Surface Detail

“You live on your fucking campuses with your heads in the fucking clouds and think everything’s as nice as it is there and everybody as civilised and reasonable and polite and noble and intellectual and as cooperative as they are there and you think that’s the way it is everywhere and how everybody is! You’ve no fucking idea what would happen if we didn’t have the threat of Hell to hold people back!”

“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm. Noble? Civilised? Reasonable? Clearly Errun had never sat in on a faculty annual performance, remuneration, seniority and self-criticism meeting. “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”

“You pompous, egotistical little cunt!” the representative screeched.

“And you, representative, are typical of those with ethical myopia, who feel only for those nearest them. You would save a friend or loved one and feel a glow of self-satisfaction at the act, no matter to what torment that same act condemned countless others.”

“… You self-important little fuck…” Errun growled, talking at the same time as Prin.

“You expect everybody else to feel the same way and deeply resent the fact that some might feel differently.”

“… I’ll make sure they tell her it’s all your fault when they’re fucking her to death every night, a hundred at a time…”

“You are the barbarian, representative; you are the one who thinks so highly of himself he assumes everybody who means something to him ought to be elevated above all others.” Prin took a breath. “And, really, listen to yourself; threatening such depravity just because I won’t do as you demand. How good do you expect to feel about yourself at the end of this, representative?”

“Fuck you, you ice-livered, self-satisfied intellectual shit. Your moral fucking high ground won’t be high enough to escape her screams every night for the rest of your life.”

“You’re just embarrassing yourself now, representative,” Prin told him. “That’s no way for an elderly and respected elected officer of the state to talk. I think we ought to conclude this here, don’t you?”

“This does not end here,” the old male told him, in a voice dripping with hatred and contempt.

But end it did, and Prin woke sweating – but not jerking upright screaming, which was something – with a sort of cold dread in his belly. He hesitated, then reached out, tugging on the antique bell-pull for help.

They found something called a thin-band cerebral induction generator. It had been stuck – a little lop-sided, as though it had been done very hastily – to the back of the bed’s headboard. A shielded cable ran from it through the wall to the roof and a satellite dish disguised as a tile patch. This was what had allowed them to take over his dreams. None of it had been there the day before.

Kemracht, Representative Filhyn’s aide, looked him in the eye as the all-wheel-drive bumped down the road in the darkness, taking them to the next hideout. The lights of the second vehicle, following behind, cast wildly waving shadows about the passenger compartment.

“You still going to testify, Prin?”

Prin, who could not be sure that Kemracht was not the traitor in their midst (those faculty committee meetings also taught you to trust no one), said, “I’ll be saying what I was always going to be saying, Kem,” and left it at that.

Kemracht looked at him for a little while, then patted him on the shoulder with one trunk.

It was like diving into a blizzard of multi-coloured sleet, a disturbed, whirling maelstrom of tens of thousands of barely glimpsed light-points all tearing turmoiled towards you against the darkness.

Auppi Unstril had glanded everything there was worth glanding, slipping into the zoned-out state of steady, unremitting concentration such engagements called for. She was entirely part of the machine, feeling its sensory, power and weapon systems as perfect extensions of herself and connecting with the little ship’s AI as though it was another higher, quicker layer of tissue laid across her own brain, tightly bundled, penetrated and penetrating via her neural lace and the network of human-mind-attuned filaments within the ship’s dedicated pilot interface suite.

At such moments she felt she was the very heart and soul of the ship; the tiny animal kernel of its being, with every other part, from her own drug-jazzed body out, like force-multiplying layers of martial ability and destructive sophistication, each concentricity of level adding, extrapolating, intensifying.