The ship was making a noise: a deep, strong, humming noise, getting louder. She’d never heard a Quietus ship make any sort of noise like that before. Never come aboard one and not been greeted almost instantly, and very politely too. So far, though, nothing. Things must be desperate.
Then gravity seemed to shift and she slid quickly along the floor with the fluffy carpet until she thudded into a wall. She was rolled over, spread out across the bulkhead. The ship felt like it was standing upright on its stern. She began to feel very heavy, and compressed again.
Appreciable acceleration inside a ship’s field structure. That was an atrociously bad sign. She suspected it was only going to get worse. She waited for a field to snap about her.
One did and she blanked out.
He caught up with Dr. Miejeyar, rising to meet her as they both rose through the warm air towards the crown of the vast, impossible tree.
He shouted hello. She smiled again, said something back. They were rising with the thermal, light as feathers, and the wind noise was not that great, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He manoeuvred closer to her, getting to within a metre or so.
“What was that again?” he asked her.
“I said, I am not on your side,” she told him.
“Really?” He favoured her with a sceptical, tolerant smile.
“And the War Conduct Agreement does not apply outside the mutually agreed limits of the confliction itself.”
“What?” he said. Suddenly the wingsuit around him turned to tatters as if slashed by a hundred razor-sharp knives. He fell out of the sky, tumbling helplessly, screaming. The air and clouds and sky all turned dark, and in the space of one clawing, flapping somersault the impossible tree became a vast, blasted leafless thing, studded with fires, wreathed in smoke, most of its twigs and branches broken off or hanging twisting in the shrivelling wind like limp and broken limbs.
He plummeted, unstoppable, the shredded wingsuit flapping madly around him, the tatters of torn material like cold black flames whipping at his limbs.
He screamed, grew hoarse, gathered more air and screamed again.
The dark angel that had been Dr. Miejeyar flowed smoothly down from above; as calm, measured and elegant as he was terror-stricken and out of control. She was very beautiful now, with arms that became great black wings, streaming dark hair and a brief, minimal costume that revealed most of her voluptuously glossy brown body.
“What you did was hack, Colonel,” she told him. “That is against the rules of the war and so leaves you unprotected by those same rules. It is tantamount to spying, and spies are accorded no mercy. Look down.”
He looked down to see a landscape filled with smoke and fire and torture: pits of flame, rivers of acid and forests of barbed spikes, some already tipped with writhing bodies. They were coming up fast towards him, just seconds away.
He screamed again.
Everything froze. He was still staring at the horrific scene beneath, but it had stopped coming closer. He tried to look away but couldn’t.
The dark angel’s voice said, “We wouldn’t waste it on you.” She make a clicking sound with her mouth and he died.
Vatueil sat on the trapeze, in Trapeze space, swaying slowly to and fro, humming to himself, waiting.
The others appeared one by one. You could have told who were his friends and who were his enemies by whether they did or did not meet his gaze. The ones who had always thought the hacking attempts were a waste of valuable time and little more than a cack-handed way of telling their enemies that they were getting desperate looked at him and smiled, happy to look him in the eye. Those who had agreed with him afforded him a quick nod and a fleeting glance at most, looking away when he tried to look at them, pursing their lips, scratching their fur, picking at their toenails and so on.
“It didn’t work,” yellow said.
So much for preamble, Vatueil thought. Oh well; it wasn’t as though they kept minutes.
“It did not,” he agreed. He picked at a little knotted tuft of red fur on his belly.
“I think we all know what the next level, the last resort is,” purple said. They all looked at each other, a sort of formal symmetry to their sequential one-to-one glances, nods and muttered words.
“Let us be clear about this,” Vatueil said after a few moments. “We are talking about taking the war into the Real. We are talking about disobeying the rules we freely agreed to abide by right at the start of all this. We are talking about going back on the commitments and undertakings we took so solemnly so long ago and have lived and fought by from then until now. We are talking about making the whole confliction to which we have dedicated three decades of our lives irrelevant and pointless.” He paused, looked round them all. “And this is the Real we are talking about. There are no resets, and while there might be extra lives for some, not everybody will be so blessed: the deaths and the suffering we cause will be real, and so will the blame we attract. Are we really prepared to go through with this?” He looked round them all again. He shrugged. “I know I am,” he told them. “But are you?”
“We have been through all this,” green said. “We all—”
“I know, but—”
“Shouldn’t—?”
“Can’t we—?”
Vatueil talked over them. “Let’s just vote and get it over with, shall we?”
“Yes, let’s not waste any more time,” purple said, looking pointedly at Vatueil.
They took the vote.
They sat, still or gently swinging on their trapezes for a while. Nobody said anything. Then:
“Let havoc be unleashed,” yellow said resignedly. “The war against the Hells brings hell to the Real.”
Green sighed. “If we get this wrong,” he said, “they won’t forgive us for ten thousand years.”
Purple snorted. “A lot of them won’t forgive us for a million years even if we get it right.”
Vatueil sighed, shook his head slowly. He said, “Fate help us all.”
Eighteen
There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked — part of the complexity of life, he supposed — that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.
At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance — he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed — but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.
Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement — or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement — was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing — the great game that was life — appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.
Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society — an entire civilisation — of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.