Surface Detail (51 page)

Bettlescroy smiled, blushing once again. “Sir,” it said, “some of the incidents to which I suspect you are referring, the ones which have reinforced that famous saying which I shall not repeat … ?”

“Yes?” Vatueil said, realising it was expected.

Bettlescroy paused, as though wondering to say what it was about to say or not. Eventually the little alien said, “Those were us, not them.”

Vatueil definitely looked dubious now. “Really?”

Bettlescroy looked down modestly again. “Really,” it said, extremely quietly.

Vatueil frowned. “Then … Do you ever wonder who might be using who?”

The little alien smiled, sighed. “We give it some consideration, sir.” It looked round the other GFCFians gathered round the table. They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying.

Bettlescroy made a flowing, resigned gesture with its arms. “We are happy with our current situational analysis and pattern of behaviour.”

“And you’re happy you can keep the Flekke and the NR in the dark?” Veppers asked. “I’m pinned by my balls at the business end of a firing range if you don’t.”

“The NR are less concerned than you think,” Bettlescroy said reassuringly. “They approach their own Sublimation, more immediately than is known by all but us. The Flekke are an irrelevance; a legacy concern. They are our old mentors – as they are still yours, Mr. Veppers – their diverse and great achievements now in many ways eclipsed by those of the GFCF, even if as a species they remain theoretically our betters.” Bettlescroy paused for a little laugh. “At least according to the inflexible and quite arguably outmoded definitions of the Galactic Council’s currently accepted Recognised Civilisationary Levels framework!” The little alien paused again, and was rewarded with what was by GFCF standards a positive storm of rowdy agreement: deep nods, loud muttering and a lot of meaningful eye-contact. Veppers would have sworn some of them even thought about slapping their manicured little hands on the table. Glowing, Bettlescroy went on: “The Flekke will be quietly proud of anything we achieve, and the same vicarious sense of accomplishment will most doubtlessly be applied to the Sichultian Enablement in turn.” He beamed at Veppers. “In sum: in both cases, leave them to us.”

Veppers exchanged looks with Vatueil. Of course, you never entirely knew what an exchanged look really meant to an alien, pan-human or not, but it felt like somebody had to exercise a little realism here. Maybe even a little healthy cynicism.

On the other hand, they were pretty much agreed. There was little enough left to iron out. They were going to go ahead with this, doubts or not. The rewards were too great not to.

Veppers just smiled. “Your confidence is reassuring,” he told Bettlescroy.

“Thank you! So, we are all agreed, yes?” Bettlescroy said, looking around the table. The alien might as well, Veppers thought, have been asking whether they wanted to order out for sandwiches or dips for lunch. It was almost impressive.

Everybody looked at everybody else. No one raised any objections. Bettlescroy just kept on smiling.

“When do we begin?” Vatueil asked eventually.

“Directly,” Bettlescroy said. “Our little pretend-smatter squib will go off within the next half a day, a little more than an hour after we deliver Mr. Veppers back to Vebezua. We start the fabricaria running immediately we see that the Culture forces are fully engaged with the outbreak.” Bettlescroy sat back, looking very satisfied. “All we need then, of course,” it said thoughtfully, “is the location of the substrates to be targeted. We can’t do anything without that information.” It turned smoothly to Veppers. “Can we, Veppers, old friend?”

They were all looking at him now. Space-Marshal Vatueil was positively staring. For the first time in the meeting Veppers felt he was finally getting the attention and respect he normally took for granted. He smiled slowly. “Let’s get the ships built first, shall we? Then we’ll be ready to target them.”

“Some of us,” Bettlescroy said, glancing around the table before focusing intently on Veppers, “are still a little sceptical about how easy it will be to get to a significant number of Hell-containing substrates in the limited amount of time that will be available.”

Veppers made his face expressionless. “You may be surprised, Bettlescroy,” he said. “Even amused.”

The little alien sat forward, perfectly proportioned arms on the table surface. It looked steadily into Veppers’ eyes for some time. “We are all … very much depending on you here, Joiler,” it said quietly.

Assuming it was a threat, it was rather well delivered, Veppers thought. He’d have been proud of it himself. Despite the apocalyptic nature of everything they’d been discussing, it was the first time – maybe since they’d met – that Veppers thought he might have caught a glimpse of the hardened steel hiding underneath all the alien velouté.

He sat forward too, towards Bettlescroy. “Why, I would have it no other way,” he said smoothly.

She flew above the Hell. It smelled – stank – just as it had. The view, from this high up – just under the dark brown boiling overcast – was of a rolling, sometimes jagged landscape of ash grey and shit brown, splattered with shadowy near-blacks, acidic yellows and bilious greens. Red mostly meant pits of fire. The distant screams, groans and wails sounded no different.

The place she had woken in really had looked like a giant piece of fruit: a bloated purple shape hanging unsupported in the choking air as though dangling from the bruised looking mass of cloud. At least in the immediate area, it appeared to be unique; she could see no other similar giant bulbs hanging from the clouds.

She tried flying up through the clouds, just to see. The clouds were acidic, choking her, making her eyes water. She flew back down, took some clearer air, waited for her eyes to clear, then tried again with lungs full, holding her breath as she beat upwards on her great dark wings. Eventually, just before her lungs felt they might be about to burst, she collided painfully with something hard and rough, slightly granular. She had the air knocked out of her, jarred her head and scraped the ends of both wings. She fell out of the clouds in a small rain of rusting flakes of iron.

She breathed, collected herself, flew on.

In the distance she saw the line of fire that was the very edge of the war within Hell; a crackling stitch of tiny red, orange and yellow bursts of light. Something that was part curiosity and part the strange hunger she had felt earlier made her fly towards it.

She wheeled overhead, watching waves and little rivulets of men make their slow breaking surges across the multiply broken, seared and blasted landscape below. They fought with every edged weapon ever known, and primitive guns and explosives. Some stopped and looked up at her, she thought, though she did not want to approach too closely.

Flying demons whizzed amongst the arcing, fizzing shells and storms of arrows; some came up towards her – she experienced terror, and each time was about to beat madly away – but then they turned and dropped away again.

The hunger nagged at her. Part of her wanted to land; to do … what? Was she to be a demon? Was the need she felt the need to torment? Was she supposed to become one of the torturers? She would starve first, kill herself if she could, simply refuse, if it was possible. Knowing Hell, knowing the way it worked, she doubted that would be possible.

The flying demons who had flown up towards her had been smaller than her. She had cruel hooks midway along the leading edges of her wings, where a biped might have had thumbs on its hands. She had sharp teeth and strong jaws, and tree-trunkcrushing claws. She wondered if she could start killing demons.

The screams from below, the smells of flesh burned by flames and acid sprays and the rising, choking clouds of poison gas all drove her away after a while.

A large black shape flew across the landscape behind her.

She looked back, saw the giant beetle thing following her, catching up, keeping a hundred metres or so off her left side. It drew level, wobbled in the air, then peeled away. She flew on and it came back, repeating the actions. The third time, she followed it.

She trod the air, beating her leathery black wings slowly such that she seemed to stand in the air, level with the face of the enormous uber-demon who had taunted and killed her, most of a lifetime ago.

Its gigantic lantern head was lit from within, the pulsing flame-cloud continually taking on the appearance of different tortured faces. The towering candles at each corner of the creature’s squared-off head sputtered and crackled, their gnarled surfaces veined with the nervous systems of the screaming unfortunates embedded within. Below, its vast, amalgamed body of reconstituted bone, pitted, sweating metals, stress-cracked twisted sinew and bubbling, weeping flesh quivered in the heat released from its dull-glowing throne. Wreathed in its hideous fumes and retchingly intense smokes, it created a briefly recognisable face within its glassed-off lantern of a head.

Chay recognised Prin. Her heart, massive in her barrel of a chest, pounded harder. A sort of hopeless pleasure filled her for a moment, then she felt suddenly sick.

Prin smiled at her for a moment, then his face contorted in pain before the image disappeared. A flat, ugly, alien face replaced Prin’s and remained there, pop-eyed and grinning while the thing talked to her.

“Welcome back,” he bellowed. The sound was still ear-splitting, but just about below the level of pain.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I will not be one of your demons,” she told it. She thought about flying at him, claws out, trying to damage the thing. She had a brief image of herself caught in one of its colossal hands, crushed like a tiny fluttering bird inside a shrinking cage of girder fingers. Another image showed her trapped inside the creature’s lantern head, beating frantically against the unbreakable glass, wings ragged, jaws broken, eyes gouged out, for ever choking …

“You would be a useless demon, little bitch,” the thing said. “That is not why you are here.”

She beat the air in front of it, of him, waiting.

It tipped its head to one side a little. The four candles roared, screamed. “That hunger you feel …”

“What of it?” Sick again. What would it turn out to be?

“It is the hunger to kill.”

“Is it indeed?” She would defy, she thought. She would be defiant. For all the good that ever did in Hell. With enough pain, you stopped defying, or simply lost your mind; if you were lucky, maybe. “Death – real death – is a blessing in Hell,” she told him.

“That is precisely the point!” the creature thundered. “You may kill one person per day.”

“May I now?”

“They will die fully. They will not be reincarnated, in this Hell or anywhere else. They will be permanently removed, deleted.”

“Why?”

The thing put back its head and laughed; a thunder spilling over the flames and smokes of the valley below. The candles sputtered furiously, dripped. “To bring hope back into Hell! You will be their angel, whore! They will beseech you to come to them, to deliver them from their torment. They will worship you. They will try to tempt you with supplications, prayers, offerings; any superstitious fuckwittery they’ll think might work. You may choose whom to reward with death. Pander to their idiocies or deliberately ignore them; have the miserable cunts set up fucking committees amongst themselves to decide democratically who should be the lucky little grub-sucker who gets to be relieved of their burden of pain; I don’t give a fuck. Just kill one a day. You can try and kill more but it won’t work; they’ll die all right but they’ll come right back, worse.”

“And if I kill none at all?”

“Then the hunger will grow inside you until it feels like it’s something alive trying to gnaw its way out. It will become unbearable. Also, the wretches will have to do without their chance of release.”

“What is the point of releasing one soul from this infinitude of suffering?”

“It’s not infinite!” the creature screamed. “It’s vast, but it has limits. You have already scraped against the sky, you stupid whore; beat away if you want until you find the iron walls of Hell and then tell me it’s ‘infinite’! Finite; it’s finite. Truly vast, but finite.

With only so many tortured souls.”

“How—?”

“One and a quarter billion! Does that fucking satisfy you? Go and count them if you don’t believe me; I don’t fucking care. You are beginning to bore me. Oh, I didn’t mention: it won’t all be fun for you. With each one you kill you’ll take on a little of their pain. The more you kill the more pain you’ll experience. Eventually the pain of the increasing hunger and the pain you’ve absorbed from those you’ve released should balance out. You might lose your mind again but we’ll deal with that when it happens. I expect I’ll have thought of something even more condign for you by then.” The king of the demons gripped the red-glowing ends of the mountainous seat’s arms and came roaring forward at her, making her beat back through the air. “Now do fuck off, and start killing.” It waved one vast hand at her.

She felt herself swallow, a sickness clutched at her belly and a terrible, aching need to fly away seemed to tug at her wings and the bundled muscles in her chest, but she held where she was, beating steadily.

“Prin!” she shouted. “What happened to Prin?”

“Who? What?”

“Prin! My mate, the one I came in here with! Tell me and I’ll do what you want!”

“You’ll do what I want whether you fucking like it or not, you dumb, wormed cunt!”

“Tell me!”

“Kill me a thousand and I’ll think about it.”

“Promise!” she wailed.

The enormous demon laughed again. “‘Promise’? You’re in Hell, you cysted cretin! Why the fuck would I make a promise but for the joy of breaking it? Go, before I change my mind and break your semen-encrusted wings just for fun. Come back when you’ve sent ten times a hundred to their undeserved ends and I’ll think about telling you what happened to your precious ‘Prin’. Now fuck off!” It brought its vast arms sweeping up towards her, one winging in from each side, hands as big as her entire body splayed out, clawed and clutching, as though trying to catch and crush her.