Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [25]
'Is there a theme?'
'Oh, anything. As long as it's historical.'
'Oh, good,' said the Doctor. 'My favourite.'
Hyper-lude
To an unprotected human being space is a hostile environment. Step through an airlock and it's a one-way ticket to freeze-dried city: eyeball moisture boils away while your capillaries burst like firecrackers. And if that isn't bad enough, space is full of hard radiation, blasting out of those humungous out-of-control fusion reactors known as stars. Hang out near one of those babies and you're quickly reduced to crispy fried bacon pieces. In short, space isn't somewhere you want to live and a lot of hassle to visit.
So people created ships to get about in and because these people were people they made sure that the ships were people too. These people met other people on their travels and these other people were cool, so some ground rules were worked out and they all went exploring together: the people, the other people and the ships that were also people. The rest, as they say, is history.
At least that's the history that got written down.
The ships were big, designed by people who were designed by people who liked big technology.
They had brains with the same mean density as a pulsar. To call them computers would be like calling Einstein a tapeworm or Shakespeare half a kilogram of feta cheese. Their hulls were constructed from interleavened layers of forcefields and they were powered by engines that did horrible things to the fabric of the space-time continuum. These babies had go faster stripes on their toilet seats and thought warp drives were strictly for wimps. When they moved, the material fabric of the universe scrambled to get out of the way.
Their full names were full of clicks, pops and aspirated consonants, the quiet, confident macho that comes with being able to prune a rosebush from a distance of twenty light-years.
Thirty years before, the people had been involved in a war during which they had committed the sort of acts that people tend to commit during wars, although being people they had been very apologetic about it. Using a tiny fraction of their available resources they had completely rebuilt the twenty-six low technology civilizations that had been devastated during the fighting but there was nothing they could do about the fifteen planets, three rings and fifteen asteroid habitats that had got themselves blown away.
Or the twenty-six billion sentient individuals that had been killed, most of them, as the euphemism goes, were collateral casualties. The enemy, a race of insectoid religious fanatics, underwent as a consequence of their defeat a profound theological transformation. The Great Hive Mind of the Universe, they reasoned, had revealed through the medium of the war that the universe was vast enough to accommodate an abundance of cultures and belief systems. Large sections of the population embraced wishy-washy liberal pluralism with a speed that dismayed the Established Church. The megasmart intelligences that ran the people's spaceships and co-ordinated the activities of the Xenocultural Relations (Normalization) Interest Group had predicted this reaction and made arrangements for the enemy to become part of the people.
They knew something that had seemingly escaped the notice of the High Priests of the Great Hive Mind of the Universe. Namely that God really was on the side of the big battalions.
As a result of the war many of the ships chilling out at the sphere's gargantuan dockyard when the Doctor arrived were warships; in the terminology of the people: VASs (Very Aggressive Ships). Some of the more aggressive VASs had themselves mothballed until they were needed again, while others either transferred to a different class of ship or were refitted for civilian duties.
On the day that Bernice met saRa!qava there were four former VASs, four GPSs (General Purpose Ships), two VLR (Very Long Range) Drones and the six-kilometre front end of a TSH (Travelling Space Habitat) who'd had a major disagreement with the