Surface Detail (50 page)

“But, still, up to two hundred and thirty million?”

“Approximately.”

“And all ready at once?”

“Better than ninety-nine point five per cent would be; with numbers on that scale, especially as we are envisaging using such ancient facilities, there are bound to be delays, stragglers, failures and incompletes. Possibly even calamities; apparently fabricaria have been known to blow up or aggressively dismantle themselves. Or – occasionally, sometimes – each other.”

Veppers hadn’t meant to stare at the alien, but he found that even he couldn’t help it. “ billion ships?” he said. “I am hearing you right? That is what you said?”

Bettlescroy looked bashful, almost embarrassed, but nodded. “Assuredly.”

“I’m not missing something here, am I?” Veppers said. “That is a truly astounding, almost farcical number of ships, isn’t it?”

Bettlescroy blinked a few times. “It’s a lot of ships,” it agreed, cautiously.

“Couldn’t you take over the fucking galaxy with a fleet that size?”

The alien’s laughter tinkled. “Gracious, no. With a fleet of that nature you’d be restricted to civilisations no more sophisticated than your own, and, even then, more sophisticated civs would quickly step in to prevent such shenanigans.” The alien smiled, waving one hand at the image of the warship now frozen on the screen. “These are quite simple craft by Level Seven or Eight civilisational standards; we ourselves would need a substantial fleet to cope with the sheer numbers involved, but it would hardly trouble us. A single large Culture GSV could probably cope on its own even if they all came at it together. Standard tactics would be to slightly outpace them and turn them on each other with its Effectors; they’d destroy themselves without the GSV firing a single real shot. Even if they were all magically equipped with hyperspace engines and were capable of performing a surprise 4D shell-surround manoeuvre, you’d bet on a GSV breaking out through them; it’d just brush them aside.”

“But if they split up and went off destroying ships and habitats and attacking primitive planets …” Veppers said.

“Then they’d need to be dealt with one-by-one,” Bettlescroy conceded uncomfortably. “In effect they would be treated as a high-initial-force-status, low-escalation-threat, non-propagating Hegemonising Swarm outbreak. But, well, we ourselves have sub-sub-munitions in cluster missiles capable of successfully engaging craft like this. And such behaviour – unleashing such a pan-destructive force – would be beyond reprehensible; condemnation would be universal. Whoever was responsible for setting such actions in motion would be signing their own Perpetual Incarceration Order.” The little alien shivered convincingly at the very thought.

“So what the hell are we doing even discussing what we are discussing?”

“That is different.” Bettlescroy sounded confident. “Depending on the locations and distributions of the targets involved – processing substrates and cores, presumably remote from high concentration habitation – less than fifty million ships ought to be quite sufficient. They would overwhelm the defences round the substrate sites through sheer numbers, effectively on suicide missions. The action would be strictly precision targeted, mission end self-destruct-limited and any perceived wider threat would be over before anybody realised it had ever existed. Meanwhile, far from meeting with genuine condemnation, a lot of the galactic In-Play would be entirely happy that the war had been settled, if not in this manner then certainly with this result.” The alien paused, looked at Veppers, apparently worried. “Let us be clear: we are talking about aiding the anti-Hell side, are we not?”

“Yes, we are.”

Bettlescroy looked relieved. “Well then.”

Veppers sat back, staring at the image of the ship on the screen. He nodded at it. “How confident of that sim we just saw are you? Will it really all happen so flawlessly?”

“That was not a sim,” Bettlescroy said. “That was a recording. We built that ship a month ago. Then we set micro-drones crawling all through it to check it had been built properly before dismantling it, just to be sure, and then letting the fabricaria reduce it back to semi-processed raw material again, to cover our tracks. The ship was entirely as specified, fully working, and the Disk object which built it is indistinguishable from its quarter of a billion fellow fabricaria.”

“You could have beamed this to me in my own study,” Veppers said, nodding at the screen.

“A little risky,” Bettlescroy said with a smile. It waved one hand, and the ship disappeared to be replaced with what side-readouts by the screen claimed was the real view again, of the fabricary’s interior, webbed with criss-crossing filaments studded with what looked like giant pieces of clockwork. “Also, we rather assumed you’d arrive with analytical equipment to let you take a closer look at all this stuff.” The little alien looked at Veppers as though searching his clothing for signs of paraphernalia. “However, you appear to have come unencumbered by both tech and suspicions. Your trust is gratifying. We thank you.”

Veppers smiled thinly at the alien. “I decided to travel light.” He turned to look at the screen again. “Why did they build all these? Why so many? What was the point?”

“Insurance, possibly,” Bettlescroy said. “Defence. You build the means to build the fleets rather than build the fleets themselves, the means of production being inherently less threatening to one’s neighbours than the means of destruction. It still makes people think twice about tangling with you.” The little alien paused. “Though it has to be said that those inclined to the fuck-up theory of history maintain that the Disk has no such planned purpose and is essentially the result of something between a minor Monopathic Hegemonising Event and an instance of colossal military over-ordering.” It shrugged. “Who is to say?”

They both stared at the dark network of threat and promise arrayed before them.

“There is still going to be some degree of blame involved in all this though, isn’t there?” Veppers asked quietly. “No matter how precisely targeted and quickly over it all is; some retribution will be required.”

“Good grief, yes!” Bettlescroy exclaimed. “That’s precisely why we intend to frame the Culture for everything!”

She became an angel in Hell.

Chay woke from the black-winged embrace of the creature which had claimed to be the angel of life and death to discover that she herself had become something not dissimilar.

She opened her eyes to find herself hanging upside down in a dark space lit by a dim red light from below. A faint smell of shit and burning flesh left little doubt where she was. She felt sick. The truth was that, despite everything, despite her best intentions, despite her daily-renewed promise to herself, she had felt hope; she had hoped that she would be spared a return to the Hell, hoped that instead she might be reincarnated once again within the reality of the Refuge, restarting her accidental career as a noviciate or even as something more humble, as long as it meant a life without any more than the average amount of pain and heartbreak.

She looked around, still slowly waking. She looked up, which wand burning as really down, at her own body. She had become something great and dark and winged. Her feet had become claws big enough to grasp a person whole. She spread her front-legs/arms/wings. They opened easily, purposefully, far out to either side. Limbs ready to walk the air. Limbs ready to grasp the wind. She folded them back in again, hugging herself.

She could feel no pain. She was in a huge hanging space in what smelled absolutely like Hell – and she was very aware that her sense of smell was much better than it had been before, both wider somehow and more sensitive; more accurate and refined – but she was not in any pain. Her feet seemed to clutch whatever she was hanging from quite naturally, without conscious will or even any discernible effort; she clutched at the thing – it felt like a great iron bar as thick as a person’s leg – and increased her grip until it did hurt, a little. She relaxed again. She opened her mouth. A predator’s mouth. A long, pointed tongue. She closed her sharp toothed jaws over her tongue, bit down tentatively.

That hurt. She tasted blood.

She shook her broad, over-size head to clear it, and found that she had been looking at everything through some sort of membranes over her eyes which she could sweep back. She did so.

She was hanging in what looked like a sort of gigantic hollow fruit, all veined and organic-looking, but with a single massive iron bar running right across it, seemingly just so she could hang on it. She lifted first one foot off it, then the other, to make sure that she wasn’t shackled to it. Each foot and leg seemed easily capable of taking her whole weight. She was strong, she realised. Her wings folded back in; she hadn’t even realised that they’d extended again as she’d tried taking her feet off the bar. Some instinctual thing, she supposed.

Beneath her head, looking properly down, there was a sort of frilled opening that looked unpleasantly like a sphincter of some sort. Beyond, she could see what appeared to be drifting, redtinged cloud. She would need to half-fold her wings, she thought, as soon as she saw the aperture.

She felt a strange hunger, and a tremendous urge to fly.

She opened her feet and dropped.

Back aboard the Messenger Of Truth, powering its way back to Vebezua, Veppers sat at an impressively large round table with Bettlescroy, the rest of the GFCF people who had first greeted him when he’d arrived, and several projections – holograms of those unable to be physically present. Even these weren’t being beamed in; they were present aboard the ship in some form, their personalities housed in the vessel’s substrates. This made for better security; increased deniability in other words. All but one were GFCFian, each as small and beautiful as the other.

The only exception was a hologram of another pan-human, a uniformed male called Space-Marshal Vatueil. He was a big, grizzled-looking creature, both unmistakably alien and entirely pan-human. To Veppers he looked barrel-chested with too long a head and freakishly small features. A hero who’d worked his way up through the ranks in the great War in Heaven, allegedly. Veppers had never heard of the guy, though admittedly he’d never taken much notice of the war at all. It had always sounded to him like just a particularly long-winded multi-player war game. He had nothing against long-winded multi-player war games – they were how his ancestors had made the first family mega-fortune – he just didn’t think that anything that happened inside them should qualify as news.

He hoped the GFCF knew what they were doing and who they were dealing with here. One of them had wittered on at the start of the meeting, singing Vatueil’s praises, describing him as a fully accredited member of something called the Trapeze group of the Strategic Operational Space (or something) and saying how they’d had extensive preparatory dealings with this, or that, or him. Like this was meant to set his mind at ease.

“To restate, then,” Bettlescroy said, waving one decorously attenuated limb at Vatueil, “the space-marshal here, on behalf of those forces known as the anti-Hell side, now taking part in the current confliction being overseen by the Ishlorsinami, requests that we – the Veprine Corporation and the currently constituted and here configured sub-section of the Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy, Special Contact Division – use the facilities of the Tsungarial Disk to build a fleet of warships – currently estimated as numbering between sixty and one hundred million, though that is subject to revision – for the purpose of attacking the processing cores running the virtual realities which house the aforementioned Hells.

“The Veprine Corporation will provide the AI operating systems and navigational software sub-complexes for the vessels, suitably groomed to make them appear stolen and modestly improved in a distinctly Culture style by our good selves. We also undertake to transport a modest proportion of the vessels as rapidly as possible to more distant parts of the galaxy to be deployed where required, if necessary. The anti-Hell forces will provide the expendable combat personalities for the fleet’s leadership hierarchy, these command vessels to make up one sixty-fifth of the total. Similar virtual specialists will also make up the direct hacking teams emplaced on certain designated ships which will attempt to disrupt the inter-Hell information traffic by, where possible, temporarily occupying the substrate housings and support systems and physically interfacing with them, preself-destruct.”

There were nods, their equivalents, and other appropriate gestures and noises of assent.

Bettlescroy went on. “We, the GFCF, will undertake to present to our friends the Culture – in the shape of the Restoria mission presently working in the Tsungarial Disk – what will appear to be a sudden and violent outbreak of the currently abated smatter infection infesting certain components of the Disk. Initially this will distract and tie up the Culture assets which we know are present, as well as drawing out and sucking in any other nearby forces within practical rush-in distance. Come the inevitable post-incident investigations, the smatter eruption will begin to look like something the Culture itself staged to allow it to take on an aggressively operational role in what transpires subsequently.”

“You are sure you can keep your own fingerprints off this, are you?” Vatueil asked.

“We are,” Bettlescroy said. “We have done this before, without detection.” The little alien smiled winningly. “The trick is to do something that the Culture would actually quite like to have done itself anyway. That way, any subsequent investigations tend to be more cursory than they might otherwise have been.”

“Have you taken any actions like this on such a scale before?” Vatueil asked.

Bettlescroy blushed, looked down. “Absolutely not. This is a significantly greater interference than any we have attempted before. However, we remain extremely confident that it will succeed.”

Vatueil looked unconvinced, Veppers thought. Maybe; always hard to tell with aliens.

“If the Culture decides it’s been tricked, used, manipulated,” the space-marshal said, slowly and deliberately, with the air of a man imparting a great and serious certitude, “it will move Afterlives to get to the truth, and it will not stop until it thinks it’s got to the bottom of it, no matter what. And,” he said, looking round them all, “there will always be forces within the Culture who will exact revenge. Again, no matter what.” Vatueil paused, looked grim. “I think we all know the saying: ‘Don’t fuck with the Culture.’”