Surface Detail

Demeisen whistled out a breath. “Oh, I am so tempted to just sprint off and leave the fuckers standing, or do the back-flip scanner thing with full targeting component and shout ‘Hello there, fellow space farers! Can I help you?’” The avatar sighed. “But we’ll learn more if we stick with the innocent little Torturer class disguise for a bit. They’ll be on us in about forty minutes.” Demeisen looked at her with what was probably meant to be a reassuring look. He wasn’t very good at it. “You must understand that this is almost certainly still nothing, and you can climb out of that suit quite soon.”

“It’s very comfortable.

“Is it? Good, good. So I understand. Anyway, just to be on the safe side I’m spooling up to full operational readiness.”

“Battle stations?” she asked.

Demeisen looked pained. “Terribly old expression. From so long ago ships had crews. Or crews that weren’t just along for the ride. But yes.”

“Anything I can do?”

He smiled. “My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvellous though they are in so many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions… or in some cases contribute to them.”

“Contribute?”

“Chemicals; colours. You know.”

Twenty-two

Anyway, more help is on the way.”

“It is? Well, hippety-hey for us. What is it? Who are they?”

“Some old Torturer class.”

“What, a proper ship?”

“A proper warship. Though old, like I say. Here in a couple of hours.”

“So soon. That’s unannounced.”

“That’s old warships for you. Tramp around, don’t tell anybody where they are or what they’re up to for years, decades or longer, but then every now and again one of them finds itself in the right place at the right time to do something useful. Breaks the monotony, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s come to the right fucking place to do that.”

“Woh. Getting frazzled, are we?”

“No more than you, coll.”

“That’s estcoll to you.”

“Blit a few kilo more of these little graveller fucks and you might just pretend to the level of esteemed colleague. Until then you’re only provisionally even a colleague, coll.”

“Golly. Terrible how we flirt, isn’t it?”

“Oh my, yes,” Auppi Unstril said, grinning, even though this was a sound-only comm. “Gets me all-scale flushed up. Any other news?”

“Our ever-helpful estcolls in the GFCF report they’re just about containing the outbreaks they’ve come across,” Lanyares Tersetier

– colleague and lover – told her. “Like us, they keep thinking that’s it, dealt with, under control, then another bit flares up. Mostly, though, they seem to be spending their time like they said: checking out all the other fabricaria.”

“I suppose we should be grateful they seem to be coping so well.”

“And that they had so many ships that close.”

“Yeah. Makes you wonder what they were all doing hereabouts in the first place.”

“You really have it in for the little cute guys, don’t you?”

“Is that how it sounds?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I don’t trust those little fucks.”

“They speak very well of you.”

“They speak very well of everybody.”

“That so bad?”

“Yes; it means you can’t trust them.”

“You’re so cynical.”

“And paranoid. Don’t forget paranoid.”

“You sure you wouldn’t have done better in SC?”

“No, I’m not. What about the Hylo?” The Fast Picket

Hylozoist was on the far side of the Disk from where they were. Bamboozlingly, an almost simultaneous eruption of smatter had taken place alarmingly near to the Disk’s Initial Contact Facility, the principal – indeed, by treaty terms, mandatory – base for all the species currently taking an active interest in the Tsungarial Disk. If anything, that infection was worse than this one, with fewer but more sophisticated machines emerging like hatching larvae from a scatter of fabricaria clustered about the Facility itself and taxing the long-disarmed Hylozoist severely. It was just about coping in its own theatre, but it had no more resources to spare for the outbreaks Auppi and her friends were trying to handle.

“Same; still struggling to cope with its share of the fun.”

The GFCF were already talking darkly about some sort of plot; these two outbreaks, so close together in time but far apart in terms of Disk geometry, looked suspicious, they reckoned. They suspected dastardly outside interference and would not rest until the culprits were unmasked. In the meantime they would fight valiantly alongside their esteemed Culture comrades to contain, roll back and ultimately extinguish the smatter outbreak. They were sending their ships all over the Disk, ensuring that the infection was spreading no further while leaving their more martially oriented Culture cousins to do the equivalent of the hand-to-hand stuff. (Play to one’s strengths, and all that.) Even trying to avoid the truly vicious stuff, they were still stumbling across bits of it now and again. They were doing their best to smite with the best of them (which meant the Culture, obviously), even though this was not really in their nature.