Surface Detail

Twenty-one

When the adults were away sometimes they could play in the places where the adults played. She had a group of friends who were all about the same age and they played together a lot when they weren’t being taught in the little school room on the top floor of the big estate house.

The others could still be cruel to her now and again, when they wanted to get back at her for something or when she had won something and they wanted to remind her that it didn’t matter if she came first in a race or got better marks then anybody else in an exam, because in the end she was just a servant really — in fact worse than a servant because at least a servant could just leave if they wanted to but she couldn’t. She was like a mount or a hunt chaser or a game-hound; she belonged to the estate, she belonged to Veppers.

Lededje had learned not to pretend that she didn’t care when the other children were like this. It had taken her a while to work out how best to handle this sort of teasing. Crying a lot and running to her mother made it too easy for the children to use her like a toy when they were bored; press Lededje’s button and off she’d race. So that was no good. Not reacting at all, going all stony-faced; that just made them say even worse things until it ended in a fight and she — it always seemed to be her fault — got them all punished. So that didn’t work either. The best thing to do was to cry a little and let them know that she’d been hurt, then just get on with things.

Sometimes when she did this she got the impression some of the other children thought she hadn’t seemed hurt enough, and they tried to hurt her some more, but then she would just tell them they were being immature. Leave it behind; move on; learn and progress. They were just about at the age when this sort of adult talk could be successfully used.

They played in the places they were supposed to play, places where nobody had said they couldn’t, and — best of all — in the places where they definitely weren’t supposed to play at all.

Of the latter, her favourite had always been the water maze: the complex of shallow channels, ponds and lakes where the adults played with big toy battleships and where they watched the miniature sea battles take place from all the big towers and soaring arches and canals in the air.

She had been allowed to watch one of the battles once with her mother, though it had taken a lot of nagging and her mother had had to ask it as a big favour and even then it wasn’t one of the really important battles with lots of rich and famous people watching, it was just a sort of trying out and testing sort of battle that people from the estate could watch sometimes if they didn’t have other duties. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed it because she didn’t like heights; she kept her eyes closed most of the time, her hands grasping the sides of the little flat-bottomed boat they rode around in on the canals in the sky.

Lededje had liked it at first but eventually got bored. She thought it would be more interesting if she could be inside one of the battleships herself rather than have to watch other people working them. Her mother, still without opening her eyes, told her that was a stupid idea. For one thing she was too small. And anyway, only men were stupid and aggressive enough to want to get inside those floating death-traps and be shot at with live ammunition for the entertainment of the spoiled rich.

In the distance, Lededje had seen one of the old dome plinths, busy with people. Teams of workmen with cranes and big vehicles full of electronics were dismantling all the sat domes, two dozen of which had surrounded the mansion house in a ring a couple of kilometres across for as long as she could remember. The first time she had run away, it had been at the foot of one of those stone-clad plinths she had been caught. That had been years and years and years ago; maybe half her life. Now the gleaming white satellite domes were useless and outdated and being dismantled.

Right there and then, for the first time, she felt herself growing old.

They had to wait to be allowed to dock at the little pier on one of the towers, then go down in the coffin-like elevator and through the tunnel that led safely away from the lake and the towers and the channels and the ships. You could hear the guns firing even from the house.

She and the other children — well, most of them; two were too frightened — used to sneak under the fence that went all the way round the water maze. They kept well away from the miniature docks where the ships were maintained and repaired. The docks were usually only busy for the few days around one of the big proper battles, but even on the quietest days there would be one or two grown-ups working there.

Misty days were best. It all looked very strange and mysterious and bigger somehow, as though the toy landscape of the channels and little lakes had grown to be the right bigness for full-size battleships. She had an old foametal plank for her ship; the others used various bits and pieces of plastic, foametal and wood as theirs. They learned how to tie and glue extra bits and scraps of other stuff that floated to their ships, or plastic bottles or that sort of thing, to make them float better. They hid their ships in the reeds so they wouldn’t get caught.

They had their own races, battles and games of group-tag and hide-and-seek. When they had proper battles they threw lumps of earth and mud at each other. One time it was almost dark before they heard adults calling for them. The others said she only won that one because she was black as the night.

A couple of their ships were found one time when somebody doing something to one of the flat-bottom boats in the sky canals saw them playing. Those two ships were taken away and they all got a lecture about danger and Unexploded Munitions. They solemnly promised not to do it again, and watched as the hole in the fence they’d got in through was wired up. It was okay because they’d already found another hole further round.

After that they were supposed to carry comms — kid-phones — that told the adults where they were at all times but a couple of the older kids had shown everybody how to turn them off completely or make them give out signals that said they were a hundred metres away from where they really were.

The last day they played in the water maze it was very bright and sunny, though they only got to play there as the sun was going down, after school. All the adults were very busy because Mr. Veppers was coming back after a long time away on a business trip way out in the stars and so the house and the whole estate needed to be made to look as pretty and clean as possible.

She didn’t like hearing that Mr. Veppers was coming back because he was the man who owned her. She didn’t see him very often when he was in the big estate house — their paths seldom crossed, as her mother put it — but just knowing he was in the place made her feel funny. It was like being breathless, like when you fell on your back and hurt yourself, but worse than the getting hurt was the not being able to draw a breath. It was a bit like that, except all the time when Mr. Veppers was at home.

Lededje hadn’t run away for a while, though she still thought about it sometimes. She was thinking about running away the next day, the day Mr. Veppers came back, but for now she wasn’t thinking about it at all and was just having fun in the last insect-buzzy heat of the day under a sky that was all red and yellow.

She paddled along, lying on her front on her old ship, the trusty battleship made from the length of foametal that had been an off-cut from one of the dock pontoons. She’d shaped it a bit over the years to make it more aerodynamic in the water; it had a point at the front and it bent over at the back where you could brace your foot. Actually hers wasn’t a battleship at all because battleships were big and heavy and slow and when she was on her ship she wasn’t any of those things; she was light and quick and so she’d decided she was a light cruiser.

They were playing group-tag. She hid in the rushes close by one of the wading points between islands as the others slid quietly or splashed noisily past. Most of them were calling out her name and Hino’s; Hino was the second youngest and small like her and he was very good at tag and hide-and-seek, also like her. That meant that probably they were the last two to be found and tagged. She liked that; she liked to be the last to be caught, or not to get caught at all; sometimes they heard the adults calling them, or one of the older kids got a comms call they couldn’t ignore, and so they had to give up on the game and that meant whoever still hadn’t been caught by then had won. Once, she had fallen asleep on her light cruiser board in the sunlight and discovered that all the others had got bored and hungry and just gone off, leaving her there alone. She’d decided that counted as winning too.

Stuck into the mud near where she was hiding was a metal and plastic shell. You rarely saw these because they had locator things in them like the kid-phones did that meant they could be tidied up after each battle, but here was this one lying with a badly dented nose that must have doinked off the armour of one of the ships. She picked it up carefully, just to look at it, holding it in two fingers like it might explode at any moment. It looked very old and dirty. There was writing on it she couldn’t make out. She thought about putting it back where she’d found it, or throwing it onto the nearest island to see if it would explode, or dropping it in one of the deeper bits of the lakes — she even thought about leaving it where it would be found really easily by one of the maintenance people — but in the end she kept it, making a little mud nest for it right at the front — the bow — of her foametal light cruiser.

Leaning over to scoop up the mud to do this must have caused ripples, because next thing she knew there was a loud shout from alarmingly nearby and Purdil — one of the bigger, older boys — was almost on top of her, powering his plastic warship towards her along the channel using both hands, raising a breaking bow wave that shone in the red rays of the setting sun as he turned to head straight for her though the reeds. She struck out as hard as she could, angling out and away through a gap in the swaying stalks, but she knew she would never make it; Purdil was going too fast and she could never outpace him anyway.

Purdil was a bully who sometimes threw stones instead of mud when they had proper battles and was one of those who most liked to tease her about her tattoo and her being owned by Mr. Veppers, so the best she could do would be to get out into the channel and hope at least she’d get caught by somebody else.

She flattened herself on the board and started paddling desperately, both hands digging deep into the warm water, raising clouds of mud towards the surface. Something flew over her head and splashed just ahead of her. Purdil was shouting and laughing close behind her. She could hear the dry, rattling sound of the reed stems being pushed aside and under by the curved prow of his plastic ship.

She got into the channel and almost collided with Hino, who was being pursued by two of the others. They both manoeuvred to avoid hitting each other. He sat up when he saw it was her and was struck in the face by a clod of earth with some broken reed stems still attached. Hino nearly fell off his board, which curved back round, blocking Lededje’s course. She’d never get past him now. She started to pull up, using both hands to slow herself as the front of her craft slid in towards Hino.

Oh, she thought. She hoped the shell she’d found didn’t blow up when her ship hit Hino’s. It didn’t. Phew, she thought.

Hino wiped the mud off his face and glared past her at Purdil. Led felt Purdil’s craft smack into the back of her own just as Hino reached out to the little lumpen nest of mud she’d put the shell in, at the bows of her ship. She saw him pick up the muddy shell and throw it in one quick movement.

Lededje had time to draw breath.

The shell tore past her, half a metre away.

The explosion seemed to slap her once, right across the back. It made her head ring. Sound seemed to go away. She was still looking forward at Hino and raising her hand to try to say, No!

She felt the ringing noise everywhere in her body. She saw Hino’s face go pale as fast as clicking your fingers. The two other kids behind him wore the same expression. It was those expressions she would never forget; they were worse than what she saw when she looked round. Their faces; the three of them, staring, open-mouthed, eyes wider than she thought eyes could go, all blood draining from the faces.

She pushed herself up and turned to look behind her. It seemed to take a long time to do this. She looked away from Hino and the other two children, away from the channel behind and the setting sun and the reed beds stretching alongside. As she turned she saw the low hill of the miniature island forming one bank of the channel; above was the arch and spire of a sky canal and a tower above that.

She glimpsed something red. What was left of Purdil was still just about sitting on his plastic board. Most of his head had gone, though she only had a little while to see this as he fell forward and crashed down, part onto his board and part into the water.

It was only then that they all started screaming.

“No backing up, then?”

“Of course not. We don’t do that; we can’t do that. We’re not you.”

Lededje frowned at Demeisen. The second or third most traumatic thing in her life and the ship’s avatar seemed almost unconcerned.

“So,” Demeisen said, “properly dead.”

“Yes. Properly dead.”

“What happened to Hino?”

“We never saw him again. He was taken to the city for the police investigation and then had intensive post-traumatic counselling. His—”

“Why? What did the police do to him?”

“What? Nothing! There had to be a formal investigation, that’s all. Of course they didn’t do anything to him! What do you think we are?” Lededje shook her head. “The post-traumatic counselling was because he’d thrown what he thought was a rock and blown a kid’s head off.”

“Ah, right. I see.”

“Hino’s father was a consulting landscaper who was only due to be on the estate until the end of that year anyway, so by the time he was fit to be seen in polite company again Hino was on the other side of the world while his dad sorted out some other rich man’s problematic mansion sight-lines.”

“Hmm.” Demeisen nodded, looked thoughtful. “I didn’t realise you had foametal.”

Lededje glared at him, eyes narrowed. “I can’t believe that hasn’t come up before,” she said through gritted teeth. “What was I thinking of? I ran away the next morning and nearly died of exposure, thanks for asking.”

“You did?” The avatar looked surprised. “Why didn’t you mention that?”

“I was coming to it,” Lededje said icily.

They were sitting in the outer two of the little shuttle craft’s pilot seats, their feet up on the seat in the middle. The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was just about to enter Enablement space and Lededje had thought to tell a little more of her life story to the ship as she came back to the place she had been born and brought up.

Demeisen nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was insensitive of me. Of course it must have been traumatic for you as well, and the other two children, not to mention the various parents involved. Were you punished, either for being in the battle area or for your part in providing the unexploded shell or for running away?”

Lededje let out a breath. “All of the above,” she said. She was silent for a moment. Eventually she said, “I don’t think Veppers was very happy about having his big triumphant homecoming spoiled by a runaway brat and a security kerfuffle over his toy battleships.”

“Well,” Demeisen said, then paused in a most un-Demeisen-like manner.

“What?” Lededje asked.

The avatar swung his legs off the seat between them, turning and pointing at the main screen, which flashed into life showing a slowly retreating star field. “Now there’s a strange thing,” Demeisen said, almost as though not talking to her at all. He glanced at her, nodded at the screen. “See that?”

Lededje looked, peered, squinted. “See what?”

“Hmm,” Demeisen said, and the image on the screen zoomed in, altered in colour and what appeared to be texture. In theory it was a holo display, but everything being shown was so far away there was no real sense of depth. Side-screens filled with coloured graphs, numerals, bar and pie charts described the image manipulation taking place. “That,” he said, nodding and sitting back.

There was a strange, granular quality to the centre of the screen, where the darkness seemed to flicker slightly, oscillating between two very similar and very dark shades of grey.

“What is that?” Lededje asked.

Demeisen was silent for a couple of beats. Then, with a small laugh, he said, “I do believe we’re being followed.”

“Followed? Not by a missile or something?”

“Not by a missile,” the avatar said, staring at the screen. Then he looked away and turned back to her, smiling. “Don’t know why I’m making this thing stare at the fucking module screen,” he said as the screen went blank again. “Yes, followed, by another ship.” Demeisen put his feet up on the seat in between them again, cradling his head in his fingers against the seat’s headrest.

“I thought you were supposed to be—”

“Fast. I know. And I am. But I’ve been slowing down for the last day or so, reconfiguring my fields. Sort of… just in case this happened,” he said, nodding at the blank screen.

“Why?”

“Why look like what you are when you can fool people by looking like what you’re not?” The avatar’s smile was dazzling.

She thought about this for a moment. “I’m glad I’ve been able to teach you something.”

Demeisen grinned. “That thing,” he said as the screen flashed on again, still showing the curious grey pixilation at its centre before it clicked off once more, almost before she could register what she’d seen, “doesn’t know what it’s following.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, I’m positive.” The avatar sounded smug.

“So what does it think it’s following?”

“A lowly Torturer-class Rapid Offensive Unit from the days of fucking yore,” Demeisen said with what sounded like relish. “That’s what it thinks it’s following, assuming it’s done its home work properly. Encasement, sensory, traction; every field I’m currently deploying right now looks convincingly like a very slightly and extremely plausibly tweaked version of the classic Torturer-class signature profile. So it thinks I am a mere dainty pebble amongst modern spacecraft. But I’m not; I’m a fucking rock-slide.” The avatar sighed happily. “It also thinks there isn’t the slightest chance that I can see it, because a Torturer couldn’t.”

“So what does it look like? The thing that’s following us.”

The avatar made a clicking noise with its mouth. “No idea. It looks like what you saw on the screen; I’m not seeing much more than you. I’m only just able to see it’s there at all. Which at that range means it’s probably level tech; an L8 civ or a high-end seven.”

“Not an Enablement ship then?”

“Nope. At a guess; could be Flekke, NR, Jhlupian… maybe GFCF if they’ve been paying especially diligent attention to The Proceedings of the Institute of Wizzo Space Ship Designers Newsletter recently.”

“Why would any of them be following you?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Demeisen said. “I presume to see what I get up to.” He grinned at her. “And to see what I might be carrying. The question they’ll be asking themselves and might want me to answer is: what am I doing here?”

Lededje hoisted one eyebrow. “Thought up anything plausible?”

“Oh, I had concentric layers of cover stories prepared,” the avatar told her, “though in the end I’m a borderline eccentric and very slightly psychotic Abominator-class picket ship and I don’t really have to answer to any fucker. However, most of my alibis are for a humble tramping Torturer class, and one involved being vaguely interested in the Tsungarial Disk, or having some connection with somebody or something in the Culture mission attached to it. An unnecessary ruse in a sense as it turns out, because the mission is actively calling for a bit of help following a smatter outbreak; any Culture ship pulling up here now has a perfect excuse.”

Lededje shook her head. “I have no idea what a smatter outbreak is.”

“Runaway nanotech. Swarmata. Remains of an MHE: a Monopathic Hegemonising Event. Sometimes known as a hegswarm. Your eyes have gone glazed. Anyway, some of that stuff got into the Disk… you do know what the Disk is?”

“Lots of abandoned alien ships no one’s allowed to use, isn’t it?”

“Lots of abandoned alien factories no one’s allowed to use… mostly,” the avatar said, nodding. “Anyway, the smatter got into the Disk sometime in the dim and distant and one of our infuriatingly well-meaning Can-we-help? teams has been in there sitting on top of it for probably longer than’s really been necessary — you know; one of those jobs you make sure you never quite finish because you like being where you are? — except now it does rather seem to have blown up in their faces and all of a sudden our chums have a properly serious runaway Event on their hands.” Demeisen paused and got that far-away look avatars sometimes did when the vastly powerful thing they represented was watching something utterly fascinating going on in mysterious high-definition realms inaccessible to mere mortal biologicals. The avatar shook his head. “Hilarious.”

“So you’re going to go and help?” Lededje asked.

“Good grief, no!” Demeisen said. “Pest Control problem. They took the decision to spin this out; they can fucking deal with it.” He shrugged. “Though having said that, I may have to pretend to go and help, I suppose, or whoever’s following us might see through my magic cloak of plausibility. We are heading straight for the Tsung system; it’s just I hadn’t intended to stop.” The avatar clicked his fingernails on the console beneath the screen. “Annoying.” He sighed. “Also, interestingly, this is — maybe — not the first odd thing to happen in this neck of the woods, either. There was an ablationary plume nine days ago not a million klicks away from that rendezvous they were trying to get you to make in the Semsarine Wisp.”

She shook her head. “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”

“What; you mean an ablationary plume?”

“Yes. What the fuck is that, now?”

“Oh, come on; this is just the stuff I have to deal with, an emergence from the weird-shit space I happen to pass my days in.” If Lededje hadn’t known better she might have thought the avatar was hurt. “An ablationary plume,” he said, sighing. “It’s what happens when a ship tries to hit the ground running and fails, in e-Grid terms; its field engines are unable to connect efficiently with the Grid and — rather than blowing up or being flung out, wrecked, to coast for ever — its engines ablate a part of themselves to cushion the energy blow. Slows the ship, though at great cost. Immediate total engine refit required. The point is that the resulting plume’s visible from way far away in e-Grid terms, so it can work as a sort of emergency distress signal. Embarrassing enough during peacetime and likely fatal in a war.” The avatar fell silent, seemingly contemplating this odd turn of events.

“… E-Grid?” Lededje asked tentatively.

“Oh come on!” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Do they teach you nothing at school?”

Somebody was calling her name. Everything was a bit fuzzy, even including her sense of who she was. Her name, for example. There it was again. Somebody saying it.

Well, they were saying something. Her first thought was that they were saying her name but now she thought about it she wasn’t so sure.

It was as though the sounds meant something but she wasn’t sure what, or maybe she knew what they meant but couldn’t be sure what the sounds actually were. No, that wasn’t what she meant. Fuzzy.

Yime. That was her name, wasn’t it?

She wasn’t entirely sure. It sounded like it was supposed to mean something pretty important and it wasn’t an ordinary word that she knew which meant something. It sounded like a name. She was pretty sure it was a name. Chances were it was her name.

Yime?

She needed to get her eyes open. She wanted to get her eyes open. She wasn’t used to having to think about opening her eyes; usually it was something that just happened.

Still, if she was going to have to think about—

Yime? Can you hear me?

—it, she’d just have to think about it. There it was again, just there, while she’d been thinking about getting her eyes open; that… feeling that somebody or something had said her name.

“Yime?” said a tiny, high-pitched voice. It was a silly voice. A pretend, made-up voice, or one belonging to a child who’d just sucked on a helium balloon.

“Yime? Hello, Yime?” the squeaky voice said. It was hard to hear at all; it was almost drowned out by the roaring sound of a big waterfall, or something like a big waterfall; a high wind in tall trees, maybe.

“Yime? Can you hear me?”

It really did sound like a doll.

She got one eye open and saw a doll.

Well, that fitted, she supposed. The doll was standing looking at her, quite close to her. It was standing on the floor. She realised that she must be lying on the floor.

The doll was standing at a funny angle. Being at that angle, it should be falling over. Maybe it had special feet with suckers on them, or magnets. She’d had a toy that could climb walls, once. She guessed the doll was the usual doll-size; about right for a human toddler to carry and cuddle like an adult would a baby. It had glowing yellow-brown skin, black, intensely curled hair and the usual too-big head and eyes and over-chubby limbs. It wore a little vest-and-pants set; some dark colour.

“Yime? Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

The voice was coming from the doll. Its mouth had moved as it had spoken, though it was a little hard to be sure because there was some stuff in her eye. She tried to bring her hand up to her face to wipe away whatever it was in her eye, but her hand wasn’t cooperating. Her whole arm wasn’t cooperating. She tried the other arm/hand combination, but it wasn’t being any more helpful. Signals seemed to be piling up inside her head from both arms, both hands, trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t make sense of whatever it was. There were a lot of signals like that, from all over her body. Another mystery. She was getting tired of them. She tried to yawn but got a strange grating feeling from her jaw and head.

She opened her other eye and saw two dolls. They were identical, and both were at the same strange angle.

“Yime! You’re back with me! Good!”

“Ack?” she said. She had meant to say “Back?” but it had come out wrong. She didn’t seem to be able to get her mouth to work properly. She tried to take a deep breath but that didn’t go too well either. It felt like she was sort of jammed, as though she’d tried to squeeze through a really tight gap and it hadn’t worked and she’d got trapped.

“Stay with me, Yime,” the doll squeaked.

She tried to nod, but… no.

“Okay,” she said.

There was only one doll, she’d worked out. Not two; it was a focusing problem. The doll was too close, there was stuff — black stuff — in her eyes and everything was at an odd angle. The ceiling, if you were going to call it that, seemed awfully close to the doll’s bubble-haired head. And the doll’s glowing skin seemed to be the only light within this cramped, shadowy space.

Where the hell was she?

She tried to think where she had been last.

She had been standing under the ship, being briefed, looking at images of stars and clusters and systems, the vast dark bulk of the ship directly above. No; she’d been walking out from underneath the ship, into rain, with the blunt snout of the ship like a black glass cliff poised above; a giant flat knife for cutting through to the underneathness of the universe…

“Yime!” something squeaked. She got one of her eyes to open. Oh yes, this weird little doll thing standing in front of her. Funny angle.

“Ot?” (“What?”)

“Don’t do that. Stay with me. Don’t drift off like that.”

She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Drift off? How? To where? She was trapped here, caught.

The doll wobbled towards her, its gait made awkward by its short, thick legs. It had something in its hand, something like a needle with a single slick-looking thread trailing behind it. The thread disappeared into the slanted narrow darkness behind the doll. She thought there was something familiar but wrong about the two very close-together surfaces behind the doll.

The doll had something in its other hand too. The toy waddled so close to her head she couldn’t see it properly any more. She could feel it, though; feel its little clothed body squeezing against the side of her head.

“Ot you doing?” she asked it. Something cold was pressed against her neck. She tried to move. Anything. Eyelids; they worked. Mouth; a bit. Her lips didn’t seem to be too keen on pressing together. Facial muscles; mostly. Tongue and throat and breathing; a bit. Fingers? No fingers. Toes? Toes not responding. Bladder muscles; something there. Great; she could pee herself if she wanted.

She could not move her head or body or limbs at all.

Suddenly the slanted narrow space made a sort of sense and she realised she was still in the ship, still in the lounge she’d been in earlier, when it had been accelerating. Accelerating? Did ships accelerate? This was the floor folded over and pressed up against the wall. She was lying on the wall and the floor had come up to meet the wall and she was lying crushed between the two. This would account for her not being able to move.

“What?” the doll squeaked, clambering lightly over her face as it moved to the other side of her neck.

“Ot you doing?” she repeated.

“I’m putting a micro med-pack on you and hooking you up to a distant-delivery med-pack that’s as close as I can get it, a couple of metres away.”

“Ang I trat?”

“Are you trapped?” the doll repeated, fiddling with something just outside of sight. “Yes, Yime, I’m afraid you are.” She felt and half-saw it flick the long silver line, then felt something cold on the other side of her neck. She sensed a needle sliding into her flesh but there was no pain at all; not even the slightest, which was surprising. She was sure you were supposed to experience a tiny bit of pain with anything the body experienced as an injury, before the pain-relief system kicked in. Unless your whole body was basically in screaming agony and therefore your brain was so flooded with pain-relief secretions coming from the appropriate glands and just-ignore-it signals coming from the relevant brain-bits that something as trivial as a needle sliding into your flesh just didn’t register at all.

That must be it. She was crushed, immobile, inside the crippled ship, barely able to breathe, and her body was probably really badly smashed up. Made sense.

She was taking all this very calmly, she thought.

Well, there wasn’t much point in panicking.

She swallowed, then said, “Ot the suck ha’ind?”

“What the fuck happened?” the doll said, finishing what it was doing and climbing back out from beside her neck and standing in front of her again. It stood a little further back now so she could see it better. “I — we — got clobbered by something very powerful: either the Bulbitian itself displaying hitherto unknown martial prowess, or an equiv-tech ship that was nearby. We only just got out of the Bulbitian’s environment sphere. I had to total — go into hyperspace — before I cleared the sphere, or we’d have been smeared. It was a rough old transit and we were still getting attacked. Got off some retaliation but no idea if I hit anything. More frazzling ensued before I could get us away. Took myself to bits; firing off burst units like missiles and p-chambers like mines. Lost 4D directional and had to traction-plough the grid to stop us subrupturing. Now we’re drifting, decoupled.”

“Oor juss a-oyding saying yeer sucked.”

“No I’m not,” the doll squeaked. “We are fucked, in the sense we’re both in a very bad way, but on the other hand we are alive at the moment, and we have a substantial chance of getting out of this alive.”

“Ee do?”

“We do. Thanks to my efforts and your body’s own emergency systems we can keep you stabilised and even start some repairs, meanwhile I seem to have shaken off our attackers, my own repair systems are running at maximum and the distress calls I got out before losing my signal fields, plus the ablation plume itself, should have been sufficient to summon help. I expect it is on its way even as we speak.”

She tried to frown. It was just about possible. “I a doll?”

“All my other remotes are compromised, too big or otherwise engaged. The doll dates from when I once had some children aboard. Rather than recycle it I retained it in this form for sentimental reasons. I’ll leave it here to keep you company if you want to stay awake, though it might be better to let you sleep now we’ve got you hooked up; going to be a while before I can get you unstuck.”

She thought about this. “Slee,” she said.

Just before she slipped under, she thought, Wait! There had been something important she’d really meant to remember.

But then it all went away from her.

“That thing’s coming up on me,” Demeisen said, frowning. “What the fuck does it think it’s trying to do; overtake?”

“You’re sure it’s not a missile?” Lededje asked. She’d got the ship to put the image back on the module screen again so she could at least see something of what was going on immediately behind them. The granular two-tone greyness in the screen’s centre looked just as it had.

“Whatever this thing is, I doubt it considers itself single-use expendable, so not a missile by the standard definition,” the avatar said. “But it is coming straight up behind us, which is a semi-hostile manoeuvre.”

“When does it become a totally hostile manoeuvre?”

Demeisen shrugged. “When it reaches a point where a Torturer-class ROU would normally catch sight of something immediately behind it. At the moment it thinks I can’t see it, so in a sense I’ve no business assuming it’s hostile. As soon as or slightly before it reaches the point where a real Torturer class would spot it, it should hail us.”

“When does that happen?”

“As things stand, if nobody alters power, about two hours.” The avatar frowned. “Which is shortly before we’ll get to the Tsung system, where the Disk is. Now isn’t that a coincidence?” The avatar plainly didn’t expect an answer, so Lededje didn’t attempt to provide one. Demeisen tapped one fingernail on a front tooth. “One slightly worrying nuance here is that it expects me to see it about halfway into my approach. It’s assuming that I’m stopping at Tsung, which is not unreasonable.” The avatar was more muttering than talking now. Lededje remained patient. “But I’ll be slowing down, halfway to dead stop, when it expects to pop up on my sensors,” Demeisen said quietly, staring sideways at the screen. “And, if you were being paranoid about it, that’s almost a hostile act in itself, because that sets our chum up for an attacking pass, unless he slows too or peels away.” The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?”

She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested.

Demeisen clicked his fingers. “What a splendid suggestion,” he said, swivelling round in the seat to look at the screen. “Naturally we have to ignore the awkward fact that the smartest thing is all too often only obvious in hindsight, but never mind.” He turned to look at her. “There is just a very small chance that this could get awkward, Lededje. I might actually get in a proper fire-fight here.” The avatar grinned at her, eyes bright.

“A prospect that patently fills you with horror.”

Demeisen laughed, might almost have looked embarrassed. “Thing is,” he said, “big space fights between grown-up ships ain’t no place for a young slip of a girl such as yourself, so if that’s what looks like happening I’ll try and get you away. Right now you’re safest here, inside me, but that could change in an instant. You might find yourself inside the shuttle inside one of my subsections, or just inside the shuttle alone, or even just in a suit or even a gel suit with scary empty space only millimetres away. All with no warning. Actually, be better even if you still had a lace; we could back you up and make you nearly as shock-proof as me, but never mind. You ever worn a gel suit?”

“No.”

“Really? I suppose not. Never mind. Nothing to it. Here you go.”

Just to the side of Lededje’s seat, a silvery ovoid swelled, popped and disappeared, depositing what looked like a cross between a large jellyfish and a thick condom the size and shape of a human onto the floor. She stared down at it. It looked like somebody had had their skin turned transparent and then been flayed. “That’s a space suit?” she asked, aghast. In her experience, space suits looked a little more reassuringly complicated. Not to mention bulky.

“You’ll probably want to empty your bladder and bowels before putting it on,” Demeisen told her, nodding back to where the shuttle’s living area was already reconfiguring to its shiny hi-tech bath/shower/toilet aspect. “Then just strip off and step in; it’ll do the rest.”

She picked the gel suit up. It was heavier than she’d expected. Peering at it, she could see what looked like dozens of thinner-than-tissue-thin layers within it, boundaries marked out with a hint of iridescence. There were some parts of it that looked a little thicker than others and which were sort of mistily opaque. They made the thing appear a little more substantial than it had at first glance, but not by much. “I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.”

“It’d be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her. “But if it appears a bit flimsy don’t worry; there’s an armoured outer-suit that goes over the top. I’m getting one of those ready too.” He nodded at the now fully formed bathroom. “Now do your business like a good little biological and don’t tarry.”

She glared at the avatar but he was staring at the screen. She wheeled out of the seat and stamped to the bathroom.

“Do you need to pee and poo?” she called from inside the bathroom. “In your human form there?”

“No,” the avatar called. “Not biological. Can do, though, if I’ve been eating or drinking for what you might call social effect. Comes out just like it went in. Though chewed, obviously, in the case of solids. Edible and drinkable. Well, unless I‘ve kept it inside long enough for any airborne or already-present organisms to start to break it down. So I can do convincing, if very delicate, belches and farts. Some human people actually like to eat what comes out of avatars. Very odd. Still, that’s people.”

“Sorry I asked,” Lededje muttered, starting to strip off.

“Ha! Thought you might be,” the avatar called back cheerily. Sometimes she forgot how good its hearing was.

She had a token pee and then laid the gel suit out on the floor. The mistily opaque bits were mostly on its back. Or front — it was impossible to tell. They tapered smoothly, looking like long, nearly transparent muscles.

She looked at herself in the reverser. The tattoo was a frozen storm of swirling black lines scrolled across her body. She had spent a lot of the time over the days since they’d left the GSV learning how to use the tat’s own controls to influence its display. She could thicken and thin the lines, alter their number, their colours and reflectivity, make them straight, wiggly, curled or spiralled, turn them into circles or squares or any other simple geometric form, or choose from any one of thousands of tweakable patterns.

She frowned at the silvery ring on her left hand. “What about the terminal ring?” she called.

“Don’t worry; the suit will adjust.”

She shrugged. Oh well, she thought. She stepped onto the foot parts of the suit. There didn’t seem to be any holes to put her feet into.

Just when she thought nothing was going to happen and that maybe she ought to reach down and see if she could pull it up somehow, the thing suddenly rippled and rose, clumping round her feet then flowing upwards, climbing up her shins and thighs, enveloping her torso and flowing down her arms as it gathered in a sort of ruff round her neck. It moved faster than the tattoo had performing its roughly similar trick. It felt like it was at blood heat; like the tat, she could hardly tell it was there.

“Stopped at my neck,” she called out.

“That’s standard,” Demeisen shouted back. “It’ll go complete if there’s any threat or if you tell it to.”

“How do I tell it to?”

“Saying ‘Helmet up,’ or just ‘Eek!’ usually works, I’m told.”

“It’s… intelligent?” she said. It came out closer to a screech than she’d intended.

“Dumber than a knife missile,” the avatar told her, sounding amused. “But it recognises speech and it can hold a conversation. Thing’s supposed to react to perceived threat even when you’re asleep, Led. Can’t be totally stupid.”

Her eyes went wide and she sucked in a breath. She felt herself rise on her tiptoes. “It’s also just given me what feels like a buttplug and a pessary,” she said, aware that her voice had risen a couple of tones. “That had better be entirely fucking standard.”

“Yup. You can adjust that too. For all that stuff you can talk to it or use the controls on either forearm, or the finger pads; just like the tattoo. Got colouring and camo functions; you can use them to give it modesty panels if you’re shy.”

She looked at herself in the reverser. The gel suit didn’t even reflect the way she’d have expected it to. She could still see the tat; it was almost like the gel suit wasn’t there at all except at the edges of her body as they appeared in the image, where it looked like she had a thin grey line drawn right round her.

“So it can talk?” she shouted.

“Mm-hmm,” the avatar replied.

“You going to introduce us then?” she asked. “Seems only right,” she muttered.

“It was being polite, waiting to be spoken to,” Demeisen said. “Say hello, suit.”

“Hello,” the suit said, making her jump. The smooth, cool, androgynous voice came from just under each of her ears.

“Well, hello,” she said, and realised she was smiling like an idiot.

“Ms. Y’breq, I understand?” the suit said.

“Hello there!” she said, probably louder and more heartily than was strictly necessary.

“May I suggest I introduce minor filaments into your ears to allow me to speak to you directly?”

“That necessary?” she said. She found she was whispering for some reason.

“It is preferable,” the suit said. “The collar components are already able to comprehend sub-vocalisations. This means we may converse without appearing to.”

“Right,” she said. “Okay then.” There was a pause. She didn’t feel anything happening, then felt a brief, tiny tickling feeling inside both ears. “That it?” she asked.

“Yes,” the suit voice said, sounding slightly different. “Testing: left, right,” it said, the source of its voice shifting appropriately before centring in her head again. “Does that sound correct to you?”

“I suppose,” she said. Another pause.

“No, couldn’t hear a thing, suit,” Demeisen said.

Lededje took a breath. “Suit, put the helmet up, please.”

The helmet component flipped up over her head almost before the last syllable had been uttered, unrolling from the neck ruff with a whoosh of air.

She was aware there was something around her head but she could still see perfectly well, and she could blink. She put her fingers tentatively up to her eyes and found what felt like invisible bulges over each eye. She flexed her jaw, stuck out her tongue; a shallow bulge had opened over her mouth and extended outwards when she stuck her tongue out. Her nose had tiny bulges under each nostril. “What am I breathing?” she asked quietly.

“Air, I imagine,” the avatar shouted.

“Ambient air,” the suit told her. “I am charging back-unit components with pressurised ambient air as a precaution; however, for long-term use I can continually reconstitute oxygen from carbon dioxide with my reactor.”

“Reactor?” Lededje said, slightly alarmed.

“Chemical processing reactor,” the suit told her.

“Ah.”

“Oh, it’s got what you’d think of as a real reactor too,” Demeisen shouted. She got the impression he was enjoying all this.

“A standard micro-form M/AM unit,” the suit told her.

Lededje rolled her eyes. “Helmet down.” she said. The helmet flipped instantly back to become a neck ruff again. “Can you go all black?” she said.

The suit turned matt black. “Now make the bit over the tat controls go transparent.” The area over her left forearm went transparent again. Touching there, it felt like the suit surface under the pads of her fingers had gone sub-millimetre thin, allowing her almost full sensitivity. She dialled the tat lines to thick and her face darkened. Satisfied, she marched out of the bathroom.

“All right,” she said. “I’m suited up. Now what—?” She stopped a couple of steps from the seats. “What the fuck is—?” she started to say, then said, “Oh, the armoured bit.” Sitting in the shuttle’s middle seat was what looked like an armoured warrior. The suit was mirror-shiny and smooth; maybe three or four times as thick as the gel suit. The head section looked like a blank-visored silver version of the sort of thing you were meant to wear riding a motor bike.

“The armoured bit,” Demeisen agreed. He glanced at her. “Very fetching,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” She sat in her seat again. The image on the screen looked just the same as before, disappointingly. “Now what?” she said.

“Now you get into the armoured suit,” the avatar said.

She looked at Demeisen.

“Just a precaution,” he said, waving his arms.

She got up. The armoured suit rose too; more smoothly, she suspected, than any mere human ever had. It stepped down and stood facing her on the floor. Then it just peeled apart, splitting centrally down every part nearest her, its legs, torso and arms spread almost flat out to each side, doubling its profile.

She stepped down too, faced it. She looked at its shiny inside surface and felt herself swallow. She glanced back. Demeisen was still staring at the screen. He seemed to become aware of a delay and looked round at her. “What?”

“You,” she began, then had to stop. She cleared her throat. “You really… wouldn’t hurt me, would you?” She hadn’t meant to, but then she found herself saying, “You did promise.”

The avatar looked at her, expression uncertain, then smiled. “Yes, I promised, Led.”

She nodded, turned, stepped backwards into the suit. The suit closed calmly around her, pressing gently in on the gel suit but seeming to add no weight. The helmet didn’t close completely; the visor slid away above leaving her an unrestricted field of vision.

“Walk normally,” Demeisen said, not looking back at her.

She walked normally, expecting to be dragging the suit with her, or maybe to fall over. Instead the suit felt like it was walking with her. She got back into the seat again, highly aware of her silvery bulk.

“I feel like I’m a fucking space warrior,” she told the avatar.

“Well you’re not,” Demeisen said. “I am.” He flashed a smile.

“Hurrah for you. So, what now?”

“Now we try focusing what’ll look like the track scanner of a Torturer class straight back. That’ll pick up our overtaking enthusiast.”

“Won’t that look suspicious?”

“Not that much; ships — especially warships, and especially old warships — do that kind of thing, every now and again. Just in case.”

“How often would you find something?”

“Practically never.”

“Are all old warships that jumpy?”

“The ones that survived are,” Demeisen said. “And then some of us are just paranoid. I’ve been known to back-flip and point my primary ahead scanner directly backwards, just to make sure there’s no fucker tagging quietly along behind. Not for long of course. It’s a bit scary; like running backwards in the dark.” The avatar laughed. “Though not as scary as thinking you’re sneakily pursuing some unsuspecting ship and then suddenly finding yourself all lit up and blinking in the glare of an Abominator class’s forward scanner.” The avatar looked amused at this. “Anyway, here we go.”

Lededje watched the screen. The granularity in the centre of the image resolved into a shape. It looked like a sort of rounded black snowflake with eight-fold symmetry.

There was a pause. Demeisen’s eyebrows went up.

“Yes?” Lededje said after a few moments when the avatar hadn’t said anything. “And? What’s happening?”

“Fucking hell,” Demeisen said. “They’re speeding up, fast.”

Lededje stared at the screen but nothing seemed to have changed. “What are you going to do?” she asked the avatar.

Demeisen whistled out a breath. “Oh, I am so tempted to just sprint off and leave the fuckers standing, or do the back-flip scanner thing with full targeting component and shout ‘Hello there, fellow space farers! Can I help you?’” The avatar sighed. “But we’ll learn more if we stick with the innocent little Torturer class disguise for a bit. They’ll be on us in about forty minutes.” Demeisen looked at her with what was probably meant to be a reassuring look. He wasn’t very good at it. “You must understand that this is almost certainly still nothing, and you can climb out of that suit quite soon.”

“It’s very comfortable.”

“Is it? Good, good. So I understand. Anyway, just to be on the safe side I’m spooling up to full operational readiness.”

“Battle stations?” she asked.

Demeisen looked pained. “Terribly old expression. From so long ago ships had crews. Or crews that weren’t just along for the ride. But yes.”

“Anything I can do?”

He smiled. “My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvellous though they are in so many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions… or in some cases contribute to them.”

“Contribute?”

“Chemicals; colours. You know.”