“What exactly is this?”
“That is a full-survival/light-battle suit, two layer.”
“What’s a light battle? Is that a skirmish or something?”
“It will keep you safe and well, even if the Displace is very slightly off, and protect you against unwelcome attentions, should locals take exception to you.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Who knows? Some people are just primitive.”
“This isn’t really about the locals, is it? This is in case the other lot — the Oglari — in case they spot me, or their bosses.” Tefwe had woken with a full briefing effectively downloaded and digested inside her head.
“We are trying to protect you as well as we can, Ms Tefwe,” the ship told her. “Ideally I would put you down in a more aggressively profiled suit and inside a supporting capsule — at least — with a full drone and missile screen, exactly where you need to be; however, our intelligence is that such a force, in such a location, would be very likely both to be sensed on emplacement and to give cause for severe diplomatic unpleasantness if discovered. Hence the suit.”
“Can I put ordinary clothes over it?”
“They’ll burn off if the Displace is even slightly out. The suit is able to mimic the appearance of clothing.”
“I’d prefer ordinary clothes. Can’t I carry them inside the suit or something?”
The drone made a sighing noise.
Eventually she got a kind of backpack that melded itself to the suit, containing some clothes and a few supplies.
“This increases both your mass and bulk,” the ship told her through the drone. “Now I have to re-calibrate and skim even closer to the planet.”
“How close you going?”
“Seventeen-five k.”
“Velocity?”
“Forty per cent Crashed to fifty-seven kilo-lights at closest approach; sub millisecond window.”
Tefwe whistled. “You’re going to scrunch me up into a tiny little ball, aren’t you?”
“If you were properly human, it would break every major bone in your body, and quite a lot of the others. Happily, you’re not. You won’t trauma, will you? I could put you under…”
“Not me. Tough as old space boots. Known for it.”
“Good. The suit will be trying not to use any fields, including AG, so the landing could be a little bumpy.”
“Kinetic.”
“Kinetic?”
“That’s how we used to express it in the old days.”
“Hmm. Kinetic. That too is appropriate.”
The Rapid Random Response Unit performed the start of a crash-stop, then — when it was, for a vanishingly brief moment, within less than a planetary radius of the world — used its heavy-duty Displacer to loose a balled-up Tefwe and a scatter of miniature subsidiary support components towards the planet. Then it continued on its way — slowing, in effect, more slowly — and started a wide turn that would bring it back to the system some hours later for a more stealthy approach to Cethyd.
Tefwe came hurtling out of the sky at a little under the speed of sound. The suit gauged where it was and what was happening to it, saw that it was heading for land with no large body of water available — which was sub-optimal, but never mind — and braked hard by spreading layers of itself like ribboned parachutes, scrubbing off ninety-five per cent of its speed in about half a kilometre of forty-five-degree flight. Tefwe felt herself tumbling, and the deceleration as a tremendous weight — oddly distributed due to the way she was packed, pressed into a contorted, maximally compacted ball that would have killed a basic human. The tumbling decreased. She felt her orientation steady and settle, and then the weight eased too.
She felt the impact as a dull thud on her back and knees, not sore at all, then the suit’s voice said quietly, “Landed.”
Tefwe started to un-ball as the suit unwrapped her, letting her spread herself out to lie looking up at an ochre sky visible between softly swaying stalks of some tall, bronze-coloured grass. She could feel her lungs re-inflating. They’d been collapsed to save volume.
“How we doing?” she asked when she had some breath to spare.
“We are doing well,” the suit said. “No hostile interest detected.”
“That’s nice.” Her conventional pain receptors came back on line, tingling once to confirm, then quieting down.
She sat up, dusted herself down, then, still sitting, unhitched the backpack and put on the clothes she’d had the ship make for her. They were supposed to make her look a bit like a pilgrim. A human pilgrim, specifically, because the locals here weren’t human, though there were used enough to hosting humanoid pilgrims from nearby systems. Then she let the backpack collapse itself and stow into the small of the suit’s back.
Finally, cautiously, she stood up.
Cethyd lay heavy beneath the orange-red sun called Heluduz.
“You used to look at my chest.”
“Because of what was not there. Absence can snag the gaze more effectively than presence.”
“What? Oh, breasts! Mammalian stuff. Of course. I thought you just thought I had a particularly fine and barrel chest.”
“One way of putting it.”
“Did you ever want… did you ever think about us, you know, fucking?”
“Which answer would insult you less: yes or no?”
“Neither. Either. I wouldn’t be insulted.”
“Then the answer would be, not really.”
“Not really? So a bit, then. Ha!”
She was a little drunk. She was still going to leave the silver-grey cube with the Incast order — she was en route to the Ospin system now, in this fine clipper ship — but she’d thought she ought to at least turn the device on, make sure the old guy was in some sense still in there, and maybe ask his forgiveness. Maybe.
Too many cocktails in the bar. Thought she’d been doing extremely well with a handsomely chunky young fellow there — a serving captain in the Eighth — but then the girlfriend he’d neglected to mention had shown up — supposed to be a surprise for him; she’d got on at the last port a couple of hours ago, been waiting impatiently in his cabin since, wondering where he’d got to… Things had started to turn just a little ugly and so she’d made her excuses and left.
She had decided before she’d left home ten days earlier that one thing she definitely wasn’t going to do during the voyage was turn on the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside — she’d been adamant about that. He was an old fraud and even just giving the damn thing to her had probably been some sort of attempt to manipulate her; he was lucky she was paying him the compliment of physically taking the device to Ospin like some sort of warped pilgrimage or homage or something rather than just posting it to the Incast order. She’d brought her volupt with her; she would use the time constructively to practise.
But then, perhaps because of the cocktails, she’d changed her mind.
“The Gzilt never joined in the great genetic mash-up that the rest of the Culture proper thought appropriate to ensure everybody could breed with everybody else,” QiRia’s voice said. (In theory she could have seen him too, had his face look down on her from the cabin’s screen; she hadn’t chosen that option.) “As a result, the genes aren’t in either of us to make us appear attractive to or feel attracted towards the other, beyond a very basic pan-human interest sparked at a distance or when clothes conceal the disappointing truth. Trust me; it is rarely an encouraging sign when the more apparel is removed, the less attractive a prospective sexual partner becomes. I wasn’t keeping a tally, but if you’d been watching carefully I suspect you’d have noticed that I looked — glanced, more likely — at your chest more often when you wore a top than when you were naked from the waist up. The point is rather that we found each other interesting at all, sexual considerations removed. Again, you’ll have to trust me that the difference implicit in a ten-millennia age difference is far more important than a difference in both gender and/or species.”