Surface Detail

Quar swallowed, gulped. “Sir,” he said, sitting even more upright in his seat, “I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal, sir; however I understood the Culture ship was most lately returned to the vicinity of the Disk Initial Contact Facility.”

“It still is, Quar; we have succeeded in detaining it there with administrational drivel until now, but it is about to depart again, and it is as it departs that we intend to attack it.”

“Sir! As I say, sir, I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal. However, we are – as I’m sure sir is aware – stationed with our sister ship the Rubric Of Ruin, on the far side of the Disk from the Facility. It will take-”

“Of course I’m aware of that, Quar. Unlike you I am not a complete idiot. And I might inform you there is another of our ships in your vicinity, standing some distance off, just beyond your scanner range.”

“There is, sir?”

“There is, Quar.”

“But I thought I was aware of our full fleet disposition, sir.”

“I know. But there are two GFCF fleets here, Quar, and the ship near you that you didn’t know about is part of the hidden one, our war fleet.”

“Our war fleet,” Quar repeated.

“Our war fleet. And when we attack the Culture ship we need to make it look as though somebody else attacked it, not us, and one of the best ways of making that appear plausible is to have one of our own ships attacked – indeed, preferably completely destroyed – at the same time. You see, war means sacrifice, some-times, Quar; that’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. We need to destroy one of our own ships.”

“We do, sir?”

“We do, Quar.”

“The… the Rubric Of Ruin, sir?”

“No, not the Rubric Of Ruin, Quar. But close.”

“Sir?”

“Goodbye, Quar; this pleases me much more than it will hurt you.” Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III unclasped his hands and brought one dainty, exquisitely manicured finger down onto the winking Commit key.

Administrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali was very briefly aware of an extremely bright light shining from all around him, and a sensation of great warmth.

The broad, sleek aircraft dived, side-slipped one way then the other before roaring over a broad, shallow river, making animals on the river bank and fish in the shallows between the gravel beds all scatter. The flier settled into a ground-hugging, low-altitude cruise, only metres above the tops of the trees on the trackway, which stretched all the ninety kilometres from here, the borders of the Espersium estate, to the great torus-shaped mansion house at its centre.

The trackway cast a long, thick shadow over the rolling pasture land to one side and the treetops were lit by a ruddy sun rising through layers of misty cloud above the horizon.

Veppers sat in one of the hunting seats in the back of the craft, looking out through the invisible barrier at the late autumn sunrise. Some high towers in Ubruater were reflecting the first direct light of the day, winking pinkly.

He looked at the laser rifle, which was lying, switched on but still stowed in front of him. He was alone in the shooting gallery; he didn’t want anybody else around him right now. Even Jasken was inside with the rest of the entourage, in the main passenger compartment. Some large bird was startled out of the canopy beneath in a chaos of twigs and feathers and Veppers went to grasp the laser rifle on its stand, then just let his hand drop again as the bird flapped frantically away.

It was a bad sign, he knew, when he lost his appetite for hunting. Well, shooting. You could hardly dignify it with the term hunting. It was an affectation, he felt now. Using a low-flying aircraft to throw up birds to shoot at. Still, it had been a useful affectation. He’d needed this excuse. He’d needed the trackways to be there. He felt heavy as the flier zoomed to follow the slope of a hill.

All about to end, now. Still, he’d always known it might have to end, one day.

He watched the landscape unwind behind the aircraft; and felt it, too, experiencing something close to weightlessness as the flier crested the hill and then followed the down-slope. Then he was heavy again, as they levelled out. The hill had hidden any sight of Ubruater, and the sunrise had been removed by a ridge to the east.

Veppers felt tired, unsettled. Maybe he just needed a fuck. He remembered Sapultride’s girl, Crederre, straddling him, bucking enthusiastically up and down, in this very seat, only – what, ten or eleven days earlier? Pleur, maybe? Or one of the other girls? Or just get a couple of them to fuck each other, in front of him. That could be oddly calming.

But he felt somehow impatient with the whole idea of sex right now. That was a bad sign too.