Surface Detail (43 page)

“What do you mean to do?”

“I have decided to alert the civilisation known as the Culture, as well as other potentially sympathetic civilisations with similar reputations for empathy, altruism, strategic decency and the possession of significant military capability. That is what I am doing now, talking to you. Until you arrived, I was thinking of finally letting Nopri and his team know this, or Dvelner’s team, or both, as well as anyone of significance arriving on the ship inbound from the Total Internal Reflection. Perhaps even the ship itself, or that which you arrived on, though this would be to break a pledge to myself made a long time ago. However, you are here, and it is you that I am telling as you appear to be a person of some importance and potential.”

“I am?”

“You have some importance within your own specialist department, Quietus, and within the Special Circumstances section of Contact. You are known. You are, within certain elites, famous. If you talk, people will listen.”

“Only if I remember. You said I might not remember all this.”

“I think you will. In fact, I may never have been able to stop you from remembering, or at least from passing on what you have learned. Hmm. That’s irksome.”

“Please explain?”

“The distributed device within your brain and central nervous system, which I have, annoyingly, only recently become aware of, will have recorded its own memories of this encounter and would be able to transmit them to your own biological brain. I strongly suspect it has already transmitted our conversation so far … else where. Perhaps to the drone you arrived with and the ship you arrived on. That is very unusual. Unique, even. Also, most irritating.”

“What are you talking about? Do you mean a neural lace?”

“Within a sufficiently wide definition, yes. It is certainly some thing similar.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t have a neural lace.”

“I think you do.”

“And I know I don’t.”

“I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it.”

“Look, I would know if …” She heard her voice trail off, her jaw going slack as the relevant string relaxed, leaving her speechless.

“Yes?”

She was pulled upright. “I do not have a neural lace.”

“But you do, Ms. Nsokyi. It is an unconventional example of high exoticism, but it would pass most people’s definition of just such a device.”

“This is absurd. Who would put such a …?” Again, she heard her voice die away as she realised.

“As I believe you may have just started to suspect, I think Special Circumstances did.”

Yime Nsokyi stared at the thing in the middle of the great dark sphere. It had given up representing pan-human sexual organs to become a little black scintillating mote, then nothing, then she seemed to be flung backwards from it, trailing her strings rippling behind her, flying through intervening walls and structure as though they weren’t there, her clothes flapping madly in the howling gale of her backward-rushing regress, her strings, whipped to destruction, suddenly snapping off in the maniacal slipstream as she was missiled back towards her cabin. The wind noise rose to a shriek, her clothes were torn off her body as though she’d been caught in a terrible explosion and she plunged naked and howling into her bed in a great burst of ripped fabric and slowly spouting, wildly frothing water.

Yime came to in what felt like a struggle with reality itself, writhing and choking in the midst of the slowly descending waters. She was still wearing the sodden night-dress, though it was bunched up round her armpits. The huge room was lit by something strobing white and pink. She coughed, rolled across the punctured bed through the remaining pools of water and hauled herself over the raised edge, looking for the drone.

The drone lay on its back, spinning on the floor. That didn’t look good, she thought, as she fell out of the bed.

“I think we need—” she began.

A bolt of violet lightning speared down from the ceiling, crashing into the drone and puncturing it, blowing a fine yellow white mist towards her; the mist was incandescent, the sparks within it setting fire to whatever they touched. The drone had been holed straight through and split almost in half by the blast. Spatterings from the mist of molten metals hit her legs, burning a dozen tiny holes in her skin. She screamed, rolled away across the damp floor. She felt her pain-management system cut in, slicing off the red-hot-needle sensations.

A knife missile bounced out of the front part of the drone’s fractured casing. It flew towards her. She thought she heard it start to say something, then it too was bludgeoned by a violet bolt from above, blasting it apart. A white-hot fragment tore past her cheek, another tugged at the night-dress where it had part fallen back across her chest. Smoke and flames seemed to be all around her. She flattened, started to crawl away as fast as she could.

There was the whip-crack of a supersonic boom, making her ears close up. Suddenly a knife missile was there, a metre in front of her. It flicked upright so that its shimmering point-field was aimed straight at the ceiling; another violet lightning bolt slammed down, hammering the knife missile’s blunt end halfway into the floor.

“CROUCH! CROUCH NOW! CROUCH POSITION! CROUCH POSITION!” the missile bellowed at her before a second bolt blew it apart and something smacked her hard in the side of the head.

She had jumped half-up and was already crouched in the Emergency Displace posture – ankles together, knees together, bum on heels, arms wrapped round her legs, head sideway to her knees – by the time the drone got to the first “POSITION”.

Cerise fire filled the air all around and a terrific thunderclap slapped across her, trying to force the air out of her lungs. For an instant everything went utterly quiet and dark. Then suddenly she was squeezed, compressed to the point where she could feel her bones start to bend, hear her spine creak and knew that if she hadn’t been under the pain-control regime she’d be screaming in agony.

Then she was half-flopping, half-exploding out across the gently lit main lounge of the GCU Bodhisattva, her skin stinging in a confusing variety of places, all her major bones aching and her head ringing.

She lay on her front on the dense, fluffy carpet, retching water. Her back hurt. She looked at the skin on her wrists, where they had been clamped tight over her legs. They’d been skinned. Blood, already clotting, was oozing out over a patch of flesh about three centimetres square on the outer fold of both wrists. Her feet felt similarly raw and tender. Blood had run down from her right temple and partially closed that eye. She put her fingers to what felt like a piece of still-hot metal protruding from her skull and pulled it out. She could hear and feel a small, boney, grinding noise inside her head. She wiped blood from her right eye and peered at the fragment. Centimetre long. Maybe she shouldn’t have pulled it out. Blood on its shiny grey surface was fuming, smoking. The fingertips holding it were burning brown. She dropped it to the carpet, which started to singe. Painfully, she put her hand to the back of her head. She’d been part scalped, too.

The ship was making a noise: a deep, strong, humming noise, getting louder. She’d never heard a Quietus ship make any sort of noise like that before. Never come aboard one and not been greeted almost instantly, and very politely too. So far, though, nothing. Things must be desperate.

Then gravity seemed to shift and she slid quickly along the floor with the fluffy carpet until she thudded into a wall. She was rolled over, spread out across the bulkhead. The ship felt like it was standing upright on its stern. She began to feel very heavy, and compressed again.

Appreciable acceleration inside a ship’s field structure. That was an atrociously bad sign. She suspected it was only going to get worse. She waited for a field to snap about her.

One did and she blanked out.

He caught up with Dr. Miejeyar, rising to meet her as they both rose through the warm air towards the crown of the vast, impossible tree.

He shouted hello. She smiled again, said something back. They were rising with the thermal, light as feathers, and the wind noise was not that great, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He manoeuvred closer to her, getting to within a metre or so.

“What was that again?” he asked her.

“I said, I am not on your side,” she told him.

“Really?” He favoured her with a sceptical, tolerant smile.

“And the War Conduct Agreement does not apply outside the mutually agreed limits of the confliction itself.”

“What?” he said. Suddenly the wingsuit around him turned to tatters as if slashed by a hundred razor-sharp knives. He fell out of the sky, tumbling helplessly, screaming. The air and clouds and sky all turned dark, and in the space of one clawing, flapping somersault the impossible tree became a vast, blasted leafless thing, studded with fires, wreathed in smoke, most of its twigs and branches broken off or hanging twisting in the shrivelling wind like limp and broken limbs.

He plummeted, unstoppable, the shredded wingsuit flapping madly around him, the tatters of torn material like cold black flames whipping at his limbs.

He screamed, grew hoarse, gathered more air and screamed again.

The dark angel that had been Dr. Miejeyar flowed smoothly down from above; as calm, measured and elegant as he was terror-stricken and out of control. She was very beautiful now, with arms that became great black wings, streaming dark hair and a brief, minimal costume that revealed most of her voluptuously glossy brown body.

“What you did was hack, Colonel,” she told him. “That is against the rules of the war and so leaves you unprotected by those same rules. It is tantamount to spying, and spies are accorded no mercy. Look down.”

He looked down to see a landscape filled with smoke and fire and torture: pits of flame, rivers of acid and forests of barbed spikes, some already tipped with writhing bodies. They were coming up fast towards him, just seconds away.

He screamed again.

Everything froze. He was still staring at the horrific scene beneath, but it had stopped coming closer. He tried to look away but couldn’t.

The dark angel’s voice said, “We wouldn’t waste it on you.” She make a clicking sound with her mouth and he died.

Vatueil sat on the trapeze, in Trapeze space, swaying slowly to and fro, humming to himself, waiting.

The others appeared one by one. You could have told who were his friends and who were his enemies by whether they did or did not meet his gaze. The ones who had always thought the hacking attempts were a waste of valuable time and little more than a cack-handed way of telling their enemies that they were getting desperate looked at him and smiled, happy to look him in the eye. Those who had agreed with him afforded him a quick nod and a fleeting glance at most, looking away when he tried to look at them, pursing their lips, scratching their fur, picking at their toenails and so on.

“It didn’t work,” yellow said.

So much for preamble, Vatueil thought. Oh well; it wasn’t as though they kept minutes.

“It did not,” he agreed. He picked at a little knotted tuft of red fur on his belly.

“I think we all know what the next level, the last resort is,” purple said. They all looked at each other, a sort of formal symmetry to their sequential one-to-one glances, nods and muttered words.

“Let us be clear about this,” Vatueil said after a few moments. “We are talking about taking the war into the Real. We are talking about disobeying the rules we freely agreed to abide by right at the start of all this. We are talking about going back on the commitments and undertakings we took so solemnly so long ago and have lived and fought by from then until now. We are talking about making the whole confliction to which we have dedicated three decades of our lives irrelevant and pointless.” He paused, looked round them all. “And this is the Real we are talking about. There are no resets, and while there might be extra lives for some, not everybody will be so blessed: the deaths and the suffering we cause will be real, and so will the blame we attract. Are we really prepared to go through with this?” He looked round them all again. He shrugged. “I know I am,” he told them. “But are you?”

“We have been through all this,” green said. “We all—”

“I know, but—”

“Shouldn’t—?”

“Can’t we—?”

Vatueil talked over them. “Let’s just vote and get it over with, shall we?”

“Yes, let’s not waste any more time,” purple said, looking pointedly at Vatueil.

They took the vote.

They sat, still or gently swinging on their trapezes for a while. Nobody said anything. Then:

“Let havoc be unleashed,” yellow said resignedly. “The war against the Hells brings hell to the Real.”

Green sighed. “If we get this wrong,” he said, “they won’t forgive us for ten thousand years.”

Purple snorted. “A lot of them won’t forgive us for a million years even if we get it right.”

Vatueil sighed, shook his head slowly. He said, “Fate help us all.”

There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.

At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.

Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement – or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement – was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing – the great game that was life – appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.