Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  It was like diving into a blizzard of multi-coloured sleet, a disturbed, whirling maelstrom of tens of thousands of barely glimpsed light-points all tearing turmoiled towards you against the darkness.

  Auppi Unstril had glanded everything there was worth glanding, slipping into the zoned-out state of steady, unremitting concentration such engagements called for. She was entirely part of the machine, feeling its sensory, power and weapon systems as perfect extensions of herself and connecting with the little ship’s AI as though it was another higher, quicker layer of tissue laid across her own brain, tightly bundled, penetrated and penetrating via her neural lace and the network of human-mind-attuned filaments within the ship’s dedicated pilot interface suite.

  At such moments she felt she was the very heart and soul of the ship; the tiny animal kernel of its being, with every other part, from her own drug-jazzed body out, like force-multiplying layers of martial ability and destructive sophistication, each concentricity of level adding, extrapolating, intensifying.

  She plunged into the storm of swirling motes. Coloured sparks against the black, each was a single truck-sized boulder of not-quite-mindless smatter; a mixture of crude, rocket-powered ballistic javelins, moderately manoeuvrable explosive cluster munitions, chemical laser-armed microships and the mirrored, ablation-armoured but unarmed breeder machines that were the real prize here; the entities amongst the lethal debris that could start other smatter infections elsewhere.

  At the start of the outbreak, all those days earlier, the breeders had made up nineteen out of twenty of the swarming machines. Immediately swept and evaluated by the ships’ sensors, they had shown up as a cloud of tiny blue dots, speckling the dark skies around the gas giant Razhir as though the great planet had birthed a million tiny water moons, with only a few of the other types of swarmers dotting the outpouring clouds of smatter.

  In retrospect, those first few days, when the blue dots made up vast near-monochrome fields of easily tracked targets, had been the days of happy hunting. Then, however, the machines – the infection – had learned. It was getting nowhere with its original mix of production; signals coming back to where the machines originated, in the infected manufacturies, told it that nothing was surviving. So it had switched its priorities. For five or six days now the blue dots had been steadily reducing in number until for the last day or so they had become lost in the billowing masses of green, yellow, orange and red points, all indicating swarmers with offensive abilities.

  Gazing into the cloud around her, Auppi could see that this latest outbreak was composed mostly of red dots, indicating these were the laser-armed variety. Red mist, she thought distantly as she and the good ship Bliterator plummeted further into them. Like a spray of blood. Good sign, natty omen. Here we go …

  Together she and the ship registered the near ninety thousand contacts and prioritised by type, designating the one-in-a-hundred blue contacts as their initial targets. This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp, neural-laced-brain running at as near to AI-speed as beyond-humanly possible, targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look.

  Only ninety thousand, though. Odd, she thought. They’d been estimating more. Usually the estimate was easy to make and reliable. Why’d they got it wrong? She ought to feel glad there were ten kilos fewer to blit, but she didn’t; instead she got a feeling something was wrong. Combat superstition, maybe.

  Embedded in the cloud of red dots – still naively ignoring the Bliterator because it hadn’t shown itself as hostile yet – the few blue dots were all located some way in, with none towards the surface of the emerging cloud.

  The ship wove a suggested route for them to the best place – deep inside the cloud – to start firing.

  ∼Let’s bend past those two blues and mine them with missiles, dormanted till we open, Auppi sent to the ship, reaching out with a sort of ghost-limb sense to adjust the ship’s sketched-in course.

  ∼Okay, the ship sent. They swung, curving round to take in the two blue contacts she’d outlined, jinking this way and that to avoid running into the swarmers. She still found this bit weird. Tactically, logically, this made sense; get to the centre and start laying waste from there, but even though the sims said this was the most destructively efficient approach, she still yearned to be firing now, in fact to have started firing as soon as they’d come into range of the first swarmers.

  But then another of her instincts just wanted to blow the fabricaria out of the sky; why treat the symptoms when you could attack the disease at the source? But the Disk, the fabricaria that made it up, was what they were all there to protect. Ancient fucking monument, wasn’t it? Couldn’t touch that. That’d be uncivilised.

  It was right, she agreed with this, of course she did – she hadn’t joined Restoria to blast smatter, she’d joined because she was fascin ated in ancient tech, and especially ancient tech that had this rather childish desire to turn everything about it into little copies of itself – but after a nine-day haul with almost no breaks pounding the only-arguably-living crap out of any glowing blue dot that presented itself in her ship-shared sensorium, you kind of got to thinking like a weapon. To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at. The fabricaria were the source of all this hassle, ergo … but no. Aside from the small matter of not getting one’s own self blitted, preserving the fabricaria and the Disk was what mattered most here.

  She felt the missiles go, programmed to initiate when the ship started brightening up its own immediate whereabouts. The missiles would prioritise the blue-echo breeder machines and then start setting about the rest.

  ∼There’s a lot of these red-echo laser fuckers, Auppi sent to the ship. ∼Let’s loose all the missiles, get this over fast and jump to the re-arm immediately after, yes?

  ∼Yes, agreed. Suggest missiles to these locations. Leaves half.

  ∼Okay. Gone?

  ∼Gone.

  ∼Beautiful spread.

  ∼Thank you.

  ∼Right, we’re about there, yes?

  ∼Centred in one tenth …

  ∼Warm them up, get spinning and a-tumbling and let’s light the fuckers up.

  ∼Nearly there …

  ∼Come on come on come on!

  ∼Oh, close enough, I suppose. On yours.

  ∼Whoop-de-doop!

  Auppi felt like she had a trigger beneath more digits than she possessed, as though each finger and toe was somehow curled round a little grouping of firing filaments, every one individually launchable according to the amount of squeeze she applied. She double-swept her gaze around the feast of targets, gloried in the sheer luxuriousness of it, and clutched the triggers smoothly to her, firing everything, loosing everything, lighting up every priority-one target in view at once.

  The space she lay in sparkled all around like a diamond-ball bathysphere lowered into the sort of planetary depths where every organism made its own light. Rosettes, florets, side-slanted bursts, little spears and dirty flurries of light erupted on every side, filling her eyes with sparks. Whirling within the seen cacophony, the spinning, tumbling ship was already flagging up the next array of targets. She swung and spun with it, untroubled by gyrations that would have had her throwing up, pre-training.

  ∼What’re the grey blobs? she asked the ship as the lasers and their collimators locked into the aiming grids of the ship’s primary sensors.

  ∼Indicates swarmer type unclear, the ship told her.

  ∼Fuck, she sent, before loosing another fusillade to strew another hundred-plus bright scratches across the sky. Unclear? They hadn’t had any “unclear” before. What the fuck was this?

  She could see the missiles popping open their own little pockets of destruction, two behind them, down the course the ship had taken towards the centre of the cloud, and others further away, some still just starting to fire. Meanwhile the smatter had woken up to the fact that this racing, wildly tumbling thing in its midst did not wish it well
and some of the truck-size laser swarmers were starting to turn their single-mouth long-axes towards them. The ship took a hit almost immediately as one swarmer found itself fortuitously pointing right at them and at the right stage in its charging cycle. The beam struck, slid off, bounced away by the little craft’s mirror field.

  ∼Proportion unclear? she sent as the next layer of targets snicked into the aiming grids.

  ∼About one per cent. Hitting some with—

  She/it/they fired, flicking destruction across the darkness.

  ∼this salvo, the ship continued. ∼Devoting sensory resources to analyse debris result.

  They were close enough to the fabricary now to have to take it into account when they targeted; this close to what they were aiming at, and with such relatively slow-moving targets, there was almost zero chance of just plain missing and a stray shot heading straight at the fabricary, but it was possible for a blast from the main laser to go straight through one of the swarmers, and some of the latest versions had semi-serviceable laser coatings capable of deflecting at least part of a bolt from one of the secondary or tertiaries. Plus you – well, the ship, thankfully – had to think about post-destruction main-remaining-body direction vectors and shrapnel-debris-scatter profiles.

  Auppi was glad she didn’t have to think about that sort of house-keeping crap; let her concentrate on just blasting stuff. They swung again, re-targeted. A few more incoming hits registered, small calibre nuisance against the heavy armour of the ship’s reactive mirror field.

  ∼So? she sent. The latest targets had blossomed so the ship would have had time to analyse the relevant debris signatures.

  ∼Zip, the ship sent. ∼All still there. Hitting nearest grey/unclear with full main.

  As the ship sent this, over twenty of the contacts they’d been aiming at suddenly weren’t being targeted any more, just blinking out.

  ∼Fuck.

  Such was the weapon’s power – and the swarmers’ relative vulnerability – the ship’s main laser usually got multiply-collimated into anything up to twenty-four separate, independently aimed beams. Devoting the whole beam on full power to a single object had been unheard-of overkill until now.

  ∼Nanoguns exhausted, the ship told her, confirming something she could already see from her own displays.

  She squeezed off another salvo at the truncated target list. The main’s was obvious, the impacting bolt lighting up whatever was around the target itself with splash-out, freeze-framing the pelting swarmers nearby as though in a flash photograph. The ship would be watching in greater detail than Auppi, but even she could see umpteen tiny glowing traces burst glinting from the aim-point.

  ∼That got it, the ship sent.

  Everything wheeled again, the ship continuing to gyrate wildly, carving a gradually increasing hollow space of smatter debris out of the centre of the cloud of swarmers. Multiple incoming registered as pops and clicks, ringing the mirror field. Meanwhile Auppi had been loosing missiles into the depths of the swarm, sending them off to start their own spreading blossoms of destruction.

  ∼Two grey on half-main each? she suggested.

  ∼Doing, the ship agreed, and the depleted grids lit up, firmed again. She flexed, distributing unseen rays like benedictions. She concentrated on the two foci of the main armament. A single unsullied brightness flicked on in each, then faded neatly. The other swarmers being engulfed in glowing debris clouds all happened elsewhere, unworthy of notice. Further afield still, the missiles careened about their own little patches of sky, dispatching all they could.

  ∼No? she asked

  ∼No! the ship said.

  Another wild twisting about the skies, and Razhir the gas giant was suddenly there, filling the view, its banded face instantly rashed with the aim points. The ship’s main armament had resumed targeting a full-power blast on individual grey targets.

  ∼Motherfucker. Analysis?

  ∼Bigger than average, non-ablating reflectivity, moving quicker. Complicated. Lot of wreckage. Accounting for fewer total targets.

  There, she thought; she’d known there was something wrong about their being only ninety K swarmers when they’d been expecting more. The fucking outbreak was switching production mix again, going for complex survivability rather than sheer numbers.

  ∼Grown-up power signatures, the ship continued, as Auppi unleashed another salvo. The incoming laser hits sounded like hail on a glass roof.

  Another hurried tumble, one more array of targets snapping into focus, caught and steadied in the aiming grids. Even as she readied to fire, Auppi was scanning for the grey contacts preferentially now, picking out where they lurked in the red sleet-storm of other contacts.

  Tiny patches of the sensor view were outing briefly now as the sheer weight of laser bursts incoming forced the mirror field to occlude the sensors, producing little hexagonal pixilations like clutter; they came and went almost before she had time to register them.

  She flung out the latest manic light-burst, like shaking water droplets from her fingers.

  With the main armament taking one target at a time it was possible to up the collimation on the secondaries for short- and medium-range targets, bringing their salvo total back up again. There might be a few more wounds rather than outright kills, but that was acceptable.

  ∼That one just took off, the ship said, indicating one of the two grey targets they’d tried to waste two salvoes earlier. ∼And there goes the other one.

  ∼See them, Auppi sent. ∼They’re fast! She had another reduced set of targets sliding across the view; she let fly at them. The two fleeing grey contacts would be out of range in seconds. ∼Any missiles we can put in their way?

  ∼Not the first one. Second, yes.

  ∼Get the other missiles to concentrate on the greys, she suggested. She wanted to fire a lot more missiles, everywhere, but they were out of missiles now too.

  ∼Shit, we powered them, the ship sounded upset.

  ∼Didn’t know you swore, ship.

  ∼I didn’t know swarmers could use incoming laser to power them to that sort of speed, the ship replied, fixing an unlikely-looking vector line across the points representing where one of the grey contacts had been when they’d hit it and where it was now, still accelerating.

  ∼We need to chase those, she sent.

  ∼You think so.

  ∼It’s prioritising them.

  Another small set of targets, swiftly dispatched, while another slotted instantly into view. The weaponry was falling out of phase now as the differences between the varying re-charging intervals started to add up and the additional collimating on the secondaries introduced its own slight delay.

  ∼Maybe it wants us to do the same, the ship suggested.

  The incoming sounded like drumming, heavy rain now. The pixilation outings were spattering across the view like manically invasive subtitles in an unknown language.

  ∼I don’t think it’s that smart.

  ∼You want to chase?

  ∼Yes. That one. She indicated the first one to set off out of the cloud of contacts at the same time as loosing another half-salvo and marking a swathe of fresh targets across the red cloud around them.

  ∼Okay.

  The view tumbled one more time, another set of targets highlighted across the wash of contact-strewn space, then even as she triggered the weaponry again they set off, their slow, near-centred drift composed of many lightning-fast tumbles and gyrations turning into a single darting vector aimed at where they reckoned the grey they were targeting would be. She kept on firing microsalvo after micro-salvo at the sleet-echoes of red targets as they pursued, triggerings becoming almost continuous as the firing patterns diverged. Red sleet, red sleet turning fire bright; they must be leaving a tunnel of ravaged, fading debris behind them through the swarmer cloud, the ship itself a sleek spear-point glittering with reflected light as the red-flagged laser elements swivelled, following it and firing. So many reds, so many …

  ∼It’s
accelerating hard, the ship sent.

  Shit, she thought.

  ∼We powered it by hitting it, she sent to the ship.

  ∼Yes.

  ∼With the laser.

  ∼Yes. Oh.

  ∼They’re not all just to hit us with.

  ∼They’re there …

  ∼To power the greys.

  ∼That’s a departure.

  ∼That could be a lot of fucking departures. Those grey fuckers are ships; microships.

  ∼The outburst has halted, the ship told her. ∼The last swarmer just exited the infected fabricary.

  Auppi and the ship were picking out double-handfuls of targets constantly now as they charged through the mist of contacts becoming targets, delegating the fire commands to the sub-AIs, effectively letting the weaponry make up its own mind when to initiate.

  ∼Hundreds of the laser swarmers are firing at the grey we’re pursuing, the ship sent. ∼I can see the back-scatter. Other laser swarmers starting to pattern themselves around each of the greys. They’re going to power them up too.

  ∼We aren’t going to be able to cope, she sent. ∼This needs mayhem weaponry; what we’ve got’s far too polite and pinpoint.

  ∼Or a serious Effector.

  ∼Job for our in-bound Torturer class.

  ∼I think we should suggest just that. Okay, we’re in range.

  Auppi squeezed off the single main-armament shot at the fleeing swarmer, blasting it across the skies in a pulsating detonation of light, fragments incandescing in the pulses of laser still coming in from the swarmers which had been helping to power it.

  Their own incoming increased again as the swarmers switched from powering the now destroyed microship to just plain shooting at the Bliterator and Auppi. The ship was swinging, powering away, curving round, lifting away from the debris field it had just created.

  ∼How many more greys? Auppi asked.

  ∼Thirty-eight.

  ∼We’ll never get them all.

  ∼As many as we can, then.

  ∼Any heading for the planet?