Surface Detail

“Oh, it’s got what you’d think of as a real reactor too,” Demeisen shouted. She got the impression he was enjoying all this.

“A standard micro-form M/AM unit,” the suit told her.

Lededje rolled her eyes. “Helmet down.” she said. The helmet flipped instantly back to become a neck ruff again. “Can you go all black?” she said.

The suit turned matt black. “Now make the bit over the tat controls go transparent.” The area over her left forearm went transparent again. Touching there, it felt like the suit surface under the pads of her fingers had gone sub-millimetre thin, allowing her almost full sensitivity. She dialled the tat lines to thick and her face darkened. Satisfied, she marched out of the bathroom.

“All right,” she said. “I’m suited up. Now what-?” She stopped a couple of steps from the seats. “What the fuck is-?” she started to say, then said, “Oh, the armoured bit.” Sitting in the shuttle’s middle seat was what looked like an armoured warrior. The suit was mirror-shiny and smooth; maybe three or four times as thick as the gel suit. The head section looked like a blank-visored silver version of the sort of thing you were meant to wear riding a motor bike.

“The armoured bit,” Demeisen agreed. He glanced at her. “Very fetching,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” She sat in her seat again. The image on the screen looked just the same as before, disappointingly. “Now what?” she said.

“Now you get into the armoured suit,” the avatar said.

She looked at Demeisen.

“Just a precaution,” he said, waving his arms.

She got up. The armoured suit rose too; more smoothly, she suspected, than any mere human ever had. It stepped down and stood facing her on the floor. Then it just peeled apart, splitting centrally down every part nearest her, its legs, torso and arms spread almost flat out to each side, doubling its profile.

She stepped down too, faced it. She looked at its shiny inside surface and felt herself swallow. She glanced back. Demeisen was still staring at the screen. He seemed to become aware of a delay and looked round at her. “What?”

“You,” she began, then had to stop. She cleared her throat. “You really… wouldn’t hurt me, would you?” She hadn’t meant to, but then she found herself saying, “You did promise.”

The avatar looked at her, expression uncertain, then smiled. “Yes, I promised, Led.”

She nodded, turned, stepped backwards into the suit. The suit closed calmly around her, pressing gently in on the gel suit but seeming to add no weight. The helmet didn’t close completely; the visor slid away above leaving her an unrestricted field of vision.

“Walk normally,” Demeisen said, not looking back at her.

She walked normally, expecting to be dragging the suit with her, or maybe to fall over. Instead the suit felt like it was walking with her. She got back into the seat again, highly aware of her silvery bulk.

“I feel like I’m a fucking space warrior,” she told the avatar.

“Well you’re not,” Demeisen said. “I am.” He flashed a smile.

“Hurrah for you. So, what now?”

“Now we try focusing what’ll look like the track scanner of a Torturer class straight back. That’ll pick up our overtaking enthusiast.”

“Won’t that look suspicious?”

“Not that much; ships – especially warships, and especially old warships – do that kind of thing, every now and again. Just in case.”

“How often would you find something?”

“Practically never.”

“Are all old warships that jumpy?’

“The ones that survived are,” Demeisen said. “And then some of us are just paranoid. I’ve been known to back-flip and point my primary ahead scanner directly backwards, just to make sure there’s no fucker tagging quietly along behind. Not for long of course. It’s a bit scary; like running backwards in the dark.” The avatar laughed. “Though not as scary as thinking you’re sneakily pursuing some unsuspecting ship and then suddenly finding yourself all lit up and blinking in the glare of an Abominator class’s forward scanner.” The avatar looked amused at this. “Anyway, here we go.”

Lededje watched the screen. The granularity in the centre of the image resolved into a shape. It looked like a sort of rounded black snowflake with eight-fold symmetry.

There was a pause. Demeisen’s eyebrows went up.

“Yes?” Lededje said after a few moments when the avatar hadn’t said anything. “And? What’s happening?”

“Fucking hell,” Demeisen said. “They’re speeding up, fast.”

Lededje stared at the screen but nothing seemed to have changed. “What are you going to do?” she asked the avatar.