“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”
“I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. They were still alive when I entered the Hell. Can you do anything useful and tell me how they are? Still alive? Passed on? Well? Well? Eh? No? Thought not. ‘Maker’ indeed. What superstitious bollocks are you trying to—?”
“Chay!” the thing shouted at her. Quite loudly, Chay thought, and — what with her failing hearing — that must have meant extremely loudly. Still the young noviciate asleep in the chair by her bedside didn’t even stir. She was glad she hadn’t wasted the effort waking the girl up. “You are about to die,” the apparition told her. “Have you no wish to see God and be accepted into Her love?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There is no God.” It was what she believed, what she had always believed, but still she looked nervously at the sleeping noviciate.
“What?” the angel cried. “Will you have no thought for your immortal soul?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Chay said. Then she stopped, and felt terrible. Swearing in front of the noviciate! She hadn’t sworn aloud for over two decades. She was the Superior; the Superior didn’t swear. But then she was annoyed at herself for being embarrassed and penitent in the first place. What did it matter? “Yes,” Chay said, while the so-called “angel of life and death” flapped its impossible wings and stared wide-eyed at her. “Fuck off. Entirely fuck off, you ersatz, cobbled-together, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other piece of poor-quality animation. Do whatever it is you have to do and let’s just get this charade over with.”
The great dark angel seemed to pull briefly back, then came forward again, enfolding her vast black wings about the bed, then just around Chay, who said, “Oh, shit. And I bet this is going to hurt.”
The ship towered within the shadowy space of its hangar, a little over three hundred and fifty metres in height, its trim, pale hull girdled about its waist with five dark weapon blisters, its sleekly pointed nose housing three even longer bubbles.
“It looks fabulously retro,” Veppers said. “What exactly is it?”
The alien who had addressed him earlier turned to him. “Technically, to allow for legal challenges based on laws which admittedly do not yet exist, it is a one-point-zero-one-two-five to one scale model of a Culture ‘Murderer’ General Offensive Unit,” it said.
Veppers thought about this. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a model which is bigger than the original?”
“Yes!” the GFCFian said, clapping its little hands. “Bigger is better, yes?”
“Well, generally,” Veppers agreed, frowning.
They were standing in a viewing gallery looking out into a cylindrical hangar a kilometre from top to bottom and half that wide. The hangar had been carved out of the compacted ice and rock making up one of the Tsung system’s half-trillion or so Oort cloud objects. The lumpy conglomerate of ice housing the GFCF base — and within it this hangar — was sufficiently massive to provide less than one per cent of standard gravity; point your mouth down when you sneezed and you could take off. The ship they were looking at — its hull a lustrous golden hue Veppers strongly suspected had been chosen to resemble as closely as possible his own usual skin colour — sat lightly on its flat, circular rear, its sharply pointed nose spiring toward the hangar’s ceiling.
“Its working name is the Joiler Veppers,” the little alien told him, “though it may be re-named anything you wish, of course.”
“Of course.” Veppers looked round the rest of the gallery. They were alone; the other GFCF people had remained on the ship when they’d shuttled across to the ancient lump of space debris, one of the near uncountable bits of debris left over after the stellar system had come into being billions of years earlier.
“You approve of the ship?”
Veppers shrugged. “Maybe. How fast is it?”
“Mr. Veppers! This obsession with speed! Let us say, faster than the original. May we not deem that sufficient?”
“What would that be in figures?”
“I sigh! However: the craft is capable of velocities up to approximately one hundred and twenty-nine thousand times the speed of light.”
Veppers genuinely had to stop for a moment and think. That did sound like a lot. He’d have to check, but he was fairly certain the Jhlupian ship which had taken him to Vebezua had travelled slower than that. The ships which the Veprine Corporation Heavy Industries Deep Space Division constructed measured their maximum velocities in hundreds of times lightspeed. This thing was a galaxy-crosser. Even so, he refused to look impressed.
“‘Up to’?” he asked. The GFCFian was called Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and was androgynous. Bettlescroy held the rank of Legislator-Admiral, though, like most people in the GFCF, the little alien seemed almost ashamed of having any rank at all. In fact, officially, Bettlescroy’s full title was — and most species required a deep breath at this point — The Most Honourable Heritably Concurrent Delegated Vice Emissary Legislator-Admiral Elect Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of Turwentire — tertiary, demesne & c. (This was the short version of course, excluding his educational qualifications and military service medals.) Certain components of this startlingly grand honorific apparently indicated that Bettlescroy was the trusted, word-good-as-the-original clone of somebody back home who was even more imposingly magnificent, to the point of being too posh even to do anything as vulgar as actually travelling.
Bettlescroy looked, briefly, very slightly pained. “The precise operational parameters are still being optimised as the vessel is fitted out,” it explained. “As in original, it utilises hyper-spacial aggregation motors and additionally applied induction factoring rather than the more common warp engine technology which powers the vessels your own society builds. Again as in the original, of course, the maximum apparent velocity is achievable over a defined period.”
“A defined period?”
“Indeed.”
“What you mean is, only in bursts?”
“Of course. Again, as in the the original. Though — again again, as it were — a higher maximum and for longer.”
“So what’s its indefinitely sustainable maximum?”
The little alien sighed. “We are still working that out, but in excess of ten kilolights, assuredly.”
“Ah. What about the weapons?”
“Generally similar to and in some cases improvements on and refinements of the originals. In a word, formidable. Far beyond anything the Sichultian Enablement currently possesses. To be frank, so far beyond they will remain arguably non-analysable and certainly non-reproducible for the foreseeable near to medium future. This, sir, will be a space yacht capable of successfully engaging entire fleets of vessels representing state-of-the-art technology by Sichultian Enablement standards, and some way beyond. Great care will need to be taken drawing up the — how shall I put this? — the generally available component of the Use and Ownership Contract for this to pass muster with the sadly all-too-zealous bureaucrats of the Galactic Council’s Technology Transfer Oversight Board.”
“Hmm. Well, we’ll see. It does look terribly retro in style, don’t you think?”
“It is not styled. It is simply designed. See: the form allows all weapons to point forward, five out of the eight to point rearward and never less than five to point to any side, without rotation. In event of field failure, the highly fluid-dynamic directional profile outline provides high abrasive-environment survivability. The internal component layout and field substrate deployment are generally held to be as close to perfection as it was then possible to achieve and has not been significantly improved upon since. I beseech you, Veppers; inquire. Such inquiry will prove what I say: the Murderer class is rightly regarded as a design classic.”