Surface Detail

via her neural lace and the network of human-mind-attuned filaments within the ship’s dedicated pilot interface suite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~Okay. Gone?

~Gone.

~Beautiful spread.

~Thank you.

~Right, we’re about there, yes?

~Centred in one tenth…

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

~Nearly there…

~Come on come on come on!

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

~Whoop-de-doop!

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

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

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

~Indicates swarmer type unclear, the ship told her.

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

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

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

~About one per cent. Hitting some with—

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

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

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