Surface Detail

Twenty

The Tsungarial Disk had been a disappointment the first time Veppers had seen it. Three hundred million space factories of half a million tonnes or more each sounded like a lot, but, spread out around an entire gas giant from within a few hundred kilometres of Razhir’s cloud tops to over half a million kilometres distant from the planet, in a band forty thousand kilometres thick, it was amazing how empty the space around the planet could seem.

It didn’t help that the fabricaria were soot black; they didn’t reflect, glint or really show up at all unless they got in the way of light coming from somewhere else, when they registered as, at best, a spatter of silhouettes. As Razhir itself was a fairly dull-coloured planet — mostly dark reds and browns with only a few lighter yellows at the poles — silhouetting the fabricaria against something wasn’t that easy either.

They looked much better and far more impressive in an enhanced image, their locations signalled by little spots of light superimposed onto the real view of the system. That gave you an impression of just how many of the fuckers there really were.

The GFCF Succour-Class ship Messenger Of Truth swung neatly out of hyperspace with the minimum of fuss just a few hundred klicks out from the Disk’s designated Initial Contact Facility, one of the Disk’s relatively rare habitats rather than a true factory unit. The little space port orbited slowly around Razhir at a distance of just over half a million klicks and so was about as far out as any part of the Disk ever got.

The Facility itself was a fat grey slightly flattened torus ten klicks across and one in diameter, its sides studded with lights and its outer surface barnacled with dock pits and mooring gantries; apparently only six of the Facility’s twenty-five docking points were in use, though that was still twice as many as Veppers had ever seen on previous visits.

Veppers sat in what he judged to be a rather cheesy, over-decorated lounge within the GFCF ship, sprawled within a recliner seat having a pedicure performed by two giggling, naked females who looked to represent a sort of halfway compromise between Sichultians and GFCFians. He’d been told their names but had lost interest in them after about the third giggle.

He sipped on a long drink with pretentious amounts of garnish and a little — allegedly entirely edible — fish swimming around inside. Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III sat in a smaller but otherwise similar recliner alongside. A roughly spherical floating robot device was gently combing the alien’s head-scales with a softly glowing, immaterial field.

“We are just checking in,” Bettlescroy explained, waving one elegantly formed hand at the screen filling their field of vision in front of them. “This is what is called the Disk Designated Initial Contact Facility, though we usually just call it Reception.”

“I have been here before,” Veppers said. He sort of drawled the remark, though he doubted the subtlety would be lost on the alien. “I own ninety-six of these factories, Bettlescroy, and I dislike being an absentee landlord.”

“Of course, of course,” the alien said, nodding wisely.

Veppers gestured at the screen, where the space station was rotating slowly. “Isn’t that a Culture ship? The one just coming into view?”

“Indeed. Well spotted. That is the Fast Picket, ex ‘Killer’ class Limited Offensive Unit, Hylozoist, of the Culture’s Restoria section. It has been stationed here for the last standard year or so, supporting the Restoria mission within the Disk.”

“Isn’t it likely to be checking us out as we are, as you put it, checking in?”

“That would be impolite,” the alien said with a charming, small smile. “In any event, rest assured that the Messenger Of Truth is one of our finest ships and easily capable of resisting any attempt by a craft like the Hylozoist to intrusively investigate us without our express permission and indeed active cooperation. We can both outgun and outrun the Hylozoist; it is no threat to us or to the actions that may need to be taken in the near future. It has been taken account of and its presence and indeed likely engagement fully factored in to our plans and sims. Plus, without giving too much away—” Bettlescroy’s pale facial skin flushed a little and it held up one delicate hand in modesty. “—I think it is no secret that the Messenger Of Truth is not here, in or near the Disk, alone. It is simply the nominal flagship of our fleet here, and indeed not even the most militarily capable of our immediately applicable assets.”

“Any other Culture ships around?” Veppers asked, eyeing the Fast Picket suspiciously as it moved slowly round in front of them, nested into its docking pit on the Facility’s outer surface.

“No,” Bettlescroy said.

Veppers looked at the alien. “You’re sure?”

It smiled beatifically back. “We’re sure.” It made a graceful, blossoming gesture with its hands. “There. We are registered, checked in. We have done the polite thing and may now go about our business.”

“I take it I haven’t been mentioned?” Veppers asked.

“Of course not. We are here ostensibly simply to carry out regular oversight and minor maintenance as required of our monitoring facilities distributed throughout the greater Disk. We may go where we please.”

“Useful.” Veppers nodded.

“Ship,” Bettlescroy said, “you may continue on to our destination.”

The view on the screen flickered. The space station was suddenly replaced by the gas giant Razhir, its side-lit disc filling a substantial part of the screen and the locations of the fabricaria again shown by tiny points of light. The effect was to create a near invisibly fine speckle of bright dust that girdled the banded ruddiness of the gas giant like a haze. The view tipped, then expanded suddenly and dramatically as the ship plunged into the mass of light points; they zipped past the vessel like hail in a ground car’s headlights. The view swung again as the ship curved round, partially following the orbits of the displayed fabricaria.

Bettlescroy clapped its hands daintily and sat up, shooing the floating robot away. “We should make our way to the shuttle,” the alien announced.

The shuttle departed the ship on the far side of the Disk from the reception Facility, ejected into space just as the Messenger Of Truth carried out a sudden course correction. This, Bettlescroy explained, should serve to conceal the shuttle’s departure from even the most assiduous monitoring equipment.

The shuttle drifted, already quite precisely aimed, towards one of the dark, anonymous fabricaria. Watching on the shuttle’s screen, Bettlescroy on one side and the craft’s pilot on the other, Veppers saw the dark absence of the rapidly approaching object blotting out more and more of the other light-points until its blackness appeared to fill the screen and it seemed they were about to collide with it. He felt an instinctive desire to push himself back into his seat. For all the good that would do, he told himself. He stared at the darkness enveloping the screen as though trying to fend off the manufactory’s implied bulk by force of will alone.

A sudden jolt of deceleration and a longer tug of calibrated slowing pulled them up short, close enough to see hints of detail on the dark satellite’s surface. The screen was still superimposing a false view; the faint wash of radiation coming off the thing was in wavelengths way below what pan-human eyes could register. It was hard to estimate size, though Veppers knew that the average manufactory was a fat disk about a couple of kilometre across and a third of that in height. They varied a little in size, though generally only by a factor of two. This one looked pretty average-sized though it was less synthetic-looking, more natural in appearance than was the norm.

Its surface looked smoothly lumpy enough to be a very old and worn comet nucleus; only a few too-straight lines and near-flat surfaces hinted at its artificiality. The shuttle flew slowly into what looked like a deep dark crater. The screen went perfectly black. Then light filtered back; a faint but slowly increasing yellow-white luminescence began to seep in all around, then flooded the screen.

The interior of the manufactory was a web-laced space over a kilometre across, the massed, silvery, criss-crossing filaments studded with hundreds upon hundreds of darkly gleaming machines like giant pieces of clockwork; all disks and gears, shafts and plates, cylinders, spindles, looms and nozzles.

The shuttle came to a halt, perhaps a hundred metres in towards the centre of the satellite.

“May I show you how this will look when and if we go ahead?” Bettlescroy said.

“Please do,” Veppers said.

The screen went into what was obviously a simulation mode, overlaying what the fabricary’s interior would look like when it was operating. The many great clockwork machines ran up and down the network of silvery lines, most retreating to the outskirt walls of the manufactory while about a twentieth of their number clumped in the very centre of the space, like a nucleus.

The machines flicked this way and that, some light flickered, and dark lumps of matter rained down from the machines set around the perimeter, falling into the central nexus to disappear. Gradually the nucleus of machines expanded and other machines slid in from the outside to join those working in the centre. Whatever they were working on, it grew, taking on a succession of fairly simple shapes, though all implied something roughly twice as long as it was wide, and approximately cylindrical.

As the shape grew — its surface only rarely visible, and never quite looking like what might be a hull — more and more of the clockwork-looking machines joined in the act of creation taking place; meanwhile the network of silvery filaments was bowing out like an expanding lens made of wires, accommodating the roughly ellipsoid shape growing in the centre. All the time, greater and greater quantities of matter in increasingly varied shapes and sizes were falling in from those machines still stationed on the outside and from holes and nozzles dotted around the interior wall of the satellite itself.

A couple of minutes after the production process had begun, the filaments had shrunk back almost to the interior walls of the fabricary and the great clockwork machines had gone with them and become still. No parcels of matter issued from the machines or from the nozzles, slots and pits on the walls.

Sitting in the middle of the space now, there was a ship.

It was still very approximately ellipsoidal in shape; maybe six hundred metres long, two hundred across and one hundred in height. Its hull shimmered in the light, seemingly unable to decide whether it was pitch black or hazy silver. Rashed all over its shifting, uncertain surface were round black blisters of various sizes and sets of shallow, perfectly elliptical craters.

“Ta-ra!” Bettlescroy said, with a shy giggle, then glanced at Veppers and blushed. “One space warship,” it said.

“How fast can it go?”

“Maximum velocity two point four kilolights.”

“And it’s fully working?” Veppers asked, sceptical.

“Fully,” Bettlescroy said. “It would be no match for the vessel we have constructed for you, of course, but it contains a real-time grown medium-level AI substrate already running all relevant internal systems maintenance functions, full-spectrum radiative and skein sensory systems, a primer fusion power unit ready to start manufacturing anti-matter for its pre-functional warp drive and a variety of weapon systems including thermonuclear warhead missiles and thermonuclear plasma generators. All that would be necessary to activate it would be to transmit the relevant run-protocols into its processing substrate. A trivial task taking minutes at most. It would then be immediately ready for space-flight and battle, though obviously giving it a few days to produce its own AM would increase its utility and power vastly. Equip it with prefabricated AM for its power units and missiles and it would be even more powerful even more quickly.”

“How long does it all take?” Veppers asked.

“For this size, the whole process to the stage you see here takes between nine and fifteen days, according to the exact specification. Sufficient raw material being present, obviously.”

“That’s just the surface layers of the fabricary itself, isn’t it?” Veppers asked. Again, he wasn’t going to show what he was feeling here; he’d had no idea the fabricaria could spin a full-size working ship — especially a full-size tooled-up working warship — so quickly. He’d always known that the fabricaria the Veprine Corporation was allowed to use had been reduced in operational effectiveness before they’d been allowed to get their hands on them but he’d had no inkling by how much; he’d asked, naturally, but everybody involved had been professionally vague.

The Veprine Corp fabricaria could also produce a ship ready for fitting out in a matter of days — albeit a much smaller, much less sophisticated ship — but the devil was in the fitting-out bit; that was where most of the hard work lay. Even disregarding the processing substrates concerned — you always brought them in from other specialist subsidiaries anyway — the sensory, power and engine components were what took all the time to make, not to mention all the other bewilderingly many and arcanely diverse sub-systems a working spacecraft seemed to require. Just making the relevant components took months of expensive, high complexity work, and then fitting them all in place and getting them all working together took almost as long again. Getting all of that done in a week or two was almost preposterous.

“The outer surfaces of the fabricaria traditionally provide the semi-processed raw material initially,” Bettlescroy confirmed. “For longer-term sequential manufacturing there are shuttle-tugs ready to bring in further truly raw material from other parts of the system, though that would not be an issue here. The point of the exercise is to manufacture a fleet of ships very quickly for effectively instant deployment rather than to set up a sustainable production process.”

“How many ships are we talking about?” Veppers asked.

Bettlescroy made a whistling noise. “Potentially, anything up to approximately two hundred and thirty million.”

Veppers stared at the alien.

“How many?” It was hard not to show his astonishment. He’d thought only a few of the fabricaria would be able, or properly primed, to build ships. This implied that almost all of them would be able to produce a ship each.

“Approximately two hundred and thirty million,” the alien repeated. “At most. Fabricaria are capable of being brought together to create larger units themselves subsequently capable of constructing larger and/or more complicated vessels. Probably to a point where the numbers of individual craft involved would be reduced by a factor of thirty or forty. No one knows; these are guesstimates. Plus, it is not impossible that slightly greater numbers of the fabricaria than we are assuming have been corrupted or disabled by the pre-existing smatter infection, or by the measures taken to deal with the infection.”

“But, still, up to two hundred and thirty million?”

“Approximately.”

“And all ready at once?”

“Better than ninety-nine point five per cent would be; with numbers on that scale, especially as we are envisaging using such ancient facilities, there are bound to be delays, stragglers, failures and incompletes. Possibly even calamities; apparently fabricaria have been known to blow up or aggressively dismantle themselves. Or — occasionally, sometimes — each other.”

Veppers hadn’t meant to stare at the alien, but he found that even he couldn’t help it. “ billion ships?” he said. “I am hearing you right? That is what you said?”

Bettlescroy looked bashful, almost embarrassed, but nodded. “Assuredly.”

“I’m not missing something here, am I?” Veppers said. “That is a truly astounding, almost farcical number of ships, isn’t it?”

Bettlescroy blinked a few times. “It’s a lot of ships,” it agreed, cautiously.

“Couldn’t you take over the fucking galaxy with a fleet that size?”

The alien’s laughter tinkled. “Gracious, no. With a fleet of that nature you’d be restricted to civilisations no more sophisticated than your own, and, even then, more sophisticated civs would quickly step in to prevent such shenanigans.” The alien smiled, waving one hand at the image of the warship now frozen on the screen. “These are quite simple craft by Level Seven or Eight civilisational standards; we ourselves would need a substantial fleet to cope with the sheer numbers involved, but it would hardly trouble us. A single large Culture GSV could probably cope on its own even if they all came at it together. Standard tactics would be to slightly outpace them and turn them on each other with its Effectors; they’d destroy themselves without the GSV firing a single real shot. Even if they were all magically equipped with hyperspace engines and were capable of performing a surprise 4D shell-surround manoeuvre, you’d bet on a GSV breaking out through them; it’d just brush them aside.”

“But if they split up and went off destroying ships and habitats and attacking primitive planets…” Veppers said.

“Then they’d need to be dealt with one-by-one,” Bettlescroy conceded uncomfortably. “In effect they would be treated as a high-initial-force-status, low-escalation-threat, non-propagating Hegemonising Swarm outbreak. But, well, we ourselves have sub-sub-munitions in cluster missiles capable of successfully engaging craft like this. And such behaviour — unleashing such a pan-destructive force — would be beyond reprehensible; condemnation would be universal. Whoever was responsible for setting such actions in motion would be signing their own Perpetual Incarceration Order.” The little alien shivered convincingly at the very thought.

“So what the hell are we doing even discussing what we are discussing?”

“That is different.” Bettlescroy sounded confident. “Depending on the locations and distributions of the targets involved — processing substrates and cores, presumably remote from high concentration habitation — less than fifty million ships ought to be quite sufficient. They would overwhelm the defences round the substrate sites through sheer numbers, effectively on suicide missions. The action would be strictly precision targeted, mission end self-destruct-limited and any perceived wider threat would be over before anybody realised it had ever existed. Meanwhile, far from meeting with genuine condemnation, a lot of the galactic In-Play would be entirely happy that the war had been settled, if not in this manner then certainly with this result.” The alien paused, looked at Veppers, apparently worried. “Let us be clear: we are talking about aiding the anti-Hell side, are we not?”

“Yes, we are.”

Bettlescroy looked relieved. “Well then.”

Veppers sat back, staring at the image of the ship on the screen. He nodded at it. “How confident of that sim we just saw are you? Will it really all happen so flawlessly?”

“That was not a sim,” Bettlescroy said. “That was a recording. We built that ship a month ago. Then we set micro-drones crawling all through it to check it had been built properly before dismantling it, just to be sure, and then letting the fabricaria reduce it back to semi-processed raw material again, to cover our tracks. The ship was entirely as specified, fully working, and the Disk object which built it is indistinguishable from its quarter of a billion fellow fabricaria.”

“You could have beamed this to me in my own study,” Veppers said, nodding at the screen.

“A little risky,” Bettlescroy said with a smile. It waved one hand, and the ship disappeared to be replaced with what side-readouts by the screen claimed was the real view again, of the fabricary’s interior, webbed with criss-crossing filaments studded with what looked like giant pieces of clockwork. “Also, we rather assumed you’d arrive with analytical equipment to let you take a closer look at all this stuff.” The little alien looked at Veppers as though searching his clothing for signs of paraphernalia. “However, you appear to have come unencumbered by both tech and suspicions. Your trust is gratifying. We thank you.”

Veppers smiled thinly at the alien. “I decided to travel light.” He turned to look at the screen again. “Why did they build all these? Why so many? What was the point?”

“Insurance, possibly,” Bettlescroy said. “Defence. You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one’s neighbours than the means of destruction. It still makes people think twice about tangling with you.” The little alien paused. “Though it has to be said that those inclined to the fuck-up theory of history maintain that the Disk has no such planned purpose and is essentially the result of something between a minor Monopathic Hegemonising Event and an instance of colossal military over-ordering.” It shrugged. “Who is to say?”

They both stared at the dark network of threat and promise arrayed before them.

“There is still going to be some degree of blame involved in all this though, isn’t there?” Veppers asked quietly. “No matter how precisely targeted and quickly over it all is; some retribution will be required.”

“Good grief, yes!” Bettlescroy exclaimed. “That’s precisely why we intend to frame the Culture for everything!”

She became an angel in Hell.

Chay woke from the black-winged embrace of the creature which had claimed to be the angel of life and death to discover that she herself had become something not dissimilar.

She opened her eyes to find herself hanging upside down in a dark space lit by a dim red light from below. A faint smell of shit and burning flesh left little doubt where she was. She felt sick. The truth was that, despite everything, despite her best intentions, despite her daily-renewed promise to herself, she had felt hope; she had hoped that she would be spared a return to the Hell, hoped that instead she might be reincarnated once again within the reality of the Refuge, restarting her accidental career as a noviciate or even as something more humble, as long as it meant a life without any more than the average amount of pain and heartbreak.

She looked around, still slowly waking. She looked up, which wand burning as really down, at her own body. She had become something great and dark and winged. Her feet had become claws big enough to grasp a person whole. She spread her front-legs/arms/wings. They opened easily, purposefully, far out to either side. Limbs ready to walk the air. Limbs ready to grasp the wind. She folded them back in again, hugging herself.

She could feel no pain. She was in a huge hanging space in what smelled absolutely like Hell — and she was very aware that her sense of smell was much better than it had been before, both wider somehow and more sensitive; more accurate and refined — but she was not in any pain. Her feet seemed to clutch whatever she was hanging from quite naturally, without conscious will or even any discernible effort; she clutched at the thing — it felt like a great iron bar as thick as a person’s leg — and increased her grip until it did hurt, a little. She relaxed again. She opened her mouth. A predator’s mouth. A long, pointed tongue. She closed her sharp toothed jaws over her tongue, bit down tentatively.

That hurt. She tasted blood.

She shook her broad, over-size head to clear it, and found that she had been looking at everything through some sort of membranes over her eyes which she could sweep back. She did so.

She was hanging in what looked like a sort of gigantic hollow fruit, all veined and organic-looking, but with a single massive iron bar running right across it, seemingly just so she could hang on it. She lifted first one foot off it, then the other, to make sure that she wasn’t shackled to it. Each foot and leg seemed easily capable of taking her whole weight. She was strong, she realised. Her wings folded back in; she hadn’t even realised that they’d extended again as she’d tried taking her feet off the bar. Some instinctual thing, she supposed.

Beneath her head, looking properly down, there was a sort of frilled opening that looked unpleasantly like a sphincter of some sort. Beyond, she could see what appeared to be drifting, redtinged cloud. She would need to half-fold her wings, she thought, as soon as she saw the aperture.

She felt a strange hunger, and a tremendous urge to fly.

She opened her feet and dropped.

Back aboard the Messenger Of Truth, powering its way back to Vebezua, Veppers sat at an impressively large round table with Bettlescroy, the rest of the GFCF people who had first greeted him when he’d arrived, and several projections — holograms of those unable to be physically present. Even these weren’t being beamed in; they were present aboard the ship in some form, their personalities housed in the vessel’s substrates. This made for better security; increased deniability in other words. All but one were GFCFian, each as small and beautiful as the other.

The only exception was a hologram of another pan-human, a uniformed male called Space-Marshal Vatueil. He was a big, grizzled-looking creature, both unmistakably alien and entirely pan-human. To Veppers he looked barrel-chested with too long a head and freakishly small features. A hero who’d worked his way up through the ranks in the great War in Heaven, allegedly. Veppers had never heard of the guy, though admittedly he’d never taken much notice of the war at all. It had always sounded to him like just a particularly long-winded multi-player war game. He had nothing against long-winded multi-player war games — they were how his ancestors had made the first family mega-fortune — he just didn’t think that anything that happened inside them should qualify as news.

He hoped the GFCF knew what they were doing and who they were dealing with here. One of them had wittered on at the start of the meeting, singing Vatueil’s praises, describing him as a fully accredited member of something called the Trapeze group of the Strategic Operational Space (or something) and saying how they’d had extensive preparatory dealings with this, or that, or him. Like this was meant to set his mind at ease.

“To restate, then,” Bettlescroy said, waving one decorously attenuated limb at Vatueil, “the space-marshal here, on behalf of those forces known as the anti-Hell side, now taking part in the current confliction being overseen by the Ishlorsinami, requests that we — the Veprine Corporation and the currently constituted and here configured sub-section of the Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy, Special Contact Division — use the facilities of the Tsungarial Disk to build a fleet of warships — currently estimated as numbering between sixty and one hundred million, though that is subject to revision — for the purpose of attacking the processing cores running the virtual realities which house the aforementioned Hells.

“The Veprine Corporation will provide the AI operating systems and navigational software sub-complexes for the vessels, suitably groomed to make them appear stolen and modestly improved in a distinctly Culture style by our good selves. We also undertake to transport a modest proportion of the vessels as rapidly as possible to more distant parts of the galaxy to be deployed where required, if necessary. The anti-Hell forces will provide the expendable combat personalities for the fleet’s leadership hierarchy, these command vessels to make up one sixty-fifth of the total. Similar virtual specialists will also make up the direct hacking teams emplaced on certain designated ships which will attempt to disrupt the inter-Hell information traffic by, where possible, temporarily occupying the substrate housings and support systems and physically interfacing with them, preself-destruct.”

There were nods, their equivalents, and other appropriate gestures and noises of assent.

Bettlescroy went on. “We, the GFCF, will undertake to present to our friends the Culture — in the shape of the Restoria mission presently working in the Tsungarial Disk — what will appear to be a sudden and violent outbreak of the currently abated smatter infection infesting certain components of the Disk. Initially this will distract and tie up the Culture assets which we know are present, as well as drawing out and sucking in any other nearby forces within practical rush-in distance. Come the inevitable post-incident investigations, the smatter eruption will begin to look like something the Culture itself staged to allow it to take on an aggressively operational role in what transpires subsequently.”

“You are sure you can keep your own fingerprints off this, are you?” Vatueil asked.

“We are,” Bettlescroy said. “We have done this before, without detection.” The little alien smiled winningly. “The trick is to do something that the Culture would actually quite like to have done itself anyway. That way, any subsequent investigations tend to be more cursory than they might otherwise have been.”

“Have you taken any actions like this on such a scale before?” Vatueil asked.

Bettlescroy blushed, looked down. “Absolutely not. This is a significantly greater interference than any we have attempted before. However, we remain extremely confident that it will succeed.”

Vatueil looked unconvinced, Veppers thought. Maybe; always hard to tell with aliens.

“If the Culture decides it’s been tricked, used, manipulated,” the space-marshal said, slowly and deliberately, with the air of a man imparting a great and serious certitude, “it will move Afterlives to get to the truth, and it will not stop until it thinks it’s got to the bottom of it, no matter what. And,” he said, looking round them all, “there will always be forces within the Culture who will exact revenge. Again, no matter what.” Vatueil paused, looked grim. “I think we all know the saying: ‘Don’t fuck with the Culture.’”

Bettlescroy smiled, blushing once again. “Sir,” it said, “some of the incidents to which I suspect you are referring, the ones which have reinforced that famous saying which I shall not repeat…?”

“Yes?” Vatueil said, realising it was expected.

Bettlescroy paused, as though wondering to say what it was about to say or not. Eventually the little alien said, “Those were us, not them.”

Vatueil definitely looked dubious now. “Really?”

Bettlescroy looked down modestly again. “Really,” it said, extremely quietly.

Vatueil frowned. “Then… Do you ever wonder who might be using who?”

The little alien smiled, sighed. “We give it some consideration, sir.” It looked round the other GFCFians gathered round the table. They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying.

Bettlescroy made a flowing, resigned gesture with its arms. “We are happy with our current situational analysis and pattern of behaviour.”

“And you’re happy you can keep the Flekke and the NR in the dark?” Veppers asked. “I’m pinned by my balls at the business end of a firing range if you don’t.”

“The NR are less concerned than you think,” Bettlescroy said reassuringly. “They approach their own Sublimation, more immediately than is known by all but us. The Flekke are an irrelevance; a legacy concern. They are our old mentors — as they are still yours, Mr. Veppers — their diverse and great achievements now in many ways eclipsed by those of the GFCF, even if as a species they remain theoretically our betters.” Bettlescroy paused for a little laugh. “At least according to the inflexible and quite arguably outmoded definitions of the Galactic Council’s currently accepted Recognised Civilisationary Levels framework!” The little alien paused again, and was rewarded with what was by GFCF standards a positive storm of rowdy agreement: deep nods, loud muttering and a lot of meaningful eye-contact. Veppers would have sworn some of them even thought about slapping their manicured little hands on the table. Glowing, Bettlescroy went on: “The Flekke will be quietly proud of anything we achieve, and the same vicarious sense of accomplishment will most doubtlessly be applied to the Sichultian Enablement in turn.” He beamed at Veppers. “In sum: in both cases, leave them to us.”

Veppers exchanged looks with Vatueil. Of course, you never entirely knew what an exchanged look really meant to an alien, pan-human or not, but it felt like somebody had to exercise a little realism here. Maybe even a little healthy cynicism.

On the other hand, they were pretty much agreed. There was little enough left to iron out. They were going to go ahead with this, doubts or not. The rewards were too great not to.

Veppers just smiled. “Your confidence is reassuring,” he told Bettlescroy.

“Thank you! So, we are all agreed, yes?” Bettlescroy said, looking around the table. The alien might as well, Veppers thought, have been asking whether they wanted to order out for sandwiches or dips for lunch. It was almost impressive.

Everybody looked at everybody else. No one raised any objections. Bettlescroy just kept on smiling.

“When do we begin?” Vatueil asked eventually.

“Directly,” Bettlescroy said. “Our little pretend-smatter squib will go off within the next half a day, a little more than an hour after we deliver Mr. Veppers back to Vebezua. We start the fabricaria running immediately we see that the Culture forces are fully engaged with the outbreak.” Bettlescroy sat back, looking very satisfied. “All we need then, of course,” it said thoughtfully, “is the location of the substrates to be targeted. We can’t do anything without that information.” It turned smoothly to Veppers. “Can we, Veppers, old friend?”

They were all looking at him now. Space-Marshal Vatueil was positively staring. For the first time in the meeting Veppers felt he was finally getting the attention and respect he normally took for granted. He smiled slowly. “Let’s get the ships built first, shall we? Then we’ll be ready to target them.”

“Some of us,” Bettlescroy said, glancing around the table before focusing intently on Veppers, “are still a little sceptical about how easy it will be to get to a significant number of Hell-containing substrates in the limited amount of time that will be available.”

Veppers made his face expressionless. “You may be surprised, Bettlescroy,” he said. “Even amused.”

The little alien sat forward, perfectly proportioned arms on the table surface. It looked steadily into Veppers’ eyes for some time. “We are all… very much depending on you here, Joiler,” it said quietly.

Assuming it was a threat, it was rather well delivered, Veppers thought. He’d have been proud of it himself. Despite the apocalyptic nature of everything they’d been discussing, it was the first time — maybe since they’d met — that Veppers thought he might have caught a glimpse of the hardened steel hiding underneath all the alien velouté.

He sat forward too, towards Bettlescroy. “Why, I would have it no other way,” he said smoothly.

She flew above the Hell. It smelled — stank — just as it had. The view, from this high up — just under the dark brown boiling overcast — was of a rolling, sometimes jagged landscape of ash grey and shit brown, splattered with shadowy near-blacks, acidic yellows and bilious greens. Red mostly meant pits of fire. The distant screams, groans and wails sounded no different.

The place she had woken in really had looked like a giant piece of fruit: a bloated purple shape hanging unsupported in the choking air as though dangling from the bruised looking mass of cloud. At least in the immediate area, it appeared to be unique; she could see no other similar giant bulbs hanging from the clouds.

She tried flying up through the clouds, just to see. The clouds were acidic, choking her, making her eyes water. She flew back down, took some clearer air, waited for her eyes to clear, then tried again with lungs full, holding her breath as she beat upwards on her great dark wings. Eventually, just before her lungs felt they might be about to burst, she collided painfully with something hard and rough, slightly granular. She had the air knocked out of her, jarred her head and scraped the ends of both wings. She fell out of the clouds in a small rain of rusting flakes of iron.

She breathed, collected herself, flew on.

In the distance she saw the line of fire that was the very edge of the war within Hell; a crackling stitch of tiny red, orange and yellow bursts of light. Something that was part curiosity and part the strange hunger she had felt earlier made her fly towards it.

She wheeled overhead, watching waves and little rivulets of men make their slow breaking surges across the multiply broken, seared and blasted landscape below. They fought with every edged weapon ever known, and primitive guns and explosives. Some stopped and looked up at her, she thought, though she did not want to approach too closely.

Flying demons whizzed amongst the arcing, fizzing shells and storms of arrows; some came up towards her — she experienced terror, and each time was about to beat madly away — but then they turned and dropped away again.

The hunger nagged at her. Part of her wanted to land; to do… what? Was she to be a demon? Was the need she felt the need to torment? Was she supposed to become one of the torturers? She would starve first, kill herself if she could, simply refuse, if it was possible. Knowing Hell, knowing the way it worked, she doubted that would be possible.

The flying demons who had flown up towards her had been smaller than her. She had cruel hooks midway along the leading edges of her wings, where a biped might have had thumbs on its hands. She had sharp teeth and strong jaws, and tree-trunkcrushing claws. She wondered if she could start killing demons.

The screams from below, the smells of flesh burned by flames and acid sprays and the rising, choking clouds of poison gas all drove her away after a while.

A large black shape flew across the landscape behind her.

She looked back, saw the giant beetle thing following her, catching up, keeping a hundred metres or so off her left side. It drew level, wobbled in the air, then peeled away. She flew on and it came back, repeating the actions. The third time, she followed it.

She trod the air, beating her leathery black wings slowly such that she seemed to stand in the air, level with the face of the enormous uber-demon who had taunted and killed her, most of a lifetime ago.

Its gigantic lantern head was lit from within, the pulsing flame-cloud continually taking on the appearance of different tortured faces. The towering candles at each corner of the creature’s squared-off head sputtered and crackled, their gnarled surfaces veined with the nervous systems of the screaming unfortunates embedded within. Below, its vast, amalgamed body of reconstituted bone, pitted, sweating metals, stress-cracked twisted sinew and bubbling, weeping flesh quivered in the heat released from its dull-glowing throne. Wreathed in its hideous fumes and retchingly intense smokes, it created a briefly recognisable face within its glassed-off lantern of a head.

Chay recognised Prin. Her heart, massive in her barrel of a chest, pounded harder. A sort of hopeless pleasure filled her for a moment, then she felt suddenly sick.

Prin smiled at her for a moment, then his face contorted in pain before the image disappeared. A flat, ugly, alien face replaced Prin’s and remained there, pop-eyed and grinning while the thing talked to her.

“Welcome back,” he bellowed. The sound was still ear-splitting, but just about below the level of pain.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I will not be one of your demons,” she told it. She thought about flying at him, claws out, trying to damage the thing. She had a brief image of herself caught in one of its colossal hands, crushed like a tiny fluttering bird inside a shrinking cage of girder fingers. Another image showed her trapped inside the creature’s lantern head, beating frantically against the unbreakable glass, wings ragged, jaws broken, eyes gouged out, for ever choking…

“You would be a useless demon, little bitch,” the thing said. “That is not why you are here.”

She beat the air in front of it, of him, waiting.

It tipped its head to one side a little. The four candles roared, screamed. “That hunger you feel…”

“What of it?” Sick again. What would it turn out to be?

“It is the hunger to kill.”

“Is it indeed?” She would defy, she thought. She would be defiant. For all the good that ever did in Hell. With enough pain, you stopped defying, or simply lost your mind; if you were lucky, maybe. “Death — real death — is a blessing in Hell,” she told him.

“That is precisely the point!” the creature thundered. “You may kill one person per day.”

“May I now?”

“They will die fully. They will not be reincarnated, in this Hell or anywhere else. They will be permanently removed, deleted.”

“Why?”

The thing put back its head and laughed; a thunder spilling over the flames and smokes of the valley below. The candles sputtered furiously, dripped. “To bring hope back into Hell! You will be their angel, whore! They will beseech you to come to them, to deliver them from their torment. They will worship you. They will try to tempt you with supplications, prayers, offerings; any superstitious fuckwittery they’ll think might work. You may choose whom to reward with death. Pander to their idiocies or deliberately ignore them; have the miserable cunts set up fucking committees amongst themselves to decide democratically who should be the lucky little grub-sucker who gets to be relieved of their burden of pain; I don’t give a fuck. Just kill one a day. You can try and kill more but it won’t work; they’ll die all right but they’ll come right back, worse.”

“And if I kill none at all?”

“Then the hunger will grow inside you until it feels like it’s something alive trying to gnaw its way out. It will become unbearable. Also, the wretches will have to do without their chance of release.”

“What is the point of releasing one soul from this infinitude of suffering?”

“It’s not infinite!” the creature screamed. “It’s vast, but it has limits. You have already scraped against the sky, you stupid whore; beat away if you want until you find the iron walls of Hell and then tell me it’s ‘infinite’! Finite; it’s finite. Truly vast, but finite. With only so many tortured souls.”

“How—?”

“One and a quarter billion! Does that fucking satisfy you? Go and count them if you don’t believe me; I don’t fucking care. You are beginning to bore me. Oh, I didn’t mention: it won’t all be fun for you. With each one you kill you’ll take on a little of their pain. The more you kill the more pain you’ll experience. Eventually the pain of the increasing hunger and the pain you’ve absorbed from those you’ve released should balance out. You might lose your mind again but we’ll deal with that when it happens. I expect I’ll have thought of something even more condign for you by then.” The king of the demons gripped the red-glowing ends of the mountainous seat’s arms and came roaring forward at her, making her beat back through the air. “Now do fuck off, and start killing.” It waved one vast hand at her.

She felt herself swallow, a sickness clutched at her belly and a terrible, aching need to fly away seemed to tug at her wings and the bundled muscles in her chest, but she held where she was, beating steadily.

“Prin!” she shouted. “What happened to Prin?”

“Who? What?”

“Prin! My mate, the one I came in here with! Tell me and I’ll do what you want!”

“You’ll do what I want whether you fucking like it or not, you dumb, wormed cunt!”

“Tell me!”

“Kill me a thousand and I’ll think about it.”

“Promise!” she wailed.

The enormous demon laughed again. “‘Promise’? You’re in Hell, you cysted cretin! Why the fuck would I make a promise but for the joy of breaking it? Go, before I change my mind and break your semen-encrusted wings just for fun. Come back when you’ve sent ten times a hundred to their undeserved ends and I’ll think about telling you what happened to your precious ‘Prin’. Now fuck off!” It brought its vast arms sweeping up towards her, one winging in from each side, hands as big as her entire body splayed out, clawed and clutching, as though trying to catch and crush her.

She beat back, fell away, swooped and zoomed, glancing fearfully back as the great demon sat back in his great glowing chair, wreathes of smoke from his recent movements pulsing through the air around him.

She killed her first that evening, as the already dull light deepened to a ruddy, sunless gloaming. It was a young female, caught on the rusted spikes of a cheval de frise on a cold hillside above a mean trickle of an acid stream, moaning almost continually except when she had banked enough breath to scream.

Chay landed, listened to the female trying to speak, but got no sense from the piteous creature. She hesitated, looking around, in case anything appearred familiar, but it was not the same hillside she and Prin had sheltered on.

She was crying as she folded her great dark wings round the female, trying not to tear the thin leathery membranes of her wings on the cruel spikes. Chay felt the female’s being move out of her broken, twisted body and into her own before dissipating entirely, just evaporating away like a little cloud on a warm, dry day.

She felt a different kind of hunger, and ate some of the body, tearing through the tough hide to get into the juicy buttock muscles.

As she flew back to her distant roost, she wondered how much pain would accrue as a result of what she had done.

She hung there, digesting.

Later, she was left with a sore tooth.

She had become an angel in Hell.