Surface Detail

… good night, good night, good night.

A chill struck her skin. She wanted to shiver, but felt too lethargic; all swaddled, lost in a warm, baking fug.

What sounded like a real voice came clanging in, unwelcome. “Hello! Anybody in there?” it said. “Anybody alive?”

“Huh?” She heard herself say. Great; now she was hallucinating, hearing voices.

“Hello!”

“Yes? What? Hello to you too.” She was talking, not sending, she realised. That was weird. It took a few moments, but she got her eyes open, unsticking them. She blinked, waited for every-thing to swim into focus. Light. There was light. Dim, but it looked real. Face plate of helmet; internal visor screen, currently showing just static, but enough to reveal that both her inner and outer suits seemed to have expanded around her, and chilly draughts of air were flowing over her exposed body, raising goose-bumps. She could breathe! She took some deep, satisfying breaths, luxuriating in the feel of the cold air entering her mouth and nostrils, and her rib cage being able to expand as far as it could.

“Auppi Unstril, that right?” the voice said.

“Umm, yes.” Her mouth felt clogged, sticky; all gummed up like her eyes had been. She licked her lips; they felt puffy and over-sensitive. But just being able to lick them felt so good. “Who you?” She cleared her throat. “Who am I talking to?”

“I’m an element of the Culture Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.”

“An element?”

“Element five.”

“Are you now? Where did you come from?”

What Abominator class? she thought. Nobody had mentioned an Abominator-class ship. Was this real? She still wasn’t sure that this wasn’t just some very lucid dream. She found the nipple on the end of the helmet’s flexible water tube, sucked on it. The water was cool, sweet, beautiful. Real, she told herself. Real water, real chill on the skin, real voice. Real real real. She felt the water coursing down inside her, chilling her throat, oesophagus and stomach as she swallowed.

“Is where I came from relevant?” the voice said. “My whole was pretending to be a Torturer class earlier, if that helps.”

“Ah. Are you rescuing me, Element five?”

“I am. Currently I have Displaced nano-dust working to repair what I can of your Module. It should be ready to power up again in a few minutes. You could then make your way to the nearest base, which would be the near-planet monitoring unit five; however, in the light of the recent hostile actions I think it might be wiser and even safer if you join me, coming within my field enclosure. Your choice.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“Oh, I’d stick with me, but then I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?”

“I suppose you are.” She drank more of the precious, beautiful water. “But I will stick with you.”

“Wise choice.”

“How is everybody else? Are you rescuing the others? There were twenty-three other microship pilots and nearly forty others, plus the people on the Hylozoist. How are they?”

“The Hylozoist lost four crew, one person was killed when the near-planet monitoring unit five was damaged. Two of the Module/microship pilots were killed, one in a collision with a fabricary, the other burning up within the atmosphere of Razhir. The other pilots have been, are being or shortly will be rescued.”

“Who were they? Who were the two pilots who died?”

“Lofgyr, Inhada was the one killed in the collision with a fabricary and Tersetier, Lanyares died when his ship burned up within the atmosphere of the gas giant.”

Backed up, she thought. He was backed up. It’s all right; he can come back. It will take time and even though he might not be exactly the same person, he’ll be mostly the same person. Of course he’ll still love you. He’d be a fool not to. Wouldn’t he?

She found that she was crying.

“Bettlescroy. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

“Indeed I have, Veppers. You look well for a dead man.”

The image of the GFCF Legislator-Admiral on the little flat-screen comms computer wavered a little. The signal was weak, multiply scrambled. Veppers sat with Jasken in a small room in one of his emergency safe houses in Ubruater city, a few blocks and the width of a ribbon-park away from the main town house.

The safe house – one of several prepared long ago, just in case the wrong politicians or judges got into positions of real power and started making things uncomfortable for creative, buccaneering business people who didn’t always do things the conventional way – had shielded comms links to the systems in the town house. As soon as they’d arrived – both in the uniforms of paramedics – Veppers had taken a shower, scrubbing any remaining radioactive soot or ash out of his hair and skin, while Jasken had woken up the slightly archaic equipment in the study and started trawling the news channels and message systems. The series of urgent calls and messages from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III had been hard to ignore.