Surface Detail (67 page)

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 that 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.

Thanks be for drug glands.

She hoped whoever had done this got seriously fucked up, by the Culture or the GFCF or somebody. Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly.

Well, let them die.

She’d compromise that far.

Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that.

Very very very hot now, and getting woozy. She wondered if it was oxygen starvation making her feel woozy, or the heat, or a bit of both. Feeling oddly numb; hazy, dissociated.

Dying. She’d be revented, she guessed, in theory. She’d been backed up; everything up to about six hours ago copied, replicable. But that meant nothing. So another body, vat-grown, would wake with her memories – up to that point six hours ago, not including this bit, obviously – so what? That wouldn’t be her. She was here, dying. The self-realisation, the consciousness, that didn’t transfer; no soul to transmigrate. Just behaviour, as patterned.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’t share the same spacial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn’t share the property of uniqueness. Blah blah; she was drifting now, remembering old lessons, ancient school stuff.

“What’s—?”

Pathetic last words.

She thought of Lan, her lover, her love, probably dying just like this, just like her, hundreds of thousands of klicks away in the suffocating heat, surrounded by the cold dark silence.

She thought she might cry again.

Instead, she could feel her skin trying to sweat, creating a prickling feeling all over her body. Pain management reduced it from extreme discomfort to mere sensation.

Her whole body, crying stickily.

Image to bow out on.

Thank you and good night …

“You the fella I need to talk to?”

“I’m not sure. Who exactly is it you wish to talk to?”

“Whoever’s in charge round here. That you?”

“I am Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III. It is my privilege to command the GFCF forces in this volume. And you?”

“I’m the passing-for-human face of the Culture warship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“You are the Torturer-class vessel we heard was in-bound? Thank goodness! We – the GFCF and our allies the Culture, here in the Tsungarial Disk – have come under heavy and sustained attack. All reinforcements are most welcome and urgently needed.”

“That was me, sort of. I was just pretending to be a Torturer class.”

“Pretending? I’m not sure I—”

“Thing is, short while ago, somebody jumped me. Whole squadron of craft: one capital ship, fourteen others plus ancillary units and slaved weapon platforms. Had to off them all.”

Bettlescroy stared at the face of the human-looking thing regarding him from the screen on the battle-bridge of the Vision Of Hope Surpassed, his flagship and one of the three Deepest Regrets-class craft under his command. Bettlescroy himself had given the order for the Abundance Of Onslaught and its flotilla of accompanying vessels to open fire on the incoming Torturer-class ship. Communication had been lost with all the craft during the engagement, which had seemed to be going well at first but then had obviously deteriorated. The ships had ceased communication so rapidly it seemed impossible that they had simply been destroyed, so the assumption Bettlescroy and his officers were working on was that some sort of comms blackout had taken place; feverish attempts to contact the ships were taking place even as he spoke.

If that wasn’t bad enough, they’d lost touch with Veppers, back on Sichult. The last thing they’d heard – minutes before this unwanted call had come in – had been was an unconfirmed report of a large explosion taking place on Veppers’ estate, possibly on the route his aircraft would have taken back to his house. Bettlescroy had been trying to keep calm and not think about what that might imply; now it looked like he had something else to keep calm and not think about.

“‘Off’ them all?” Bettlescroy said carefully. That couldn’t possibly mean what he dreaded, could it? “I’m sorry, I’m not cognisant of that term’s official weight, as it were. Obviously we were aware there had been some sort of engagement a little way beyond the system’s outer limit …”

“I was attacked, without provocation,” the human-looking thing on the screen said. “I retaliated. By the time I’d finished retaliating, fifteen ships were gone. Offed. Deleted. Blown to smithereens. Thing is, they looked remarkably like GFCF ships. In every way, really. The biggest and most capable presented as almost exactly like that one you’re on. A Deepest Regrets class, unless I’m mistaken. Weird eh? How do you account for that?”

“I confess, I cannot. No GFCF craft would ever knowingly attack a Culture vessel.” Bettlescroy could feel his guts churning and his face burning. He was this close to cutting the comms, to give himself time to think if nothing else. Had this … thing just casually obliterated nearly a third of his war fleet? Was it trying to get him to confess something, blurt something out, enrage him with its off-hand attitude? Bettlescroy was very aware of his officers on the bridge keeping extremely quiet; he could feel their gazes on him.

The human on the screen was talking again: “ … Excuse they had was something about deeming me to be a hostile, just pretending to be a Culture vessel.”

It was still sinking in. He’d lost a Deepest Regrets-class ship!

Dear Gods of Old! The faction within the GFCF High Command which had authorised this high-risk strategy had known they risked losing vessels and materiel, but no one had so much as hinted they might lose one of their capital ships; not a pride of the fleet, not a Deepest Regrets class. This whole thing would all have to go fabulously well from this point on if he was to be forgiven for that.

“I see. Well, indeed. Yes, I see,” Bettlescroy said, stalling while he got himself under control. “Of course, I have to point out that, as you have said, you are – or were – pretending to be a Torturer class, so—”

“Ah, I get it. You think that might have been the source of the misunderstanding?”

“Well, you can see how it might be.”

“Sure. So, were they your ships, or not?”

Bettlescroy wanted to weep, to scream, to fold himself into a little ball and never talk to anyone ever again. “The operational status of the fleet I was given to command here within the Disk comprises one medium-level, non-military vessel and a screen of eighteen smaller ships. The vessel which you find me on, ah, has just been delivered to us, in recognition of the seriousness of the threat we are facing.”