Kallier-Falpise’s fields went frosty grey again. “You did not think to ask me if I consent to being Displaced when a far more intrinsically safe method of transferring us between ships exists to hand.”
Demeisen rolled his eyes. “Fine, you take the shuttle, you rough, tough little protection-and-intervention drone; I’ll Displace the squidgy bag of guts, gas and fluids that is the painfully vulnerable but patently unafraid human being.”
“Frankly I wouldn’t trust you to wait for me,” the little drone said. “I shall Displace along with Ms. Y’breq. Within the same containment field, if you please.”
“Fuck me,” Demeisen breathed. “Hoity and toity. Fine! We’ll do it your way.” He pointed at the ship’s drone. “Tell you what, grandpa; why don’t you do the fucking Displace? You move them both over to me.”
“I was going to suggest that anyway,” the ship-drone said coldly.
“Right,” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Can we get going? Now? Your venerableness here might be going flat out but I’m barely strolling. Getting antsy here.”
“Excuse me,” the little cream-coloured drone said as it floated closer to Lededje and up-ended itself to press gently in against her stomach. She wore another set of the trews and top she had grown fond of since waking in this body. “You are sure you don’t want to take your luggage?”
“Quite sure,” she said.
“Both ready?” the ship-drone asked.
“Entirely so.”
“Yes.”
“After you,” the ship-drone said to Demeisen.
“See you over there,” he said to Lededje, then a silver ovoid enclosed him. It winked to nothing.
An instant later Lededje briefly found herself staring at a distorted version of her own face.
The ship’s drone tipped back to look up at the ceiling, which was where the protection-and-intervention drone Kallier-Falpise had floated the instant the Displacement containment field around it and Lededje Y’breq had flicked out of existence. Kallier-Falpise, listing badly, bumped randomly along the ceiling a few times, for all the world like an escaped party balloon, partly deflated. Its aura field displayed the colours of oil floating on water.
“Shao, shum-shan-shinaw, sholowalowa, shuw, shuwha …” it mumbled.
The boxy-looking ship-drone used its own light effector unit to administer the equivalent of a slap. Kallier-Falpise trembled against the ceiling fixtures, then dropped, side-slipping. It flashed a strident yellow-orange for an instant, then it seemed to shake itself. It straightened, floating down to the same level as the shipdrone, its aura field glowing white with anger.
∼Meatfucker.
∼If it’s any comfort, the ship-drone sent – I don’t even know how it did that. It’s not as though it let you land and then spat you straight back. Fucking thing jumped my Displace mid-throw. I wasn’t even aware we could do that. That’s downright worrying.
∼Did you put anything on the girl?”
∼On and in. Best bits and pieces I was given. I’m just waiting to—
There was a flicker of silver directly over the ship-drone, followed by a tiny clapping noise as the incoming Displacement field collapsed. A bitty rain of tiny components, seemingly little more than dust, some hair-thin threads and a few grains of sand, floated down through the air to be caught and held by a maniple field the drone extended above itself.
∼Ah, it sent – here they are now. It made a show of bouncing the maniple field up and down, weighing. – Yup, they’re all there, to the last picogram.
∼Meatfucker, the other drone repeated.
∼Trying comms; zero avail. The ship’s drone rose a quarter-metre in the air then sank slowly down. – Guess that’s that then.
The two machines watched through the ship’s main sensor array as it showed the sixteen-hundred-metre length of the other warship sweeping its multiple deep-space high-speed engine fields about it with a completely unnecessary flourish. For the merest instant the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints presented in real space as a black, perfectly reflecting ovoid, then with a flicker it was gone, so quickly even the Fast Picket’s finely tuned sensors struggled to track it.
Thirteen
This deep in the ice you would need serious amounts of cooling. Otherwise you’d boil. At least you would if you were any normal sort of human, or indeed if you were any kind of conventional being with the sort of biochemistry that could not cope with temperatures much outside a narrow band between freezing and boiling. Keep cool inside the ice or you’d boil alive. The alternative would be to submit to the pressure, which would crush you to oblivion even quicker than the temperature would cook you to death.
It was all relative, of course. Below freezing or above boiling of what, and where? Water was the reference medium he was used to, as part of the pan-human meta-species, and liquid water at standard temperature and pressure, he supposed, but then: whose standard temperature and pressure?
Down here, inside a water planet, under a hundred kilometres of warm ocean, the sheer pressure of the water column above turned the water first to slush and then to ice. It was high-pressure ice, not low-temperature ice, but it was still ice, and the further down towards the planet’s centre you went the harder and hotter the ice got, heated by the same pressure that had forced the water from its liquid to its solid state.
Even so, there were imperfections and contaminants in the ice: flaws, boundaries – sometimes narrowing down to only a single molecule wide – between volumes of the solid where it was possible for other liquids to slip amidst the vast compressive masses of the surrounding ice.
And, if you had evolved here, or had been carefully designed to exist here, it was even possible for creatures to exist within the ice. Tendril-slim, transparently tenuous, more like highly spread-out membranes than anything resembling an animal, they were able to make their way up and down and along the flaws and seams and fissures in the ice, seeking food in the shape of those minerals and other contaminants the ice held, or, in the case of the predators of the deep ice, attacking those grazing creatures themselves.
He – what he now was – had not evolved here. What he was now was a simulation of a creature, an organism designed to be at home in the pressure ice of a water world. But only a simulation. He was not what he appeared to be.
He was beginning to wonder if he ever had been.
The ice inside the water planet did not really exist; neither did the water planet itself, nor the star it orbited nor the galaxy beyond nor anything of what appeared to be real no matter how far out you might think you were looking. Nor how far in you looked, either. Peer into anything closely enough and you would find only the same graininess that the Real exhibited; the smallest units of measurement were the same in both realms, whether it was of time or extent or mass.
For some people, of course, this meant the Real itself was not really real, not in the sense of being genuinely the last un-simulated bedrock of actuality. According to this view everybody was already in a pre-existing simulation but simply unaware of it, and the faithful, accurate virtual worlds they were so proud of creating were just simulations within a simulation.
That way though, arguably, madness lay. Or a kind of lassitude through acceptance that could be exploited. There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.
The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.
Musing upon such thoughts, he slipped with the others down a one-kilometre-high, many-kilometres-long flaw in the ice. In human terms it was probably like being a caver, a pot-holer, he imagined. Though that must do the experience little justice.
They were, he supposed, like separate strands of sluggish oil seeping between the ice sheets on what he still thought of as a conventional
world, a rocky planet with ice at the poles and mountain peaks.
He commanded a small but potent force a crack team of thirty, all highly trained and armed with poisons, chemical micro-explosives and packages of solvent. Most – perhaps all – of the marines and machines whose representations he’d inhabited over the subjective-time decades the great war had lasted to date would have regarded this as laughably inadequate weaponry, but it would be perfectly deadly down here, where not one of those marines or war machines would last for more than a fraction of a second. They were over-officered – he was here as a major, though in any other theatre he’d be a general – but that just reflected the importance of the mission.
He could feel the presence of each of the others, chemical gradients and electrochemical signals passing within and between each of them keeping him in literal touch with every one of the thirty marines under his command. Here was Corporal Byozuel on the right, slipping and sliding down a particularly wide channel, briefly beating the rest of them for penetration; here was Captain Meavaje way out on the left and spin-forward, guiding his squad’s four solvent-carrying specialists through a tricky sequence of fissures like a three-dimensional maze. First Byozuel, then the marines between them in sequence, reported a strong quake. Vatueil felt it himself an instant later.
The ice seemed to creak and whine, the space which most of Vatueil himself was in tightened, shrinking by half a millimetre. Another part of him was in a cavity a little higher further up; this widened a fraction, trying to pull him upwards. He had to grip tighter, push harder, to continue his slow progress downwards, towards the core.
… All right, sir …? came the question from Lieutenant Lyske, who was next but one along the line.
… Fine, lieutenant … he sent back.
Vatueil had sensed them all stopping, freezing in position as the quake’s compression wave had passed around and through them. Freezing like that slowed them down a fraction and it did no real good unless you were in a wide fissure about to enter a narrower one, but it was just what happened, what you did; human nature, or animal nature, or sentient nature, however you wanted to characterise it; you stopped and waited, hoping and dreading, hoping not to be about to die and dreading the feel of the ice around you shifting, and dreading too the biochemical scream that might come pulsing through the single living net they had made of themselves as somebody else was so compressed by fissures closing around them that they were squeezed to single, separated molecules, crushed to mush, chemicalised out of existence.
However, the quake had gone, leaving them all intact and alive. They resumed their progress, insinuating themselves deeper and deeper into the water world’s ice. He sent electrochemical signals out to let everybody know that they were all okay. Still, they could not afford to relax just because that little instance of random danger had gone; they were approaching the level where they might expect to find defences and guards.
He wondered how you could characterise where they were now. It was not part of the main war sim. It was not another simulation running within that one either. It was something separate, something elsewhere; similar, but held apart from the other sims.
Byozuel’s sudden signal came flashing through the net of the unit, passing from marine to marine: … Something, sir . . .
Vatueil commanded a full stop; they all came to a halt as quickly as possible without causing any further disturbance.
He waited a moment then sent … What do we have, corporal?
… Movement ahead, sir …
Vatueil held, waited. They all did. Byozuel was no fool – none of them were, they’d all been carefully picked. He’d be in touch when there was something to report. In the meantime, best to let him listen, sniff ahead, watch for any scintillations in the glassy darkness of the ice all around them.
Not that they’d seen much since the submarine had offloaded them in the silt slush at the bottom of the ocean, hours earlier. There had been absolutely nothing to see there; no sunlight was visible below a quarter of a klick down from the ocean surface, never mind a hundred klicks.
Once they’d entered the ice, a few cosmic rays had produced distant flashes, and a shallow ice-quake when they’d been less than a kilometre into the hard ice had produced some piezoelectric activity including a few dim glimmers, but their eyes, such as they were, represented their least useful sense.
… Ha! … The exclamation came along with a chemically transmitted wave of elation and relief, pulsing through the company of marines as though through a single body … Sorry, sir … Byozuel sent … Didn’t want to risk communicating anything there. Enemy combatant engaged and neutralised, sir …
… Well done, Byozuel. Its identity?
… Here, sir … A complex set of chemical idents and gradients transmitted itself through the web of the unit to Vatueil. A guard. A single, highly aware but barely sentient unit secreted in a fissure within the ice ahead and sensed by Byozuel before it could sense him. So they had to hope, anyway. Studying the analysis of the paralysed, dying creature, Vatueil could see no sign that it had communicated anything before it had been speared by Byozuel and filled with poison.
Vatueil communicated the necessary details to the rest of the platoon … Let’s assume there will be more ahead … he told them … Byozuel … he sent … how’s the way ahead look from where you are?
… Good, sir. Good as we’ve seen. Not getting anything un toward, listening or smelling.
… Okay, we’re going to shift formation … Vatueil sent … Rest of squad one and squad two, follow behind Byozuel. Three and four, regroup with same internal spacing and keep probing as we descend. We’ve got one enemy profile so watch for that but be aware there will be other types. We’re tightening up here, concentrating. Stay as wary as you like.
He felt the formation change around him, the two squads slowly shifting to concentrate and gather above Byozuel, the other two pulling in from the other side.
The ice-quake came without warning. The screams came from both sides, seemingly at the same time as the tortured shriek of the shifting ice and the hazy scintillations produced by ice contaminants’ piezoelectricity. The ice closed around Vatueil, squeezing him, producing a feeling of utter helplessness and terror just for a moment. He ignored it, let it all pass through him, prepared to die if it came to it but not prepared to show his fear. He was squeezed out of where he was, forced downwards by the sheer closing force of the ice above into a broader fissure beneath. He felt others moving out of control as well, felt three lose contact, tendrils between them broken, snapped, teased apart.
They all stopped again, those that were not writhing. Moments later, even they ceased to move, either dead or after self-administering relaxants, or being darted with them by their comrades.
Could it have been an explosion, enemy action? Had they set something off when Byozuel had neutralised the guard? The after-shocks moaned and rattled through the vastness above and around them. The quake felt too big, too comprehensive, to have come from a single-point detonation.
… Report, Vatueil sent, a moment later.
They had lost five of their total including Captain Meavaje. Some injuries: loss of senses in two, partial loss of locomotion in another two.
They regrouped again. He confirmed Lyske as his new second-in-command. They left the injured and one able-bodied marine to guard their retreat.
… Bastard blow, sir … Byozuel sent from his down-forward position, fifteen metres further down … But it’s opened a fine-looking cleft down here. A positive highway it is, sir.
… Treat it as suspicious, Byozuel … he told the marine … Anything obvious might be mined or sucker-trapped.
… Yes, sir. But this only just opened, to the side of the one where our friend was. Looks pristine. And deep.
… Feel confident to explore, Byozuel?
… Feel confident, sir.
… Okay, I think we’re all where we should be again. Go ahead, Byozuel, but still; take it easy.
The other two squads were making little progress. Vatueil decided to make the most of the advantage. He ordered them into the new fissure too.
The next guard came stumbling out of a side-crevice, a breach from the earlier fissure they’d been taking before. The guard lanced into Byozuel, instantly disabling him, but was in turn pierced by a pump-dart from one of the weapon-support specialists immediately behind Byozuel; the enemy struggled, died, started to dissolve. Byozuel adhered to one wall of the crevasse, sticking there, immobile, poisons spreading through his extended body. Another specialist flowed over him; investigating, diagnosing, trying to see where he might be cauterised, what parts might be amputated to save him. The specialist pulled away, cutting connections with Byozuel before communicating with Vatueil.
… Looks like I’ll be covering retreat too, sir … Byozuel sent.
… Looks like it, Byozuel …
… That one might have got a warning off … one of the specialists sent.
… I can see something down here, sir … sent the one who’d continued past where Byozuel had been hit … Deep down. Looks … looks like a comprehensive light source, sir.
Establishing a better link through two more descending marines, Vatueil could more or less see what the deepest marine was seeing.
Caution to the wind time, he thought to himself.
… Stay here, Byozuel.
… Not much choice, sir.
… We’ll be back for you, Byozuel. Everybody else: we’re here. This is it. Form up for maximum attack by squad.
They gathered, shifted, configured. He felt the familiar pride, close to love, for those to whom he’d become close as they calmly and efficiently prepared to put themselves at great risk for a cause they believed in and for the collective good of their comrades. Almost sooner than he’d have liked, they were ready.
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