Surface Detail

“Approximately two hundred and thirty million,” the alien repeated. “At most. Fabricaria are capable of being brought together to create larger units themselves subsequently capable of constructing larger and/or more complicated vessels. Probably to a point where the numbers of individual craft involved would be reduced by a factor of thirty or forty. No one knows; these are guesstimates. Plus, it is not impossible that slightly greater numbers of the fabricaria than we are assuming have been corrupted or disabled by the pre-existing smatter infection, or by the measures taken to deal with the infection.”

“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?”