Surface Detail

Twenty-two

“Anyway, more help is on the way.”

“It is? Well, hippety-hey for us. What is it? Who are they?”

“Some old Torturer class.”

“What, a proper ship?”

“A proper warship. Though old, like I say. Here in a couple of hours.”

“So soon. That’s unannounced.”

“That’s old warships for you. Tramp around, don’t tell anybody where they are or what they’re up to for years, decades or longer, but then every now and again one of them finds itself in the right place at the right time to do something useful. Breaks the monotony, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s come to the right fucking place to do that.”

“Woh. Getting frazzled, are we?”

“No more than you, coll.”

“That’s estcoll to you.”

“Blit a few kilo more of these little graveller fucks and you might just pretend to the level of esteemed colleague. Until then you’re only provisionally even a colleague, coll.”

“Golly. Terrible how we flirt, isn’t it?”

“Oh my, yes,” Auppi Unstril said, grinning, even though this was a sound-only comm. “Gets me all-scale flushed up. Any other news?”

“Our ever-helpful estcolls in the GFCF report they’re just about containing the outbreaks they’ve come across,” Lanyares Tersetier — colleague and lover — told her. “Like us, they keep thinking that’s it, dealt with, under control, then another bit flares up. Mostly, though, they seem to be spending their time like they said: checking out all the other fabricaria.”

“I suppose we should be grateful they seem to be coping so well.”

“And that they had so many ships that close.”

“Yeah. Makes you wonder what they were all doing hereabouts in the first place.”

“You really have it in for the little cute guys, don’t you?”

“Is that how it sounds?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t trust those little fucks.”

“They speak very well of you.”

“They speak very well of everybody.”

“That so bad?”

“Yes; it means you can’t trust them.”

“You’re so cynical.”

“And paranoid. Don’t forget paranoid.”

“You sure you wouldn’t have done better in SC?”

“No, I’m not. What about the Hylo?” The Fast Picket.

Hylozoist was on the far side of the Disk from where they were. Bamboozlingly, an almost simultaneous eruption of smatter had taken place alarmingly near to the Disk’s Initial Contact Facility, the principal — indeed, by treaty terms, mandatory — base for all the species currently taking an active interest in the Tsungarial Disk. If anything, that infection was worse than this one, with fewer but more sophisticated machines emerging like hatching larvae from a scatter of fabricaria clustered about the Facility itself and taxing the long-disarmed Hylozoist severely. It was just about coping in its own theatre, but it had no more resources to spare for the outbreaks Auppi and her friends were trying to handle.

“Same; still struggling to cope with its share of the fun.”

The GFCF were already talking darkly about some sort of plot; these two outbreaks, so close together in time but far apart in terms of Disk geometry, looked suspicious, they reckoned. They suspected dastardly outside interference and would not rest until the culprits were unmasked. In the meantime they would fight valiantly alongside their esteemed Culture comrades to contain, roll back and ultimately extinguish the smatter outbreak. They were sending their ships all over the Disk, ensuring that the infection was spreading no further while leaving their more martially oriented Culture cousins to do the equivalent of the hand-to-hand stuff. (Play to one’s strengths, and all that.) Even trying to avoid the truly vicious stuff, they were still stumbling across bits of it now and again. They were doing their best to smite with the best of them (which meant the Culture, obviously), even though this was not really in their nature.

“Okay. So what’s the news with you personally, lover?”

“Missing you. Otherwise okay. Keeping busy.”

“Oh, aren’t we all? Well, I’d better go. More swarmers to waste. Got another cloud coming out of one of the mid L-Sevens. Off I go to blit.”

“Blit away. Don’t get blitted.”

“Ditto to you. Till next—”

“You forgot to say, ‘Missing you too.’”

“Wha—? I did, didn’t I? What a crap girlfriend. Miss you; love you.”

“Love you too. Back to the fray, I guess.”

“Hold on. We have a name for that Torturer class?”

“Oddly, no. Probably means it’s one of the particularly weird ones. Want to bet it’s a vet of the I-war still troubled and trying to deal with its issues after a millennium and a half?”

“Oh, fuck. A weirded-up geriatric warship getting piled into the current mix. With our luck it’ll have come to join the fucking outbreak, not help us jump up and down on it.”

“There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll use at least part of the next four hours thinking up fresh negativities to display for you. Good hunting.”

“Spoiled for choice out here. You too. Off.”

“Later. Off.”

Auppi Unstril muted comms, glanded a little more edge and took a deep breath as the drug coursed through her. The displays seemed to sharpen and brighten, their 3D qualities appeared enhanced and all the other signals coming into her sort of freshened, whether they were auditory, tactile or anything else — and there was a lot else. She felt very alert, and raring to go.

“Junkie,” said the ship.

“Yep,” she said. “Enjoying it, too.”

“You worry me sometimes.”

“When I worry you all the time we may have started to reach equilibrium,” she told it, though it was more just the sort of thing you felt you had to say when you were riding an edge buzz than what she actually felt. The ship didn’t really worry her at all. She worried it. Just as it should be; she enjoyed that feeling too.

The ship wasn’t really a ship (too small) and so didn’t have a proper name; it was a Fast Fleet Liaison Module with emergency weaponisationability (or something) and all it had was a number. Well, it had been thoroughly weaponisationed all right and it had room inside for a human pilot so, like the dashingly gorgeous Mr. Lanyares Tersetier — colleague and lover — she’d been determined not to let the machines have all the fun dealing with the unexpected, semi-widespread and bizarrely uncontainable smatter outbreak. She’d decided to call the ship The Bliterator, which smacked even her as a bit childish, but never mind.

Auppi and the ship blitted the fuck out of whatever elements of the hegswarm outbreak they got to point themselves at; just blowing the Selfish Dust out of the skies. She was genuinely in mortal danger, hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time for — well, off-hand, she couldn’t remember how many days — and she was starting to feel more like a machine than a fully functioning and quite attractive human female. Didn’t matter; she was loving it.

There were immersive shoot-games as good — arguably better in some ways — than this, and she had played them all, but this had an advantage over all of them: it was real.

One unlucky collision with a boulder, stone, gravel granule, or maybe even sand-grain-size bit of the current infection and she’d be lucky to live. Same applied to the weapons that some of these later outbreakians were coming equipped with. (That was worrying in itself — the hegswarm getting gunned-up too; developing.) So far the weapons themselves were nothing to worry a properly prepared tooled-up piece of Culture offensive kit, like the one she was in, humble civilian transport origins or not, but — again — an unlucky combination of events and she’d be plasma, meat-dust; a highly distributed red smear.

She, Lanyares and the others had agreed that knowing that fact added something to the whole experience. Terror, mostly. But also an extra level of excitement, of exultation when you came out the other side of an encounter still alive, plus a feeling after each engagement that you never really got in a sim: that of having genuinely done something, of accomplishment.

There had been over sixty humans in the Restoria mission to the Tsungarial Disk when the outbreak began. They’d all volunteered to get involved. They’d drawn lots for who got to pilot the twenty-four microships they could field. So far, two of the drone ships had been damaged but had managed to get back to base for repair. None of the humans had ended up dead/missing/ injured.

The humans had all run their own sims and looked at old scenarios and reckoned that they had about a four-to-one chance of getting through this unscathed, if the outbreak ran the way it had been expected to.

Only it hadn’t; they didn’t even think to report it immediately because the original little smatter burstlet had been interesting, something worth studying. Then, a day later, when they’d realised it was the real thing, they’d still confidently assured superiors and distant offers of help that they could handle it; it’d be over before anybody more than a day away got there, and there was nobody anywhere near a day away.

It went over that first one-day prediction, but by then they were even more confident they had worked it out and knew how to deal with it; it’d be over in a couple of days. Well, four. Okay; definitely six. Now they were on day eight or nine, the fucking outbreak wasn’t letting up, in fact it was showing signs of developing — those weapons, crude or not — and they were all starting to get, as Lan had put it, frazzled.

Plus their pooled, averaged, constantly updated should-be-fairly-reliable sims had, over the last few days, gone from giving them a four out of five chance of surviving without casualties to odds of three out of four, then to a two out of three chance and then — inevitably, it felt like — to a one-to-one likelihood. That had been sobering. It was only a sim, only a prediction, but it was still worrying. That last estimate had been good up to about five hours ago. By now they must be well into negative odds. Unless the outbreak just stopped or even just tailed away unfeasibly rapidly, or they were ridiculously lucky, they were going to lose somebody.

Well, maybe they were. But she wasn’t going to be the one. They might lose more than one. She wasn’t going to be the first. Fuck it, maybe they’d all die. She wanted to be the one survivor, or the last to go down. A ferocity Auppi would never have guessed resided in her rose and burned in her chest and behind her eyes when she thought about this sort of stuff. Yeah, natural warrior, that was her. She could hear Lanyares laughing at her already. Glanded too much edge, sperk, quicken, focal, drill and gung, young lady.

Still, though. That lust for destruction, glory — even glorious death — was a sort of extra, emergent drug in itself; a meta-hit that spoke to something deep-buried, long veneered over but never entirely expunged in the pan-human bio-heritage.

She was armour-suited, plugged into a gel-foamed brace couch with at least four metres of high-density gunned-up much-beweaponed Fast Fleet Liaison Module between her and the vacuum — twelve metres of pointy, armoured ditto measuring from the front — and she had an arsenal of weaponry: one main laser, four secondaries, eight tertiaries, six point-defence high-repeat shrapnel laser cells, a couple of nanogun pods — currently seven-eighths depleted, so it would soon be time to get back to base to re-arm — and a heavy, slowing, bulky but useful hullslung missile container with an assortment of sleekly deadly lovelies inside. That was only half depleted, which the ship still maintained meant she was being too miserly with the missiles. She saw it as just being careful. Be tight with the stuff that could get depleted and extravagant with what seemed never-ending: her own desire to fight and destroy.

She was almost ashamed to be backed up. A real warrior shouldn’t be. A real warrior should face the certainty of death and oblivion and still be fearless, still treat their life as just something to be gambled with against the odds of fate, as effectively as possible.

Fuck it, though; the warriors of old had thought they were effectively backed up too, sure in themselves that they were bound for some glorious martial heaven. That it was nonsense wasn’t the point. Some of them must have had their doubts but they had still behaved as though they didn’t. That was fucking bravery. (Or stupidity. Or gullibility. Or a kind of narcissism — what you thought it was depended on what sort of person you were, what you might have felt and done in the same situation.) Would they have taken the offer of being truly backed up, had they been able? Leapt at it, she’d have bet. And never forget they would be killing other people, not dumb matter smartened up a couple of notches to the point it became annoying. That was where the analogy with game-playing became something even closer; you could waste smatter with exactly the same moral abandon as something whacked in a shoot-up game.

Anyway, she was backed up, and popped out of the fray every four hours or so like the others to draw breath, find out what was happening and transmit the latest version of her all-too-mortal soul to the Restoria mission control hab on the inner fringe of the Disk, only a thousand klicks above the cloud tops of the gas giant Razhir — where she’d be heading shortly, to re-arm. Doubtless extra copies of her mind-state would then be passed on to whatever the nearest Restoria ship was, and beyond that, probably, to other substrates overseen by different Minds quite possibly on the other side of the big G, or even further afield.

Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something.

She used the stare-focus function to zoom in on the cloud of boulders coming out of the mid-Disk Level-Seven fabricary. The front of the cloud was less than a minute old; most of it was still bursting out of the ancient space factory through round ports in the fabricary’s dark surface. It looked a lot like a giant seed pod releasing spores, which was fairly appropriate, she supposed.

“Two point eight minutes away,” she said. She took a sweep about, scanning right around right to left and back to forward and then looking everywhere at once just to get the local feel. (She could just about remember how that had felt the first time it had been demonstrated to her. She’d almost thrown up. Looking in two contra-rotating directions at once, and then in all directions at the same time, just wasn’t stuff the ancient human brain systems were able to cope with; processing the results kind of confused the frontal cortex, too. She’d thought she’d never get the hang of it, but she had. It was routine, now.) “Anything closer smaller nastier? Or further but worse? If there is, I’m not seeing it.”

“Agree,” the ship said. It had already started powering up its engines and pointed them at the offending fabricary and the cloud of smart boulders pouring out of it.

“Numbers?”

“Twenty-six K and counting; better than 400 per second from about as many ports. Stable issue rate. Just over a hundred thousand by the time we get there and estimating as many to come.”

“Where are the fucking GFCF and their in-fab intervention teams?”

“Not in that one, at a guess,” the ship said. “I’m sending its ident to the Initial Contact Facility so they can come sanitise it later.”

“Never mind. Let’s go get the fuckers.”

The ship hummed around her, she felt it accelerate and felt, too, her body adjust to the force. Most of the Gs they were pulling were being cancelled but they could go faster if they let some leak through. The ship went tearing through the field of Disk components, heading inward for the middle of the torus, flashing past the dark shapes of the fabricaria. She wondered how many more held infestations of the smatter, how much longer they could keep whacking everything that appeared.

There was another way, of course, for her, Lan and the others not to get killed: they could just stop fighting and leave it all to the machines. There were another twenty drone-or self-controlled microships similar to the one she was in, all desperately trying to contain the outbreak. If the humans just stopped taking part in the fight the ships they were in would keep on operating regardless, once they’d off-loaded their single crew person.

They’d be able to accelerate and turn faster without their biological component aboard and they would hardly suffer in the heat of battle; the ships took advantage of useful aspects of the human brain’s behaviour — like its intrinsic pattern recognition, on-target concentration and flinch responses — so their wired-in human charges genuinely did some useful work alongside the AIs, but in the end everybody knew this was really just one set of machines against another and the humans were only along for the ride. Participant observers; taking part because not to do so would be dishonourable, ignominious. In the big, long picture, this was just another tiny instance that told anybody who was interested that the Culture was not just its machines.

Auppi didn’t care. Useful, useless, big help or hindrance, she was having the time of her life. She hoped she’d have great-great-grandchildren to dandle on her knee one day so she could tell them about the time she’d fought the nasty cancerous breeding machines of the Tsungarial Disk armed only with a highly sophisticated little weaponified microship, an on-board brain-linked AI and more exotic weaponry than you could shake a space-stick at, but that was for another time, what would feel, no doubt, like another life altogether.

For now she was a warrior and she had stuff to blit.

She wondered what the incoming Torturer-class ship would bring to the fray, and almost wished it hadn’t come at all.

They came for him, as he’d known they would. He’d expected they’d find a way, eventually. Representative Filhyn, her aide Kemracht and the others — many others; it had turned into quite a big operation — had done all they could to keep him safe, away from interference and temptation. They had spirited him away from the parliament building after the hearing where he had spoken out and they had kept him mobile, moving him from place to place almost every day over the ensuing weeks; he rarely slept in the same place twice.

He had stayed in vast skyscraper apartments belonging to sympathisers, budget hotels off buzzing superhighways, house-boats on shallow lagoons near the sea, and, for the last two nights, in an old hill station in the mountains, a leafy summer retreat for the upper and upper-middle classes of centuries ago, before anybody had invented air conditioning. A little narrow-gauge railway had brought them up here, him and his two immediate companions and the small team of less obvious helpers and guards that nowadays always travelled with him.

The lodge sat on a shallow ridge, looking out over unbroken slopes of trees stretching to the gently undulating horizon. On a clear day, they said, you could see the plains and some of the great ziggurats of the nearest big city. Not this weather, though; it was cloudy, misty, humid, and great snagging strands of clouds drifted above and around the lodge, sometimes wrapping themselves about the ridge like insubstantial, too-easily torn veils.

They had been due to move to a different travellers’ lodge that morning, but there had been a mud slide overnight and the road was blocked. They’d move tomorrow.

However reluctantly, Prin had become a star. It was not something he was comfortable with. People wanted him; they wanted to interview him, they wanted to change his mind or show him the error of his ways, they wanted to support him, they wanted to condemn him, they wanted to save him, they wanted to destroy him, they wanted to help him and they wanted to obstruct and hinder him. Mostly they wanted access to him to accomplish all these things.

Prin was an academic, a law professor who had devoted his life to the theory and the practice of justice. The theoretical side was his professional life, the practical part had drawn him into worthy causes, campus protests, underground semi-legal net-publishing and, finally, into the scheme to infiltrate the Hell that everybody either denied existed outright or sort of knew was there but liked to pretend wasn’t because they sort of half agreed with the idea behind it, to punish those who deserved punishment. Hell was always for other people.

He’d known something of the grisly reality of it from officially published and illegally disseminated accounts, and he and one of his junior colleagues had taken the decision to be the ones who went into Hell to experience it first hand and bring back the truth. The very fact he and Chay wouldn’t have been anybody’s first choice for such a bizarre and frightening mission they hoped would make them more credible witnesses if and when they returned. They were not fame-obsessed attention-seekers, not journalists trying to make a reputation, not people who had ever had much obvious interest in doing anything which would bring them the amount of attention such an undertaking might result in.

Then, when they were doing what training they could for their undercover mission — training that to them just meant doing lots of reading about the subject, though others in their little cell of subversives had insisted include psychological “hardening” that had involved experiences a lot like the sort of stuff they were going in there to denounce — they had become lovers. That had complicated things a little, but they had discussed it and decided that if anything it would be an advantage; they would be more committed to each other as a team when they were in the Hell, now that they were something more than colleagues and friends.

He looked back on their pathetic preparations and their terribly earnest discussions with a mixture of embarrassment, fondness and bitterness. What could prepare you for such horror? Not all their days of “hardening” — enduring small electric shocks, the start of suffocation and a lot of being shouted at and verbally abused by the ex-army guys who’d agreed to help — had amounted to a minute’s worth of what they had experienced in Hell right from the start, from day one.

Nevertheless, despite being caught up in the horrifying vortex of violence and sheer hatred that had enveloped them instantly on their arrival, they had stayed together and they had, in some sense, accomplished their mission. He had got out, even if Chay had lost her mind. He had been able to be the sober, sensible, unrufflable witness that he had meant to be right from the start, when they had first started talking about the mission with the relevant programmers, hackers and ex-government agency whistle-blowers who’d originally been put in touch with their little underground organisation.

But he had had to leave Chay behind. He’d done what he could to get her through as well, but he hadn’t made her his first priority. At the last moment, as they’d hurtled through the air towards the glowing gate that led back to reality and a relief from pain, he had twisted, led with his own back rather than with her, held in his limbs, literally putting himself first.

He had hoped they would both make it through, but he had known that it was unlikely.

And what he had to ask himself — what he had been asking himself, ever since — was this: if Chay had been of sound mind at the time, would he have acted any differently?

He thought — he hoped — he would have.

That being the case, he was sure she would have made just as good a witness as he had. Then he could have done the decent, chivalrous, masculine thing and saved the girl, got her to safety and taken whatever extra punishment the mephitic bureaucracy of Hell decreed. But he could only have done that if he’d thought that she would get back to the Real as anything other than a broken, weeping wreck.

She had denied the Real while she’d been in Hell, to preserve what was left of her disintegrating sanity; how could he be sure she wouldn’t have denied the reality of Hell once she was back in the Real? Even that presupposed that she’d have made a considerable recovery from the pathetic state she’d been in towards the end.

Well, the end for him, because he got out. Probably just the start of fresh torment and horror for her.

Of course he had nightmares and of course he tried not to think of what might be happening to her back in the Hell. The pro-Hell parts of Pavulean society, headed by people like Representative Errun, had been doing everything they could to destroy his reputation and make his testimony look like a lie, or grossly exaggerated. Everything from a schooldays girlfriend who felt she’d been dumped too harshly to a fine for being disruptive in a university bar when he was a first-year student had been dragged out to make him look unreliable. That such trivial misdemeanours were the best the other side could do had been treated as a great and unexpected victory by Rep. Filhyn, who had become a trusted friend over the months since he’d first testified at her side.

They saw each other only rarely now; it would have made him too easy to trace. Instead they talked on the phone, left messages. He could watch her on the screen most evenings too, on news coverage, magazine programmes, documentaries or specialist feeds; denouncing the Hells and defending him, mostly. He liked her and could even imagine something happening between them — if that idea wasn’t in itself a wild fantasy — if things had been different, if he wasn’t for ever thinking of Chay.

It was assumed that the Pavulean Hell was running on a substrate far away from Pavul itself; for decades people had been searching for any sign of it being in any sense physically on the planet itself, or even anywhere near — the relatively anarchic habitats of the planet’s inner system were particularly favoured as locations — but without having found any evidence at all. Most likely, Chay’s being resided tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away, deep-buried inside the substrate of some unknowably alien society.

He looked up at the stars some nights, wondering where she was.

Don’t you feel guilty about leaving her? Do you feel guilty that you left her? How guilty do you feel, abandoning her there? Do you sleep well, with all that guilt? Do you dream about her? You must feel so guilty — would you do the same thing again? Would she have abandoned you there? He had been asked the same question in many slightly different guises many times and answered it as honestly as he could, each time.

They had tried to get at him through her, tried to get her — the Chay who had been woken up on the houseboat, the Chay who would never have the memories of their time together in Hell — to denounce him for abandoning her. But she hadn’t let them use her. She said she’d felt hurt initially but thought he’d done the right thing. She still completely believed in what they’d done. She supported him fully.

She wasn’t saying the things the media — especially the hostile, pro-Hell media — wanted her to say so they quickly stopped asking her how she felt.

And the pro-Hell side — the Erruns of their world, the people who would keep Hell — had started trying to reach him through their public pronouncements, hinting at a deal that would let Chay go, if he would retract his earlier testimony and agree not to testify again. Prin had given Filhyn and Kemracht permission to try to shield him from this sort of temptation, but there was only so much he could do, especially when journalists — granted interviews and calling in remotely — asked him for his response to such vicariously delivered overtures.

And now, a week before he was due to testify before the Galactic Council, the pro-Hell people had tracked him down.

He knew something was wrong even before he fully woke up. The sensation was like knowing you had gone to sleep on a narrow ledge high on a cliff and woken in darkness to find there was the hint of an edge under your back and nothing there when you stretched out to one side.

His heart thumped, his mouth felt dry. He felt he was about to fall. He struggled to consciousness.

“Prin, son, are you all right?”

It was Representative Errun, the old pro-Hell campaigner who had tried to stop him giving any evidence at all in the parliament two long months earlier. Of course now it felt like he’d known from the start it would be Errun they’d send, but he told himself it was just a lucky guess, a coincidence.

Prin woke up, looked around. He was in a fairly grand, rather cluttered, comfortable-looking room that might have been modelled on Representative Errun’s own study for all he knew.

So, he had not really woken up at all, was not really looking round. They had found a way into his dreams. They would tempt him here, then. He wondered how they’d accomplished this. May as well just ask. “How are you doing this?” he asked.

Errun shook his head. “I don’t know the technical details, son.”

“Please do not call me ‘son’.”

Errun sighed, “Prin, I just need to talk to you.”

Prin got up, walked to the door of the room. The door was locked. Where windows might have been there were mirrors. Errun was watching him. Prin nodded at the desk. “I intend to pick up that antique lamp and attempt to strike you across the head with it, representative. What do you think will happen?”

“I think you should sit down and let us talk, Prin,” Errun said.

Prin said nothing. He went to the desk, picked up the heavy oil lamp, gripped it in both trunks so that its weighted base was upright and walked towards the older male, who was now looking alarmed.

He was back in the seat, sitting facing Errun again. He looked at the desk. The lamp was where it had been. The representative appeared unruffled.

“That is what will happen, Prin,” Errun told him.

“Say what you have to say,” Prin said.

The older male hesitated, wore an expression of concern. “Prin,” he said, “I can’t claim to know everything you’ve been through, but…”

Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.

When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

So Representative Errun had been blathering on with some homely, folksy little speech about a childhood experience that had left him convinced of the need for useful lies, pretend worlds and keeping those that made up the lumpen herd in their place. He was coming to the end of his rather obvious and graceless summing-up now. Reviewing it with his academic hat on, Prin thought it had been a rather pedestrian presentation; capable but unimaginative. It might have merited a C. A C+ if one was being generous.

Sometimes you didn’t want to re-engage quickly and seamlessly; sometimes you wanted the student, post-grad, colleague or official to know that they had been boring you. He gazed expressionlessly at Errun for a moment too long to be entirely polite before saying, “Hmm. I see. Anyway, representative; I assume you’re here to offer a deal. Why don’t you just make your offer?”

Errun looked annoyed, but — with an obvious effort — controlled himself. “She’s still alive in there, Prin. Chay; she’s still in there. She hasn’t suffered, and she’s proved stronger than people in there thought she was, so you can still save her. But their patience is running out, both with her and you.”

“I see,” Prin said, nodding. “Go on.”

“Do you want to see?”

“See what?”

“See what has happened to her since you left her there.”

Prin felt the words like a blow, but tried not to show it. “I’m not sure that I do.”

“It’s not… it’s not that unpleasant, Prin. The first, longest part isn’t even Hell at all.”

“No? Where, then?”

“In a place they sent her to recover,” Errun said.

“To recover?” Prin was not especially surprised. “Because she’d lost her mind, and the mad don’t suffer properly?”

“Something like that, I suppose. Though they didn’t punish her after she seemed to get it back, either. Let me show you.”

“I don’t—”

But they showed him anyway. It was like being strapped into a chair in front of a wrap-around screen, unable to move your eyes or even blink.

He watched her arrive at a place called the Refuge, in some medieval place and time, copying manuscripts in an era before moveable type and printing. He heard her voice, saw her threatened with punishment for voicing doubts about religion and faith, saw her acquiesce and conform, saw her work diligently through the following years and watched her work her way up the shallow, arthritic hierarchy of the place, always keeping a journal, until she became its chief. He saw her sing their chants and take comfort in the rituals of their faith, saw her admonish a noviciate for lack of faith, just as she had been admonished years earlier, and thought he could see where this was going.

But then on her death bed she revealed she had not changed, had not let the behaviour of piety become the reality of internalised faith. He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself. But still.

Then he watched her become an angel in Hell. One who delivered sufferers from their suffering, ending their torment — one per day, no more — and taking on a fraction of their pain with every merciful snuffing-out, so that to the extent that she suffered, she did so of her own volition, and meanwhile became an object of veneration, the centre of a death cult within Hell, the miracle-working messiah of a new faith. So she was being used to bring a little extra hope to Hell, removing one lucky winner per day as though in some fatal state lottery of release, to increase the suffering of the vast majority left behind.

Prin was moderately impressed. What an inspired, diabolical way to use one who had lost their mind, to stop others losing theirs, the better to torment them more efficiently.

A blink, and he was back in Errun’s study.

“Taking that all at face value,” Prin said, “it provides a fascinating insight into the thought processes of those concerned. And so; this deal?”

The old male stared at him for a moment, as though nonplussed, before he seemed to gather himself. “Don’t go humiliating your own society at that hearing, Prin,” he said. “Don’t presume to know better than so many generations of your ancestors; don’t give in to that desire to posture. Don’t testify, that’s all we ask… and she will be released.”

“Released? In what sense?”

“She can come back, Prin. Back to the Real.”

“There already is a Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter here in the Real, representative.”

“I know.” Errun nodded. “And I understand there is probably no way of re-integrating the two. However, there would be nothing to stop her from living on in an entirely pleasant Afterlife. I understand there are hundreds of different Heavens, enough to suit every taste. There is, however, another possibility. A new body could be found for her. Grown for her, indeed; created specially just for Chay.”

“I thought we had laws about that sort of thing.” Prin said, smiling.

“We do, Prin. But laws can be amended.” It was Errun’s turn to smile. “That’s what those of us lucky enough to serve as representatives do.” He looked serious again. “I can assure you there will be no obstacle to Chay being re-embodied. Absolutely none.”

Prin nodded, and hoped that he looked thoughtful. “And, either way,” he said, “whether she ends up in a Heaven or a new body, there will be no trace left of her being, her consciousness, left in Hell?” Prin asked. Immediately, he felt guilty. He, not the senator, already knew how this was going to play out, and giving the old male false hope was a little cruel. Only a little cruel, of course; within the context they were talking about, it was trivial to the point of irrelevance.

“Yes,” Errun agreed. “There will be no trace of her consciousness left in Hell whatsoever.”

“And all I have to do is not testify.”

“Yes.” The old male looked avuncular, encouraging. He sighed, made a tired-looking gesture with both trunks. “Oh, in time, you might be expected to take back some of what you’ve already said in the past, but we’d leave that for the moment.”

“On pain of what?” Prin asked, trying to sound merely reasonable, pragmatic. “If I didn’t, what then?”

Representative Errun sighed, looked sad. “Son — Prin — you’re smart and you’re principled. You could be set to do very well within the academic community, with the right people taking an interest in your advancement. Very well. Very well indeed. But if you insist on being awkward… well, the same trunks that can help lift you up can keep you pressed down, keep you in your place.” He held up both trunks in a defensive gesture, as though fending off an objection Prin had not voiced. “It’s no great conspiracy, it’s just nature; people are liable to help out people who’ve helped them. Make life difficult for them and they’ll just do the same for you. No need to invoke secret societies or sinister cabals.”

Prin looked away for a moment, taking in the view of the carved wood desk and the highly patterned carpet, wondering idly how deep the level of detail went in such dream-realities. Would a microscope reveal further intricacy, or a blurred pixel?

“Representative,” he said, and both hoped and suspected he sounded tired, “let me be frank. I had thought to string you along, tell you that I’d think about it, that I’d let you know my answer in a few days.”

Errun was shaking his head. “I’m afraid I need your—” he began, but Prin just held one trunk up and talked over him.

“But I’m not going to. The answer is no. I will not deal with you. I intend to make my statement before Council,”

“Prin, no,” the old male said, sitting forward in his seat. “Don’t do this! If you say no to this there’ll be nothing I can do to hold them back. They’ll do whatever they want to do to her. You’ve seen what they do to people, to females in particular. You can’t condemn her to that! For God’s sake! Think what you’re saying! I’ve already asked if there’s any leniency I can ask for, but—”

“Shut up you foul, corrupt, cruel old male,” Prin said, keeping his voice level. “There is no ‘they’; there is only you. You are one of them, you help control them; don’t pretend they are somehow separate from you.”

“Prin! I’m not in Hell; I don’t control what happens there!”

“You’re on the same side, representative. And you must have some control over Hell or you couldn’t offer this deal in the first place.” Prin waved one trunk. “But in any event, let’s not distract ourselves. The answer is no. Now, may I resume my sleep, do I get to wake up screaming or do you intend to subject me to some further punishment in this strange little virtual dream environment we’re inhabiting?”

Errun stared at him wide-eyed. “Do you have any idea what they’ll do to her?” he said, voice raised, hoarse. “What sort of barbarian are you that you can condemn somebody you purport to love to that?”

Prin shook his head. “You really can’t see that you’ve made a monster of yourself, can you, representative? You threaten to do these things, or — if we are to accept your naive attempt to distance yourself from the grisly realties of the environment you so readily support — to let these things happen to another being unless I lie in a manner that suits you, and then you accuse me of being the monster. Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute.”

“You cold-hearted bastard!” The representative seemed genuinely upset. Prin got the impression the old male would be out of his seat and attacking him if he’d been younger, or shaking him by the shoulders at the very least. “How can you leave her there? How can you just abandon her?”

“Because if I save her I condemn all the others, representative. Whereas, if I tell you to lift your tail and insert your deal where only a loved one will ever get wind of it, perhaps I can do something to end the obscenity of the Hells, for Chay and all the others.”

“You conceited, presumptuous little shit-head! Who the fuck are you to decide how we run our fucking society?”

“All I can do is tell the—”

“We need the Hells! We’re fallen, evil creatures!”

“Nothing that requires torture for its continuance is worth—”

“You live on your fucking campuses with your heads in the fucking clouds and think everything’s as nice as it is there and everybody as civilised and reasonable and polite and noble and intellectual and as cooperative as they are there and you think that’s the way it is everywhere and how everybody is! You’ve no fucking idea what would happen if we didn’t have the threat of Hell to hold people back!”

“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm. Noble? Civilised? Reasonable? Clearly Errun had never sat in on a faculty annual performance, remuneration, seniority and self-criticism meeting. “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”

“You pompous, egotistical little cunt!” the representative screeched.

“And you, representative, are typical of those with ethical myopia, who feel only for those nearest them. You would save a friend or loved one and feel a glow of self-satisfaction at the act, no matter to what torment that same act condemned countless others.”

“… You self-important little fuck…” Errun growled, talking at the same time as Prin.

“You expect everybody else to feel the same way and deeply resent the fact that some might feel differently.”

“… I’ll make sure they tell her it’s all your fault when they’re fucking her to death every night, a hundred at a time…”

“You are the barbarian, representative; you are the one who thinks so highly of himself he assumes everybody who means something to him ought to be elevated above all others.” Prin took a breath. “And, really, listen to yourself; threatening such depravity just because I won’t do as you demand. How good do you expect to feel about yourself at the end of this, representative?”

“Fuck you, you ice-livered, self-satisfied intellectual shit. Your moral fucking high ground won’t be high enough to escape her screams every night for the rest of your life.”

“You’re just embarrassing yourself now, representative,” Prin told him. “That’s no way for an elderly and respected elected officer of the state to talk. I think we ought to conclude this here, don’t you?”

“This does not end here,” the old male told him, in a voice dripping with hatred and contempt.

But end it did, and Prin woke sweating — but not jerking upright screaming, which was something — with a sort of cold dread in his belly. He hesitated, then reached out, tugging on the antique bell-pull for help.

They found something called a thin-band cerebral induction generator. It had been stuck — a little lop-sided, as though it had been done very hastily — to the back of the bed’s headboard. A shielded cable ran from it through the wall to the roof and a satellite dish disguised as a tile patch. This was what had allowed them to take over his dreams. None of it had been there the day before.

Kemracht, Representative Filhyn’s aide, looked him in the eye as the all-wheel-drive bumped down the road in the darkness, taking them to the next hideout. The lights of the second vehicle, following behind, cast wildly waving shadows about the passenger compartment.

“You still going to testify, Prin?”

Prin, who could not be sure that Kemracht was not the traitor in their midst (those faculty committee meetings also taught you to trust no one), said, “I’ll be saying what I was always going to be saying, Kem,” and left it at that.

Kemracht looked at him for a little while, then patted him on the shoulder with one trunk.

It was like diving into a blizzard of multi-coloured sleet, a disturbed, whirling maelstrom of tens of thousands of barely glimpsed light-points all tearing turmoiled towards you against the darkness.

Auppi Unstril had glanded everything there was worth glanding, slipping into the zoned-out state of steady, unremitting concentration such engagements called for. She was entirely part of the machine, feeling its sensory, power and weapon systems as perfect extensions of herself and connecting with the little ship’s AI as though it was another higher, quicker layer of tissue laid across her own brain, tightly bundled, penetrated and penetrating via her neural lace and the network of human-mind-attuned filaments within the ship’s dedicated pilot interface suite.

At such moments she felt she was the very heart and soul of the ship; the tiny animal kernel of its being, with every other part, from her own drug-jazzed body out, like force-multiplying layers of martial ability and destructive sophistication, each concentricity of level adding, extrapolating, intensifying.

She plunged into the storm of swirling motes. Coloured sparks against the black, each was a single truck-sized boulder of not-quite-mindless smatter; a mixture of crude, rocket-powered ballistic javelins, moderately manoeuvrable explosive cluster munitions, chemical laser-armed microships and the mirrored, ablation-armoured but unarmed breeder machines that were the real prize here; the entities amongst the lethal debris that could start other smatter infections elsewhere.

At the start of the outbreak, all those days earlier, the breeders had made up nineteen out of twenty of the swarming machines. Immediately swept and evaluated by the ships’ sensors, they had shown up as a cloud of tiny blue dots, speckling the dark skies around the gas giant Razhir as though the great planet had birthed a million tiny water moons, with only a few of the other types of swarmers dotting the outpouring clouds of smatter.

In retrospect, those first few days, when the blue dots made up vast near-monochrome fields of easily tracked targets, had been the days of happy hunting. Then, however, the machines — the infection — had learned. It was getting nowhere with its original mix of production; signals coming back to where the machines originated, in the infected manufacturies, told it that nothing was surviving. So it had switched its priorities. For five or six days now the blue dots had been steadily reducing in number until for the last day or so they had become lost in the billowing masses of green, yellow, orange and red points, all indicating swarmers with offensive abilities.

Gazing into the cloud around her, Auppi could see that this latest outbreak was composed mostly of red dots, indicating these were the laser-armed variety. Red mist, she thought distantly as she and the good ship Bliterator plummeted further into them. Like a spray of blood. Good sign, natty omen. Here we go…

Together she and the ship registered the near ninety thousand contacts and prioritised by type, designating the one-in-a-hundred blue contacts as their initial targets. This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp, neural-laced-brain running at as near to AI-speed as beyond-humanly possible, targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look.

Only ninety thousand, though. Odd, she thought. They’d been estimating more. Usually the estimate was easy to make and reliable. Why’d they got it wrong? She ought to feel glad there were ten kilos fewer to blit, but she didn’t; instead she got a feeling something was wrong. Combat superstition, maybe.

Embedded in the cloud of red dots — still naively ignoring the Bliterator because it hadn’t shown itself as hostile yet — the few blue dots were all located some way in, with none towards the surface of the emerging cloud.

The ship wove a suggested route for them to the best place — deep inside the cloud — to start firing.

~Let’s bend past those two blues and mine them with missiles, dormanted till we open, Auppi sent to the ship, reaching out with a sort of ghost-limb sense to adjust the ship’s sketched-in course.

~Okay, the ship sent. They swung, curving round to take in the two blue contacts she’d outlined, jinking this way and that to avoid running into the swarmers. She still found this bit weird. Tactically, logically, this made sense; get to the centre and start laying waste from there, but even though the sims said this was the most destructively efficient approach, she still yearned to be firing now, in fact to have started firing as soon as they’d come into range of the first swarmers.

But then another of her instincts just wanted to blow the fabricaria out of the sky; why treat the symptoms when you could attack the disease at the source? But the Disk, the fabricaria that made it up, was what they were all there to protect. Ancient fucking monument, wasn’t it? Couldn’t touch that. That’d be uncivilised.

It was right, she agreed with this, of course she did — she hadn’t joined Restoria to blast smatter, she’d joined because she was fascinated in ancient tech, and especially ancient tech that had this rather childish desire to turn everything about it into little copies of itself — but after a nine-day haul with almost no breaks pounding the only-arguably-living crap out of any glowing blue dot that presented itself in her ship-shared sensorium, you kind of got to thinking like a weapon. To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at. The fabricaria were the source of all this hassle, ergo… but no. Aside from the small matter of not getting one’s own self blitted, preserving the fabricaria and the Disk was what mattered most here.

She felt the missiles go, programmed to initiate when the ship started brightening up its own immediate whereabouts. The missiles would prioritise the blue-echo breeder machines and then start setting about the rest.

~There’s a lot of these red-echo laser fuckers, Auppi sent to the ship. ~Let’s loose all the missiles, get this over fast and jump to the re-arm immediately after, yes?

~Yes, agreed. Suggest missiles to these locations. Leaves half.

~Okay. Gone?

~Gone.

~Beautiful spread.

~Thank you.

~Right, we’re about there, yes?

~Centred in one tenth…

~Warm them up, get spinning and a-tumbling and let’s light the fuckers up.

~Nearly there…

~Come on come on come on!

~Oh, close enough, I suppose. On yours.

~Whoop-de-doop!

Auppi felt like she had a trigger beneath more digits than she possessed, as though each finger and toe was somehow curled round a little grouping of firing filaments, every one individually launchable according to the amount of squeeze she applied. She double-swept her gaze around the feast of targets, gloried in the sheer luxuriousness of it, and clutched the triggers smoothly to her, firing everything, loosing everything, lighting up every priority-one target in view at once.

The space she lay in sparkled all around like a diamond-ball bathysphere lowered into the sort of planetary depths where every organism made its own light. Rosettes, florets, side-slanted bursts, little spears and dirty flurries of light erupted on every side, filling her eyes with sparks. Whirling within the seen cacophony, the spinning, tumbling ship was already flagging up the next array of targets. She swung and spun with it, untroubled by gyrations that would have had her throwing up, pre-training.

~What’re the grey blobs? she asked the ship as the lasers and their collimators locked into the aiming grids of the ship’s primary sensors.

~Indicates swarmer type unclear, the ship told her.

~Fuck, she sent, before loosing another fusillade to strew another hundred-plus bright scratches across the sky. Unclear? They hadn’t had any “unclear” before. What the fuck was this?

She could see the missiles popping open their own little pockets of destruction, two behind them, down the course the ship had taken towards the centre of the cloud, and others further away, some still just starting to fire. Meanwhile the smatter had woken up to the fact that this racing, wildly tumbling thing in its midst did not wish it well and some of the truck-size laser swarmers were starting to turn their single-mouth long-axes towards them. The ship took a hit almost immediately as one swarmer found itself fortuitously pointing right at them and at the right stage in its charging cycle. The beam struck, slid off, bounced away by the little craft’s mirror field.

~Proportion unclear? she sent as the next layer of targets snicked into the aiming grids.

~About one per cent. Hitting some with—

She/it/they fired, flicking destruction across the darkness.

~this salvo, the ship continued. ~Devoting sensory resources to analyse debris result.

They were close enough to the fabricary now to have to take it into account when they targeted; this close to what they were aiming at, and with such relatively slow-moving targets, there was almost zero chance of just plain missing and a stray shot heading straight at the fabricary, but it was possible for a blast from the main laser to go straight through one of the swarmers, and some of the latest versions had semi-serviceable laser coatings capable of deflecting at least part of a bolt from one of the secondary or tertiaries. Plus you — well, the ship, thankfully — had to think about post-destruction main-remaining-body direction vectors and shrapnel-debris-scatter profiles.

Auppi was glad she didn’t have to think about that sort of house-keeping crap; let her concentrate on just blasting stuff. They swung again, re-targeted. A few more incoming hits registered, small calibre nuisance against the heavy armour of the ship’s reactive mirror field.

~So? she sent. The latest targets had blossomed so the ship would have had time to analyse the relevant debris signatures.

~Zip, the ship sent. ~All still there. Hitting nearest grey/unclear with full main.

As the ship sent this, over twenty of the contacts they’d been aiming at suddenly weren’t being targeted any more, just blinking out.

~Fuck.

Such was the weapon’s power — and the swarmers’ relative vulnerability — the ship’s main laser usually got multiply-collimated into anything up to twenty-four separate, independently aimed beams. Devoting the whole beam on full power to a single object had been unheard-of overkill until now.

~Nanoguns exhausted, the ship told her, confirming something she could already see from her own displays.

She squeezed off another salvo at the truncated target list. The main’s was obvious, the impacting bolt lighting up whatever was around the target itself with splash-out, freeze-framing the pelting swarmers nearby as though in a flash photograph. The ship would be watching in greater detail than Auppi, but even she could see umpteen tiny glowing traces burst glinting from the aim-point.

~That got it, the ship sent.

Everything wheeled again, the ship continuing to gyrate wildly, carving a gradually increasing hollow space of smatter debris out of the centre of the cloud of swarmers. Multiple incoming registered as pops and clicks, ringing the mirror field. Meanwhile Auppi had been loosing missiles into the depths of the swarm, sending them off to start their own spreading blossoms of destruction.

~Two grey on half-main each? she suggested.

~Doing, the ship agreed, and the depleted grids lit up, firmed again. She flexed, distributing unseen rays like benedictions. She concentrated on the two foci of the main armament. A single unsullied brightness flicked on in each, then faded neatly. The other swarmers being engulfed in glowing debris clouds all happened elsewhere, unworthy of notice. Further afield still, the missiles careened about their own little patches of sky, dispatching all they could.

~No? she asked.

~No! the ship said.

Another wild twisting about the skies, and Razhir the gas giant was suddenly there, filling the view, its banded face instantly rashed with the aim points. The ship’s main armament had resumed targeting a full-power blast on individual grey targets.

~Motherfucker. Analysis?

~Bigger than average, non-ablating reflectivity, moving quicker. Complicated. Lot of wreckage. Accounting for fewer total targets.

There, she thought; she’d known there was something wrong about their being only ninety K swarmers when they’d been expecting more. The fucking outbreak was switching production mix again, going for complex survivability rather than sheer numbers.

~Grown-up power signatures, the ship continued, as Auppi unleashed another salvo. The incoming laser hits sounded like hail on a glass roof.

Another hurried tumble, one more array of targets snapping into focus, caught and steadied in the aiming grids. Even as she readied to fire, Auppi was scanning for the grey contacts preferentially now, picking out where they lurked in the red sleet-storm of other contacts.

Tiny patches of the sensor view were outing briefly now as the sheer weight of laser bursts incoming forced the mirror field to occlude the sensors, producing little hexagonal pixilations like clutter; they came and went almost before she had time to register them.

She flung out the latest manic light-burst, like shaking water droplets from her fingers.

With the main armament taking one target at a time it was possible to up the collimation on the secondaries for short- and medium-range targets, bringing their salvo total back up again. There might be a few more wounds rather than outright kills, but that was acceptable.

~That one just took off, the ship said, indicating one of the two grey targets they’d tried to waste two salvoes earlier. ~And there goes the other one.

~See them, Auppi sent. ~They’re fast! She had another reduced set of targets sliding across the view; she let fly at them. The two fleeing grey contacts would be out of range in seconds. ~Any missiles we can put in their way?

~Not the first one. Second, yes.

~Get the other missiles to concentrate on the greys, she suggested. She wanted to fire a lot more missiles, everywhere, but they were out of missiles now too.

~Shit, we powered them, the ship sounded upset.

~Didn’t know you swore, ship.

~I didn’t know swarmers could use incoming laser to power them to that sort of speed, the ship replied, fixing an unlikely-looking vector line across the points representing where one of the grey contacts had been when they’d hit it and where it was now, still accelerating.

~We need to chase those, she sent.

~You think so.

~It’s prioritising them.

Another small set of targets, swiftly dispatched, while another slotted instantly into view. The weaponry was falling out of phase now as the differences between the varying re-charging intervals started to add up and the additional collimating on the secondaries introduced its own slight delay.

~Maybe it wants us to do the same, the ship suggested.

The incoming sounded like drumming, heavy rain now. The pixilation outings were spattering across the view like manically invasive subtitles in an unknown language.

~I don’t think it’s that smart.

~You want to chase?

~Yes. That one. She indicated the first one to set off out of the cloud of contacts at the same time as loosing another half-salvo and marking a swathe of fresh targets across the red cloud around them.

~Okay.

The view tumbled one more time, another set of targets highlighted across the wash of contact-strewn space, then even as she triggered the weaponry again they set off, their slow, near-centred drift composed of many lightning-fast tumbles and gyrations turning into a single darting vector aimed at where they reckoned the grey they were targeting would be. She kept on firing microsalvo after micro-salvo at the sleet-echoes of red targets as they pursued, triggerings becoming almost continuous as the firing patterns diverged. Red sleet, red sleet turning fire bright; they must be leaving a tunnel of ravaged, fading debris behind them through the swarmer cloud, the ship itself a sleek spear-point glittering with reflected light as the red-flagged laser elements swivelled, following it and firing. So many reds, so many…

~It’s accelerating hard, the ship sent.

Shit, she thought.

~We powered it by hitting it, she sent to the ship.

~Yes.

~With the laser.

~Yes. Oh.

~They’re not all just to hit us with.

~They’re there…

~To power the greys.

~That’s a departure.

~That could be a lot of fucking departures. Those grey fuckers are ships; microships.

~The outburst has halted, the ship told her. ~The last swarmer just exited the infected fabricary.

Auppi and the ship were picking out double-handfuls of targets constantly now as they charged through the mist of contacts becoming targets, delegating the fire commands to the sub-AIs, effectively letting the weaponry make up its own mind when to initiate.

~Hundreds of the laser swarmers are firing at the grey we’re pursuing, the ship sent. ~I can see the back-scatter. Other laser swarmers starting to pattern themselves around each of the greys. They’re going to power them up too.

~We aren’t going to be able to cope, she sent. ~This needs mayhem weaponry; what we’ve got’s far too polite and pinpoint.

~Or a serious Effector.

~Job for our in-bound Torturer class.

~I think we should suggest just that. Okay, we’re in range.

Auppi squeezed off the single main-armament shot at the fleeing swarmer, blasting it across the skies in a pulsating detonation of light, fragments incandescing in the pulses of laser still coming in from the swarmers which had been helping to power it.

Their own incoming increased again as the swarmers switched from powering the now destroyed microship to just plain shooting at the Bliterator and Auppi. The ship was swinging, powering away, curving round, lifting away from the debris field it had just created.

~How many more greys? Auppi asked.

~Thirty-eight.

~We’ll never get them all.

~As many as we can, then.

~Any heading for the planet?

That had always been one of the nightmare scenarios: the swarmers turning properly feral and plunging into the gas giant to start trying to tear it apart. So far they hadn’t shown any desire to do this.

~None. Mostly sticking to the system plane; few straight up and down.

~Nearest?

~This one, The ship highlighted one of the microships seemingly headed straight for another fabricary, its rear end lit up by the laser swarmers helping to propel it.

~Signal Lan and the others, she sent. ~Get Base to contact the Torturer class and suggest it gets stuck straight in with its Effector. Only way we’re going to cope here is by turning these fuckers on themselves.

~Agree. Done.

They left the missiles to deal with the blue-tagged breeder swarmers while they went after the microship. This one loosed its own tail laser at them, re-directing some of its vicarious propellant laser fire back at its pursuer. The Bliterator’s mirror field blanked their sensors for an instant to cope.

~Oh, that’s not funny, she sent.

~Range, the ship replied.

~Take that with your fucking arse-light, Auppi sent as she triggered their main armament. The weapon was wound up to frequencies there was no way the target ship’s own mirror armour could counter; the swarmer erupted brightly, way in the distance; the Bliterator was already curving away hard, picking out their next target.

They ran down ten more, the intervals between growing greater as the fleeing swarmer ships moved quickly away from the initial outbreak point. They passed the time frazzling as many of the cloud of laser swarmers as they could get near, dipping into the still-slowly expanding cloud of contacts like a predatory fish into a bait-ball.

The next grey was taking them way out of the original infection outbreak volume, zipping past other dormant fabricaria as they tore after the rear-lit microship.

~This one’s accelerating harder than the others, given its distance from the laser swarmers powering it, the ship told her.

~Thought it was taking a while.

~May mean it’s learned something about using that rear absorption/deflector set.

~We in any danger?

~Shouldn’t be. Mirror field’s been unstressed so far. The ship sounded unworried.

~Range. She fired. The resulting explosion didn’t look right. Too small, for a start.

~A partial, the ship sent. ~Just wounded.

~Wow, our first partial.

~Still accelerating, though slower. Seventy per cent. Course change, too. Heading straight for that fabricary. Collisionary. The ship highlighted one of the great dark slowly orbiting shapes, sitting less than a thousand kilometres ahead.

~Collisionary? Auppi sent. Oh, fuck, she thought; just what they needed. High-speed swarmer/fabricary collisions.

~Ready, the ship told her.

~Hit it again. She did. Still too small a result. The swarmer had got harder, smaller, more reflective.

~Forty-five per cent of original acceleration, the ship reported. ~Still picking up speed though.

~Come on, you fucker, fucking die! They whizzed through the debris field from their first partial hit. The ship scanned the still hot cloud as they flashed through it, shields taking tiny impacts that made the ship judder.

~Interesting materials profile, the ship said. ~Definitely learning.

~Same course?

~Yes; swerved back to it after we knocked it off.

~Impact?

~Three seconds.

They had time to hit the swarmer twice more.

By the time it collided with the fabricary it had stopped accelerating and been reduced to the status of something more like a tight cloud of debris all travelling in the same direction rather than a ship, though it was still making sufficient speed to create a substantial flash when it hit the dark, three-kilometre-long lump of the fabricary.

~Fuck, Auppi sent, watching the debris bloom and expand.

~Agree, the ship replied.

They cruised in after it, already turned about and decelerating hard as the engines readied them to go back the way they’d come, still heading backwards on their earlier course through sheer momentum.

~Unexpected impact signature. The ship sounded puzzled.

~Oh, fuck; has it broken it? she asked. The debris had hit at over thirty klicks a second. It had ended up being a glancing blow rather than head-on, but it had blasted a hole in the fabricary and set it spinning and tumbling. It was already spiralling out of its orbit and drifting fractionally inwards towards Razhir. Uncorrected it would eventually head right down, into the gas giant’s atmosphere, to burn up.

In theory the Disk ought to remain stable for ever; in practice passing comets and even near-passing stars could disrupt it, and the fabricaria each had automatic systems that could vent gas to keep them on station. It was one of the responsibilities of whatever species was in charge of the Disk to keep those automatics charged and working. The systems were designed to nudge the fabricaria back into place when their orbits were ruffled by tiny fractions though; even if they’d survived the impact undamaged, the gross effect of the swarmer remains slamming into it would be orders of magnitude beyond anything the automatics could deal with.

~It’s as though, the ship said, sounding hesitant, probably waiting for additional detail to accrue via its sensors, ~the surface had been hollowed out. The outer shell should be solid; protecting the fabricary itself and providing raw material for when it’s producing something, but instead it’s like the debris hit a thin outer crust and then partly went through, partly collided with some sort of minimal structure underneath.

They had almost drawn to a stop now, still approaching the damaged fabricary but increasingly slowly as the engines, still at full power, cancelled their earlier vector.

~Cut engines, she sent. ~Back flip. Take us in for a look.

~You sure?

The ship cut its engines, a half-second or so before they would have started pulling away from the holed, slowly cartwheeling fabricary. They were nearly stationary, still drifting slowly towards the impact site.

~No, not sure, she admitted. ~But…

~Okay. The ship turned about, fired its engines briefly, turned, fired them again and, with a little finessing, got them locally stationary relative to the hundred-metre-long, raggedly ellipsoid breach in the giant slowly tumbling fabricary.

Auppi and the Bliterator found themselves looking straight into the torn-open interior of the thing. The view was edged all around with sections of its still-glowing outer surface, which must have been largely hollowed out to leave only a thin outer skin supported by a fragile-looking network of skinny girders, cables and beams that lay between that impromptu hull and the wall of the fabricary proper, about twenty metres deeper inside. That too had been breached by part of the swarmer’s wreckage cascade, so they could see all the way inside to where the ancient stuff-making machinery and associated paraphernalia lay.

This was the antique alien apparatus that was not meant to have been touched or used for a couple of million years. It was supposed to be lying there, metaphorically cobwebbed, in a cavern which was otherwise completely empty.

Unasked, the Bliterator described a small circle around the main breach so that they could see into different parts of the fabricary interior through the smaller secondary hole in its hull, so building up a larger picture.

The ship displayed the results. Some bits were blurred because, despite the damage, there was some sort of movement taking place inside the fabricary, but the main image was clear.

~What, Auppi sent slowly, ~the holy fuck… is that?