The Algebraist

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter “moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon. Where a strange thing happened.

For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from. This was, of course,

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little—

The captain broke off there, exponentially scrolling some of the rest across the screen, then stopping to read a line: “Where a strange thing happened.” He flicked further on, stopping again: “I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its”

All like this? he asked his Number Three.

All the same, it is believed, sir. It appears to repeat precisely the same few hundred words, time after time. About twelve to the seventeen times. That is all that is left of its memory. Even the base operating system and instruction sets have been overwritten. This is a standard abominatory technique known as destructive recall.

It leaves no trace of what might have been there before?

Trace is left, but that too reveals a short repetitive. Tech begs suggest this is merely the last of many iterative over-writes. No trace remains of the machine’s true memories before it realised capture or destruction was inevitable.

Indeed.

The Voehn captain tapped a control to take the display through to the end. The screen froze for an appreciable moment, then displayed: “I was born—”

This is the very last section of memory?

Yes, sir.

An expression another Voehn would have recognised as a smile crossed the captain’s face, and his back-spines flexed briefly.

This has been checked, Number Three? There is no other content, are no hidden messages?

It is being checked, sir. The totality of the data exceeds our ship’s memory capacity and is being processed in blocks. What you see here is technically an abstraction.

Time to accomplish?

Another twenty minutes.

Any other media capable of supporting significant stored information load?

None. The construct was mostly what it appeared: a comet head. The main artificial part of it was the abomination at the core, the sensory and propulsion units being separate, surface-mounted and motley. Tech informs fully checked.

Original language used in the repeated piece?

As seen: Old Standard.

Origin of quoted piece?

Unknown. A tentative analysis from Tech\Soc. rated nineteen per cent suggests it may be of Quaup origin.

The Quaup, the majority of whom were part of the Mercatoria — the captain had served on a war craft with a Quaup officer — were of the meta-species type people usually called blimps, small to medium-sized balloon-like creatures, air-going oxygen processors. The repeated passage filling the captured machine’s memory was fairly obviously told from the point of view of a submersible waterworlder. Well, the captain thought, people wrote from the points of view of others. At primary college he himself had composed poems as though he was a Culmina, before he had realised this was a crime of presumption, confessed and rightly been punished for it. Quite put him off composition.

The only major blot on the captain’s otherwise exemplary military-education record had been a phase of remediation required to bring his Deployable Empathic Quotient up to scratch, this flaw later being diagnosed as a consequence of his shunning all such feelings after his inadvertent insult and subsequent disciplining. Still, he had made captain, which one did not do without some empathic subtlety, anticipating the feelings of both one’s crew and one’s opponents.

He looked out at the half-melted remains of the captured construct, a pitted, black-body, comet-disguised vessel which had been roughly eight hundred metres in diameter and was now missing a great quarter-bite of structure. It lay a couple of kilometres off, radiating the last of the heat from its partial destruction, surrounded by a small system of wreckage, dark shards and splinters orbiting its ravaged body.

The view, lit by one of their own ship’s attenuated CR beams, was about as clear and perfect as it could possibly be; there was no screen in the way, and not even any transparent hull material, atmosphere or other medium. The captain was looking straight out from the flying bridge of his ship, an open-work nest of massive but elegantly sculpted girder work on the outside of the vessel. The vessel was unshared with any other species, crewed by Voehn only, happily, so the rest of the ship was open to vacuum too. For the duration of the action they had been deep in the guts of the ship, of course, safe in the core control space, sheltered by layers of shields and hull, senses protected by screens, but — once the wreck had been judged safe — the captain, his Number Three and a couple of favoured ratings had made their way to the exterior, the better to appreciate the view of their vanquished foe.

The captain looked around, as if hoping to see some real comet nuclei floating past. Taking a bearing, zooming in, he could just make out the lights denoting the drives of his other two ships, ordered to return to the inner system once the engagement was over, two dim blue stars, untwinkling. Save those, all that was visible nearby was the ship beneath them and the wreck two klicks away.

A cold and lonely spot to die, the captain thought. A logical, sensible choice of hiding place for the abomination machine, but still not a site any living — or apparently living — thing raised anywhere else would normally choose as a place to spend its last moments.

He handed the screen back to his Number Three and turned his principal eyes to look out at the hulk again, his rear recessional signal pit and secondary eye complex still facing the junior officer, flickering the words,

Well, one mission-part accomplished. Lay in a return to system base and, once the full contents of the abomination’s memory have been processed, deploy AM charges sufficient to leave residue no greater than elementary particle in size.

Sir.

Dismissed.

* * *

The ship accelerated smoothly but moderately hard, creating a distant humming roar. Fassin had a little pad under his right forearm which sensed muscle movements there and adjusted the screen across from him — above from him, now, it felt, as the couch straightened out and the gee-suit supported him — and so he got a glimpse of Pirrintipiti as the ship turned away from Nasqueron and headed deeper in-system, to the next planet sunward, the more-or-less Earthlike Sepekte.

On the screen, ’glantine’s tropical capital was a towered and shimmering smear draped across a scatter of dark green islands set in a pale green sea. Odd, already to be missing Pirri, he thought. He wouldn’t have had a chance to set foot out of the port there, but he’d been expecting the usual routine of transferring from a suborb to a tube train and then, somewhere in the bowels of the vast stalk, the Equatower, waiting for the lift up the cable to the satport and a space-capable ship there. To be heading straight out from the Autumn House into space just seemed wrong somehow, a curious disconnect of the soul.

Trips to Sepekte usually took anywhere from under five days to over a week at the standard one-gee acceleration, depending on planetary alignment. The ships were large and comfortable and you could move around normally, visiting restaurants and bars, screens and gyms and, on the bigger liners, even swimming pools. The weightless minutes in the middle were an interlude for fun (and, often, some rushed and oddly unsatisfactory sex). People from ’glantine sometimes found the double weight of standard gee a little uncomfortable, but it was pretty much what they’d experience when they got to Sepekte anyway, so it was kind of like getting in training.

The pressure of what the screen told him was three, four and then just over five gees settled into Fassin. The gee-suit was sensing his breaths, gently helping him inflate his lungs without too much added effort.

“Think I’ll take,” First Officer Dicogra said, “a snooze. Or would you,” she asked, “like to talk?”

“Snooze away,” he told her. “Thinking of taking a nap myself.”

“Fine. Systems’ll watch our vitals anyway. Till later, then.”

“Pleasant dreams.”

Fassin watched the screen show ’glantine drop away. Beyond it, revealed, was not initially the night of space or foamy wash of stars, but instead the broad, sunlit face of Nasqueron, a mad, swirling dance of gases the colour of some fabulous desert but moving in colossal ribbons like opposed streams of liquid around a globe a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across, a planet you could drop a thousand ’glantines or Sepektes or Earths into and never notice the difference; a not so little system of its own within Ulubis system, a vast world that was almost as unlike home for any human as it was possible to imagine, and yet the place where Fassin had already spent most of his unusual, sporadically paced life, and so, for all its alien scale, wild magnetic and radiation gradients, extremes of temperature, crushing pressures, unbreathable atmosphere and dangerously, unpredictably eccentric inhabitants, it was for Fassin as it was for his fellow Seers, something like home after all.

He watched until it too started to shrink, until ’glantine was a mere dot floating above its vast and banded ochre face, and the brighter stars appeared around it, then switched the screen off, and slept.

He woke. Four hours had passed. The pressure was the same as it had been, the ship still roaring far away. He didn’t need any more sleep, so he went into slowtime, just thinking.

Everybody in Ulubis system knew where they were when the portal was destroyed. You knew because as soon as you heard you realised you’d be staying in Ulubis for the next two and a half centuries at least. For most people, even the vast majority — ninety-nine per cent of them human — who would never have the chance to travel out of system, that meant something profound. It meant that they were here for the rest of their lives. No dream they’d ever had or hope they’d entertained about seeing the rest of the galaxy would ever be reflected in reality.

For others, it meant that loved ones, elsewhere in the rest of the galaxy, on the far side of the vanished portal, were for ever gone. Two hundred and fourteen years to Zenerre: over two centuries for light and therefore any sort of message or signal to travel from there to Ulubis; maybe three centuries before the wormhole link was re-established, even if the Engineers set out from there with a portal-carrying ship almost immediately.

And who was truly to know if there were any Engineers or great ships left? Perhaps the Ulubis portal had not been alone, and all the rest had been attacked and destroyed at the same time. Maybe the Mercatoria itself was no more, maybe there was no Complex, no more Arteria and no more portals left anywhere and all that remained of the galaxy’s latest great civil-isation were umpteen thousand separate little island systems, fractured and abandoned and alone.

The usual wash of through-portal comms traffic just before the destruction had betrayed no hint of such a galaxy-wide attack. But then, there had been no hint more than ten minutes before of an attack on the Ulubis portal either, until the biggest fleet of Beyonder craft Ulubis had ever seen had swung glittering out of empty nowhere, throwing themselves against the single greatest concentration of ships and firepower anywhere in the system, being obliterated in their hundreds, but — effectively ignoring the defending ships except where they were directly in their way — pummelling and battering their way through defensive screen after defensive screen, oblivious to harm, straight towards the portal mouth itself, finally erasing everything around them in a flurry of immense antimatter explosions that alone announced to the system the scale and violence of what had taken place, creating a vanishingly brief cluster of novae in the facing skies of every inhabited surface, casting shadows far away, blinding those nearer-to and vaporising most of what was still left of the Beyonder fleet and many of their pursuers.

For a short while it looked as though they had failed, because the last line of defence had held and the portal had survived.

The entire attack up to that point had been a feint, and the real assault took place when a large ship — a few million tonnes of hollowed-out asteroid travelling at over ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light — flicked in from the opposite direction. In a sense, it missed too, darting past the portal mouth a hundred metres away and colliding with a collection of laser battlesats which hadn’t even started to turn towards it when it smashed into them, instantly annihilating them, the entire portal surround, its sub-units and almost all its associated systems and creating another stunning detonation of light in the sky.

None of which destroyed the portal; that was done by the relativistic mass of the sacrificed ship itself.

Portals were only ever positioned at Lagrange points or other orbits distant from large heavenly bodies because they needed a section of space-time that was relatively flat. Too great a gradient — too near the gravity well of a planet or other large object — and they stopped working. Increase the S-T curve only a little more and they imploded and disappeared altogether, usually violently. The hurtling asteroid-ship was so massive and its velocity so close to light speed that it had the same apparent mass as a planet the size of Sepekte. The passing of its gravity well so close to the portal mouth, especially at that extreme velocity, was sufficient to collapse the portal and the “hole beyond, sending one more cataclysmic pulse of light flashing throughout the system.

The last few of the earlier attackers immediately fled but were either destroyed or were disabled and then self-destructed.

Two days before the attack took place, Fassin had been sort of in space, sort of on Sepekte, sitting in a revolving restaurant at the summit of the Borquille Equatower having dinner with Taince Yarabokin, who was due to head back to the Summed Fleet Academy the following day after an extended compassionate leave following the death of her mother. Fassin had just come out of a month-long trawl through some of the seedier, less salubrious entertainment palaces of “skem, Sepekte’s second city. He felt jaded. Old, even.

He and Taince had kept in touch since the incident in the ruined ship, though they’d never become especially close, despite a night spent together shortly afterwards. Saluus had kind of drifted away from both of them subsequently, then headed off early to a finishing college half the galaxy away, then spent decades being a problem playboy son to his vexed father — behaving more or less continually on a galactic scale the way Fassin did only intermittently on a systemic one — and returning to Ulubis very occasionally for brief, unannounced visits.

A Guard Rescue suborb had arrived at the ruined ship lying crumpled on ’glantine’s North Waste Land a few minutes behind the Navarchy craft Taince had summoned. Its personnel had entered the alien ship and found Ilen’s broken body. There was an inquiry. Sal was fined by the civil authorities for violating the ship’s interior more than had been strictly required for the purposes of physical sanctuary from the external threat, while the Navarchy Military had awarded Taince extra course credits for her actions.

Fassin found himself copping for some sort of civil bravery award thanks to Taince’s testimony but managed to avoid the ceremony. He never did mention the piece of twisted metal that Sal had stolen from the wreck, but Taince had broached the subject herself over dinner in the Equatower. She’d known at the time, she just hadn’t found herself capable of being bothered enough to take it off Sal again. Let him have his pathetic trophy.

“Probably their equivalent of a door knob or a coat hook,” she said ruefully. “But one gets you ten, by the time it was sitting in Sal’s locker or on his desk it was the ship’s control yoke or the main-armament ‘fire’ button.”

Taince looked out at the distant horizon and near surface of Sepekte, sliding past as the restaurant revolved, providing the appearance of gravity in this gravity-cancelled habitat, anchored at the space limit of a forty kilo-klick cable whose other end fell to ground in Borquille, Sepekte’s capital city.

“Shit, you knew all the time,” Fassin said, nodding. “I suppose I should have expected that. Not much ever got past you.”

Taince had gone on to become a high-flier in every sense, carving a perfect career through the Navarchy Military and being chosen for the Summed Fleet, one of the Mercatoria’s highest divisions and one into which very few humans had ever been invited. Commander Taince Yarabokin looked young, had aged well.

The three of them had.

Sal, despite his multifarious debaucheries, could afford the very best treatments and plausibly access some supposedly forbidden to him, so he looked like he’d lived through a lot fewer of the hundred and three years which had actually elapsed since Ilen’s death. Lately there was even a rumour that he was thinking of settling down, becoming a good son, learning the business, applying himself.

Taince had spent decades at close to light speed pursuing the Beyonders’ craft and attacking their bases, fighting quickly, ageing slowly.

Fassin had joined the family firm and become a Slow Seer after all, so spent his own time-expanded decades conversing with and gradually extracting information from the Dwellers of Nasqueron. He’d had, like Saluus, his own wild years, been a roaring lad ripping through the highs and dives of ’glantine, Sepekte and beyond, taking in a not so Grand Tour of his own round some of the supposedly civilised galaxy’s more colourful regions, losing money and illusions, gaining weight and some small amount of wisdom. But his indulgences had been on a smaller scale than Sal’s, he supposed, and certainly took place over a shorter timescale. Before too long he came home, sobered up and calmed down, took the training and became a Seer.

He still had his wild interludes, but they were few and far between, if never quite enough of either for the taste of his uncle Slovius.

Even in the millennia-hallowed halls of Seerdom, he had kept on making waves, upsetting people. The trend over the last fifteen hundred years — the years of Uncle Slovius’s reign — had favoured virtual delving over the direct method. Virtual or remote delving meant staying comatose and closely cared-for in a clinic-clean Seer faculty complex on Third Fury, the close-orbit moon riding barely above the outer reaches of Nasqueron’s hazy atmosphere, to communicate from there with the Dwellers beneath by a combination of high-res NMR scanners, laser links, comms satellites and, finally, mechanical remotes which did the dirty dangerous bit, keeping close contact with the flights and flocks and pods and schools and individuals of the Dwellers themselves.

Fassin had been a ringleader in a small rebellion, insisting, with a few other young Seers, on sliding into cramped arrowhead gascraft, breathing in gillfluid, accepting tubes and valves into every major orifice and surrendering body and fate to a little ship that contained the Seer, accepted the gees and poison and radiation and everything else and took him or her physically into the gas-giant’s atmosphere, the better to earn the respect and confidence of the creatures who lived there, the better to do the job and learn the stuff.

There had been deaths, setbacks, arguments, bannings and strikes, but eventually, largely on the back of unarguably better delving results and more raw data (unarguably better delving results in the sense that they were manifestly superior compared with what had gone before, not unarguably better in the sense that the old guard couldn’t claim this would all have happened anyway if everybody had just stuck to their ways, which were probably what had really prompted this long-overdue improvement in the first place) the youngsters had triumphed, and delving the hard way, Real Delving, hands metaphorically dirty, became the norm, not the exception. It was, anyway, more exciting, more risky but also so much more rewarding, more fun for the Seer concerned, as well as being more viewer-friendly for those who chose to pick up the edited, distilled, time-delayed feed that the more progressive Seer houses had been putting out to the entsworks for the last half-millennium or so.

“You have made it into something like a sport,” Slovius had said sadly one day, when he and Fassin had been fishing together in a dust-boat on ’glantine’s Sea of Fines. “It used to be more of the mind.”

Nevertheless, from being a steadfast, heels-in critic of the whole Real Delve movement, Slovius, who had always been quick to seize any opportunity to advance the interests of his Sept, had become a sort of — appropriately — remote champion, supporting Fassin and eventually putting the full weight of Sept Bantrabal behind him and his fellow revolutionaries. That both Fassin and Slovius had been right, and their Sept flourished to become arguably the most productive and respected of the twelve Septs of Ulubis system — and so by implication one of the foremost Seer houses in the galaxy — had been the single most satisfying achievement of Slovius’s time as Chief Seer and paterfamilias of Sept Bantrabal.

Fassin was now arguably the best-known Seer in the system, especially after his time with the Tribe Dimajrian, the wild pod of adolescent Dwellers he’d befriended and effectively become part of for a seeming century and a real half-dozen years. He was not yet even at the start of his prime by Seer reckoning but was nevertheless already at the top of his game. He had been born three hundred and ninety years earlier, had lived barely forty-five of those in body-time, and looked a decade younger.

Sometimes he thought back to what had happened in the ruined alien ship, and he looked at all that had happened to Sal and Taince and himself, and reflected that it was as though they had all come away from that nightmare with a sort of bizarre blessing, an inverted curse, a trio of charmed lives, quite as if Ilen had unknowingly given up whatever golden future had awaited her to add that weight of divided bounty to theirs.

He and Taince parted with a kiss. She was heading to the portal and through the Complex to the far side of the galaxy, to the Fleet Academy to spend a year passing on her knowledge. Fassin was going to the far side of Ulubis, where Nasqueron was at the time, to continue trying to extract knowledge from the Dwellers.

Taince was safely through the portal a day before it was destroyed. Fassin was on a liner, a day out of Sepekte. He understood even as the news was still coming in that he might never see her again.

Sal, who might so easily have been away, was at home with his long-suffering father when the attack took place. After ten catatonic hours of disbelief he spent a month mourning his lost freedoms, trying to sink, fumigate and fuck his sorrows away in what passed for the pleasure-pits of Ulubis. In fact, Sepekte, and especially Borquille, had perfectly disrespectable bars, smoke houses and bordellos — Borquille had a whole district, Boogeytown, set aside for just such recreations — but the point was they were not the rest of the civilised galaxy. Fass had bumped into Saluus in a Boogeytown spike bar once, though Sal had been so out of it that he hadn’t recognised his one-time friend.

Then Sal straightened out, cut his hair, lost a few tattoos and a lot of acquaintances and at the start of the next working week turned up bang on time at the company offices, where people were still running around in a frenzy, spooked by all the numerous false alarms, expecting to be invaded at any moment. Right from the start, the questions were: Why? Why us? What next? And: Anybody else?

Had something like this happened everywhere? It would take over two centuries for Ulubis to discover if it was part of a wider catastrophe or had been singled out for its own specific disaster. From being no more remote than any other system at the end of a single wormhole — and so orders of magnitude less remote than the many hundreds of thousands of Faring systems still to be connected or reconnected — Ulubis, its principal planet Sepekte, its three significant inhabited moons including ’glantine, its thousands of artificial habitats and the twenty billion souls that the whole system contained were fully as remote and exposed as they’d always seemed from any casual glance at a galactic star chart.

The Guard, Navarchy Military and surviving units of the Ulubis Ambient Squadron repaired and regrouped. Martial law was declared and a War Emergency Plan actioned which turned the bulk of the system’s advanced productive capacity to weapons and war craft. As a consequence, Kehar Heavy Industries, Saluus’s father’s company, expanded and prospered beyond its founder’s most avaricious fantasies, and Saluus went from wastrel heir to a great fortune to inheritor-in-waiting of a vast one.

In the system hierarchy, thought was given at the highest levels to attempting to construct a wormhole of Ulubis’s own and a carrier fleet to take one end of it to Zenerre. But aside from the vast cost and the point — assuming a portal would be heading in the other direction before too long — that it would be a waste of time and effort which would bring reconnection no quicker, there was one clinching argument that would apply until either no signal arrived from Zenerre or word came of an utter breakdown in civil society: in the Mercatoria only Engineers were allowed to make and emplace wormholes.

There were sanctions and punishments for those systems and rulers who even began a “hole-creation programme without explicit permission, and that permission had not been present in the Mercatoria’s pre-agreed War Emergency Plan for Ulubis.

Back in space, distributed around the Lagrange point where the portal had lain, the few pieces of recovered Beyonder ships indicated that the portal’s attackers had been made up from the same three groups which had troubled Ulubis and some of the nearby volumes for thousands of years: Transgress, the True Free and the BiAlliance, for this one occasion working in concert and in far greater numbers than they ever had before.

Anxious, on edge, waiting for whatever a Beyonder invasion might bring, the people of the system reverted to a state something more like that of Earth’s rHumanity before it had been fully brought into the galactic community.

It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed that they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe. Even knowing that the rest of the galactic community did exist — at least in some form, even in a worst case — the culture of Ulubis system shifted fractionally towards that earlier, pre-ascensionary state.

Restricted by martial law in new and annoying but sometimes oddly exciting ways, coming to terms with their sudden isolation and newly appreciated vulnerability, people lived more for the short term, clutching at what pleasures and rewards might be available today, just in case there really was no tomorrow. No great breakdown in society took place and there were no significant riots or rebellions, though there were protests and crack-downs, and, as the authorities admitted much later — much later — Mistakes Were Made. But the system held together rather than fell apart, and many people would look back on that strange, unsettled epoch with a sort of nostalgia. There had been something feverish but vivid about the time, a reconnection with life after the disconnection with everybody else, which led to what even looked from some angles suspiciously like a cultural renaissance for what people were now starting to call the Ulubine Disconnect.

Fassin missed out on most of the excitement, taking every opportunity he could to go delving, as if frightened that he might not be able to do so in the future. Even when he was living back in real-time he was insulated from the extremes of the system-wide turmoil of fear and nervous energy by being on ’glantine rather than Sepekte or its ring habitats, then by living within the Sept, at one of its five seasonal houses, rather than in Pirrintipiti or any of the planet-moon’s other major cities. He still travelled, spending occasional holidays in Pirri or off-’glantine, and that was when he felt the strange new atmosphere of freneticism most keenly.

Mostly, though, he was in Nasqueron, nestled in a fragile little gascraft, occasionally at normal life-speed, flying with the younger Dwellers, riding the gases alongside them, buffeted by the gas-giant-girdling, planet-swallowing super-winds and whirling hyper-storms of the planet, sometimes — more often and much more productively, though far less excitingly — floating sedately in a study or a library in one of the millions of Dweller cities with one of the more elderly and scholarly Dwellers, who alone in the system seemed perfectly unconcerned about the portal’s demise. A few of the (rare) polite ones expressed the sort of formal shame-but-there-you-go sympathy people tend to exhibit when an acquaintance’s elderly relative expires peacefully, but that was about it.

Fassin supposed that it was foolish to expect anything else from a race that was as ancient as the Dwellers claimed to be, who had supposedly explored the galaxy several times over at velocities of only a few per cent of light speed long before the planetary nebula that gave birth to Earth, Jupiter and the Sun had even formed out of the debris of still more antique generations of stars, and who still maintained they felt vaguely restricted not by that absolute limit on the conventional pace of travel but rather by the modest scale of the galaxy that these staggeringly long-ago, almost wilfully leisurely sets of voyages had revealed.

The days, weeks and months of waiting and preparation for an invasion became a year. The Beyonder attacks, rather than increasing, faded away almost to nothing, as though the portal assault had been one last insane hurrah rather than the logical, if wasteful, precursor to a war of conquest. The years added up towards a decade and gradually people and institutions relaxed and came to believe that the invasion might never come. The majority of the emergency powers lapsed, though the armed forces remained in high numbers and on high alert, sensors and patrols sweeping the volumes of space around Ulubis, seeking a threat that seemed to have disappeared.

In four directions lay almost empty intergalactic nothingness: barren volumes holding a few ancient, exhausted cinder suns with life-free systems or none at all, a scattering of dust and gas clouds, brown dwarfs, neutron stars and other debris — some of these, or the space in between, technically life-supporting for Slow exotics, Cincturia and Enigmatics, but patently devoid of any species who cared or could even understand the fate or concerns of the people of Ulubis — but no allies, no one to help or offer assistance or support, and certainly no portal connections.

Down-arm, nearly parallel with the galaxy’s wispy limit, heading into the thickening mass of gas and nebulae and stars, was Zenerre. Inwards, between Ulubis and the galactic centre spread a vast mass of Disconnect; the Cluster Epiphany Five Disconnect, millions of stars spread throughout cubic light-centuries which, it was believed, still supported worlds that had once been part of the civilised, connected, “hole-networked galactic community until over seven thousand years earlier and the Arteria Collapse which had preceded the War of the New Quick and all the excitement and the woes that had flowed from it.

* * *

Two centuries, one decade, four years and twenty days after the portal attack, exactly when it might have been expected, the first signal arrived from Zenerre, the wavefront of what would become a constant stream of information from the rest of the connected galaxy. Where, Ulubis was informed, life was going on as usual. The attack on its portal had been unique, and all was basically well with the Mercatoria. Attacks and incursions by the various Beyonder groups continued throughout the civilised galaxy, as did operations against them, but these were on the usual mainly nuisance-value level that the Beyonder Wars had evidenced for thousands of years, the tactically distressing and annoyingly wasteful but strategically irrelevant distributed background micro-violence that people had started calling the Hum.

Relief, puzzlement and a vague sense of victimisation spread throughout Ulubis system.

The Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir, portal-carrying, set out from Zenerre for Ulubis less than a year after the disaster, with a travel time initially given as 307 years, later reduced by increments to level out at 269 as the Eship upped its velocity even closer to light speed, the Engineers aboard fine-tuning the systems which insulated the hauled portal from the effects of its own and the ship’s relativistic mass. People in Ulubis system relaxed, the last vestiges of martial law were hidden away from public sight again. Those many born after the portal’s destruction wondered what it would be like to have a connection to the rest of the galaxy, to this semi-mythical meta-civilisation they’d heard so much about.

The flip-over point came, and Fassin was vaguely aware of it as the pressure on his chest and flesh and limbs faded away over the course of a few seconds, replacing that feeling of oppression with a sensation of sudden blood-roaring bloatedness as his body struggled to cope with the change. He kept his eyes closed. Almost immediately there was a faint trace of force, a gentle push from somewhere beneath his head, then weightlessness again, and a few moments later a matching tug from somewhere beneath his feet, and then weight returning, pressure quickly building, until the roaring in his head faded and became the distant thunder of the ship again.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous, standing before the ruins of the city, stooped and dug gloved fingers into the soft earth by his feet, wrenching out a handful of soil. He held it to his face for a while, staring at it, then brought it close to his nose and smelled it, then let it fall and dusted off his gloves while staring down at the huge crater where a large part of the city had been.

The crater was still filling from the sea, a slow curling curve of brown-white water spilling from the estuary beyond. The waterfall disappeared into the seat of the crater in a vast cloud-bank of vapour, and steam rose everywhere from the rolling, tumbling confusion of waters as the great rocky bowl cooled. A massive trunk of steam, three kilometres or more across, rose into the calm pastel sky, rolling up through thin layers of cloud, flat-heading where it achieved the middle reaches of the atmosphere.

It was the Archimandrite’s conceit, where a severe lesson had to be taught on a planet capable of supporting such a mark, that a city by the sea, which was either itself guilty of resisting or judged by him symbolic of resistance shown by others on the planet, be remade in the image of his beloved Junch City, back on Leseum9 IV. If a people would resist him, either while undergoing conquest or enduring occupation, they would suffer, of course, but they would be part of something greater at the same time and they would, even in death, even in the death of much of their city, be the unwitting and unwilling participants in what was, indeed, a work of art. For here, seen from this hillside, was there not a new Faraby Bay? Was that slot through which the waters thundered, shaking the ground, not another Force Gap? Was that piling tower of steam, first drawn straight up then stroked to the horizon, not a kind of signature, his very own flourish?

The Bay was overly circular, certainly, and the slot a mere break in a modest crater wall composed largely of estuarine mud, presenting no aesthetic match at all for the great kilometre-high cliffs of the real Force Gap — indeed, the whole setting for this new image of junch City entirely lacked the original’s dramatic ring of surrounding mountains, and this little parkland hill on which he stood — with his admirals, generals and guard waiting obediently behind, allowing him this moment of reflection — was frankly a poor substitute for the vertical cliff of the Sheer Citadel and its magnificent views.

Nevertheless, an artist had to work with what there was to hand, and where there had once been just another swarming seaside city, lying tipped upon the land, variously hilled, messily distributed round a tributary river, with the all usual urban sprawl, great buildings, docks, breakwaters and anchorages — in other words what it had always been, roughly, no matter that there had been earlier so-called catastrophes like earthquakes or floods or great fires or bombardment from sea or air or earlier invasion — now there was an image of a fair and distant place, now there was a new kind of savage beauty, now there was a fit setting for a new city reborn in the image of his sovereignty, now there was a sort of — even — healing joining with those other peoples and places who had surrendered to his will, in suffering and in image, for this majestic crater, this latest work, was just the most recent of his creations, one more jewel on a string stretching back to the primacy of elegance that was Junch City.

Anyone with sufficient self-belief, enough ruthlessness and (Luseferous believed himself modest enough to admit) an adequate supply of luck could — if the will was there and the times required such determination — conquer and destroy. Judging how much to destroy for the effect one wished to achieve, knowing when to be ruthless, when to show leniency, even when to exhibit beguiling, rage-sapping generosity and a touch of humour; that required a more measured, a more subtle, a more — he could think of no other word for it — civilised touch. He had that touch. The record spoke for itself. To then go on from there and use the sad necessity of destruction to create art, to form an image of a better place and forge symbolic unity… that was on another level again, that elevated the mere war-maker, the mere politician, to the status of creator.

Tendrils of smoke rose all around the central column of steam, dark paltry vines adorning a huge pale trunk. These marked where defending aircraft had fallen and where fires had been started by the crater-weapon’s ground shock, no doubt. Part of the artistry involved in such a work was creating a great declivity without utterly destroying all around it (a new, reborn city had to grow here, after all). Some sophistication of weaponry was required to achieve such precision. His armaments experts attended to such details.

The Archimandrite Luseferous looked about him, smiling to his chiefs of staff, all standing respectfully at his heel, looking a little nervous to be here in the fresh air of another newly subject planet. (Yet was it not good to breathe in that fresh air, for all its alien scents? Did those strange new odours not themselves mean that another treasure had been added to their ever-increasing domain?) Above and behind, bristling war craft hovered and hummed, attended by small clouds of sensory and weapon platforms. Spread in a ring all around were his personal guards, most lying or kneeling on the grass, their darkly glinting weaponry poised. A few in military exoskels lumbered around or squatted, splayed feet squashing into the earth.

At the foot of the hill, beyond another ring of guards, beneath a watchful buzz of guard drones, the refugees moved like a slow river of dun and grey.

Stilters; groundbats, whule. A Mercatorial species. Disconnected all these millennia, certainly, but still a Mercatorial species. Luseferous looked up into the pale green sky, imagining night, the veils of stars, and the one particular sun — pointed out to him from orbit just forty hours ago, while the invasion forces were being prepared for the initial drop — growing steadily closer as they crawled and fought their way towards it, which was called Ulubis.

* * *

In the bright, golden-hued air of Sepekte, with the Borquille Equatower a thin stem in the hazy distance, the little Navarchy ship approached the palace complex, sliding through an ancient forest of kilometres-tall atmospheric power columns and between more modest but still impressive administration and accommodation towers. It disappeared into a wide, gently sloped tunnel set into the reception plaza in front of the enormous ball that was the palace of the Hierchon, an eight-hundred-metre sphere modelled after Nasqueron itself by a long-departed Sarcomage, complete with individual bands of slowly contra-rotating floors all sliding round a stationary inner core. Changing orange-red, brown and ochre swirls of pattern, convincingly like the view of the distant gas-giant’s cloud tops seen from space, moved across the face of the palace, hiding windows and balconies, sensors and transmitters.

“Major Taak? Lieutenant Inesiji, palace guard. This way, please. Quick as we can, sir.” The speaker, whose voice sounded like a human child talking with a mouthful of ball bearings, was a jajuejein, a creature which in repose resembled an insectile tumbleweed sixty or seventy centimetres in diameter. This one had drawn itself up to Fassin’s two-metre height, marshalling a host of twiglike components coloured dark green and steel blue to resemble a sort of openwork head like a bird’s nest — thankfully it had not tried to make a face — and had balanced itself on two vaguely leglike stalks. The rest of its body, offering glimpses of the reception cavern’s floor beyond, was just a cylinder, adorned with belts of soft-looking material and small metallic components that might have been jewellery, gadgets or weapons. It half-turned, half-flowed to a small open cart where the ship’s whule rating was already depositing Fassin’s luggage.

Fassin turned and waved to the groggily cheerful Dicogra, joined the jajuejein in the cart and was whisked away through a brief security reception area to a lift and a curving corridor which took him to a suite of rooms with what looked like a real outside view of the city — north, with pale, jagged hills in the far distance. Lieutenant Inesiji placed Fassin’s bags on the bed with fluid grace and informed him that he had exactly three-fifths of an hour to freshen up, don his ceremonial court clothes and present himself outside his door, whereupon he would be escorted to the audience chamber.

Fassin blipped a safe-arrival message to Bantrabal and then did as he’d been told.

The circular audience chamber was glittering and warm, walls of white gold sparkling under a ceiling-filling galaxy-shaped cloud of tiny sharp lights impersonating stars. Lieutenant Inesiji showed Fassin to a position on one of the many platforms set into the shallow, stepped bowl of the chamber. A human-conforming seat malleabled its way up from the floor. He sat in it — stiffly, in his bulky court robes — and the lieutenant told him, “Please stay where you are for now, sir’ in a sort of gargled whisper, executed what might have been a bow, turned into what looked very like a cartwheel, and rolled away back up the slope of gangway to an exit.

Fassin looked around. The chamber looked like it might hold a thousand people, but he was one of only about two dozen people present, distributed around the shallowly conical space as though to maximise the distance between each individual. Humans — all, like him, in cumbersome, rather gaudy court dress — just about outnumbered the others, but he saw another jajuejein — balled, either resting or sleeping, criss-crossed with iridescent ribbons — two whule sitting like angular grey tents covered in silver flowers, both looking at him, a pair of quaup, one of the two-metre-long red-tan ellipses floating and also looking at him (well, certainly pointing at him), and the other stood on its end, either also snoozing or possibly at attention — Fassin’s knowledge of alien body language was wide but shallow except where Dwellers were concerned. Three large environment suits containing waterworlders completed the non-human contingent: two of the esuits, looking like aquamarine impersonations of the quaups, most likely contained kuskunde; the third was a matt black lozenge the size of a small bus, radiating warmth. That esuit would almost certainly contain an symbioswarm Ifrahile.

In the centre of the chamber, at its deepest point, just before a set of wide, tall, concentric platforms which broke the symmetry of the space, there was an incongruous-looking device which looked like an ancient iron cooking pot: a black-bellied urn a couple of metres in diameter, capped with a shallow dome and sitting on a tripod of stubby legs on the buttery sheen of the solid gold floor. Its surface was pinstriped with thin vanes, but otherwise it resembled something almost prehistoric. Fassin had never seen anything like it before. He shivered, despite the warmth of the chamber.

The quaup which might have been sleeping suddenly flicked level with a ripple of lateral mantle and turned towards its fellow creature thirty metres away, which swivelled to look back at it. Expression patterns flashed across their face nacelles, then they moved towards each other, hovering together, faces signal-flickering conversation for the few seconds it took for a small flutter drone to drop from the ceiling and — in spoken voice, with chirps and squeaks — apparently ordered them back to their places. The quaup shriek-popped back at the mechanical remote, but split up, drifting away to their earlier positions.

They had just about resumed their allotted patches when a group of half a dozen jajuejein technicians, awkward in their shape-constraining formal court gear of dimly iridescent ribbons, entered from a door at one side of the chamber floor, pushing large pallets full of highly techy-looking equipment which they positioned in a rough circle round the cooking-pot device. Their body ribbons marked them out as Shrievalty, Fassin suddenly realised, wondering whether as a major of the Ocula he was senior enough to order them around. A similar-sized group — human Cessorian priests from their garb, though in their court best it was hard to be sure — could they even be Lustrals? — approached from the opposite direction. The priests stood close behind the technicians, who ignored them and busied themselves setting up and adjusting their arcane apparatus.

Finally, an alarming group of four human and four whule troopers in full mirror-finish power-armour stalked in, complete with a variety of heavy infantry weapons. The ambience of the chamber changed; even across species the mood almost tangibly altered from one of some puzzlement and a degree of expectation to one of alarm, even fear. The two quaup were exchanging rapid large-scale face signals, the Ifrahile esuit rose hissing from its platform and the whule pair were alternating between staring at each other and glaring down at their mirror-armoured kin. Who brought armed forces into an audience chamber? Was this a trap? Had all here offended the Hierchon? Were they all to be murdered?

The soldiers deployed in a wide circle around the Shrievalty and Cessoria, standing at ease, weaponry poised, armour-locked. They were facing inwards, towards the black cooking-pot device. The mood in the room seemed to relax a little.

Then the series of platforms beyond the giant urn and the various groups of functionaries shimmered once and dropped into the floor, to re-emerge some moments later, crowded with people.

An outer ring of white-uniformed human court officials, an inner ring of species-varied, extravagantly emblazoned courtiers and an outer core, again mixed-species, of Ascendancy, Omnocracy, Administrata and Cessoria — Fassin recognised most of them from the news and the few formal visits he’d had to make to the court over the years — formed semicircular tiers of importance around the being in the centre: the Hierchon Ormilla himself, resplendent in his giant platinum-sheathed discus of an environment suit, floating humming just above the highest platform, the dark creature’s great gaping face visible through the suit’s forward diamond window amongst roiling clouds of crimson gas. Seven metres high, three wide, the suit was by some margin the largest and most impressive of the micro-environments in the chamber. It quickly took on a frosted look, as humidity in the air condensed on its deep-chilled surfaces.

As the Hierchon and his attendants appeared, Fassin’s seat gave a warning vibration and began to sink back into the platform beneath. Fassin took the hint and stood, then bowed, while the various other people in the chamber performed their equivalent actions. The giant esuit lowered fractionally so that its base touched the platform, and Fassin’s seat rose smoothly from the platform again.

The Hierchon Ormilla was an oerileithe: a gas-giant dweller, but — important distinction, this, to all concerned — not a Dweller, even if the shape of his esuit made him look like one. Ormilla had ruled the Ulubis system since his investiture nearly six thousand years earlier, long before the humans who now made up the bulk of its populace had arrived. He was generally thought to be a competent if unimaginative governor, exercising what leeway a Hierchon had within the Mercatorial system with caution, sense and, on occasion, even a degree of compassion. His rule since the portal’s destruction had, by the estimation of the officially sanctioned media, been a humbling combination of breathtaking majesty, heroic, utterly exemplary fortitude and a touching, steadfast solidarity with his human charges. Unkinder, unsanctioned, often human critics might have accused him of betraying an early disposition towards authoritarianism and even paranoid repression, eventually followed later by a more composed and lenient attitude, when he started listening to his advisers again.

Looking more carefully at the high-ups present, Fassin realised that, basically, the gang was all here. Apart from Ormilla himself, the Hierchon’s two most senior deputies, the Peregals Tlipeyn and Emoerte were in attendance, as was the most senior member of the Propylaea to survive the portal’s destruction, sub-master Sorofieve, the top Navarchy officer, Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, Guard-General Thovin, First Secretary Heuypzlagger of the Administrata, Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty — his own ultimate superior officer for the duration of the current emergency, Fassin supposed — and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria. The absolute elite of the system.

Fassin looked at the pot-bellied stove device squatting on the golden floor, and at the heavily armed troopers, and thought what a perfect opportunity was presenting itself for a complete decapitation of the system’s top brass.

“This is an extraordinary session of the Mercatorial Court of Ulubis, before the Hierchon Ormilla,” an official announced over the chamber’s PA, voice thundering. “The Hierchon Ormilla!” the official shouted, as though concerned that people hadn’t heard him the first time.

The official was speaking the human version of Standard, the galaxy’s lingua franca. Standard had been chosen as an inter-species, pan-galactic language over eight billion years ago. Dwellers had been the main vector in its spread, though they made a point of emphasising that it was not theirs originally. They had one very ancient, informal vernacular and another even more ancient formal language of their own, plus lots that had survived somehow from earlier times or been made up in the meantime. These latter came and went in popularity as such things tended to.

“Oh no, there was a competition,” the Dweller guide\mentor Y’sul had explained to Fassin on his first delve, hundreds of years ago. “Usual thing; lots of competing so-called universal standards. There was a proper full-scale war after one linguistic disagreement — a grumous and a p’Liner species, if memory serves — and after that came the usual response: inquiries, missions, meetings, reports, conferences, summits.

“What we now know as Standard was chosen after centuries of research, study and argument by a vast and unwieldy committee composed of representatives of thousands of species, at least two of which became effectively extinct during the course of the deliberations. It was chosen, astonishingly, on its merits, because it was an almost perfect language: flexible, descriptive, uncoloured (whatever that means, but apparently it’s important), precise but malleable, highly, elegantly complete yet primed for external-term-adoption and with an unusually free but logical link between the written form and the pronounced which could easily and plausibly embrace almost any set of phonemes, scints, glyphs or pictals and still make translatable sense.

“Best of all, it didn’t belong to anybody, the species which had invented it having safely extincted themselves millions of years earlier without leaving either any proven inheritors or significant mark on the greater galaxy, save this sole linguistic gem. Even more amazingly, the subsequent conference to endorse the decision of the mega-committee went smoothly and agreed all the relevant recommendations. Take-up and acceptance were swift and widespread. Standard became the first and so far only true universal language within just a few Quick-mean generations. Set a standard for pan-species cooperation that everybody’s been trying to live up to ever since.

“Which is not to say that everybody everywhere loves it without qualification. Amongst my own species in particular, resistance to its use continues to this day, and individual obsessives and small and indeed quite large groups and networks of enthusiasts are forever coming up with new and, they claim, even better universal languages. Some Dwellers persist in regarding Standard as an outrageous alien imposition and a symbol of our craven surrender to galactic fashion.

“Such persons tend to speak ancient formal. Or at least they do where they haven’t invented their own unique and generally utterly incomprehensible language.”

Uncle Slovius himself, on what, fittingly, had turned out to be his final delve, had accompanied Fassin on this, the young man’s first. “How perfectly typical,” he’d observed later. “Only Dwellers could have a completely fair competition eight billion years ago and still be arguing over the result.”

Fassin smiled at the thought and looked round the giant auditorium as the official’s words echoed and faded amongst the precious metals and sumptuous clothing. He thought it was all very impressive, in a slightly camp, almost vulgar way. He wondered how much tedious ceremony and baroque speechifying they would now have to sit through before anything of note happened or was said. He did a quick count of the bodies in the chamber. There were well over twice the thirty that the emissarial projection had told him to expect.

A tap-screen appeared on a stalk out of the platform surface and positioned itself in front of him, flicking into life with search and note facilities enabled, but no audio or visual record. Fassin tapped a symbol to confirm that he was there. Round the circular chamber, the others were also being presented with screens or their species-relevant alternative.

“You are here to witness the transmission of a signal from the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir,” Ormilla’s deep, synthesised voice said calmly. “We are informed that it is, of necessity, in the form of an Artificial Intelligence construct which will be destroyed after the audience has finished.” Ormilla paused, to let this sink in. Fassin thought he just hadn’t heard right. “How you use the information you are about to learn is a matter of duty and conscience,” Ormilla told them. “How you came by it is not; any revelation regarding the signal’s form is punishable by death. Begin.”

An AI? A conscious machine? An abomination? Were they serious? Fassin couldn’t believe it. The entire history of the Mercatoria was the record of its implacable persecution and destruction of AIs and the continual, laborious, zealously pursued effort to prevent them ever again coming into existence within the civilised galaxy. That was what the Lustrals were all about; they were the AI hunters, the remorseless, fanatic persecutors of machine intelligence and any and all research into it, and yet here they were, calmly watching the cooking-pot device and the technicians surrounding it.

A semi-transparent image flickered in the air above the dark machine in the centre of the chamber. The hologram was of a human male dressed in the uniform of an Admiral of the Summed Fleet. Fassin hadn’t even known that one of his species had risen to such impressive heights. The human admiral was an old, well-built man with a heavily lined face. Bald, of course, but sporting a heavily tattooed scalp. He wore, or his image appeared to wear, a high-rank space-combat suit, its helmet components in stowed configuration round the neck and shoulders. Various insignia on the surface of the suit confirmed with no discernible subtlety that the Admiral was an extremely important military person.

“Thank you, Hierchon Ormilla,” the image said, then seemed to look straight at Fassin, who felt startled for a moment before realising that the image probably appeared to be looking directly at everybody in the chamber. He certainly hoped so. “I represent Admiral Quile of the Summed Fleet, commanding the Third Medium Squadron of the battle fleet accompanying the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir on its journey towards Ulubis system, Fleet Admiral Kisipt commanding,” the projection said in a calm, no-nonsense voice.

Battle fleet? thought Fassin. You didn’t send a battle fleet to accompany an Eship, portal-carrying or not, did you? They usually travelled with a few Guard ships or one or two units of the Navarchy Military plus a single small Summed Fleet craft sometimes for ceremonial purposes. He was no military expert, but even he knew this sort of stuff, just from catching newscasts of at-the-time-recent connections and reconnections. He watched the military on the semicircular podia closely. Yep, looked like they were startled by this news, too.

“I am to dispense information, and orders,” the hologram said. “Then I will answer questions. Then I will be destroyed. Information first. Intelligence we have received strongly indicates that Ulubis system will, probably within a year and possibly within months of this signal reaching you, become the target of a full-scale invasive assault originating from the Cluster Epiphany Five Disconnect.”

The hologram paused, appearing to listen. There was a certain sense of stillness, even of shock in the chamber, but no gasps or expressions of fear or incredulity that Fassin could hear.

He scanned the people in the chamber, trying to work out if he was the only person present to whom this news might come as a surprise. Face flickers from the quaup, big staring looks between the whule, perhaps a few rather wide-eyed expressions amongst the tech people down near the dark AI machine. Some of the more readable courtiers looked a little stunned. The Ifrahile esuit might have wobbled fractionally. Fassin’s hand was moving towards the tap-screen when it lit up with a diagram of the galactic local volume, about a thousand years in diameter and centred on Cluster Epiphany Five, the millions-strong mass of stars core-in from the isolated wisp of suns near the end of which lay Ulubis.

“Indeed, our strategists put at about six per cent the possibility that by the time this signal arrived the invasion would already have happened.” The hologram looked around the chamber and smiled. “I am glad to see that is not the case.” The smile disappeared. “On the other hand I had hoped, when the original of this signal was recorded, that I would be telling you that the invasion was still three to five years away. Since becoming embodied here I’ve been given access to some of the real-time intelligence you’ve been gathering and have had no choice but to plump for an estimate that gives you even less time to prepare than we’d been hoping for.” The image paused briefly.

“The E-5 Discon was already known to be expanding aggressively. Deep-space monitors have been picking up blossoming eighth-power-level weapon-blink for several hundred years, centred on the Leseum systems.” The image looked around the chamber. “Space battles and high-megatonne nukes, in other words. All the signs are of a rogue hegemony, possibly under the thrall of a human calling himself the Archimandrite Luseferous. He was once genuinely of the Cessoria, though at the rank of Hariolator, not Archimandrite, so it would appear he’s promoted himself. In any case, I think we may now count him apostate.” The hologram smiled thinly. “The Leseum systems were until not all that long ago the last remaining connected part of the Epiphany Five region. However, that wormhole portal fell victim to a minor action of the Strew, leaving the whole volume completely cut off from civilisation.” The thin smile faded.

“Ten days ago from the time this signal was sent an invasion force out of the E-5 Discon comprising several hundred capital ships plus retinue and troop carriers attacked the Ruanthril system, inward from the E-5 Cluster. We assume it came as a surprise to them that Ruanthril had just received a new portal and been connected to the Mercatoria. It had not been part of the Complex before, which may help explain their miscalculation. In any event, elements of the Summed Fleet were present when the E-5 forces attacked. The attack was beaten off, with heavy losses on both sides.” At this, Fassin saw a look of something that certainly seemed like consternation pass over the face-parts of the Fleet Admiral Brimiaice. “Yes,” the image said, as though responding. “We were surprised too, frankly, and just had insufficient ships. Even more distressingly, the portal was subsequently destroyed.” Here, Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, a quaup, assumed the blank face of — if Fassin recalled his Facial [or equivalent] Expressions and Body Language of Mercatorial Species 101 course — vicariously shamed shock.

“Before that happened,” the hologram continued, “intelligence from the captured enemy flagship was transmitted into the Complex. It included a personal record belonging to their equivalent of a Grand-Admiral — the invasion fleet’s Supreme Commander — in which he recorded for posterity or his memoirs his puzzlement that so much of the vast military machine of which he was so proud to be a part was being directed not where it would carry the most weight or help capture the greatest number of systems in the shortest possible time — in other words, towards where the greatest mass of stars were, spin-ward, back, up, down and especially core-ward — but away from those regions, towards the almost empty galactic outskirts, towards the Southern Tendril Reefs, towards Stream Quaternary and the Ulubis system, or ‘the shit-nailed anus-probing finger at the end of a withered arm’, as he colourfully described it.”

Fassin nearly laughed. Most of the officials on the main ceremonial platforms, led by the humans, registered shock, horror or outrage in some form. The Hierchon’s esuit rolled back half a metre, as though physically struck.

The image took its time to look around the chamber. “Yes, unflattering. My apologies. You will be happy to know that the gentleman who was the source of this memorable image is currently helping the Combined Forces Intelligence Inquisitariat with its inquiries.”

Fassin watched a few slightly forced expressions of satisfaction appear. They really didn’t know any of this before, he thought. He’d assumed the Hierchon and his chums would have been granted some sort of sneak preview earlier, but this seemed to be as new to them as it was to him.

“We also, of course, have the pre-invasion probing-sequence profile for the E-5 Discon’s attempted conquest of Ruanthril,” the hologram said, “plus those of several other systems attacked by the same force-mix. The musings of the invasion fleet’s commander provide credible reason to believe Ulubis is under significant threat. The comparison of the pre-attack probing-sequence profile for Ruanthril with the recent raids on and other hostile actions within Ulubis system leads to the conclusion that said threat is imminent, within the time-frame of a few months to less than a year and a half. There is a long-accepted, high-consistency Beyonder attack profile, and the aggressions Ulubis system has been experiencing over the last three years are anomalous to that.”

Fassin suspected that this was a subtle criticism of the system intelligence and strategy services, and especially the Navarchy’s. Fleet Admiral Brimiaice looked unnaturally still, as though trying not to draw any unnecessary attention to himself. The information also pointed to something of a cover-up. Like Verpych, Fassin had thought these “anomalous’ attacks had begun just over a year ago; this AI had been given access to information indicating that they had been going on for two years before that. Well, that would come as no surprise to anyone. Being spoon-fed rosy-hued misinformation by the authorities was no more than people had come to expect — and pre-emptively discount. They only got suspicious when presented with what looked like the plain unvarnished truth.

“I do have more to say,” the image above the cooking-pot device told the assembled listeners. “However, I sense that some of you are already anxious to ask questions, and so at this point I would like to invite queries regarding what you have heard so far. No need to introduce yourselves, by the way — I know who you all are.”

Everybody looked at the Hierchon, who obligingly boomed, “Machine, what percentage of likelihood pertains to this invasion?”

The hologram did not look particularly impressed with this first question. It might even have sighed.

Fassin only half listened to the answer and paid even less attention to the following questions and answers; none of them added anything significant to what he’d already heard and mostly the questions boiled down to the categories: Are you sure? Are you mad? Are you lying, abomination? And, I won’t get blamed for any of this, will I?

He used the tap-screen to get a better idea of the relevant galactic topography. He called up a usefully scaled hologram and flicked between the local civilisational state of play as it had been understood until today — effectively two and a half centuries out of date — and the updated version that the AI signal had brought with it, which was only seventeen years old. As he did so, whole vast volumes of stars changed from one false colour to another, indicating where this Cluster Epiphany Five Disconnect hegemony had spread its influence.

“ — Resist them with all our might!” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice roared.

“I’m sure you will,” the hologram said. “However, all the indications are that even if you devoted yourself to all-out, full-time emergency war-craft construction and a full war economy, you will still be outnumbered several times over.”

Fleet Admiral Brimiaice then blustered.

Fassin had a question of his own, but it was a question for inside his own head, not one that he wished to ask the AI. It was a question he had the unpleasant feeling would at some point shortly be answered, though he sincerely hoped it wouldn’t. It was: What the hell does all this have to do with me?

“May I continue?” the image said after the next few contributions showed unmistakable signs of heading in the direction of becoming not so much questions as attestations of innocence, pledges of heroic determination, position-protection statements and attacks on other functionaries present within a wide spectrum of subtlety, biased towards the low end. The hologram gave a small, thin, regretful smile. “I realise that all the foregoing has come as something of a shock, for all of you. However, it is, I am afraid to say, in effect just a preamble to the most significant part of this communication.”

The image of Admiral Quile paused to let that sink in, too. Then the hologram said, “Now then. There is a gentleman amongst you who has no doubt been wondering for some little time what exactly he is doing here.”

Oh, shit, Fassin had time to think, then the image looked at him. Was it really looking at him now? Could everybody see the hologram looking at him? Heads, or other parts as appropriate, turned in his direction. That probably meant yes.

“Seer Fassin Taak, would you make yourself known to the others?”

Fassin heard the blood roar in his ears as he stood and gave a slow, if shallow, bow towards the Hierchon. He was getting that flesh-shrinking thing again. The chamber looked to be tipping, and he was glad to sit down again. He tried to control the blush that he felt building under his throat.

“Seer Taak is a young man, though born centuries ago,” the image said. “He has spent a productive and dutiful career with the gas-giant Dwellers of the planet Nasqueron. I understand that many of you may have heard of him already. He has now been given the rank of major within the Shrievalty Ocula, for reasons which will become clear in due course.”

Fassin, still feeling very much looked-at, noticed that Colonel Somjomion, the human female who was acting chief of staff of the Shrievalty contingent in the Ulubis system, smiled cautiously at him from the podium across the chamber when the holo-gram said this. Unsure whether the Shrievalty saluted or not, Fassin rose fractionally in his seat, and nodded formally.

Oh, fuck, were his precise thoughts.

The image floating above the cooking-pot AI said, “The reason that Seer — Major — Taak is here today to hear what I have had to tell you all is that it was something which he discovered — stumbled over might be an equally accurate description, with no disrespect to Seer Taak — that has led to my being here in the first place.”

Oh, fucking hell. I always thought delving would be the death of me but I assumed it would be an equipment failure, not something like this. On the other hand, that smile from Colonel Somjomion had been restrained, even careful, not mean or mocking. Might live yet.

“Which brings us, of course, to the real, or at least the most pressing, reason for my appearance here, in this almost unprecedented form,” the hologram said, then made a show of taking a deep breath.

It looked around them all, slowly, before saying, “Ulubis, I’m sure we would all agree, is a pleasant and fairly favoured system.” It paused again.

Fassin was listening fairly hard at this point, and would have taken decent odds on the literal truth of the old you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop saying. “And,” the projection said with a smile, radiantly confident that it now had their full attention, “as a centre of Dweller Studies, it is not without significance galactically, unquestionably from an antiquarian and intellectual standpoint.” Another pause. It occurred to Fassin that an AI controlling a hologram could put a quite literal twinkle in its eye. “However, one might think it reasonable to ask — again, with no disrespect intended, or, I hope, taken — why Ulubis has attracted the attention of our new-found adversaries from Cluster Epiphany Five. One might even — knowing the importance that the Mercatoria attaches to reconnecting all the many, many systems which have been without Arteria access all these millennia — wonder why the expedition from Zenerre to Ulubis with a new portal was dispatched with such alacrity, given the arguably still greater claims that more populous, more classically strategically important and more at-the-time obviously threatened systems might have had upon the resources and expertise of our esteemed colleagues in the Engineering faculty.

“One might also pause to give thought to the reasons why the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir is accompanied by those elements of the Summed Fleet of which my original has the honour of being part — why, indeed, the Eship Est-taun Zhiffir is escorted by such a preponderance of force at all.” The hologram raised its head, looked all around again. “It might not even be totally unreasonable to call into question the apparently unchallenged assumptions and settled conclusions concerning the destruction of the Ulubis portal by the Beyonders, over two centuries ago.”

That caused a little frisson in the chamber, Fassin noticed. Is any of this still about me and anything I might have found? he wondered. The more I hear, the more I hope it isn’t.

“There is one circumstance, one nexus of contingent information,” the image said with a broad, unamused smile and something like relish, “which is, we strongly suspect, behind all of this.” The projection turned to look directly at the Hierchon Ormilla. “Sir, at this point I must ask that those not specifically cleared to be present at this meeting be withdrawn. I believe we might make an exception for the troopers, providing their ear mikes are turned off, but I would be disobeying my orders if I continued with those not invited still present.”

“Admiral Quile,” the Hierchon boomed, with just sufficient emphasis, “I vouch for all those present who were inadvertently excluded from the clearance list you refer to. You may continue.”

“And were it up to me, sir, that would of course be more than enough reason to proceed without care or reservation,” the Admiral’s image said. “However, devastated though I may be at being seen to offer even the slightest suggestion of an insult to your esteemed court, I am specifically forbidden to continue, bound as I am by the orders of the Complector Council.”

Ouch, Fassin thought. He almost felt sorry for the Hierchon. He’d not just had rank pulled on him, he’d been made to look small. A Sarcomage outranked a Hierchon, and was in turn answerable to a Complector, any single one of which — supremely powerful as they were in every other exercise and iteration of power within the civilised galaxy — themselves had at least to take into account the will of the Complector Council. The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting round those.

Hierchon Ormilla took his defeat with a degree of grace and within a few minutes the chamber was emptied of half its earlier occupants. The stepped sequence of podia in front of the Hierchon’s imposing esuit now looked positively bare. All the court officials and courtiers had departed, with much muttering and the single highest quotient of affronted dignity Fassin had ever witnessed, by several factors. The military bigwigs were still present, but even their on-podium ranks had been depleted as Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria were reduced to stepping down to floor level so that they could operate the two most important pieces of equipment monitoring the cooking-pot device embodying the AI. The mirror-finish troopers still stood in a wide circle beyond, armour locked in at-ease, deaf now.

While all this had been going on, Fassin had been left to sit there, not knowing what to think. He knew what he ought to be thinking; he ought to be thinking, What the fuck could I ever have stumbled across that possibly warranted this level of right-to-the-top paranoia and secrecy? It was, however, hard to know what to think. He also knew what he ought to feel: fear. There, he was fine; he had a superabundance of high weapon-grade trepidation. “Thank you,” the image of the Admiral said. “Now then,” it said, looking round all those who remained. “I have a question for you. What do you know of something called the Dweller List?” It held up one hand. “Rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer. Those of you who wish, feel free to consult your screens or equivalent. Take a moment.”

There was a flurry of distant tapping. The Dweller List? thought Fassin. Oh, fucking hell; not that shit.

The hologram smiled. “Let me in due time tell you what we at this end — as we design and record this signal and projection — consider important regarding this subject.”

Fassin had heard of the Dweller List, of course; no Seer hadn’t. Unfortunately, lots of laypeople had heard of the List, too, and so it had become one of those tired, inward-groan-producing subjects that people tended to raise when they met a Seer at a party, along with other hoary old cliché-questions such as, “Do Dwellers really hunt their own children?” and, “Are they really as old as they say they are?”

The Dweller List was a collection of coordinates. It had turned up, as far as anyone could be sure, towards the end of the Burster War four hundred million years earlier, and was probably well out of date even then. Allegedly, the list detailed all the Dwellers’ own secret arteria portals. According to the story, these had been under development since the time of the Long Collapse, when the Dwellers had decided that the other species — or groups of species — with which they were forced to share the galaxy couldn’t be trusted to keep their own or jointly owned “hole networks safe, and so the Dwellers had better construct an arteria web which they controlled — and which preferably nobody else knew about — if they wanted to voyage from gas-giant to gas-giant reliably and without fuss.

This, of course, completely ignored the Dwellers’ attitudes to time and space and scale and more or less everything else. The Dwellers didn’t need wormholes and the near-instantaneous travel between systems that they offered. They lived for billions of years, they could slow their metabolism and thoughts down as required so that a journey of a thousand years or ten thousand years or a hundred thousand years would appear to be over in the course of a single sleep, or occupied no more time than that required to read a good book, or play a complicated game. Plus they were already everywhere; they claimed they had spread throughout the galaxy during the First Diasporian Age, which had ended when the universe was only two and a half billion years old. Even if that claim was a boast, a typical Dweller exaggeration, what was undeniable was that Dwellers were present in significant numbers in well over ninety-nine per cent of all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and had been for as long as anybody could remember. (Though not, as it had turned out, Jupiter. Humanity’s own backyard gas-giant was unusual in being relatively water-poor. The Dwellers considered it a desert planet and rarely visited.)

After centuries of real-time and decades of seem-time spent with Dwellers, Fassin had gained the distinct impression that Dwellers both despised and felt sorry for the Quick — the species, like humans, like all the others in the Mercatoria, which felt the need to use wormholes.

As the Dwellers saw it, to be Quick — to live life that precipitously — was to condemn oneself to an early end. Life had an inescapable trajectory, a natural curve. Evolution, development, progress: all conspired to push a sentient species along in a certain direction, and all you could do was choose to run that road or saunter along it. The Slow took their time, adapting to the given scale and natural limits of the galaxy and the universe as it existed.

The Quick insisted on short cuts and seemed determined to bend the very fabric of space to their frantic, impatient will. When they were smart they succeeded in this wilfulness, but they only brought their own end all the quicker. They lived fast and died faster, describing sudden, glorious but quickly fading trails across the firmament. The Dwellers, like the other Slow, wanted to be around for the long term, and so were prepared to wait.

So quite why the Dwellers would ever have bothered building a secret wormhole network was something of a mystery, as was how they had managed to keep it secret all these hundreds of millions of years, not to mention how this fitted in with the rather obvious nature of each different Dweller community’s isolation from each other.

Nevertheless, the myth of the Dweller List continued to excite people in general and conspiracy theorists in particular, especially in times of threat and desperation, when it would be really, really great if a secret wormhole network did exist.

Fassin agreed with the textbooks that it had been no coincidence the List had first turned up during the Burster War, when the whole galactic community had seemed to be falling apart, and people were looking for salvation, for hope, anywhere. Then, the arteria total had been falling from its earlier — and then all-time — high of nearly 39,000 to under a thousand. At the nadir of the Third Chaos there had been less than a hundred “holes in the whole galaxy, and the Dwellers hadn’t stepped in then with an offer to let everybody else use this secret system. If not then, when the light of civilisation seemed to be fading from the great lens entirely, then when? When and why would they ever come galloping to the rescue?

Part of the seductive attraction of the List was its sheer size. It contained over two million sets of alleged portal coordinates, implying more than one million arteria, presumably linked in a single enormous network. At the height of the Third Complex, eight thousand years earlier, there had been exactly 217,390 established wormholes threading the galaxy together, and that was as good, as far as was known, as it had ever got. If the Dweller List genuinely enumerated existing portals and arteria, it would represent the promise of instigating the single greatest change in the history of the galaxy; the sudden linking-up of two million systems, many of which had never had any connection before, the bringing together of almost everybody everywhere — the very furthest, most utterly isolated star would likely be a mere decade or two away from the nearest portal — and the near-instant revitalising, on a scale unheard of in nearly twelve billion years of tenacious, sporadically stuttering civilisation, of the entire galactic community.

It was, Fassin and almost all his fellow Seers had long thought, a forlorn hope. The Dwellers didn’t need or show any sign of using wormholes. Being Dwellers, they naturally claimed they were experts at arteria and portal technology, and certainly they were not afraid of using wormholes, it was just that they didn’t see the need for them… but if they ever had been seriously involved with wormhole production, those days were long gone. In any case, the List itself, which had been lying around in libraries and data reservoirs, multitudinously copied for hundreds of millions of years, accessible to anybody with a link, was not the end of the story; it just gave the rough coordinates of two million gas-giants in two million systems. What was needed was a more precise location.

The obvious places to look were the relevant Trojan or Lagrange points, the gravitationally stable locations dotted around and between the orbits of the various planets in the named systems. However, these had all long since been eliminated. After that it got much more tricky. In theory a worm-hole mouth could be left in any stable orbit anywhere in a system and never be found unless you practically tripped over it. Working portals were anything up to a kilometre wide and had an effective mass of several hundred thousand tonnes, whereas a portal shrunk and stabilised and set up to keep itself that way with relatively simple automatics systems could lie in an orbit as far out as a system’s Oort cloud with a gravitational footprint of less than a kilogramme more or less indefinitely. The problem was how to describe where it was.

Allegedly there was some extra set of coordinates, or even a single mathematical operation, a transform, which, when applied to any given set of coordinates in the original list, somehow magically derived the exact position of that system’s portal. The obvious objection to this was that after four hundred million years, minimum, there was no known coordinate system ever devised capable of reliably determining where something as small as a portal was. (Unless the holes had all somehow automatically kept themselves in the same relative position all that time. Given the haphazard and cavalier attitude that Dwellers tended to display towards anything especially high-tech, this was regarded as highly unlikely.)

“So,” the image hovering above the dark device in the centre of the audience chamber said, “if I may assume we are all happy we know what we’re talking about…’ It looked around them again. Nobody demurred.

“The Dweller List,” the hologram said, “supposedly giving the approximate location of two million ancient portals dating from the time of the Third Diasporian Age, has been dismissed as an irrelevance, a lie or a myth for over a quarter of a billion years. The so-called Transform, supposed to complete the information required to access this secret network, has proved as elusive as it is unlikely to work if it does exist. Nevertheless. Some new information has come to light, thanks to Seer, now Major, Taak.” Fassin was aware that he was being looked at again. He just kept staring at the hologram.

“A little under four hundred years ago,” the hologram said, “Seer Taak took part in an extended expedition — a ‘delve’ as it is known — which took him amongst the Dwellers of Nasqueron, and specifically into the company of a group of Dweller youngsters called the Dimajrian Tribe. While with them, he encountered an antique Dweller who — in a fit of generosity unusual in his kind — granted Seer Taak access to a small library of information, part of a still larger hoard.”

(This was the wrong way round — the myth, not the fact. Fassin had been with Valseir for centuries and the Dimajrian Tribe for less than a year. He hoped that the rest of the Admiral’s information was more reliable. All the same, he had a sudden, vivid memory of choal Valseir, huge and ancient, accoutred with rags, draped in life-charms, floating absently within his vast nest-bowl of a study, deep in the lost section of abandoned CloudTunnel on the rim of a giant, dying storm which had long since broken up and dissipated. “Clouds. You are like clouds,” Valseir had told Fassin. At the time he hadn’t understood what the ancient Dweller had meant.)

“The raw data containing this information was passed on to the Shrievalty for analysis,” the image hovering above the black device said. “Twenty years later, after the usual analysis and interpretation and, you’d imagine, with plenty of time for second thoughts, re-evaluations and sudden inspirations, it was shared with the Jeltick under the terms of an infotrade agreement.”

The Jeltick were an arachnoid species, eight-limbed — 8ar, in the conventional shorthand of the galactic community. Obsessive cataloguers, they were one of the galaxy’s two most convincing self-appointed historian species. Timid, cautious, deliberate and very inquisitive (at a safe remove), they had been around for much longer than Quick species usually lasted.

“Somehow, the Jeltick contrived to notice something the Shrievalty had missed,” the hologram continued. (Now, Fassin noticed, it was Colonel Somjomion’s turn to look awkward and aggrieved.) “Heads have rolled due to this incompetence,” the image told them. It smiled. “Ido not speak figuratively”

Colonel Somjomion compressed her lips and rechecked something on the machine she was in charge of.

“Within months,” the hologram said, “the Jeltick sent their best excuse for a battle fleet to the Zateki system — unexplored for millennia — which lies about eighteen years from the portal at Rijom; they got there in twenty years, so they were not exactly dawdling. It ought to be pointed out that the Jeltick would never normally try anything so dynamic, or risky.

“Something at Zateki seriously chewed up the Jeltick ships and what is assumed to have been the sole survivor was later found by a Voehn craft. The surviving ship was fleeing, all upon it were dead and its biomind was deranged, invoking the mercy of an unknown god and babbling for forgiveness for what had been its mission, which had been to search for the remains of something called the Second Ship and, therein, the Dweller List Transform.”

Ah, thought Fassin. The Second Ship Theory. That was a sub-fallacy of the whole Dweller List delusion. The further you looked into the List myth, the more complicated it got and the more possibilities appeared to open up. All nonsense, of course, or so everybody had thought.

“Somehow, we assume through spies, the Beyonders and — possibly through the Beyonders — the E-5 Disconnect got to hear about this. The Beyonders attacked the Ulubis portal less than a month later and the E-5 Discon’s sudden interest in Ulubis also dates from this point. When the Jeltick realised the secret was no longer theirs alone,” the image said, “they broadcast-leaked it, to avoid accusations of partiality and maintain their reputation for disinterestedness.” The projection gave a sour look. “This has not gone down too well with the Ascendancy, either — one imagines the Jeltick will be made to pay somewhere down the line. In any event, five full squadrons of the Summed Fleet — over three hundred capital ships — retraced the Jeltick fleet’s route to Rijom and Zateki, but found nothing. Under full disclosure it has turned out that the information concerned was in any case incomplete; the lead is, as it were, only half-formed. The Jeltick move was a gamble, reckoned even by themselves at having a less than twelve per cent likelihood of success. For such a cautious species to make such a wild wager with their reputation and future alone indicates the value of the prize they sought.”

The hologram brought its gloved hands together, producing an audible clap. “So, now almost everybody who wants to know about the new Transform lead — such as it may be — does know, and this would appear to include the Disconnect of the Starveling Cult, and — quiet though they may have seemed recently — the Beyonders, who may or may not be in league with the E-5 Discon. Hence the most recent attacks on Ulubis, and the coming invasion.

“But be aware,” the image said, growling, eyes narrowing, “that behind this terrible threat lies a fabulous prize. If we can discover where the hidden portals lie — assuming that they are indeed there to be discovered — we may well be able to intervene in the Ulubis system before the Starveling Cult invasion force arrives. It would be entirely worth the most supreme effort and sacrifice for that result alone. Even more importantly, however, this is a prize that could, that just might, that can unlock the galaxy and usher in a new golden age of prosperity and security for the Mercatoria, for all of us.” The projection paused once more. “Our strategists estimate that even with the best result from those actions we shall ask you to undertake, the chances of success remain below fifty per cent.” The projection appeared to draw breath. “But that is not the point. The smallest chance of the greatest reward, when so few may compete for it, makes the contention compulsory. All that matters is that we may have been presented with an extraordinary, utterly unprecedented opportunity. We would all be in serious, even ultimate dereliction of duty if we did not do everything in our power to seize that opportunity, not just on our own behalf but for the good of all our fellow creats, and for those generations yet unborn.”

The image smiled one of its cold smiles. “The orders I have to pass on to you from the Complector Council are: to Seer — now Major — Taak.” (The projection was already looking straight at Fassin. Now so did a lot of the people in the chamber.) “Return to Nasqueron, seek out the ancient Dweller who gave you the original information and try to find out all you can about the Dweller List, the Second Ship, its location and the Transform. And, to everybody else here,” (the image looked around all the others in the chamber) “first, provide every aid you can to Major Taak in the furtherance of his mission, including doing nothing that will delay, obstruct or compromise it, and, second, return the Ulubis system to an invasion-imminent, full-scale, total-war footing immediately and prepare to oppose the coming invasion. Your goal should be — and I do not exaggerate here — to resist to the very last creat, to the very last mortal, to the very last breath.”

The hologram seemed to stand back a little and take the measure of them all. “I would say to all of you that, without doubt, your fate lies in your own hands. More importantly, so, potentially, does the fate of the Mercatoria and the civilised galaxy. The rewards for success will be unprecedented in their scale and splendour. The punishments for failure will begin with ignominy and disgrace and plumb new depths of ghastliness beyond. One last thing. You know that the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir and battle-fleet escort which sent this signal are still seventeen years from reaching Ulubis system. I must tell you that significant elements of the Summed Fleet, above Squadron strength, were dispatched in your direction from Zenerre even before the Eship left and have been making well in excess of the Eship fleet’s velocity directly towards Ulubis ever since. The attack squadrons will arrive years before the Eship and its escort fleet, their war craft will be fully deployed for uninhibited battle against all who oppose the Mercatoria, and — depend upon it — they will prevail.”

The image smiled again. “How I wish I could tell you exactly how soon from this point they will appear. However, even I do not know; this signal was sent from the fleet accompanying the Eship and we do not yet know quite how close to light speed they have pushed themselves, or how close they will have by the time this signal arrives. We can only hazard. If the Disconnecters leave off for as long as another couple of years, the attack squadrons may well arrive before them. Otherwise, they will descend upon a system already fallen to the enemy, or, one would hope, still somehow resisting. Their reaction when they arrive largely depends on your determination, fortitude and ability to absorb punishment.” The projection smiled. “Now: any further questions?”

* * *

The Beyonders must have anticipated them. Their ships were already making ninety per cent of their own furious, headlong speed when they appeared on the point ship’s long-distance scanners.

Taince Yarabokin floated foetal, swaddled in shock-gel, lungs full of fluid, umbilicalled to the ship, nurtured by it, talking to it, listening to it, feeling it all around her. A gee-suit half-completed the image of warrior as unborn, leaving the wearer clothed in a close second skin. Her connection with the ship was via implants and an induction collar rather than a cord into her navel, and her chest moved only faintly as the gillfluid tided oxygen into her blood and scrubbed waste gases out again. Behind her closed lids in that darkness, her eyes flickered to and fro, twitching involuntarily. She shared her close confinement with another forty or so of her comrades, all lying curled and protected and wired up in their own life-pods, all carried deep in the belly of the fleet’s flagship, the Mannlicher- Carcano.

Way ahead at point, the destroyer Petronel veered, maxing its engines, then blinked out in a wash of light that became darkness as the sensors compensated. The buffering faded and revealed the half of the lead ship that was left, tumbling wildly, tearing itself apart in dark curved fountains of debris, spraying fragments against the tunnel-scape of hard blue-white stars collected ahead.

— Point registers multiple contacts at ninety fleet-vee, said one voice, flagged as LR sensors.

· Point is hit, came another; Fleet Status.

· Point contact lost, came a third, followed immediately by:

· Point gone; Fleet Comms and Status almost colliding.

Instantly aware, Taince had just sufficient time for one small,

frightened part of herself to think, No! Not on my watch! And right in the Fleet Admiral’s nap time, when she was in sole charge. But even as that reaction seemed to echo and die inside her head, she was sensing, judging, thinking, getting ready to issue orders. She flitted between the real-as-it-could-be view shown by the deep-space scan sensors, where the stars were bunched hard blue-white in a circle ahead and collected into a fuzzy red pool behind with pure blackness in every other direction, and the dark abstraction that was Tacspace, a multi-lined and radiused sphere where the ships of the fleet sat, little stylised arrowhead shapes of varying sizes and colours, a line of fading dots behind each indicating their courses, green glowing identities and status codes riding alongside them.

The pre-prepared split pattern wouldn’t work; the ship which had just traded point with the Petronel was still sliding back into position in the main body of the fleet and a pattern-one split would at worst cause multiple collisions and at best be just too slow.

Oh well, time to start earning her pay and communicate. Taince sent,

— Pattern-five split, all ships. BC-three, that plus a two-point inward, left-skew delta, for five, then resume.

Copy signals flicked back, the first from her own helm officer, the last from the battlecruiser Jingal, registering its adherence to the slight kink she’d put in its course the better to accommodate their D-seven: Destroyer seven, the Culverin, the ship which had been falling back after swapping point with the Petronel. She was distantly aware of her body registering a pulse of movement, a sudden change in direction so extreme that even the shock-gel couldn’t completely mask it. Around them, the ships would be flaring off like their own silent shrapnel burst.

· Hull stress eighty-five, Ship Integrity-Damage Control told her.

· All units responding. Full pattern-five flare, said Fleet Status.

· D-seven: thanks for that, joining pattern.

· C-one: single contact, five nor-down-west.

· D-three: double contact, neg-four nor-up-east.

The cruiser Mitrailleuse and the destroyer Cartouche registering hostiles. Taince didn’t even need to glance into Tacspace to know that meant harmfuls on both sides.

· So, bracketing.

· A straddle. Got us good.

The last two voices had been the two most senior fellow tactical officers.

· We sound as though we play Battleships. (That was Fleet Admiral Kisipt. Awake now, watching. Apparently content to let Taince run the show for the moment.)

· C-one: hostile contact confirmed. PTF.

· D-three: hostile contact confirmed. PTF.

Mitrailleuse and Cartouche requesting permission to fire.

· Suggest fire\Suggest fire, the other tacticians chorused.

· Agree fire, Fleet Admiral Kisipt said. — Vice?

Vice Admiral Taince Yarabokin thought so too. — C-one, D-three; grant free fire.

· C-one: Firing.

· D-three: Firing.

Tacspace showed bright crimson beams flick from the two ships. Tiny, lime-green dots with their own status bars were missiles, darting towards the enemy ships.

· Multiple hits on the D-one debris field, LR Sensors reported.

· Still flare?

· Still flare, Taince confirmed. She was watching the scintil-lations ahead, where the wildly spinning, whirling, somer-saulting wreckage of the Petronel was being hit by further enemy munitions. The remains were dropping back rapidly towards the main fleet as it spread quickly outwards. She clicked up a countdown to their impact with the debris field: seventy-six seconds. She shifted the read-out to a skin-sensation to avoid cluttering her visual feed.

No positive results from the laser fire being laid down by the Mitrailleuse and Cartouche. Their missiles were still heading towards the hostile craft. No sign of reply so far.

What if we’re wrong? Taince thought. What if they’ve out-thought us and our so-neat manoeuvre? Deep in her life-pod cocoon, she gave a semblance of a shrug without realising it herself. Oh well, then we may all be dead. At least it should be quick.

· Still flare?

· Still flare, she confirmed again. Waiting, judging, wondering if this would work. Tacspace showed the second-hand, now increasingly out-of-date contacts the Petronel had spotted as a glowing, slowly dispersing cloud of pulsing yellow echoes. The two hard contacts still registering on the sensors of the Mitrailleuse and the Cartouche and now confirmed by other nearby ships were strobing red dots, slowly closing. The wreckage from the Petronel was a stippled mess of purple, dead ahead and drifting closer, slowly spreading.

It’s okay, Taince told herself. We can do this.

They had rehearsed all this, trained and exercised in VR time after time, specifically for this eventuality, this ambush and manoeuvre and response suite.

They knew that the Beyonders would anticipate a fleet being sent from Zenerre to Ulubis. There was, of course, only one quickest possible route; the straight-line direct one, its laser-clean rule turned into the shallowest of curves solely by allowing for the minimal drift of the respective systems as they circled with the rest of the galactic outskirts round the great wheel’s core, fifty thousand light years away.

So, did the fleet take exactly that route, laying itself open to ambush by other ships, and — more threateningly — to mines? (Mines, indeed; all you needed was a few tonnes of crushed rock. Smash a tiny asteroid into gravel the size of rice grains, spread it across the course the fleet would- take and — if they were travelling quickly enough — you could waste the lot; so close to light speed that you didn’t need to have anything home in and explode, just getting in the way was devastating enough.) Or did you loop further out, avoiding likely interception but arriving later?

And did you stick together (obvious but sensible) or split up, all the individual craft taking their own route to Ulubis, only regrouping near their destination (very risky, but potentially a tactic that the enemy wouldn’t have anticipated)? In the end the Fleet Admiral had chosen one out of a bunch of faintly bowed courses recommended by the strategists and their sub-AI machines, and they followed that route en masse.

It was a gamble. The chances were that they would be inter-cepted, especially if the Beyonders possessed the kind of materiel they were thought to have between Zenerre and Ulubis. The obvious intercept strategy was to station minor ships and other sensor platforms about halfway, then position the intercept units well behind that — already making high speed — to give them time to gather for the attack. In a direct pitched battle, there was no possibility that the vastly outnumbered and out-armed Beyonder ships would prevail. But then, they didn’t need or want a pitched battle, they just had to slow the Mercatoria fleet down as much as possible. They wanted skirmishes, ambushes, and to use the fleet’s own colossal velocity against it.

The Mercatoria fleet could, in theory, have gone slow and safe, assured just by its sheer weight of arms of being able to blast anything ahead of it out of the skies. Its orders, though, were to get to Ulubis as quickly as possible, regardless, and so it had to travel almost ultimately quickly and risk being torn to bits by a few small ships and nothing more high-tech than a few tonnes of pulverised rock.

They’d come up with a surprise plan of their own. Needle ships were designed to fit through narrow worm-holes, it was that simple. The biggest arteria and the widest portals were a kilometre across, but the average “hole diameter was under fifty metres and a few very old arteria were barely ten metres wide. It took a vast amount of energy and\or matter to make an arteria and its two portals, and it was difficult, expensive and dangerous to expand them once they were emplaced. There was, for the Mercatoria, little point in having a network of super-fast travel connections scattered throughout the galaxy if your ships were too fat to fit, and so the proportions of war craft — the ultimate levers of power for the Mercatoria, just as they had been for all earlier imperia, semimperia and others who had thought to enforce their peace or impose their will on the galactic community over the aeons — were derived from the width of the channels they would have to negotiate.

In the past, some great capital ships could auto-deconstruct to become a shower of smaller, slimmer components which could fit through a wormhole, and were then capable of reassembling themselves at the far end, but this had proved a wasteful way of designing war craft. Needle ships were simpler and cheaper, for all their astounding complexity and cost. The biggest craft in the battle fleet heading from Zenerre to Ulubis were a kilometre long but less than forty metres across the beam. Almost right at the enemy ship, the missile fired by the Mitrailleuse winked out, replaced by a tiny debris field. Signals from the cruiser, Sensors and Status confirmed this.

— That missile snapped a hostile profile before it was picked off, Weapons reported, side-screening the data the missile had plipped back.

— Sceuri ship, Sulcus or Fosse class, one Tactics officer sent.

So they were dealing — at least in that ship — with the Deathspiral, Taince thought. That particular Beyonder group was exclusively Sceuri; waterworlders with a hatred for the Mercatoria in general and those of their own kind who were a part of it in particular (which meant most of them). Renowned for their viciousness and without even the excuse that they were protecting their precious civilian habitats. They didn’t have any, they were almost entirely ship-based. A bunch of piratical terrorists, in other words, just fanatics. And yet as far as anyone knew the Deathspiral hadn’t taken part in the attack on the Ulubis portal.

· So that makes four, not three varieties of Beyonder oper-ating in this volume, the Admiral sent, saying what Taince was thinking.

· Two more and we’ll have the set, she replied.

Back in Tacspace, she watched the Cartouche’s missile curving to meet the twisting trace that was the other nearest hostile. It joined it, overlaying it. A white blink, then an infinitesimal spray of debris, red speckled with green.

— D-three: Hit! Hostile hit!

Taince’s two fellow tacticians aboard the flagship made whooping noises.

· Well done, D-three, said Kisipt.

· Still flare?

· Still flare. Taince ignored the celebratory noises and her own feeling of excitement. She watched Tacspace, listened to the ship chatter, felt the seconds count down.

The fleet was still spreading, the vessels’ courses fanning out like thin stems from a short vase. Taince held off and held off and held off, until she could almost feel Fleet Admiral Kisipt and everybody else getting ready to shout at her.

Forty seconds. She sent,

— De-flare. Pattern-five reverse.

· Copy, said her own helm officer, then the other acknowledgements followed. In Tacspace, the flowering, widening ship tracks immediately started to bunch up again, the distances between them closing.

· C-one: Going to be tight.

But it was doable. They could get back to their earlier formation before they encountered the remains of the Petronel; that was all that mattered for now. Tacspace showed the fleet regrouping smoothly. The view ahead showed the fiercely glowing nebula of wreckage from the Petronel, seeming to spread across the sky as they approached it, encroaching onto the dark, starless tube on either side. She zoomed in, picking out a clear spot near the centre of the debris field, checking it in Tacspace. There.

The two hard contacts winked out, became orange and started to spread. Tacspace was throwing out probability cones, estimating where the ships might be. Ahead, the sky briefly glowed a pale uniform yellow, indicating that the rest of the Beyonder fleet could be anywhere within that volume. Then a scattering of bright red hard contacts firmed up out of the yellow wash, dispersing it.

The fleet re-formed. They were back where they had started. If nothing else, Taince thought, they ought to have confused the Beyonders.

— Pattern Zero, all ships.

Even in the life-pod, she felt the flagship lurch as it braked, manoeuvred and then accelerated again. She watched it all on Tacspace. The fleet was collapsing, thinning, extending itself forwards and back, ship after ship slipping into a single long line, nose to tail.

— BC-four, back down about ten. D-eleven, forward five. B-three and B-two, centre on D-eight. BC-four, maintain there.

Taince watched them all in Tacspace, shuffling, jostling, ordering them into position until they were all lined up.

— Ships of the line, yes, Vice? the Fleet Admiral sent, also watching.

— Sir.

There were no collisions, no botched moves, no drives left running too long, incinerating the craft behind. The line formation came together as smoothly as it ever had in VR sims. The battleship Gisarme led the way, blasting away a few tiny parti-cles left over from the wreck of the Petronel and laying down a stuttered laser barrage to try to intercept any mines, kinetic or otherwise, left in the way.

This was a gamble, too. If it worked they’d be through and away, one after another, charging mob-handed right behind the Gisarme like a long sequence of battering rams. If it didn’t work, there was a chance that first the Gisarme would hit something and then they’d all hit whatever was left of it. Potentially the whole fleet could be wiped out in one long pile-up of cascading collisions. The chances were small — smaller, the simulations indicated, than the risks associated with any of the other manoeuvres — but only because this one included a safety premium due to its assumed unexpectedness, its sheer novelty value. If they’d got that wrong, it was much riskier than all the rest.

The manoeuvre caught the Beyonders unawares. It was profoundly not standard Summed Fleet behaviour. The needle ships were one giant needle now, plunging through the debris field of the wrecked destroyer, firing all around them, scoring a couple of hits on distant hostiles desperately closing. Tacspace showed the lines of fire blazing out from the fleet like spokes from a filament-thin shaft and missiles spinning away like tiny glowing emeralds. The Beyonders were attempting to close, but it was too late. All that the nearest hostile units accomplished was their own destruction. In two minutes the Mercatorial fleet was through without loss, and a minute later its entire fire-pattern was rearward: a swirling skirt of crimson lines combing and coning into the emptying depths of space behind. Any further engagement now would be entirely on their terms, and the fleet’s vastly superior firepower would have the first word, and the last.

· Nice work, Vice. Fleet Admiral Kisipt sounded a little surprised, a little disappointed and moderately impressed. Taince knew that a lot of her fellow officers had wanted a proper battle, but this way had been better, quicker, more elegant. “Nice work’ — from a Voehn; that was real praise.

· Sir. Taince kept her thought-voice calm, but inside it was her turn to whoop. Submerged in her dark womb of fluid, tubes and wires, her fists clenched, a smile appeared on her until then frowning face, and a little shiver shook her cradled body.

* * *

The Kehar family house on Murla, an island off the south coast a few hundred kilometres from Borquille, was another spherical building, a quarter of the size of the Hierchon’s palace, but remarkable for being balanced on top of a great upthrust of water, precisely like a ball balanced on a water jet in a fairground.

Saluus Kehar, perfectly groomed, glowing with health and generally looking as smoothly gleaming as one of his company’s spaceships, met Fassin personally on the slim suspension bridge connecting the house with the spit of land jutting out into the ancient drowned caldera where the waters foamed and roared and spumed and the house balanced, barely trembling, on the giant column of water.

“Fassin! Great to see you! Hey! That uniform suits you!”

Fassin had thought he’d be briefed-indoctrinated-psyche-tested-pep-talked-fuck-knows-whatted and then bundled aboard ship to be whisked straight to Nasqueron. But even faced with arguably the single greatest emergency in its history, the Ulubine bureaucracy had a set way of doing things, and central to this ethos appeared to be not doing anything too momentous too quickly, just in case.

The rest of the session in the Hierchon’s audience chamber after the AI projection had issued its orders and asked for questions had involved a great deal of talk, speech-making, point-scoring, back-covering, back-targeting and pre-emptive blame-avoidance. The image of Admiral Quile answered all the questions tirelessly and with a patience that was probably the most sure sign possible that it really was an AI talking. A human — especially an admiral, used to being obeyed instantly and without argument — would have lost patience long before the proceedings finally ground to a halt. Fassin had been pointed at and referred to several times, and been left with the distinct impression that this was all his fault. Which, he supposed, in a way it was. It had all gone on so long that Fassin’s stomach had perhaps in sympathy with a large component of the mood in the chamber — started grumbling. He hadn’t eaten since early breakfast on ’glantine, after all.

“You are quite sure?” the image above the cooking-pot device asked eventually, when even the most talkative of those present seemed to have run out of questions to ask and points — and delicate portions of the anatomy — to cover. There was no hint of either pleading or relief in the projection’s voice. Fassin thought either would have been appropriate.

“Very well, then. I will bid you farewell, and good luck.”

The image of the human male with a bald, tattooed scalp and lined face, standing there in his much-decorated armoured suit, looked around them one last time, executed a short, formal bow to the Hierchon and disappeared. Nobody seemed to know quite what to do for a moment. Then the black, pot-bellied machine in the centre of the floor started to make a loud humming noise. Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion and Cessorian Clerk-Regnant Voriel, attending as best they could to the machines they had been put in charge of when the others had been required to leave the chamber, started peering intently at various screens and controls. The circle of mirror-armoured troopers each tapped one ear, then brought up their guns, pointing them at the cooking-pot device, which was humming loudly now and starting to glow in the infrared. The hum rose and took on extra harmonics, deepening until the machine was visibly vibrating. Some of those close to the device either drew back or looked like they wanted to, as if fearing that the machine was going to explode. The air around its ribbed flanks shimmered. Above it, the atmosphere seemed to writhe and quiver, as though some mutant ghost of the image that had stood there was still fighting to escape.

Then, just as the pot-bellied thing started to glow a deep cherry red around its midriff, it all faded away: noise and vibration and heat. People relaxed. Somjomion and Voriel took deep breaths and nodded at the Hierchon. The troopers shouldered their arms. Whatever complex substrate inside the dark device had played host to the AI image of the Admiral had been turned to slag.

The Hierchon Ormilla spoke from his glittering esuit. “I invoke the full emergency powers of the War Emergency Plan. Martial law will be declared at the close of this extended session. Let those earlier excluded resume their places.”

The flurry of politicking that Fassin had witnessed earlier was made to look mild in comparison as — without actually telling anybody not cleared to know about it any details — what was becoming known as The Current Emergency was talked over and enhanced roles and new responsibilities were discussed, squabbled over — between and within departments — revised, re-revised, traded, further discussed and re-re-revised before finally being handed out.

Fassin’s belly was still making noises when the full session broke up and he was called to a briefing with his superiors in the Shrievalty Ocula. They kept him waiting in an ante-room within the Ocula’s floor inside the Hierchon’s palace; he shed one layer of his cumbersome court clothes and found some human food in a dispenser in a curving outside corridor with a view over the reception plaza. (Long evening shadows, towers and spires burnished red with sunset. He looked for some obvious sign that the city, planet and system were all under martial law again, but saw nothing.) He was still wiping his fingers when they called him in.

“Major Taak,” Colonel Somjomion said. “Welcome.” He was shown to a large circular table surrounded by uniformed Shrievalty personnel. They were mostly human or whule, though there were two jajuejein doing their best to look humanoid and seated, and a single oerileithe in a duller and slightly smaller version of the Hierchon’s esuit, the discus of which was half-hidden in a wide slot in the floor. It seemed to radiate chill and dominate the room, all the same.

Somjomion indicated the oerileithe. “This is Colonel Hatherence,” she told Fassin. “She will be your superior in this mission.”

“Pleasure, sure,” the oerileithe boomed, twisting fractionally towards Fassin. The Colonel’s esuit had no transparent faceplate like the Hierchon’s, just armour and sensors, giving no sign of the creature within.

Fassin nodded. “Ma’am.” He’d thought the only oerileithe in the system apart from the Hierchon were basically Ormilla’s near family and his girlfriends (’harem’ was, though only just, too pejorative). He wondered whether Colonel Hatherence fitted neatly into either category or not.

It was explained to him that they could not, of course, just send him off alone to do what he was supposed to do. Over the next hour, as communications, memos and remote audiences with the Hierchon himself interrupted Somjomion, Fassin was gradually given to understand that the task assigned quite specifically to him alone was one which would nevertheless unar-guably be best accomplished if he was escorted and overseen by people the Hierchon and his claque of cohorts felt they could actually trust.

Accordingly, Fassin would not be alone on his next delve. He would benefit from the protection and guidance of Colonel Hatherence here, and from that of two of his fellow human Seers, Braam Ganscerel, Chief Seer of the most senior Sept of all, Sept Tonderon, and — as Fassin’s junior — Paggs Yurnvic of Sept Reheo, with whom he had worked before. Chief Seer Ganscerel was currently readying himself to return as rapidly as possible from a habitat orbiting Qua’runze, and would rendezvous with Colonel Hatherence, Major Taak and Seer Yurnvic on Third Fury, from which the delve or delves would be conducted, as soon as possible.

Qua’runze was the other big gas-giant in Ulubis system — there were two smaller examples as well. All had Dweller populations too, though compared to Nasqueron’s they were negligible in size. Getting Ganscerel from Qua’runze to Nasqueron and the Third Fury base would take well over a week, Fassin suspected. The old guy liked his luxuries and anyway wouldn’t be physically able to cope with much more than one gee during the journey even if he wanted to.

Fassin, very much feeling his way in all this, suddenly caught up within organisations and power structures he never imagined having anything much to do with and having to cope with networks of rank and superiority he had only the vaguest working knowledge of, had been about to start banging the table — probably only figuratively — and complaining about not being able to start the job he’d been very clearly ordered to begin as soon as possible. Then they mentioned Ganscerel and his journey back from Qua’runze and he saw that there was prob-ably no way he was going to be able to move this forward faster than the pace that had already been decided.

Which, in a way, suited him fine. If the system really was under threat of imminent invasion and he was being asked to go on the most important delve of his life in the midst of it — and given the amount of time they were being told there was before the invasion took place, there was every likelihood he’d still be in-planet when it happened — then he wanted — needed — one last delve of his own, into Borquille’s underworld, its own hazy, clouded, turbulent and dangerous nether-environment. He suddenly had things to do and people, or at least one person, to meet. The delay caused by Ganscerel might work out quite usefully. Of course, they probably wouldn’t want to let him out of their sight, so he’d have to find a way round that.

He also suspected that they wanted the whole delve done at a distance, from Third Fury, with him and Ganscerel and Paggs Yurnvic all lying wired up in the base there and communicating with remotes down in Nasqueron itself. (Certainly Ganscerel wasn’t capable of jumping into a gascraft, breathing gillfluid and taking multiple gees, squished in shock-gel — he hadn’t even done any of that stuff when he was young.) Fassin would have to try and find a way round that, too.

He complained as crossly as he could pretend about not being allowed to get on with things, and then demanded some time off.

“You mean, leave?” Somjomion said, goggle-eyed. “I believe you have some very intense briefing and training ahead of you, Major Taak. Many days’ worth which will have to be crammed into hours. There is absolutely no time for leave.”

He explained about Ganscerel’s age, infirmity and therefore slow rate of travel. Somjomion looked indignant, but checked this, finally having another hurried conference with the Hierchon himself. “Indeed,” she said, sighing, “Chief Seer Ganscerel is profiled as being unable to withstand forces greater than 1.5 gee, and is already complaining at the prospect of that. It will be nine days before he can reach the Third Fury base.” Colonel Somjomion narrowed her eyes at Fassin. “We shall proceed with your fuller briefing first thing tomorrow, Major Taak. If there is any time left over, a day or two of leave may be granted. I guarantee nothing.”

“So. Another Emergency,” Saluus said. He smiled broadly. Tm told I have you to thank for this, Fass.” He held out a slim flute. Fassin accepted the glass. “Entirely my own work.” Sal was, he supposed, one of the few people in the system for whom the prospect of a War Emergency Plan coming into force was genuinely cause for celebration.

“Really?” Saluus said. “You’re even more eminent than I thought. And you still look about twenty, you dog.” Sal laughed the easy laugh of a man who could afford to be generous with his compliments. Sal chinked glasses. They were drinking champagne; some ancient Krug with a meaningless date all the way from Earth and probably worth as much as a small spaceship. It had a pleasant taste, though not many bubbles.

The two men stood on a balcony, looking out over the caldera. The surging waters beneath formed a great frothed slope spreading all around from underneath the house, a shallow cone of billows and hummocks of foam all furiously bunching and collapsing and rushing ever outwards to where the fractious turmoil settled slightly and became merely wildly charging waves. The balcony was just above the equatorial rim of the house so the column of water actually supporting the place was hidden from them, but the crater walls, a couple of kilometres distant, echoed with the tumult.

They had climbed up here after a modest reception and light lunch with a few of Sal and his wife’s friends — notables all — who were here for the afternoon. Fassin had secured an invitation to stay for a couple of days, until the Shrievalty needed him back in Borquille. He had changed out of his dark grey Shrievalty uniform into casual clothes.

Sal leaned back against the barrier. “Well, thank you for coming to visit.”

Fassin nodded. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“My pleasure. Just mildly surprised you asked.”

“They trust you, Sal.” Fassin gave a small shrug. “Ineeded to get away from all that military shit and they wouldn’t let me just skip out the door of the palace and into Boogeytown.” He looked out at the tumbling waters. “Anyway’ — a glance at Sal—”been too long.” He wanted to give the impression that this had been a good excuse to effect some sort of reconciliation he’d long wanted to make. He and Sal had met up only very occasionally over the two centuries since the wormhole’s destruction, usually at the sort of gigantic social events it was hard to get out of but easy to remain alone within. They hadn’t really talked.

Even now, meeting up, there were whole aspects of their lives that somehow didn’t need to be gone into. How and what they had each been doing was a matter of public record and it would almost be an insult to inquire. Fassin had recognised Sal’s wife from news and social images, hadn’t really needed introducing. There hadn’t been a single person at the reception below, alien or otherwise — servants apart, obviously — about whom Fassin, who was no great social observer, couldn’t have written a short biography. Saluus probably didn’t know as much about Fassin as vice versa, but he’d already congratulated him on his engagement to Jaal Tonderon, so he knew that much (or, more likely perhaps, he just had an efficient social secretary with a good database).

“So, what can you tell me, Fass?” Sal asked casually. He wrinkled his nose. “Can you say anything?”

“About the Emergency?”

“Well, about whatever’s causing all the fuss.”

There was more than a fuss; there was low-level war. Starting the day after martial law was declared there had been a sequence of attacks, mostly on isolated and system-edge craft and settlements, though with some worrying assaults further in-system, including one on a Navarchy dock-habitat in Sepekte’s own trailing Lagrange that had killed over a thousand. Nobody knew whether it was Beyonders behind this resurgence of violence, or the E-5 Discon advanced forces, or a mixture of both.

More oddly, but for Fassin far more disturbingly, somebody had nuked the High Summer house of Sept Litibiti, back on ’glantine, just the day before; missiled it from space like it was a military facility. Bizarre and unprecedented. The place had been empty save for a handful of unlucky gardeners and cleaners, keeping the place ticking over until the appropriate season, but it made Seers throughout the system worried that they’d suddenly, for some reason, become targets. Fassin had sent a message to Slovius saying that maybe they should consider shifting the whole Sept elsewhere on ’glantine. Head for an out-of-season hotel, perhaps. He’d yet to receive a reply, which might be Slovius ignoring his advice, or just the authorities’ new message-traffic checking and censoring software struggling to cope. Neither would surprise.

“Tell me what you know,” Fassin suggested. “I’ll fill in what I can.”

“They want lots of warships, Fass.” Sal gave a sad-looking smile. “Lots and lots of warships. We’re to turn out as many as we can for as long as we can, though they want them sooner rather than later, and any advanced projects that might take longer than a year, even existing ones, are being deprioritised. We’re to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for—” Sal paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. “Hell, idiot stuff; we’re to rough-cut a whole load of civilian conversions: armed merchantmen, one-shot cloud-miners, tooled-up cruise liners and so on. We didn’t even do that in the last Emergency. So whatever it is, it’s serious, it’s presumably what our military friends would call credible, and it’s not very far away. Over to you.”

“Lot I can’t tell you,” Fassin said carefully. “Most of which I guess wouldn’t interest you anyway.” He wondered how much he could say, how much he needed to say. “Supposedly to do with something called the Epiphany-Five Disconnect.”

Sal raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. Bit away. Wonder why they’d bother? Richer pickings inward of where they are.”

“But a significant part of the Summed Fleet is on the way. We’re told.” Fassin grinned.

“Mm-hmm. I see. And what about you?” Sal asked, dipping closer to Fassin, voice dropping. “What’s your part in all this?”

Fassin wondered how much the continual rush of noise produced by the waves below would mask their words, if anybody was listening from far away. Since he’d arrived he’d showered and put on a change of clothes he’d requested from the house — caught without the necessary means of attire due to an extended stay away from home, he’d explained, needlessly. He got the impression the servants were perfectly used to providing clothes of varying sizes and for whatever sex to house guests. Still, even without the proscribed horror of nanotech, it was possible to make bugs very small indeed these days. Had the Shrievalty or the Hierchon’s people put some sort of trace or mike on him? Had Sal? Did Sal put surveillance on his guests as a matter of course? His host was waiting for an answer.

Fassin looked into the drink. A few small bubbles of gas rose to the surface and broke, giving some tiny proportion of the substance of Earth to the atmosphere of a planet twenty thousand light years away. “I just did my job, Sal. Delved, talked, took away what the Dwellers would let me take away. Most of which was not momentous, not important, not going to change anything much at all, not something everybody would want or risk everything for.” He looked Saluus Kehar in the eye. “Just stumbled my way through life, you know? Over whatever turned up. Never knowing what would lead to what.”

“Whoever does?” Sal asked, then nodded. “But I see.”

“Sorry I can’t really tell you too much more.”

Sal smiled and looked out at the slope of artificial surf, the pandemonium of waves beyond and the sheer cliffs further away still, brown-black beneath a hazy azure sky.

“Ah, your minder,” he said. The esuit of Colonel Hatherence of the Shrievalty appeared to one side, low over the foam, floating out over the mad froth of waters like a great fat grey and gold wheel. Whirling vane-sets on either side of her esuit kept the Colonel from sinking into the maelstrom. For all its massive size when you were standing next to it, the esuit looked very small from up here.

“She giving you any problems?”

“No. She’s okay. Doesn’t insist I salute her or call her Ma’am all the time. Happy to keep things informal.” All the same, he was hoping to get the Colonel out of the way somehow, either before or once he got down into Nasqueron.

Fassin watched the Colonel as she picked her way across the scape of waves. “But can you imagine trying to sneak into Boogeytown with that dogging your every move?” he asked. “Even just for one last night?”

Sal snorted. “The dives and the ceilings are too low.”

Fassin laughed. This is like sex, he thought. Well, like the seduction-scenario thing, like the whole stupid mating dance of will-you-won’t-you, do-you-don’t-you rigmarole. Tempting Sal, leading him on…

He wondered if he’d seemed sufficiently mysterious yet hinted at maybe being available. He needed this man.

Dinner with Sal, his wife, their concubines and some business associates, including — amongst the latter — a whule, a jajuejein and a quaup. The talk was of new attacks on distant outposts, martial law, delays in comms, restrictions in travel and who would gain and who would lose from the new Emergency (nobody on any of the couches seemed to anticipate losing more than a few trivial freedoms for a while). Colonel Hatherence sat silent in one corner, needing no external sustenance, thank you, but happy, indeed honoured, to be there while they consumed nourishment, communicated conversationally and intercoursed socially while she continued her studies (much-needed!), screening up on Nasqueron and its famous Dwellers.

Drinks, semi-narcotic foods, drug bowls. A human acrobat troupe entertained them, floodlit beyond the dining room’s balcony.

“No, I’m serious!” Sal shouted at his guests, gesturing at the acrobats, swinging through the air on ropes and trapezes. “If they fall they almost certainly die! So much air in the water you can’t float. Sink right down. Get caught up in the under-turbulence. No, idiot!” Sal told his wife. “Not enough air to breathe!”

Some people left. Drinks later, just the humans. To Sal’s trophy room, corridors and rooms too small, sorry, for Colonel Hatherence (not minding; so to sleeping; good nights!). Sal’s wife, going to bed, and the remaining few. Soon just the two of them, overlooked by the stuffed, lacquered, dry-shrunk or encased heads of beasts from dozens of planets.

“You saw Taince? Just before the portal went?”

“Dinner. Day or two before. Equatower.” Fassin waved in what might have been the general direction of Borquille. You could see the lights of the Equatower from the house, a thin stipple of red climbing into the sky, sometimes perversely clearer above when the lower atmosphere was hazed and the higher beacons shone down at a steeper angle through less air.

“She okay?” Sal asked, then threw his head back and laughed too loudly. “As though it matters. It was two centuries ago. Still”

“Anyway, she was fine.”

“Good.”

They drank their drinks. Cognac. Also from Earth, long, long ago. Far, far away.

Fassin got swim.

“Oh shit,” he said, “I’ve got Swim.”

“Swim?” said Saluus.

“Swim,” Fassin said. “You know; when your head kind of seems to swim because you suddenly think, ‘Hey, I’m a human being but I’m twenty thousand light years from home and we’re all living in the midst of mad-shit aliens and super-weapons and the whole fucking bizarre insane swirl of galactic history and politics!’ That: isn’t it weird?”

“And that’s what? Swing? Swirl?” Sal said, looking genuinely confused.

“No, Swim!” Fassin shouted, not able to believe that Sal hadn’t heard of this concept. He thought everybody had. Some people — most people, come to think of it, or so he’d been told — never got Swim, but lots did. Not just humans, either. Though Dwellers, mind you, never. Wasn’t even in their vocabulary.

“Never heard of it,” Sal confessed.

“Well, didn’t imagine you might have.”

“Hey, you want to see something?”

“Whatever it is, I cannot fucking wait.”

“Come with me.”

“Last time I heard that—”

“We agreed no more of those.”

“Fuck! So we did. Total retraction. Show me what you got to show me.”

“Walk this way.”

“Ah now, just fuck off.”

Fassin followed Sal through to the inner recess of his study. It was kind of what he might have expected if he’d given the matter any thought: lots of wood and softly glowing pools of light, framed stuff and a desk the size of a sunken room. Funny-looking twisted bits of large and gleaming metal or some other shiny substance sitting in one corner. Fassin guessed these were starship bits.

“There.”

“Where? What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“This.” Sal held up a very small twisted-looking bit of metal mounted on a wooden plinth.

Fassin tried very hard not to let his shiver show. He was nothing like as drunk as he was trying to appear to be.

“Yeah? An whassat?” (Overdoing it, but Sal didn’t seem to notice.)

Saluus held the piece of odd-looking metal up before Fassin’s eyes. “This is that thing I got out of that fucking downed ship, my man.” Sal looked at it, swallowed and took a deep breath. Fassin saw Sal’s lip tremble. “This is what—”

The fucker’s going to break down, Fassin thought. He slapped one hand on Sal’s shoulder. “This is no good,” he told him. “We need different, we need, I don’t know; something. We need not this, not what is before us here. We need something different. Elsewhen or elsestuff or elsewhere. This might be my last night of freedom, Sal.” He gripped the other man hard by the shoulder of his perfectly tailored jacket. “I’m serious! You don’t know how bad things might get for me! Oh fuck, Sal, you don’t know how bad things might get for all of us, and I can’t fucking tell you, and this could be my last night of fun anywhere, and… and… and you’re showing me some fucking coat hook or something, and I don’t know…’ He swiped weakly at the twisted piece of metal, patting it away and still missing. Then he sniffed and drew himself up. “Sorry,” he said, soberly. “Sorry, Sal.” He patted the other man’s shoulder. “But this is maybe my last, ah, night of fun, and… look, I feel totally charged for anything — wish Boogeytown was right outside, really do, but on the other hand it’s been a long few days and maybe — no, not maybe. Maybe definitely. In fact, not that, just plain definitely the sensible thing to do is just go to bed and—”

“You serious?” Sal said, dropping the metal piece on its wooden plinth onto the desk behind him.

“About sleep?” Fassin said, gesturing wildly. “Well, it — -”

“No, you moron! About Boogeytown!”

“What? Eh? I didn’t mention Boogeytown!”

“Yes, you did!” Sal said, laughing.

“I did? Well, fuck!”

Sal had a flier. Automatic to the point of being nearly banned under the AI laws. Loaded with repair mechanisms that were not quite nanotech but only by such a tiny-tiny-tiny little bit. Deeply civilian but with total military clearance. If a Grand Fleet Admiral of the Summed Fucking Fleet stepped into this baby and toggled his authority it would only decrease the fucker’s all-areas, multi-volumes access profile. Down in the hangar deck. Walk this way, har har.

They left the top down part of the way, to clear their heads. It was very, very cold.

They set down somewhere where litter blew about under the fans of the flier. Fassin hadn’t thought there was still such a thing as litter.

Boogeytown was much as he remembered it. They hit the lows, looking for highs. They trawled the bowl-bars and narctail parlours, coming up with a brimming catch of buzz and girls, Fassin meanwhile trying to edge Sal in a certain bar’s direction, while Sal — vaguely recalling this wasn’t supposed to be just fun but also a way of getting his old pal Fass to open up with more potentially useful and lucrative details about whatever the fuck was going on — tried to get his old-new best buddy to move in a certain informational direction but without much success and anyway with decreasing amounts of concern and an increasing feeling of oh-who-gives-a-fuck?

Fassin too was getting frustrated, still angling for one more move and one particular streetlet, one particular bar, but they were here now in this diamond-walled emporium called the Narcateria where the sleaze was so coolly glitz it almost hurt, surrounded by people who hadn’t seen Sal in so long and just had to keep him where he was, don’t you dare go away, you wicked man you! And is this your friend? Where you been keeping him? Can I sit here, hmm? Me too me too! So eventually he had to stumble away and make a call in a private public booth and then head for the toilet where he threw up in a thin burning stream all the alcohol he’d drunk since the last time he’d been to the loo (over the hole, so it looked and sounded authentic), then wash his face and rejoin the drunken stoned-out fray of breath-catching loveliness, waiting for the right girl, the one all this had been about, all of it: asking to go to Sal’s in the first place, then getting him drunk and seeming to get drunk himself (which he was, but not that drunk) and then dropping hints about Boogeytown, all so that he could get away and get here and see this one particular girl…

… Who finally appeared nearly an hour later when he was just starting to despair but there she was, perfect and calm and quietly beautiful as ever, though looking quite different, again, with white-gold hair swinging heavy as the real 24-carat article about her near-triangular face, chin just made for holding, strawberry-bruise lips for kissing, tiny little nose for nuzzling, cheeks for stroking, eyes for gazing into (depths, ah, depths!) brows for licking, forehead for licking too, licking dry of sex-sweat after — oo! oo! oo! just too strenuous a session!

Aun Liss.

The one real love of his life, his controlling passion.

Older again but not as old as she should be. Looking different, living different, being different, called different. Called Ko now (and that was all), not Aun Liss, but she would always be Aun Liss to him. No need to say her real name. A lot of what passed between them wasn’t said anyway. Dressed in salarygirl clothes. Nothing special, revealing or provocative.

Nevertheless.

She held out her hand.

Nearby, surrounded by — actually, nearly drowning in — utter human female and super-stimulus hyper-pulchritude loveli-nessence, even Sal looked impressed.

“Fass, you dog!”

Aun Liss was still holding out her hand.

Back in Sal’s flier. Sal was in the front, being grievously attended to by the infamous Segrette Twins, moaning.

Fassin and Aun in the back seat, utterly happy to appear so archetypical. They kissed for a long time, then — looking round, shrugging at the front-seat antics (the flier at this point not really going anywhere, circling in a holding pattern — a clinching pattern, Aun Liss suggested) — she rose up and straddled him, his hands up underneath the light dress she wore, fingers still kneading her back… as they continued to do once they were finally returned to the idiot Kehar house poised over the column of water just as, Aun pointed out, she was poised over his column. (This aloud, for the benefit of anybody listening. They both laughed, not too loudly, he hoped.) Meanwhile she kept the dress on still, even in the heat of it, with his fingers pressing, kneading, moving above her arched spine producing little half-pained gasps until later when they were finally just lying together under a thin sheet she shucked off the dress and he just held her.

And this is what, over the course of those several hours, their fingers said, drawing and tapping out the private, effectively unbuggable code they had used for hundreds of years, since she first became his control, his link:

U STILL MY CNNECTN?

They were in the private booth deep inside the Narcateria, just kissing. She slid her hands between his jacket and shirt, knuckled back, YS. WOT U GOT 4 I?

1ST, I MAJR IN OCULA NW. GOT 2NDD.

Y?

COS I FND SMTING IN THE FMOUS DLVE. BOUT THE DWLLR LIST. YOU HRD OF?

VGLY.

2ND SHIP THERY, he sent. SCRT “HOLE NTWRK.

WAIT, she sent back. WORMHOLE NTWRK?

YS. SCRT 1.

There was a pause. She kept on kissing him. Her fingers sent, YR CRZY.

Walking to the flier, hands up each other’s jackets:

OL AFTR WHTI FND. E-5 DISCONINVDS IN 6 MNTHS TO 1 YR. THEY THNK BYNDRS WITH THEM. TRU?

CMPLCTD. SUM R, SUM RNT.

MRGNCY COS OF THS.

U STRTD THE FKNG MRGNCY?

YS. SORY. SUMD FLT ON WAY. BIG BIT AHED OF ESHIP. HYR IN 2 YRS MAYB. USD A.I. TRNSMTD FRM SUMD FLT 2 TEL US OL THIS.

AN A.I.?

YS.

HYPCRTS.

Then, in the flier:

WOT NXT 4 U?

DLVE SOON AGEN. WITH CHF C-R GNSRL, OERL SHRVLTY CNL C-R PGS YRNVIC. TRY FND RST OF WHTVR WS I FND IN 1ST PLACE.

Straddled-ridden like that, they could talk, too.

“How’s that for you?” she whispered.

“Oh, that’s very good. And you?”

“As above.”

WHT DID U FND?

DNT NO XCTLY. I NO RL2E AT TIME. OL CAME OUT MUCH L8TR WHN JELTCK DID ANLYS. SMTHNG ABT THIS 2ND SHIP THNG CALLD A TRANSFORM, SPSD 2 MAK RST OF DWLR LIST MEAN SMTHNG. JLTCK SNT FLEET 2 TRY FIND. NO FIND. FLT WRKD.

She felt him pause, tense. She sent:

WOT?

ALGDLY THIS ALSO Y BYNDRS WRKD PORTL. TRU?

DNT NO. IJST A MSG GRL. She paused. SO U SAY NOT ONLY U START THIS MRGNCY, U COSD LAST 1 2 GOT PRTL DSTRYD?

YS. GES I JST ACCDNT PRN.

FKNG HEL.

“Very good to see you again.”

“Copy that.”

“We should do this more often.”

“Indeed we should. Now, shh.”

BUT IF SO THIS KNWN, Y I NOT ASKD 2 DLV FIND MOR INFO 4 GUD GYS ERLYR?

NO IDEA.

OL NONSNS ANYWY BUT THEY WNT I 2 LUK.

SO LUK.

WHT U MYN SUM BYNDRS 4 E-5 DISCON, SUM NOT?

FACTNS.

FACTIONS? YR GVNG I FKNG FACTIONS? RLY BEST U CN DO?

KYP BING PASSYN8. CVR SLPNG.

He made passionate moves, uttered passionate sounds.

In his bed, his hands at the small of her back:

I GO 2 3RD FURY MOON 3 DAYS TYM.

… OH.

OH?

KND OF A RMR. I SHLDNT EVN NO. MAYB ATK ON NASQ MNS.

NASQ MOONS? NOT “GLNTN?

NO. LTL MNS.

CN U GET WRD, NO ATCK ON 3RD FURY MOON? NO ATK ON ANY SEERS?

WILL TRY.

TRY HRD.

PROMIS.

OK. IF I DO FIND ANYTHING ON NASQ WILL GET 2 U, NT MRCTRIA.

OK. GOOD. HOW?

STN A MICROSAT MIDWY BTWN OUR SATS EQ4 EQ5. I AIM BRST THER. MY OLD CODE FREQ STL GOOD?

THNK SO. TAK TYM 2 SET UP.

TAK I MNTHS 2 FIND NYTHNG. PRBLY 0 TO FIND ANYWY. HAV MICROSAT ABL 2 RCV FRM B-LOW 2, IN CASE I IN NASQ.

WILL PASS ON.

A little later:

LUV U.

YR CRZY.

TRU.

B MOR PASSYN8.

He pulled the sheet further over his Beyonder girl. CVR SLPNG AGEN?

NO, JST B MOR PASSYN8…