Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  ∼Fucking hell, she heard herself say.

  ∼You enjoying it? the ship asked. ∼My favourite bit’s coming up in a moment.

  ∼What do you mean, your favourite bit? she asked it as the next hapless ship appeared, transfixed, in the concentric targeting/ weapon-choice circles.

  ∼Ha! You didn’t think this is happening in real time, did you? The ship sounded amused.

  ∼This is a recording? she said – nearly wailed – as the tiny green ship blazed and turned to what looked like minutely shredded, wind-blown grass-dust. Instantly the view flicked back before throwing her down again somewhere else, her view wobbling to focus on another petrified target.

  ∼Slow-motion replay, the ship told her. ∼Pay attention, Led.

  This green target looked bigger and more complicated than the others. The rings around it were larger, fatter and brighter, though less numerous. The ship seemed to start to change, taking on the appearance of the black, over-limbed snowflake again. Then bits of it detached, started to float away, while each of them blossomed with rosettes of green haze. Altogether, it filled her zoomed-in field of vision, dazzling.

  ∼At this point they still think I’m hitting them too late, the ship murmured.

  A violet halo she hadn’t been aware of zeroed in on the central contact. The halo flashed. When it faded the ship was still there, but it had turned violet itself now. Then tiny violet rings appeared around the floating-away bits and each microscopic part of the hazy stuff, so small that the green haze disappeared to be replaced with a slightly dimmer violet one.

  Everything flashed apart from the central target. The earlier haze had gone. The pulverised remains of the specks that had been floating away formed the haze now, flashing violet and light green and dissipating, filling her field of vision; sumptuous, scintillating. In some ways it was the most beautiful firework display she had ever seen. It began to end as the violet ship in the centre of the view grew in brightness, going from a distinct but un-showy glow to a sky-splitting glare in a few seconds – much slower than anything else had reacted. When it faded, there was more violet/lime green flashing debris, scattered everywhere, all slowly spreading, fading, going dull and disappearing, leaving just the stars to be seen once more; calm, faint, tiny, far away and unchanging after the shattering, psychotic tumult of flickering images that had kept her rapt, shocked, transfixed till now.

  She felt herself let out a deep breath.

  Then – bizarrely, even shockingly – Demeisen was there in front of her, lounging in what looked like the control seat next to hers, but somehow straight in front of her, against the star field. He was gently lit from above, his feet up on something invisible and his hands clasped behind his neck.

  He turned to look at her, nodding once. ∼There you go, he said. ∼You’ve just seen one of the most significant military engagements of modern times, doll; lamentably but fascinatingly one-sided though it turned out to be. Strongly suspect they just weren’t giving their ship Minds full tactical authority. Demeisen shook his head, frowned. ∼Amateurs. He shrugged. ∼Oh well. Hopefully not the start of an actual proper all-out war between the Culture and our over-cute tribute civ – perish that thoughtlet – but they did shoot first, and it was with what they assumed would be full lethal force, so I was entirely within my rights to waste the miserable trigger-happy fuckers to a soul, without mercy. He sighed. ∼Though I am obviously anticipating the inevitable board of inquiry and I do slightly worry about being ticked off for being just a tad over-enthusiastic. He sighed again, sounding happier this time. ∼Still. Abominator class; we have a reputation to protect. Fuck me, the others are going to be so jealous! He paused. ∼What?

  ∼Were there people in those ships? she asked.

  ∼GFCF navy? Definitely. Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting them-selves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded.

  The doubly unreal vision of the avatar floating in space looked away, as though gazing contentedly round at the almost unsee-ably small debris floating around him. ∼That’ll fucking learn the bastards.

  Lededje waited a short while but he kept on looking about him, sighing happily and seemingly either ignoring or having forgotten all about her. ∼Fuck me, she heard him say quietly, ∼I just blighted an entire fucking fleet there. Without even stretching a limb. Squadron, at the very least. Fuh-zuck-elling hell-cocks, I’m good.

  ∼I think I’d like to get back to Sichult now, if that’s all right, she told the avatar.

  ∼Of course, Demeisen said, turning to her with a neutral expres-sion. ∼There’s that man you want to kill, isn’t there?

  Veppers had to slide slowly down the carpeted floor of the corridor beyond the door; it was too steep to try to walk down. The first thing he found was Jasken attempting to climb up towards him, pushing open another dented door. Behind Jasken there was dim light, and the sound of crying and moaning. A breeze rolled up the tipped corridor, from behind Jasken.

  “Sir! Are you all right?” Jasken said when he recognised Veppers in the gloom.

  “Alive, nothing broken. I think some fucker tried to nuke me. Did you see that fucking fireball?”

  “I think the pilots are dead, sir. Can’t get into the flight deck. We’ve a door open to the outside. There are some dead, sir. Some injured, too.” He waved the arm that had been in the fake cast.

  “I thought it might be time to discard—”

  “Is there any help on the way?”

  “Don’t know yet, sir. There’s a hardened comms set in the compartment somewhere; the two Zei left are checking the emergency storage.”

  “Two? Left?” Veppers said, staring at Jasken. There had been four of his clone guards aboard, hadn’t there? Or had they called off at the last moment?

  “Two of the Zei died in the crash, sir,” Jasken told him.

  “Fuck,” Veppers said. Well, you could always grow more, he supposed, though it still took time to train them. “Who else?”

  “Pleur, sir. And Herrit. Astle’s got a broken leg. Sulbazghi’s unconscious.”

  They descended into the passenger compartment. It was lit by emergency lighting and the daylight from outside coming through the small oval portholes and the opened emergency door. The place smelled bad, Veppers thought. Moaning sounds and people crying. Thankfully it was hard to see too much. He wanted to get out immediately.

  “Sir,” one of the Zei said, approaching them over the tipped chaos of seats and spilled possessions. He was holding a comms transceiver. “We are glad you are alive, sir,” he said. He’d bled heavily from a wound on his head and his other arm hung oddly.

  “Yes, thank you,” Veppers said as the Zei handed the set to Jasken. “That’s all.” He nodded to the Zei to go. The big man bowed, then turned and walked back awkwardly over the seats.

  Veppers brought his mouth close to Jasken’s ear as the other man checked the transceiver and activated it. “Whatever turns up first, even if it’s an ambulance flier, you and I get on it alone,” he told Jasken. “Understand?”

  “Sir?” Jasken said, blinking.

  “Make sure there’s enough other craft to get everybody else off, but we take the first thing that arrives. Just us, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And where are your Oculenses? We might need them.”

  “They’re broken, sir.”

  Veppers shook his head. “Some fucker wants me dead, Jasken. Let’s let them think I am. Let’s let them think they succeeded. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” Jasken shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “Should I tell the others to say that you were killed?”

  “No, they’re to say that I’m alive. Injured, perfectly wel
l, traumatised, missing, in a coma; more different stories the better. Point is I don’t show, I don’t appear. Everybody will assume they’re all lying. They’ll think I’m dead. Possibly you, too. You and I are going to hide, Jasken. D’you ever do that when you were a kid, Jasken? Hide? I used to. Did it a lot. I was great at it. So we’re going to do that now; we’re going to hide.” Veppers patted the other man on the shoulder, hardly noticing that he winced when he did so. “Shares will go into a tail-spin, but that can’t be helped.” He nodded at the transceiver. “Make the call. Then find me a flight suit or something to use as a disguise.”

  Twenty-five

  Auppi Unstril felt very hot now. The cold would win eventually though – it would be creeping in from all sides, making its way towards her from the Bliterator’s hull; seeping its way inwards to where she lay, at the craft’s centre, as the vessel’s heat leaked away, radiating into space. She would be the last bit to go completely cold. She was the little pit, the stone at the heart of the fruit … well, more its soft centre, the mushy middle.

  She would be hard, in time though. Once she’d frozen. In the meantime she was dying, maybe from suffocation, maybe from overheating.

  The last thing they’d heard from the Hylozoist had been that it had been attacked, disabled. It had just departed the Initial Contact Facility, got barely ten kilometres away, when it had been hit by some EqT energy weapon, slicing in through some hi-tech field disruptor. Its engines were wrecked, field generators shattered, some personnel dead; it had announced it was limping back towards the Facility.

  In what had sounded like a series of simultaneous attacks, the GFCF comms had lit up with alarms telling of attacks on their vessels too; one of their MDVs on the other side of the Disk had been blown out of the skies and other ships damaged, at least temporarily disabled.

  Auppi and the Bliterator had been scanning one of the fabricaria, trying to see if it was one of the ship-building ones, when the attacks had started. They were studiously ignoring a nearby smatter outbreak, even though they were ideally placed to tackle it and it looked like a serious one. That had felt wrong. The Bliterator hadn’t been configured as a general-purpose mini space-craft; it was a cobbled-together attack ship. Very skilfully and even elegantly cobbled together, but cobbled together nevertheless; single minded, no nonsense. Leaving its weapons on standby while a smatter outbreak raged only a few minutes’ flight away felt wrong wrong wrong.

  But checking a proper sample of the fabricaria for illicit ship-making activity was, even Auppi had to admit, more important. She’d wanted to take the Bliterator inside the ripped-open fabri-cary to get a still closer look at the ship they’d found by accident, but they already had the readings to show it was a serious if relatively simple bit of kit, and the consensus had been that it would be too dangerous to try to enter the fabricary; the fab was still single-mindedly completing the ship, hull holed or not, and the maker machines were still whizzing back and forth on their network of lines and cables; even if they’d all been still it would have taken some delicate manoeuvring for the Bliterator to thread its way inside the thing. With them still darting back and forth unpredictably it would be suicide.

  So she’d ignored the scarily fascinating weird new ship and ignored the fresh, enticing smatter outbreak and taken on what they’d all agreed was the most important task: choose a few fabs at random, over a decent spread of the Disk, and take a look inside using the very limited solids-scanning abilities of their little improvised attack ships. It had proved easier than they’d anticipated because all the fabs they’d looked at had the same hollow-skin outer hulls. Where there should have been a thick crust of dense raw material, there was a thin outer skin supported by a light girder-net, then the hull proper, then lots of activity, with some-thing big growing slowly at the centre. A few of the tiny Culture craft had even had time to choose a fourth random fab each and investigate those too.

  Before they were hit.

  She’d been looking at her own results – yup, looked like another ship getting built in there – when she’d heard, amongst the chatter on the shared open channel they were all using, the Hylozoist ship voice – ramped fast, clipped, compressed, in full emergency mode

  – announce it had suffered attack, been disabled … would have to limp back to the Facility.

  The chatter had subsided, the channel had gone almost totally quiet. Then hubbub, as people started saying things like, “What the fuck? / Did it say—? / Is this a drill? / That can’t be—” before, clearly, over them all, she heard Lanyares shout, “Hey. I’m getting—!”

  Then spreading silence, sometimes preceded by a shout or exclamation, from all of them.

  “What’s—?” she’d had time to say. Then the Bliterator had gone quiet around her.

  “Warning, Effector att—” the ship had told her, probably via some pre-loaded back-up substrate. The little ship had four other fall-back layers of processing below the AI core, but even those needed Effector-vulnerable tech to communicate with her via her suit, so when everything went dark and quiet and still, it went really dark and quiet and still, fast.

  There was probably some life left in the ship, even now, at the atomechanical or bio-chemical level, but if there was, she and it couldn’t communicate.

  And her neural lace was off-line too; even that had been taken out in whatever Effector event had wasted the Bliterator. The last from it had been its sign-off signal, its I’m-fucked message, what she’d heard described as being like a tiny brittle wire breaking in the centre of your head. Which had proved a fairly accurate description. She’d experienced a faint, flat, half-felt, half-heard ping somewhere between the ears. Just so you knew you were on your own now. Not much comfort there.

  She wondered why they’d bothered to incorporate the lace-wasted signal in the first place. Better to leave the poor sap with a dead lace in their head thinking everything was still somehow all hunky-dory; but no, that would be a lie, and this was the Culture, so you had to be told the truth, no matter how un -comfortable it was, no matter how much it might contribute to feelings of despair.

  Some real purists even refused drug glands and the related pain-management systems because those were somehow “untruthful” too. Weirdos.

  So she was stuck in here, imprisoned in the suit, unable to move in the gel foam and anyway locked inside the miniscule, extra-equipment-stuffed flight deck within a ship that would probably need cutting equipment to enter.

  The only excitement had been when she’d felt a soft bump, maybe a quarter-hour after it had all gone quiet. That had got her hopes up; maybe somebody was coming to rescue her! But it had probably just been the ship clunking into the side of the fab they’d been scanning when they’d been attacked. Bounced off, most likely. Tumbling, surely, though at a guess very slowly because she couldn’t feel any sense of being spun or rotated.

  “What’s—?”

  As last words went, it was pretty shit. She hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to Lan, or any of the others, or the ship.

  “What’s—?”

  Just hopeless.

  Very very hot now. She had been keeping a watch on the time but now even that was getting hazy. Everything had been getting hazy; senses, sense of self, sense of humour, as the heat had built up in her body. It seemed wrong; unfair somehow. She was surrounded by intense cold, this far out in the system from the central star, and the ship was dead, or as good as, no longer providing energy or heat, and yet she was going to die of self-inflicted heatstroke, if simple suffocation didn’t kill her first. Too well insulated, inside here. The cold would freeze her solid eventually, but that would take days, tens of days; maybe more.

  Meantime her body’s own internal processes, the chemical stuff that made you human, were going to cook her brain, because there was nowhere for the heat to go fast enough, now that the suit and ship were dead.

  What a depressing way to die.

  It had been hours, she reckoned. She’d had a time-count tha
t had been accurate to the minute until not long ago, but then the brain-scrambling heat had made her forget it and having dropped that strand, she couldn’t for the life of her pick it up again. At some point, she realised, her dead body would be back to exactly normal blood heat, as it cooled down again after its self-produced temperature spike. She wondered when that would happen. A lot of heat in the ship, and the double suit was a very good insulator. It would take a while to radiate all that warmth away. Days sounded about right.

  She had cried, at one point. She couldn’t remember when. Fear, and frustration, and a sort of primal terror at being so utterly trapped, unable to move.

  The tears had collected around her eyes, unable to go anywhere else in the dead, close-fitting suit. If the suit had still been working it would have capillaried the tears away.

  She was still breathing, very shallowly, because there was a purely mechanical link to a set of tiny, finger-thin tanks on the suit’s back, and a purely chemical set of reactions going on some-where in the system that ought to keep her alive for tens of days. The trouble was the suit held her too tightly for her to breathe properly; her chest muscles couldn’t expand her lungs sufficiently. It had to be that way, of course, for the suit to do its job properly when everything had been working; it had to clasp her tightly or she’d run the risk of getting bruised and hurt when they accelerated hard. She could feel her brain closing bits of her body down, cutting off blood supplies, keeping her oxygenated blood needs down to a minimum, but it wasn’t going to be enough; she’d start to lose parts of her brain soon, cells dying, suffocated.

  She was glanding softnow every now and again, to keep herself calm. No point in panicking when it would do no use. If she had to die she might as well do so with a little dignity.