Surface Detail

“Make sure there’s enough other craft to get everybody else off, but we take the first thing that arrives. Just us, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And where are your Oculenses? We might need them.”

“They’re broken, sir.”

Veppers shook his head. “Some fucker wants me dead, Jasken. Let’s let them think I am. Let’s let them think they succeeded. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Jasken shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “Should I tell the others to say that you were killed?”

“No, they’re to say that I’m alive. Injured, perfectly well, traumatised, missing, in a coma; more different stories the better. Point is I don’t show, I don’t appear. Everybody will assume they’re all lying. They’ll think I’m dead. Possibly you, too. You and I are going to hide, Jasken. D’you ever do that when you were a kid, Jasken? Hide? I used to. Did it a lot. I was great at it. So we’re going to do that now; we’re going to hide.” Veppers patted the other man on the shoulder, hardly noticing that he winced when he did so. “Shares will go into a tail-spin, but that can’t be helped.” He nodded at the transceiver. “Make the call. Then find me a flight suit or something to use as a disguise.”

Twenty-five

Auppi Unstril felt very hot now. The cold would win eventually though – it would be creeping in from all sides, making its way towards her from the Bliterator’s hull; seeping its way inwards to where she lay, at the craft’s centre, as the vessel’s heat leaked away, radiating into space. She would be the last bit to go completely cold. She was the little pit, the stone at the heart of the fruit… well, more its soft centre, the mushy middle.

She would be hard, in time though. Once she’d frozen. In the meantime she was dying, maybe from suffocation, maybe from overheating.

The last thing they’d heard from the Hylozoist had been that it had been attacked, disabled. It had just departed the Initial Contact Facility, got barely ten kilometres away, when it had been hit by some EqT energy weapon, slicing in through some hi-tech field disruptor. Its engines were wrecked, field generators shattered, some personnel dead; it had announced it was limping back towards the Facility.

In what had sounded like a series of simultaneous attacks, the GFCF comms had lit up with alarms telling of attacks on their vessels too; one of their MDVs on the other side of the Disk had been blown out of the skies and other ships damaged, at least temporarily disabled.

Auppi and the Bliterator had been scanning one of the fabricaria, trying to see if it was one of the ship-building ones, when the attacks had started. They were studiously ignoring a nearby smatter outbreak, even though they were ideally placed to tackle it and it looked like a serious one. That had felt wrong. The Bliterator hadn’t been configured as a general-purpose mini space-craft; it was a cobbled-together attack ship. Very skilfully and even elegantly cobbled together, but cobbled together nevertheless; single minded, no nonsense. Leaving its weapons on standby while a smatter outbreak raged only a few minutes’ flight away felt wrong wrong wrong.

But checking a proper sample of the fabricaria for illicit ship-making activity was, even Auppi had to admit, more important. She’d wanted to take the Bliterator inside the ripped-open fabri-cary to get a still closer look at the ship they’d found by accident, but they already had the readings to show it was a serious if relatively simple bit of kit, and the consensus had been that it would be too dangerous to try to enter the fabricary; the fab was still single-mindedly completing the ship, hull holed or not, and the maker machines were still whizzing back and forth on their network of lines and cables; even if they’d all been still it would have taken some delicate manoeuvring for the Bliterator to thread its way inside the thing. With them still darting back and forth unpredictably it would be suicide.

So she’d ignored the scarily fascinating weird new ship and ignored the fresh, enticing smatter outbreak and taken on what they’d all agreed was the most important task: choose a few fabs at random, over a decent spread of the Disk, and take a look inside using the very limited solids-scanning abilities of their little improvised attack ships. It had proved easier than they’d anticipated because all the fabs they’d looked at had the same hollow-skin outer hulls. Where there should have been a thick crust of dense raw material, there was a thin outer skin supported by a light girder-net, then the hull proper, then lots of activity, with some-thing big growing slowly at the centre. A few of the tiny Culture craft had even had time to choose a fourth random fab each and investigate those too.

Before they were hit.