Surface Detail

He felt his way down the last few stairs and opened the door to the better-lit corridor beyond. Pipes and conduits covered the ceiling, the floor was concrete and a few large metal doors were the only adornments to the rough-cast walls. A few very dim lights were on constantly; others were flickering. He was a little surprised Jasken wasn’t here already. He supposed time seemed to move oddly when everything was getting this fraught. He checked the antique watch; at least twelve minutes to go.

The strongroom door was a massive circular metal plug as tall as a man and a metre thick. The display – he’d forgotten it even had a display – was blinking an error message.

“Cunt!” he screamed, smashing one fist on the door. He rolled the code in anyway, but the noises the mechanism made didn’t even sound right and the display didn’t alter. Certainly there was no series of reassuring clicks from umpteen places round the door’s circumference, as there would have been if it was unlocking itself. He tried the levers and handles that then had to be moved, but they wouldn’t budge.

He glimpsed movement further down the long curve of the corridor, near a set of doors leading to another stairwell.

“Jasken?” he called. It was hard to tell in the dim, inconstant light. Maybe it was the Culture lunatic who’d come to “appre-hend” him again. He pulled the Jhlupian gun out. No; the figure moving towards him moved normally, looked Sichultian.

“Jasken?” he shouted.

The figure stopped, maybe thirty metres away. It raised its arms level in front of it, gripping something. A gun! he realised as some-thing flashed. He started to fall into a crouch. There was a smack and a whine from somewhere way overhead and to his left, then a barking roar came ringing down the corridor. Crouched on one knee, he aimed the Jhlupian gun at the figure and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again. The figure fired the gun once more and a bullet kicked off the top of the strongroom door, whining away behind him as another thunderclap of noise pulsed down the corridor. He could see smoke swirling round the figure. Smoke? What were they firing? A fucking musket? But at least their gun still worked, unlike the Jhlupian blaster. Like a knife would still work.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he said, throwing the useless gun away and scrabbling to his feet, holding the hide bag between him and the figure down the corridor as he ran for the doors he’d just come through.

There was something round lying on the floor of the first landing; he discovered this when he trod on it and his foot went out behind him, dropping him and banging his knee on the next step up. He howled in rage, limped on up the steps.

The fucking gun hadn’t worked! It had worked before but it had stopped! Was it some fucking stupid ceremonial piece of junk that only had one fucking shot in it? Xingre, the bastard, had told him it could stop a tank, bring down aircraft and keep on firing till you grew old. Lying mother-fucking alien cunt!

He was one flight down from the ground floor when he heard the doors at the foot of the stairwell bang open and steps come hurrying up towards him. Fuck everything else, then; just get to Jasken, get to the flier. Cut and run. What fucker would dare fire a fucking gun at him anyway? Probably only the demented little bitch claiming to be Y’breq. She was about as good a shot as he’d have expected.

His lungs and throat felt like a blast furnace after running up all those steps; his knee was hurting really badly but he just had to ignore it. He threw open the door to the main ground-level corridor and ran for the nearest courtyard doors.

The flier wasn’t there. He could see this twenty or more steps away from the doorway because there was a large open reception area with huge windows looking straight out at the courtyard, but he kept on running for the doors, not believing what he was seeing, and threw the doors open anyway, in time to see the flier pulling away overhead, as though it had just taken off from the roof of the mansion.

“Jasken!” he screamed, the force of it tearing at his throat.

He looked frantically round the circular courtyard. This couldn’t be happening. The flier couldn’t have gone. It just couldn’t; he needed it, he needed it to be here, needed it so he could get away. That must have been another, similar flier he’d just seen above the rooftops. It couldn’t have gone. It just wasn’t possible. He was depending on it, so it had to be here. It couldn’t disguise itself, could it? Go see-through or something freakish, could it? It was just a hired civilian flier; nothing military or alien. Best money could hire, built by one of his own companies, but it couldn’t turn fucking invisible. He stared round the courtyard, willing the aircraft still to be there. But all that he could see was a half-collapsed pile of paintings; nothing and nobody else. He glimpsed movement through the windows to one side, in the corridor he’d just run down.