Surface Detail

“Oh, fuck off,” Chay said. Then she stopped, and felt terrible. Swearing in front of the noviciate! She hadn’t sworn aloud for over two decades. She was the Superior; the Superior didn’t swear. But then she was annoyed at herself for being embarrassed and penitent in the first place. What did it matter? “Yes,” Chay said, while the so-called “angel of life and death” flapped its impossible wings and stared wide-eyed at her. “Fuck off. Entirely fuck off, you ersatz, cobbled-together, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other piece of poor-quality animation. Do whatever it is you have to do and let’s just get this charade over with.”

The great dark angel seemed to pull briefly back, then came forward again, enfolding her vast black wings about the bed, then just around Chay, who said, “Oh, shit. And I bet this is going to hurt.”

The ship towered within the shadowy space of its hangar, a little over three hundred and fifty metres in height, its trim, pale hull girdled about its waist with five dark weapon blisters, its sleekly pointed nose housing three even longer bubbles.

“It looks fabulously retro,” Veppers said. “What exactly is it?”

The alien who had addressed him earlier turned to him. “Technically, to allow for legal challenges based on laws which admittedly do not yet exist, it is a one-point-zero-one-two-five to one scale model of a Culture ‘Murderer’ General Offensive Unit,” it said.

Veppers thought about this. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a model which is bigger than the original?”

“Yes!” the GFCFian said, clapping its little hands. “Bigger is better, yes?”

“Well, generally,” Veppers agreed, frowning.

They were standing in a viewing gallery looking out into a cylindrical hangar a kilometre from top to bottom and half that wide. The hangar had been carved out of the compacted ice and rock making up one of the Tsung system’s half-trillion or so Oort cloud objects. The lumpy conglomerate of ice housing the GFCF base

– and within it this hangar – was sufficiently massive to provide less than one per cent of standard gravity; point your mouth down when you sneezed and you could take off. The ship they were looking at – its hull a lustrous golden hue Veppers strongly suspected had been chosen to resemble as closely as possible his own usual skin colour – sat lightly on its flat, circular rear, its sharply pointed nose spiring toward the hangar’s ceiling.

“Its working name is the Joiler Veppers,” the little alien told him, “though it may be re-named anything you wish, of course.”

“Of course.” Veppers looked round the rest of the gallery. They were alone; the other GFCF people had remained on the ship when they’d shuttled across to the ancient lump of space debris, one of the near uncountable bits of debris left over after the stellar system had come into being billions of years earlier.

“You approve of the ship?”

Veppers shrugged. “Maybe. How fast is it?”

“Mr. Veppers! This obsession with speed! Let us say, faster than the original. May we not deem that sufficient?”

“What would that be in figures?”

“I sigh! However: the craft is capable of velocities up to approximately one hundred and twenty-nine thousand times the speed of light.”

Veppers genuinely had to stop for a moment and think. That did sound like a lot. He’d have to check, but he was fairly certain the Jhlupian ship which had taken him to Vebezua had travelled slower than that. The ships which the Veprine Corporation Heavy Industries Deep Space Division constructed measured their maximum velocities in hundreds of times lightspeed. This thing was a galaxy-crosser. Even so, he refused to look impressed.

“‘Up to’?” he asked. The GFCFian was called Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and was androgynous. Bettlescroy held the rank of Legislator-Admiral, though, like most people in the GFCF, the little alien seemed almost ashamed of having any rank at all. In fact, officially, Bettlescroy’s full title was – and most species required a deep breath at this point – The Most Honourable Heritably Concurrent Delegated Vice Emissary Legislator-Admiral Elect Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of Turwentire – tertiary, demesne & c. (This was the short version of course, excluding his educational qualifications and military service medals.) Certain components of this startlingly grand honorific apparently indicated that Bettlescroy was the trusted, word-good-as-the-original clone of somebody back home who was even more imposingly magnificent, to the point of being too posh even to do anything as vulgar as actually travelling.