Surface Detail

Twenty-five

Auppi Unstril felt very hot now. The cold would win eventually though — it would be creeping in from all sides, making its way towards her from the Bliterator’s hull; seeping its way inwards to where she lay, at the craft’s centre, as the vessel’s heat leaked away, radiating into space. She would be the last bit to go completely cold. She was the little pit, the stone at the heart of the fruit… well, more its soft centre, the mushy middle.

She would be hard, in time though. Once she’d frozen. In the meantime she was dying, maybe from suffocation, maybe from overheating.

The last thing they’d heard from the Hylozoist had been that it had been attacked, disabled. It had just departed the Initial Contact Facility, got barely ten kilometres away, when it had been hit by some EqT energy weapon, slicing in through some hi-tech field disruptor. Its engines were wrecked, field generators shattered, some personnel dead; it had announced it was limping back towards the Facility.

In what had sounded like a series of simultaneous attacks, the GFCF comms had lit up with alarms telling of attacks on their vessels too; one of their MDVs on the other side of the Disk had been blown out of the skies and other ships damaged, at least temporarily disabled.

Auppi and the Bliterator had been scanning one of the fabricaria, trying to see if it was one of the ship-building ones, when the attacks had started. They were studiously ignoring a nearby smatter outbreak, even though they were ideally placed to tackle it and it looked like a serious one. That had felt wrong. The Bliterator hadn’t been configured as a general-purpose mini space-craft; it was a cobbled-together attack ship. Very skilfully and even elegantly cobbled together, but cobbled together nevertheless; single minded, no nonsense. Leaving its weapons on standby while a smatter outbreak raged only a few minutes’ flight away felt wrong wrong wrong.

But checking a proper sample of the fabricaria for illicit ship-making activity was, even Auppi had to admit, more important. She’d wanted to take the Bliterator inside the ripped-open fabricary to get a still closer look at the ship they’d found by accident, but they already had the readings to show it was a serious if relatively simple bit of kit, and the consensus had been that it would be too dangerous to try to enter the fabricary; the fab was still single-mindedly completing the ship, hull holed or not, and the maker machines were still whizzing back and forth on their network of lines and cables; even if they’d all been still it would have taken some delicate manoeuvring for the Bliterator to thread its way inside the thing. With them still darting back and forth unpredictably it would be suicide.

So she’d ignored the scarily fascinating weird new ship and ignored the fresh, enticing smatter outbreak and taken on what they’d all agreed was the most important task: choose a few fabs at random, over a decent spread of the Disk, and take a look inside using the very limited solids-scanning abilities of their little improvised attack ships. It had proved easier than they’d anticipated because all the fabs they’d looked at had the same hollow-skin outer hulls. Where there should have been a thick crust of dense raw material, there was a thin outer skin supported by a light girder-net, then the hull proper, then lots of activity, with some-thing big growing slowly at the centre. A few of the tiny Culture craft had even had time to choose a fourth random fab each and investigate those too.

Before they were hit.

She’d been looking at her own results — yup, looked like another ship getting built in there — when she’d heard, amongst the chatter on the shared open channel they were all using, the Hylozoist ship voice — ramped fast, clipped, compressed, in full emergency mode — announce it had suffered attack, been disabled… would have to limp back to the Facility.

The chatter had subsided, the channel had gone almost totally quiet. Then hubbub, as people started saying things like, “What the fuck? / Did it say—? / Is this a drill? / That can’t be—” before, clearly, over them all, she heard Lanyares shout, “Hey. I’m getting—!”

Then spreading silence, sometimes preceded by a shout or exclamation, from all of them.

“What’s—?” she’d had time to say. Then the Bliterator had gone quiet around her.

“Warning, Effector att—” the ship had told her, probably via some pre-loaded back-up substrate. The little ship had four other fall-back layers of processing below the AI core, but even those needed Effector-vulnerable tech to communicate with her via her suit, so when everything went dark and quiet and still, it went really dark and quiet and still, fast.

There was probably some life left in the ship, even now, at the atomechanical or bio-chemical level, but if there was, she and it couldn’t communicate.

And her neural lace was off-line too; even that had been taken out in whatever Effector event had wasted the Bliterator. The last from it had been its sign-off signal, its I’m-fucked message, what she’d heard described as being like a tiny brittle wire breaking in the centre of your head. Which had proved a fairly accurate description. She’d experienced a faint, flat, half-felt, half-heard ping somewhere between the ears. Just so you knew you were on your own now. Not much comfort there.

She wondered why they’d bothered to incorporate the lace-wasted signal in the first place. Better to leave the poor sap with a dead lace in their head thinking everything was still somehow all hunky-dory; but no, that would be a lie, and this was the Culture, so you had to be told the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it was, no matter how much it might contribute to feelings of despair.

Some real purists even refused drug glands and the related pain-management systems because those were somehow “untruthful” too. Weirdos.

So she was stuck in here, imprisoned in the suit, unable to move in the gel foam and anyway locked inside the miniscule, extra-equipment-stuffed flight deck within a ship that would probably need cutting equipment to enter.

The only excitement had been when she’d felt a soft bump, maybe a quarter-hour after it had all gone quiet. That had got her hopes up; maybe somebody was coming to rescue her! But it had probably just been the ship clunking into the side of the fab they’d been scanning when they’d been attacked. Bounced off, most likely. Tumbling, surely, though at a guess very slowly because she couldn’t feel any sense of being spun or rotated.

“What’s—?”

As last words went, it was pretty shit. She hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to Lan, or any of the others, or the ship.

“What’s—?”

Just hopeless.

Very very hot now. She had been keeping a watch on the time but now even that was getting hazy. Everything had been getting hazy; senses, sense of self, sense of humour, as the heat had built up in her body. It seemed wrong; unfair somehow. She was surrounded by intense cold, this far out in the system from the central star, and the ship was dead, or as good as, no longer providing energy or heat, and yet she was going to die of self-inflicted heatstroke, if simple suffocation didn’t kill her first. Too well insulated, inside here. The cold would freeze her solid eventually, but that would take days, tens of days; maybe more.

Meantime her body’s own internal processes, the chemical stuff that made you human, were going to cook her brain, because there was nowhere for the heat to go fast enough, now that the suit and ship were dead.

What a depressing way to die.

It had been hours, she reckoned. She’d had a time-count that had been accurate to the minute until not long ago, but then the brain-scrambling heat had made her forget it and having dropped that strand, she couldn’t for the life of her pick it up again. At some point, she realised, her dead body would be back to exactly normal blood heat, as it cooled down again after its self-produced temperature spike. She wondered when that would happen. A lot of heat in the ship, and the double suit was a very good insulator. It would take a while to radiate all that warmth away. Days sounded about right.

She had cried, at one point. She couldn’t remember when. Fear, and frustration, and a sort of primal terror at being so utterly trapped, unable to move.

The tears had collected around her eyes, unable to go anywhere else in the dead, close-fitting suit. If the suit had still been working it would have capillaried the tears away.

She was still breathing, very shallowly, because there was a purely mechanical link to a set of tiny, finger-thin tanks on the suit’s back, and a purely chemical set of reactions going on some-where in the system that ought to keep her alive for tens of days. The trouble was the suit held her too tightly for her to breathe properly; her chest muscles couldn’t expand her lungs sufficiently. It had to be that way, of course, for the suit to do its job properly when everything had been working; it had to clasp her tightly or she’d run the risk of getting bruised and hurt when they accelerated hard. She could feel her brain closing bits of her body down, cutting off blood supplies, keeping her oxygenated blood needs down to a minimum, but it wasn’t going to be enough; she’d start to lose parts of her brain soon, cells dying, suffocated.

She was glanding softnow every now and again, to keep herself calm. No point in panicking when it would do no use. If she had to die she might as well do so with a little dignity.

Thanks be for drug glands.

She hoped whoever had done this got seriously fucked up, by the Culture or the GFCF or somebody. Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly.

Well, let them die.

She’d compromise that far.

Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that.

Very very very hot now, and getting woozy. She wondered if it was oxygen starvation making her feel woozy, or the heat, or a bit of both. Feeling oddly numb; hazy, dissociated.

Dying. She’d be revented, she guessed, in theory. She’d been backed up; everything up to about six hours ago copied, replicable. But that meant nothing. So another body, vat-grown, would wake with her memories — up to that point six hours ago, not including this bit, obviously — so what? That wouldn’t be her. She was here, dying. The self-realisation, the consciousness, that didn’t transfer; no soul to transmigrate. Just behaviour, as patterned.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’t share the same spacial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn’t share the property of uniqueness. Blah blah; she was drifting now, remembering old lessons, ancient school stuff.

“What’s—?”

Pathetic last words.

She thought of Lan, her lover, her love, probably dying just like this, just like her, hundreds of thousands of klicks away in the suffocating heat, surrounded by the cold dark silence.

She thought she might cry again.

Instead, she could feel her skin trying to sweat, creating a prickling feeling all over her body. Pain management reduced it from extreme discomfort to mere sensation.

Her whole body, crying stickily.

Image to bow out on.

Thank you and good night…

“You the fella I need to talk to?”

“I’m not sure. Who exactly is it you wish to talk to?”

“Whoever’s in charge round here. That you?”

“I am Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III. It is my privilege to command the GFCF forces in this volume. And you?”

“I’m the passing-for-human face of the Culture warship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“You are the Torturer-class vessel we heard was in-bound? Thank goodness! We — the GFCF and our allies the Culture, here in the Tsungarial Disk — have come under heavy and sustained attack. All reinforcements are most welcome and urgently needed.”

“That was me, sort of. I was just pretending to be a Torturer class.”

“Pretending? I’m not sure I—”

“Thing is, short while ago, somebody jumped me. Whole squadron of craft: one capital ship, fourteen others plus ancillary units and slaved weapon platforms. Had to off them all.”

Bettlescroy stared at the face of the human-looking thing regarding him from the screen on the battle-bridge of the Vision Of Hope Surpassed, his flagship and one of the three Deepest Regrets-class craft under his command. Bettlescroy himself had given the order for the Abundance Of Onslaught and its flotilla of accompanying vessels to open fire on the incoming Torturer-class ship. Communication had been lost with all the craft during the engagement, which had seemed to be going well at first but then had obviously deteriorated. The ships had ceased communication so rapidly it seemed impossible that they had simply been destroyed, so the assumption Bettlescroy and his officers were working on was that some sort of comms blackout had taken place; feverish attempts to contact the ships were taking place even as he spoke.

If that wasn’t bad enough, they’d lost touch with Veppers, back on Sichult. The last thing they’d heard — minutes before this unwanted call had come in — had been was an unconfirmed report of a large explosion taking place on Veppers’ estate, possibly on the route his aircraft would have taken back to his house. Bettlescroy had been trying to keep calm and not think about what that might imply; now it looked like he had something else to keep calm and not think about.

“‘Off’ them all?” Bettlescroy said carefully. That couldn’t possibly mean what he dreaded, could it? “I’m sorry, I’m not cognisant of that term’s official weight, as it were. Obviously we were aware there had been some sort of engagement a little way beyond the system’s outer limit…”

“I was attacked, without provocation,” the human-looking thing on the screen said. “I retaliated. By the time I’d finished retaliating, fifteen ships were gone. Offed. Deleted. Blown to smithereens. Thing is, they looked remarkably like GFCF ships. In every way, really. The biggest and most capable presented as almost exactly like that one you’re on. A Deepest Regrets class, unless I’m mistaken. Weird eh? How do you account for that?”

“I confess, I cannot. No GFCF craft would ever knowingly attack a Culture vessel.” Bettlescroy could feel his guts churning and his face burning. He was this close to cutting the comms, to give himself time to think if nothing else. Had this… thing just casually obliterated nearly a third of his war fleet? Was it trying to get him to confess something, blurt something out, enrage him with its off-hand attitude? Bettlescroy was very aware of his officers on the bridge keeping extremely quiet; he could feel their gazes on him.

The human on the screen was talking again: “… Excuse they had was something about deeming me to be a hostile, just pretending to be a Culture vessel.”

It was still sinking in. He’d lost a Deepest Regrets-class ship!

Dear Gods of Old! The faction within the GFCF High Command which had authorised this high-risk strategy had known they risked losing vessels and materiel, but no one had so much as hinted they might lose one of their capital ships; not a pride of the fleet, not a Deepest Regrets class. This whole thing would all have to go fabulously well from this point on if he was to be forgiven for that.

“I see. Well, indeed. Yes, I see,” Bettlescroy said, stalling while he got himself under control. “Of course, I have to point out that, as you have said, you are — or were — pretending to be a Torturer class, so—”

“Ah, I get it. You think that might have been the source of the misunderstanding?”

“Well, you can see how it might be.”

“Sure. So, were they your ships, or not?”

Bettlescroy wanted to weep, to scream, to fold himself into a little ball and never talk to anyone ever again. “The operational status of the fleet I was given to command here within the Disk comprises one medium-level, non-military vessel and a screen of eighteen smaller ships. The vessel which you find me on, ah, has just been delivered to us, in recognition of the seriousness of the threat we are facing.”

“Wow. That’s incredibly fast work. Congratulate your simming/planning/dispositioning people.”

“Thank you. More than that I am not at liberty to say, I regret.”

“So what you’re saying is you can’t confirm or deny those were your ships? The ones that attacked me.”

“Effectively. Though if they were ours and they did attack you, it could only have been a mistake.”

“Fine. Just thought I’d check. Also, to let you know; I’m still on my way in. Currently braking hard; due with you guys in the Disk in twelve and a half minutes. Just wanted to keep you informed, so there wouldn’t be any more misunderstandings.”

“Quite. Well, yes, of course. And you are…?”

“The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, like I said. And definitely a Culture ship. That’s the main thing. Feel free to check my provenance and references. Here to help. One of your allies. All in this together. So. Understand things are a bit awkward in there; happy to get stuck in alongside your good selves. Going to let me have an interface situational with your tactical substrates so I can get a head start on the task in hand?”

“Ah… yes, of course. Relevant protocols agreeing, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“But I meant your class, if you’re not a Torturer?”

“Picket ship. Glorified night-watchman, that’s me.”

“Picket Ship. Picket Ship. Picket Ship. Yes, I see. Well, welcome aboard, if I may make so bold.”

“Cheers, person. With you in twelve minutes.”

Bettlescroy signed to cut the connection. He turned to his Security chief. “We are supposed to be presenting as the Messenger Of Truth. How the fuck could that thing tell we’re actually on a Deepest Regrets class?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

Bettlescroy permitted himself a sigh, through a tight, jerky smile. “Well, that would appear to be our motto at the moment, wouldn’t it? We seem to have no idea about anything.”

The Fleet Coordination Officer cleared his throat and said, “MDV nearest the projected engagement start-point reports incoming weapon blink and battle light, sir. Debris spectra so far indicating ours alone.”

Bettlescroy nodded silently. He turned to the Disk Fabricaria Control section of the bridge. The lead officer sat at attention. “Tell every second fabricaria to release its ship, immediately; random choice,” Bettlescroy told him. “One half of the remainder to let their ship go within the next quarter-hour to four hours, again randomly, and randomly in time as well, within those parameters. One half of the rest to release theirs between four and eight hours, and so on until it doesn’t matter any more. Do you under-stand?”

“Sir, most of them—”

“Will be unprepared and may not even function at all. I know. Nevertheless. Even if they have to be physically ejected by their particular fabricary, do what I have said. Have as many as possible of the most functional equipped with donated AM from the war fleet. Spare nothing; our ships can operate on fusion for a while. Not us, though; not this ship.”

“Sir.”

Bettlescroy turned to the bridge comms section and smiled coldly at the chief communications officer. “Get me Veppers. If not Veppers, get me Jasken. I know they’re missing, but just find them. Do whatever it takes.”

The comms connection was cut and the image of the silkily beautiful Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of the GFCF remained frozen before them.

Demeisen turned to Lededje. “What do you think?”

“He’s not my species,” she protested. “How should I know?”

“Yeah, but you must have a feeling; come on.”

Lededje shrugged. “Lying through his perfect teeth.”

Demeisen nodded. “Same here.”

She got fed up trying to finish her meal on the ground, surrounded by fawning, keening worshippers. She sighed, roared at them. A few backed off a little; most stayed where they were. Then, tearing off a haunch, she lifted wearily into the foul-smelling air, carrying the piece of leg as something to gnaw on somewhere else more private. Each wing-beat hurt, her great dark wings seeming to creak.

It was mid-afternoon by the raw chronologies of Hell, and something like fresh light shone from grey overcast that for once looked tentative rather than dark and heavy. It was as close to direct sunlight as the place ever got, and the air, though still smelling of sewage and burned flesh, was relatively clear.

The crowd of worshippers was a wide, messy torus, now filling slowly in as the people came forward to gaze on the remains of the one she had killed, possibly looking for clues regarding what might have attracted her to that lucky individual in the first place.

She had long since given up trying to tell them it was pointless.

She chose her victims, her blessed, at random. She flew high until she felt physically hungry sometimes, then just dropped, spread her wings over the first person she found. Other times she went to some particular place she’d seen before and noted, and alighted there, waiting for the first one to come to her. She varied where she went and which time of day she chose to make her kills. There was no particular pattern to it; it just happened. Not entirely at random, but not predictable so that one of these benighted wretches could arrange to collate information on where she struck and contrive to be in the right place at the right time.

Still, people had indeed made a religion of her and her daily killings. As the king of the demons had envisaged and desired, she had brought a little hope back into Hell.

She thought about stopping, sometimes, but never did, not for more than a day. She had decided at the start that she would release one of these unfortunates from their pains each day, and the few times she had tried to experiment by not killing once per day had left her racked with cramps; gut pains that left her nauseous and barely able to fly. That had only happened three times.

She still only got to release one soul on the following day; the earlier day’s unused kill didn’t seem to carry over. Any extra she killed were, as ever, resurrected, often almost instantaneously, coming shrieking back to life in their impossibly torn-open bodies, miraculously repairing and reforming themselves before her eyes, while their eyes filled with looks of uncomprehending betrayal.

The ones she truly killed departed with a look of gratitude she had come to treasure. The expressions on the faces of those who gathered round to watch were of simple envy, a sort of beatific hunger laced with outright jealousy. Sometimes she’d deliberately choose people because they were on their own or only with a few other people, just so she escaped the weight of those death-desiring gazes.

You could not reason with people in the grip of such a faith. She had tried, but failed. The truth was that she could offer them release; she was an angel who, here, really did exist, and really could offer these people what they most desired. It was not even really faith; it was perfectly reasonable belief.

She climbed into the high, clear air, chewing on the still-warm haunch of the one she’d released only minutes earlier. The crowd gathering round the body was too small to see now, lost in the scabbed landscapes beneath the drifting clouds of smoke.

Way off in the distance, something shimmered in a way that she was not sure she had seen here, ever before. Something seemed almost to shine, way over there, towards a line of small mountains, tall cliffs and acid lakes. Not with flame; with what could almost be watery sunlight, if that wasn’t an absurd idea, here in Hell, where there contrived to be light without sun. It looked like a column, like a broad, silvery pillar, half invisible, between land and cloud.

She took one last gulping bite, then dropped the haunch-bone and struck off for the distant anomaly.

The column only grew more mysterious the closer she got. It was like a strange irregular curtain of silver draped over the land; a few kilometres across, maybe one deep; a sort of semi-regular shape of what looked like a pure mirror. It had no light of its own, but seemed to reflect all light that touched it. Flying close, she saw her own dark, elongated shape flickering liquidly across its surface.

She went up through the clouds to see that the pillar extended all the way to the iron sky, tens of kilometres above. The effort made it feel like her muscles were on fire.

She dropped back through the cloud, landed. Her feet, her legs, all hurt, protesting, as they took her weight. They always did. Her legs hurt when she was on the ground, her wings ached when she was flying, and her whole body grumbled distantly when she hung upside down to rest. She just tried not to think about it.

There were some chopped-up bodies lying right beside the shimmering curtain of silver, where it met the ground. It looked as though they had been cut with a very sharp blade.

She picked up a sliced-off leg lying on the ground, threw it at the silvery barrier. It bounced off, as though it had hit solid metal. She picked the leg back up, prodded the barrier. Felt solid. She touched it with one talon. Very solid; iron solid. To the touch, it was a little cold. Again, as cold as iron or steel would have felt.

One cowering creature nearby squealed as she dragged it from the poison bush it had been trying to hide within. Its pelt was already starting to blister. The little male was emaciated; missing one trunk, one eye, his face badly scarred by tooth marks.

“Did you see this happen?” she demanded, shaking him towards the silent mirror-barrier.

“It just happened!” he wailed. “All of a sudden! Without warning! Please, ma’am; are you the one who releases us?”

“Yes. Has anything like this happened here before?” she said, still not letting him go. She knew this area a little. She tried to recall its details. Cliffs; mountains. A munitions factory set into the cliffs… over there. She could see the road that had served it, lined with petrified, very quietly shrieking statues.

“No! Never seen anything like it! Nobody here has! Please, sacred lady; take me; release me; kill me, please!”

She looked round. There were a few others, she could see now, all cowering behind whatever cover they could find.

She let the male go. “I can’t help you,” she told him. “I’ve already killed today.”

“Tomorrow, then! I’ll wait here tomorrow!” He fell kneeling at her feet, supplicating.

“I don’t make fucking appointments!” she roared.

The male stayed where he was, quivering. She gazed up at the shimmering, reflecting curtain, wondering what to make of it.

Still, she flew back there the next day.

The mirror curtain was gone. So was the geography she remembered from before it had been there; a barren dusty plain, rising smoothly, replaced everything that had been within the boundary of the shimmering curtain. It joined as best it could with the cliffs and mountains beyond where the mirror-barrier had been, but it looked dropped-in, added-on somehow. A patch.

She didn’t know what to make of it.

The scarred male from the day before was still there, where she’d left him, pleading to be released. She sighed, landed, took him into her wings and let his spirit go, taking on yet another additional pain.

Glitches in Hell. Fucking appointments in fucking Hell. Whatever fucking next?

“This place is definitely coarsening me,” she muttered to herself as she flew off, clutching another torn-off haunch.

The Me, I’m Counting Displaced Yime Nsokyi into the window-less suite at the rear of the very grand hotel near the centre of Iobe Cavern City, Vebezua, while it kept station overhead, just beyond the atmosphere, arguing with the Planetary Near Space Traffic Authority.

The boxy ship-drone serving as escort to her and Himerance switched on all the lights. The bedroom was vast, palatial, unoccupied.

“The secret passage is hidden under the bed,” Himerance said. The drone activated the relevant motors and the giant circular bed sank out of sight. They went to the edge and watched it drop.

“That leads to the tunnel that ends up in the desert?” Yime asked. She was dressed properly, in her tunic, at last, for the first time in days. She was still not fully healed, and still somewhat delicate, but her hair was tidy and she felt… regained.

“Yes,” Himerance said. “Veppers might have been absent for days, though officially he never left here. He probably left on a Jhlupian ship, but nobody’s sure. His entourage supposedly arrived back on Sichult this morning, but there’s no confirmation he’s with them. This is the last place we can be absolutely sure he was.”

The drone dropped into the hole left by the descending bed. Himerance produced a scroll screen, letting it unroll and hang in the air in front of them, displaying the view the drone had as it made its way up the short corridor beneath the room, heading into the cliff. A small underground car shaped like a fat bullet sat in front of a dark tunnel.

“Getting anything?” Yime asked.

Himerance shrugged. “Nothing much,” he told her. “There is a variety of surveillance tech in here. Place is like a history of bugging through the ages; whole tiny networks of linked spy-tech and outdated eavesdropping gear splattered about the entire suite. Lot of stuff that’s probably lost, forgotten about. Many tiny dead batteries in here. Ancient stuff.” The ship, only a couple of hundred kilometres over their heads, was targeting one of its main Effectors on the city, the hotel and the suite. If there was anything useful here, it would find it.

“Most recent is equiv-tech stuff,” Himerance said, relaying what the ship was finding. “Passably… NR stuff.” He looked at Yime.

“NR?”

“Probably. It’s recent,” Himerance said, “and working; it’d be relaying what we’re saying now if I wasn’t blocking it. Synched into hidden hotel cameras and comms-intercept gear too.” Himerance nodded at four different points in the room. “Sprayed on: in the wall hangings, drapes, on the surfaces of paintings and embedded in the rugs.”

“Anything recorded?”

“No; and no idea where it would have transmitted to either,” Himerance admitted.

“Would it have registered Veppers using his sinking-bed escape route?”

“Maybe not,” Himerance said, gazing up at the great thick fold of curtains which could envelop and surround the bed. “Not if these were drawn.” He squinted. Yime could almost feel the ship overhead shifting the focus of its Effector by minute fractions of a degree. “No spray-on surveillance on those,” Himerance confirmed. “And they’re a lot more hi-tech than the simple organic woven material they look like. Shield you from most interference once they’re drawn right round.”

Yime sighed. “I don’t think he’s here,” she said. “I certainly don’t think she is.”

Stopping here had been an easy enough decision; the direction they’d approached the Sichultian Enablement from, Vebezua had been almost directly en route. Sichult itself still seemed the best place to find both Veppers and Lededje Y’breq, but taking a quick look at the last place they had a definite fix on Veppers had seemed to make sense and cost them only a couple of hours.

“I’m still not getting what’s going on with the Restoria mission,” Himerance said, sounding puzzled. “Some sort of comms blackout now. Something’s happening out there, at the Disk.”

“Smatter outbreak?” Yime asked.

“Those fabricaria ships are more than smatter,” Himerance said as they watched the drone retrace its flight back down the tunnel towards them. Yime knew the ship already felt torn between taking her where she wanted to go, and joining in whatever action was taking place out at the Tsungarial Disk.

“There’s some sort of full-on battle going on out there,” Himerance said, frowning now. “Beyond the Disk, on the fringes of the Enablement; way too hi-tech for mere smatter. I do so hope that isn’t the Abominator class arriving. If it is we may genuinely have a full-scale war on our hands.”

The drone reappeared in the hole the bed had left; Himerance snapped the scroll-screen closed again and tucked it inside his jacket.

“What about the explosion on Veppers’ estate?” Yime asked.

“Nothing new. News blackout.” Himerance paused. “Actually, something new. Couple of agencies Veppers doesn’t control reporting members of his entourage killed and injured in some sort of flier crash; survivors arriving back at Ubruater at one of his private hospitals.” Another pause. “Hmm. Guess that counts as speculation.”

“What does?”

Himerance looked at her. “Reports that Veppers might be dead.”

“I’d better let you go. You take care. I mean, I’m staying; this Demeisen unit right here is sticking with you, but me myself I, the ship; I have to stick around here, see what’s up. Sleeve-rolling, palm-spitting time for me. You get to stay inside the shuttle inside this element, this shiplet. It’ll take you on to Sichult.”

“Okay,” Lededje said. “Thanks for the ride so far.”

“My pleasure. Take care. See you later, I hope.”

“Me too.”

The image of Demeisen waved bye-bye against the star field. The screen inside her suit’s helmet showed the main body of the ship slipping away to one side, fields flickering between the element she was looking from and the main body of the vessel. It was still elongatedly ellipsoidal, but each curved sliver of ship-element had separated slightly from the other, so that the ship looked like a fat throw-ball knifed open from tip to tail, segments teased apart. As she watched, the gap left by the departure of the part that she was in started to close up, the other sections pulling fractionally further away from each other. Then they reached the ship’s outer field boundary and passed through opaque layers. Outside, the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was just a giant silver ellipsoid. It shimmered, disappeared.

The Demeisen figure was still there, seemingly floating in space. He turned to her. “Just you and me now, babe. And the ship-section sub-Mind, of course.”

“Does it have a separate name?” she asked.

Demeisen shrugged. “Element twelve?”

“That’ll have to do.”

He crossed his arms, frowned. “Now; the good news first or the bad news?”

She frowned too. “Good,” she said.

“We’ll have you on Sichult in a few hours.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“This just in: Veppers might be already dead.”

She stared at the image of the avatar. She hadn’t expected this. “That it?” she said after a moment.

“Yup. You seem relatively unconcerned.”

She shrugged. “I wanted him dead. If he’s dead, good. Why only ‘might’? What happened?”

“Someone nuked his aircraft as it was flying low over his estate. Some of his retinue killed, some injured; Veppers himself… mysteriously unaccounted for.”

“Huh. I bet he’s still alive. I’d want to see the body before I believe otherwise. And check it for neural laces or whatever.”

Demeisen smiled at her. It was a strange, unsettling sort of smile. She wondered if this version of Demeisen would be different to the one controlled by the main ship. “Thought you wanted to kill him yourself,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment. “I’ve never killed anyone before,” she told him. “I don’t really want to have to kill another person. I’m not… totally, completely sure that I can even kill Veppers. I think I can, and I’ve fantasised about it a hundred times, but… If he really was dead, maybe that would be a relief. Part of me would be angry he didn’t die by my hand, but part of me would be grateful; I get out of finding whether I could really do it or not.”

Demeisen raised an eyebrow. “How many times did he rape you?”

She let a couple of controlled, regular breaths pass before she answered. “I lost count.”

“And then he murdered you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Though to give him his due, he only did that once.” When the avatar didn’t say anything, but simply kept looking at her, she added, “I’m not him, Demeisen. I’m not even like him. If I get close to him and have the gun or the knife in my hand but then find that I can’t do it, then I’ll be angry at myself for not being strong enough, for letting him get away with it, and for giving him the chance to rape and murder again.” She took another breath. “But if I can do it, if I do do it, then on one level I’m no better than him, and he’ll have won by making me behave like he does.” She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong; I fully intend to put a bullet through his head or slit his throat if I get the chance, but I won’t know if I can do it until the moment actually presents itself.” Another shrug. “If it ever does.”

Demeisen shook his head. “That is the sorriest, limpest, most self-defeating piece of self-motivating I have ever fucking heard. We should have talked about this before. I ought to have been giving you assassin lessons for the past umpteen days. How long we got now? Five hours?” Demeisen slapped one hand over his forehead and eyes, theatrically. “Oh fuck. You’re going to die, kid.”

Lededje’s frown deepened. “Thanks for your confidence.”

“Hey, you started it.”