“It moved over from you to him when you tried to strangle the fucker in ambassador Huen’s office,” Demeisen told her, going over to kick the body once, as though testing it was real. “Left you with nothing but a glorified sun tan.”
She coughed again, looked around at the sheer lunatic devastation going on all around them.
“Other ships,” she said. “Soon. Need to—”
“No, we don’t,” Demeisen said, stretching and yawning. “No second wave. None left.” He stooped, plucking the knife out of the leg of the headless body, which had stopped twitching now. “Left the last handful for the planetary defence guys, to give them something to feel heroic about,” he told her as he inspected the knife, weighing it in his hand, twirling it a couple of times. A furious whizzing noise, barely following a flash of light, was a shell from one of the stricken, fire-consumed battleships; the avatar’s arm moved blurringly fast and he batted it away from his face without even looking, still admiring the knife. The fizzing shell slapped into the nearest reed bed and blew up in a tall fountain of water, orange-tinged white on grubby black. “I did think of letting just one through, or even stomping the relevant targets myself, just for the heck of it,” Demeisen said, “and pretending. But in the end I thought not; better to leave more of the evidence on the ground. Plus some of the Hells have only gone dormant, still storing personalities. Might be able to save some, if there’s anything sane left to save.”
The avatar held one arm straight out and the tattoo — glinting, pristine — uncurled itself from Veppers’ body, spiralling lazily up into the air like a twister-wind in a stubble field and wrapping itself round the avatar’s hand like spun mercury, disappearing as it flowed over his skin and up his arm.
“Was that thing alive all the time?” she asked.
“Yup. Not just alive; intelligent. So fucking smart it’s even got a name.”
She held up one hand while he was drawing his next breath. “I’m sure it has,” she said. “But… spare me.”
Demeisen grinned. “Slap-drone, personal protection, weapon; all of the above,” he said, stretching again, as though the tattoo had spread itself all over him and he was testing how it fitted his body.
He looked down at her.
“You ready to go back? If you’re coming back?”
She sat, arms out behind her, blood in one eye, aching everywhere, feeling like shit. She nodded. “I suppose.”
“Want this?” offering her the knife handle first.
“Better,” she said, taking it, then struggling to her feet, helped by his other hand. “Family heirloom.” She looked at the avatar, frowning. “There were two,” she said.
He shook his head, tsked, stooped and pulled the other knife from where it had stuck in the ground. He took the double sheath from Veppers’ jacket, presenting it and both blades to her with a bow.
A scale-model battleship, still tied-up to its quayside, on fire from stem to stern, lifted suddenly in the middle, breaking its back as it blew up, dispensing fire and flames, debris and shrapnel and angrily buzzing and whining shells and rockets all about. The first, keel-sundering gout of fire briefly lit up two silvery ovoids stood on their ends on a small low island nearby, before they vanished, almost as quickly as they had appeared.
Dramatis Personae
Ambassador Huen jumped before she was pushed, as was traditional. Even the very limited amount of interfering she’d suggested and sanctioned was somewhat more than was strictly allowable in the circumstances. She resigned her post, went home, spent the next few years raising her son and the following couple of centuries not regretting what she’d done at all.
The Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints manifested at the Board Of Inquiry Into The Recent Events Around The Sichultian Enablement as a fabulously tattooed limping albino dwarf with a speech impediment and double incontinence. Quickly cleared of all but the most allowable and — for an Abominator-class — expected malfeasance, it returned to its usual stand-by task of punctuated loneliness, sitting, generally in the middle of cold nowhere, waiting for stuff to happen and trying not to be too disappointed when nothing did.
It received from its fellow Abominator-class and other SC ships precisely the sort of congratulations and plaudits it might have expected for its actions around Tsung and Quyn; all deeply tinged with envy. It treasured them almost as much as the exquisitely rendered recordings of the engagements.
It spent quite a lot of time in or around the larger classes of GSVs, just for the company. Its avatar Demeisen continued to behave appallingly.
Joiler Veppers’ reputation survived more or less intact for a few weeks, but then as the weeks became months and the months years, it all fell apart as stories of his cruelty, greed and selfishness, and the extent of his callousness towards his own people and even his own planet, became clear. It was over a decade before the first revisionist right-wing historian attempted to restore his reputation, and even then to no lasting effect.
Yime Nsokyi really had been an SC plant, deep within Quietus, for all that time, even if, in a sense, she hadn’t known it herself after she’d both agreed to be so and then consented to have the memory of that agreement deleted. In any event, given that even in one of the most successful Specialist Agencies-led interventions in recent centuries she had been largely relegated to a supporting role, she resigned from the Quietudinal Service. More in frustration than disgust, but she resigned all the same.
She returned to her adopted home Orbital and began a successful political career, starting with the position of emergency drill supervisor on her home Plate and eventually becoming the representative for the entire Orbital. As with all hierarchic positions within the Culture it was almost entirely an honorary, figurehead role, but she found the achievement highly satisfying all the same.
Her personal life ended up consisting of a sort of cycle of being neuter, female and male in turn, each for a decade or so. She found that she was able to establish tender, meaningful relationships — with an agreeable physical component when she was not neuter — at every stage, but would have been the first to admit that real passion and true love, if there was such a thing, always eluded her.
The ex-Limited Offensive Unit Me, I’m Counting returned briefly to the Forgotten GSV Total Internal Reflection, then resumed a life of galactic tramping. It found new hobbies.
Hibin Jasken served some time in prison for his complicity in a few of his late master’s better-publicised crimes, though his efforts to pick up survivors from the firestorm around the Espersium mansion and his full cooperation with the authorities helped reduce his final sentence.
On his release he became a security consultant and successful businessman, living relatively modestly and contributing most of what he earned to charitable causes, especially those concerned with orphaned and disadvantaged children. He was instrumental in the Wheel Halo VII being turned into a mobile holiday home for the dependants of the bankrupt and destitute, and was an ardent supporter of the moves, eventually successful, to end the practice of Indented Intagliation.
The GCU Bodhisattva, its Mind re-housed in a new-build Escarpment class, remained attached to the Quietus section but subsequently spent a lot of time investigating — very carefully — Fallen and Unfallen Bulbitians, thinking to present a paper on the entities at some point in the future.
Auppi Unstril was reunited with a revented, slightly changed Lanyares Tersetier. It didn’t last long.