Surface Detail

“Okay. So what’s the news with you personally, lover?”

“Missing you. Otherwise okay. Keeping busy.”

“Oh, aren’t we all? Well, I’d better go. More swarmers to waste. Got another cloud coming out of one of the mid L-Sevens. Off I go to blit.”

“Blit away. Don’t get blitted.”

“Ditto to you. Till next-”

“You forgot to say, ‘Missing you too.’”

“Wha-? I did, didn’t I? What a crap girlfriend. Miss you; love you.”

“Love you too. Back to the fray, I guess.”

“Hold on. We have a name for that Torturer class?”

“Oddly, no. Probably means it’s one of the particularly weird ones. Want to bet it’s a vet of the I-war still troubled and trying to deal with its issues after a millennium and a half?”

“Oh, fuck. A weirded-up geriatric warship getting piled into the current mix. With our luck it’ll have come to join the fucking outbreak, not help us jump up and down on it.”

“There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll use at least part of the next four hours thinking up fresh negativities to display for you. Good hunting.”

“Spoiled for choice out here. You too. Off.”

“Later. Off.”

Auppi Unstril muted comms, glanded a little more edge and took a deep breath as the drug coursed through her. The displays seemed to sharpen and brighten, their 3D qualities appeared enhanced and all the other signals coming into her sort of freshened, whether they were auditory, tactile or anything else – and there was a lot else. She felt very alert, and raring to go.

“Junkie,” said the ship.

“Yep,” she said. “Enjoying it, too.”

“You worry me sometimes.”

“When I worry you all the time we may have started to reach equilibrium,” she told it, though it was more just the sort of thing you felt you had to say when you were riding an edge buzz than what she actually felt. The ship didn’t really worry her at all. She worried it. Just as it should be; she enjoyed that feeling too.

The ship wasn’t really a ship (too small) and so didn’t have a proper name; it was a Fast Fleet Liaison Module with emergency weaponisationability (or something) and all it had was a number. Well, it had been thoroughly weaponisationed all right and it had room inside for a human pilot so, like the dashingly gorgeous Mr. Lanyares Tersetier – colleague and lover – she’d been determined not to let the machines have all the fun dealing with the unexpected, semi-widespread and bizarrely uncontainable smatter outbreak. She’d decided to call the ship The Bliterator, which smacked even her as a bit childish, but never mind.

Auppi and the ship blitted the fuck out of whatever elements of the hegswarm outbreak they got to point themselves at; just blowing the Selfish Dust out of the skies. She was genuinely in mortal danger, hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time for

– well, off-hand, she couldn’t remember how many days – and she was starting to feel more like a machine than a fully functioning and quite attractive human female. Didn’t matter; she was loving it.

There were immersive shoot-games as good – arguably better in some ways – than this, and she had played them all, but this had an advantage over all of them: it was real.

One unlucky collision with a boulder, stone, gravel granule, or maybe even sand-grain-size bit of the current infection and she’d be lucky to live. Same applied to the weapons that some of these later outbreakians were coming equipped with. (That was worrying in itself – the hegswarm getting gunned-up too; developing.) So far the weapons themselves were nothing to worry a properly prepared tooled-up piece of Culture offensive kit, like the one she was in, humble civilian transport origins or not, but

– again – an unlucky combination of events and she’d be plasma, meat-dust; a highly distributed red smear.

She, Lanyares and the others had agreed that knowing that fact added something to the whole experience. Terror, mostly. But also an extra level of excitement, of exultation when you came out the other side of an encounter still alive, plus a feeling after each engagement that you never really got in a sim: that of having genuinely done something, of accomplishment.

There had been over sixty humans in the Restoria mission to the Tsungarial Disk when the outbreak began. They’d all volunteered to get involved. They’d drawn lots for who got to pilot the twenty-four microships they could field. So far, two of the drone ships had been damaged but had managed to get back to base for repair. None of the humans had ended up dead/missing/ injured.

The humans had all run their own sims and looked at old scenarios and reckoned that they had about a four-to-one chance of getting through this unscathed, if the outbreak ran the way it had been expected to.