Surface Detail

“Ah,” Himerance said, taking the small man by the throat and pressing the gun against his temple. The small man looked more stunned and terrified than furious now. “Some sort of neural blaster.” This remark seemed addressed to nobody in particular. His next was as squarely aimed at the hotel’s general manager as the neural blaster. “Good day, sir. You will kindly help us to escape.”

Himerance obviously took the man’s subsequent strangled gurgle as indicating assent, because he smiled, relaxed his grip a fraction and, looking at Yime, nodded down the corridor. “This way, I think.”

“What happens now?” Yime asked as they frog-marched the manager down the corridor. “How do we get off the planet?” She stopped and stared at the avatar. “Do we get off the planet?”

“No, we’ll be safer here, just for now,” Himerance told her, stopping at the lift doors and suggesting to the manager that he use his pass-key to priority-order an elevator car.

“We will?” Yime said.

The lift arrived; the avatar took the pass-keys off the manager, inserted them into the elevator car’s control panel, pushed the manager out of the car and stunned him with the neural blaster as the doors closed. Himerance looked round the elevator car as they descended towards a sub-basement not usually accessible to non-staff. A small puff of smoke came out of the control panel through the grille of the emergency speaker. “Actually, no, we won’t be safer here,” Himerance said. “The ship will snap-Displace us off.”

“‘Snap-Displace’? That sounds-”

“Dangerous. Yes, I know. And it is, though we are assuming it’ll be less dangerous than staying here.”

“But if the ship can’t Displace us now-?”

“It can’t Displace us now because it and we are both effectively static, giving the NR time to intercept the Displacement. Whereas later it’ll be coming through at very high speed, passing dangerously close to the planet, grazing its gravity well at high translight and attempting to fit the Displacement event into an ungenerous handful of pico-seconds.”

The avatar sounded remarkably casual about all this, Yime thought. It watched the screen indicating the floors as it counted slowly down. The lift car’s lighting, close overhead, made Himerance’s bald head gleam. “Providing it’s done at sufficiently high speed, that should leave the NR with insufficient time to arrange any interception of the Displacement singularity.” The avatar smiled at her. “That’s the real reason the ship is doing as the NR have demanded, and leaving; it’ll power up the whole way out, execute a minimum-radius-to-power turn and come straight back in, still accelerating, snapping us off and then heading for Sichult. The whole procedure will take some hours, however, as the ship gathers speed, both to make it look like it really is leaving and to make sure that when it passes us it’s going fast enough to confound the NR vessel or vessels. During that time we need to remain hidden from the NR.”

“Will it work?”

“Probably. Ah.” The car drew to a stop.

“‘Probably’?” Yime found herself saying to an empty lift as the avatar moved swiftly between the opening doors.

She followed, to find they were in a deserted basement car park full of wheeled ground vehicles. Yime opened her mouth to speak but the avatar pirouetted, one finger to his lips as he moved towards a bulky-looking vehicle with six wheels and a body that appeared to be made from a single billet of black glass. “This’ll do,” he said. A gull-wing door sighed open. “Though…” he said, as they settled into their seats. “Oh, do put your seat-belt on, won’t you? Thank you… Though the NR may well guess that the ship will attempt this manoeuvre and so either try to prevent or interfere with the Displacement. Or they might attack the ship itself, of course, though that would be rather extreme.”

“They just destroyed the ship’s drone and seem to be trying to kill us – isn’t that fairly extreme already?”

“It is, rather,” the avatar agreed reasonably, looking at the vehicle’s controls until lights came on. “Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.” A screen flashed on, filled with what looked like a city road map.

“Thank you,” Yime said. “It is always salutary to be reminded of one’s true place in the proper arrangement of matters.”

Himerance nodded. “Yes, I know.”

In the distance, up a short ramp, a large door to what appeared to be the outside was rising open. “Many of these are automatic too,” Himerance muttered to himself. “That’s useful.”

Most of the other vehicles in the car park were turning their lights on; some were already moving, all heading for the ramp and the doorway.