Surface Detail (48 page)

Veppers left Pleur sleeping; the tiny drug-delivery bulb attached to her neck would keep her under for days if necessary. The drug bulb looked just like an insect, which was a nice touch, he thought. He must get Sulbazghi to provide more of the things.

The bed went back to where it had come from; Veppers walked across the gently lit tunnel and into a little underground car. Not too dissimilar to the Reliquarian’s bullet shape, he thought as he swung the door down, switched the thing on and flicked a button to tell it to go. He was pressed back in the couch as the car accelerated. The Reliquaria. Annoying species, or machine type – whatever the fuck they were. Again, though; useful on occasion. Even if it was to be little better than a decoy. He punched in the destination code.

The private underground car system had various stops, most within Iobe city, almost all within buildings and other structures owned by Veppers. One, though, was inside an old mine, way out in the karst desert a quarter of an hour and over a hundred kilometres from the city outskirts.

The stealthed GFCF shuttle was waiting for him: a dark shape like a ragged shallow dome of night squatting on the serrations of rock. Moments after he’d boarded, it rose silently, kept subsonic, accelerated harder once it achieved space, threaded its way through the layers of the orbiting habs, fabs and satellites, and docked with a much larger but similarly secretive ship keeping a little above geosynchronous orbit. The dark, slimly ellipsoid vessel swallowed the shuttle craft and slipped away into hyperspace with barely a ripple to disturb the skein of real space.

He was met by a group of small, obviously alien but ethereally beautiful creatures with sliver-blue skin which turned to delicate scales – insect-wing thin and iridescent, like a tiny lacy rainbow

– where most pan-humans had head hair. They wore white, wispy clothes and had large, round eyes. One came forward and addressed him.

“Mr. Veppers,” it said, its sing-song voice soft, high and mellifluous, “how good to see you again. You are indeed most welcome back aboard the GFCF Succour-Class Contact Craft Messenger Of Truth.”

Veppers smiled. “Evening all. Great to be aboard.”

“And what are you supposed to be?”

“I am the angel of life and death, Chay. It is time.”

The thing had appeared in her sleeping chamber in the very middle of the night. There was a noviciate sleeping in a chair by Chay’s bedside, but Chay didn’t even bother trying to wake her. She knew in her heart this was something she would have to deal with, or endure, by herself.

The creature was something between quadri- and bi-pedal in form; its front legs still looked like legs but they were much smaller than its rear legs. It had a single trunk, and two vast, slowly beating wings which flared from its back. They were impossibly wide; far too big to fit into the chamber, and yet – by whatever logic was supposed to be operating here – they appeared to fit inside quite comfortably nevertheless. The thing claiming to be the angel of life and death hovered over the foot of bed, which was where such things were generally expected to show up, if you believed in that sort of thing. And perhaps even if you didn’t, she supposed.

She wondered again about reaching out and shaking the noviciate awake. But it would be such an effort, she thought. Everything was such an effort these days. Getting up, hunkering down, bending, standing, eating, defecating; everything. Even seeing, of course, though she noticed that she could see the self-proclaimed “angel of life and death” better than she ought to be able to.

An apparition, then; a virtuality or whatever you wanted to call it. After all these years, she thought, finally some proof beyond her own dimming memories and the fading ink in her charred page diary that all she had lived through in the Real and the Hell had been in some sense true, not just figments of her imagination.

“You mean time for me to die?”

“Yes, Chay.”

“Well, I must disappoint you, whatever you are or might claim to be. By one way of looking at things I am already dead. I was killed by the king of Hell himself.” She gave a bubbling, choking laugh. “Or at least by some big bugger of a thing. In another way of looking—”

“Chay, you have lived here and now it is time to die.”

“—at things, you cannot kill me,” said Chay, who, as Superior of the Refuge for many years, had become used to not being interrupted. “Because, in the place I came from originally, I am still alive, or at least I presume I am, and will continue to remain so, no matter what sort of tricks you—”

“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”

“I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. They were still alive when I entered the Hell. Can you do anything useful and tell me how they are? Still alive? Passed on? Well? Well? Eh? No? Thought not. ‘Maker’ indeed. What superstitious bollocks are you trying to—?”

“Chay!” the thing shouted at her. Quite loudly, Chay thought, and – what with her failing hearing – that must have meant extremely loudly. Still the young noviciate asleep in the chair by her bedside didn’t even stir. She was glad she hadn’t wasted the effort waking the girl up. “You are about to die,” the apparition told her. “Have you no wish to see God and be accepted into Her love?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There is no God.” It was what she believed, what she had always believed, but still she looked nervously at the sleeping noviciate.

“What?” the angel cried. “Will you have no thought for your immortal soul?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Chay said. Then she stopped, and felt terrible. Swearing in front of the noviciate! She hadn’t sworn aloud for over two decades. She was the Superior; the Superior didn’t swear. But then she was annoyed at herself for being embarrassed and penitent in the first place. What did it matter? “Yes,” Chay said, while the so-called “angel of life and death” flapped its impossible wings and stared wide-eyed at her. “Fuck off. Entirely fuck off, you ersatz, cobbled-together, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other piece of poor-quality animation. Do whatever it is you have to do and let’s just get this charade over with.”

The great dark angel seemed to pull briefly back, then came forward again, enfolding her vast black wings about the bed, then just around Chay, who said, “Oh, shit. And I bet this is going to hurt.”

The ship towered within the shadowy space of its hangar, a little over three hundred and fifty metres in height, its trim, pale hull girdled about its waist with five dark weapon blisters, its sleekly pointed nose housing three even longer bubbles.

“It looks fabulously retro,” Veppers said. “What exactly is it?”

The alien who had addressed him earlier turned to him. “Technically, to allow for legal challenges based on laws which admittedly do not yet exist, it is a one-point-zero-one-two-five to one scale model of a Culture ‘Murderer’ General Offensive Unit,” it said.

Veppers thought about this. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a model which is bigger than the original?”

“Yes!” the GFCFian said, clapping its little hands. “Bigger is better, yes?”

“Well, generally,” Veppers agreed, frowning.

They were standing in a viewing gallery looking out into a cylindrical hangar a kilometre from top to bottom and half that wide. The hangar had been carved out of the compacted ice and rock making up one of the Tsung system’s half-trillion or so Oort cloud objects. The lumpy conglomerate of ice housing the GFCF base

– and within it this hangar – was sufficiently massive to provide less than one per cent of standard gravity; point your mouth down when you sneezed and you could take off. The ship they were looking at – its hull a lustrous golden hue Veppers strongly suspected had been chosen to resemble as closely as possible his own usual skin colour – sat lightly on its flat, circular rear, its sharply pointed nose spiring toward the hangar’s ceiling.

“Its working name is the Joiler Veppers,” the little alien told him, “though it may be re-named anything you wish, of course.”

“Of course.” Veppers looked round the rest of the gallery. They were alone; the other GFCF people had remained on the ship when they’d shuttled across to the ancient lump of space debris, one of the near uncountable bits of debris left over after the stellar system had come into being billions of years earlier.

“You approve of the ship?”

Veppers shrugged. “Maybe. How fast is it?”

“Mr. Veppers! This obsession with speed! Let us say, faster than the original. May we not deem that sufficient?”

“What would that be in figures?”

“I sigh! However: the craft is capable of velocities up to approximately one hundred and twenty-nine thousand times the speed of light.”

Veppers genuinely had to stop for a moment and think. That did sound like a lot. He’d have to check, but he was fairly certain the Jhlupian ship which had taken him to Vebezua had travelled slower than that. The ships which the Veprine Corporation Heavy Industries Deep Space Division constructed measured their maximum velocities in hundreds of times lightspeed. This thing was a galaxy-crosser. Even so, he refused to look impressed.

“‘Up to’?” he asked. The GFCFian was called Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and was androgynous. Bettlescroy held the rank of Legislator-Admiral, though, like most people in the GFCF, the little alien seemed almost ashamed of having any rank at all. In fact, officially, Bettlescroy’s full title was – and most species required a deep breath at this point – The Most Honourable Heritably Concurrent Delegated Vice Emissary Legislator-Admiral Elect Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of Turwentire – tertiary, demesne & c. (This was the short version of course, excluding his educational qualifications and military service medals.) Certain components of this startlingly grand honorific apparently indicated that Bettlescroy was the trusted, word-good-as-the-original clone of somebody back home who was even more imposingly magnificent, to the point of being too posh even to do anything as vulgar as actually travelling.

Bettlescroy looked, briefly, very slightly pained. “The precise operational parameters are still being optimised as the vessel is fitted out,” it explained. “As in original, it utilises hyper-spacial aggregation motors and additionally applied induction factoring rather than the more common warp engine technology which powers the vessels your own society builds. Again as in the original, of course, the maximum apparent velocity is achievable over a defined period.”

“A defined period?”

“Indeed.”

“What you mean is, only in bursts?”

“Of course. Again, as in the the original. Though – again again, as it were – a higher maximum and for longer.”

“So what’s its indefinitely sustainable maximum?”

The little alien sighed. “We are still working that out, but in excess of ten kilolights, assuredly.”

“Ah. What about the weapons?”

“Generally similar to and in some cases improvements on and refinements of the originals. In a word, formidable. Far beyond anything the Sichultian Enablement currently possesses. To be frank, so far beyond they will remain arguably non-analysable and certainly non-reproducible for the foreseeable near to medium future. This, sir, will be a space yacht capable of successfully engaging entire fleets of vessels representing state-of-the-art technology by Sichultian Enablement standards, and some way beyond. Great care will need to be taken drawing up the – how shall I put this? – the generally availablecomponent of the Use and Ownership Contract for this to pass muster with the sadly all-too-zealous bureaucrats of the Galactic Council’s Technology Transfer Oversight Board.”

“Hmm. Well, we’ll see. It does look terribly retro in style, don’t you think?”

“It is not styled. It is simply designed. See: the form allows all weapons to point forward, five out of the eight to point rearward and never less than five to point to any side, without rotation. In event of field failure, the highly fluid-dynamic directional profile outline provides high abrasive-environment survivability. The internal component layout and field substrate deployment are generally held to be as close to perfection as it was then possible to achieve and has not been significantly improved upon since. I beseech you, Veppers; inquire. Such inquiry will prove what I say: the Murderer class is rightly regarded as a design classic.”

“So it is actually quite old?”

“Let us say that it is proven. In many ways, it has never been bettered for purposeful elegance.”

“Still, though; old.”

“Veppers, my dear friend, the example you see before you is better than the original, and that was the best there was at the time. Warship design has improved only incrementally since, with gradual though significant improvements to raw speed, crude weapon-power effectiveness and so on, but, in a sense, all the various design teams have ever been trying to do is to re-create the design you see here before you for future ages. Any given design produced right now to represent the sum of all subsequent improvements will quickly itself be improved upon and so eclipsed within a relatively short interval. The beauty of the Murderer class is that in a way it never was improved upon. That legacy is secure, endures and ensures that its reputation, rather than fade, will likely only grow the brighter.”

“Accommodation?”

“The original could accommodate up to one hundred and twenty humans, in admittedly relatively cramped conditions. Our improved version requires minimal operational crew – perhaps three or four – and so allows for, say, equal numbers of twenty servant-crew and twenty passengers, the latter existing in conditions of some considerable luxury. The exact disposition of the apartments and suites would be up to your good self.”

“Hmm,” Veppers said. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“Well said. Like our civilisational inspirates we worship nothing, but if we and they did worship anything, it would be thought, reason and rationality. As such, your ambition to think leaves us assured that our offer will be seen as the generous – indeed, generous almost to a fault – one that it is.”

“Your confidence is an inspiration to us all, I’m sure.”

The Tsungarial Disk had been a disappointment the first time Veppers had seen it. Three hundred million space factories of half a million tonnes or more each sounded like a lot, but, spread out around an entire gas giant from within a few hundred kilometres of Razhir’s cloud tops to over half a million kilometres distant from the planet, in a band forty thousand kilometres thick, it was amazing how empty the space around the planet could seem.