Surface Detail

“This’ll end in tears, mark my words.”

“So stop smiling.”

“I can’t! There are natural… Okay, I can,”‘ the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. “I can help it,” he admitted, “I just don’t want to help it.” He waved his arms again. “Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I’m deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?”

“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?”

“Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it’s looking clearer and clearer there’s going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that’s precisely what I’m built for. I’m going to get to strut my stuff, I’m going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can’t fucking wait.”

“We are talking about a shooting war?” she said.

“Well, yes!” Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.

“And people are going to die.”

“People? Very likely even ships!”

She just looked at him.

“Lededje,” the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. “I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!”

On the word “shine”, Demeisen’s eyebrows shot up, his voice rose a tone or two and increased markedly in volume. Even through the armoured glove, she could feel the pressure of his hands squeezing hers.

Lededje had never seen anybody look so happy.

“And what happens to me?” she asked quietly.

“You should get back home,” the avatar told her. It glanced at the screen, where the black snowflake with too many limbs still filled the centre of the image. “I’d chuck you overboard in this shuttle right now and let you head for Sichult, but whatever the fuck that is might mistake you for a munition or just waste you for the target practice so I’d better deal with it first.” The avatar looked at her with a strange, intense expression. “Necessarily dangerous, I’m afraid. No getting away from it.” Demeisen took a deep breath. “You afraid to die, Lededje Y’breq?”

“I’ve already died,” she told him.

He spread his hands, looked genuinely interested. “And?”

“It’s shit.”

“Fair enough,” he said, turning to face the screen and sitting back properly in the shuttle command seat. “Let’s put that one down as a mistake and try to stop it turning into a habit.”

Lededje watched the seat contort itself around the avatar, securing his body in place with padded extensions of the chair’s own legs, arms, seat and back. She felt movement around and beneath her and realised her seat was doing the same thing, enclosing her one more time; another layer of confinement beyond the gel suit and the armoured outer suit. She was pressed and shuffled backwards until everything fitted snugly against the contours of the seat.

“Now we get foamed,” Demeisen told her.

“What?” she said, alarmed, as the suit’s visor swung smoothly down over her face. The shuttle’s interior went dark, but the visor showed some sort of compensated image that gave her a very clear view of what looked like red-glowing bubbling liquid filling up the space she’d been living in for the last twenty-plus days, rising quickly in a dark red tide around the base of the chair, flowing up and over her armoured body and then foaming all about her, rapidly covering the visor and leaving her briefly blind in the darkness before she heard the avatar speak again.

“Space view? Or some screen entertainment to while away the time?” Suddenly the visor was showing her the same view the screen had, but wrap-around. The wrong-looking, eight-limbed black snowflake was still centre-image.

“You might have done better to ask whether I was afraid of forced immobility and confined spaces,” Lededje told the avatar.

“I forgot. Of course, the suit can just put you under for the duration of… well, whatever.”

“No, thanks.”