Surface Detail

“Umm, yes.” Her mouth felt clogged, sticky; all gummed up like her eyes had been. She licked her lips; they felt puffy and over-sensitive. But just being able to lick them felt so good. “Who you?” She cleared her throat. “Who am I talking to?”

“I’m an element of the Culture Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“An element?”

“Element five.”

“Are you now? Where did you come from?”

What Abominator class? she thought. Nobody had mentioned an Abominator-class ship. Was this real? She still wasn’t sure that this wasn’t just some very lucid dream. She found the nipple on the end of the helmet’s flexible water tube, sucked on it. The water was cool, sweet, beautiful. Real, she told herself. Real water, real chill on the skin, real voice. Real real real. She felt the water coursing down inside her, chilling her throat, oesophagus and stomach as she swallowed.

“Is where I came from relevant?” the voice said. “My whole was pretending to be a Torturer class earlier, if that helps.”

“Ah. Are you rescuing me, Element five?”

“I am. Currently I have Displaced nano-dust working to repair what I can of your Module. It should be ready to power up again in a few minutes. You could then make your way to the nearest base, which would be the near-planet monitoring unit five; however, in the light of the recent hostile actions I think it might be wiser and even safer if you join me, coming within my field enclosure. Your choice.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“Oh, I’d stick with me, but then I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?”

“I suppose you are.” She drank more of the precious, beautiful water. “But I will stick with you.”

“Wise choice.”

“How is everybody else? Are you rescuing the others? There were twenty-three other microship pilots and nearly forty others, plus the people on the Hylozoist. How are they?”

“The Hylozoist lost four crew, one person was killed when the near-planet monitoring unit five was damaged. Two of the Module/microship pilots were killed, one in a collision with a fabricary, the other burning up within the atmosphere of Razhir. The other pilots have been, are being or shortly will be rescued.”

“Who were they? Who were the two pilots who died?”

“Lofgyr, Inhada was the one killed in the collision with a fabricary and Tersetier, Lanyares died when his ship burned up within the atmosphere of the gas giant.”

Backed up, she thought. He was backed up. It’s all right; he can come back. It will take time and even though he might not be exactly the same person, he’ll be mostly the same person. Of course he’ll still love you. He’d be a fool not to. Wouldn’t he?

She found that she was crying.

“Bettlescroy. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“Indeed I have, Veppers. You look well for a dead man.”

The image of the GFCF Legislator-Admiral on the little flat-screen comms computer wavered a little. The signal was weak, multiply scrambled. Veppers sat with Jasken in a small room in one of his emergency safe houses in Ubruater city, a few blocks and the width of a ribbon-park away from the main town house.

The safe house — one of several prepared long ago, just in case the wrong politicians or judges got into positions of real power and started making things uncomfortable for creative, buccaneering business people who didn’t always do things the conventional way — had shielded comms links to the systems in the town house. As soon as they’d arrived — both in the uniforms of paramedics — Veppers had taken a shower, scrubbing any remaining radioactive soot or ash out of his hair and skin, while Jasken had woken up the slightly archaic equipment in the study and started trawling the news channels and message systems. The series of urgent calls and messages from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III had been hard to ignore.

“Thank you,” Veppers told the angelic-looking little alien. “You look as you always do. What’s our situation?”

A wavering smile on the little alien’s face might have been distorted or exaggerated by the lo-fi screen. “Your situation is that you need to tell me, now, Veppers, where our targets are. It is more than urgent; it is crucial. All we’ve planned and worked for now depends on this.”

“I see. All right. I’ll tell you.”

“That comes as a great, if absurdly belated, relief.”

“Though, first, I am — as you might imagine — quite interested in finding out who tried to blow me out of the skies on my own flier, over my own estate.”

“Almost certainly the NR,” Bettlescroy said quickly, waving one hand as though this was hardly worth mentioning.

“You’ve obviously given the subject considerable thought, ally,” Veppers said quietly.

Bettlescroy looked exasperated. “The NR seem to feel you have betrayed them in some way. Though just possibly it was the Flekke, sub-contracting in some way, ever anxious to please. And the Jhlupians might feel wronged, too. Your friend Xingre seems to have disappeared, which probably means something. We will do all we can with all the resources we can afford to devote to the matter to find out who might have been responsible; however the targets are still — by far — the most important issue outstanding here.”

“Agreed. But first, your situation. I’ve got a little out of touch here; what’s happening?”

Bettlescroy seemed to be trying to control itself. “Perhaps,” it said calmly, “I have not indicated as forcefully as I might that the target information is of vital importance right now!” it said, almost screaming the last two words.

“I take your point,” Veppers said smoothly. “The targets will be with you very shortly. But I need to know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening, Veppers,” Bettlescroy hissed, sitting so close to the screen camera at its end that its face appeared distorted, almost ugly, “is that a fucking Culture hyper- ship that can split up to become a fleet of ships is laying waste to our fucking war fleet of ships even as we speak and even as you, unbelievably, continue to waste time. It’s destroying thousands of them each minute! Within a day and a half there will be no more ships left! And this despite the fact that I took it upon myself to order that all the fabricaria able to do so start manufacturing ships, not just the proportion we originally agreed on.”

Veppers assumed a look of pretended hurt. “Going back on our agree—?” he began.

“Shut up!” Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. “The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying each other, which might result in the ships annihilating themselves even quicker; within a matter of hours. It would appear only to be holding back from this course because it fears some of the ships might accidentally or mistakenly damage the fabricaria, a consequence it wishes to avoid if possible, to preserve the — and I quote — ‘unique techno-cultural monument that is the Tsungarial Disk’. That’s so thoughtful, don’t you think that’s so thoughtful? I think that’s so fucking thoughtful.” Bettlescroy stared out of the screen at them with a fierce, unnatural smile that held no humour whatsoever. “However, this thing, this wonderful super-powerful ‘ally’ that we suddenly discovered we had, now blithely tells us it will hold this tactic in reserve and meanwhile continue to target the ships itself for the sake of ‘engagemental accuracy’ and to ‘minimise collateral damage’, though frankly my fellow officers and myself strongly suspect it’s really doing so because it’s enjoying itself so much, just as it appeared quite heartily to enjoy disposing of nearly a third of our naval fleet on its approach to the Tsung system. I hope this is giving you some small, modest, indicationary idea of just how powerless we are out here at the moment, Veppers, old fellow, while we wait for your precious fucking targets.

“Meanwhile, we are continuing to deal with our pretend smatter outbreak, which has proved trickier than we anticipated, and are ourselves even having to destroy some of the fabricaria-built war fleet we worked so hard to create, just to make it look convincing to the Culture that we really are all just chums and allies fighting on the