Iain Banks: Look to Windward

Uagen coughed up some fluid. He nodded and looked around. This looked like the interior of Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters, with the sub-divisions removed.

“Am I back on Yoleus?” he asked.

“You are aboard the dirigible behemothaur Yoleusenive.”

Uagen stared at the hanging creature in front of him. It took him a moment or two to work out the implications of what he’d just heard. He felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed. “The Yoleus has… evolved?” he croaked.

“That is the case.”

He put his hand up to his throat, feeling the tender but whole flesh. He looked slowly up and around. “How was I,” he began, then had to stop and swallow and start again. “How was I brought back? How was I rescued?”

“You were found in the without. You wore a piece of equipment which stored your personality. The Yoleusenive has repaired and reconstructed your body and quickened your mind-life within said body.”

“But I wasn’t wearing any…” Uagen began, then his voice trailed off as he looked down to where his fingers were stroking the skin around his neck where, once, there had been a necklace.

“The piece of equipment that stored your personality was where your fingers are now,” 8827 Praf confirmed, and clacked her beak once.

Aunt Silder’s necklace. He remembered the tiny sting at the back of his neck. Uagen felt tears well in his eyes. “How much time has passed?” he whispered.

Praf’s head tipped to one side again and her eyelids flickered.

Uagen cleared his throat and said, “Since I left the Yoleus; how much time has passed?”

“Nearly one Grand Cycle.”

Uagen found he could not speak for a little while. Eventually he said, “One… one, ah, galactic, umm Grand Cycle?”

8827 Praf’s beak clacked a couple of times. She shook herself, adjusting her dark wings as though they were a cloak. “That is what a Grand Cycle is,” she said as though explaining something obvious to someone just hatched. “Galactic.”

Uagen swallowed on a dry, dry throat. It was as though it was still ripped out and open to the vacuum. “I see,” he said.

She went bounding across the grass towards the cliff, nostrils flared to the wind and the tang of ozone, her face-fur flattened in the breeze. She came to the great double bowl where the land had long ago been vaporised and blown away. The grass fell curving beneath her. Beyond lay the ocean. In front, the seastacks rose like the trunks of immense fossilised trees, their bases awash with creamy foam. She leapt.

A small drone had been sent to investigate the running figure. Its weapons were armed and ready to fire. Just as it was about to intercept the female and shout a challenge, she came to the grassy edge of the crater and jumped. What happened next was unexpected. The drone’s camera showed the leaping figure disintegrate and turn into a flock of birds. They flew past the drone, flowing around its casing like water about a stone. The machine twitched this way and that, then turned and followed.

The order came to attack the flock of birds. The drone instigated a prey-rich-environment targeting regime, but then another order countermanded the first and told it to attack a group of three more defence drones which had just risen from the nearest seastack. It curved away, zooming to gain height.

Lasers flickered from cupolas high on two of the seastacks, but the flock of birds had become a swarm of insects; the weapon light found few of them and those it did simply reflected it. Then the two laser towers began to fire at each other, and both exploded in balls of flame.

The first drone attacked the other three as they spread out and accelerated towards the swarm of insects. It shot down one before it was itself destroyed. Then the other two drones attacked each other, swooping in and ramming at high speed in a flash and a single sharp detonation of sound; much of the resulting wreckage was composed of pieces small enough to drift in the wind.

Several small- and medium-sized explosions shook each of the seastacks, and smoke began to drift across the blue sky.

The insect swarm collected on a broad balcony and resumed the form of a Chelgrian female. She knocked the balcony doors down and stepped into the room. Alarms warbled. She frowned and they fell silent. The only sensory or command system not fully under her control was a tiny passive camera in one corner of the room. She was to leave the complex’s security monitoring system uncorrupted, so that what was done was seen to be done, and recorded. She listened carefully.

She strode into the bathroom and found him in the emergency one-person lift which had been disguised as a shower cabinet. The lift had jammed in the shaft. She flowed over the hole, formed a partial vacuum and sucked the capsule back up. She pulled open the door and reached in for the naked, cowering male.

Estodien Visquile opened his mouth to scream for mercy. She became insects — they represented something of a phobia for the Estodien — and poured into his throat, choking him and forcing open the route to his lungs and to his stomach. The insects packed each tiny air-sac in his lungs tight; others bulked out the Estodien’s stomach to the point of bursting and beyond, then invaded his body cavity, while others rammed down into the rest of his digestive system, forcing an explosion of faecal matter from his anus.

The Estodien crashed and battered about the shower cabinet lift capsule, smashing the ceramic fittings and denting the plastics. More insects streamed into his ears and forced their way around his horrified, staring eyes, burning their way into his skull while his skin crawled and writhed with the insects which had invaded his body cavity and gone on to slide their way under his flesh.

The insects infested his entire body eventually, as he lay thrashing on the floor on a film of his own blood. They continued to insinuate their way into every bodily part of him until, about three minutes after the attack had begun, Visquile’s movements gradually ceased.

The insects, the birds and the Chelgrian female were made of EDust. Everything Dust was composed of tiny machines of varying sizes and capabilities. With the exception of one type, none was larger than a tenth of a millimetre in any direction. Interestingly, the dust had originally been designed as the ultimate building material.

The one class of exception to the tenth-of-a-millimetre rule was that of AM nanomissiles, which were only a tenth of a millimetre in diameter, but an entire millimetre in length. One of those lodged in the centre of the Estodien’s brain, beside his Soulkeeper, while all the other components withdrew and reformed into the Chelgrian female.

She padded away from the deflated body lying in its bloody pool. The nanomissiles were, she thought, a give-away to the identity of her makers; an integral part of the message she was delivering. She went out of the bathroom and the apartment, down some stairs and across a terrace. Somebody shot at her with an ancient hunting rifle. It was the only projectile weapon left working for several kilometres around; she let the bullet pass through a hole in her chest and out the other side, while a set of components in one of her eyes briefly lased and blinded the male who had shot at her.

In the accommodation block behind her, the nanomissile embedded in Visquile’s brain sensed his Soulkeeper about to read and save his mind. The explosion of the missile’s warhead destroyed the whole building. Debris rained down, around and through her as she walked calmly away.

She found her second target trapped in a small two-person flyer, trying to smash his way out of the cockpit canopy with an oxygen cylinder.