Surface Detail

Three

It was some time before Yime Nsokyi realised she was the last one left firing.

The Orbital’s Hub had been the first thing to go, blitzed in an instant by a staggeringly bright CAM burst before there had been any warning whatsoever. Then the hundred or so major ships moored beneath the O’s outer surface, contained within Bulkhead Range docks or approaching or leaving the Orbital, had been destroyed in a single synchronised scatter-gun blaze, Minds precisely obliterated by exquisitely focused Line-gun loci, their already cram-packed substrates collapsing into particles more dense than neutron star material, all that prized wit, intelligence and knowledge-almost-beyond-measuring snuffed in every case to a barely visible ultra-dense cinder almost before they had time to realise what was happening to them.

While the shock waves from the gravity-point collapses were still propagating through the victim vessels’ internal structures and hulls, they were slammed with meticulously graded degrees of further destruction, the craft within or very close to the O targeted with small nukes and thermonuclear charges sufficient to destroy the ships themselves without compromising the strategic structure of the Orbital itself, while those further out were simply smithereened with anti-matter warheads, their megatonne bodies slashed across the outboard skies in blinding pulses of energy that threw jagged shadows across the vast internal surfaces of the world.

All of this in a handful of seconds. A heartbeat later the independent high-AI Defensive Nodes overseeing each of the O’s original Plates had been knocked out with pinpoint plasma displacements and simultaneously the few thousand nearby Interstellar-class ships were attacked, meeting their fates in a grotesque parody of size seniority; first the larger, more capable craft vanishing in nuclear or thermonuclear explosions, then the second-rank ships moments later, followed by smaller and smaller vessels until all those were gone and the blossoming waves of annihilation moved on to target the slowest, in-system craft.

Finally the semi-slaved AIs, dotted at random throughout the fabric of the entire bracelet world, had stopped communicating all at once, the weapon systems that they had fallen heir to as the higher-level control processes had been destroyed either subsiding to dormancy or actively starting to attack whatever defensive capability there was left.

Drones and humans taking command of independently controllable weapon and munition delivery systems made up what was left, the few machines and people in the right place at the right time scrabbling to take over from the blitzed machines even as they were struggling to comprehend what was happening to their world. Its end, Yime Nsokyi thought as she’d careened down a drop shaft from the traveltube interchange she’d been in as the attack began. She’d bounced into the little blown-diamond bubble of the ancient plasma cannon’s back-up control blister in time to be almost blinded by a detonating in-system clipper ship less than a millisecond away, the diamond’s outer protective film barely having time to switch to mirror and her own eyes reacting late, leaving her with dots dancing in her eyes as well as the blush of an instant radiation tan warming her face.

Not the end of the world, though, she thought as she settled into the seat and felt the restraints close around her. Not destroying the O itself, just everything about it. Probably the end of my world, though; this doesn’t look survivable. She tried to remember when she’d last backed up. Months ago? She wasn’t even sure. Sloppy. She kicked the gun’s systems out of network and into local control, dumbing its systems down to minimally interferable-with hardened optic communication with atomechanical back-up readied and mirroring, then flicked antiquely solid switches on a control panel, creating a great hum and buzz all around her as the thirty-metre turret woke up, screens bright, controls alive.

She brought the bulky helmet over her head, checked it was working on visual and audio and that there was air in the mask component, then left it in place for added protection as much as anything while the gun’s ancient control comms established direct links with her neural lace; systems designed and code written millennia apart met, made sense and established rules and parameters. It was a strange, invasively unpleasant feeling, like a spreading itch inside her skull she could not scratch. She felt the lace using her drug glands to jink her already quickened senses and reactions up to one of her pre-agreed maxima. Felt like the setting was deterioration within minutes and burn-out in less than a quarter of an hour. Ah, the very quickest, the all-out emergency mode. That wasn’t encouraging; her own lace was giving her just a handful of minutes to be of use as a fully functioning component of the Orbital’s last-ditch defence.

Outside, grippings and pressings all over her body, like being nuzzled by a few dozen small but powerful animals, confirmed that the gun control blister’s protective armour had enfolded her. She and the gun were as ready as they’d ever be for what came next.

She stared out into the darkness, senses enhanced to the point of nearly painful distraction as she searched for anything that wasn’t basically Culture stuff getting wasted. Nothing visible, appreciable at all. She established hardened comms links with a few other people and drones, all of them within the limit of this section’s original plate boundary. Her fellow warriors were shown as a line of blue tell-tale lights on a screen at the lower limit of her field of vision. They quickly determined that none of them knew what was happening and nobody could see anything to fire at. Almost immediately, there was a hoarse scream, quickly cut off, and one light turned from blue to red as a compromised high-kinetic cannon picked off another plasma turret a thousand kilometres away. Five hundred klicks spinward a drone controlling a Line-gun with links to a skein-sensing field reported nothing happening on the skein either, save for the fallback waves following the initial pulses that had wrecked the ship Minds.

“Whoever it is they want the O,” one of the humans said as they watched the spread of detonating sparks that were just a few of the nearby in-system craft meeting their ends. The ships’ deaths outshone the stars, replacing the familiar constellations with bright but fading patterns of their own. Her lace stepped her awareness speed down to a level where something like normal speech was possible.

“Grunts on the ground,” another agreed.

“Maybe they’ll just drop into the surface, displace onto the interior,” Yime suggested.

“Maybe. Edgewall stuff emplaced for that.”

“Anybody in touch with any Edgewall firepower?”

Nobody was. They had no contact with the O’s interior at all, or with any independent craft or with anybody manning the defences anywhere else. They busied themselves with scanning with what senses they had access to, checking and readying their own weaponry and trying to establish contact with survivors further afield. In the darkness, the wrecks of the last in-system craft winked out, brief fires exhausted. Around Yime’s position a few traveltube cars dropped away into the night as people tried to save themselves by using the cars as lifeboats. On average they got about ten klicks out before they were picked off too, quick tiny eruptions of light pinpricking the black.

“Anything—” somebody began.

—Got something, the drone with the skein sense sent, too quick for speech. Her lace kicked her awareness speed up to maximum so quickly the last syllable of the previous speaker’s word went on for many seconds, providing an impromptu soundtrack to what was happening in the skies beyond.

The ships were popping into existence just a few thousand klicks out, travelling at between one and eight per cent of lightspeed. No beaconry, IFF or any signal at all; not even trying to pretend they were anything else but hostile.

—Thinking these are targets, somebody communicated. Over the still-open voice comm channels came a high-pitched whine like something charging.

A first glance indicated hundreds of the ships, a second thousands. They filled the sky, darting like demented fireworks in as many different directions as there were craft. Some accelerated hard, some slowed to almost stationary seemingly within seconds; those incoming zipped in and were a few tens of klicks out and closing fast before there was time to get more than a few shots off. The drones, Yime thought. The drones will be reacting fastest, firing first. She swung the ancient plasma turret directly outwards, found a target and felt the antique machine’s senses and hers agree, lock and fire in the same instant. The old turret trembled and twin pulses of light lanced out, missing whatever it was they were aiming at. Plenty more targets, she thought, as she and the gun swung fractionally, retargeted, set for a wider beamspread and fired again. Something blazed within the cone of beam filaments but there was no time to celebrate as she and the gun swung again and again, flicking minutely from side to side and up and down like something trembling, uncertain.

There were more bursts of fire within the targeting focus and there was a certain desperate exultation in just firing, firing, firing, but in some still-calm part of her mind she knew they weren’t getting more than a per cent of the attacking craft, and the rest were still closing or had arrived.

Something at the lower limit of her vision attracted her attention; she watched the last of the little blue tell-tale lights turn red. All gone? So quickly? She was the last one, she realised; the last one left firing.

The view hazed, quivered, started to die. She killed the link systems, swept the helmet back over her head as its screens went blank and — staring out into the night through her own eyes and the invisible diamond blister — yanked the manual controls from the arm squabs and hauled the turret round to fire at a fast-approaching bright dot just starting to take on substance.

There was a thump that somehow felt nearby, back here by the turret, not out there where she was aiming, and the impression of something just outside the diamond bubble. She clicked a switch to let the gun’s atomechanical brain do its own targeting and turned her head.

The things scrabbling towards the turret across the O’s outer surface looked like metallic versions of a human ribcage plus skull, running and bouncing on six multiply jointed legs. Bizarrely, they appeared to be racing across the surface as though they were experiencing the equivalent of gravity drawing them down against it, rather than its exact opposite. She was still reaching for the control seat’s hand weapon when one of the creatures launched itself at the bubble, smashed through it and landed where her lap would have been had she not been swaddled in the turret’s control blister armour. The air in the diamond bubble left in a burst of white vapour that disappeared almost instantly as the skull-faced creature — a machine, she saw — stuck its face up to hers and, despite the lack of atmosphere and no visible method of producing the sound, said very clearly, “Drill over!”

She sighed, sat back, somewhere else entirely, as the shattered control blister, the crippled plasma turret itself and the doomed Orbital dissipated like mist around her.

“It was unpleasant, distressing and of little practical use,” Yime Nsokyi told her drill supervisor sternly. “It was a punishment drill, a simulation for masochists. I saw little point to it.”

“Granted it is about as extreme as they get,” her supervisor said cheerfully. “All-out equiv-tech complete surprise attack just short of total Orbital destruction.” Hvel Costrile was an elderly-looking gent with dark skin, long blond hair and a bare chest. He was talking to her in her apartment via a wall screen; it looked like he was on a sea vessel somewhere, as there was a large expanse of water in the background and his immediate surroundings — a plush seat, some railings — kept tipping slightly this way and that. The screen display was in 2D, by her choice; Yime Nsokyi didn’t hold with things looking too much like whatever they were not. “Instructive, though, don’t you think?”

“No,” she told him. “I fail to see the instructional element implicit in being subject to a completely unstoppable attack and thus being utterly overwhelmed in a matter of minutes.”

“Worse things happen in real wars, Yime,” Costrile told her with a grin. “Faster, more complete destruction.”

“I imagine simulations of those would have even less to teach, apart from the wisdom of avoiding such initial condition sets in the first place,” she told him. “And I might add that I also fail to see the utility of causing me to experience a simulation in which I harbour a neural lace, given that I have never possessed one and have no intentions of ever having one.”

Costrile nodded. “That was propaganda. Neural laces are just useful in that sort of extremity.”

“Until they too are corrupted, and possibly the person invested by the device as well.”

He shrugged. “By that time the game’s pretty much up anyway, you’d imagine.”

Yime shook her head. “One might equally well imagine otherwise.”

“Whatever, they let you back-up really easily,” he said reasonably.

“That is not a life-choice I have chosen to make,” Yime informed him frostily.

“Oh well.” Costrile sighed, then accepted a long drink from somebody just out of shot. He raised it to her. “Till next time? Something more practical, I promise.”

“Till then,” she agreed. “Strength in depth.” But the screen was already blank. She said, “Close screen,” anyway, telling the relatively dumb house computer to kill any link at her end. Yime was entirely untroubled by intelligent house systems, but did not wish to be subject to one. She was happy to admit to feeling a degree of satisfaction that she was by some orders of magnitude the most intelligent entity within her immediate surroundings in general and her own living space in particular. It was not a claim one could convincingly make in very many Culture dwellings.

Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh much preferred to be known only as Yime Nsokyi. She had moved away from her home Orbital and so her name now lacked utility, no longer working as even an approximate address. Worse; bearing the name of one location while living in another felt to her like something close to deceit. She walked over to the window, picked up a plain but functional brush from a small table and continued to brush her long hair, which was what she had been doing, meticulously, when the emergency militia drill alert had come through on her personal terminal and she had, reluctantly, had to submit to the induction collar and the resulting horribly realistic sim of the Orbital — even if it wasn’t this Orbital but a more standard, less militarily prepared Orbital — being so thoroughly savaged and so easily taken over.

Outside the oval of window she stood at, only very slightly distorted by the sheer thickness of the crystal and other materials forming the glazing, the view was of rolling grassy countryside punctuated with numerous lakes and strewn with forests, woods, copses and individual trees. All the windows in Yime’s apartment looked out in roughly the same direction, but had she been looking from any other apartment on this level, the view would have been much the same, plus or minus hazy views of mountains, inland seas and oceans, with no other buildings visible at all, beyond the occasional distant lake-side villa or drifting houseboat.

Despite this, Yime lived in a city, and although the construction she lived in was fairly substantial — a kilometre tall and perhaps a tenth of that across — it itself was not the totality of the metropolis, forming only a small part of it and being nowhere near the most impressive of its buildings. But then it was nowhere near any of the other buildings of the city. The building was part of a Distributed City, which to the naive or uninformed eye looked remarkably like no city whatsoever.

Most Culture cities, where they existed at all, resembled giant snowflakes, with greenery — or at least countryside, in whatever colour or form — penetrating almost to the heart of the conurbation.

Had its major buildings been gathered together on the same patch of ground, this city, Irwal, on the Orbital called Dinyol-hei, would have looked more like some vision of the far future from sometime in the enormously distant past; it was almost entirely composed of great soaring sleek skyscrapers hundreds or thousands of metres tall, generally slimly conical or ellipsoid in appearance and looking uncannily like ships, or starships, as they had once been called. Fittingly, the buildings were exactly that: ships, fully capable of existing and making their way in space, between stars, should the need ever arise.

All the thousand or so major cities on Dinyol-hei were composed in the same way, from hundreds of giant buildings that could happily double as spacecraft. It was a truism that as a scientific society progressed, its ships gradually ceased to be strictly utilitarian designs in which almost every part was in some way vital to the running of the craft. Normally they went through an intermediate stage where the overall conception was still limited by the necessities imposed by the environment in which the vessels travelled but within which there was considerable opportunity for the designers, crew and passengers/inhabitants to fashion them pretty much as they pleased, before — usually some centuries after the gross vulgarity of rocket power — simple space travel became so mature a technology it was almost trivial. At this point, practically anything not messily joined to lots of other important stuff could be quite easily turned into a space-capable craft able to transport humans — or any other species spectacularly maladapted to hard vacuum and the somewhat industrial radiation environment generally associated with it — to (at the very least) different parts of the same stellar system.

A stand-alone building was almost laughably easy to convert; a bit of strengthening and rigidising, some only semi-scrupulous sealant work, throw a gel coat over the whole thing as well just to be doubly sure, strap on an engine unit or two somewhere, and you were away. In the Culture, you could even dispense with sensory and navigation systems; stay within a light year or two of the nearest Orbital and you could navigate with your own neural lace, even an antique pen terminal. It was DIY space travel, and people did exactly that, though — always to the surprise of those just on the brink of contributing to the relevant statistics — the results made it one of the more dangerous hobbies pursued with any enthusiasm within the Culture.

The means, then, were readily to hand. The motive behind the sort of building Yime now stood in was simply survival; should some catastrophe befall the Orbital itself, its inhabitants could escape the place in what were essentially giant lifeboats.

The principle had swung in and out of fashion. At one point very early in the Culture’s history, many thousands of years ago, such high-redundancy safety consciousness had been the fairly strictly followed rule. It fell from favour as habitat and especially Orbital design, construction and protection rose to levels that pretty much guaranteed that those who lived in them had nothing catastrophic to worry about, then came very rapidly back into fashion when the Idiran war had gone from being an almost unthinkable absurdity through being an unlikely joke to — seemingly without warning — becoming a terrifyingly tangible reality.

Suddenly whole systems full of Orbitals and their vast populations had found themselves in a firing line they had never even imagined might exist. Nevertheless, almost all the humans most at risk, and even a few deeply wise machines, convinced themselves that no sentient space-faring species would actually attack a habitat the size of an Orbital, certainly not with the intention of destroying it.

By universal agreement almost completely irrelevant militarily, an O was simply a beautiful place for lots of people to live, as well as being an elegantly devised and artistically detailed cultural achievement; why would anybody attack one? Developing civilisations and barbarian under-achievers aside, things had been acutely civilised and agreeably quiet in the greater galaxy for centiaeons; a working consensus regarding acceptable behaviour between the Involved had long since been arrived at, inter-cultural conflict resolution was a mature technology, pan-species morality had quite entirely moved on from the unfortunate lapses of days gone by and outright destruction of major civilisational assets was rightly seen by all as inelegant, wasteful, counter-productive and — apart from anything else — simply shrieking of shamefully deep societal insecurity.

This entirely civilised and not unreasonable assumption proved ill-founded when the Idirans — thinking to make it very clear to all concerned who were the fanatical, invincible ultra-warriors in the matter and who represented the hopelessly decadent, simpering, irredeemably civilian bunch of martial no-hopers merely playing at war — attempted to traumatise the Culture straight back out of their newly begun war by attacking and attempting to destroy every Orbital its war-fleets could reach.

An Orbital was just a fabulously thin bracelet of matter three million kilometres in circumference orbiting a sun, the apparent gravity on its interior surface provided by the same spin that gave it its day-night cycle; break one anywhere around its ten million kilometres circumference — and some were only a few thousand kilometres across — and it tore itself apart, unwinding like a released spring, dumping landscape, atmosphere and inhabitants unceremoniously into space.

All this came as something of a surprise. Natural disasters occurring to an Orbital were almost unheard of, the systems they inhabited having generally been cleared of wandering debris to form the material from which the O itself had been constructed, and even the most carefree, socially relaxed Orbitals packed a healthy variety of defensive systems easily able to pick off any remaining rocks and ice lumps that might have the temerity to approach.

However, against the sort of weaponry the Idirans — amongst many others — possessed, Orbitals were both effectively defenceless and hopelessly vulnerable. When the Idiran ships fell upon the Orbitals, the Culture was still mostly reminding itself how to build warships; the few war craft and militarised Contact ships it was able to put in the way of the attacks were swept aside.

Tens upon tens of billions died. And all for nothing, even from the Idiran point of view; the Culture, insufficiently traumatised perhaps, conspicuously failed to retreat from the war. Orders obeyed, damage duly inflicted, the Idiran war-fleets fell back to more martially relevant, not to say honourable, duties. Meanwhile the Culture — arguably to its own amazement as much as anybody else’s — had hunkered down, gritted what needed to be gritted, did the same regarding girding and, to the chorus of umpteen trillion people telling each other stoically, “It’s going to be a long war,” got grimly on with putting itself onto a proper war footing.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many Orbitals, generally those closest to the action, were simply evacuated. Some were militarised, to the extent this made sense given they were so enormous and — patently, as had just been proved — fragile in the face of modern weaponry. Many were just left to revolve, empty, effectively mothballed. Some were destroyed by the Culture itself.

Orbitals could be moved, and some were, but it was an excruciatingly long-winded business. There was even, for this whole shifting-out-of-danger procedure, what was effectively a thing called a “waiting list”; a term and concept many devoutly pampered Culture citizens had some trouble getting entirely to grips with.

Regardless; having lots of pleasantly fitted-out buildings which could double as luxury lifeboats suddenly made unimpeachable sense. Even Orbitals almost certainly unreachably far away from the conflict took up the new construction trend, and giant skyscrapers, usually reassuringly sleek and ship-like in form, blossomed like colossal suddenly fashionable plants across the Culture’s Orbitals.

Distributed Cities came about when it was realised that even having the buildings/ships physically close to each other on the surface of an O was unwise, should an attack take place. Keeping them far apart from each other made the enemy’s targeting similarly distributed and confused. Fast, dedicated traveltube lines, in hard vacuum under the O’s outer surface, connected the buildings of any city cluster preferentially and directly, making the average journey time between buildings of any given city as quick or quicker than walking a conventional city block.

The absolute need to live in such cities or even such buildings had long since passed, unless you were cautious to the point of neuroticism, even paranoia, but the fashion still ebbed and flowed a little and throughout the fifty trillion people and many millions of Orbitals in the Culture there would always be enough people and Orbitals who still liked the idea for it never entirely to disappear. Some people just felt safer in a building that could casually survive even the destruction of an Orbital. Yime was one such person. It was why she lived in this building, and on this Orbital.

She combed her hair slowly, thoughtfully, looking out of the porthole window but not really seeing the view. She thought Costrile was not a particularly good supervisor for even a part of an Orbital’s emergency militia force. Ineffective. Altogether too lackadaisical. It was disgraceful that hardly anybody on most Orbitals even knew that such organisations existed. Even here, on staid, careful, buttoned-up, backed-up, fastened-down and just plain cautious Dinyol-hei, almost nobody was interested in such things. They were all too busy having fun. Attempts had been made before to get people more involved in last-ditch Orbital defence techniques, but to little avail. It was as though people just didn’t want to think about such things. When it was obviously so important. Odd.

Perhaps the problem was that it had been so long since there had been a proper, thorough-going war. It had been fifteen hundred years since the Idiran conflict; within living human memory for only the most determinedly so-called Immortalists, of whom there were surpassing few and who were anyway usually too obsessed with themselves to care about warning others what real warfare was like. Minds and drones who’d been involved were also surprisingly reluctant to share their experiences. Still, there had to be a way. The whole approach needed shaking up, and she might be just the person to make it happen. She doubted Costrile was up to it. Why, he hadn’t even bothered to reply in kind when she’d signed off with “Strength in depth”. How rude! She decided she would have to see about deposing Mr. Costrile from his post and having herself elected in his place.

One hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and twenty-six… She had almost reached her set number of morning hair-brushings. Yime had thick, lustrous brown hair which she kept in what was called an Eye cut, every hair on her head kept at a length such that when it was pulled round towards either eye, it was just too short either to obstruct her field of vision or otherwise cause annoyance.

A chime from her terminal, in the shape of a slim pen lying on another table, interrupted her reverie of power. She realised with an undignified lurch in her insides that the particular tone the terminal had used meant it was a call from Quietus.

She might actually be going to work.

Even so, she completed the last two hair-brushing strokes before answering.

One had to have rules.