Surface Detail

This was a simulation, a virtual world, but it was not part of the war sim and there would be no going back for him or any of the other marines. They might succeed or fail, but both results would lead to their deaths. His real, continuing self, back in the war sim, would learn nothing from this mission.

If he was lucky, that self might hear that this self had succeeded on this mission – if he and the others succeeded.

They closed quickly with the core’s guards. The guards were wriggling up to meet them almost as fast as they were plunging downwards. Some darts from their opponents whizzed up past them, one deflecting off the shield of the marine next to Vatueil. His squad was in the lead; they were the vanguard, the very tip of the spear. He watched the dark shapes of the guards flit quickly closer. Very quickly; faster now than his force was falling and powering down towards them.

They would have time for one barrage, Vatueil realised, then this was rapidly going to turn into what in the old days they’d have called hand-to-hand… Steady… he sent. Then:… Open fire!

Impact lances, poison darts, dissolver rods and tasing bolts rained down onto their opponents.

Representative Filhyn had taken her lunch on one of the broad grassy terraces on the wide roof of the main senate building. The terrace looked out over the rolling grasslands that wound around the Central Leadership Complex like a mother’s trunk round a new-born. Beyond the green river of the grasslands, the great shallow-sided ziggurats rose, vast outcrops of administration, commerce and habitation, their sides festooned with vegetation, their terraces and levels dotted with trees. The great plains beyond the city were lost in the bulking presences of the pyramids and the haze of the warm day.

Errun came alone, as his obviously hastily scribbled message had said he would. She wondered how much he had found out, and through whom. She met him at a deserted wallow near the transparent wall which ran round the terrace. She had left her robes and other personal effects with her aides, so sat, modestly attired, in the cool mud, nodding to the old male when he arrived, grunted a greeting and lowered his old, rotund body into the mud alongside.

“I am trying to imagine to what I owe this unexpected honour, senator,” she told him.

“Perhaps you are,” the portly old male said, relaxing luxuriantly in the mud. He kept his back to the view from the wallow. There was a three-metre safety gap between the transparent wall round the whole terrace and the edge – that was pretty much the minimum that a Pavulean could cope with once they were higher than one storey up – but the old senator was known to be particularly prone to vertigo. She was surprised he’d agreed to meet on such a high level in the first place. He turned in the mud to look at her. “On the other trunk, perhaps you’re not.”

He left a space she was seemingly meant to fill, but she didn’t. Half a year ago, she would have, and might have given away more than she’d have wanted to. She declined to congratulate herself just yet. Representative Errun had many more tricks than just leaving people the space to talk themselves into trouble.

“Either way,” he said, slapping some mud over his back with one trunk, “I think we should clear some things up.”

“I am all for clearing things up,” she told him.

“Um-hum,” he said, throwing more mud over himself. There was a surprising neatness, almost a delicacy to how he did this that Filhyn found quite endearing. “We are,” the old male began, then paused. “We are a fallen species, Representative.” He stopped, looked her in the eye. “May I call you Filhyn?” He raised one muddied trunk, let it fall with a small muddy splash. “As we are in such informal circumstances?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “Why not?”

“Well then. We are a fallen species, Filhyn. We have never been entirely sure what really came before us, but we have always imagined something more heroic, more bold, more like a predator. We are told this is the price of having become civilised.” Errun snorted at this. “Anyway, we are who we are, and although we are not perfect, we have done the best we could, and done quite well. And we can be proud that we have not yet surrendered to the AIs we have brought into being, or abandoned all the attributes and mechanisms that made us great, and civilised, in the first place.”