Surface Detail

A few of the more militantly Altruistic civs tried to hack into the Hells belonging to those they saw as their more barbaric peers, to free or destroy the tormented souls within, but that carried its own dangers, and a couple of small wars had resulted.

Eventually, though, a war was agreed upon as the best way to settle the whole dispute. The vast majority of protagonists on both sides agreed they would fight within a controlled Virtuality overseen by impartial arbiters and the winner would accept the result; if the pro-Hell side won there would be no more sanctions or sanctimoniousness from the anti-Hell faction and if the anti-Hellists triumphed then the Hells of the participating adversaries would be shut down.

Both sides thought they would win, the anti-Hell side because they were generally more advanced – an advantage that would be partially reflected in the simmed war – and the pro-Hell side because they were convinced they were the less decadent, more intrinsically warlike side. They also had a couple of hidden assets in the shape of civs who nobody knew had been hosting Hells but who had been persuaded to come on board and who just about (it was decided, after a lengthy legal case) qualified due to the way the relevant agreement had been worded.

Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.

Battle was joined. It duly raged to and fro across the vast virtual conflict spaces within the scrupulously and multiply policed substrates allotted to it, overseen by a people called the Ishlorsinami, a species long notorious for their absolute incorruptibility, spartan lifestyles, near complete lack of humour and a sense of fairness that struck most other normal civs as positively pathological.

But now the war was nearing its end, and, to Vatueil, it looked like his side was going to lose.

It was a micro-nuke, but low-yield. Disposable sensor units deployed on his armoured Main Weapon Nacelles – his upper sensory dome was retracted beneath its armour clamshell – watched what happened. Three sub-munitions had deployed an instant before the main warhead had exploded, fanning downwards towards the floor where he’d been hunkered earlier. It was hard to be sure but he thought that he – the thing he was in – would have survived, had he still been there.

The floor beneath him thudded.

There was much damage where he had been; the bulkhead behind was holed, the ceiling above perforated, bulging upwards, now dipping back down, glowing white and yellow hot as heated supporting elements gave in to the apparent gravity the Abandoned Space Factory’s rotation provided. The Unidentified High-Solidity Object he’d been hiding behind earlier had been partially vaporised/destroyed and shifted across the floor of the hangar until it had impacted with the section of tipped, already-damaged floor.

“Still there!” (Different voice 4.)

“Hit it, Gulton.”

A bright yellow-white line lanced down from where the ceiling had been, smashing into the hangar deck where Vatueil had been positioned earlier and creating an exploding white ball of plasma. This blew outward in a boiling cloud behind a wave-front of condensing particles of molten metals; metre-scale yellow-glowing fragments of the floor went tumbling everywhere at various speeds, mostly high. He saw one piece somersaulting towards him, bouncing once off the floor and once off the ceiling. He did not have enough time to move. Perhaps if he had not been hunkered down he might have been able to avoid it.

The piece of wreckage impacted hard on the armoured body of the thing he was inside. It impacted badly, too. Not a flat side or even an edge hit first but a jagged point. It smacked into his top, off centre so that it half-spun him and sent the piece of wreckage spinning into the shoulder section of his left Main Weapon Pod.

Everything shook. Damage control screen-spreads filled his field of vision. There was a further impact from above. It was relatively slow, implicitly high inertia, crushing.

“Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” (Genius.)

“Sir, ordnance discharged, sir.” (Gulton.)

“Fuck me, I think my anal plug just exited my fucking suit.” (Different voice 2.)

“Oh, that’s spatted. That is one spatted shitfuck of an Armoured Combat Unit.” (Different voice 3.)

“Got to have done it. Got to have fucking done it. Take fucking that, you miserable three-legged space tank motherfucker.” (Genius.)

“Last one in’s an officer. No offence, sir.” (Different voice 2.)

“Steady. Just hold. Those things are tough.”

He was injured. The machine he was in was now sub-optimal. It was called an Armoured Combat Unit.