows What The Dead Think then departed the Bulbitian’s atmospheric envelope,” Himerance continued, “but left behind a small high-stealth drone-ship which attempted to access the Bulbitian directly without permission, using smaller drones, knife and scout missiles, eDust and so on. All were destroyed. An attempt by the Fast Picket to Displace sensory apparatus directly into the Bulbitian met with no more success and resulted in an attack on the Fast Picket by the Bulbitian.
“Forewarned, and – having been a warship, the GOU Obliterating Angel, in its earlier incarnation – more martially capable than the Bodhisattva, the Fast Picket was undamaged by the Bulbitian’s attack and retired to a safe distance to keep watch on the entity and await the arrival of the Equator-class GSV Pelagian, which is five days away. A Continent class with SC links is also strongly believed to be en route, though it’s keeping its arrival time quiet.
“Other species/civs who had personnel aboard the Bulbitian also report no contact or sign of their people and, like us, suspect that the entity has killed them.”
Yime stopped, looked at Himerance, then at the skeletal assembly of components which was the Bodhisattva’s drone, and – with the vessel’s Mind – one of the few bits of the ship it had been worthwhile salvaging from the near-total wreck. “So they’re all dead?” she asked, her voice hollow. She thought of the elegantly elderly Ms. Fal Dvelner and the terribly earnest, multiply-reincarnated Mr. Nopri.
“Very likely,” the drone told her. “I’m sorry.”
“Was that us?” Yime asked, starting to walk again, going hesi-tantly forward. “Did we cause that?” She stopped. “Did I cause that?” She shook her head. “There was something,” she said, “some issue, some… I antagonised it somehow. Something I said or did…” She knocked one set of knuckles on her temple, gently. “What the hell was it?”
“Possibly we bear some collective technical responsibility,” the drone said. “Though frankly, triggering an act of homicidal insta-bility in a Bulbitian is hardly proof by itself of any culpability. Still, we are certainly attracting the blame from those already-mentioned other species and civs who had people on the Bulbitian. That the entity itself is entirely to blame for an unprovoked attack and that we were its first victims – and, very nearly, its first fatal-ities – seems to matter little compared to the ease with which we may be blamed.”
“Oh, grief,” Yime said, sighing. “There’s going to be an Inquiry, isn’t there?”
“Many, probably,” the drone said, sounding resigned.
“Before we start thinking ahead to the aftermath,” Himerance said, after clearing his throat, “we might do well to contemplate our immediate course.”
“Ms. Y’breq is still our focus,” the Bodhisattva’s drone said. “The point may rapidly be approaching when the input or deci-sions of one person stops making much difference, but for the moment we might hope to influence events through her, if we can find her.”
“And of course,” Himerance said, “Mr. Veppers’ inputs and decisions almost certainly do matter, considerably.”
“So do Ms. Y’breq’s,” Yime said, turning at the far end of the lounge to head back the way she had come. There was no unsteadiness this time. “If she gets near him with a clear shot, or whatever.”
“The latest we have from Sichult places Veppers in a place called Iobe Cavern City, on the planet Vebezua, in the Chunzunzan Whirl,” the drone said.
“There, then,” Himerance said, then hesitated. An expression of surprise crossed his face. “The Culture Restoria mission dealing with the smatter outbreak just discovered more ships being built within the Tsungarial Disk,” he said.
“How many more?” Yime asked.
It was the Bodhisattva’s drone which answered. “One in every fabricaria they’ve looked in so far,” it told her.
Yime stopped. “How many have they looked in?” she asked, looking from the drone to the avatar.
“About seventy, so far,” Himerance said.
“As highly spread as they could manage, too,” the drone said. “Good representative sample.”
“Doesn’t that mean-?” Yime began.
“Could be all of them are making ships,” the drone said.
“All of them?” Yime felt her eyes widening.
“Certainly a very high proportion of the three hundred million fabricaria,” the drone said.
“In the name of grief,” Yime cried, “what do you do with three hundred million ships?”
“You could certainly start a war,” the drone said.
“With that many ships,” Himerance said, “you might end it, too.”
“Nevertheless,” the drone said, “we had best get there.”
“Time to hit sprint,” Himerance said. Then he nodded at the wall screen at the far end of the lounge as it lit up, showing the battered-looking remains of the Bodhisattva floating within the Me, I’m Counting’s field envelope. The crippled, wrecked ship didn’t look that badly damaged, from where they were looking. A little scratched, grazed, crumpled and dented, perhaps. The most serious damage was internal. “Last drone team’s ready to clear,” Himerance announced. “Suggest we forget about that anterior remote stressor.”
“Agreed,” said the drone. The little machine hung very still and steady in the air, giving every impression of staring at the wreck of its ship on the screen.
“Well, I think you should give the command,” Himerance said.
“Of course,” the little drone said.
The hazily shining wall of the field enclosure approached the stricken ship, moved smoothly over it and left it outside, exposed to the distant stars. The view switched to beyond the field enclo-sure, to where the lifeless body of the Bodhisattva floated naked, without any fields or shields about it at all. It was drawing slowly away, falling behind.
“Oh well,” the drone said.
The Bodhisattva convulsed, almost as though shaking itself awake after a long asleep, then started to come slowly apart as though it was an exploded diagram made real. A spherical mirror field appeared all about it for an instant, then, when it dropped, the ship was ablaze, light flaring from every part of it, burning brighter and brighter as they watched; flameless, orderly, still non-explosive but searing in its intensity, the pure fires raged until gradually they started to fade and go out, and when they had entirely gone, there was nothing left of the ship at all, save light-slow radiation, flowing out in every direction towards the distant suns.
“There,” the Bodhisattva’s drone said, turning to Yime and the avatar. “Full speed ahead, I think.”
Himerance nodded. The stars on the screen started to drift away. “Fields at naked-hull minimum,” he said. “Going to a velocity which will be traction-injurious within about forty hours.”
“When do we get there?” Yime asked.
“Eighteen hours,” Himerance said. The avatar stared at the screen. The view had swung to dead ahead. “I’d better check my Manual files, see if I remember how to work as a functioning warship. Probably all sorts of stuff I need to do. Prepping shields, calibrating Effectors, manufacturing warheads; that sort of thing.”
“Anything I can-?” Yime began to say, then realised how absurd this would sound to a ship. “Sorry. Never mind,” she said, flapping one hand, which hurt a little.
The avatar just smiled at her.
He woke to a sort of busy quietness. There was a ringing noise somewhere, and some distinctly annoying beeping, and something else he couldn’t immediately identify, but it all felt terribly muffled, like it was happening somewhere down the other end of a very long tunnel and he really needn’t be concerned about it. He kept his eyes open and looked around, but nothing made sense. He closed his eyes again. Then thought that was probably a bad idea. Something bad had happened and it might not have stopped happening yet; he needed to keep alert, keep his eyes open, keep focused.
He felt heavy in a strange way, as though his weight was being taken by his head and neck and shoulders. He turned his head to one side, then the other.
Fuck; he knew where he was. He was in the back of the flier. All this dark, tipped chaos around him was the remains of the aircraft. What the fuck had happened?
He was lying in the seat he’d been in when whatever had happened… had happened. He wanted to shake his head to clear it but wasn’t sure that was a good idea. He brought one hand up to his face, wiping. Sticky. He looked at his hand. That was blood. He was breathing heavily.
His feet were up in the air, pointing towards the sky, which he could see through the contorted remains of the flier’s rear deck. Where the ultraclear glass should be, there appeared to be nothing. Stuff was falling out of the cloud-dark sky and landing on him, landing all about him. Black and grey. Soot and ash.
He remembered the fireball he’d glimpsed.
Had that been a nuke?
Had some fucker tried to nuke him?
Had some motherfucker tried to nuke him in his own plane on his own fucking estate?
“Motherfucker,” he said, his voice sounding heavy and slurred and far away.
He didn’t seem to be badly injured; nothing broken. He glanced behind him – that did hurt, as though he’d been bruised – then pushed himself back down the seat, head first, grabbing onto the support for the laser rifle – still on, little tell-tale lights blinking – to stop himself from falling backwards against the bulkhead, which was now tipped so that it was nearer to being a floor than a wall.
He got himself standing upright and stood there swaying, brushing the dirt and bits of glass and smears of blood off his clothes. What a state. He looked at the soot and ash still falling down around him through the space where the ultraclear had been. He’d have to climb if he was going to get out that way. He brushed some of the ash and soot out of his hair. Fucking radioactive shit, he’d bet. When he found who’d been responsible he’d have them fucking skinned alive while he hosed them with saline solution. He wondered who to suspect. Had there been anybody meant to come on this flight who’d called off at the last moment? He couldn’t think of anybody. All present. His whole entourage, all his people.
He looked along to the door into the rest of the flier, then reached up and struggled to detach the laser rifle from its stand, eventually giving up.
Felt like the flier was nose down into the ground. That meant the pilots were probably dead. He wondered how many of those in the main passenger compartment were still alive, if any.
He pulled at the door – more of a trap-door, now – but it wouldn’t open. He had to get down on his knees and use both hands to pull it open, cutting one of his fingers on a bit of torn metal as he did so. He sucked the blooded finger, licked it. Like a fucking animal, he thought. Like a fucking animal. Skinning alive would be too good for whoever had done this. He’d want to think of something worse. There were probably experts you could consult.
He lowered himself into the darkness beneath the protesting, creaking door.
“What’s happening to my eyes?” It came out as a cry, like a yelp, not the calm question she’d intended. Her eyes were getting sore, feeling pressured.
“Suit’s getting ready to foam inside your visor,” the ship told her crisply. “Gas pressure first, so the foam won’t come as a shock.
Don’t want detached retinas, do you?”
“As ever, thanks for the warning.”
“As ever, apologies. Not big on warnings. Grief; it’s so compli-cated keeping you humans undamaged.”
“What’s happening now?”
“The suit will be using its neural inductor to set up screening images straight into your brain. You may get double vision while your eyes are still working and it’s calibrating.”
“I meant outside, with the other ship.”
“It’s mulling over my last communication, which was basically, Stop following me or I’ll treat you as hostile. Reconfigured a touch to a more defensive posture. I gave it half a minute to make its mind up. Probably too generous. It’s one of my failings.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lededje watched the eight-limbed snowflake shape, unsure now whether she was seeing it with her eyes projected inside the suit’s helmet, or somehow purely with her visual centre, lensed in there directly by the suit. The image shimmered again.
“What-?”
“See?” the ship said. “Too long. Didn’t even take the full half-minute.”
“What did it do?”
“Fucker tried putting a shot across my bows, is what it did. Told me to heave to and prepare for boarding, in what you might call classical terms. Says it suspects me of being part of some swarm outbreak, which is amusing, if deeply implausible. Marks for orig-inality.” The ship sounded amused. “Also, hitting me with a comms enclosure, cutting me off from outside contact. That’s not neigh-bourly at all. Plus means it’s either very big and capable or it’s not working alone, and there are at least another three ships in the vicinity. I could find them, plus I could just punch through it, but both would mean I’d have to drop the li’l-old-me Torturer disguise.” The ship made a sighing noise. “Going to have to foam you up, lass. Close your eyes.”
She closed her eyes, felt the pressure and temperature on her eyelids change subtly. She tried, tentatively, to open her eyes again, but they felt glued shut. Disorientingly, the view she had of space around the ship didn’t seem to change at all.
“I-” she began.
“Now your mouth.”
“What?”
“Your mouth.”
“How can I talk to you if I close my mouth?”
“You’re not closing it, initially; you’re opening it so another sort of foam can get in there; coats your throat in carbon fibre to stop it closing up under high acceleration, then you close it, the buttress foam fills your mouth and another load of foam does something similar with your nose; you can still breathe normally but you’re right, you can’t talk. You just have to think the words; sub-vocalising with your throat should help. Mouth open, please.”
“I am not happy with this. This is all very… invasive. You can understand that with my history I’m troubled by this.”
“Again, apologies. We can always not do this but then we can’t manoeuvre with the alacrity we might need to keep both you and me alive. Potentially, this means death or discomfort. Death or trauma. Or I ditch you in the module and-”
“Do it!” she said, almost shouting. “I can always get counselling,” she muttered.
Warm foam slid into her mouth. She felt it – or something, somewhere – numbing her mouth and throat; she didn’t gag, didn’t feel exactly where the foam went.
“Well done,” the ship sent. “Now, bite down, Lededje. No rush. Our pursuers are giving us a countdown to compliance but there’s ample time. Hmm. Finally some ident. GFCF. There’s a surprise.”
She bit down, into the warm foam. Something started to tickle her nose, then that sensation faded too.
∼Right! the ship announced breezily, its voice inside her head.
∼That’s you as ready as you’re ever going be. Try sending instead
of saying?
∼Howowow ig diss? Oh, fshuck.
∼“How is this?” You’re overdoing the sub-vocalising. Just do it, don’t think about doing it.
∼Okay, how’s this?
∼Perfect. See? Easy. Now we can start behaving like a proper warship!
∼Oh, great.
∼It’ll be fine.
∼What’s happening?
She was watching the screen-like images change; the black snowflake had flicked to one side, then swung slowly back to centre-rear. Then it had flicked in the other direction, before swinging back again. So far she hadn’t felt anything; if the ship was manoeuvring hard it was preventing any trace of the acceler-ations affecting her physically. It all felt perfectly smooth so far. She suspected this was a deceptive sensation.
∼I’m shaking my humble-Torturer-class-pretending behind at them, the ship told her. ∼Bit more energetically than an original-spec ship could, but that’s still plausible; most of those old ships have upgraded significantly. Looking like I’m trying to shake them off. Spooling up burst units for a series of break-angle turns.
Lededje felt herself clenching, without being entirely aware what she was clenching. The image of the black snowflake disappeared. Then she saw it, way off to one side. It started to slide slowly back towards where it had been. It flickered, disappeared to another part of her field of view. She still couldn’t feel anything. Another flick/suddenly-somewhere-else motion, then another. She was losing the black snowflake for seconds at a time between flicks.
∼How we doing? she asked.
∼Successfully giving the appearance of getting desperate, the ship told her. ∼Really trying everything to get them off our tail, apparently. Without result, of course. Spooling bursters for a single max-to-zero draining event and preparing to execute a whip flare with main traction; means a little engine degradation but it’s allowable if it might get you out of a tight spot and at the moment it looks like our best shot. Or at least it looks like it looks like our best shot. Haw, haw.
∼Should I be reassured that you seem to be enjoying this so much?
∼Abso-fucking-lutely. Watch this.
The black snowflake with too many limbs disappeared entirely. She cast her gaze about, trying to find it.
∼Where’d the fucker go? she found herself muttering.
∼It’s here, the ship’s voice told her. A portion of space which she was aware was almost directly behind her and yet somehow just at the periphery of her oddly lensed vision lit up with a green circle and zoomed in to show the snowflake again, much smaller and getting smaller still.
∼Sorry, she sent. ∼Didn’t mean to distract you.
∼You won’t, the ship sent. ∼I’m talking through the suit at the moment. All ship’s own main processing power’s going to manoeu-vrage, tactical simming and field management. Not to mention keeping up appearances, of course. Sub-routine here. Distraction impossible. Ask whatever you want.
The green circle faded as the black snowflake started to get bigger again and slide across the visual field, still heading for centre-rear.
∼That doesn’t look so good.
∼Got the fucker, the ship said.
∼Got it? You’ve been firing at it?
∼Ha! No. Got it identified. It’s a Deepest Regrets class. Probably the Abundance Of Onslaught. Thought to be in this neck of the woods, if not exactly hereabouts. That’s interesting all by itself. Why would that just happen to be hanging round here?
∼Can you beat it? she asked. The black snowflake was still enlarging, sliding round to centre. Back to backwards, she supposed.
∼Oh, yes. The ship sounded blasé. ∼I most severely outgun, out-armour and can outrun the fucker. Does raise the question though: how many of its little friends has it brought? Deepest Regretsers are pride-of-the-fleet, Ultimate Asset, not-many-ofthose-to-the-handful grade craft for the GFCF. Won’t be here by itself. Kind of hints at a maternally fornicating war fleet. What’re these shit-kickers up to? What did they know?
∼About what?
∼About the smatter outbreak and this new ship-building enthu-siasm some bits of the disk have discovered, the ship replied. ∼Main local news recently, wouldn’t you say?
∼I suppose.
∼Ah! Torturer-class-plausible track scanner on seemingly random search finds other ship shock, the ship announced. ∼Bugger me, there’s a screen of the little fuckers. They keep peeling off war-craft like this, I’m going to have a fair fight on my hands. Last thing we fucking want.
∼Are we in danger?
∼Mhm, marginally, I won’t pretend, the ship told her. ∼There’s a multiplicatory implication about the presence of a serious capital ship like a Deepest Regretser, and about the way they’ve been able to contain even something as venerable as a Torturer class. Ancient tub, but still a serious piece of ordnance for the GFCF to go up against, in the normal course of events. Whatever the fuck is going on here, this ain’t day-to-day behaviour. This sims as peaking, fulcruming stuff.
∼Are those swear words I don’t know about?
∼Sort of. Means somebody here might be on a risking-everything approach. That would alter the rules a bit.
∼In a good way?
∼What do you think?
∼I suspect in a bad way.
∼Well done.
∼What now?
∼Time to stop fucking about.
∼You’re going to attack?
∼Eh? No! You really are bloodthirsty, aren’t you? No; we get you out of danger by letting slip part of the humble-Torturer-class disguise and just powering away from them until they can’t see what I’m doing. Then I can set you off in the shuttle… actu-ally, maybe not in the shuttle; maybe in one of my component shiplets, given the trashing potential that seems to be floating around here at the moment. You head for Sichult to have words with Mr. Veppers, I stick around here to knock some sense into the GFCF – hopefully only metaphorically – and then get stuck into the smatter outbreak, on whatever fucking scale that partic-ular complication happens to be manifesting lately.
∼Sure you can afford this “shiplet”?
∼Yes, I – oh, hello; they’re hailing again, saying heave-to or blah-blah-blah. Anyway.
She watched the image around her flick-swivel, then all the stars seemed to change colour, blazing blue ahead, red behind.
∼Off and run- the ship started to tell her, then everything went dark.
Dark? She thought? Dark?
She had time to send, ∼Ship? before the ship’s voice said,
∼Sorry about that.
The view clicked back on. This time there were lots of addi-tions within the image: dozens of tiny, sharp green shapes with numbers floating just in front of them and with garish coloured lines trailing after them and – in different colours – pointing in front of them. Concentric circles of varying pastel shades, noded with symbols meaningless to her, seemed to target each of the tiny green shapes, which were rapidly accruing accompanying floating icons like stacks of cards; looking at one made it blossom into nested pages of information showing as text, diagrams and multi-dimensional moving images that made her eyes hurt. She looked away, took in the general view instead; a thousand tiny gaudy glow-flies loose in a pitch-black cathedral.
∼What happened? she asked.
∼Enemy action. Seems the fuckers want a shooting war, the ship told her. ∼That hit would have smeared a real Torturer class. Motherfuckers. Time for me to reply in kind, sweetheart. I must prepare to smite. Sorry, but this may smart.
∼What?
∼Body-slap they call it. Healthy; means you’re still alive and I’m still functioning. Don’t worry, there’s a sub-routine moni-toring your nervous system; it can de-pain you if it starts to get really sore. Come on, let’s get on with it! Time’s-a-wasting! Just say you’re ready.
∼Fucking hell. All right. I’m ready. Like I-
Then her entire body seemed to be hit, as though every part of it had been slapped at the same time. It seemed to come from one side – her right – but it felt like it hit every part of her. It wasn’t especially sore – it had been too distributed – but it certainly got one’s attention.
∼How we doing? the ship asked as another tremendous shock registered throughout Lededje’s body, this time from her left.
∼We are doing fine.
∼That’s my girl.
∼I’ll- she started to say.
∼Now, hold on to your hat.
Another titanic slap, everywhere through her body. She seemed to drift away, then came to, feeling woozy. She gazed about at all the hundreds of pretty little symbols floating around her, haloed with pastel colours.
∼Still with us?
∼Think so, she sent. ∼I think… my lungs are hurting. Is that even possible?
∼No idea. Anyway; only calibrating. Shouldn’t get any worse than that.
∼Did they hit us?
∼Hell no; that was just us getting us out from under their track scanners. They’ve lost us now, poor fuckers. No idea where we are.
∼Oh.
∼Which means what’s about to happen to them will seem to come out of nowhere. Watch – as they say – this…
Instantly she was tipped and thrown; sucked tumbling into the view as though the whole weight of the ship had grabbed her by the eyeballs, pulled, and hurled her into the frenzied welter of impossible colours, staggering speed and infinite detail that was its riotously ungraspable sensorium. She felt assaulted, might have screamed if it hadn’t felt the breath had just been smacked out of her.
Immediately – thankfully – the whole bewildering complexity of it was reduced, pared and focused, as though just for her; the view rushed in on one of the little green symbols and the concen-tric rings around it whizzed, flicking this way and that, symbols flickering and changing too fast to make sense of. Then two rings flashed and changed places; the one that became the innermost ring seemed to start to flash again but this time blazed; she felt her eyes trying to close up, virtual eyelids shutting. The flare faded, left tiny granules of green where there had been a complicated shape before. It had all taken less than a second.
She tried to watch the little spray of green bits spread but then the view whirled her away before throwing her back down again, straight at another tiny green shape. The rings around it snapped into a new configuration, blazed; it disappeared in a haze of green too. She was hauled away from the contemplation of what she was starting to understand represented missiles or shells or something getting wasted. Each time, there was no apparent moment of still-ness; she was jerked back from one close-up only to be flung straight back down into the next one, the star-scape she was in the middle of wheeling madly with each new target.
After about the fifth or sixth zoom-flick-flare event, a dispersing cloud of even tinier green particles – so small she was amazed she could see them, and knew that with her own eyes, looking at a screen, she wouldn’t have – started crawling away from some of the little jagged green shapes. They too had leading and trailing lines and were accompanied by neatly sorted banners of figures, illustrations and descriptions. The lines flickered, hazed, came steady, thickening as they turned light then dark but shining blue.
Vectors, she thought, quite suddenly, as she was hurled towards one of the larger green shapes, close enough to see that it was a ship. These were ships the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints had been targeting and destroying. Not missiles. The even tinier green shapes were the missiles. The concentric haloes surrounding each target represented weapon-choice.
Haloes appeared around each of the missiles, like hundreds upon hundreds of tiny necklaces of beaded light. They flashed all at once and when the haloes disappeared there wasn’t even wreckage left behind. The view pulled back a fraction, the green ship shape seemed to hesitate, frozen, as the haloes surrounding it flicked, settled, flared. She felt a sudden urge to look away, but it was only to the next target, snapped out and then back in to watch another ship freeze in the ship’s targeting headlights; then another then another and another, then two at once; that felt like her brain was having its hemispheres ripped apart.
∼Fucking hell, she heard herself say.
∼You enjoying it? the ship asked. ∼My favourite bit’s coming up in a moment.
∼What do you mean, your favourite bit? she asked it as the next hapless ship appeared, transfixed, in the concentric targeting/ weapon-choice circles.
∼Ha! You didn’t think this is happening in real time, did you? The ship sounded amused.
∼This is a recording? she said – nearly wailed – as the tiny green ship blazed and turned to what looked like minutely shredded, wind-blown grass-dust. Instantly the view flicked back before throwing her down again somewhere else, her view wobbling to focus on another petrified target.
∼Slow-motion replay, the ship told her. ∼Pay attention, Led.
This green target looked bigger and more complicated than the others. The rings around it were larger, fatter and brighter, though less numerous. The ship seemed to start to change, taking on the appearance of the black, over-limbed snowflake again. Then bits of it detached, started to float away, while each of them blossomed with rosettes of green haze. Altogether, it filled her zoomed-in field of vision, dazzling.
∼At this point they still think I’m hitting them too late, the ship murmured.
A violet halo she hadn’t been aware of zeroed in on the central contact. The halo flashed. When it faded the ship was still there, but it had turned violet itself now. Then tiny violet rings appeared around the floating-away bits and each microscopic part of the hazy stuff, so small that the green haze disappeared to be replaced with a slightly dimmer violet one.
Everything flashed apart from the central target. The earlier haze had gone. The pulverised remains of the specks that had been floating away formed the haze now, flashing violet and light green and dissipating, filling her field of vision; sumptuous, scintillating. In some ways it was the most beautiful firework display she had ever seen. It began to end as the violet ship in the centre of the view grew in brightness, going from a distinct but un-showy glow to a sky-splitting glare in a few seconds – much slower than anything else had reacted. When it faded, there was more violet/lime green flashing debris, scattered everywhere, all slowly spreading, fading, going dull and disappearing, leaving just the stars to be seen once more; calm, faint, tiny, far away and unchanging after the shattering, psychotic tumult of flickering images that had kept her rapt, shocked, transfixed till now.
She felt herself let out a deep breath.
Then – bizarrely, even shockingly – Demeisen was there in front of her, lounging in what looked like the control seat next to hers, but somehow straight in front of her, against the star field. He was gently lit from above, his feet up on something invisible and his hands clasped behind his neck.
He turned to look at her, nodding once. ∼There you go, he said. ∼You’ve just seen one of the most significant military engagements of modern times, doll; lamentably but fascinatingly one-sided though it turned out to be. Strongly suspect they just weren’t giving their ship Minds full tactical authority. Demeisen shook his head, frowned. ∼Amateurs. He shrugged. ∼Oh well. Hopefully not the start of an actual proper all-out war between the Culture and our over-cute tribute civ – perish that thoughtlet – but they did shoot first, and it was with what they assumed would be full lethal force, so I was entirely within my rights to waste the miserable trigger-happy fuckers to a soul, without mercy. He sighed. ∼Though I am obviously anticipating the inevitable board of inquiry and I do slightly worry about being ticked off for being just a tad over-enthusiastic. He sighed again, sounding happier this time. ∼Still. Abominator class; we have a reputation to protect. Fuck me, the others are going to be so jealous! He paused. ∼What?
∼Were there people in those ships? she asked.
∼GFCF navy? Definitely. Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting them-selves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded.
The doubly unreal vision of the avatar floating in space looked away, as though gazing contentedly round at the almost unsee-ably small debris floating around him. ∼That’ll fucking learn the bastards.
Lededje waited a short while but he kept on looking about him, sighing happily and seemingly either ignoring or having forgotten all about her. ∼Fuck me, she heard him say quietly, ∼I just blighted an entire fucking fleet there. Without even stretching a limb. Squadron, at the very least. Fuh-zuck-elling hell-cocks, I’m good.
∼I think I’d like to get back to Sichult now, if that’s all right, she told the avatar.
∼Of course, Demeisen said, turning to her with a neutral expres-sion. ∼There’s that man you want to kill, isn’t there?
Veppers had to slide slowly down the carpeted floor of the corridor beyond the door; it was too steep to try to walk down. The first thing he found was Jasken attempting to climb up towards him, pushing open another dented door. Behind Jasken there was dim light, and the sound of crying and moaning. A breeze rolled up the tipped corridor, from behind Jasken.
“Sir! Are you all right?” Jasken said when he recognised Veppers in the gloom.
“Alive, nothing broken. I think some fucker tried to nuke me. Did you see that fucking fireball?”
“I think the pilots are dead, sir. Can’t get into the flight deck. We’ve a door open to the outside. There are some dead, sir. Some injured, too.” He waved the arm that had been in the fake cast.
“I thought it might be time to discard-”
“Is there any help on the way?”
“Don’t know yet, sir. There’s a hardened comms set in the compartment somewhere; the two Zei left are checking the emergency storage.”
“Two? Left?” Veppers said, staring at Jasken. There had been four of his clone guards aboard, hadn’t there? Or had they called off at the last moment?
“Two of the Zei died in the crash, sir,” Jasken told him.
“Fuck,” Veppers said. Well, you could always grow more, he supposed, though it still took time to train them. “Who else?”
“Pleur, sir. And Herrit. Astle’s got a broken leg. Sulbazghi’s unconscious.”
They descended into the passenger compartment. It was lit by emergency lighting and the daylight from outside coming through the small oval portholes and the opened emergency door. The place smelled bad, Veppers thought. Moaning sounds and people crying. Thankfully it was hard to see too much. He wanted to get out immediately.
“Sir,” one of the Zei said, approaching them over the tipped chaos of seats and spilled possessions. He was holding a comms transceiver. “We are glad you are alive, sir,” he said. He’d bled heavily from a wound on his head and his other arm hung oddly.
“Yes, thank you,” Veppers said as the Zei handed the set to Jasken. “That’s all.” He nodded to the Zei to go. The big man bowed, then turned and walked back awkwardly over the seats.
Veppers brought his mouth close to Jasken’s ear as the other man checked the transceiver and activated it. “Whatever turns up first, even if it’s an ambulance flier, you and I get on it alone,” he told Jasken. “Understand?”
“Sir?” Jasken said, blinking.
“Make sure there’s enough other craft to get everybody else off, but we take the first thing that arrives. Just us, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And where are your Oculenses? We might need them.”
“They’re broken, sir.”
Veppers shook his head. “Some fucker wants me dead, Jasken. Let’s let them think I am. Let’s let them think they succeeded. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir.” Jasken shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “Should I tell the others to say that you were killed?”
“No, they’re to say that I’m alive. Injured, perfectly well, traumatised, missing, in a coma; more different stories the better. Point is I don’t show, I don’t appear. Everybody will assume they’re all lying. They’ll think I’m dead. Possibly you, too. You and I are going to hide, Jasken. D’you ever do that when you were a kid, Jasken? Hide? I used to. Did it a lot. I was great at it. So we’re going to do that now; we’re going to hide.” Veppers patted the other man on the shoulder, hardly noticing that he winced when he did so. “Shares will go into a tail-spin, but that can’t be helped.” He nodded at the transceiver. “Make the call. Then find me a flight suit or something to use as a disguise.”