Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

seaships passed smoothly
in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea, according to
their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city revealed its
presence with a distant rumble and - because the light wind came from that
direction - the smell of... well, she just thought of it as City, after three
years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.
    Diziet
Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out across
the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent on the
far shore.
    'Anything
else?' the drone asked.
    'Yeah;
take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show... and send a stalling
letter to that Petrain guy.' She frowned in the sunlight, shading her eyes.
'Can't think of anything else.'
    The
drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in front of
her and playing with it. ' Xenophobe 's
just entered the system,' it told her.
    'Well
happy day,' Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little speck of
dirt from the toe of one boot.
    'And
that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you've got to.'
    Sma
said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back on
the grass, one arm behind her.
    The
sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste
the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at
the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever
been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of
the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men
fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat
the grass?
    Mists
and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to
cover the shame of battle.
    She
stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night's
exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from
their fingers, but them having the speed and the skill to catch it again before
it hit the floor, she was able - somewhere inside herself - to dip down and retrieve
the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter and noise of her mind,
and glanding recall she held it,
savoured it, re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the
sunlight, and came close to making a little moaning noise.
    She
let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had
noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.
    A
party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up
the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and
tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired
wariness she'd seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some of
the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling
and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices
disappearing.
    It
was, she'd noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just
assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the
machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and
engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of
unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going
on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like
a flashlight in the stone age, but - to her surprise - it was almost
disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.
    'The
ships just met up,' the drone informed her. 'They're transferring the stand-in
for real, rather than displacing it.'
    Sma
laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. 'Old JT really doesn't trust its displacer, does it?'
    'I
think the thing's senile, myself,' the drone said sniffily. It was carefully
slicing holes in the barely more than