Surface Detail

Jasken shook his head. Sulbazghi clenched his jaw and looked away to one side.

All three experienced a momentarily disquieting lurch as the Halo 7, which had been quietly and suitably re-configuring itself for the last couple of minutes, left the land precisely as scheduled and crunched down a long, broad beach in two giant troughs of pebbles to meet the misty, torpid waters of the Oligyne Inland Sea, turning itself into a giant paddle wheel as it ploughed on through the banks of mist, its pace only slightly reduced.

“We need to look into this, obviously,” Veppers said. “Jasken, use any resources required. Keep me informed, daily.” Jasken nodded. Veppers stood up, nodded to Sulbazghi. “Thank you, doctor. I trust you’ll stay for breakfast. If there’s nothing more for now, though, I think I’ll go and get dressed. Excuse me.”

He walked towards the link leading to his bedroom, currently joined with the lounge gondola. As sometimes happened, Veppers found that the giant Wheel’s faint bobbing motion as it rolled through waters was giving him a feeling of nausea.

He felt sure it would pass.

Eight

The planet outside was very big and blue and white and bright. It was revolving, like planets usually did, but you couldn’t really see that on normal-time sight. It only seemed to move because the place where he was was moving. The place where he was was separate from the planet and it was moving. It was above the planet and it was moving. The place where he was was called an Abandoned Space Factory and he was here to wait for the enemy to come and when they came he would fight them. That was what he did; he fought. He had been built to fight. What he was, the thing that he was inside; that had been built to fight.

The thing he was in was a thing, an “it”, but he was not an “it”; he was a he. He was a man. Or he had been, at least. He was still who he was but he was also inside the thing, the machine that was designed and built to fight and perhaps get destroyed. But not him. He wouldn’t be destroyed. He was still who he was. He was somewhere else as well, and that was where he would wake up, if this thing he was in was destroyed. That was how it worked.

“Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”

They were talking to him again.

We’re losing, he thought, reviewing the latest schematics. You hardly needed the schematics; just step back far enough from the whole thing, replay what had happened since the war had broken out and you could see it writing itself out in front of you.

They’d had some early disasters, then successes, then they’d been beaten back consistently, then they’d consolidated and subsequently seemed to achieve the upper hand across almost every front, making steady progress everywhere… then found that the fronts were not true fronts, the fronts – or at least the places where his side was strongest and was prevailing – were like stubborn tatters of a balloon that it turned out had already burst some time ago; there just hadn’t been time to hear the Bang. They were making forward progress the way the torn strips of the exploded balloon made forward progress: flailing hopelessly, uselessly outwards like soft shrapnel.

He sat – or floated or whatever you wanted to call it – in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space as it was rather grandly called, surrounded by the other members of the Grand War Council. The council was mostly composed of people who were his comrades, friends, colleagues and respected rivals. There was only the barest minimum of contrarians, awkwardistas and outright defeatists, and even they argued their points well and arguably contributed to the working consensus. Human, alien, whatever, he knew all of them about as well as was possible by now, and yet still he felt quite alone.

He looked round them.

There was no perfect Real analogy for the situation he and the rest were currently in: it was as though they all hovered around some modest spherical space maybe a handful of metres across. From the outside the sphere’s surface appeared solid and opaque, but you could stick your head through it from the outside if you had the right clearance and a sufficient degree of military seniority.

You stuck your head through and there you were; one bodiless head sticking through protruding into this dimly lit spherical space with lots of other bodiless heads – only a minority of them in any sense human.

Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre of the space. Right now the display was showing some detail of the general battle space; an antique faux-Real volume in which small rocket ships armed with nuclear missiles, particle beam guns and CREWs went skating around a few billion asteroids spread in a ring round a sun, blasting and zapping each other. He had seen such battle environments many times before. Versions of him had invested the simmed humans fighting in these, or invested the machines.