Surface Detail

The girl twirled, scooped his robe from the floor. Veppers lifted Sohne’s head up by her long golden hair and slapped her across the face a couple of times, bringing her round. She sat back, looking woozy, cheeks reddened.

“Both of you, out,” Veppers told the women as he wrapped his robe around himself. “Leave the door unlocked and tell Jasken and the Zei to wait where they are. Let him know what’s happened here, but nobody else.”

Diamle wrapped herself and Sohne in sheets and helped the other girl to the doors. Veppers heard Diamle saying something to Jasken, then the doors thudded shut again.

Veppers turned to the small creature. “Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘This had better be good,’ Over- Lieutenant Vrept?” he asked, knee-walking his way up the bed towards the sitting alien, then looking down, towering over it.

“I am,” it told him. “This is not good though; this is bad. Hence the urgency. My commander, the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III, bids me inform you that there has been a security breach in the Tsungarial Disk; one of the currently ship-constructing fabricaria was damaged during the ongoing diversionary smatter outbreak containment action and a light space craft belonging to the Culture Restoria mission caught recorded sight of the extemporised ship being built within said fabricary, signalling this information to the rest of the Culture mission within the Disk, which has concomitantly relayed said information beyond to other Culture units while at the same time investigating other fabricaria to discover whether others amongst them are also building ships, the results of this investigation being positive, of course, though steps have been and are being taken to neutralise the Culture mission’s abilities.

“In sum: it is now known within the Culture, and feasibly beyond, that certain of the Disk elements are manufacturing a war fleet. The fleet is still a day and a half from earliest completion, excluding AM-fuelling. Several Culture ships are approaching the Disk. The NR seem not to have been informed of the full substance of the aforesaid intelligence, however they have expressed strong interest in knowing what precisely is going on in the matter of the Tsungarial Disk, and unconfirmed reports suggest they may be moving militarily relevant assets into position.

“That is the initial substance of my message. Any questions, good sir? Or, and also, you may wish to enlighten the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III regarding the previously discussed but still unspecified targets pertaining to the still-being-built ships. That would be appreciated.”

Veppers stared open-mouthed at the little alien for at least two heartbeats, then wondered if he too was about to faint.

“Well, happy fucking day!” Demeisen said. He turned to Lededje with a grin that extended into a broad smile.

She looked at him. “I have the feeling that what you think of as good news might not strike everybody else as being quite so smashing.”

“Some nutter’s building a bunch of ships in the Tsungarial Disk!” Demeisen sat back in the seat, staring at the module’s screen, still smiling.

“How is that good news?”

“It’s not, it’s a fucking disaster,” Demeisen said, waving his arms. “This’ll end in tears, mark my words.”

“So stop smiling.”

“I can’t! There are natural… Okay, I can,” the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. “I can help it,” he admitted, “I just don’t want to help it.” He waved his arms again. “Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I’m deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?”

“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?”

“Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it’s looking clearer and clearer there’s going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that’s precisely what I’m built for. I’m going to get to strut my stuff, I’m going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can’t fucking wait.”

“We are talking about a shooting war?” she said.

“Well, yes!” Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.

“And people are going to die.”

“People? Very likely even ships!”

She just looked at him.

“Lededje,” the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. “I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!”

On the word “shine”, Demeisen’s eyebrows shot up, his voice rose a tone or two and increased markedly in volume. Even through the armoured glove, she could feel the pressure of his hands squeezing hers.

Lededje had never seen anybody look so happy.

“And what happens to me?” she asked quietly.

“You should get back home,” the avatar told her. It glanced at the screen, where the black snowflake with too many limbs still filled the centre of the image. “I’d chuck you overboard in this shuttle right now and let you head for Sichult, but whatever the fuck that is might mistake you for a munition or just waste you for the target practice so I’d better deal with it first.” The avatar looked at her with a strange, intense expression. “Necessarily dangerous, I’m afraid. No getting away from it.” Demeisen took a deep breath. “You afraid to die, Lededje Y’breq?”

“I’ve already died,” she told him.

He spread his hands, looked genuinely interested. “And?”

“It’s shit.”

“Fair enough,” he said, turning to face the screen and sitting back properly in the shuttle command seat. “Let’s put that one down as a mistake and try to stop it turning into a habit.”

Lededje watched the seat contort itself around the avatar, securing his body in place with padded extensions of the chair’s own legs, arms, seat and back. She felt movement around and beneath her and realised her seat was doing the same thing, enclosing her one more time; another layer of confinement beyond the gel suit and the armoured outer suit. She was pressed and shuffled backwards until everything fitted snugly against the contours of the seat.

“Now we get foamed,” Demeisen told her.

“What?” she said, alarmed, as the suit’s visor swung smoothly down over her face. The shuttle’s interior went dark, but the visor showed some sort of compensated image that gave her a very clear view of what looked like red-glowing bubbling liquid filling up the space she’d been living in for the last twenty-plus days, rising quickly in a dark red tide around the base of the chair, flowing up and over her armoured body and then foaming all about her, rapidly covering the visor and leaving her briefly blind in the darkness before she heard the avatar speak again.

“Space view? Or some screen entertainment to while away the time?” Suddenly the visor was showing her the same view the screen had, but wrap-around. The wrong-looking, eight-limbed black snowflake was still centre-image.