Surface Detail

Lededje smiled at it. She looked at the ship’s drone. “Thank you for all your help,” she told it. She turned to Demeisen again. “Ready when you are.”

“I’ll prepare a shuttle,” the ship-drone said.

Demeisen flapped one hand. “We’ll Displace.”

“Has Ms. Y’breq been informed-?”

“There is a chance Displacements can be bad for you,” Demeisen said with a sigh. “Yes. I’ve read her her last rights.”

Kallier-Falpise’s fields went frosty grey again. “You did not think to ask me if I consent to being Displaced when a far more intrinsically safe method of transferring us between ships exists to hand.”

Demeisen rolled his eyes. “Fine, you take the shuttle, you rough, tough little protection-and-intervention drone; I’ll Displace the squidgy bag of guts, gas and fluids that is the painfully vulnerable but patently unafraid human being.”

“Frankly I wouldn’t trust you to wait for me,” the little drone said. “I shall Displace along with Ms. Y’breq. Within the same containment field, if you please.”

“Fuck me,” Demeisen breathed. “Hoity and toity. Fine! We’ll do it your way.” He pointed at the ship’s drone. “Tell you what, grandpa; why don’t you do the fucking Displace? You move them both over to me.”

“I was going to suggest that anyway,” the ship-drone said coldly.

“Right,” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Can we get going? Now? Your venerableness here might be going flat out but I’m barely strolling. Getting antsy here.”

“Excuse me,” the little cream-coloured drone said as it floated closer to Lededje and up-ended itself to press gently in against her stomach. She wore another set of the trews and top she had grown fond of since waking in this body. “You are sure you don’t want to take your luggage?”

“Quite sure,” she said.

“Both ready?” the ship-drone asked.

“Entirely so.”

“Yes.”

“After you,” the ship-drone said to Demeisen.

“See you over there,” he said to Lededje, then a silver ovoid enclosed him. It winked to nothing.

An instant later Lededje briefly found herself staring at a distorted version of her own face.

The ship’s drone tipped back to look up at the ceiling, which was where the protection-and-intervention drone Kallier-Falpise had floated the instant the Displacement containment field around it and Lededje Y’breq had flicked out of existence. Kallier-Falpise, listing badly, bumped randomly along the ceiling a few times, for all the world like an escaped party balloon, partly deflated. Its aura field displayed the colours of oil floating on water.

“Shao, shum-shan-shinaw, sholowalowa, shuw, shuwha…” it mumbled.

The boxy-looking ship-drone used its own light effector unit to administer the equivalent of a slap. Kallier-Falpise trembled against the ceiling fixtures, then dropped, side-slipping. It flashed a strident yellow-orange for an instant, then it seemed to shake itself. It straightened, floating down to the same level as the shipdrone, its aura field glowing white with anger.

∼Meatfucker.

∼If it’s any comfort, the ship-drone sent – I don’t even know how it did that. It’s not as though it let you land and then spat you straight back. Fucking thing jumped my Displace mid-throw. I wasn’t even aware we could do that. That’s downright worrying.

∼Did you put anything on the girl?”

∼On and in. Best bits and pieces I was given. I’m just waiting to-

There was a flicker of silver directly over the ship-drone, followed by a tiny clapping noise as the incoming Displacement field collapsed. A bitty rain of tiny components, seemingly little more than dust, some hair-thin threads and a few grains of sand, floated down through the air to be caught and held by a maniple field the drone extended above itself.

∼Ah, it sent – here they are now. It made a show of bouncing the maniple field up and down, weighing. – Yup, they’re all there, to the last picogram.

∼Meatfucker, the other drone repeated.

∼Trying comms; zero avail. The ship’s drone rose a quarter-metre in the air then sank slowly down. – Guess that’s that then.

The two machines watched through the ship’s main sensor array as it showed the sixteen-hundred-metre length of the other warship sweeping its multiple deep-space high-speed engine fields about it with a completely unnecessary flourish. For the merest instant the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints presented in real space as a black, perfectly reflecting ovoid, then with a flicker it was gone, so quickly even the Fast Picket’s finely tuned sensors struggled to track it.

Thirteen

This deep in the ice you would need serious amounts of cooling. Otherwise you’d boil. At least you would if you were any normal sort of human, or indeed if you were any kind of conventional being with the sort of biochemistry that could not cope with temperatures much outside a narrow band between freezing and boiling. Keep cool inside the ice or you’d boil alive. The alternative would be to submit to the pressure, which would crush you to oblivion even quicker than the temperature would cook you to death.