Surface Detail

“Lededje Y’breq isn’t back there already, is she?” Yime asked.

“Doubtful,” Himerance said. “And I would doubt she could organise a nuke inside Veppers’ estate either. She’s just a kid with a grudge, not some super-powered SC agent. Not that a super-powered SC agent would use anything as inelegant as a bomb aimed at an aircraft. Or miss if they did.”

“What if the Abominator’s helping her?”

“I would prefer not to think about that,” Himerance said with a sigh.

Yime frowned, looked about the palatial suite. “Can you hear that thumping noise?”

“That,” the ship drone said, “is the hotel’s general manager registering his disapproval at his pass-key codes not allowing him entry into his finest suite when there appears to be something ‘going on’ inside.”

Himerance was frowning now. The ship’s drone fell silent, hanging in the air for a moment.

“We need to conduct a small experiment,” Himerance said.

“That statue,” the drone announced, and Himerance turned to look at a three-quarters-sized statue of a buxom nymph carrying a stylised torch in one corner of the bedroom.

“What’s going-?” Yime began, as a silvery ellipsoid flickered into existence around the statue, obscuring it. When the ellipsoid vanished with a small “pop”, the statue was gone and where it had stood there was a fresh-looking patch of rug.

“What’s happening?” Yime said, just starting to feel worried and looking from the humanoid avatar to the ship-drone.

The two machines seemed to hesitate, then the little drone said, “Uh-oh.”

Himerance turned to Yime. “That was the ship attempting a Displace, back to it.”

“The micro-singularity didn’t arrive,” the drone told her.

“What?” Yime said. “How-?”

Himerance stepped forward, took Yime by the elbow. “We need to go,” he said, moving Yime towards the suite’s entrance.

“Checking that tunnel again,” the drone said, and flew quickly across the room, disappearing into the hole the circular bed had left.

“The ship’s being instructed to quit the system by an NR vessel,” Himerance told Yime as he hustled her into the suite’s main drawing room. “In no uncertain terms. The NR think we’re up to something and seem, by Reliquarian standards, extremely upset. They’re intercepting any Displaces. The drone-” Then Himerance made a noise that was almost a yelp, and covered Yime’s ears with his hands so fast it hurt. The explosion from the depths of the bedroom blew them both over, thudding into the floor. Himerance managed to twist in the air as they fell so that Yime landed on top of him. It still hurt and Yime’s nose, which had thudded into his chin, started to bleed immediately. Every just-healed bone in her body ached in protest.

The avatar dragged her to her feet as clouds of smoke, dust and small floating scraps of debris came rolling out of the bedroom.

Yime started to cough. “-the fuck is going on?” she managed as Himerance walked her smartly towards the suite’s vestibule.

“That was the tunnel being collapsed and sealed by the NR ship,” Himerance said.

“What about the drone?” Yime asked, sniffing back blood as they approached the suite’s double doors.

“Gone,” Himerance told her.

“Can’t we reason with the-?”

“The ship is reasoning as fast as it machinely can with the NR vessel,” Himerance said. “To little avail thus far. It will have to flee or fight very soon. We are already effectively on our own.” The avatar looked at the doors for a moment. They swung open to reveal a broad, plushly decorated corridor, a small man with a furious look on his face and three large men dressed in uniforms of what appeared to be a semi-military nature. The rolling cloud of smoke and dust flowed gently past Himerance and Yime, towards the people in the corridor. The small, furious-looking man stared in utter horror at the dust.

One of the large men levelled a thick-barrelled weapon of some sort at Himerance, who said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have no time for this right now,” and – moving more quickly than Yime would have believed possible – was suddenly, smoothly, after a sort of liquidic, ducking motion, in the midst of the three large men, flicking the weapon out of the hand of the one pointing it while simultaneously, and – almost accidentally, it appeared – stabbing one elbow into the midriff of one of the other men, whose eyes nearly popped from his head as he collapsed with a whooshing noise of rapidly expelled air.

Yime barely had time to register this happening before the other two men went down too, one felled after the avatar pointed the weapon at him – there was a click and a hum, no more – while the other, who’d been holding the weapon, was sent flying backwards into the wall behind by a single thrust from Himerance’s now-outstretched palm.