Surface Detail

She plunged into the storm of swirling motes. Coloured sparks against the black, each was a single truck-sized boulder of not-quite-mindless smatter; a mixture of crude, rocket-powered ballistic javelins, moderately manoeuvrable explosive cluster munitions, chemical laser-armed microships and the mirrored, ablation-armoured but unarmed breeder machines that were the real prize here; the entities amongst the lethal debris that could start other smatter infections elsewhere.

At the start of the outbreak, all those days earlier, the breeders had made up nineteen out of twenty of the swarming machines. Immediately swept and evaluated by the ships’ sensors, they had shown up as a cloud of tiny blue dots, speckling the dark skies around the gas giant Razhir as though the great planet had birthed a million tiny water moons, with only a few of the other types of swarmers dotting the outpouring clouds of smatter.

In retrospect, those first few days, when the blue dots made up vast near-monochrome fields of easily tracked targets, had been the days of happy hunting. Then, however, the machines – the infection – had learned. It was getting nowhere with its original mix of production; signals coming back to where the machines originated, in the infected manufacturies, told it that nothing was surviving. So it had switched its priorities. For five or six days now the blue dots had been steadily reducing in number until for the last day or so they had become lost in the billowing masses of green, yellow, orange and red points, all indicating swarmers with offensive abilities.

Gazing into the cloud around her, Auppi could see that this latest outbreak was composed mostly of red dots, indicating these were the laser-armed variety. Red mist, she thought distantly as she and the good ship Bliterator plummeted further into them. Like a spray of blood. Good sign, natty omen. Here we go…

Together she and the ship registered the near ninety thousand contacts and prioritised by type, designating the one-in-a-hundred blue contacts as their initial targets. This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp, neural-laced-brain running at as near to AI-speed as beyond-humanly possible, targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look.

Only ninety thousand, though. Odd, she thought. They’d been estimating more. Usually the estimate was easy to make and reliable. Why’d they got it wrong? She ought to feel glad there were ten kilos fewer to blit, but she didn’t; instead she got a feeling something was wrong. Combat superstition, maybe.

Embedded in the cloud of red dots – still naively ignoring the Bliterator because it hadn’t shown itself as hostile yet – the few blue dots were all located some way in, with none towards the surface of the emerging cloud.

The ship wove a suggested route for them to the best place – deep inside the cloud – to start firing.

∼Let’s bend past those two blues and mine them with missiles, dormanted till we open, Auppi sent to the ship, reaching out with a sort of ghost-limb sense to adjust the ship’s sketched-in course.

∼Okay, the ship sent. They swung, curving round to take in the two blue contacts she’d outlined, jinking this way and that to avoid running into the swarmers. She still found this bit weird. Tactically, logically, this made sense; get to the centre and start laying waste from there, but even though the sims said this was the most destructively efficient approach, she still yearned to be firing now, in fact to have started firing as soon as they’d come into range of the first swarmers.

But then another of her instincts just wanted to blow the fabricaria out of the sky; why treat the symptoms when you could attack the disease at the source? But the Disk, the fabricaria that made it up, was what they were all there to protect. Ancient fucking monument, wasn’t it? Couldn’t touch that. That’d be uncivilised.

It was right, she agreed with this, of course she did – she hadn’t joined Restoria to blast smatter, she’d joined because she was fascin ated in ancient tech, and especially ancient tech that had this rather childish desire to turn everything about it into little copies of itself – but after a nine-day haul with almost no breaks pounding the only-arguably-living crap out of any glowing blue dot that presented itself in her ship-shared sensorium, you kind of got to thinking like a weapon. To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at. The fabricaria were the source of all this hassle, ergo… but no. Aside from the small matter of not getting one’s own self blitted, preserving the fabricaria and the Disk was what mattered most here.

She felt the missiles go, programmed to initiate when the ship started brightening up its own immediate whereabouts. The missiles would prioritise the blue-echo breeder machines and then start setting about the rest.