ferocity Auppi would never have guessed resided in her rose and burned in her chest and behind her eyes when she thought about this sort of stuff. Yeah, natural warrior, that was her. She could hear Lanyares laughing at her already. Glanded too much
Still, though. That lust for destruction, glory — even glorious death — was a sort of extra, emergent drug in itself; a meta-hit that spoke to something deep-buried, long veneered over but never entirely expunged in the pan-human bio-heritage.
She was armour-suited, plugged into a gel-foamed brace couch with at least four metres of high-density gunned-up much-beweaponed Fast Fleet Liaison Module between her and the vacuum — twelve metres of pointy, armoured ditto measuring from the front — and she had an arsenal of weaponry: one main laser, four secondaries, eight tertiaries, six point-defence high-repeat shrapnel laser cells, a couple of nanogun pods — currently seven-eighths depleted, so it would soon be time to get back to base to re-arm — and a heavy, slowing, bulky but useful hullslung missile container with an assortment of sleekly deadly lovelies inside. That was only half depleted, which the ship still maintained meant she was being too miserly with the missiles. She saw it as just being careful. Be tight with the stuff that could get depleted and extravagant with what seemed never-ending: her own desire to fight and destroy.
She was almost ashamed to be backed up. A real warrior shouldn’t be. A real warrior should face the certainty of death and oblivion and still be fearless, still treat their life as just something to be gambled with against the odds of fate, as effectively as possible.
Fuck it, though; the warriors of old had thought they were effectively backed up too, sure in themselves that they were bound for some glorious martial heaven. That it was nonsense wasn’t the point. Some of them must have had their doubts but they had still behaved as though they didn’t. That was fucking bravery. (Or stupidity. Or gullibility. Or a kind of narcissism — what you thought it was depended on what sort of person you were, what you might have felt and done in the same situation.) Would
Anyway, she was backed up, and popped out of the fray every four hours or so like the others to draw breath, find out what was happening and transmit the latest version of her all-too-mortal soul to the Restoria mission control hab on the inner fringe of the Disk, only a thousand klicks above the cloud tops of the gas giant Razhir — where she’d be heading shortly, to re-arm. Doubtless extra copies of her mind-state would then be passed on to whatever the nearest Restoria ship was, and beyond that, probably, to other substrates overseen by different Minds quite possibly on the other side of the big G, or even further afield.
Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something.
She used the stare-focus function to zoom in on the cloud of boulders coming out of the mid-Disk Level- Seven fabricary. The front of the cloud was less than a minute old; most of it was still bursting out of the ancient space factory through round ports in the fabricary’s dark surface. It looked a lot like a giant seed pod releasing spores, which was fairly appropriate, she supposed.
“Two point eight minutes away,” she said. She took a sweep about, scanning right around right to left and back to forward and then looking everywhere at once just to get the local feel. (She could just about remember how that had felt the first time it had been demonstrated to her. She’d almost thrown up. Looking in two contra- rotating directions at once, and then in all directions at the same time, just wasn’t stuff the ancient human brain systems were able to cope with; processing the results kind of confused the frontal cortex, too. She’d thought she’d never get the hang of it, but she had. It was routine, now.) “Anything closer smaller nastier? Or further but worse? If there is, I’m not seeing it.”
“Agree,” the ship said. It had already started powering up its engines and pointed them at the offending fabricary and the cloud of smart boulders pouring out of it.
“Numbers?”
“Twenty-six K and counting; better than 400 per second from about as many ports. Stable issue rate. Just over a hundred thousand by the time we get there and estimating as many to come.”
“Where are the fucking GFCF and their in-fab intervention teams?”
“Not in that one, at a guess,” the ship said. “I’m sending its ident to the Initial Contact Facility so they can come sanitise it later.”
“Never mind. Let’s go get the fuckers.”
The ship hummed around her, she felt it accelerate and felt, too, her body adjust to the force. Most of the Gs they were pulling were being cancelled but they could go faster if they let some leak through. The ship went tearing through the field of Disk components, heading inward for the middle of the torus, flashing past the dark shapes of the fabricaria. She wondered how many more held infestations of the smatter, how much longer they could keep whacking everything that appeared.
There was another way, of course, for her, Lan and the others not to get killed: they could just stop fighting and leave it all to the machines. There were another twenty drone-or self-controlled microships similar to the one she was in, all desperately trying to contain the outbreak. If the humans just stopped taking part in the fight the ships they were in would keep on operating regardless, once they’d off-loaded their single crew person.
They’d be able to accelerate and turn faster without their biological component aboard and they would hardly suffer in the heat of battle; the ships took advantage of useful aspects of the human brain’s behaviour — like its intrinsic pattern recognition, on-target concentration and flinch responses — so their wired-in human charges genuinely did some useful work alongside the AIs, but in the end everybody knew this was really just one set of machines against another and the humans were only along for the ride. Participant observers; taking part because not to do so would be dishonourable, ignominious. In the big, long picture, this was just another tiny instance that told anybody who was interested that the Culture was not just its machines.
Auppi didn’t care. Useful, useless, big help or hindrance, she was having the time of her life. She hoped she’d have great-great-grandchildren to dandle on her knee one day so she could tell them about the time she’d fought the nasty cancerous breeding machines of the Tsungarial Disk armed only with a highly sophisticated little weaponified microship, an on-board brain-linked AI and more exotic weaponry than you could shake a space-stick at, but that was for another time, what would feel, no doubt, like another life altogether.
For now she was a warrior and she had stuff to blit.
She wondered what the incoming Torturer-class ship would bring to the fray, and almost wished it hadn’t come at all.
They came for him, as he’d known they would. He’d expected they’d find a way, eventually. Representative Filhyn, her aide Kemracht and the others — many others; it had turned into quite a big operation — had done all they could to keep him safe, away from interference and temptation. They had spirited him away from the parliament building after the hearing where he had spoken out and they had kept him mobile, moving him from place to place almost every day over the ensuing weeks; he rarely slept in the same place twice.
He had stayed in vast skyscraper apartments belonging to sympathisers, budget hotels off buzzing superhighways, house-boats on shallow lagoons near the sea, and, for the last two nights, in an old hill station in the mountains, a leafy summer retreat for the upper and upper-middle classes of centuries ago, before anybody had invented air conditioning. A little narrow-gauge railway had brought them up here, him and his two immediate companions and the small team of less obvious helpers and guards that nowadays always travelled with him.
The lodge sat on a shallow ridge, looking out over unbroken slopes of trees stretching to the gently undulating horizon. On a clear day, they said, you could see the plains and some of the great ziggurats of the nearest big city. Not this weather, though; it was cloudy, misty, humid, and great snagging strands of clouds drifted above and around the lodge, sometimes wrapping themselves about the ridge like insubstantial, too-easily torn veils.
They had been due to move to a different travellers’ lodge that morning, but there had been a mud slide overnight and the road was blocked. They’d move tomorrow.
However reluctantly, Prin had become a star. It was not something he was comfortable with. People wanted
