Surface Detail (60 page)

∼Agree. Done.

They left the missiles to deal with the blue-tagged breeder swarmers while they went after the microship. This one loosed its own tail laser at them, re-directing some of its vicarious propellant laser fire back at its pursuer. The Bliterator’s mirror field blanked their sensors for an instant to cope.

∼Oh, that’s not funny, she sent.

∼Range, the ship replied.

∼Take that with your fucking arse-light, Auppi sent as she triggered their main armament. The weapon was wound up to frequencies there was no way the target ship’s own mirror armour could counter; the swarmer erupted brightly, way in the distance; the Bliterator was already curving away hard, picking out their next target.

They ran down ten more, the intervals between growing greater as the fleeing swarmer ships moved quickly away from the initial outbreak point. They passed the time frazzling as many of the cloud of laser swarmers as they could get near, dipping into the still-slowly expanding cloud of contacts like a predatory fish into a bait-ball.

The next grey was taking them way out of the original infection outbreak volume, zipping past other dormant fabricaria as they tore after the rear-lit microship.

∼This one’s accelerating harder than the others, given its distance

from the laser swarmers powering it, the ship told her. ∼Thought it was taking a while. ∼May mean it’s learned something about using that rear absorp-

tion/deflector set. ∼We in any danger? ∼Shouldn’t be. Mirror field’s been unstressed so far. The ship

sounded unworried. ∼Range. She fired. The resulting explosion didn’t look right. Too small,

for a start. ∼A partial, the ship sent. ∼Just wounded. ∼Wow, our first partial. ∼Still accelerating, though slower. Seventy per cent. Course

change, too. Heading straight for that fabricary. Collisionary. The ship highlighted one of the great dark slowly orbiting

shapes, sitting less than a thousand kilometres ahead. ∼Collisionary? Auppi sent. Oh, fuck, she thought; just what they needed. High-speed

swarmer/fabricary collisions. ∼Ready, the ship told her. ∼Hit it again. She did. Still too small a result. The swarmer had got harder,

smaller, more reflective. ∼Forty-five per cent of original acceleration, the ship reported.

∼Still picking up speed though. ∼Come on, you fucker, fucking die! They whizzed through the debris field from their first partial

hit. The ship scanned the still hot cloud as they flashed through

it, shields taking tiny impacts that made the ship judder. ∼Interesting materials profile, the ship said. ∼Definitely learning. ∼Same course? ∼Yes; swerved back to it after we knocked it off. ∼Impact? ∼Three seconds.

They had time to hit the swarmer twice more.

By the time it collided with the fabricary it had stopped accelerating and been reduced to the status of something more like a tight cloud of debris all travelling in the same direction rather than a ship, though it was still making sufficient speed to create a substantial flash when it hit the dark, three-kilometre-long lump of the fabricary.

∼Fuck, Auppi sent, watching the debris bloom and expand.

∼Agree, the ship replied.

They cruised in after it, already turned about and decelerating hard as the engines readied them to go back the way they’d come, still heading backwards on their earlier course through sheer momentum.

∼Unexpected impact signature. The ship sounded puzzled.

∼Oh, fuck; has it broken it? she asked. The debris had hit at over thirty klicks a second. It had ended up being a glancing blow rather than head-on, but it had blasted a hole in the fabricary and set it spinning and tumbling. It was already spiralling out of its orbit and drifting fractionally inwards towards Razhir. Uncorrected it would eventually head right down, into the gas giant’s atmosphere, to burn up.

In theory the Disk ought to remain stable for ever; in practice passing comets and even near-passing stars could disrupt it, and the fabricaria each had automatic systems that could vent gas to keep them on station. It was one of the responsibilities of whatever species was in charge of the Disk to keep those automatics charged and working. The systems were designed to nudge the fabricaria back into place when their orbits were ruffled by tiny fractions though; even if they’d survived the impact undamaged, the gross effect of the swarmer remains slamming into it would be orders of magnitude beyond anything the automatics could deal with.

∼It’s as though, the ship said, sounding hesitant, probably waiting for additional detail to accrue via its sensors, ∼the surface had been hollowed out. The outer shell should be solid; protecting the fabricary itself and providing raw material for when it’s producing something, but instead it’s like the debris hit a thin outer crust and then partly went through, partly collided with some sort of minimal structure underneath.

They had almost drawn to a stop now, still approaching the damaged fabricary but increasingly slowly as the engines, still at full power, cancelled their earlier vector.

∼Cut engines, she sent. ∼Back flip. Take us in for a look.

∼You sure?

The ship cut its engines, a half-second or so before they would have started pulling away from the holed, slowly cartwheeling fabricary. They were nearly stationary, still drifting slowly towards the impact site.

∼No, not sure, she admitted. ∼But …

∼Okay. The ship turned about, fired its engines briefly, turned, fired them again and, with a little finessing, got them locally stationary relative to the hundred-metre-long, raggedly ellipsoid breach in the giant slowly tumbling fabricary.

Auppi and the Bliterator found themselves looking straight into the torn-open interior of the thing. The view was edged all around with sections of its still-glowing outer surface, which must have been largely hollowed out to leave only a thin outer skin supported by a fragile-looking network of skinny girders, cables and beams that lay between that impromptu hull and the wall of the fabricary proper, about twenty metres deeper inside. That too had been breached by part of the swarmer’s wreckage cascade, so they could see all the way inside to where the ancient stuff-making machinery and associated paraphernalia lay.

This was the antique alien apparatus that was not meant to have been touched or used for a couple of million years. It was supposed to be lying there, metaphorically cobwebbed, in a cavern which was otherwise completely empty.

Unasked, the Bliterator described a small circle around the main breach so that they could see into different parts of the fabricary interior through the smaller secondary hole in its hull, so building up a larger picture.

The ship displayed the results. Some bits were blurred because, despite the damage, there was some sort of movement taking place inside the fabricary, but the main image was clear.

∼What, Auppi sent slowly, ∼the holy fuck … is that?

She woke up. She looked around.

She was in a standard-looking medium-dependency medical pod in a standard-looking medical facility. Could be anywhere; ship-board, on an Orbital – anywhere. She felt okay. She was physically whole, wrapped in light compression foam over almost her entire body and she had some sort of movement-restricting bandages round her head. Pain indicators minimal; bodily damage assessment said she was recovering fast from multiple fractures of most major bones. No brain damage, little major organ damage. Widespread tissue damage, healing fast. She should be on her feet in two days, in fragile good health the following day and back to normal a day or two after that.

She could flex her toes and move her arms. Both her hands were free of the recovery foam; she could waggle them, and feel the liquidic texture of the pod covering. Raising her right arm, she could sense the compression foam taking the physical strain, letting her muscles flex but leaving her knitting bones unstressed.

“Okay,” she said, “now where are we?”

“Ms. Nsokyi,” a voice said. It sounded like the ship. Or a ship. Or at least like something non-human trying to be reassuring. A ship-drone, bulbous and smooth, like a giant pebble, swung into view. “Welcome aboard. I am the Culture vessel Me, I’m Counting.”

“Oh,” Yime said. “Well, I was looking for you, but now you’ve found me. What of the Bodhisattva?”

“Severely damaged. Its remains are being held within my own field structure. I intend to leave it with the first GSV we encounter. The extent of the damage it sustained is such I suspect it will make more sense to re-house the Mind in a new ship. Frankly, the main fabric is mostly fit for recycling. In any event, a point may come shortly when I may have to suggest that the Mind of the Bodhisattva abandon ship and throw in its lot with me, allowing me to abandon the rest of the remains and so resume my habitual field structure and hence operational fitness.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because, Ms. Nsokyi, we appear to be heading into what will shortly become, if it is not already, a war zone.”

Over the many, many years of his sexually active life, Veppers had worked out how to manage the rhythms and stages of a sexual encounter, all with a view to maximising his own pleasure. It was definitely a skill worth having. He thought of mundane, nonsexual things when he wanted to hold himself back, and of particularly exciting moments from earlier sexual escapades when he wanted to bring on his orgasm. One of the downsides of becoming very old was that the remembered stuff was generally always better than the sex you were actually having right there and then, but that was a small price to pay, he reckoned.

That evening, he was fucking Diamle, another of his fabulous Harem Troupe girls, in the master bedroom of the Ubruater town house, while Sohne looked on. Sohne was the other girl besides Pleur who was an Impressionist, able to take on any appearance. Currently, she looked like a very famous actress. He was already looking forward to fucking her next. Right now though – sweating a little, his long blond-white hair tied back in a pony tail – he was concentrating on holding back, aiming for an orgasm in about a minute’s time that ought to be a good one. This was no more than he deserved, he thought; he’d only arrived back that morning from his trip to Vebezua and beyond and was intent on making up for lost fucking time.

The air in the room changed, there was a massive “Bang!” and he was stopped in mid-stroke, still holding Diamle’s perfectly formed hips while the girl herself – until that point yelping and moaning with possibly pretended pleasure – stared straight ahead at a small, rather beautiful-looking alien creature with large eyes and milky, slightly pink-tinged skin, most of it hidden by a slim-fitting grey uniform. The creature had materialised where some of the great bed’s plumper pillows and cushions had been, and had caused several of them either to split or to disintegrate, either way spilling bounteous amounts of feathers and almost air-light stuffing into the air. The alien looked like it was emerging from its own small snowstorm. It flapped ineffectually at the feathers and stuffing, gaze darting this way and that.

Diamle screamed.

Internally, as it were, this was quite a pleasurable experience for Veppers, not that it made the slightest bit of difference to his sense of shock, violation and even betrayal. Sohne fell forward, fainting on the bed in a dead weight, her forehead thudding into one of Diamle’s splayed calves. Diamle was whimpering now. Veppers let her go; she pulled a deflated cushion cover around her and jumped off the bed, stood there quivering, staring at the little alien. She coughed suddenly, spitting out feathers.

The creature wobbled in the midst of the slowly falling debris, then seemed to find its balance, composing itself. It was one of Bettlescroy’s immediate underlings. “Mr. Veppers,” it said. It looked first at his face, then down at his engorged penis. “Gracious,” it said. It looked back at his face. “Over-Lieutenant Vrept,” it told him, nodding once. “Answering directly to the honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III himself.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Veppers said. This was not funny, not forgivable.

“I have information. We must talk,” the GFCFian said. It glanced at the sprawled, still-fainted form of Sohne, and the no-longer-quivering, merely gulping Diamle. “Send these persons away.”

“Sir?” Jasken’s voice came distantly from the bedroom’s main doors. The locked handles were turned from outside, then released. The door thudded to knocks. “Sir?”

Veppers pointed back towards the doors. “Just before I have my chief of security take you away for—”

“Information. Talk. Immediately,” the little alien said. “No further delay. I have orders.”

“Sir?” Jasken shouted from beyond the doors again. “Are you all right? It’s Jasken, with two Zei.”

“Yes!” Veppers shouted. “Wait there!” He turned to Diamle.

“My robe.”

The girl twirled, scooped his robe from the floor. Veppers lifted Sohne’s head up by her long golden hair and slapped her across the face a couple of times, bringing her round. She sat back, looking woozy, cheeks reddened.

“Both of you, out,” Veppers told the women as he wrapped his robe around himself. “Leave the door unlocked and tell Jasken and the Zei to wait where they are. Let him know what’s happened here, but nobody else.”

Diamle wrapped herself and Sohne in sheets and helped the other girl to the doors. Veppers heard Diamle saying something to Jasken, then the doors thudded shut again.

Veppers turned to the small creature. “Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘This had better be good,’ Over-Lieutenant Vrept?” he asked, knee-walking his way up the bed towards the sitting alien, then looking down, towering over it.

“I am,” it told him. “This is not good though; this is bad. Hence the urgency. My commander, the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III, bids me inform you that there has been a security breach in the Tsungarial Disk; one of the currently ship-constructing fabricaria was damaged during the ongoing diversionary smatter outbreak containment action and a light space craft belonging to the Culture Restoria mission caught recorded sight of the extemporised ship being built within said fabricary, signalling this information to the rest of the Culture mission within the Disk, which has concomitantly relayed said information beyond to other Culture units while at the same time investigating other fabricaria to discover whether others amongst them are also building ships, the results of this investigation being positive, of course, though steps have been and are being taken to neutralise the Culture mission’s abilities.