Surface Detail

Only it hadn’t; they didn’t even think to report it immediately because the original little smatter burstlet had been interesting, something worth studying. Then, a day later, when they’d realised it was the real thing, they’d still confidently assured superiors and distant offers of help that they could handle it; it’d be over before anybody more than a day away got there, and there was nobody anywhere near a day away.

It went over that first one-day prediction, but by then they were even more confident they had worked it out and knew how to deal with it; it’d be over in a couple of days. Well, four. Okay; definitely six. Now they were on day eight or nine, the fucking outbreak wasn’t letting up, in fact it was showing signs of developing – those weapons, crude or not – and they were all starting to get, as Lan had put it, frazzled.

Plus their pooled, averaged, constantly updated should-be-fairly-reliable sims had, over the last few days, gone from giving them a four out of five chance of surviving without casualties to odds of three out of four, then to a two out of three chance and then – inevitably, it felt like – to a one-to-one likelihood. That had been sobering. It was only a sim, only a prediction, but it was still worrying. That last estimate had been good up to about five hours ago. By now they must be well into negative odds. Unless the outbreak just stopped or even just tailed away unfeasibly rapidly, or they were ridiculously lucky, they were going to lose somebody.

Well, maybe they were. But she wasn’t going to be the one. They might lose more than one. She wasn’t going to be the first. Fuck it, maybe they’d all die. She wanted to be the one survivor, or the last to go down. A ferocity Auppi would never have guessed resided in her rose and burned in her chest and behind her eyes when she thought about this sort of stuff. Yeah, natural warrior, that was her. She could hear Lanyares laughing at her already. Glanded too much edge, sperk, quicken, focal, drill and gung, young lady.

Still, though. That lust for destruction, glory – even glorious death – was a sort of extra, emergent drug in itself; a meta-hit that spoke to something deep-buried, long veneered over but never entirely expunged in the pan-human bio-heritage.

She was armour-suited, plugged into a gel-foamed brace couch with at least four metres of high-density gunned-up much-beweaponed Fast Fleet Liaison Module between her and the vacuum

– twelve metres of pointy, armoured ditto measuring from the front – and she had an arsenal of weaponry: one main laser, four secondaries, eight tertiaries, six point-defence high-repeat shrapnel laser cells, a couple of nanogun pods – currently seven-eighths depleted, so it would soon be time to get back to base to re-arm – and a heavy, slowing, bulky but useful hullslung missile container with an assortment of sleekly deadly lovelies inside. That was only half depleted, which the ship still maintained meant she was being too miserly with the missiles. She saw it as just being careful. Be tight with the stuff that could get depleted and extravagant with what seemed never-ending: her own desire to fight and destroy.

She was almost ashamed to be backed up. A real warrior shouldn’t be. A real warrior should face the certainty of death and oblivion and still be fearless, still treat their life as just something to be gambled with against the odds of fate, as effectively as possible.

Fuck it, though; the warriors of old had thought they were effectively backed up too, sure in themselves that they were bound for some glorious martial heaven. That it was nonsense wasn’t the point. Some of them must have had their doubts but they had still behaved as though they didn’t. That was fucking bravery. (Or stupidity. Or gullibility. Or a kind of narcissism – what you thought it was depended on what sort of person you were, what you might have felt and done in the same situation.) Would theyhave taken the offer of being truly backed up, had they been able? Leapt at it, she’d have bet. And never forget they would be killing other people, not dumb matter smartened up a couple of notches to the point it became annoying. That was where the analogy with game-playing became something even closer; you could waste smatter with exactly the same moral abandon as something whacked in a shoot-up game.