Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “Hit it, Gulton.”

  A bright yellow-white line lanced down from where the ceiling had been, smashing into the hangar deck where Vatueil had been positioned earlier and creating an exploding white ball of plasma. This blew outward in a boiling cloud behind a wave-front of condensing particles of molten metals; metre-scale yellow-glowing fragments of the floor went tumbling everywhere at various speeds, mostly high. He saw one piece somersaulting towards him, bouncing once off the floor and once off the ceiling. He did not have enough time to move. Perhaps if he had not been hunkered down he might have been able to avoid it.

  The piece of wreckage impacted hard on the armoured body of the thing he was inside. It impacted badly, too. Not a flat side or even an edge hit first but a jagged point. It smacked into his top, off centre so that it half-spun him and sent the piece of wreckage spinning into the shoulder section of his left Main Weapon Pod.

  Everything shook. Damage control screen-spreads filled his field of vision. There was a further impact from above. It was relatively slow, implicitly high inertia, crushing.

  “Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” (Genius.)

  “Sir, ordnance discharged, sir.” (Gulton.)

  “Fuck me, I think my anal plug just exited my fucking suit.” (Different voice 2.)

  “Oh, that’s spatted. That is one spatted shitfuck of an Armoured Combat Unit.” (Different voice 3.)

  “Got to have done it. Got to have fucking done it. Take fucking that, you miserable three-legged space tank motherfucker.” (Genius.)

  “Last one in’s an officer. No offence, sir.” (Different voice 2.)

  “Steady. Just hold. Those things are tough.”

  He was injured. The machine he was in was now sub-optimal. It was called an Armoured Combat Unit.

  The protective clamshell had taken a serious kinetic hit and was refusing to open, disabling the upper sensory dome. His left Main Weapon Nacelle had been torn off by the same piece of wreckage. Four Secondary Weapon Pods were non-operational and the upper secondary weapon collar had jammed. Something had damaged his Main Power Distribution Unit, too. He didn’t know how that had happened but it had. Now he couldn’t move his legs properly. Some secondary power left in his Number One leg. That was all. Difficult to estimate how much power or leverage was available.

  Some piece of heavy equipment from the ceiling above, the source of the earlier high-inertia impact, appeared to be pinning him to the deck. Additionally, the condensing metals from the plasma event seemed to have spot-welded some parts of himself to some other parts of himself and some parts of himself to the hangar floor.

  He rotated another set of disposable sensors into place on the right shoulder. This would be all he had to work with for now.

  He would have to stay where he was. He could still turn, though there was a grinding sensation when he did and he could not turn smoothly, which contra-indicated tracking-firing.

  He couldn’t see much. The lower sensory dome was obstructed by the squat cage of his immobile legs.

  “Okay. Trooper Drueser. You have the honour, I believe.”

  “Sir.” (Genius = Drueser.)

  The figure came in through the curved entrance, bouncing on all fours and keeping very low to the hangar deck, a medium kinetic rifle tripodded on its back, barrel sweeping back and forth.

  Vatueil let it go well past him, almost to the tipped, torn part of the hangar floor, then quietly lobbed a superblack snowflake grenade just behind it. The magnetic launcher produced no exhaust, the superblack coating kept the projectile stealthed and it was too dark for the trooper to have much chance of seeing the round curving towards him through the vacuum.

  He launched a second round aimed to fall right on top of the suited figure if it stopped about … Now.

  The first grenade hit the deck two metres behind the trooper, then detonated with a flash and a floor-thud. The figure had stopped and spun round. The trooper was caught inside the hail of millimetre- and centimetre-scale fragments.

  There was a shriek. (Drueser.)

  The back-mounted gun fired twice at where the first grenade had detonated. Then the second grenade landed. It was supposed to fall right on top of the figure but landed half a metre to its left side and half a metre in front it because of his own sensor-compromised aiming and the fact that the trooper had been blown backwards by the fragment shower from the first grenade.

  The second grenade had been set to detonate on contact. The detonation caused the figure’s head to kick back. It also tore off and then disintegrated Drueser’s helmet visor, causing an obvious pressure-loss event. The figure collapsed to the floor without further movement or transmitted sound.

  “Drueser?”

  “Fuck.” (Different voice 2.)

  “Drueser?”

  “Sir, I think he triggered something. A suckertrap. That thing’s still dead. Must be.” (Different voice 4.)

  “Sir? The real bad guys are due to get here awful soon now. We need to be in there even if it’s just to hide.” (Gulton.)

  “Aware of that, Gulton. You want to be next?”

  “Sir, me and Koviuk thought we might favour the skirmish space below with our twin presences, sir.” (Gulton.)

  “BMG, Gulton.” (He didn’t know what BMG meant.)

  The two figures dropped through the hole in the ceiling. Their dark suits were made briefly bright by the orange glow still coming from the slagged materials of what had been the hangar ceiling and the floor of the deck above.

  Vatneil could have hit both of them but he had heard what they had said and he thought that what it meant was that they thought he was dead. If that was true then it was better to let them think that and to bring them all into the same Immediate Tactical Environment as he was in, the better to attack and destroy them.

  Trapeze, came the call. It was not a surprise. Vatueil had been thinking of making it himself.

  He left a shell presence of himself in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space and navigated to the Trapeze space, scattering pass-codes and decoys like petals.

  There were five of them. They sat on what looked like trapezes hanging in utter darkness; the wires vanished upwards into the black and there was no sign or implication of any floor below or wall to any side. It was meant to symbolise the isolation of the secret space or something. He had no idea what they’d have chosen had one of their number had a high-gravity heritage and been congenitally terrified of any drop more than a few millimetres. They’d all taken up different appearances to be here but he knew who the other four were and trusted them completely, just as he hoped they trusted him.

  He had shown up as a furred quadruped with big eyes and three powerful fingers at the end of each of his four limbs. They all tended to present as the sort of multi-limbed creature which had evolved in gravity, in trees. He knew how strange this must feel to the two water worlders he knew were present, but it was the sort of thing you got used to in VR. They took on colours to distinguish themselves; he was red, as usual.

  He looked round at all of them “We’re losing,” he announced.

  “You always say that,” said yellow.

  “I didn’t when we weren’t,” he replied. “When I realised we were, I started saying so.”

  “Depressing,” yellow said, looking away.

  “Losing often is,” green said.

  “It is starting to look kind of non-get-out-able,” purple agreed with a sigh. Purple held onto the supporting side-wires and started rocking back and forth, making its trapeze oscillate slowly.

  “So, next level?” said green. Their exchanges had become terse over the last few meetings; they’d talked exhaustively about the situation, and the choices it left them with. It was just a question of waiting for the voting balance to change, or for some of their number to become so frustrated with the process and the whole Trapeze set-up, that they formed another even more exclusive sub-committee and took matters into their own hands. They had all pledged n
ot to do this, but you never entirely knew.

  They all looked at blue. Blue was the waverer. Blue had been voting No to going to what they usually called “the next level” until now, but had made no secret of being the one of the three nay-sayers who was most likely to change his, her or its mind, as circumstances altered.

  Blue scratched itself about the groin with one long-fingered hand, then sniffed at its fingers; they had each made their own choices about how closely their tree-dwelling images stuck to the sort of behaviour the real thing got up to, back in the jungle. Blue sighed.

  As soon as he saw just how blue sighed, Vatueil knew they had won.

  Blue looked regretfully at yellow and purple. “I’m sorry,” it told them. “Truly I am.”

  Purple shook its head, started picking at its fur, looking for who knew what.

  Yellow let out an exasperated whoop and did a backward circle dismount, falling silently into the darkness beneath, becoming a yellow scrap which quickly disappeared entirely. Its abandoned trapeze swung in a wild, jerking dance.

  Green reached out and steadied it with one hand and looked down into the abyss. “Not bothering with a formal vote, then,” it said quietly.

  “For what it’s worth,” purple said disconsolately, “I agree too.” It looked round them, while each was still watching for the reactions of the others. “But I do so not … in protest, but mainly in a spirit of solidarity, and out of despair. I think we’ll come to regret this decision.” It looked down again.

  “None of us does this lightly,” green said.

  “So,” he said. “We go to the next level.”

  “Yes,” blue said. “We cheat.”

  “We hack, we infiltrate, we sabotage,” green said. “Those are war skills too.”

  “Let’s not make excuses for ourselves,” purple muttered. “We’re still breaking an oath.”

  “We’d all rather have achieved victory with our honour fully intact,” green said sternly, “but our options now are either an honourable defeat or the sacrifice of our honour for at least a chance of victory. However achieved, the outcome justifies the sacrifice.”

  “If it works.”

  “There are no guarantees in war,” green said.

  “Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. “It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”

  They were all silent for a moment, alone with their own thoughts.

  Then green rattled the wires of its trapeze. “Enough. We must plan. To the details.”

  They hadn’t seen him. Two were where the plasma event had taken place, one was at the body of the trooper Drueser, one was somewhere he couldn’t see and the other two knelt just ten metres away, almost in front of him, twelve metres in from the curved entrance.

  “Bit of the fucker over here. One of his arm-weapon pods.” (Different voice 2.) The two kneeling in front of him looked round, almost at him. That was helpful, telling him where trooper Different voice 2 might currently be.

  “Fuck all over here. Sir.” (Gulton.)

  One of the two kneeling figures had continued to look in his direction after the other had turned away again. He appeared to be looking straight at him.

  “Is that another bit under that—?” It was the one who had said he was Major Q’naywa. His gun had started to level, pointing straight at him.

  He fired both his available laser rifles at the two kneeling men, achieving multiple hits with high out-splash but minimal reflectivity and several observed-piercing hits, though the Major Q’naywa figure was partially shielding the one behind, who was probably Different voice 4. He followed up with a couple of Anti-Armoured Personnel/Light Armoured Vehicle minimissiles.

  At the same time he swung his remaining Main Weapon Nacelle round to target the part of the hangar where he’d been earlier and where Gulton and Koviuk were now. He used the railgun, set to Scatter. Tiny hyper-kinetic rounds made a disintegrating haze out of the tipped section of floor, the bulkheads and ceiling.

  As the Main Weapon Nacelle had deployed, it had roughly tracked across the location of the trooper kneeling by the body of trooper Drueser, so he’d loosed a trio of General Purpose High Explosive/Fragmentation Subscale Missiles towards them. Then he lobbed five more Subscales towards the centre of the railgun’s targeting area, cutting their engines off almost as soon as they exited the Weapon Nacelle so that they fell into the part of the target area he couldn’t see.

  From the start, he had been pumping round after round of snowflake, heatseeker, emission-homing and movement-primed grenades overhead, guessing at where Different voice 2 might be, behind him in the hangar. Some of the grenades ricocheted off the ceiling but that did not really matter.

  The trooper Major Q’naywa and the figure behind him disappeared in the twin explosions of the minimissiles. Unidentifiable gurgling screams might have been Gulton and Koviuk. They cut off quickly as the railgun rounds continued to eat away at the bulkheads, floor and ceiling. The Subscales erupted in the centre of the hangar, creating a billowing cloud of gasses and debris. The two troopers, one of them Drueser, who was already dead, vanished in the fireballs.

  The lobbed Subscales landed in a spread in what was left of the hangar’s rear corner, filling it with a brief haze of plasma, gas and shrapnel.

  He stopped firing, railgun magazine depleted by 60 per cent.

  Debris trajectoried, impacted, ricocheted, fell back, tumbled, slid, became still. The gasses dissipated, mostly through the wide, curved entrance that framed the view of the big bright blue and white planet outside.

  No transmissions.

  The only traces of the troopers he could see were ambiguous in nature and quite small.

  After nearly nine minutes he used what power he had in his single operational leg, trying to lift himself free from whatever was pinning him. The attempt failed and he knew he was trapped. He thought there was a high likelihood he had not killed the trooper who’d been somewhere in the hangar behind him, but his attempt to rise, which had caused some movement of the wreckage around and over him, attracted no further hostile attention.

  He sat there and waited, wishing he could see the beautiful planet better.

  Others arrived half an hour later. They were different troopers with different suits and weapons.

  They didn’t have the correct IFF codes either so he fought them too. By the time he was blown out of the hangar entrance in a cloud of plasma he was completely blind, almost without any senses. Only his internal heat sensors and a feeling that he was experiencing a faint but gradually increasing force from one particular direction, once he allowed for the fact he was tumbling, told him he was falling into the atmosphere of the beautiful bright white and blue planet.

  The heat increased rapidly and started to leak into his Power and Processing Core through piercing-damage channels sustained in the engagement just passed. His Processor Suite would shut down or melt in eighteen, no eleven, no nine seconds: eight, seven, no, three: two, one …

  His last thought was that it would have been nice to have seen the beautiful—

  He returned to the simulation within a simulation that was the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space. In Trapeze they had discussed the initial details of plans that might end the war, one way or the other. Here they were still reviewing and re-reviewing the same old territory they had been fretting over when he’d left.

  “One of your old stamping grounds, isn’t it, Vatueil?” one of the others in the High Command said as they watched the irrelevancy of the war amongst these tumbling rocks and lumps of ice replay itself. Rocket exhausts plumed in the darkness amongst the billions of orbiting fragments; munitions blazed, forces swept back and forth.

  “Is it?” he said. Then he recognised it.

  He had been many things in this war. He had died within the simulations many times, some failing of character or application on his part occasionally contributing to his end, more usually the mistak
es of those above him in the command structure – or just the need for sacrifice – providing all of the cause. How many lifetimes had he spent waging war? He had lost count, long ago.

  Of course here, in the kingdom of the dead, engaged in a seemingly never-ending fight over the fate of the souls of the departed, further deaths were no barrier to continuance. After each death in service the soldier’s achievements were reviewed by panels of his peers and other expert minds. Had he been brave, cool under fire, resourceful? According to the answers, lessons were learned. Soldiers, reincarnated to fight again, rose, fell or maintained their position in the ranks depending on how well they were judged to have done, and military practice itself changed gradually in response to the same adjudication.

  Gradually at first, Vatueil had worked his way up through the hierarchy. Even where his contribution ended in death, failure and defeat he was found to have done the best he could have done with what resources and advantages he’d started with, and, most especially, to have shown imagination in his decisions.

  His very first incarnation in the war effort had given every indication of being a disaster; not even knowing that he was in a simulation, having no idea what he was really fighting for, he had been a military tunneller who had turned traitor, been tortured and then died. Still, he had thought to walk through the poison gas rather than try to outrun it, which had counted in his favour, and the fact that such a previously stalwart and dependable soul had chosen to take his chances with the enemy rather than immediately try to get back to his own side had counted more against those in charge of that aspect of the battle space than it had against him, and helped convince those then running the war at a higher level that much of it was being waged too harshly and with too great an emphasis on secrecy.

  And yes, here – in this open maze of broken moons, drifting rocks, abandoned facilities and empty factories, many generations of combatants ago – he had been part of the struggle.

  Again, even though he had ended up fighting – all too successfully – against his own people, that had not been his fault. He had not even been his complete self in that instance, some all-too-believable glitch within the re-created scenario meaning that his download into the combat unit had been only partial, leaving it crippled inside, not knowing who was friend and who was foe. Still, even reduced, his essence had fought well, displayed imagination and shown some glimmerings of trying to develop. That had been worth another promotion.