Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  The Me, I’m Counting Displaced Yime Nsokyi into the window-less suite at the rear of the very grand hotel near the centre of Iobe Cavern City, Vebezua, while it kept station overhead, just beyond the atmosphere, arguing with the Planetary Near Space Traffic Authority.

  The boxy ship-drone serving as escort to her and Himerance switched on all the lights. The bedroom was vast, palatial, unoccupied.

  “The secret passage is hidden under the bed,” Himerance said. The drone activated the relevant motors and the giant circular bed sank out of sight. They went to the edge and watched it drop.

  “That leads to the tunnel that ends up in the desert?” Yime asked. She was dressed properly, in her tunic, at last, for the first time in days. She was still not fully healed, and still somewhat delicate, but her hair was tidy and she felt … regained.

  “Yes,” Himerance said. “Veppers might have been absent for days, though officially he never left here. He probably left on a Jhlupian ship, but nobody’s sure. His entourage supposedly arrived back on Sichult this morning, but there’s no confirmation he’s with them. This is the last place we can be absolutely sure he was.”

  The drone dropped into the hole left by the descending bed. Himerance produced a scroll screen, letting it unroll and hang in the air in front of them, displaying the view the drone had as it made its way up the short corridor beneath the room, heading into the cliff. A small underground car shaped like a fat bullet sat in front of a dark tunnel.

  “Getting anything?” Yime asked.

  Himerance shrugged. “Nothing much,” he told her. “There is a variety of surveillance tech in here. Place is like a history of bugging through the ages; whole tiny networks of linked spy-tech and outdated eavesdropping gear splattered about the entire suite.

  Lot of stuff that’s probably lost, forgotten about. Many tiny dead batteries in here. Ancient stuff.” The ship, only a couple of hundred kilometres over their heads, was targeting one of its main Effectors on the city, the hotel and the suite. If there was anything useful here, it would find it.

  “Most recent is equiv-tech stuff,” Himerance said, relaying what the ship was finding. “Passably … NR stuff.” He looked at Yime.

  “NR?”

  “Probably. It’s recent,” Himerance said, “and working; it’d be relaying what we’re saying now if I wasn’t blocking it. Synched into hidden hotel cameras and comms-intercept gear too.” Himerance nodded at four different points in the room. “Sprayed on: in the wall hangings, drapes, on the surfaces of paintings and embedded in the rugs.”

  “Anything recorded?”

  “No; and no idea where it would have transmitted to either,” Himerance admitted.

  “Would it have registered Veppers using his sinking-bed escape route?”

  “Maybe not,” Himerance said, gazing up at the great thick fold of curtains which could envelop and surround the bed. “Not if these were drawn.” He squinted. Yime could almost feel the ship overhead shifting the focus of its Effector by minute fractions of a degree. “No spray-on surveillance on those,” Himerance confirmed. “And they’re a lot more hi-tech than the simple organic woven material they look like. Shield you from most interference once they’re drawn right round.”

  Yime sighed. “I don’t think he’s here,” she said. “I certainly don’t think she is.”

  Stopping here had been an easy enough decision; the direction they’d approached the Sichultian Enablement from, Vebezua had been almost directly en route. Sichult itself still seemed the best place to find both Veppers and Lededje Y’breq, but taking a quick look at the last place they had a definite fix on Veppers had seemed to make sense and cost them only a couple of hours.

  “I’m still not getting what’s going on with the Restoria mission,” Himerance said, sounding puzzled. “Some sort of comms blackout

  now. Something’s happening out there, at the Disk.”

  “Smatter outbreak?” Yime asked.

  “Those fabricaria ships are more than smatter,” Himerance said as they watched the drone retrace its flight back down the tunnel towards them. Yime knew the ship already felt torn between taking her where she wanted to go, and joining in whatever action was taking place out at the Tsungarial Disk.

  “There’s some sort of full-on battle going on out there,” Himerance said, frowning now. “Beyond the Disk, on the fringes of the Enablement; way too hi-tech for mere smatter. I do so hope that isn’t the Abominator class arriving. If it is we may genuinely have a full-scale war on our hands.”

  The drone reappeared in the hole the bed had left; Himerance snapped the scroll-screen closed again and tucked it inside his jacket.

  “What about the explosion on Veppers’ estate?” Yime asked.

  “Nothing new. News blackout.” Himerance paused. “Actually, something new. Couple of agencies Veppers doesn’t control reporting members of his entourage killed and injured in some sort of flier crash; survivors arriving back at Ubruater at one of his private hospitals.” Another pause. “Hmm. Guess that counts as speculation.”

  “What does?”

  Himerance looked at her. “Reports that Veppers might be dead.”

  “I’d better let you go. You take care. I mean, I’m staying; this Demeisen unit right here is sticking with you, but me myself I, the ship; I have to stick around here, see what’s up. Sleeve-rolling, palm-spitting time for me. You get to stay inside the shuttle inside this element, this shiplet. It’ll take you on to Sichult.”

  “Okay,” Lededje said. “Thanks for the ride so far.”

  “My pleasure. Take care. See you later, I hope.”

  “Me too.”

  The image of Demeisen waved bye-bye against the star field. The screen inside her suit’s helmet showed the main body of the ship slipping away to one side, fields flickering between the element she was looking from and the main body of the vessel. It was still elongatedly ellipsoidal, but each curved sliver of ship-element had separated slightly from the other, so that the ship looked like a fat throw-ball knifed open from tip to tail, segments teased apart. As she watched, the gap left by the departure of the part that she was in started to close up, the other sections pulling fractionally further away from each other. Then they reached the ship’s outer field boundary and passed through opaque layers. Outside, the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints was just a giant silver ellipsoid. It shimmered, disappeared.

  The Demeisen figure was still there, seemingly floating in space. He turned to her. “Just you and me now, babe. And the ship-section sub-Mind, of course.”

  “Does it have a separate name?” she asked.

  Demeisen shrugged. “Element twelve?”

  “That’ll have to do.”

  He crossed his arms, frowned. “Now; the good news first or the bad news?”

  She frowned too. “Good,” she said.

  “We’ll have you on Sichult in a few hours.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “This just in: Veppers might be already dead.”

  She stared at the image of the avatar. She hadn’t expected this. “That it?” she said after a moment.

  “Yup. You seem relatively unconcerned.”

  She shrugged. “I wanted him dead. If he’s dead, good. Why only ‘might’? What happened?”

  “Someone nuked his aircraft as it was flying low over his estate. Some of his retinue killed, some injured; Veppers himself … mysteriously unaccounted for.”

  “Huh. I bet he’s still alive. I’d want to see the body before I believe otherwise. And check it for neural laces or whatever.”

  Demeisen smiled at her. It was a strange, unsettling sort of smile. She wondered if this version of Demeisen would be different to the one controlled by the main ship. “Thought you wanted to kill him yourself,” he said.

  She looked at him for a moment. “I’ve never killed anyone before,” she told him. “I don’t really want to have to kill another person. I’m not … totally, completely sure that I can even
kill Veppers. I think I can, and I’ve fantasised about it a hundred times, but … If he really was dead, maybe that would be a relief. Part of me would be angry he didn’t die by my hand, but part of me would be grateful; I get out of finding whether I could really do it or not.”

  Demeisen raised an eyebrow. “How many times did he rape you?”

  She let a couple of controlled, regular breaths pass before she answered. “I lost count.”

  “And then he murdered you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Though to give him his due, he only did that once.” When the avatar didn’t say anything, but simply kept looking at her, she added, “I’m not him, Demeisen. I’m not even like him. If I get close to him and have the gun or the knife in my hand but then find that I can’t do it, then I’ll be angry at myself for not being strong enough, for letting him get away with it, and for giving him the chance to rape and murder again.” She took another breath. “But if I can do it, if I do do it, then on one level I’m no better than him, and he’ll have won by making me behave like he does.” She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong; I fully intend to put a bullet through his head or slit his throat if I get the chance, but I won’t know if I can do it until the moment actually presents itself.” Another shrug. “If it ever does.”

  Demeisen shook his head. “That is the sorriest, limpest, most self-defeating piece of self-motivating I have ever fucking heard. We should have talked about this before. I ought to have been giving you assassin lessons for the past umpteen days. How long we got now? Five hours?” Demeisen slapped one hand over his forehead and eyes, theatrically. “Oh fuck. You’re going to die, kid.”

  Lededje’s frown deepened. “Thanks for your confidence.”

  “Hey, you started it.”

  Twenty-six

  “Veppers dead?” Yime Nsokyi said. “How?”

  “In that explosion or the flier crash. Reports remain confused,” Himerance said.

  “Lededje Y’breq isn’t back there already, is she?” Yime asked.

  “Doubtful,” Himerance said. “And I would doubt she could organise a nuke inside Veppers’ estate either. She’s just a kid with a grudge, not some super-powered SC agent. Not that a super-powered SC agent would use anything as inelegant as a bomb aimed at an aircraft. Or miss if they did.”

  “What if the Abominator’s helping her?”

  “I would prefer not to think about that,” Himerance said with a sigh.

  Yime frowned, looked about the palatial suite. “Can you hear that thumping noise?”

  “That,” the ship drone said, “is the hotel’s general manager registering his disapproval at his pass-key codes not allowing him entry into his finest suite when there appears to be something ‘going on’ inside.”

  Himerance was frowning now. The ship’s drone fell silent, hanging in the air for a moment.

  “We need to conduct a small experiment,” Himerance said.

  “That statue,” the drone announced, and Himerance turned to look at a three-quarters-sized statue of a buxom nymph carrying a stylised torch in one corner of the bedroom.

  “What’s going—?” Yime began, as a silvery ellipsoid flickered into existence around the statue, obscuring it. When the ellipsoid vanished with a small “pop”, the statue was gone and where it had stood there was a fresh-looking patch of rug.

  “What’s happening?” Yime said, just starting to feel worried and looking from the humanoid avatar to the ship-drone.

  The two machines seemed to hesitate, then the little drone said, “Uh-oh.”

  Himerance turned to Yime. “That was the ship attempting a Displace, back to it.”

  “The micro-singularity didn’t arrive,” the drone told her.

  “What?” Yime said. “How—?”

  Himerance stepped forward, took Yime by the elbow. “We need to go,” he said, moving Yime towards the suite’s entrance.

  “Checking that tunnel again,” the drone said, and flew quickly across the room, disappearing into the hole the circular bed had left.

  “The ship’s being instructed to quit the system by an NR vessel,” Himerance told Yime as he hustled her into the suite’s main drawing room. “In no uncertain terms. The NR think we’re up to something and seem, by Reliquarian standards, extremely upset. They’re intercepting any Displaces. The drone—” Then Himerance made a noise that was almost a yelp, and covered Yime’s ears with his hands so fast it hurt. The explosion from the depths of the bedroom blew them both over, thudding into the floor. Himerance managed to twist in the air as they fell so that Yime landed on top of him. It still hurt and Yime’s nose, which had thudded into his chin, started to bleed immediately. Every just-healed bone in her body ached in protest.

  The avatar dragged her to her feet as clouds of smoke, dust and small floating scraps of debris came rolling out of the bedroom.

  Yime started to cough. “—the fuck is going on?” she managed as Himerance walked her smartly towards the suite’s vestibule.

  “That was the tunnel being collapsed and sealed by the NR ship,” Himerance said.

  “What about the drone?” Yime asked, sniffing back blood as they approached the suite’s double doors.

  “Gone,” Himerance told her.

  “Can’t we reason with the—?”

  “The ship is reasoning as fast as it machinely can with the NR vessel,” Himerance said. “To little avail thus far. It will have to flee or fight very soon. We are already effectively on our own.” The avatar looked at the doors for a moment. They swung open to reveal a broad, plushly decorated corridor, a small man with a furious look on his face and three large men dressed in uniforms of what appeared to be a semi-military nature. The rolling cloud of smoke and dust flowed gently past Himerance and Yime, towards the people in the corridor. The small, furious-looking man stared in utter horror at the dust.

  One of the large men levelled a thick-barrelled weapon of some sort at Himerance, who said, “I’m terribly sorry, I have no time for this right now,” and – moving more quickly than Yime would have believed possible – was suddenly, smoothly, after a sort of liquidic, ducking motion, in the midst of the three large men, flicking the weapon out of the hand of the one pointing it while simultaneously, and – almost accidentally, it appeared – stabbing one elbow into the midriff of one of the other men, whose eyes nearly popped from his head as he collapsed with a whooshing noise of rapidly expelled air.

  Yime barely had time to register this happening before the other two men went down too, one felled after the avatar pointed the weapon at him – there was a click and a hum, no more – while the other, who’d been holding the weapon, was sent flying backwards into the wall behind by a single thrust from Himerance’s now-outstretched palm.

  “Ah,” Himerance said, taking the small man by the throat and pressing the gun against his temple. The small man looked more stunned and terrified than furious now. “Some sort of neural blaster.” This remark seemed addressed to nobody in particular. His next was as squarely aimed at the hotel’s general manager as the neural blaster. “Good day, sir. You will kindly help us to escape.”

  Himerance obviously took the man’s subsequent strangled gurgle as indicating assent, because he smiled, relaxed his grip a fraction and, looking at Yime, nodded down the corridor. “This way, I think.”

  “What happens now?” Yime asked as they frog-marched the manager down the corridor. “How do we get off the planet?” She stopped and stared at the avatar. “Do we get off the planet?”

  “No, we’ll be safer here, just for now,” Himerance told her, stopping at the lift doors and suggesting to the manager that he use his pass-key to priority-order an elevator car.

  “We will?” Yime said.

  The lift arrived; the avatar took the pass-keys off the manager, inserted them into the elevator car’s control panel, pushed the manager out of the car and stunned him with the neural blaster as the doors closed. Himerance looked round the elevator car as they descended towards a sub-basem
ent not usually accessible to non-staff. A small puff of smoke came out of the control panel through the grille of the emergency speaker. “Actually, no, we won’t be safer here,” Himerance said. “The ship will snap-Displace us off.”

  “‘Snap-Displace’? That sounds—”

  “Dangerous. Yes, I know. And it is, though we are assuming it’ll be less dangerous than staying here.”

  “But if the ship can’t Displace us now—?”

  “It can’t Displace us now because it and we are both effectively static, giving the NR time to intercept the Displacement. Whereas later it’ll be coming through at very high speed, passing dangerously close to the planet, grazing its gravity well at high translight and attempting to fit the Displacement event into an ungenerous handful of pico-seconds.”

  The avatar sounded remarkably casual about all this, Yime thought. It watched the screen indicating the floors as it counted slowly down. The lift car’s lighting, close overhead, made Himerance’s bald head gleam. “Providing it’s done at sufficiently high speed, that should leave the NR with insufficient time to arrange any interception of the Displacement singularity.” The avatar smiled at her. “That’s the real reason the ship is doing as the NR have demanded, and leaving; it’ll power up the whole way out, execute a minimum-radius-to-power turn and come straight back in, still accelerating, snapping us off and then heading for Sichult. The whole procedure will take some hours, however, as the ship gathers speed, both to make it look like it really is leaving and to make sure that when it passes us it’s going fast enough to confound the NR vessel or vessels. During that time we need to remain hidden from the NR.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Probably. Ah.” The car drew to a stop.

  “‘Probably’?” Yime found herself saying to an empty lift as the avatar moved swiftly between the opening doors.

  She followed, to find they were in a deserted basement car park full of wheeled ground vehicles. Yime opened her mouth to speak but the avatar pirouetted, one finger to his lips as he moved towards a bulky-looking vehicle with six wheels and a body that appeared to be made from a single billet of black glass. “This’ll do,” he said. A gull-wing door sighed open. “Though …” he said, as they settled into their seats. “Oh, do put your seat-belt on, won’t you? Thank you … Though the NR may well guess that the ship will attempt this manoeuvre and so either try to prevent or interfere with the Displacement. Or they might attack the ship itself, of course, though that would be rather extreme.”