Surface Detail (18 page)

An expert sub-system suggested that should the mortar round detonate where he had been, further additional advantage might be accrued. That sounded good too.

The mortar round was travelling so slowly there was plenty of time to work out exactly where he had been, to target his left upper Light Laser Rifle Unit on the spinning projectile and set himself up for minimal blast-front damage from the direction the round was heading, should it prove to be a micro-nuke.

When it was directly above where he’d been he landed four direct low-power hits on its rear; zero misses or out-splash, which made him feel very good. He whipped the rifle unit back into the armoured nacelle. The mortar round detonated.

Micro-nuke.

The Hells existed because some faiths insisted on them, and some societies too, even without the excuse of over-indulged religiosity.

Whether as a result of perhaps too faithful a transcription – from scriptural assertion to provable actuality – or simply an abiding secular need to continue persecuting those thought worthy of punishment even after they were dead, a number of civilisations – some otherwise quite respectable – had built up impressively ghastly Hells over the eons. These were only rarely linked with other Afterlives, hellish or otherwise, and even then only under strict superveillance, and usually only with the aim of heightening the anguish of the sufferers by subjecting them to torments their own people somehow hadn’t thought of, or the same old ones but inflicted by extra-gruesome alien demons rather than the more familiar home-grown variety.

Very gradually though, perhaps just due to the exact nature of the chance mix the contemporary crop of In-play civilisations represented, a sort of network of Hells – still only partial, and remaining strictly controlled in their interactions – did emerge, and news of their existence and the conditions within them became more widely known.

This led to trouble, in time. Many species and civilisations objected profoundly to the very idea of Hells, no matter whose they were. A lot objected profoundly to the very idea of torture in any event, and the practice of setting up Virtual Environments – traditionally such dazzlingly fabulous realms of unmitigated pleasure – devoted to inflicting pain and suffering on sentient creatures seemed not just wrong but perverse, sadistic, genuinely evil and shamefully, disgracefully cruel. Uncivilised, in fact, and that was not a word such societies bandied about without having thought carefully about its deployment.

The Culture took a particularly dim view of torture, either in the Real or in a Virtuality, and was quite prepared to damage its short- and even – at least seemingly – long-term interests to stop it happening. Such a devoutly censorious, non-pragmatic approach confused people used to dealing with the Culture, but it was a characteristic that had been there since the civilisation’s inception so there was little point in treating it as just a temporary moral fad and waiting for it to pass. As a result, over the millennia, the Culture’s atypically inflexible attitude probably had shifted the whole meta-civilisational moral debate on such matters slightly but significantly to the liberal, altruistic end of the ethical spectrum, that definitive identification of torture with barbarism being perhaps its most obvious mimetic achievement.

There was a predictable mix of responses. A few of the civs hosting Hells simply had a think, took the point and closed them down; generally these were species who had never shown any great enthusiasm for the concept in the first place, their number including some who had only adopted the idea at all because they’d got the erroneous impression it was what all up-and-coming societies did and they hadn’t wanted to appear backward.

Some civilisations just ignored the fuss and said it had nothing to do with anybody else. Others, generally those constitutionally unable to look past any opportunity to go spasming into full High Dudgeon mode, reacted with hysterical bluster, complaining loudly of bullying, ethical imperialism, grossly unwarranted cultural interference and persecution bordering on outright hostility. Some of those, having made their point – and after a decent interval – still proved persuadable that Hells were un acceptable. But not all.

The Hells remained, as did the discord they engendered.

Even so, now and again a civ was effectively bribed out of continuing to host Hells, usually with tech that was a bit beyond it in the normal course of development, though that was a tricky precedent to set in case it encouraged others to try the same trick just to get their hands on the relevant toys, so it remained a strategy that had to be used sparingly.

A few of the more militantly Altruistic civs tried to hack into the Hells belonging to those they saw as their more barbaric peers, to free or destroy the tormented souls within, but that carried its own dangers, and a couple of small wars had resulted.

Eventually, though, a war was agreed upon as the best way to settle the whole dispute. The vast majority of protagonists on both sides agreed they would fight within a controlled Virtuality overseen by impartial arbiters and the winner would accept the result; if the pro-Hell side won there would be no more sanctions or sanctimoniousness from the anti-Hell faction and if the anti-Hellists triumphed then the Hells of the participating adversaries would be shut down.

Both sides thought they would win, the anti-Hell side because they were generally more advanced – an advantage that would be partially reflected in the simmed war – and the pro-Hell side because they were convinced they were the less decadent, more intrinsically warlike side. They also had a couple of hidden assets in the shape of civs who nobody knew had been hosting Hells but who had been persuaded to come on board and who just about (it was decided, after a lengthy legal case) qualified due to the way the relevant agreement had been worded.

Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.

Battle was joined. It duly raged to and fro across the vast virtual conflict spaces within the scrupulously and multiply policed substrates allotted to it, overseen by a people called the Ishlorsinami, a species long notorious for their absolute incorruptibility, spartan lifestyles, near complete lack of humour and a sense of fairness that struck most other normal civs as positively pathological.

But now the war was nearing its end, and, to Vatueil, it looked like his side was going to lose.

It was a micro-nuke, but low-yield. Disposable sensor units deployed on his armoured Main Weapon Nacelles – his upper sensory dome was retracted beneath its armour clamshell – watched what happened. Three sub-munitions had deployed an instant before the main warhead had exploded, fanning downwards towards the floor where he’d been hunkered earlier. It was hard to be sure but he thought that he – the thing he was in – would have survived, had he still been there.

The floor beneath him thudded.

There was much damage where he had been; the bulkhead behind was holed, the ceiling above perforated, bulging upwards, now dipping back down, glowing white and yellow hot as heated supporting elements gave in to the apparent gravity the Abandoned Space Factory’s rotation provided. The Unidentified High-Solidity Object he’d been hiding behind earlier had been partially vaporised/destroyed and shifted across the floor of the hangar until it had impacted with the section of tipped, already-damaged floor.

“Still there!” (Different voice 4.)

“Hit it, Gulton.”

A bright yellow-white line lanced down from where the ceiling had been, smashing into the hangar deck where Vatueil had been positioned earlier and creating an exploding white ball of plasma. This blew outward in a boiling cloud behind a wave-front of condensing particles of molten metals; metre-scale yellow-glowing fragments of the floor went tumbling everywhere at various speeds, mostly high. He saw one piece somersaulting towards him, bouncing once off the floor and once off the ceiling. He did not have enough time to move. Perhaps if he had not been hunkered down he might have been able to avoid it.

The piece of wreckage impacted hard on the armoured body of the thing he was inside. It impacted badly, too. Not a flat side or even an edge hit first but a jagged point. It smacked into his top, off centre so that it half-spun him and sent the piece of wreckage spinning into the shoulder section of his left Main Weapon Pod.

Everything shook. Damage control screen-spreads filled his field of vision. There was a further impact from above. It was relatively slow, implicitly high inertia, crushing.

“Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” (Genius.)

“Sir, ordnance discharged, sir.” (Gulton.)

“Fuck me, I think my anal plug just exited my fucking suit.” (Different voice 2.)

“Oh, that’s spatted. That is one spatted shitfuck of an Armoured Combat Unit.” (Different voice 3.)

“Got to have done it. Got to have fucking done it. Take fucking that, you miserable three-legged space tank motherfucker.” (Genius.)

“Last one in’s an officer. No offence, sir.” (Different voice 2.)

“Steady. Just hold. Those things are tough.”

He was injured. The machine he was in was now sub-optimal. It was called an Armoured Combat Unit.

The protective clamshell had taken a serious kinetic hit and was refusing to open, disabling the upper sensory dome. His left Main Weapon Nacelle had been torn off by the same piece of wreckage. Four Secondary Weapon Pods were non-operational and the upper secondary weapon collar had jammed. Something had damaged his Main Power Distribution Unit, too. He didn’t know how that had happened but it had. Now he couldn’t move his legs properly. Some secondary power left in his Number One leg. That was all. Difficult to estimate how much power or leverage was available.

Some piece of heavy equipment from the ceiling above, the source of the earlier high-inertia impact, appeared to be pinning him to the deck. Additionally, the condensing metals from the plasma event seemed to have spot-welded some parts of himself to some other parts of himself and some parts of himself to the hangar floor.

He rotated another set of disposable sensors into place on the right shoulder. This would be all he had to work with for now.

He would have to stay where he was. He could still turn, though there was a grinding sensation when he did and he could not turn smoothly, which contra-indicated tracking-firing.

He couldn’t see much. The lower sensory dome was obstructed by the squat cage of his immobile legs.

“Okay. Trooper Drueser. You have the honour, I believe.”

“Sir.” (Genius = Drueser.)

The figure came in through the curved entrance, bouncing on all fours and keeping very low to the hangar deck, a medium kinetic rifle tripodded on its back, barrel sweeping back and forth.

Vatueil let it go well past him, almost to the tipped, torn part of the hangar floor, then quietly lobbed a superblack snowflake grenade just behind it. The magnetic launcher produced no exhaust, the superblack coating kept the projectile stealthed and it was too dark for the trooper to have much chance of seeing the round curving towards him through the vacuum.

He launched a second round aimed to fall right on top of the suited figure if it stopped about … Now.

The first grenade hit the deck two metres behind the trooper, then detonated with a flash and a floor-thud. The figure had stopped and spun round. The trooper was caught inside the hail of millimetre- and centimetre-scale fragments.

There was a shriek. (Drueser.)

The back-mounted gun fired twice at where the first grenade had detonated. Then the second grenade landed. It was supposed to fall right on top of the figure but landed half a metre to its left side and half a metre in front it because of his own sensor-compromised aiming and the fact that the trooper had been blown backwards by the fragment shower from the first grenade.

The second grenade had been set to detonate on contact. The detonation caused the figure’s head to kick back. It also tore off and then disintegrated Drueser’s helmet visor, causing an obvious pressure-loss event. The figure collapsed to the floor without further movement or transmitted sound.

“Drueser?”

“Fuck.” (Different voice 2.)

“Drueser?”

“Sir, I think he triggered something. A suckertrap. That thing’s still dead. Must be.” (Different voice 4.)

“Sir? The real bad guys are due to get here awful soon now. We need to be in there even if it’s just to hide.” (Gulton.)

“Aware of that, Gulton. You want to be next?”

“Sir, me and Koviuk thought we might favour the skirmish space below with our twin presences, sir.” (Gulton.)

“BMG, Gulton.” (He didn’t know what BMG meant.)

The two figures dropped through the hole in the ceiling. Their dark suits were made briefly bright by the orange glow still coming from the slagged materials of what had been the hangar ceiling and the floor of the deck above.

Vatneil could have hit both of them but he had heard what they had said and he thought that what it meant was that they thought he was dead. If that was true then it was better to let them think that and to bring them all into the same Immediate Tactical Environment as he was in, the better to attack and destroy them.

Trapeze, came the call. It was not a surprise. Vatueil had been thinking of making it himself.

He left a shell presence of himself in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space and navigated to the Trapeze space, scattering pass-codes and decoys like petals.

There were five of them. They sat on what looked like trapezes hanging in utter darkness; the wires vanished upwards into the black and there was no sign or implication of any floor below or wall to any side. It was meant to symbolise the isolation of the secret space or something. He had no idea what they’d have chosen had one of their number had a high-gravity heritage and been congenitally terrified of any drop more than a few millimetres. They’d all taken up different appearances to be here but he knew who the other four were and trusted them completely, just as he hoped they trusted him.