Surface Detail

Twenty-nine

^“The Scoudenfrast, I think. No, Jasken, that’s a Scundrundri. The Scoudenfrast is the one alongside, the purple one with the yellow splodges. I always did think Scundrundri was over-rated. Besides, with these gone, the rest I have in the town house will be worth more. Nolyen, give Mr. Jasken a hand with these out to the flier, would you?”

“Sir.”

“Quickly, both of you.”

“Sir,” Jasken said. He lifted an armful of old masters and headed for the end of the long, curved gallery, followed by Nolyen, similarly laden. It was gloomy in the place; the house was relying on its emergency lighting, and not even all of that was functioning properly. Nolyen — a big, dim country lad from the kitchens — dropped one of the paintings he was carrying, and struggled to pick it up again; Jasken came back and used his foot to help lever the thing back up into the boy’s hands. Veppers watched all this, sighing.

He was actually a little bit disappointed in his staff and their commitment. He’d expected to find more people here in the house, worried over the fate of their master — they still thought he might be dead, after all — and determined to help save the house from the surrounding and encroaching fires. Instead, he’d discovered that most of them had already fled the place.

They’d taken to the wheeled vehicles that the estate used on a day-to-day basis, and to those from Veppers’ own collection of automotive exotica, stored and cared for in some of the mansion’s underground garages. There were some fliers left dotted about the place but it looked like they’d fallen victim to the same stray radiation pulses that had knocked out the local comms.

Nolyen had greeted them joyfully as they’d left the flier and somebody had shouted a glad-you’re-safe-sir or something similar from the roof as they’d walked across the courtyard, but that was about it. “Ingrates,” Veppers had muttered as they made their way to the gallery with the most expensive paintings.

“Four minutes and I’ll see you at the Number Three Strongroom!” Veppers called after Jasken, who, arms full of paintings, just turned and nodded. Veppers supposed they could have cut the paintings from the frames, like thieves did, but that had seemed wrong somehow.

Veppers jogged along the gallery, down a radial corridor towards some splendidly tall windows — my, there was a lot of smoke and even some flame out there, and it was far too dark for the time of evening — and let himself into his study. He sat at his desk.

The study was dark in the patchy emergency lighting. He allowed himself the poignant luxury of one last look round the place, thinking how sad, and yet also how oddly exciting it was that it might all soon be gone, then he started opening drawers and compartments. The desk — self-powered, identifying him by his smell as well as by his palm and fingerprints — made soft, sighing, snicking noises as it obeyed him; a little familiar oasis of calm and reassurance in all the chaos. He filled a small hide carrybag with all the most precious and useful things he could think of. The last thing he lifted, after a slight hesitation, was a pair of knives, sheathed in skin-soft hide, that had belonged to his grand-father and, before that, to somebody else’s.

A wind seemed to be getting up, judging from the way smoke was moving on the far side of the barely visible formal gardens; however, despite all the commotion outside, little sound got through the multiply glazed and bullet-proof windows. He was just closing the last drawer, ready to go, when he heard a noise like a faint “pop”.

He looked up and saw a tall, dark alien figure standing looking at him from near the closed doors. For a moment he thought it might be ambassador Huen, but it was somebody else; thin, with a too-straight, contorted-looking back. Dressed in different shades of dark grey.

“Can I help you?” he said, putting the still-open hide bag down at his feet where he sat, and dipping one hand into it, feeling around. He made a waving, distracting gesture with his other hand. “For example, with your manners? We tend to knock first, here.”

“Mr. Joiler Veppers, my name is Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh,” the figure said in an oddly accented voice that might have been female but that definitely didn’t appear to be entirely in synch with its lip-movements. “I am a citizen of the Culture. I am here to apprehend you on suspicion of murder. Will you come with me?”

“How can I put this?” he said, raising and firing the alien-tech gun in the same movement. The gun made a loud snapping noise, light flared in the dim study and the alien disappeared in a silvery shimmer. The doors immediately behind where it had been standing burst open against their hinges, swinging broken and hanging into the corridor beyond in a flurry of black dust, a semi-circular hole punched in each, circumferenced with glowing yellow-white sparks. Veppers looked at the gun — a present from the Jhlupian Xingre, long ago — then at the still-swinging, smoking doors, and finally at the patch of rug where the figure had been standing. “Hmm,” he said.

He shrugged, stood, stuffed the gun into his waistband, snapped the hide bag shut and waved some of the noxious fumes away from his face as he exited through the wrecked doors, which were starting to burn.

“Jasken.”

He heard the female voice pronounce his name behind him, and knew it was her. He placed the paintings carefully on the floor of the flier and turned. Nolyen had stopped in the doorway of the flier. He was staring over the top of the paintings he held at the young woman standing by the door to the flight deck. Perhaps he was intimidated by the scroll-work of faint, tattooed lines covering her face.

“Miss,” Jasken said, nodding to her.

“It is me, Jasken.”

“I know,” he said. He turned his head deliberately, nodding to Nolyen. “Leave those, Nolyen; never mind anything else. Just leave; get well away from the house.”

Nolyen set the paintings down. He hesitated.

“Get away, Nolyen,” Jasken said.

“Sir,” the young man said, then turned and left.

Lededje watched him go, then turned back to Jasken.

“You let him kill me, Hib.”

Jasken sighed. “No, I tried to stop him. But, in the end, all right; I could have done more. And I suppose I could have killed him after he killed you. So I’m as bad as he is. Hate me if you like. I don’t claim to be a particularly good person, Led. And there is such a thing as duty.”

“I know. I thought you might feel some towards me.”

“My first is towards him, whether either of us likes it or not.”

“Because he pays your wages and all I did was let you fuck me?”

“No; because I pledged myself to his service. I never said anything to you that contradicted that.”

“No, you didn’t, did you?” She gave a wan smile. “I suppose I should have spotted that. How very correct of you, even while you were… despoiling his property. All those little whispered words of tenderness, about how much I meant, what we might hope for in the future. Were you always reviewing them as you said them? Running them past some lawyer bit in your brain, looking for inconsistencies?”

“Something like that,” Jasken told her, meeting her gaze. He shook his head. “We never had a future, Led. Not the sort you wanted to imagine. More quick couplings while his back was turned, hidden from everyone, until one of us got bored, or he found out. You belonged to him for ever, didn’t you ever under-stand that? We were never going to be able to run away together.” He looked down, then back up into her eyes again. “Or are you going to tell me you loved me? Because I always thought you took me as a lover just to get back at him and have me on-side for the next time you tried to escape.”

“Didn’t fucking work, did it?” she said bitterly. “You helped him hunt me down.”

“I had no choice. You didn’t have to run. As—”

“Really? That’s not how it felt to me.”

“As soon as you did, I had to do what my duty to him demanded.”

“So, none of it meant anything.” She was crying a little now, but quickly wiped both cheeks with the back of her wrists, tears smeared across the tattoo lines. “More fool me. Because I didn’t come back just to kill Veppers. I needed to ask how…” She stopped, swallowed. “Did it mean nothing to you?”

Jasken sighed. “Of course it meant something. A sweetness. Moments I’ll never forget. It just couldn’t mean what you wanted it to mean.”

She laughed, without hope or humour. “Then I am a fool, am I not?” she said, shaking her head. “I really did think you might love me.”

He gave the smallest of smiles. “Oh, I loved you with all my heart, from the very first.”

She glared at him.

He stared at her, eyes bright. “It’s just that love is not enough, Led. Not always. Not these days; maybe not ever. And never around people like Joiler Veppers.”

She looked down at the floor of the flier, brought her arms up and hugged herself. Jasken glanced at the time display on the flier’s bulkhead.

“Could be as little as a quarter of an hour till the second wave arrives,” he said. His tone was concerned, even kind. “You seemed to get here pretty fast. Can you get away again just as quickly?”

She nodded. She sniffed back her tears, wiped her cheeks and eyes again. “Do one thing for me,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Go.”

“Go? I can’t just—”

“Now. Just leave. Take the flier and go. Save the servants and staff; all you can find. But leave him here, with me.”

She looked into his eyes. Jasken hesitated, his jaw working. She shook her head. “He’s finished, Hib,” she said. “The NR — the Nauptre — they know. They can intercept whatever passes between him and the GFCF; they know about his agreement, about how he tricked them. The Culture know everything too. The Hells are gone, so he can’t use those to save himself now. He won’t be allowed to get away with all he’s done. Even if the Enablement can turn a blind eye to something on this scale, he’s got the NR and the Culture to answer to.” She smiled a small, half-despairing smile. “He finally found people more powerful than he is to fall foul of.” She shook her head again. “But the point is: you can’t save him. All you can save now is yourself.” She nodded towards the open door of the flier. “And anybody else you can find out there.”

Jasken looked out through one of the high-level ports in the flier, at the skies above the dully lit mansion. A wall of smoke like the end of the world was lit from beneath by flames.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll try to find him.” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “I will kill him, if I can. Not pretending otherwise.”

“He won’t be an easy man to kill.”

“I know.” She shrugged. “Perhaps I won’t have to. A condition of me getting this chance was that one of the Culture people went to confront him, give him the chance to turn himself in.”

Jasken gave a small, snorting laugh. “Think that’ll work?”

“No.” She tried to smile; failed.

Jasken looked into her eyes for a little while. Then he reached behind his back and brought out a small gun, holding it by the barrel as he passed it to her. “Try the Number Three Strongroom.”

She took the gun. “Thank you.” Their hands hadn’t touched as the weapon passed from him to her. She looked at the gun. “Will it still work?” she asked. “The ship was going to disable all the electronic weapons.”

“Most are already fried,” Jasken told her. “But that one’ll work. Just metal and chemicals. Ten shots. Safety catch is on the side facing you; move that little lever till you can see the red dot.” He watched her take the safety off. He realised she’d probably never handled a gun in her life. “Take care,” he told her. Another hesitation, as he seemed to think about coming towards her, hugging or holding or kissing her, but then she said:

“You too,” and turned and left, walking out of the flier and across the courtyard.

Jasken looked at the floor for a moment, then along it to the paintings in their ornate frames.

Lededje found the young servant Nolyen in the archway leading to the main vestibule, crouched on his haunches. “You were supposed to leave, Nolyen,” she said.

“I know, miss,” he said. He looked like he’d been crying too.

“Go back to the flier, Nolyen,” she told him. “Mr. Jasken will need help looking for people to take to safety. Now, quickly; still time.”

Nolyen ran back towards the flier and helped Jasken throw the paintings out before they took off to look for people to save.

He jogged down the stairs to the basement. The stairwell was poorly lit and he’d forgotten how far down the level holding the deepest strongrooms was. He’d rung for a lift up in the house, but even as he’d stood watching the floor-indicator display winking on and off with an error code, he’d realised he shouldn’t step into an elevator car in the circumstances even if one did arrive.

He stopped on the last landing, above a pool of darkness beneath, and dug inside the hide bag, pulling out a pair of night-vision glasses; lighter, less bulky but also less sophisticated versions of the Oculenses Jasken had worn. They weren’t working either; he threw them away. Next thing he tried was a torch, but the flash-light refused to work too. He smashed it against the wall. That felt good. At least the bag was getting lighter.

He felt his way down the last few stairs and opened the door to the better-lit corridor beyond. Pipes and conduits covered the ceiling, the floor was concrete and a few large metal doors were the only adornments to the rough-cast walls. A few very dim lights were on constantly; others were flickering. He was a little surprised Jasken wasn’t here already. He supposed time seemed to move oddly when everything was getting this fraught. He checked the antique watch; at least twelve minutes to go.

The strongroom door was a massive circular metal plug as tall as a man and a metre thick. The display — he’d forgotten it even had a display — was blinking an error message.

“Cunt!” he screamed, smashing one fist on the door. He rolled the code in anyway, but the noises the mechanism made didn’t even sound right and the display didn’t alter. Certainly there was no series of reassuring clicks from umpteen places round the door’s circumference, as there would have been if it was unlocking itself. He tried the levers and handles that then had to be moved, but they wouldn’t budge.

He glimpsed movement further down the long curve of the corridor, near a set of doors leading to another stairwell.

“Jasken?” he called. It was hard to tell in the dim, inconstant light. Maybe it was the Culture lunatic who’d come to “apprehend” him again. He pulled the Jhlupian gun out. No; the figure moving towards him moved normally, looked Sichultian.

“Jasken?” he shouted.

The figure stopped, maybe thirty metres away. It raised its arms level in front of it, gripping something. A gun! he realised as some-thing flashed. He started to fall into a crouch. There was a smack and a whine from somewhere way overhead and to his left, then a barking roar came ringing down the corridor. Crouched on one knee, he aimed the Jhlupian gun at the figure and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again. The figure fired the gun once more and a bullet kicked off the top of the strongroom door, whining away behind him as another thunderclap of noise pulsed down the corridor. He could see smoke swirling round the figure. Smoke? What were they firing? A fucking musket? But at least their gun still worked, unlike the Jhlupian blaster. Like a knife would still work.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he said, throwing the useless gun away and scrabbling to his feet, holding the hide bag between him and the figure down the corridor as he ran for the doors he’d just come through.

There was something round lying on the floor of the first landing; he discovered this when he trod on it and his foot went out behind him, dropping him and banging his knee on the next step up. He howled in rage, limped on up the steps.

The fucking gun hadn’t worked! It had worked before but it had stopped! Was it some fucking stupid ceremonial piece of junk that only had one fucking shot in it? Xingre, the bastard, had told him it could stop a tank, bring down aircraft and keep on firing till you grew old. Lying mother-fucking alien cunt!

He was one flight down from the ground floor when he heard the doors at the foot of the stairwell bang open and steps come hurrying up towards him. Fuck everything else, then; just get to Jasken, get to the flier. Cut and run. What fucker would dare fire a fucking gun at him anyway? Probably only the demented little bitch claiming to be Y’breq. She was about as good a shot as he’d have expected.

His lungs and throat felt like a blast furnace after running up all those steps; his knee was hurting really badly but he just had to ignore it. He threw open the door to the main ground-level corridor and ran for the nearest courtyard doors.

The flier wasn’t there. He could see this twenty or more steps away from the doorway because there was a large open reception area with huge windows looking straight out at the courtyard, but he kept on running for the doors, not believing what he was seeing, and threw the doors open anyway, in time to see the flier pulling away overhead, as though it had just taken off from the roof of the mansion.

“Jasken!” he screamed, the force of it tearing at his throat.

He looked frantically round the circular courtyard. This couldn’t be happening. The flier couldn’t have gone. It just couldn’t; he needed it, he needed it to be here, needed it so he could get away. That must have been another, similar flier he’d just seen above the rooftops. It couldn’t have gone. It just wasn’t possible. He was depending on it, so it had to be here. It couldn’t disguise itself, could it? Go see-through or something freakish, could it? It was just a hired civilian flier; nothing military or alien. Best money could hire, built by one of his own companies, but it couldn’t turn fucking invisible. He stared round the courtyard, willing the aircraft still to be there. But all that he could see was a half-collapsed pile of paintings; nothing and nobody else. He glimpsed movement through the windows to one side, in the corridor he’d just run down.

He ran for the nearest archway leading through the house to the grounds. A gun. He needed a gun. An old fashioned chemical-explosion gun. What had happened to Jasken? Jasken had a gun. He always carried several weapons. He had a little hand-gun that had no sight or screen or electrics in it at all, just as a last resort. Dear fuck, it wasn’t Jasken chasing him, was it? He ran through the tall archway leading towards the outside, his steps echoing in the arch high overhead. He glanced back, saw the figure pursuing him, but stumbled and nearly fell as he did so. No, not Jasken. Too small and slim to be Jasken. And Jasken wouldn’t have missed, not twice.

It had to be the little bitch claiming to be Y’breq. She must have tricked Jasken, had an accomplice; maybe the Culture maniac who’d tried to arrest him. They’d be flying the aircraft. The fucking Culture! A gun. Where would he find a gun? He ran out onto the flagstone circle which encompassed the house.

The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fires beyond.

Gun. He needed a gun. There were old-fashioned, ancient, even antique guns splattered liberally over the walls of the house, just like there were swords and spears and shields, but none of them worked; none of them were any fucking use. Who the hell still used old-fashioned guns for fuck’s sake? Gamekeepers? They used lasers like everybody else, didn’t they? He wasn’t even sure where the gamekeepers’ cottages were; hadn’t they been moved when he’d had the raceball court put in?

He limped on, breath wheezing, knee aching, wondering if he could hide in the maze; maybe jump out on whoever was pursuing him, slit their throat using one of the two knives he still had. He sort of remembered the layout of the maze, he thought. He looked at where the maze ought to be and saw its central tower, on fire, flames waving wildly like orange banners from its wooden super-structure. He looked desperately around, searching for the flier, or another aircraft. He should have headed for the garages, he thought. Maybe some of the cars were still there and working. He patted the pocket where his antique watch had been, but it was gone.

Tall, skinny towers and linked, soaring arches stood out black against a distant roaring wall of yellow-orange flame, off to one side.

The fucking battleships. They had chemical guns. There were explosives, rockets, grenades, bullets; all that stuff, there. He couldn’t think of anything else. He ran for the battleship area. He looked back briefly. The figure sprinted out of the archway, heading towards him, then seemed to slow, looking about. Maybe they couldn’t see him. He was wearing mostly dark clothes, thank fuck.

Throat on fire, legs like jelly, knee like a spike had been driven into it, he scrabbled around inside the hide bag, found a soft, double sheath, pulled it out and stuck it and the pair of knives it held into his jacket. He threw the bag and everything else away.

She had never fired a gun before, never even held one. She used both hands, hoping this was right. The noise of the old explosive-based weapon going off was so great, and the kick against her arms so hard, she thought it had blown up in her hands; she half expected to find she’d lost fingers. She didn’t see where the bullet went, but now Veppers was on one knee, pointing something at her. The gun and her fingers were intact. She coughed on the acrid gas the gun had given off, fired it again. Another ear-ringing detonation. She couldn’t believe it was meant to be this noisy.

She’d missed again. At least she saw where this shot hit: well above Veppers, near the top of the great circular door of the strongroom. She knew these old reaction weapons had significant recoil but she’d always assumed it happened after the bullet had left the barrel, on its way to wherever it had been aimed. Maybe it didn’t work that way.

Veppers turned and ran, crashing through the doors to the stairs. She set off after him. When she got to the doors she kicked them open in case he was hiding just behind them. The stairwell was a little dimmer than the corridor, but she could see okay. Bits of a smashed-up torch were strewn across the first landing; on the first step up lay the antique watch Veppers had looked at in ambassador’s Huen’s office. She ran on up, seeing and hearing Veppers a handful of flights above.

Running along the corridor, she saw him hesitate in the court-yard, staring frantically about. Then he ran off through the main archway. And not running quite perfectly; limping.

Outside, once she’d exited the tall archway, she stopped for a moment, taken aback by the sheer apocalyptic scale of the fiery roaring chaos swirling around the mansion.

A ragged, tearing wind that seemed to have come out of nowhere howled beneath a cauldron of night-black, sky-obliterating smoke. Manically leaping, furiously rolling flames spilled everywhere; the air was full of whirling, burning debris, numerous as leaves in the first storm of autumn. The shock was almost physical, the heat on her face from the ubiquitous flames as strong as that from an equatorial sun; she slowed to a trot without realising.

She shook herself out of it, quickly looked around.

For a moment, she thought she’d lost him, then she saw him half running, half staggering in the direction of the water maze. He was silhouetted against flames for a moment and she aimed at him, nearly fired, but then decided he was too far away; the gun was for close range and she was anyway no marksman. Eight shots left.

Down a grassed bank, clattering against a chain-link fence, hidden from the mansion by the slope, running along the path, making for the gates that led to the network of channels around the lakes. The gates, the fucking gates; what if they were closed, locked? Then he saw something ahead, glinting in the flames, and running towards it found a crash-landed flier, one of the estate’s runabouts, snouted into the path and the fence at one end of a trough of ploughed-up earth; the fence had tipped, fallen, lay flat on the ground just beyond the crumpled nose of the craft. He leapt onto the flier’s stubby front canard, jumped over the fractured nose and was in the battleship ground, pumping and wheezing along the internal path beneath the towers and arches of the raised system of canals. The sheds where the ships were kept were on the far side of the grounds, away from the mansion, near the trees.

Crazy, crazy, crazy; what was he doing? The fucking sheds would be locked.

But maybe not. There were people there a lot of the time, and he’d been planning a battleship tournament in a few days, so the engineers and technicians would have been working on the vessels, testing them, readying them. It hadn’t been night when all this chaos had kicked off, even though it felt like midnight now. It had been afternoon; people would have been in and around the ships and sheds, and what were the odds in the midst of all this mayhem that they’d carefully packed everything away and locked up everything they were meant to lock up? Not a chance.

See? He’d been vindicated. This had been the right place to come; his instinct had been smack on the money.

He — not this mad bitch running after him with a miniature cannon — would come out of this ahead; he’d survive, he’d win. He was the winner, he had the history of success, he was the one who knew how to triumph. Fuck; if it really was her he’d already killed her once. What did that tell you?

A burning tree, storeys high, already half uprooted, was slowly falling, thirty metres ahead of him. It came thudding through the fence, crashing and rolling off a flying buttress in a storm of sparks and splashing into a watery channel, smothering the path with flame. The buttress seemed to hesitate then started to crumple and fall, crashing down in a welter of stone and water, creating billows of steam.

The way ahead was blocked; he ran instead for the nearest wading point leading to the first of the islands. He could see the layout of the lakes and channels in his head, knew it better than the hedge maze because he’d looked down on it so many times. The wading points, surfaced with mesh-covered slabs under the water, were located in the middle of each island’s shore line. They stretched as far as one island away from the pool in front of the maintenance area and the sheds. He could wade through the mud-bottomed pool or even swim the rest.

She saw him leap into the water maze over the front of the crashed flier, saw the great tree fall. She followed, vaulting the buckled nose of the flier, catching up as he took splashing to the water, wading from the mainland to the nearest island. Burning embers and curtains of smoke were blowing across the water maze, darkening and lighting the miniature landscape alternately, revealing and concealing the running, limping figure ahead of her as he headed for who knew where. Maybe he was thinking of the sheds where the ships were kept. Perhaps he saw himself jumping into one and firing all its pretend little guns at her. She followed via the wading point, the water in the channel cold round her legs, dragging at her, slowing her. It was like trying to run in a dream.In the centre of the channel the water reached as far up as her hips before shallowing again.

Veppers had crossed the island beyond and was wading the next channel to one of the larger islands by the time she hauled her protesting legs out of the water. He disappeared as a dark, rolling cloud of smoke flowed between them.

When it cleared he’d gone.

She ran, panting, across the island, splashed across the next wading point and went stumbling up onto the next island. She looked all about, terrified that she’d lost him or that he might be lying in wait for her. She had to wave burning, floating scraps of twigs and leaves away from her face. A copse of trees forty metres away suddenly caught and flamed, casting a fierce yellow-orange glow over the whole low, hump-back island.

Something glinted down and to one side, in the reed bed close to her, and she turned.

He’d fallen, slipping on something as his knee had given way and his foot went out from under him, sending him skidding and plunging down the muddy slope into the reeds that lined the island. Wading the channels had taken the last of the strength from his legs; he doubted he’d be able to stand, let alone run any more. His back had hit some solid ground just before his feet and legs splashed into the dark water, and he was half winded, bouncing from the impact and turned onto his side. Behind, he saw a wall of black smoke just clearing and realised it had been between him and her as he’d slipped. She might not have seen him fall.

For an instant there he’d despaired, thinking he’d never get to where he was going and she’d catch him, but now he thought, No, I can use this to my advantage. She’s the one who has to watch out. I’m going to win here, not her. Even upsets and what looked like misfortune could be turned to advantage if you had the right mind-set, the right attitude, if the universe was somehow always subtly on your side just because you fitted it better than anybody else, knew its true and secret workings better than anybody else.

He lay, partially concealed by the reeds around him, waiting for her. He dug inside his jacket, where the knives were, pulling one of them out of its sheath. When she came stumbling up onto the island, panting and dripping, he could see that she had lost him. He had his advantage. He raised himself up a little on one elbow, threw the knife with all his might.

Knife-throwing wasn’t one of his skills, and the knives weren’t throwing knives anyway. The weapon somersaulted a couple of times, flashing in the orange light from the fires that raged all around them. She must have caught a glimpse of it coming at her, because she started to duck and instinctively began to raise the hand nearest the knife’s trajectory, to fend it off.

The handle of the knife caught her hard on one temple, grazing her, and the hand she’d raised to try and protect herself, the hand holding the gun, went on up past her head. An instant after the knife struck her head the gun roared, flashing in the night, its detonation flatter and less sharp than it had been in the tunnel beneath the house. He saw the gun fly from her hand as she staggered, stumbled and started to fall.

He’d seen where the gun had landed, though it had disappeared again after bouncing into some longer grass over the other side of the island. Still, he knew where it must be. He scrambled to his knees then his feet, finding renewed strength from somewhere, hands clawing at the mud and grass and earth until he was in a crouch, most of the way upright and could throw himself across the grass as the girl pirouetted nearby, staggering like a drunk, staring at him as he limped and hopped past a few metres away, heading for where the gun must be.

He should just have knifed her, he realised. He had the other knife. He’d fixated on getting a gun but that wasn’t really what was important; what mattered was killing her before she killed him. The gun hadn’t really mattered at all. What had he been thinking of? He was an idiot. Then he saw the gun, lying at the edge of the reed bed, a hand’s breadth from the dark, glinting water.

He dived, hand outstretched, thudding into the ground, hand closing round the barrel of the gun, desperately slapping at it and trying to turn it as he brought his other hand up, finally grasping it properly. He rolled over, expecting to find her running towards him, leaping on top of him, clutching the knife he’d thrown at her or just with her clawed hands reaching for his throat.

She’d gone. He sat up as quickly as he could, legs quivering, chest heaving, breath whistling to and fro inside his throat. He stood, shakily, and saw her, down by the reeds a little way off, just starting to pull herself back out onto dry land.

Off to one side, more trees were catching fire, sending flames leaping and boiling into the darkness. They lit up the sheds where the miniature battleships were kept. He could see some of the vessels themselves: one on a wheeled cradle on the dockside, another floating in the water by the quay. Some of the sheds were surrounded by burning grass and fallen branches, flames starting to lick up their metal walls and curl over their shallow-pitched roofs. A burning bough fell from a tree and crashed through the roof of the nearest shed in a shower of sparks.

He walked, slowly, legs shaking, breath raw and ragged in the warm, fire-parched air, to where the girl was trying to pull herself out of the mud and the crushed, flattened reeds. Blood was running down her face from where the knife had hit her.

Part of him wanted to tell her he still didn’t believe that she was who she said she was, but even if it was true, well tough. Winners won, the successful succeeded, aggression and predation and ruthlessness tended to win out — what a surprise. Just the way life was. Nothing personal. Well, actually, everything fucking personal.

But he didn’t really have the breath for any of it. “Fuck you,” he said at her as she crawled in front of him and he stood over her, pointing the gun at her straggle-haired head. He’d said it as loud as he could but it still came out as more of a wheeze than anything else. She swung at him, one arm and hand whirling round. She’d found the knife he’d thrown at her, had gone into the reed bed to find it. The blade whacked into his leg, into the calf just below his good knee, sending pain darting up his leg and spine and detonating in his head.

He screamed, staggered back, held the gun in both hands and nearly fell as the girl collapsed to one side, unbalanced by the need to wield the knife that was now sticking out of his leg. “Fucking little—!” he shrieked at her.

He steadied, straightened despite the pain, aimed the gun at her and squeezed the trigger.

The trigger was stuck. He heaved at it, tried again to pull it, but it just wasn’t moving. Felt like his finger couldn’t move. He tried to move the gun to the other hand, but even that was difficult. It was as though his hands were so cold they weren’t obeying orders. He heard himself make a mewling, whimpering noise. He glanced at the side of the gun, looking for a safety catch, but it was already off. He tried the gun again, but it just wasn’t happening. He tried to throw it away, but then it was as though it was stuck to his hand. Finally it sailed off into the darkness. He fumbled in his jacket for the second knife, then — staggering, feeling like he was about to black out — realised he could pull out the one sticking into his leg.

The girl was still on the ground near his feet. She seemed to be trying to get up again, then she collapsed back, thudding down onto her rump, one arm going behind to steady herself.

He found the second knife inside his jacket pocket, pulled it from its sheath. Somewhere off to one side there were lots of little explosions like fireworks. Light flickered everywhere. Stuff was whining and zipping overhead. He took a step towards her as she looked woozily up at him.

Then he was caught, steadied by something that wasn’t him, rooted to the ground, unable to move, as though every part of him had seized up: muscles, skeleton, everything.

The girl looked up at him, and something changed in her face. It seemed to relax, and her shoulders and chest shook once, almost as though she was laughing.

“Ah,” she said, and got her legs beneath her, pushing herself up until she was kneeling. She felt at the side of her head, where the blood was, looked at the darkness of it on her hand in the flickering orange light. She looked back to him.

He couldn’t move. He simply could not move. He wasn’t paralysed — he could feel his muscles straining, trying to move him — but he was stuck, as though enchanted, utterly immobile.

“Look at your hands, Veppers,” the girl told him, over the noise of more explosions. Stuttering light flared against her mud-streaked face and wet, bedraggled hair.

He could still move his eyes. He looked down at his hands.

They were covered in fine silver lines, glinting in the firelight.

Where had—?

“Aye-aye,” said a male voice nearby. “Pleasant evening for it, what?”

A tall, too-thin man in pale, loose clothes strolled past. When he glanced back, he saw that it was Demeisen. The avatar spared him a glance then went to stand by the girl.

“You okay?”

“Never better. Thought you’d left.”

“Yup. That was the idea. Need a hand up?”

“Give me a moment.”

“Happily.” The man turned and looked at Veppers, folding his arms. “This isn’t her doing this,” he told him. “It’s me.”

Veppers couldn’t get his mouth or jaw to work. Even his breathing was difficult. Then a thousand tiny fierce pains sprang up, as though hundreds of hair-fine wires were wrapping every centimetre of him, and were starting to shrink, cutting into every part of his body.

A bubbling, wheezing whine escaped his mouth.

The man glanced down at the girl again. “Unless you want to finish him, of course,” he said to her. He looked back at Veppers, frowning a little. “I wouldn’t though. Conscience can be a terrible thing.” He smiled. “So I hear.” He shrugged. “Unless you’re some-thing like me, of course,” he murmured. “I don’t give a fuck.”

The girl looked up into Veppers’ eyes as the wires of the tattoo device cut slowly into him. He had never known such pain, never guessed that anything could hurt so much.

“Quickly,” she said, and coughed as more smoke and burning embers sailed past the three of them.

“What?” the avatar said.

“Quickly,” she said. “Don’t draw it out. Just—”

The avatar gazed into Veppers’ eyes and nodded down at the girl. “See?” he said. “Good kid, really.”

The pain, already intolerable, increased wildly, just around his neck and head.

The coup de grâce was Veppers’ head twisting right round, an almost comical expression filling his already blood-flecked face as the tattoo lines flicked into a spiral, rose up and shrank inwards all at once, so that his head seemed to crumple and shrink into itself, becoming a far-too-thin tall cylinder that disappeared in a spray of blood.

Lededje had to look away. She heard what sounded like a whole big bowl full of rotten fruit being emptied onto the ground, then heard and felt the body thump into the grass beside her a moment later. She opened her eyes to see it twitch a couple of times, blood still pumping from the garrotted, twisted-open neck.

She felt she was going to faint. She put both arms out behind her. “Neat trick,” she said, watching arcs of flame and little sprays of fire burst from the miniature docks and the sheds where the model battleships were kept, as they burned and blew up, shells and rockets whizzing everywhere.

“It moved over from you to him when you tried to strangle the fucker in ambassador Huen’s office,” Demeisen told her, going over to kick the body once, as though testing it was real. “Left you with nothing but a glorified sun tan.”

She coughed again, looked around at the sheer lunatic devastation going on all around them.

“Other ships,” she said. “Soon. Need to—”

“No, we don’t,” Demeisen said, stretching and yawning. “No second wave. None left.” He stooped, plucking the knife out of the leg of the headless body, which had stopped twitching now. “Left the last handful for the planetary defence guys, to give them something to feel heroic about,” he told her as he inspected the knife, weighing it in his hand, twirling it a couple of times. A furious whizzing noise, barely following a flash of light, was a shell from one of the stricken, fire-consumed battleships; the avatar’s arm moved blurringly fast and he batted it away from his face without even looking, still admiring the knife. The fizzing shell slapped into the nearest reed bed and blew up in a tall fountain of water, orange-tinged white on grubby black. “I did think of letting just one through, or even stomping the relevant targets myself, just for the heck of it,” Demeisen said, “and pretending. But in the end I thought not; better to leave more of the evidence on the ground. Plus some of the Hells have only gone dormant, still storing personalities. Might be able to save some, if there’s anything sane left to save.”

The avatar held one arm straight out and the tattoo — glinting, pristine — uncurled itself from Veppers’ body, spiralling lazily up into the air like a twister-wind in a stubble field and wrapping itself round the avatar’s hand like spun mercury, disappearing as it flowed over his skin and up his arm.

“Was that thing alive all the time?” she asked.

“Yup. Not just alive; intelligent. So fucking smart it’s even got a name.”

She held up one hand while he was drawing his next breath. “I’m sure it has,” she said. “But… spare me.”

Demeisen grinned. “Slap-drone, personal protection, weapon; all of the above,” he said, stretching again, as though the tattoo had spread itself all over him and he was testing how it fitted his body.

He looked down at her.

“You ready to go back? If you’re coming back?”

She sat, arms out behind her, blood in one eye, aching everywhere, feeling like shit. She nodded. “I suppose.”

“Want this?” offering her the knife handle first.

“Better,” she said, taking it, then struggling to her feet, helped by his other hand. “Family heirloom.” She looked at the avatar, frowning. “There were two,” she said.

He shook his head, tsked, stooped and pulled the other knife from where it had stuck in the ground. He took the double sheath from Veppers’ jacket, presenting it and both blades to her with a bow.

A scale-model battleship, still tied-up to its quayside, on fire from stem to stern, lifted suddenly in the middle, breaking its back as it blew up, dispensing fire and flames, debris and shrapnel and angrily buzzing and whining shells and rockets all about. The first, keel-sundering gout of fire briefly lit up two silvery ovoids stood on their ends on a small low island nearby, before they vanished, almost as quickly as they had appeared.