Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “‘Up to’?” he asked. The GFCFian was called Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and was androgynous. Bettlescroy held the rank of Legislator-Admiral, though, like most people in the GFCF, the little alien seemed almost ashamed of having any rank at all. In fact, officially, Bettlescroy’s full title was – and most species required a deep breath at this point – The Most Honourable Heritably Concurrent Delegated Vice Emissary Legislator-Admiral Elect Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of Turwentire – tertiary, demesne & c. (This was the short version of course, excluding his educational qualifications and military service medals.) Certain components of this startlingly grand honorific apparently indicated that Bettlescroy was the trusted, word-good-as-the-original clone of somebody back home who was even more imposingly magnificent, to the point of being too posh even to do anything as vulgar as actually travelling.

  Bettlescroy looked, briefly, very slightly pained. “The precise operational parameters are still being optimised as the vessel is fitted out,” it explained. “As in original, it utilises hyper-spacial aggregation motors and additionally applied induction factoring rather than the more common warp engine technology which powers the vessels your own society builds. Again as in the original, of course, the maximum apparent velocity is achievable over a defined period.”

  “A defined period?”

  “Indeed.”

  “What you mean is, only in bursts?”

  “Of course. Again, as in the the original. Though – again again, as it were – a higher maximum and for longer.”

  “So what’s its indefinitely sustainable maximum?”

  The little alien sighed. “We are still working that out, but in excess of ten kilolights, assuredly.”

  “Ah. What about the weapons?”

  “Generally similar to and in some cases improvements on and refinements of the originals. In a word, formidable. Far beyond anything the Sichultian Enablement currently possesses. To be frank, so far beyond they will remain arguably non-analysable and certainly non-reproducible for the foreseeable near to medium future. This, sir, will be a space yacht capable of successfully engaging entire fleets of vessels representing state-of-the-art technology by Sichultian Enablement standards, and some way beyond. Great care will need to be taken drawing up the – how shall I put this? – the generally availablecomponent of the Use and Ownership Contract for this to pass muster with the sadly all-too-zealous bureaucrats of the Galactic Council’s Technology Transfer Oversight Board.”

  “Hmm. Well, we’ll see. It does look terribly retro in style, don’t you think?”

  “It is not styled. It is simply designed. See: the form allows all weapons to point forward, five out of the eight to point rearward and never less than five to point to any side, without rotation. In event of field failure, the highly fluid-dynamic directional profile outline provides high abrasive-environment survivability. The internal component layout and field substrate deployment are generally held to be as close to perfection as it was then possible to achieve and has not been significantly improved upon since. I beseech you, Veppers; inquire. Such inquiry will prove what I say: the Murderer class is rightly regarded as a design classic.”

  “So it is actually quite old?”

  “Let us say that it is proven. In many ways, it has never been bettered for purposeful elegance.”

  “Still, though; old.”

  “Veppers, my dear friend, the example you see before you is better than the original, and that was the best there was at the time. Warship design has improved only incrementally since, with gradual though significant improvements to raw speed, crude weapon-power effectiveness and so on, but, in a sense, all the various design teams have ever been trying to do is to re-create the design you see here before you for future ages. Any given design produced right now to represent the sum of all subsequent improvements will quickly itself be improved upon and so eclipsed within a relatively short interval. The beauty of the Murderer class is that in a way it never was improved upon. That legacy is secure, endures and ensures that its reputation, rather than fade, will likely only grow the brighter.”

  “Accommodation?”

  “The original could accommodate up to one hundred and twenty humans, in admittedly relatively cramped conditions. Our improved version requires minimal operational crew – perhaps three or four – and so allows for, say, equal numbers of twenty servant-crew and twenty passengers, the latter existing in conditions of some considerable luxury. The exact disposition of the apartments and suites would be up to your good self.”

  “Hmm,” Veppers said. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

  “Well said. Like our civilisational inspirates we worship nothing, but if we and they did worship anything, it would be thought, reason and rationality. As such, your ambition to think leaves us assured that our offer will be seen as the generous – indeed, generous almost to a fault – one that it is.”

  “Your confidence is an inspiration to us all, I’m sure.”

  Twenty

  The Tsungarial Disk had been a disappointment the first time Veppers had seen it. Three hundred million space factories of half a million tonnes or more each sounded like a lot, but, spread out around an entire gas giant from within a few hundred kilometres of Razhir’s cloud tops to over half a million kilometres distant from the planet, in a band forty thousand kilometres thick, it was amazing how empty the space around the planet could seem.

  It didn’t help that the fabricaria were soot black; they didn’t reflect, glint or really show up at all unless they got in the way of light coming from somewhere else, when they registered as, at best, a spatter of silhouettes. As Razhir itself was a fairly dull-coloured planet – mostly dark reds and browns with only a few lighter yellows at the poles – silhouetting the fabricaria against something wasn’t that easy either.

  They looked much better and far more impressive in an enhanced image, their locations signalled by little spots of light superimposed onto the real view of the system. That gave you an impression of just how many of the fuckers there really were.

  The GFCF Succour-Class ship Messenger Of Truth swung neatly out of hyperspace with the minimum of fuss just a few hundred klicks out from the Disk’s designated Initial Contact Facility, one of the Disk’s relatively rare habitats rather than a true factory unit. The little space port orbited slowly around Razhir at a distance of just over half a million klicks and so was about as far out as any part of the Disk ever got.

  The Facility itself was a fat grey slightly flattened torus ten klicks across and one in diameter, its sides studded with lights and its outer surface barnacled with dock pits and mooring gantries; apparently only six of the Facility’s twenty-five docking points were in use, though that was still twice as many as Veppers had ever seen on previous visits.

  Veppers sat in what he judged to be a rather cheesy, over-decorated lounge within the GFCF ship, sprawled within a recliner seat having a pedicure performed by two giggling, naked females who looked to represent a sort of halfway compromise between Sichultians and GFCFians. He’d been told their names but had lost interest in them after about the third giggle.

  He sipped on a long drink with pretentious amounts of garnish and a little – allegedly entirely edible – fish swimming around inside. Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III sat in a smaller but otherwise similar recliner alongside. A roughly spherical floating robot device was gently combing the alien’s head-scales with a softly glowing, immaterial field.

  “We are just checking in,” Bettlescroy explained, waving one elegantly formed hand at the screen filling their field of vision in front of them. “This is what is called the Disk Designated Initial Contact Facility, though we usually just call it Reception.”

  “I have been here before,” Veppers said. He sort of drawled the remark, though he doubted the subtlety would be lost on the alien. “I own ninety-six of these factories, Bettlescroy, and I dislike being an absentee landlord.”

  “Of course, of course,” the alien sai
d, nodding wisely.

  Veppers gestured at the screen, where the space station was rotating slowly. “Isn’t that a Culture ship? The one just coming into view?”

  “Indeed. Well spotted. That is the Fast Picket, ex ‘Killer’ class Limited Offensive Unit, Hylozoist, of the Culture’s Restoria section. It has been stationed here for the last standard year or so, supporting the Restoria mission within the Disk.”

  “Isn’t it likely to be checking us out as we are, as you put it, checking in?”

  “That would be impolite,” the alien said with a charming, small smile. “In any event, rest assured that the Messenger Of Truth is one of our finest ships and easily capable of resisting any attempt by a craft like the Hylozoist to intrusively investigate us without our express permission and indeed active cooperation. We can both outgun and outrun the Hylozoist; it is no threat to us or to the actions that may need to be taken in the near future. It has been taken account of and its presence and indeed likely engagement fully factored in to our plans and sims. Plus, without giving too much away—” Bettlescroy’s pale facial skin flushed a little and it held up one delicate hand in modesty. “—I think it is no secret that the Messenger Of Truth is not here, in or near the Disk, alone. It is simply the nominal flagship of our fleet here, and indeed not even the most militarily capable of our immediately applicable assets.”

  “Any other Culture ships around?” Veppers asked, eyeing the Fast Picket suspiciously as it moved slowly round in front of them, nested into its docking pit on the Facility’s outer surface.

  “No,” Bettlescroy said.

  Veppers looked at the alien. “You’re sure?”

  It smiled beatifically back. “We’re sure.” It made a graceful, blossoming gesture with its hands. “There. We are registered, checked in. We have done the polite thing and may now go about our business.”

  “I take it I haven’t been mentioned?” Veppers asked.

  “Of course not. We are here ostensibly simply to carry out regular oversight and minor maintenance as required of our monitoring facilities distributed throughout the greater Disk. We may go where we please.”

  “Useful.” Veppers nodded.

  “Ship,” Bettlescroy said, “you may continue on to our destination.”

  The view on the screen flickered. The space station was suddenly replaced by the gas giant Razhir, its side-lit disc filling a substantial part of the screen and the locations of the fabricaria again shown by tiny points of light. The effect was to create a near invisibly fine speckle of bright dust that girdled the banded ruddiness of the gas giant like a haze. The view tipped, then expanded suddenly and dramatically as the ship plunged into the mass of light points; they zipped past the vessel like hail in a ground car’s headlights. The view swung again as the ship curved round, partially following the orbits of the displayed fabricaria.

  Bettlescroy clapped its hands daintily and sat up, shooing the floating robot away. “We should make our way to the shuttle,” the alien announced.

  The shuttle departed the ship on the far side of the Disk from the reception Facility, ejected into space just as the Messenger Of Truth carried out a sudden course correction. This, Bettlescroy explained, should serve to conceal the shuttle’s departure from even the most assiduous monitoring equipment.

  The shuttle drifted, already quite precisely aimed, towards one of the dark, anonymous fabricaria. Watching on the shuttle’s screen, Bettlescroy on one side and the craft’s pilot on the other, Veppers saw the dark absence of the rapidly approaching object blotting out more and more of the other light-points until its blackness appeared to fill the screen and it seemed they were about to collide with it. He felt an instinctive desire to push himself back into his seat. For all the good that would do, he told himself. He stared at the darkness enveloping the screen as though trying to fend off the manufactory’s implied bulk by force of will alone.

  A sudden jolt of deceleration and a longer tug of calibrated slowing pulled them up short, close enough to see hints of detail on the dark satellite’s surface. The screen was still superimposing a false view; the faint wash of radiation coming off the thing was in wavelengths way below what pan-human eyes could register. It was hard to estimate size, though Veppers knew that the average manufactory was a fat disk about a couple of kilometre across and a third of that in height. They varied a little in size, though generally only by a factor of two. This one looked pretty average-sized though it was less synthetic-looking, more natural in appearance than was the norm.

  Its surface looked smoothly lumpy enough to be a very old and worn comet nucleus; only a few too-straight lines and near-flat surfaces hinted at its artificiality. The shuttle flew slowly into what looked like a deep dark crater. The screen went perfectly black. Then light filtered back; a faint but slowly increasing yellow-white luminescence began to seep in all around, then flooded the screen.

  The interior of the manufactory was a web-laced space over a kilometre across, the massed, silvery, criss-crossing filaments studded with hundreds upon hundreds of darkly gleaming machines like giant pieces of clockwork; all disks and gears, shafts and plates, cylinders, spindles, looms and nozzles.

  The shuttle came to a halt, perhaps a hundred metres in towards the centre of the satellite.

  “May I show you how this will look when and if we go ahead?” Bettlescroy said.

  “Please do,” Veppers said.

  The screen went into what was obviously a simulation mode, overlaying what the fabricary’s interior would look like when it was operating. The many great clockwork machines ran up and down the network of silvery lines, most retreating to the outskirt walls of the manufactory while about a twentieth of their number clumped in the very centre of the space, like a nucleus.

  The machines flicked this way and that, some light flickered, and dark lumps of matter rained down from the machines set around the perimeter, falling into the central nexus to disappear. Gradually the nucleus of machines expanded and other machines slid in from the outside to join those working in the centre. Whatever they were working on, it grew, taking on a succession of fairly simple shapes, though all implied something roughly twice as long as it was wide, and approximately cylindrical.

  As the shape grew – its surface only rarely visible, and never quite looking like what might be a hull – more and more of the clockwork-looking machines joined in the act of creation taking place; meanwhile the network of silvery filaments was bowing out like an expanding lens made of wires, accommodating the roughly ellipsoid shape growing in the centre. All the time, greater and greater quantities of matter in increasingly varied shapes and sizes were falling in from those machines still stationed on the outside and from holes and nozzles dotted around the interior wall of the satellite itself.

  A couple of minutes after the production process had begun, the filaments had shrunk back almost to the interior walls of the fabricary and the great clockwork machines had gone with them and become still. No parcels of matter issued from the machines or from the nozzles, slots and pits on the walls.

  Sitting in the middle of the space now, there was a ship.

  It was still very approximately ellipsoidal in shape; maybe six hundred metres long, two hundred across and one hundred in height. Its hull shimmered in the light, seemingly unable to decide whether it was pitch black or hazy silver. Rashed all over its shifting, uncertain surface were round black blisters of various sizes and sets of shallow, perfectly elliptical craters.

  “Ta-ra!” Bettlescroy said, with a shy giggle, then glanced at Veppers and blushed. “One space warship,” it said.

  “How fast can it go?”

  “Maximum velocity two point four kilolights.”

  “And it’s fully working?” Veppers asked, sceptical.

  “Fully,” Bettlescroy said. “It would be no match for the vessel we have constructed for you, of course, but it contains a real-time grown medium-level AI substrate already running all relevant internal systems maintenance fun
ctions, full-spectrum radiative and skein sensory systems, a primer fusion power unit ready to start manufacturing anti-matter for its pre-functional warp drive and a variety of weapon systems including thermonuclear warhead missiles and thermonuclear plasma generators. All that would be necessary to activate it would be to transmit the relevant run-protocols into its processing substrate. A trivial task taking minutes at most. It would then be immediately ready for space-flight and battle, though obviously giving it a few days to produce its own AM would increase its utility and power vastly. Equip it with prefabricated AM for its power units and missiles and it would be even more powerful even more quickly.”

  “How long does it all take?” Veppers asked.

  “For this size, the whole process to the stage you see here takes between nine and fifteen days, according to the exact specification. Sufficient raw material being present, obviously.”

  “That’s just the surface layers of the fabricary itself, isn’t it?” Veppers asked. Again, he wasn’t going to show what he was feeling here; he’d had no idea the fabricaria could spin a full-size working ship – especially a full-size tooled-up working warship – so quickly. He’d always known that the fabricaria the Veprine Corporation was allowed to use had been reduced in operational effectiveness before they’d been allowed to get their hands on them but he’d had no inkling by how much; he’d asked, naturally, but everybody involved had been professionally vague.

  The Veprine Corp fabricaria could also produce a ship ready for fitting out in a matter of days – albeit a much smaller, much less sophisticated ship – but the devil was in the fitting-out bit; that was where most of the hard work lay. Even disregarding the processing substrates concerned – you always brought them in from other specialist subsidiaries anyway – the sensory, power and engine components were what took all the time to make, not to mention all the other bewilderingly many and arcanely diverse sub-systems a working spacecraft seemed to require. Just making the relevant components took months of expensive, high complexity work, and then fitting them all in place and getting them all working together took almost as long again. Getting all of that done in a week or two was almost preposterous.