Surface Detail (32 page)

She lay back down in her little organised storm of well-behaved snowflakes.

After a few moments the lights faded away too.

“Whereabouts?”

“Hmm?”

“Where would this rendezvous take place?” she asked Kallier-Falpise. They were in a part of the ship’s lounge shaped like a giant bay window. She sat at a table, eating a meal that was part breakfast, part early supper. A breeze blew about her, bringing smells of the ocean. She had rolled the cuffs of her pyjamas up to feel the soft warm wind on her calves and forearms. The concave wall around her impersonated the view of a blue-green cloudless sky, a ruffled green ocean and snow-white breakers crashing onto the pale blue sand of a wide, deserted beach framed by gently swaying trees. Even the floor beneath her bare feet was taking part in the illusion, ridging and roughening to become a convincing impression of polished but uneven wooden boards, just like you’d find at a beach-side villa or resort somewhere nice and hot and far away. She’d almost finished the plate of completely unidentifiable but perfectly delicious fresh fruits. She’d been ravenous.

“There’s a place in a part of the sky called the Semsarine Wisp,” the little drone told her, as though she really didn’t need to bother her pretty little head about such boring details. “That’s where the rendezvous is expected to take place.”

“Mm-hmm.” She drank some water, sloshed it round her teeth.

The drone, floating over the table near her right hand, was silent for a moment, as though thinking. “You’ve … you’ve heard of it?”

She swallowed the water, dabbed at her mouth with a fluid-soft napkin. She gazed out at the fake view of the beach and sea, then looked at the little cream-coloured drone and smiled. “Would you ask the ship to contact the General Offensive Unit Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, please?”

“What? Why?”

“Go on; say it’s irregular.”

“Irregular is the very least of what it is. It’s rude, it is suspicious.” The boxy ship’s drone swivelled in mid-air, turning away from the grinning figure of Demeisen to point itself at Lededje. “Ms. Y’breq,” it said frostily. “I cannot emphasise strongly enough that I think this would be a profoundly unwise move; frankly, even a stupid and dangerous one. I’m sorry to be so blunt.” It glanced at Demeisen. “I thought you had seen something of how this person, this ship is liable to treat innocent human beings. I cannot believe that you are even contemplating such a hazardous and foolhardy choice.”

“Hmm,” Lededje said, nodding at this. “You know, I think I’ll leave these bags behind.” She frowned down at the two small cases Sensia had given her. They sat at her feet in the ship’s main lounge. Demeisen stood at her side; the two drones floated in front of them. She turned at Demeisen. “You can provide me—?”

“Of course.”

“Ms. Y’breq,” Kallier-Falpise said, sounding like it was trying to remain calm. “Obviously, I shall be coming with you . . .”

“Obviously,” the ship’s drone agreed, traversing to point at Demeisen.

There was only the faintest of pauses. “Eh? Oh. Yes, obviously,” Demeisen said, nodding strenuously.

“Ah. You agree then?” Kallier-Falpise said, flicking to look straight at Demeisen. “I accompany Ms. Y’breq?”

“I would have it no other way,” Demeisen said solemnly.

“Just so.” The little drone’s aura field glowed an agreeable pink. It turned smoothly back to Lededje. “As we all agree, then, I shall be coming with you, still charged, of course, with protecting you—”

“Mostly from yourself,” Demeisen said with a quick grin. He bowed his head and held up one hand as the little cream-coloured drone’s field flashed a bright grey. “Sorry,” he said.

“However,” Kallier-Falpise continued, “I too am very much of the opinion that this is, nevertheless, a foolish, dangerous and unnecessary move. Please, I beg you; reconsider.”

Lededje smiled at it. She looked at the ship’s drone. “Thank you for all your help,” she told it. She turned to Demeisen again. “Ready when you are.”

“I’ll prepare a shuttle,” the ship-drone said.

Demeisen flapped one hand. “We’ll Displace.”

“Has Ms. Y’breq been informed—?”

“There is a chance Displacements can be bad for you,” Demeisen said with a sigh. “Yes. I’ve read her her last rights.”

Kallier-Falpise’s fields went frosty grey again. “You did not think to ask me if I consent to being Displaced when a far more intrinsically safe method of transferring us between ships exists to hand.”

Demeisen rolled his eyes. “Fine, you take the shuttle, you rough, tough little protection-and-intervention drone; I’ll Displace the squidgy bag of guts, gas and fluids that is the painfully vulnerable but patently unafraid human being.”

“Frankly I wouldn’t trust you to wait for me,” the little drone said. “I shall Displace along with Ms. Y’breq. Within the same containment field, if you please.”

“Fuck me,” Demeisen breathed. “Hoity and toity. Fine! We’ll do it your way.” He pointed at the ship’s drone. “Tell you what, grandpa; why don’t you do the fucking Displace? You move them both over to me.”

“I was going to suggest that anyway,” the ship-drone said coldly.

“Right,” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Can we get going? Now? Your venerableness here might be going flat out but I’m barely strolling. Getting antsy here.”

“Excuse me,” the little cream-coloured drone said as it floated closer to Lededje and up-ended itself to press gently in against her stomach. She wore another set of the trews and top she had grown fond of since waking in this body. “You are sure you don’t want to take your luggage?”

“Quite sure,” she said.

“Both ready?” the ship-drone asked.

“Entirely so.”

“Yes.”

“After you,” the ship-drone said to Demeisen.

“See you over there,” he said to Lededje, then a silver ovoid enclosed him. It winked to nothing.

An instant later Lededje briefly found herself staring at a distorted version of her own face.

The ship’s drone tipped back to look up at the ceiling, which was where the protection-and-intervention drone Kallier-Falpise had floated the instant the Displacement containment field around it and Lededje Y’breq had flicked out of existence. Kallier-Falpise, listing badly, bumped randomly along the ceiling a few times, for all the world like an escaped party balloon, partly deflated. Its aura field displayed the colours of oil floating on water.

“Shao, shum-shan-shinaw, sholowalowa, shuw, shuwha …” it mumbled.

The boxy-looking ship-drone used its own light effector unit to administer the equivalent of a slap. Kallier-Falpise trembled against the ceiling fixtures, then dropped, side-slipping. It flashed a strident yellow-orange for an instant, then it seemed to shake itself. It straightened, floating down to the same level as the shipdrone, its aura field glowing white with anger.

∼Meatfucker.

∼If it’s any comfort, the ship-drone sent – I don’t even know how it did that. It’s not as though it let you land and then spat you straight back. Fucking thing jumped my Displace mid-throw. I wasn’t even aware we could do that. That’s downright worrying.

∼Did you put anything on the girl?”

∼On and in. Best bits and pieces I was given. I’m just waiting to—

There was a flicker of silver directly over the ship-drone, followed by a tiny clapping noise as the incoming Displacement field collapsed. A bitty rain of tiny components, seemingly little more than dust, some hair-thin threads and a few grains of sand, floated down through the air to be caught and held by a maniple field the drone extended above itself.

∼Ah, it sent – here they are now. It made a show of bouncing the maniple field up and down, weighing. – Yup, they’re all there, to the last picogram.

∼Meatfucker, the other drone repeated.

∼Trying comms; zero avail. The ship’s drone rose a quarter-metre in the air then sank slowly down. – Guess that’s that then.

The two machines watched through the ship’s main sensor array as it showed the sixteen-hundred-metre length of the other warship sweeping its multiple deep-space high-speed engine fields about it with a completely unnecessary flourish. For the merest instant the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints presented in real space as a black, perfectly reflecting ovoid, then with a flicker it was gone, so quickly even the Fast Picket’s finely tuned sensors struggled to track it.

This deep in the ice you would need serious amounts of cooling. Otherwise you’d boil. At least you would if you were any normal sort of human, or indeed if you were any kind of conventional being with the sort of biochemistry that could not cope with temperatures much outside a narrow band between freezing and boiling. Keep cool inside the ice or you’d boil alive. The alternative would be to submit to the pressure, which would crush you to oblivion even quicker than the temperature would cook you to death.

It was all relative, of course. Below freezing or above boiling of what, and where? Water was the reference medium he was used to, as part of the pan-human meta-species, and liquid water at standard temperature and pressure, he supposed, but then: whose standard temperature and pressure?

Down here, inside a water planet, under a hundred kilometres of warm ocean, the sheer pressure of the water column above turned the water first to slush and then to ice. It was high-pressure ice, not low-temperature ice, but it was still ice, and the further down towards the planet’s centre you went the harder and hotter the ice got, heated by the same pressure that had forced the water from its liquid to its solid state.

Even so, there were imperfections and contaminants in the ice: flaws, boundaries – sometimes narrowing down to only a single molecule wide – between volumes of the solid where it was possible for other liquids to slip amidst the vast compressive masses of the surrounding ice.

And, if you had evolved here, or had been carefully designed to exist here, it was even possible for creatures to exist within the ice. Tendril-slim, transparently tenuous, more like highly spread-out membranes than anything resembling an animal, they were able to make their way up and down and along the flaws and seams and fissures in the ice, seeking food in the shape of those minerals and other contaminants the ice held, or, in the case of the predators of the deep ice, attacking those grazing creatures themselves.

He – what he now was – had not evolved here. What he was now was a simulation of a creature, an organism designed to be at home in the pressure ice of a water world. But only a simulation. He was not what he appeared to be.

He was beginning to wonder if he ever had been.

The ice inside the water planet did not really exist; neither did the water planet itself, nor the star it orbited nor the galaxy beyond nor anything of what appeared to be real no matter how far out you might think you were looking. Nor how far in you looked, either. Peer into anything closely enough and you would find only the same graininess that the Real exhibited; the smallest units of measurement were the same in both realms, whether it was of time or extent or mass.

For some people, of course, this meant the Real itself was not really real, not in the sense of being genuinely the last un-simulated bedrock of actuality. According to this view everybody was already in a pre-existing simulation but simply unaware of it, and the faithful, accurate virtual worlds they were so proud of creating were just simulations within a simulation.

That way though, arguably, madness lay. Or a kind of lassitude through acceptance that could be exploited. There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

Musing upon such thoughts, he slipped with the others down a one-kilometre-high, many-kilometres-long flaw in the ice. In human terms it was probably like being a caver, a pot-holer, he imagined. Though that must do the experience little justice.

They were, he supposed, like separate strands of sluggish oil seeping between the ice sheets on what he still thought of as a conventional world, a rocky planet with ice at the poles and mountain peaks.

He commanded a small but potent force a crack team of thirty, all highly trained and armed with poisons, chemical micro-explosives and packages of solvent. Most – perhaps all – of the marines and machines whose representations he’d inhabited over the subjective-time decades the great war had lasted to date would have regarded this as laughably inadequate weaponry, but it would be perfectly deadly down here, where not one of those marines or war machines would last for more than a fraction of a second. They were over-officered – he was here as a major, though in any other theatre he’d be a general – but that just reflected the importance of the mission.

He could feel the presence of each of the others, chemical gradients and electrochemical signals passing within and between each of them keeping him in literal touch with every one of the thirty marines under his command. Here was Corporal Byozuel on the right, slipping and sliding down a particularly wide channel, briefly beating the rest of them for penetration; here was Captain Meavaje way out on the left and spin-forward, guiding his squad’s four solvent-carrying specialists through a tricky sequence of fissures like a three-dimensional maze. First Byozuel, then the marines between them in sequence, reported a strong quake. Vatueil felt it himself an instant later.

The ice seemed to creak and whine, the space which most of Vatueil himself was in tightened, shrinking by half a millimetre. Another part of him was in a cavity a little higher further up; this widened a fraction, trying to pull him upwards. He had to grip tighter, push harder, to continue his slow progress downwards, towards the core.

… All right, sir …? came the question from Lieutenant Lyske, who was next but one along the line.

… Fine, lieutenant … he sent back.

Vatueil had sensed them all stopping, freezing in position as the quake’s compression wave had passed around and through them. Freezing like that slowed them down a fraction and it did no real good unless you were in a wide fissure about to enter a narrower one, but it was just what happened, what you did; human nature, or animal nature, or sentient nature, however you wanted to characterise it; you stopped and waited, hoping and dreading, hoping not to be about to die and dreading the feel of the ice around you shifting, and dreading too the biochemical scream that might come pulsing through the single living net they had made of themselves as somebody else was so compressed by fissures closing around them that they were squeezed to single, separated molecules, crushed to mush, chemicalised out of existence.