Iain Banks: Surface Detail

Crazy, crazy, crazy; what was he doing? The fucking sheds would be locked.

But maybe not. There were people there a lot of the time, and he’d been planning a battleship tournament in a few days, so the engineers and technicians would have been working on the vessels, testing them, readying them. It hadn’t been night when all this chaos had kicked off, even though it felt like midnight now. It had been afternoon; people would have been in and around the ships and sheds, and what were the odds in the midst of all this mayhem that they’d carefully packed everything away and locked up everything they were meant to lock up? Not a chance.

See? He’d been vindicated. This had been the right place to come; his instinct had been smack on the money.

He — not this mad bitch running after him with a miniature cannon — would come out of this ahead; he’d survive, he’d win. He was the winner, he had the history of success, he was the one who knew how to triumph. Fuck; if it really was her he’d already killed her once. What did that tell you?

A burning tree, storeys high, already half uprooted, was slowly falling, thirty metres ahead of him. It came thudding through the fence, crashing and rolling off a flying buttress in a storm of sparks and splashing into a watery channel, smothering the path with flame. The buttress seemed to hesitate then started to crumple and fall, crashing down in a welter of stone and water, creating billows of steam.

The way ahead was blocked; he ran instead for the nearest wading point leading to the first of the islands. He could see the layout of the lakes and channels in his head, knew it better than the hedge maze because he’d looked down on it so many times. The wading points, surfaced with mesh-covered slabs under the water, were located in the middle of each island’s shore line. They stretched as far as one island away from the pool in front of the maintenance area and the sheds. He could wade through the mud-bottomed pool or even swim the rest.

She saw him leap into the water maze over the front of the crashed flier, saw the great tree fall. She followed, vaulting the buckled nose of the flier, catching up as he took splashing to the water, wading from the mainland to the nearest island. Burning embers and curtains of smoke were blowing across the water maze, darkening and lighting the miniature landscape alternately, revealing and concealing the running, limping figure ahead of her as he headed for who knew where. Maybe he was thinking of the sheds where the ships were kept. Perhaps he saw himself jumping into one and firing all its pretend little guns at her. She followed via the wading point, the water in the channel cold round her legs, dragging at her, slowing her. It was like trying to run in a dream.In the centre of the channel the water reached as far up as her hips before shallowing again.

Veppers had crossed the island beyond and was wading the next channel to one of the larger islands by the time she hauled her protesting legs out of the water. He disappeared as a dark, rolling cloud of smoke flowed between them.

When it cleared he’d gone.

She ran, panting, across the island, splashed across the next wading point and went stumbling up onto the next island. She looked all about, terrified that she’d lost him or that he might be lying in wait for her. She had to wave burning, floating scraps of twigs and leaves away from her face. A copse of trees forty metres away suddenly caught and flamed, casting a fierce yellow-orange glow over the whole low, hump-back island.

Something glinted down and to one side, in the reed bed close to her, and she turned.

He’d fallen, slipping on something as his knee had given way and his foot went out from under him, sending him skidding and plunging down the muddy slope into the reeds that lined the island. Wading the channels had taken the last of the strength from his legs; he doubted he’d be able to stand, let alone run any more. His back had hit some solid ground just before his feet and legs splashed into the dark water, and he was half winded, bouncing from the impact and turned onto his side. Behind, he saw a wall of black smoke just clearing and realised it had been between him and her as he’d slipped. She might not have seen him fall.

For an instant there he’d despaired, thinking he’d never get to where he was going and she’d catch him, but now he thought, No, I can use this to my advantage. She’s the one who has to watch out. I’m going to win here, not her. Even upsets and what looked like misfortune could be turned to advantage if you had the right mind-set, the right attitude, if the universe was somehow always subtly on your side just because you fitted it better than anybody else, knew its true and secret workings better than anybody else.

He lay, partially concealed by the reeds around him, waiting for her. He dug inside his jacket, where the knives were, pulling one of them out of its sheath. When she came stumbling up onto the island, panting and dripping, he could see that she had lost him. He had his advantage. He raised himself up a little on one elbow, threw the knife with all his might.

Knife-throwing wasn’t one of his skills, and the knives weren’t throwing knives anyway. The weapon somersaulted a couple of times, flashing in the orange light from the fires that raged all around them. She must have caught a glimpse of it coming at her, because she started to duck and instinctively began to raise the hand nearest the knife’s trajectory, to fend it off.

The handle of the knife caught her hard on one temple, grazing her, and the hand she’d raised to try and protect herself, the hand holding the gun, went on up past her head. An instant after the knife struck her head the gun roared, flashing in the night, its detonation flatter and less sharp than it had been in the tunnel beneath the house. He saw the gun fly from her hand as she staggered, stumbled and started to fall.

He’d seen where the gun had landed, though it had disappeared again after bouncing into some longer grass over the other side of the island. Still, he knew where it must be. He scrambled to his knees then his feet, finding renewed strength from somewhere, hands clawing at the mud and grass and earth until he was in a crouch, most of the way upright and could throw himself across the grass as the girl pirouetted nearby, staggering like a drunk, staring at him as he limped and hopped past a few metres away, heading for where the gun must be.

He should just have knifed her, he realised. He had the other knife. He’d fixated on getting a gun but that wasn’t really what was important; what mattered was killing her before she killed him. The gun hadn’t really mattered at all. What had he been thinking of? He was an idiot. Then he saw the gun, lying at the edge of the reed bed, a hand’s breadth from the dark, glinting water.

He dived, hand outstretched, thudding into the ground, hand closing round the barrel of the gun, desperately slapping at it and trying to turn it as he brought his other hand up, finally grasping it properly. He rolled over, expecting to find her running towards him, leaping on top of him, clutching the knife he’d thrown at her or just with her clawed hands reaching for his throat.

She’d gone. He sat up as quickly as he could, legs quivering, chest heaving, breath whistling to and fro inside his throat. He stood, shakily, and saw her, down by the reeds a little way off, just starting to pull herself back out onto dry land.

Off to one side, more trees were catching fire, sending flames leaping and boiling into the darkness. They lit up the sheds where the miniature battleships were kept. He could see some of the vessels themselves: one on a wheeled cradle on the dockside, another floating in the water by the quay. Some of the sheds were surrounded by burning grass and fallen branches, flames starting to lick up their metal walls and curl over their shallow-pitched roofs. A burning bough fell from a tree and crashed through the roof of the nearest shed in a shower of sparks.