Surface Detail

~Off and run— the ship started to tell her, then everything went dark.

Dark? She thought? Dark?

She had time to send, ~Ship? before the ship’s voice said,

~Sorry about that.

The view clicked back on. This time there were lots of additions within the image: dozens of tiny, sharp green shapes with numbers floating just in front of them and with garish coloured lines trailing after them and — in different colours — pointing in front of them. Concentric circles of varying pastel shades, noded with symbols meaningless to her, seemed to target each of the tiny green shapes, which were rapidly accruing accompanying floating icons like stacks of cards; looking at one made it blossom into nested pages of information showing as text, diagrams and multi-dimensional moving images that made her eyes hurt. She looked away, took in the general view instead; a thousand tiny gaudy glow-flies loose in a pitch-black cathedral.

~What happened? she asked.

~Enemy action. Seems the fuckers want a shooting war, the ship told her. ~That hit would have smeared a real Torturer class. Motherfuckers. Time for me to reply in kind, sweetheart. I must prepare to smite. Sorry, but this may smart.

~What?

~Body-slap they call it. Healthy; means you’re still alive and I’m still functioning. Don’t worry, there’s a sub- routine monitoring your nervous system; it can de-pain you if it starts to get really sore. Come on, let’s get on with it! Time’s-a-wasting! Just say you’re ready.

~Fucking hell. All right. I’m ready. Like I—

Then her entire body seemed to be hit, as though every part of it had been slapped at the same time. It seemed to come from one side — her right — but it felt like it hit every part of her. It wasn’t especially sore — it had been too distributed — but it certainly got one’s attention.

~How we doing? the ship asked as another tremendous shock registered throughout Lededje’s body, this time from her left.

~We are doing fine.

~That’s my girl.

~I’ll— she started to say.

~Now, hold on to your hat.

Another titanic slap, everywhere through her body. She seemed to drift away, then came to, feeling woozy. She gazed about at all the hundreds of pretty little symbols floating around her, haloed with pastel colours.

~Still with us?

~Think so, she sent. ~I think… my lungs are hurting. Is that even possible?

~No idea. Anyway; only calibrating. Shouldn’t get any worse than that.

~Did they hit us?

~Hell no; that was just us getting us out from under their track scanners. They’ve lost us now, poor fuckers. No idea where we are.

~Oh.

~Which means what’s about to happen to them will seem to come out of nowhere. Watch — as they say — this…

Instantly she was tipped and thrown; sucked tumbling into the view as though the whole weight of the ship had grabbed her by the eyeballs, pulled, and hurled her into the frenzied welter of impossible colours, staggering speed and infinite detail that was its riotously ungraspable sensorium. She felt assaulted, might have screamed if it hadn’t felt the breath had just been smacked out of her.

Immediately — thankfully — the whole bewildering complexity of it was reduced, pared and focused, as though just for her; the view rushed in on one of the little green symbols and the concentric rings around it whizzed, flicking this way and that, symbols flickering and changing too fast to make sense of. Then two rings flashed and changed places; the one that became the innermost ring seemed to start to flash again but this time blazed; she felt her eyes trying to close up, virtual eyelids shutting. The flare faded, left tiny granules of green where there had been a complicated shape before. It had all taken less than a second.

She tried to watch the little spray of green bits spread but then the view whirled her away before throwing her back down again, straight at another tiny green shape. The rings around it snapped into a new configuration, blazed; it disappeared in a haze of green too. She was hauled away from the contemplation of what she was starting to understand represented missiles or shells or something getting wasted. Each time, there was no apparent moment of stillness; she was jerked back from one close-up only to be flung straight back down into the next one, the star-scape she was in the middle of wheeling madly with each new target.

After about the fifth or sixth zoom-flick-flare event, a dispersing cloud of even tinier green particles — so small she was amazed she could see them, and knew that with her own eyes, looking at a screen, she wouldn’t have — started crawling away from some of the little jagged green shapes. They too had leading and trailing lines and were accompanied by neatly sorted banners of figures, illustrations and descriptions. The lines flickered, hazed, came steady, thickening as they turned light then dark but shining blue.

Vectors, she thought, quite suddenly, as she was hurled towards one of the larger green shapes, close enough to see that it was a ship. These were ships the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints had been targeting and destroying. Not missiles. The even tinier green shapes were the missiles. The concentric haloes surrounding each target represented weapon-choice.

Haloes appeared around each of the missiles, like hundreds upon hundreds of tiny necklaces of beaded light. They flashed all at once and when the haloes disappeared there wasn’t even wreckage left behind. The view pulled back a fraction, the green ship shape seemed to hesitate, frozen, as the haloes surrounding it flicked, settled, flared. She felt a sudden urge to look away, but it was only to the next target, snapped out and then back in to watch another ship freeze in the ship’s targeting headlights; then another then another and another, then two at once; that felt like her brain was having its hemispheres ripped apart.

~Fucking hell, she heard herself say.

~You enjoying it? the ship asked. ~My favourite bit’s coming up in a moment.

~What do you mean, your favourite bit? she asked it as the next hapless ship appeared, transfixed, in the concentric targeting/ weapon-choice circles.

~Ha! You didn’t think this is happening in real time, did you? The ship sounded amused.

~This is a recording? she said — nearly wailed — as the tiny green ship blazed and turned to what looked like minutely shredded, wind-blown grass-dust. Instantly the view flicked back before throwing her down again somewhere else, her view wobbling to focus on another petrified target.

~Slow-motion replay, the ship told her. ~Pay attention, Led.

This green target looked bigger and more complicated than the others. The rings around it were larger, fatter and brighter, though less numerous. The ship seemed to start to change, taking on the appearance of the black, over-limbed snowflake again. Then bits of it detached, started to float away, while each of them blossomed with rosettes of green haze. Altogether, it filled her zoomed-in field of vision, dazzling.

~At this point they still think I’m hitting them too late, the ship murmured.

A violet halo she hadn’t been aware of zeroed in on the central contact. The halo flashed. When it faded the ship was still there, but it had turned violet itself now. Then tiny violet rings appeared around the floating-away bits and each microscopic part of the hazy stuff, so small that the green haze disappeared to be replaced with a slightly dimmer violet one.

Everything flashed apart from the central target. The earlier haze had gone. The pulverised remains of the specks that had been floating away formed the haze now, flashing violet and light green and dissipating, filling her field of vision; sumptuous, scintillating. In some ways it was the most beautiful firework display she had ever seen. It began to end as the violet ship in the centre of the view grew in brightness, going from a distinct but un-showy glow to a sky-splitting glare in a few seconds — much slower than anything else had reacted. When it faded, there was more violet/lime green flashing debris, scattered everywhere, all slowly spreading, fading, going dull and disappearing, leaving just the stars to be seen once more; calm, faint, tiny, far away and unchanging after the shattering, psychotic tumult of flickering images that had kept her rapt, shocked, transfixed till now.

She felt herself let out a deep breath.

Then — bizarrely, even shockingly — Demeisen was there in front of her, lounging in what looked like the