Surface Detail

The male stayed where he was, quivering. She gazed up at the shimmering, reflecting curtain, wondering what to make of it.

Still, she flew back there the next day.

The mirror curtain was gone. So was the geography she remembered from before it had been there; a barren dusty plain, rising smoothly, replaced everything that had been within the boundary of the shimmering curtain. It joined as best it could with the cliffs and mountains beyond where the mirror-barrier had been, but it looked dropped-in, added-on somehow. A patch.

She didn’t know what to make of it.

The scarred male from the day before was still there, where she’d left him, pleading to be released. She sighed, landed, took him into her wings and let his spirit go, taking on yet another additional pain.

Glitches in Hell. Fucking appointments in fucking Hell. Whatever fucking next?

“This place is definitely coarsening me,” she muttered to herself as she flew off, clutching another torn-off haunch.

The Me, I’m Counting Displaced Yime Nsokyi into the window-less suite at the rear of the very grand hotel near the centre of Iobe Cavern City, Vebezua, while it kept station overhead, just beyond the atmosphere, arguing with the Planetary Near Space Traffic Authority.

The boxy ship-drone serving as escort to her and Himerance switched on all the lights. The bedroom was vast, palatial, unoccupied.

“The secret passage is hidden under the bed,” Himerance said. The drone activated the relevant motors and the giant circular bed sank out of sight. They went to the edge and watched it drop.

“That leads to the tunnel that ends up in the desert?” Yime asked. She was dressed properly, in her tunic, at last, for the first time in days. She was still not fully healed, and still somewhat delicate, but her hair was tidy and she felt… regained.

“Yes,” Himerance said. “Veppers might have been absent for days, though officially he never left here. He probably left on a Jhlupian ship, but nobody’s sure. His entourage supposedly arrived back on Sichult this morning, but there’s no confirmation he’s with them. This is the last place we can be absolutely sure he was.”

The drone dropped into the hole left by the descending bed. Himerance produced a scroll screen, letting it unroll and hang in the air in front of them, displaying the view the drone had as it made its way up the short corridor beneath the room, heading into the cliff. A small underground car shaped like a fat bullet sat in front of a dark tunnel.

“Getting anything?” Yime asked.

Himerance shrugged. “Nothing much,” he told her. “There is a variety of surveillance tech in here. Place is like a history of bugging through the ages; whole tiny networks of linked spy-tech and outdated eavesdropping gear splattered about the entire suite. Lot of stuff that’s probably lost, forgotten about. Many tiny dead batteries in here. Ancient stuff.” The ship, only a couple of hundred kilometres over their heads, was targeting one of its main Effectors on the city, the hotel and the suite. If there was anything useful here, it would find it.

“Most recent is equiv-tech stuff,” Himerance said, relaying what the ship was finding. “Passably… NR stuff.” He looked at Yime.

“NR?”

“Probably. It’s recent,” Himerance said, “and working; it’d be relaying what we’re saying now if I wasn’t blocking it. Synched into hidden hotel cameras and comms-intercept gear too.” Himerance nodded at four different points in the room. “Sprayed on: in the wall hangings, drapes, on the surfaces of paintings and embedded in the rugs.”

“Anything recorded?”

“No; and no idea where it would have transmitted to either,” Himerance admitted.

“Would it have registered Veppers using his sinking-bed escape route?”

“Maybe not,” Himerance said, gazing up at the great thick fold of curtains which could envelop and surround the bed. “Not if these were drawn.” He squinted. Yime could almost feel the ship overhead shifting the focus of its Effector by minute fractions of a degree. “No spray-on surveillance on those,” Himerance confirmed. “And they’re a lot more hi-tech than the simple organic woven material they look like. Shield you from most interference once they’re drawn right round.”

Yime sighed. “I don’t think he’s here,” she said. “I certainly don’t think she is.”

Stopping here had been an easy enough decision; the direction they’d approached the Sichultian Enablement from, Vebezua had been almost directly en route. Sichult itself still seemed the best place to find both Veppers and Lededje Y’breq, but taking a quick look at the last place they had a definite fix on Veppers had seemed to make sense and cost them only a couple of hours.

“I’m still not getting what’s going on with the Restoria mission,” Himerance said, sounding puzzled. “Some sort of comms blackout now. Something’s happening out there, at the Disk.”

“Smatter outbreak?” Yime asked.

“Those fabricaria ships are more than smatter,” Himerance said as they watched the drone retrace its flight back down the tunnel towards them. Yime knew the ship already felt torn between taking her where she wanted to go, and joining in whatever action was taking place out at the Tsungarial Disk.

“There’s some sort of full-on battle going on out there,” Himerance said, frowning now. “Beyond the Disk, on the fringes of the Enablement; way too hi-tech for mere smatter. I do so hope that isn’t the Abominator class arriving. If it is we may genuinely have a full-scale war on our hands.”

The drone reappeared in the hole the bed had left; Himerance snapped the scroll-screen closed again and tucked it inside his jacket.

“What about the explosion on Veppers’ estate?” Yime asked.

“Nothing new. News blackout.” Himerance paused. “Actually, something new. Couple of agencies Veppers doesn’t control reporting members of his entourage killed and injured in some sort of flier crash; survivors arriving back at Ubruater at one of his private hospitals.” Another pause. “Hmm. Guess that counts as speculation.”

“What does?”

Himerance looked at her. “Reports that Veppers might be dead.”

“I’d better let you go. You take care. I mean, I’m staying; this Demeisen unit right here is sticking with you, but me myself I, the ship; I have to stick around here, see what’s up. Sleeve-rolling, palm-spitting time for me. You get to stay inside the shuttle inside this element, this shiplet. It’ll take you on to Sichult.”

“Okay,” Lededje said. “Thanks for the ride so far.”

“My pleasure. Take care. See you later, I hope.”

“Me too.”

The image of Demeisen waved bye-bye against the star field. The screen inside her suit’s helmet showed the main body of the ship slipping away to one side, fields flickering between the element she was looking from and the main body of the vessel. It was still elongatedly ellipsoidal, but each curved sliver of ship-element had separated slightly from the other, so that the ship looked like a fat throw-ball knifed open from tip to tail, segments teased apart. As she watched, the gap left by the departure of the part that she was in started to close up, the other sections pulling fractionally further away from each other. Then they reached the ship’s outer field boundary and passed through opaque layers. Outside, the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was just a giant silver ellipsoid. It shimmered, disappeared.

The Demeisen figure was still there, seemingly floating in space. He turned to her. “Just you and me now, babe. And the ship-section sub-Mind, of course.”

“Does it have a separate name?” she asked.

Demeisen shrugged. “Element twelve?”

“That’ll have to do.”

He crossed his arms, frowned. “Now; the good news first or the bad news?”

She frowned too. “Good,” she said.