Surface Detail

∼Eh? No! You really are bloodthirsty, aren’t you? No; we get you out of danger by letting slip part of the humble-Torturer-class disguise and just powering away from them until they can’t see what I’m doing. Then I can set you off in the shuttle… actu-ally, maybe not in the shuttle; maybe in one of my component shiplets, given the trashing potential that seems to be floating around here at the moment. You head for Sichult to have words with Mr. Veppers, I stick around here to knock some sense into the GFCF – hopefully only metaphorically – and then get stuck into the smatter outbreak, on whatever fucking scale that partic-ular complication happens to be manifesting lately.

∼Sure you can afford this “shiplet”?

∼Yes, I – oh, hello; they’re hailing again, saying heave-to or blah-blah-blah. Anyway.

She watched the image around her flick-swivel, then all the stars seemed to change colour, blazing blue ahead, red behind.

∼Off and run- the ship started to tell her, then everything went dark.

Dark? She thought? Dark?

She had time to send, ∼Ship? before the ship’s voice said,

∼Sorry about that.

The view clicked back on. This time there were lots of addi-tions within the image: dozens of tiny, sharp green shapes with numbers floating just in front of them and with garish coloured lines trailing after them and – in different colours – pointing in front of them. Concentric circles of varying pastel shades, noded with symbols meaningless to her, seemed to target each of the tiny green shapes, which were rapidly accruing accompanying floating icons like stacks of cards; looking at one made it blossom into nested pages of information showing as text, diagrams and multi-dimensional moving images that made her eyes hurt. She looked away, took in the general view instead; a thousand tiny gaudy glow-flies loose in a pitch-black cathedral.

∼What happened? she asked.

∼Enemy action. Seems the fuckers want a shooting war, the ship told her. ∼That hit would have smeared a real Torturer class. Motherfuckers. Time for me to reply in kind, sweetheart. I must prepare to smite. Sorry, but this may smart.

∼What?

∼Body-slap they call it. Healthy; means you’re still alive and I’m still functioning. Don’t worry, there’s a sub-routine moni-toring your nervous system; it can de-pain you if it starts to get really sore. Come on, let’s get on with it! Time’s-a-wasting! Just say you’re ready.

∼Fucking hell. All right. I’m ready. Like I-

Then her entire body seemed to be hit, as though every part of it had been slapped at the same time. It seemed to come from one side – her right – but it felt like it hit every part of her. It wasn’t especially sore – it had been too distributed – but it certainly got one’s attention.

∼How we doing? the ship asked as another tremendous shock registered throughout Lededje’s body, this time from her left.

∼We are doing fine.

∼That’s my girl.

∼I’ll- she started to say.

∼Now, hold on to your hat.

Another titanic slap, everywhere through her body. She seemed to drift away, then came to, feeling woozy. She gazed about at all the hundreds of pretty little symbols floating around her, haloed with pastel colours.

∼Still with us?

∼Think so, she sent. ∼I think… my lungs are hurting. Is that even possible?

∼No idea. Anyway; only calibrating. Shouldn’t get any worse than that.

∼Did they hit us?

∼Hell no; that was just us getting us out from under their track scanners. They’ve lost us now, poor fuckers. No idea where we are.

∼Oh.

∼Which means what’s about to happen to them will seem to come out of nowhere. Watch – as they say – this…

Instantly she was tipped and thrown; sucked tumbling into the view as though the whole weight of the ship had grabbed her by the eyeballs, pulled, and hurled her into the frenzied welter of impossible colours, staggering speed and infinite detail that was its riotously ungraspable sensorium. She felt assaulted, might have screamed if it hadn’t felt the breath had just been smacked out of her.

Immediately – thankfully – the whole bewildering complexity of it was reduced, pared and focused, as though just for her; the view rushed in on one of the little green symbols and the concen-tric rings around it whizzed, flicking this way and that, symbols flickering and changing too fast to make sense of. Then two rings flashed and changed places; the one that became the innermost ring seemed to start to flash again but this time blazed; she felt her eyes trying to close up, virtual eyelids shutting. The flare faded, left tiny granules of green where there had been a complicated shape before. It had all taken less than a second.