“Anything—” somebody began.
—Got something, the drone with the skein sense sent, too quick for speech. Her lace kicked her awareness speed up to maximum so quickly the last syllable of the previous speaker’s word went on for many seconds, providing an impromptu soundtrack to what was happening in the skies beyond.
The ships were popping into existence just a few thousand klicks out, travelling at between one and eight per cent of lightspeed. No beaconry, IFF or any signal at all; not even trying to pretend they were anything else but hostile.
—Thinking these are targets, somebody communicated. Over the still-open voice comm channels came a high-pitched whine like something charging.
A first glance indicated hundreds of the ships, a second thousands. They filled the sky, darting like demented fireworks in as many different directions as there were craft. Some accelerated hard, some slowed to almost stationary seemingly within seconds; those incoming zipped in and were a few tens of klicks out and closing fast before there was time to get more than a few shots off. The drones, Yime thought. The drones will be reacting fastest, firing first. She swung the ancient plasma turret directly outwards, found a target and felt the antique machine’s senses and hers agree, lock and fire in the same instant. The old turret trembled and twin pulses of light lanced out, missing whatever it was they were aiming at. Plenty more targets, she thought, as she and the gun swung fractionally, retargeted, set for a wider beamspread and fired again. Something blazed within the cone of beam filaments but there was no time to celebrate as she and the gun swung again and again, flicking minutely from side to side and up and down like something trembling, uncertain.
There were more bursts of fire within the targeting focus and there was a certain desperate exultation in just firing, firing, firing, but in some still-calm part of her mind she knew they weren’t getting more than a per cent of the attacking craft, and the rest were still closing or had arrived.
Something at the lower limit of her vision attracted her attention; she watched the last of the little blue tell-tale lights turn red. All gone? So quickly? She was the last one, she realised; the last one left firing.
The view hazed, quivered, started to die. She killed the link systems, swept the helmet back over her head as its screens went blank and — staring out into the night through her own eyes and the invisible diamond blister — yanked the manual controls from the arm squabs and hauled the turret round to fire at a fast-approaching bright dot just starting to take on substance.
There was a thump that somehow felt nearby, back here by the turret, not out there where she was aiming, and the impression of something just outside the diamond bubble. She clicked a switch to let the gun’s atomechanical brain do its own targeting and turned her head.
The things scrabbling towards the turret across the O’s outer surface looked like metallic versions of a human ribcage plus skull, running and bouncing on six multiply jointed legs. Bizarrely, they appeared to be racing across the surface as though they were experiencing the equivalent of gravity drawing them down against it, rather than its exact opposite. She was still reaching for the control seat’s hand weapon when one of the creatures launched itself at the bubble, smashed through it and landed where her lap would have been had she not been swaddled in the turret’s control blister armour. The air in the diamond bubble left in a burst of white vapour that disappeared almost instantly as the skull-faced creature — a machine, she saw — stuck its face up to hers and, despite the lack of atmosphere and no visible method of producing the sound, said very clearly, “Drill over!”
She sighed, sat back, somewhere else entirely, as the shattered control blister, the crippled plasma turret itself and the doomed Orbital dissipated like mist around her.
“It was unpleasant, distressing and of little practical use,” Yime Nsokyi told her drill supervisor sternly. “It was a punishment drill, a simulation for masochists. I saw little point to it.”
“Granted it is about as extreme as they get,” her supervisor said cheerfully. “All-out equiv-tech complete surprise attack just short of total Orbital destruction.” Hvel Costrile was an elderly-looking gent with dark skin, long blond hair and a bare chest. He was talking to her in her apartment via a wall screen; it looked like he was on a sea vessel somewhere, as there was a large expanse of water in the background and his immediate surroundings — a plush seat, some railings — kept tipping slightly this way and that. The screen display was in 2D, by her choice; Yime Nsokyi didn’t hold with things looking too much like whatever they were not. “Instructive, though, don’t you think?”
“No,” she told him. “I fail to see the instructional element implicit in being subject to a completely unstoppable attack and thus being utterly overwhelmed in a matter of minutes.”
“Worse things happen in real wars, Yime,” Costrile told her with a grin. “Faster, more complete destruction.”
“I imagine simulations of those would have even less to teach, apart from the wisdom of avoiding such initial condition sets in the first place,” she told him. “And I might add that I also fail to see the utility of causing me to experience a simulation in which I harbour a neural lace, given that I have never possessed one and have no intentions of ever having one.”
Costrile nodded. “That was propaganda. Neural laces are just useful in that sort of extremity.”
“Until they too are corrupted, and possibly the person invested by the device as well.”
He shrugged. “By that time the game’s pretty much up anyway, you’d imagine.”
Yime shook her head. “One might equally well imagine otherwise.”
“Whatever, they let you back-up really easily,” he said reasonably.
“That is not a life-choice I have chosen to make,” Yime informed him frostily.
“Oh well.” Costrile sighed, then accepted a long drink from somebody just out of shot. He raised it to her. “Till next time? Something more practical, I promise.”
“Till then,” she agreed. “Strength in depth.” But the screen was already blank. She said, “Close screen,” anyway, telling the relatively dumb house computer to kill any link at her end. Yime was entirely untroubled by intelligent house systems, but did not wish to be subject to one. She was happy to admit to feeling a degree of satisfaction that she was by some orders of magnitude the most intelligent entity within her immediate surroundings in general and her own living space in particular. It was not a claim one could convincingly make in very many Culture dwellings.
Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh much preferred to be known only as Yime Nsokyi. She had moved away from her home Orbital and so her name now lacked utility, no longer working as even an approximate address. Worse; bearing the name of one location while living in another felt to her like something close to deceit. She walked over to the window, picked up a plain but functional brush from a small table and continued to brush her long hair, which was what she had been doing, meticulously, when the emergency militia drill alert had come through on her personal terminal and she had, reluctantly, had to submit to the induction collar and the resulting horribly realistic sim of the Orbital — even if it wasn’t this Orbital but a more standard, less militarily prepared Orbital — being so thoroughly savaged and so easily taken over.