Surface Detail (53 page)

She glimpsed something red. What was left of Purdil was still just about sitting on his plastic board. Most of his head had gone, though she only had a little while to see this as he fell forward and crashed down, part onto his board and part into the water.

It was only then that they all started screaming.

“No backing up, then?”

“Of course not. We don’t do that; we can’t do that. We’re not you.”

Lededje frowned at Demeisen. The second or third most traumatic thing in her life and the ship’s avatar seemed almost unconcerned.

“So,” Demeisen said, “properly dead.”

“Yes. Properly dead.”

“What happened to Hino?”

“We never saw him again. He was taken to the city for the police investigation and then had intensive post-traumatic counselling. His—”

“Why? What did the police do to him?”

“What? Nothing! There had to be a formal investigation, that’s all. Of course they didn’t do anything to him! What do you think we are?” Lededje shook her head. “The post-traumatic counselling was because he’d thrown what he thought was a rock and blown a kid’s head off.”

“Ah, right. I see.”

“Hino’s father was a consulting landscaper who was only due to be on the estate until the end of that year anyway, so by the time he was fit to be seen in polite company again Hino was on the other side of the world while his dad sorted out some other rich man’s problematic mansion sight-lines.”

“Hmm.” Demeisen nodded, looked thoughtful. “I didn’t realise you had foametal.”

Lededje glared at him, eyes narrowed. “I can’t believe that hasn’t come up before,” she said through gritted teeth. “What was I thinking of? I ran away the next morning and nearly died of exposure, thanks for asking.”

“You did?” The avatar looked surprised. “Why didn’t you mention that?”

“I was coming to it,” Lededje said icily.

They were sitting in the outer two of the little shuttle craft’s pilot seats, their feet up on the seat in the middle. The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was just about to enter Enablement space and Lededje had thought to tell a little more of her life story to the ship as she came back to the place she had been born and brought up.

Demeisen nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was insensitive of me. Of course it must have been traumatic for you as well, and the other two children, not to mention the various parents involved. Were you punished, either for being in the battle area or for your part in providing the unexploded shell or for running away?”

Lededje let out a breath. “All of the above,” she said. She was silent for a moment. Eventually she said, “I don’t think Veppers was very happy about having his big triumphant homecoming spoiled by a runaway brat and a security kerfuffle over his toy battleships.”

“Well,” Demeisen said, then paused in a most un-Demeisen-like manner.

“What?” Lededje asked.

The avatar swung his legs off the seat between them, turning and pointing at the main screen, which flashed into life showing a slowly retreating star field. “Now there’s a strange thing,” Demeisen said, almost as though not talking to her at all. He glanced at her, nodded at the screen. “See that?”

Lededje looked, peered, squinted. “See what?”

“Hmm,” Demeisen said, and the image on the screen zoomed in, altered in colour and what appeared to be texture. In theory it was a holo display, but everything being shown was so far away there was no real sense of depth. Side-screens filled with coloured graphs, numerals, bar and pie charts described the image manipulation taking place. “That,” he said, nodding and sitting back.

There was a strange, granular quality to the centre of the screen, where the darkness seemed to flicker slightly, oscillating between two very similar and very dark shades of grey.

“What is that?” Lededje asked.

Demeisen was silent for a couple of beats. Then, with a small laugh, he said, “I do believe we’re being followed.”

“Followed? Not by a missile or something?”

“Not by a missile,” the avatar said, staring at the screen. Then he looked away and turned back to her, smiling. “Don’t know why I’m making this thing stare at the fucking module screen,” he said as the screen went blank again. “Yes, followed, by another ship.” Demeisen put his feet up on the seat in between them again, cradling his head in his fingers against the seat’s headrest.

“I thought you were supposed to be—”

“Fast. I know. And I am. But I’ve been slowing down for the last day or so, reconfiguring my fields. Sort of … just in case this happened,” he said, nodding at the blank screen.

“Why?”

“Why look like what you are when you can fool people by looking like what you’re not?” The avatar’s smile was dazzling.

She thought about this for a moment. “I’m glad I’ve been able to teach you something.”

Demeisen grinned. “That thing,” he said as the screen flashed on again, still showing the curious grey pixilation at its centre before it clicked off once more, almost before she could register what she’d seen, “doesn’t know what it’s following.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, I’m positive.” The avatar sounded smug.

“So what does it think it’s following?”

“A lowly Torturer-class Rapid Offensive Unit from the days of fucking yore,” Demeisen said with what sounded like relish. “That’s what it thinks it’s following, assuming it’s done its home work properly. Encasement, sensory, traction; every field I’m currently deploying right now looks convincingly like a very slightly and extremely plausibly tweaked version of the classic Torturer-class signature profile. So it thinks I am a mere dainty pebble amongst modern spacecraft. But I’m not; I’m a fucking rock-slide.” The avatar sighed happily. “It also thinks there isn’t the slightest chance that I can see it, because a Torturer couldn’t.”

“So what does it look like? The thing that’s following us.”

The avatar made a clicking noise with its mouth. “No idea. It looks like what you saw on the screen; I’m not seeing much more than you. I’m only just able to see it’s there at all. Which at that range means it’s probably level tech; an L8 civ or a high-end seven.”

“Not an Enablement ship then?”

“Nope. At a guess; could be Flekke, NR, Jhlupian … maybe GFCF if they’ve been paying especially diligent attention to The Proceedings of the Institute of Wizzo Space Ship Designers Newsletter recently.”

“Why would any of them be following you?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Demeisen said. “I presume to see what I get up to.” He grinned at her. “And to see what I might be carrying. The question they’ll be asking themselves and might want me to answer is: what am I doing here?”

Lededje hoisted one eyebrow. “Thought up anything plausible?”

“Oh, I had concentric layers of cover stories prepared,” the avatar told her, “though in the end I’m a borderline eccentric and very slightly psychotic Abominator-class picket ship and I don’t really have to answer to any fucker. However, most of my alibis are for a humble tramping Torturer class, and one involved being vaguely interested in the Tsungarial Disk, or having some connection with somebody or something in the Culture mission attached to it. An unnecessary ruse in a sense as it turns out, because the mission is actively calling for a bit of help following a smatter outbreak; any Culture ship pulling up here now has a perfect excuse.”

Lededje shook her head. “I have no idea what a smatter outbreak is.”

“Runaway nanotech. Swarmata. Remains of an MHE: a Monopathic Hegemonising Event. Sometimes known as a hegswarm. Your eyes have gone glazed. Anyway, some of that stuff got into the Disk … you do know what the Disk is?”

“Lots of abandoned alien ships no one’s allowed to use, isn’t it?”

“Lots of abandoned alien factories no one’s allowed to use … mostly,” the avatar said, nodding. “Anyway, the smatter got into the Disk sometime in the dim and distant and one of our infuriatingly well-meaning Can-we-help? teams has been in there sitting on top of it for probably longer than’s really been necessary – you know; one of those jobs you make sure you never quite finish because you like being where you are? – except now it does rather seem to have blown up in their faces and all of a sudden our chums have a properly serious runaway Event on their hands.” Demeisen paused and got that far-away look avatars sometimes did when the vastly powerful thing they represented was watching something utterly fascinating going on in mysterious high-definition realms inaccessible to mere mortal biologicals. The avatar shook his head. “Hilarious.”

“So you’re going to go and help?” Lededje asked.

“Good grief, no!” Demeisen said. “Pest Control problem. They took the decision to spin this out; they can fucking deal with it.” He shrugged. “Though having said that, I may have to pretend to go and help, I suppose, or whoever’s following us might see through my magic cloak of plausibility. We are heading straight for the Tsung system; it’s just I hadn’t intended to stop.” The avatar clicked his fingernails on the console beneath the screen. “Annoying.” He sighed. “Also, interestingly, this is – maybe – not the first odd thing to happen in this neck of the woods, either. There was an ablationary plume nine days ago not a million klicks away from that rendezvous they were trying to get you to make in the Semsarine Wisp.”

She shook her head. “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomen-clature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”

“What; you mean an ablationary plume?”

“Yes. What the fuck is that, now?”

“Oh, come on; this is just the stuff I have to deal with, an emergence from the weird-shit space I happen to pass my days in.” If Lededje hadn’t known better she might have thought the avatar was hurt. “An ablationary plume,” he said, sighing. “It’s what happens when a ship tries to hit the ground running and fails, in e-Grid terms; its field engines are unable to connect efficiently with the Grid and – rather than blowing up or being flung out, wrecked, to coast for ever – its engines ablate a part of themselves to cushion the energy blow. Slows the ship, though at great cost. Immediate total engine refit required. The point is that the resulting plume’s visible from way far away in e-Grid terms, so it can work as a sort of emergency distress signal. Embarrassing enough during peacetime and likely fatal in a war.” The avatar fell silent, seemingly contemplating this odd turn of events.

“… E-Grid?” Lededje asked tentatively.

“Oh come on!” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Do they teach you nothing at school?”

Somebody was calling her name. Everything was a bit fuzzy, even including her sense of who she was. Her name, for example. There it was again. Somebody saying it.

Well, they were saying something. Her first thought was that they were saying her name but now she thought about it she wasn’t so sure.

It was as though the sounds meant something but she wasn’t sure what, or maybe she knew what they meant but couldn’t be sure what the sounds actually were. No, that wasn’t what she meant. Fuzzy.

Yime. That was her name, wasn’t it?

She wasn’t entirely sure. It sounded like it was supposed to mean something pretty important and it wasn’t an ordinary word that she knew which meant something. It sounded like a name. She was pretty sure it was a name. Chances were it was her name.

Yime?

She needed to get her eyes open. She wanted to get her eyes open. She wasn’t used to having to think about opening her eyes; usually it was something that just happened.

Still, if she was going to have to think about—

Yime? Can you hear me?

—it, she’d just have to think about it. There it was again, just there, while she’d been thinking about getting her eyes open; that … feeling that somebody or something had said her name.

“Yime?” said a tiny, high-pitched voice. It was a silly voice. A pretend, made-up voice, or one belonging to a child who’d just sucked on a helium balloon.

“Yime? Hello, Yime?” the squeaky voice said. It was hard to hear at all; it was almost drowned out by the roaring sound of a big waterfall, or something like a big waterfall; a high wind in tall trees, maybe.

“Yime? Can you hear me?”

It really did sound like a doll.

She got one eye open and saw a doll.

Well, that fitted, she supposed. The doll was standing looking at her, quite close to her. It was standing on the floor. She realised that she must be lying on the floor.

The doll was standing at a funny angle. Being at that angle, it should be falling over. Maybe it had special feet with suckers on them, or magnets. She’d had a toy that could climb walls, once. She guessed the doll was the usual doll-size; about right for a human toddler to carry and cuddle like an adult would a baby. It had glowing yellow-brown skin, black, intensely curled hair and the usual too-big head and eyes and over-chubby limbs. It wore a little vest-and-pants set; some dark colour.

“Yime? Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

The voice was coming from the doll. Its mouth had moved as it had spoken, though it was a little hard to be sure because there was some stuff in her eye. She tried to bring her hand up to her face to wipe away whatever it was in her eye, but her hand wasn’t cooperating. Her whole arm wasn’t cooperating. She tried the other arm/hand combination, but it wasn’t being any more helpful. Signals seemed to be piling up inside her head from both arms, both hands, trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t make sense of whatever it was. There were a lot of signals like that, from all over her body. Another mystery. She was getting tired of them. She tried to yawn but got a strange grating feeling from her jaw and head.

She opened her other eye and saw two dolls. They were identical, and both were at the same strange angle.

“Yime! You’re back with me! Good!”

“Ack?” she said. She had meant to say “Back?” but it had come out wrong. She didn’t seem to be able to get her mouth to work properly. She tried to take a deep breath but that didn’t go too well either. It felt like she was sort of jammed, as though she’d tried to squeeze through a really tight gap and it hadn’t worked and she’d got trapped.