Surface Detail

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.