Surface Detail

Twenty-six

“Veppers dead?” Yime Nsokyi said. “How?”

“In that explosion or the flier crash. Reports remain confused,” Himerance said.

“Lededje Y’breq isn’t back there already, is she?” Yime asked.

“Doubtful,” Himerance said. “And I would doubt she could organise a nuke inside Veppers’ estate either. She’s just a kid with a grudge, not some super-powered SC agent. Not that a super-powered SC agent would use anything as inelegant as a bomb aimed at an aircraft. Or miss if they did.”

“What if the Abominator’s helping her?”

“I would prefer not to think about that,” Himerance said with a sigh.

Yime frowned, looked about the palatial suite. “Can you hear that thumping noise?”

“That,” the ship drone said, “is the hotel’s general manager registering his disapproval at his pass-key codes not allowing him entry into his finest suite when there appears to be something ‘going on’ inside.”

Himerance was frowning now. The ship’s drone fell silent, hanging in the air for a moment.

“We need to conduct a small experiment,” Himerance said.

“That statue,” the drone announced, and Himerance turned to look at a three-quarters-sized statue of a buxom nymph carrying a stylised torch in one corner of the bedroom.

“What’s going—?” Yime began, as a silvery ellipsoid flickered into existence around the statue, obscuring it. When the ellipsoid vanished with a small “pop”, the statue was gone and where it had stood there was a fresh-looking patch of rug.

“What’s happening?” Yime said, just starting to feel worried and looking from the humanoid avatar to the ship-drone.

The two machines seemed to hesitate, then the little drone said, “Uh-oh.”

Himerance turned to Yime. “That was the ship attempting a Displace, back to it.”

“The micro-singularity didn’t arrive,” the drone told her.

“What?” Yime said. “How—?”

Himerance stepped forward, took Yime by the elbow. “We need to go,” he said, moving Yime towards the suite’s entrance.

“Checking that tunnel again,” the drone said, and flew quickly across the room, disappearing into the hole the circular bed had left.

“The ship’s being instructed to quit the system by an NR vessel,” Himerance told Yime as he hustled her into the suite’s main drawing room. “In no uncertain terms. The NR think we’re up to something and seem, by Reliquarian standards, extremely upset. They’re intercepting any Displaces. The drone—” Then Himerance made a noise that was almost a yelp, and covered Yime’s ears with his hands so fast it hurt. The explosion from the depths of the bedroom blew them both over, thudding into the floor. Himerance managed to twist in the air as they fell so that Yime landed on top of him. It still hurt and Yime’s nose, which had thudded into his chin, started to bleed immediately. Every just-healed bone in her body ached in protest.

The avatar dragged her to her feet as clouds of smoke, dust and small floating scraps of debris came rolling out of the bedroom.

Yime started to cough. “—the fuck is going on?” she managed as Himerance walked her smartly towards the suite’s vestibule.

“That was the tunnel being collapsed and sealed by the NR ship,” Himerance said.

“What about the drone?” Yime asked, sniffing back blood as they approached the suite’s double doors.

“Gone,” Himerance told her.

“Can’t we reason with the—?”

“The ship is reasoning as fast as it machinely can with the NR vessel,” Himerance said. “To little avail thus far. It will have to flee or fight very soon. We are already effectively on our own.” The avatar looked at the doors for a moment. They swung open to reveal a broad, plushly decorated corridor, a small man with a furious look on his face and three large men dressed in uniforms of what appeared to be a semi-military nature. The rolling cloud of smoke and dust flowed gently past Himerance and Yime, towards the people in the corridor. The small, furious-looking man stared in utter horror at the dust.

One of the large men levelled a thick-barrelled weapon of some sort at Himerance, who said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have no time for this right now,” and — moving more quickly than Yime would have believed possible — was suddenly, smoothly, after a sort of liquidic, ducking motion, in the midst of the three large men, flicking the weapon out of the hand of the one pointing it while simultaneously, and — almost accidentally, it appeared — stabbing one elbow into the midriff of one of the other men, whose eyes nearly popped from his head as he collapsed with a whooshing noise of rapidly expelled air.

Yime barely had time to register this happening before the other two men went down too, one felled after the avatar pointed the weapon at him — there was a click and a hum, no more — while the other, who’d been holding the weapon, was sent flying backwards into the wall behind by a single thrust from Himerance’s now-outstretched palm.

“Ah,” Himerance said, taking the small man by the throat and pressing the gun against his temple. The small man looked more stunned and terrified than furious now. “Some sort of neural blaster.” This remark seemed addressed to nobody in particular. His next was as squarely aimed at the hotel’s general manager as the neural blaster. “Good day, sir. You will kindly help us to escape.”

Himerance obviously took the man’s subsequent strangled gurgle as indicating assent, because he smiled, relaxed his grip a fraction and, looking at Yime, nodded down the corridor. “This way, I think.”

“What happens now?” Yime asked as they frog-marched the manager down the corridor. “How do we get off the planet?” She stopped and stared at the avatar. “Do we get off the planet?”

“No, we’ll be safer here, just for now,” Himerance told her, stopping at the lift doors and suggesting to the manager that he use his pass-key to priority-order an elevator car.

“We will?” Yime said.

The lift arrived; the avatar took the pass-keys off the manager, inserted them into the elevator car’s control panel, pushed the manager out of the car and stunned him with the neural blaster as the doors closed. Himerance looked round the elevator car as they descended towards a sub-basement not usually accessible to non-staff. A small puff of smoke came out of the control panel through the grille of the emergency speaker. “Actually, no, we won’t be safer here,” Himerance said. “The ship will snap-Displace us off.”

“‘Snap-Displace’? That sounds—”

“Dangerous. Yes, I know. And it is, though we are assuming it’ll be less dangerous than staying here.”

“But if the ship can’t Displace us now—?”

“It can’t Displace us now because it and we are both effectively static, giving the NR time to intercept the Displacement. Whereas later it’ll be coming through at very high speed, passing dangerously close to the planet, grazing its gravity well at high translight and attempting to fit the Displacement event into an ungenerous handful of pico-seconds.”

The avatar sounded remarkably casual about all this, Yime thought. It watched the screen indicating the floors as it counted slowly down. The lift car’s lighting, close overhead, made Himerance’s bald head gleam. “Providing it’s done at sufficiently high speed, that should leave the NR with insufficient time to arrange any interception of the Displacement singularity.” The avatar smiled at her. “That’s the real reason the ship is doing as the NR have demanded, and leaving; it’ll power up the whole way out, execute a minimum-radius-to-power turn and come straight back in, still accelerating, snapping us off and then heading for Sichult. The whole procedure will take some hours, however, as the ship gathers speed, both to make it look like it really is leaving and to make sure that when it passes us it’s going fast enough to confound the NR vessel or vessels. During that time we need to remain hidden from the NR.”

“Will it work?”

“Probably. Ah.” The car drew to a stop.

“‘Probably’?” Yime found herself saying to an empty lift as the avatar moved swiftly between the opening doors.

She followed, to find they were in a deserted basement car park full of wheeled ground vehicles. Yime opened her mouth to speak but the avatar pirouetted, one finger to his lips as he moved towards a bulky-looking vehicle with six wheels and a body that appeared to be made from a single billet of black glass. “This’ll do,” he said. A gull-wing door sighed open. “Though…” he said, as they settled into their seats. “Oh, do put your seat-belt on, won’t you? Thank you… Though the NR may well guess that the ship will attempt this manoeuvre and so either try to prevent or interfere with the Displacement. Or they might attack the ship itself, of course, though that would be rather extreme.”

“They just destroyed the ship’s drone and seem to be trying to kill us — isn’t that fairly extreme already?”

“It is, rather,” the avatar agreed reasonably, looking at the vehicle’s controls until lights came on. “Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.” A screen flashed on, filled with what looked like a city road map.

“Thank you,” Yime said. “It is always salutary to be reminded of one’s true place in the proper arrangement of matters.”

Himerance nodded. “Yes, I know.”

In the distance, up a short ramp, a large door to what appeared to be the outside was rising open. “Many of these are automatic too,” Himerance muttered to himself. “That’s useful.”

Most of the other vehicles in the car park were turning their lights on; some were already moving, all heading for the ramp and the doorway.

“We’ll leave in the middle, I think,” he said, as their vehicle made a low, distant humming noise and moved smoothly off, joining the line of quickly moving cars. Judging by the ones she could see into, none of the others had any occupants.

“Are you doing this, or the ship?” Yime asked as they left the underground garage.

“Me,” the avatar said. “The ship left some ninety seconds ago.”

Outside, the enormous tunnel of the city was bright with artificial lights, the cupped spread of the place disappearing upwards and down into a faint haze. The far side of the city — a perpendicular jumble of mostly tall, variegated buildings — was only a kilometre or so distant but looked further away in the murk. Around them, the driverless vehicles the avatar had set in motion were all heading off in as many different directions as they could find amongst the city’s jumbled network of streets. Above, little tethered aircraft flitted back and forth along the great cavern.

As Yime watched, one of the larger empty vehicles a short way in front of them in a side-lane slowed, met with some hanging cables and was hoisted rapidly into the air.

“We’re going to do the same thing,” Himerance said, shortly before their vehicle followed the other one, though it then promptly headed off in the opposite direction.

Their vehicle rose quickly amongst the hundreds of cable-held craft.

They had reached a steady height and held it for about twenty seconds when the avatar sucked in a breath, the black glass around parted directly overhead then started to sink back into the sides of the vehicle. Before the retracting glass had reached shoulder level, Himerance’s arm flicked almost too fast to see as he threw the stubby tube of the neural blaster out of the vehicle. Immediately, the glass moved back up around them.

Moments later there was a flash from behind, quickly followed by a great thudding bang which left the vehicle swinging back and forth, causing it to slow automatically, briefly, to correct the oscillation. Himerance and Yime looked back to see a blossoming cloud of smoke and debris rising from near the centre-line of the cavern city; pieces of a great bridge, sundered in the middle, were starting to fall slowly towards the river on the tunnel’s floor. Directly above, more glowing pieces of wreckage and cinders were falling from a tiny, yellow-rimmed hole in the cavern ceiling. Echoes of the detonation slammed back and forth amongst the buildings, disappearing slowly down the tunnel city.

Himerance shook his head. “I beg your pardon. I should have thought they might trace that somehow. My mistake,” he said, as they drew level with a tall stone tower. The glass around them flowed fully down into the sides of the vehicle. The vehicle was beeping irately, though it was almost drowned out by multitudinous echoing sirens starting to sound around the city. They bumped gently against the summit of the tower.

“We need to get out,” the avatar said, rising, taking Yime’s hand and together making the small jump onto the grass beyond the tower’s parapet. The impact hurt her knees. The vehicle stopped beeping and swung away again, glass panels rising back into place as the cables above whisked it back to the heights.

Himerance hauled an old but stout-looking trap-door open in a flurry of earth and popping rivets. They hurried down an unlit spiral staircase and had descended about two complete turns — Yime following Himerance and trusting him to see in a darkness so profound even her moderately augmented eyes could register next to nothing — when there was a distant-sounding thud from outside. The tower shook, just a little.

“That was the vehicle we were just in, wasn’t it?” she said.

“It was,” the avatar agreed. “Whoever’s coordinating this is thinking commendably quickly. NR, almost certainly.” They thudded down more steps, spiralling downwards all the time, so fast Yime felt she was starting to get dizzy. It was hurting her knees and ankles and back, too. “Best not to tarry, then,” the avatar said, putting on a burst of speed. She heard and vaguely sensed him disappearing round the curve of the winding stair.

“I can’t go that fast!” she shouted.

“Of course not,” he said, stopping; she thudded into him. “My apologies. Jump on my back; we’ll go faster. Just keep your head down.”

She was too breathless to argue. She climbed onto his back, legs round his waist, arms about his neck.

“Hold tight,” the avatar said. She did. They set off, whirling down the steps so fast it was almost falling.

Those who had seen the first two incursions reported seeing a cerise beam destroy first the high bridge and then the wheeled, airborne cable-craft. In both cases the beam simply came angling down from the ceiling of the cavern having bored through many tens of metres of rock before transfixing its target.

The third and the last time the beam assaulted Iobe Cavern City, it hit an ancient ornamental stone tower, part of the original Central University buildings. The beam struck the old tower near its base, bringing the whole edifice tumbling down.

At first it was thought there had been no casualties, until, half a day later, the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered, still locked together, her legs round his waist, her arms round his neck, under the hundreds of tonnes of rubble.

There was a house which was the shape of the galaxy. It was a virtual house, of course, but it was very highly detailed and well imagined, and although the scale on which it modelled the galaxy could vary quite a lot from time to time and from place to place within it, the general effect was convincing for the beings who had brought the house into existence, and, at least as far as they were concerned, the surroundings felt agreeably familiar.

The beings concerned were Culture Minds: the very high-level AIs which were, by some distance, the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole civilisation, and — arguably — amongst the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole galaxy-wide meta-civilisation.

The house was used to indicate where the individual Minds were in the real galaxy, so that a Mind which existed within an Orbital Hub close to the galactic centre would be located in the great bulbous, multi-storeyed centre of the house, while a ship Mind in a vessel currently somewhere towards the wispy tip of one of the galaxy’s arms would appear in one of the single-room tall outer wings. There were special arrangements for those Minds who didn’t want their location known by all and sundry: they tended to inhabit pleasingly dilapidated outbuildings within what were effectively the grounds of the main construction, communicating at a remove.

The house itself manifested as an echoingly vast baroque edifice of extraordinary, ornamental richness, every room the size of a cathedral and full of intricately carved wooden walls and pierced screens, gleaming floors of inlaid wood and semi-precious stone, ceilings dripping with precious metals and minerals, and populated, usually quite sparsely, by the avatars of the Minds, which took on pretty much every form of being and object known.

Unrestricted by such tiresome three-dimensional constraints as the laws of perspective, every one of the many thousands of rooms was visible from every other, if not through doorways then through tiny icons/screens/apertures in the walls which, on sufficiently close inspection, let one see into those immensely distant rooms in some detail. Minds, of course, being used to existing within four dimensions as a matter of tedious day-to-day reality, had no problem dealing with this sort of topological sleight-of-hand.

The only reality-based restriction the galactic house modelled accurately was that produced by the deeply annoying fact that even hyperspacial light did not travel with infinite speed. To carry on a normal conversation with another Mind, one had to be in the same room and reasonably close to it. Even two Minds being within the same vast room but on opposite sides created a noticeable delay as they shouted back and forth.

Being any further away meant sending messages. These usually showed up as gently glowing symbols flickering disembodied in the air in front of the recipient, but — subject to the witheringly prodigious imaginations of Minds in general and the particular and quite possibly highly eccentric predilections of the sender in particular — could show up as almost anything. Swift-moving ballets consisting of multiply-limbed aliens, on fire and throwing shapes which just happened briefly to resemble Marain symbols (for example) were by no means unknown.

Vatueil had vaguely heard of this place. He’d always wondered what it actually looked like. He gazed around, astounded, wondering how you would describe it, how a poet might find the words to portray something of its bewildering richness and complexity. In appearance he was a pan-human male; tall and wearing the dress uniform of a Space Marshal. He stood in this vast room — shaped like the inside of a vast beach-shell to resemble the general volume of space called the Doplioid Spiral Fragment — and watched as what looked like a substantial chandelier lowered itself from the ceiling. Inspected closely, the ceiling was mostly composed of such chandeliers. When its lower-middle section got level with his head, the chandelier — a riot of fabulously inter-twined multi-coloured glass spirals and corkscrew shapes — stopped.

“Space Marshal Vatueil, welcome,” it said. Its voice had a sort of gentle, tinkling quality appropriate to its appearance. “My name is Zaive; I’m a Hub-mind with a special interest in the Quietus section. I’ll let the others introduce themselves.”

Vatueil turned to find that — without him having noticed them arriving — there were two humans, a large, hovering blue bird and what looked like a crudely carved, garishly painted ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on a small multi-coloured balloon, all standing or floating around him.

“I’m the Fixed Grin,” the first human told him; the avatar had silvery skin and looked vaguely female. “Representing Numina.” It nodded/bowed.

“The Scar Glamour,” the blue bird told him. “SC.”

“Beastly To The Animals,” the other humanoid avatar said, a thin-looking male. “I represent the interests of Restoria.”

“Labtebricolephile,” the dummy may have announced, having what sounded like trouble with the “L” sounds. “Civilian.” It paused. “Eccentric,” it added, needlessly.

“And that,” the chandelier called Zaive said, as the others help-fully looked off to one side, “is the Dressed Up To Party.”

The Dressed Up To Party was a small orange-red cloud hanging more or less over the hovering blue bird.

“The Dressed Up To Party is also non-aligned and is some non-specific distance away; its contributions will be sporadic,” Zaive said.

“And probably beside the point, as well as trailing it,” the blue bird representing the Scar Glamour said. It cocked its iridescently plumaged head to look up at the orange-red cloud, but there was no visible response.

“Together,” Zaive said, “we make up the Specialist Agencies Prompt Response Committee, or at least the local chapter, as it were. A small number of other interested parties, each no less security-conscious than ourselves, will be listening in at greater removes and may contribute subsequently. Do you need any explanation regarding our titles or terminology?”

“No, thank you,” Vatueil said.

“We understand that you represent the highest strategic level of command within the anti-Hell side in the current confliction regarding the Hells, is that right?”

“Yes,” Vatueil confirmed.

“So, Space Marshal Vatueil,” the bird said flapping its short wings lazily — too slowly for it to have truly hovered had this all been taking place in the Real. “You indicated this was both urgent and of the highest importance. What is it you wish to tell us?”

“It’s about the war over the Hells,” Vatueil said.

“That kind of came presupposed,” the bird said.

Vatueil sighed. “Are you aware that the anti-Hell side is losing?”

“Of course,” the bird said.

“And that we attempted to hack the substrates of the pro-Hell side?”

“We had guessed as much,” the thin-looking male said.

“Those attempts failed,” Vatueil said. “Therefore we decided to bring the war into the Real, to construct a fleet of ships which would destroy as many of the Hell-containing substrates as possible.”

“So the entire decades-long confliction was for nothing,” the blue bird said crisply, “putting it on the same level as the vows one assumes you must have taken at the start of the war renouncing resort to precisely the two courses you have just outlined.”

“That’s… a weighty thing to have done, Space Marshal,” the dummy said, hinged jaws clicking as it spoke.

“It was not a step we took lightly,” Vatueil agreed.

“Perhaps it was not a step you should have taken at all,” the blue bird said.

“I am not here to justify my actions or decisions or those of my comrades or co-conspirators,” Vatueil said. “I am here only to—”

“Try to implicate us?” the blue bird said. “Half the galaxy assumes we’re behind the anti-Hell forces anyway. Perhaps by coming here — and being allowed audience despite the earnest entreaties of some of us — you intend to persuade the other half?” Directly above the bird’s head, the little orange-red cloud had just started to rain, though no moisture seemed to reach the Scar Glamour’s avian avatar.

“I’m here to tell you that the anti-Hell forces came to an agreement with the GFCF and elements of the Sichultian Enablement — behind the backs of the NR and their allies, the Flekke and the Jhlupians — to build us our fleet using the Tsungarial Disk. However, we have received intelligence that the NR thought that they too had an agreement with the Sichultia, promising that they — the Sichultia — would refuse to help the anti-Hell side and would do whatever the NR wanted them to do to stop any war fleet being built.”

“The Sichultia sound as free with their agreements as you and your fellows are with your solemn undertakings, Space Marshal,” the blue bird representing SC said.

“Must you be quite so unpleasant to our guest?” the silver-skinned avatar asked the Scar Glamour’s avatar. The bird bristled its feathers and said:

“Yes.”

“We have also heard,” Vatueil said, “that the NR, the Culture and the GFCF are currently in some way engaged in the Sichultian Enablement, especially around the Tsungarial Disk. Assuming this is the case, it was thought important that you were informed — at the highest level — that the Sichultia are on the side which everyone assumes you wish to win in the confliction.”

“Difficult though it may be for you to imagine somebody keeping their word in any circumstances, Space Marshal,” the blue bird said, “what makes you think that the Sichultia will stick to the agreement they made with you rather than the one they made with the NR?”

“The agreement made with the NR basically meant doing nothing. The agreement made with us meant becoming involved with a conspiracy that would be largely under the control of others and that would proceed regardless of the Sichultians’ initial operational involvement, while exposing them to a substantial risk of being punished by the NR even if they changed their minds before their part in the conspiracy became crucial. It makes no sense for them to have entered into the agreement unless they were going to see it through.”

“That does make sense,” Zaive said, voice tinkling. “So,” the thin male avatar said, “we should do nothing to stop the Sichultia from doing whatever it is they are doing in and around the Tsungarial Disk?”

Vatueil shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do. I’m not even going to make any suggestions. We just thought you should know what’s going on.”

“We understand,” Zaive said.

“I have some intelligence,” the blue bird announced.

Vatueil turned and looked levelly at it.

“My intelligence tells me that you are a traitor, Space Marshal Vatueil.”

Vatueil continued to look at the bird as it flapped lazily in front of him. The orange-red cloud above the Scar Glamour’s avatar had stopped raining. Vatueil turned to address Zaive. “I have no more to report. If I may be excused…”

“Yes,” the chandelier said. “Though there was no indication with the signal carrying you what was to be done with your mind-state following delivery of your message. I think we all assumed that you were to be returned to your war sim high command, but perhaps you had something else in mind?”

Vatueil smiled. “I’m to be deleted,” he said. “To avoid any further unseemly hint at complicity with the anti-Hell forces on your part.”

“How very thoughtful,” the silver-skinned vaguely female avatar said. Vatueil chose to assume that she meant it.

“I’m sure we can offer you the processing space to be housed within a Virtuality,” Zaive said. “Wouldn’t you rather—?”

“No, thank you. My original has been through more virtualities, downloads and re-incorporations than he cares to think about. Any selves he sends out such as myself are quite inured to the thought of personal deletion so long as we know our original persists somewhere.” The Space Marshal smiled, and knew that he looked resigned as he did so. “And even if not… this has been a very long war, and I am very tired, in all my iterations. Death no longer seems so terrible a thing, on any level.”

“That may,” the blue bird said, “be just as well.” For once though, its tone was less than cutting.

“Indeed,” Vatueil said. He looked round them all. “Thank you for listening. Goodbye.” He looked at the chandelier and nodded.

He winked out of existence.

“Well,” Zaive said.

“Do we take this at face value?” the silver-skinned avatar asked.

“It fits well with what we know,” the wooden dummy said. “Better than most sims.”

“And do we trust the Space Marshal?” Zaive asked.

The bird made a snorting sound. “That errant, ramshackled ghost?” it said scornfully. “He’s known of old; I doubt he even remembers who he used to be, let alone what he believes in or most recently promised.”

“We don’t need to trust it to incorporate the import of its information into our calculations,” the silver-skinned female said.

The thin male avatar looked at the chandelier. “You need to tell your accident-prone agent to stop wasting time and get to where she’s supposed to get to, preferably without, this time, getting any more innocent people killed. Stop the Y’breq woman killing Veppers.” The man turned to the blue bird with the orange-red cloud hanging over it. “Though of course that won’t be necessary if SC would just tell the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints to stop indulging whatever bizarre fantasies of gallantry, vicarious revenge or just devilment it’s currently revelling in.”

“Don’t look at me,” the Scar Glamour’s avatar said, flapping indignantly. “That bastard excuse for a picket ship’s got nothing to do with me.” The bird cocked its head and looked up at the orange cloud. “You’d better be listening,” it squawked. “You’ve got the contacts; you talk to the GSV that spawned that particular Abomination; get it to try and bang some sense into the bug-fuck shrapnel that makes up what passes for a Mind in that demented machine.”

…good night, good night, good night.

A chill struck her skin. She wanted to shiver, but felt too lethargic; all swaddled, lost in a warm, baking fug.

What sounded like a real voice came clanging in, unwelcome. “Hello! Anybody in there?” it said. “Anybody alive?”

“Huh?” She heard herself say. Great; now she was hallucinating, hearing voices.

“Hello!”

“Yes? What? Hello to you too.” She was talking, not sending, she realised. That was weird. It took a few moments, but she got her eyes open, unsticking them. She blinked, waited for every-thing to swim into focus. Light. There was light. Dim, but it looked real. Face plate of helmet; internal visor screen, currently showing just static, but enough to reveal that both her inner and outer suits seemed to have expanded around her, and chilly draughts of air were flowing over her exposed body, raising goose-bumps. She could breathe! She took some deep, satisfying breaths, luxuriating in the feel of the cold air entering her mouth and nostrils, and her rib cage being able to expand as far as it could.

“Auppi Unstril, that right?” the voice said.

“Umm, yes.” Her mouth felt clogged, sticky; all gummed up like her eyes had been. She licked her lips; they felt puffy and over-sensitive. But just being able to lick them felt so good. “Who you?” She cleared her throat. “Who am I talking to?”

“I’m an element of the Culture Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“An element?”

“Element five.”

“Are you now? Where did you come from?”

What Abominator class? she thought. Nobody had mentioned an Abominator-class ship. Was this real? She still wasn’t sure that this wasn’t just some very lucid dream. She found the nipple on the end of the helmet’s flexible water tube, sucked on it. The water was cool, sweet, beautiful. Real, she told herself. Real water, real chill on the skin, real voice. Real real real. She felt the water coursing down inside her, chilling her throat, oesophagus and stomach as she swallowed.

“Is where I came from relevant?” the voice said. “My whole was pretending to be a Torturer class earlier, if that helps.”

“Ah. Are you rescuing me, Element five?”

“I am. Currently I have Displaced nano-dust working to repair what I can of your Module. It should be ready to power up again in a few minutes. You could then make your way to the nearest base, which would be the near-planet monitoring unit five; however, in the light of the recent hostile actions I think it might be wiser and even safer if you join me, coming within my field enclosure. Your choice.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“Oh, I’d stick with me, but then I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?”

“I suppose you are.” She drank more of the precious, beautiful water. “But I will stick with you.”

“Wise choice.”

“How is everybody else? Are you rescuing the others? There were twenty-three other microship pilots and nearly forty others, plus the people on the Hylozoist. How are they?”

“The Hylozoist lost four crew, one person was killed when the near-planet monitoring unit five was damaged. Two of the Module/microship pilots were killed, one in a collision with a fabricary, the other burning up within the atmosphere of Razhir. The other pilots have been, are being or shortly will be rescued.”

“Who were they? Who were the two pilots who died?”

“Lofgyr, Inhada was the one killed in the collision with a fabricary and Tersetier, Lanyares died when his ship burned up within the atmosphere of the gas giant.”

Backed up, she thought. He was backed up. It’s all right; he can come back. It will take time and even though he might not be exactly the same person, he’ll be mostly the same person. Of course he’ll still love you. He’d be a fool not to. Wouldn’t he?

She found that she was crying.

“Bettlescroy. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“Indeed I have, Veppers. You look well for a dead man.”

The image of the GFCF Legislator-Admiral on the little flat-screen comms computer wavered a little. The signal was weak, multiply scrambled. Veppers sat with Jasken in a small room in one of his emergency safe houses in Ubruater city, a few blocks and the width of a ribbon-park away from the main town house.

The safe house — one of several prepared long ago, just in case the wrong politicians or judges got into positions of real power and started making things uncomfortable for creative, buccaneering business people who didn’t always do things the conventional way — had shielded comms links to the systems in the town house. As soon as they’d arrived — both in the uniforms of paramedics — Veppers had taken a shower, scrubbing any remaining radioactive soot or ash out of his hair and skin, while Jasken had woken up the slightly archaic equipment in the study and started trawling the news channels and message systems. The series of urgent calls and messages from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III had been hard to ignore.

“Thank you,” Veppers told the angelic-looking little alien. “You look as you always do. What’s our situation?”

A wavering smile on the little alien’s face might have been distorted or exaggerated by the lo-fi screen. “Your situation is that you need to tell me, now, Veppers, where our targets are. It is more than urgent; it is crucial. All we’ve planned and worked for now depends on this.”

“I see. All right. I’ll tell you.”

“That comes as a great, if absurdly belated, relief.”

“Though, first, I am — as you might imagine — quite interested in finding out who tried to blow me out of the skies on my own flier, over my own estate.”

“Almost certainly the NR,” Bettlescroy said quickly, waving one hand as though this was hardly worth mentioning.

“You’ve obviously given the subject considerable thought, ally,” Veppers said quietly.

Bettlescroy looked exasperated. “The NR seem to feel you have betrayed them in some way. Though just possibly it was the Flekke, sub-contracting in some way, ever anxious to please. And the Jhlupians might feel wronged, too. Your friend Xingre seems to have disappeared, which probably means something. We will do all we can with all the resources we can afford to devote to the matter to find out who might have been responsible; however the targets are still — by far — the most important issue outstanding here.”

“Agreed. But first, your situation. I’ve got a little out of touch here; what’s happening?”

Bettlescroy seemed to be trying to control itself. “Perhaps,” it said calmly, “I have not indicated as forcefully as I might that the target information is of vital importance right now!” it said, almost screaming the last two words.

“I take your point,” Veppers said smoothly. “The targets will be with you very shortly. But I need to know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening, Veppers,” Bettlescroy hissed, sitting so close to the screen camera at its end that its face appeared distorted, almost ugly, “is that a fucking Culture hyper-ship that can split up to become a fleet of ships is laying waste to our fucking war fleet of ships even as we speak and even as you, unbelievably, continue to waste time. It’s destroying thousands of them each minute! Within a day and a half there will be no more ships left! And this despite the fact that I took it upon myself to order that all the fabricaria able to do so start manufacturing ships, not just the proportion we originally agreed on.”

Veppers assumed a look of pretended hurt. “Going back on our agree—?” he began.

“Shut up!” Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. “The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying each other, which might result in the ships annihilating themselves even quicker; within a matter of hours. It would appear only to be holding back from this course because it fears some of the ships might accidentally or mistakenly damage the fabricaria, a consequence it wishes to avoid if possible, to preserve the — and I quote — ‘unique techno-cultural monument that is the Tsungarial Disk’. That’s so thoughtful, don’t you think that’s so thoughtful? I think that’s so fucking thoughtful.” Bettlescroy stared out of the screen at them with a fierce, unnatural smile that held no humour whatsoever. “However, this thing, this wonderful super-powerful ‘ally’ that we suddenly discovered we had, now blithely tells us it will hold this tactic in reserve and meanwhile continue to target the ships itself for the sake of ‘engagemental accuracy’ and to ‘minimise collateral damage’, though frankly my fellow officers and myself strongly suspect it’s really doing so because it’s enjoying itself so much, just as it appeared quite heartily to enjoy disposing of nearly a third of our naval fleet on its approach to the Tsung system. I hope this is giving you some small, modest, indicationary idea of just how powerless we are out here at the moment, Veppers, old fellow, while we wait for your precious fucking targets.

“Meanwhile, we are continuing to deal with our pretend smatter outbreak, which has proved trickier than we anticipated, and are ourselves even having to destroy some of the fabricaria-built war fleet we worked so hard to create, just to make it look convincing to the Culture that we really are all just chums and allies fighting on the same jolly side.

“Oh! And I nearly forgot; an NR ship is causing havoc on/in/all over Vebezua! Yes! Another ship, possibly a Culture ship, possibly another Culture warship, was last heard of high-tailing it out of the Vebezua system, possibly having delivered some-thing or somebody, and possibly now departing there with the intention of joining in all the fun out here at the Disk and depleting our once-fine fleet of ships even quicker. And the NR themselves are making deeply suspicious noises, bordering on outright hostile noises, when it comes both to ourselves and you, Veppers, and are only not helping to destroy our short-lived war fleet because they want to see how fast and how ably the Culture vessel-fleet does so; valuable intelligence, we are given to understand. Though of course the presence and presumed hostility of the NR does mean that any of our ships that might escape from the vicinity of the Disk itself may well find themselves being picked off by the NR.

“There. That is the fucking situation. I face shame, humiliation, demotion, court martial and ruin, and — oh, please do believe me, dear Mr. Veppers — if such a fate befalls me I shall do everything I possibly can to make sure that you fall with me, cherished ally and co-conspirator.”

Bettlescroy took a deep breath, drew itself up and, collecting itself, it seemed, made a calm, expansive motion with its hands. “Now,” it said. “I can’t really imagine how many more of our ships have been laid waste while I have been speaking but I imagine the number comes to some several thousand. Please, Veppers, if we are to salvage anything, anything at all from what is increasingly looking like a calamitous venture and an utterly hopeless situation, tell us where the targets are. At least some of them, at least the nearest ones, given that we will have so few ships, so ill-equipped and so slow-moving, by the time you get round to finally telling us where…” Bettlescroy paused, “… the fucking…” it paused again, taking another deep breath, “… targets…” one last pause, “… are.”

Veppers sighed. “Thank you, Bettlescroy. That was really all I wanted to know.” He smiled. “One moment…” He clicked the sound off at the computer and turned to Jasken. On the screen, Bettlescroy appeared to be shouting, and striking the screen at its end with both hands. Jasken had to tear his gaze away.

“Sir?”

“Jasken, I’m absolutely famished. Would you mind seeing what we have in the kitchen here? Just a bite or two and some decent wine. Even water would do… but do look for some drinkable wine. Get something for yourself, too.” Veppers grinned, nodded at the comms unit, where Bettlescroy appeared to be trying to bite the edge of the screen. “I can manage here.”

“Sir,” Jasken said, and left the room.

Veppers watched the study door close, then turned back to the screen and switched the sound back on.

“… Where?” Bettlescroy shrieked.

“Ready?” Veppers asked calmly.

Bettlescroy sat staring at the screen, eyes wide, breathing hard. What might have been spittle disfigured its finely made chin.

“Good,” Veppers said, smiling. “The most important targets — the only ones really worth bothering with now — are easily reached and close by; they’re under the trackways on my estate of Espersium. In fact, come to think of it, somebody — possibly the NR, as you suggest — has already begun the task of destroying them, when they attacked my flier.

“Anyway, to reiterate: every trackway is underlain by what to the untutored eye looks like some sort of giant fungal structure. It isn’t. It’s substrate. Low-power, bio-based, not ultra-fast running, but high-efficiency, highly damage-resistant substrate; anything from ten to thirty metres thick under and amongst the roots, but adding up to over half a cubic kilometre of processing power spread throughout the estate. All the comms traffic to and from it is channelled through the phased array satellite links dotted round the mansion house itself. The ones that everyone still thinks just control the Virtualities and games.

“That’s what you have to hit, Bettlescroy. The under-trackway substrates contain over seventy per cent of the Hells in the entire galaxy.” He smiled again. “Of those we know of, anyway. Used to be slightly more, but very recently I sub-contracted the NR Hell, just to be on the safe side. I’ve been buying Hells up for over a century, Legislator-Admiral, taking the processing requirements and legal and jurisdictional implications off other peoples’ hands for most of my business life. The majority of the Hells are right here, in system, on planet. That is why I have always felt able to be so relaxed regarding the targeting details. Think you can get enough ships to Sichult to lay waste to my estate?”

“Truly?” Bettlescroy said, gulping, still breathing deeply. “The targets are on your own estates? Why would you do that?”

“Deniability, Bettlescroy. You’ll have to raze the trackways, wreck my lands, blast the satellite links and damage the house itself; maybe even destroy it. That house has been in my family for centuries; it and the estate are inestimably precious to me. Or at least so everybody assumes. Who’s going to believe I brought all that destruction on myself?”

“And yet you… no, wait.” The little alien shook its head. “I have to issue the relevant orders.” The Legislator-Admiral bent over its desk, then looked up again. “That’s all; the trackways of Espersium, centred on the house?”

“Yes,” Veppers said. “Target away.”

Bettlescroy took only seconds to issue the orders. When it came back it was after a blanked-out delay of a few more seconds during which, Veppers suspected, the Legislator-Admiral had composed itself, smoothed down its scalp scales and wiped its face. Bettlescroy certainly seemed much more like its old glossily imperturbable self when it switched back on.

“You would do this to yourself, Veppers? To your family’s legacy?”

“If it keeps me alive to enjoy my spoils, of course. And the spoils promise to be fabulous; another order of magnitude greater than anything I’ll be losing. The house can be rebuilt, the art treasures replaced, the trackways… well, I’d grown tired of them anyway, frankly, but they could be filled in and re-grown, I dare say. The energy weapons leave negligible radioactivity, hyper-velocity kinetics leave even less, as I understand it, and the missile warheads are clean, aren’t they?”

“Thermonuclear, but clean as possible. Designed to destroy, not contaminate,” Bettlescroy agreed.

“There you are then; it’s not as though I go camping in my estates at the best of times, so even if some areas are a bit radioactive I shan’t be too heartbroken. Let’s be honest; the grounds are mostly there to maintain a barrier between me and the proletarian hordes anyway. If the hills and fields do end up glowing in the dark they’ll work even better as insulation against the milling masses. And, in the end, I can just buy another estate; another dozen if I like.”

“And the people?”

“What people?”

“The people on the estate when it is laid waste.”

“Oh. Yes. I assume I have a few hours before any attack takes place.”

“Hmm.” The little alien hesitated, peered at its screen. “… Yes. The quickest attack would come from a small squadron of the ships fitted with fleet-donated anti-matter for their warp engines; if they simply sped on past without attempting to draw to a stop first they could hit the targets within three and a half hours of now. But their on-board weaponry targeting accuracy would not be great at that speed; they would struggle to hit with less than a hundred-metre error-allowance, at best. Missiles and smart warheads would be more precise, though Sichult’s own planetary defences would most likely intercept some of those. More pinpoint accuracy would need to come from ships that had slowed down almost to a stop. Again, your planet’s own defences might exact a toll, though they would probably still arrive in such numbers that this would not matter. Say four to five hours for those to arrive. One might attack the trackways themselves with the first high-speed waves and target the satellite links near the house with the later-arriving vessels.”

“So, bottom line: I’d have time to get a few people out,” Veppers said. “Not too many, of course; it still has to look convincing. But I can always hire more people, Bettlescroy. Never a shortage of those, ever.”

“Still, it is quite a toll you would ask of yourself.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice small things in order to achieve great things, Bettlescroy,” Veppers told the little alien. “Hosting the Hells has made me a great deal of money over the years, but they were bound to prove an embarrassment one day, or just be shut down, quite possibly with talk of law suits or reparations or whatever. All I have I can replace, and with the funds we have agreed on, and that wonderful ship… you haven’t forgotten that wonderful ship, have you, Bettlescroy?”

“It is yours, Veppers,” the Legislator-Admiral told him. “It is still being fitted out, to your instructions.”

“Marvellous. Well, with all that, I’m sure I can console myself to the loss of a few trees and my country cottage. So; let’s be clear. Nothing will happen for three and half hours, is that correct?”

The little alien looked at its screen again. “The first fly-by bombardment and missile launch targeting the trackways will take place in three point four-one hours from now. The missiles will impact between one and five minutes after the bombardment. The second wave of ships charged with carrying out the precision bombardment of the satellite links around the house will arrive between point five and one point zero hours later. We can’t be any more accurate with the timing due to the inherent variability of warp-engine crash-stops, especially that far into the gravity wells of a star and planet. So sorry. I trust that will afford you the time to do what you need to do.”

“Hmm. That will have to suffice, then, I suppose.” Veppers made an expansive gesture. “Don’t look so horrified, Bettlescroy! Onward and upward, don’t you agree? Can’t stand still; one has to embrace change, knock old stuff down to build bigger and better new stuff. Speculate to accumulate. All that sort of thing. I’m sure you have your own appropriate, culturally relevant clichés.”

The Legislator-Admiral shook its small, perfectly formed head.

“What a remarkable person you are, Veppers.”

“I know. I amaze myself sometimes.” He turned round as he heard the door behind him open. “Ah, Jasken; well done. Would you mind parcelling that stuff up to go, as a picnic? We’re off on our travels again.”