Surface Detail

She was still breathing, very shallowly, because there was a purely mechanical link to a set of tiny, finger-thin tanks on the suit’s back, and a purely chemical set of reactions going on some-where in the system that ought to keep her alive for tens of days. The trouble was the suit held her too tightly for her to breathe properly; her chest muscles couldn’t expand her lungs sufficiently. It had to be that way, of course, for the suit to do its job properly when everything had been working; it had to clasp her tightly or she’d run the risk of getting bruised and hurt when they accelerated hard. She could feel her brain closing bits of her body down, cutting off blood supplies, keeping her oxygenated blood needs down to a minimum, but it wasn’t going to be enough; she’d start to lose parts of her brain soon, cells dying, suffocated.

She was glanding softnow every now and again, to keep herself calm. No point in panicking when it would do no use. If she had to die she might as well do so with a little dignity.

Thanks be for drug glands.

She hoped whoever had done this got seriously fucked up, by the Culture or the GFCF or somebody. Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly.

Well, let them die.

She’d compromise that far.

Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that.

Very very very hot now, and getting woozy. She wondered if it was oxygen starvation making her feel woozy, or the heat, or a bit of both. Feeling oddly numb; hazy, dissociated.

Dying. She’d be revented, she guessed, in theory. She’d been backed up; everything up to about six hours ago copied, replicable. But that meant nothing. So another body, vat-grown, would wake with her memories – up to that point six hours ago, not including this bit, obviously – so what? That wouldn’t be her. She was here, dying. The self-realisation, the consciousness, that didn’t transfer; no soul to transmigrate. Just behaviour, as patterned.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’t share the same spacial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn’t share the property of uniqueness. Blah blah; she was drifting now, remembering old lessons, ancient school stuff.

“What’s-?”

Pathetic last words.

She thought of Lan, her lover, her love, probably dying just like this, just like her, hundreds of thousands of klicks away in the suffocating heat, surrounded by the cold dark silence.

She thought she might cry again.

Instead, she could feel her skin trying to sweat, creating a prickling feeling all over her body. Pain management reduced it from extreme discomfort to mere sensation.

Her whole body, crying stickily.

Image to bow out on.

Thank you and good night…

“You the fella I need to talk to?”

“I’m not sure. Who exactly is it you wish to talk to?”

“Whoever’s in charge round here. That you?”

“I am Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III. It is my privilege to command the GFCF forces in this volume. And you?”

“I’m the passing-for-human face of the Culture warship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“You are the Torturer-class vessel we heard was in-bound? Thank goodness! We – the GFCF and our allies the Culture, here in the Tsungarial Disk – have come under heavy and sustained attack. All reinforcements are most welcome and urgently needed.”

“That was me, sort of. I was just pretending to be a Torturer class.”

“Pretending? I’m not sure I-”

“Thing is, short while ago, somebody jumped me. Whole squadron of craft: one capital ship, fourteen others plus ancillary units and slaved weapon platforms. Had to off them all.”

Bettlescroy stared at the face of the human-looking thing regarding him from the screen on the battle-bridge of the Vision Of Hope Surpassed, his flagship and one of the three Deepest Regrets-class craft under his command. Bettlescroy himself had given the order for the Abundance Of Onslaught and its flotilla of accompanying vessels to open fire on the incoming Torturer-class ship. Communication had been lost with all the craft during the engagement, which had seemed to be going well at first but then had obviously deteriorated. The ships had ceased communication so rapidly it seemed impossible that they had simply been destroyed, so the assumption Bettlescroy and his officers were working on was that some sort of comms blackout had taken place; feverish attempts to contact the ships were taking place even as he spoke.