The Algebraist

Where?

“You want to go where?”

“Hoestruem, near Aopoleyin,” Fassin said. “We know where Hoestruem is.”

“We’re not stupid.”

“Well, I’m not. Janath might be.”

“I entirely fulfilled my Creat Minimum Stupidity Allocation by associating with you.”

“Forgive my partner. We were asking for confirmation more out of shock at your unspeakable alienness than anything else. So. You want to go to Hoestruem.”

“Yes,” Fassin said.

“And Zosso sent you.”

“Still banging on about that damn scarf.”

“Useful code, though.”

“Hoestruem.”

“Hoestruem.”

“Doable.”

“Yes, but it’s more the why of it, not the how.”

“The how is easy.”

“The how is easy. Problem is definitely why.”

“As in bother.”

“As in should we.”

“Well, should we?”

“More rhetorical.”

“Has to be a joint decision.”

“Absolutely.”

“Zosso asks.”

“Zosso does.”

“Do we accommodate?”

“We could just give him back his mantle scarf.”

“Was there ever a scarf?”

“A real scarf?”

“Yes.”

“Now you mention it.”

“Anyway.”

“Beside the point.”

“Always a dangerous place to tarry”

“Zosso. A travel request. This human gentleman in his gascraft esuit.”

“Ahem,” said Y’sul. “And his friend.”

“Not forgetting his friend.”

“And mentor,” Y’sul pointed out.

“Yes, that too.”

“Do we do or do we don’t?”

“Is the question.”

“Does we does or don’t we not?”

“Yes. No. Select one of the aforementioned.”

“Quite.”

“Precisely.”

“In your own time,” Y’sul muttered.

They were in a spinbar in Eponia, a globular stickycity in the cold chaotic wastes of the North Polar Region. The borrowed jetclipper had done its best impression of a suborb, skipping nearly into space in a series of bounced trajectories, finally slowing, sinking and coming to rest by the tenuous cloudlike structure of the great city, occupying hundreds of cubic kilometres of cold, stale gas just fifteen thousand klicks from the giant planet’s North Pole. They’d tracked Quercer Janath down to a spinbar called The Liquid Yawn. Valseir had demurred but Y’sul and Fassin had crammed into a crushpod, been accelerated up to speed and then — dizzily — joined the two travelcaptains in their booth.

Fassin had never encountered a travelcaptain before. He’d heard of them, and knew that they were almost always found in the equatorial band, but they were elusive, even shy. He’d tried to meet with one many times in the past but there had always been some sort of problem, often at the last moment.

The spinbar whirled madly, twisting and looping and rolling at extreme high speed, making the city outside its bubble-diamond walls seem to gyrate as though with the express intention of disorientating the outward-looking bar-going public. The effect was intense and intentional. Dwellers had a superb sense of balance and it took a lot to make them dizzy. Being spun like a maniac was one Dweller idea of fun just because it led to a profound, giddy dislocation with one’s surroundings. Taking drugs at the same time just added to the hilarity. Y’sul, however, it had seemed to Fassin, looked a little grey around the gills as they’d woven their way through the mostly empty spinbar to the travelcaptains’ booth.

“You all right?”

“Perfectly”

“Bringing back memories of heading through the storm wall in the Poaflias?”

“Not at… Well, just a little. Ulp. Perhaps.”

Quercer Janath, travelcaptains, were one. They looked like one big Dweller, of about Adult age, but there were two individuals in there, one in each discus. Fassin had heard of truetwin Dwellers before, but never met a set. Usually a Dweller’s brain was housed just off the central spine in the thickest, central part of one discus; generally the left one. Right-brain Dwellers were about fifteen per cent of the total population, though this varied from planet to planet. Very, very occasionally, two brains developed in the one creature, and something like Quercer Janath tended to be the result. The double-Dweller wore a shiny set of all-overs with transparent and mesh patches over the hub sense organs, and a shaded transparent section over the outer frill of sensory fringe.

“You’ll not be able to see much.”

“That’s if we take you at all.”

“Yes, that’s if we do take you in the first.”

“Place. Which is by no means guaranteed.”

“Indeed not. Decision not yet made.”

“Still pending.”

“Absolutely. But.”

“In any event.”

“You’ll not be able to see much of anything.”

“Not exactly a sightseeing trip.”

“Or a cruise.”

“Either.”

“And you’ll have to switch everything off.”

“All non-bio systems.”

“At least.”

“If, that is.”

“Big if.”

“We do take you.”

“I think we get the idea,” Fassin said. “Good.”

“Brilliant.”

“When can we expect a decision?” Y’sul asked. He’d turned his right sense-fringe inward so that he was seeing with only one. This was the Dweller equivalent of a drunk human closing one eye.

“Made it. I’ve made it. You made it?”

“Yep, I’ve made it.”

“It’s a Yes?”

“It’s a Yes.”

“You’ll take us?” Fassin asked. “Are you deaf? Yes.”

“Definitely.”

“Thank you,” Fassin said. “So where are we going?” Y’sul asked tetchily. “Ah.”

“Ha!”

“Wait.”

“And see.”

The ship was no joke. Three hundred metres long, it was a polished ebony spike necklaced with drive pods like fat seeds. It lay in a public hangar deep under the stickycity, a semi-spherical space a kilometre across bounded by the hexagonal planes of adjacent smaller bubble volumes.

Valseir was bidding them farewell here. The trip would begin with what the two travelcaptains described as an intense, fractally spiralled, high-acceleration, torque-intense manoeuvre complex, and was not for the faint-willed. The old Dweller had invoked his seniority to excuse himself the ordeal.

“More spinning around,” Y’sul sighed, on hearing what awaited them.

“My regards to Leisicrofe,” Valseir told Fassin. “You still have the leaf image, I hope.”

Fassin took the image-leaf with its depiction of sky and clouds out of its storage locker in the little gascraft and showed it to the old Dweller. “I’ll say hello.”

“Please do. Best of luck.”

“You too. How do I find you when I get back?”

“Leave that to me. If I’m not readily available, try where we found Zosso. Or, perhaps at a StormSail regatta.”

“Yes,” Y’sul said. “But next time just don’t bring any friends.”

The black spike-ship was called the Velpin. It burst from the vast cloud of the city like a needle shot from a frozen waterfall of foam, disappeared into the gelid rush of gases forever swirling around the planet’s distant pole and started its bizarre flight, spiralling, rolling, looping, rising and falling and rising again.

Locked into a centrally positioned space which doubled as a passenger compartment and hold, restrained by webbing, Fassin and Y’sul felt the ship commit to spirals within spirals within spirals, tiny corkscrew motions threaded into a whole ramped course of greater coils, themselves part of a still wider set of ever quicker, tighter loops.

“Fucking hell,” Y’sul commented.

A faulty screen was set in the far wall, hazed over with static. It made buzzing noises and occasionally flashed with images of ragged, striated clouds whipping past in distorted twists of light and shade. Fassin could see and hear, though both senses were degraded. All the systems in the gascraft had been switched off. Webbed upright, he could see out of the de-opaqued plate over his face — he’d let some of the shock-gel drain away so he could see better. The sound that came through the little arrowhead was at once dulled and high. Y’sul’s voice sounded like squeaks, barely comprehensible.

Fassin and Y’sul were stuck to the inner surface of the compartment, pinned there by the ship’s wild spins.

“Any idea why they have to do all this fractal spiralling?” Fassin had asked when they’d both been secured and Quercer Janath had gone to their command space a single compartment away.

“Could just be pure mischief,” Y’sul had said.

Fassin looked at Y’sul now. Both the Dweller’s sense fringes were turned in.

The ship accelerated hard, executing a broad curve. The screen flashed black pitted with stars, all revolving frantically, then blanked out.

The insane, nested sets of spirals resolved down to a single long-axis spin, as though the Velpin was a shell travelling down the barrel of some vast gun.

The ship resounded with a high, singing note around them and seemed to settle into something like a cruise. The rate of spin slackened off gradually. Fassin watched as Y’sul’s sense fringes gradually opened. The screen showed slowly spinning stars for several minutes. Then it blanked out again. The spinning picked up once more and Y’sul turned his fringes outside-in again. The spin built up until Fassin could feel his whole body being pressed through the shock-gel. It was his own coffin, he realised. Of course it was. He was getting tunnel vision now, starting to see the view down that great gun barrel, the view ahead shrunk to a single point far away; way, way in the distance, nothing but darkness and grey beyond darkness on either side, down that never-ending tube towards the last defined place they were aiming towards, never coming any closer.

Fassin woke up. Still spinning, but the rate was slackening off again. His nose itched and it felt like he needed to pee, even though he knew he didn’t. This never happened when the shock-gel and gillfluid were doing their jobs. He fell asleep.

* * *

Taince Yarabokin woke up. One of her first thoughts as she surfaced slowly to full consciousness was that Saluus Kehar would not have received the message she’d prepared for him, that there was still time for more reviewings and re-recordings and revisions, that she would be able to spend more time watching and listening to herself on the recording, and reduce herself to tears every time. Still time and a chance to confront him, maybe kill him, if that was both possible and something she felt driven to do at the time (she had no idea — sometimes she wanted to kill him, sometimes she wanted him alive to suffer the shame of knowing that she had released the story to the newsnets, and sometimes she just wanted him to know that she knew what had really happened that long-ago night in the ruined ship on the high desert).

She checked the time, feeling woozily around in virtual space for information. Still half a year out from Ulubis. She would be awake now until the attack itself, one of the first to be wakened for the final run-in, because she represented the closest thing they had to local knowledge. Privately she doubted she’d be able to offer much practical help, given that she’d last seen Ulubis over two centuries earlier and it might, to put it mildly, have changed somewhat after having been invaded, but she was the best they had. She thought of herself in that respect more as a talisman than anything else, a small symbol of the system that they would be fighting for. If that had been one consideration in her getting a place in the fleet, it didn’t bother her. She was confident that she was a good, competent and brave officer and deserved her post on merit alone. The fact that it was her own home system she was riding to the rescue of was just a bonus.

The fleet had spread out a little since the battle with the Beyonders in mid-voyage, sacrificing the immediate weight of arms it could bring to bear for a net of forward picket craft which would flag any trouble long before the main body of the fleet got to it. Taince had spent most of the intervening years slow-asleep in her pod, but — thanks to that relative security provided by the advance ships — she’d had some recreational and morale-time out of the shock-gel as well, walking around almost like a normal human being in the spun-gravity of the battleship, feeling odd and strange confronted with such normality, like an alien inhabiting a human’s body; clumsy, astonished at tiny things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm, awkward, especially at first, with meeting other off-duty humans, and missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual existence — with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data and meaning — like an amputated limb.

It would be like that again now, once she had finally come round. Taince wasn’t really looking forward to it. When she was stumbling about on two legs she wanted to be back in the pod, synched in, but when she was there she was forever nostalgic for a normal, physical one-speed, one-reality life. Blue skies and sunlight, a fresh breeze blowing through her hair and green grass and flowers under her bare feet.

Long time ago. And maybe never again, who knew?

Another of Taince’s first thoughts, even when she realised that she was being woken up slowly, without alarms going off, as part of the programmed, pre-agreed duty-shift system rather than some fateful emergency that might end in her death at any moment, was that she had not yet escaped into death, that it was not yet all over, and any terrors and agonies that might be hers to encounter before the peace of oblivion were still ahead of her.

* * *

“Hoestruem,” Quercer Janath said.

“Where?” Fassin asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Where?’?”

“You’re in it.”

Fassin had recovered from his blackout once they’d turned his little gascraft’s systems back on. He still felt disorientated and oddly dirty, a sensation that was only gradually disappearing as the shock-gel enveloped him fully again. Y’sul had seemed a bit groggy too, wobbly in the air when released from his webbing.

Now they were looking at the passenger-compartment screen, which Quercer Janath, still dressed in their shiny overalls, had hit with one rim-arm and got to work. Fassin looked carefully at the image on the screen but all he could see was a star field. He could not, for now, work out in which direction he was looking. Certainly not a direction he was used to looking in. He didn’t recognise anything.

“In it?” he asked, feeling fuzzy, and foolish.

“Yes, in it.”

Fassin looked at Y’sul, who still looked a little grey about the mantle.

The Dweller just shrugged. “Well,” he said, “I certainly give in. Who, what or where the fuck is Hoestruem?”

“A Clouder.”

“A Clouder?” Fassin said. This had to be a translation thing, or a simple misunderstanding. Clouders were part of the Cincturia: the beings, devices, semi-civs and tech dross that were beyond the Beyonders, way on the outside of everything.

Y’sul shook himself. “You mean a WingClouder or TreeClouder or StickyClouder or—”

“No.”

“None of the above.”

“Just a Clouder.”

“But—” Fassin said.

“Aopoleyin, then!” Y’sul shouted. “Let’s start with that! Is that where we are?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, sort of.”

“Depends.”

“It’s the nearest place.”

“The nearest system.”

“Eh?” Y’sul said.

“The nearest what?” Fassin asked, simply not understanding. He peered at the star field. This didn’t look right. This didn’t look right at all. Not in any way whatsoever, not upside down or mirrored or backside-holo’d or anything.

“I think I’m still confused,” Y’sul said, rippling his sense mantles to wake himself up.

Fassin felt as though he was at the bottom of that gun barrel again, about to be blasted out of it, or already being blown out of it, up the biggest, longest most unspeakably enormous and forever unending gun barrel in all the whole damn universe.

“How far are we from Nasqueron?” he heard himself say.

“Wait a moment,” Y’sul said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘system’?”

“About thirty-four kiloyears.”

“Stellar, not gas-giant. Apologies for any confusion.”

“Thirty-four kiloyears?” Fassin said. It felt like he was going to black out again. “You mean…’ His voice just trailed off.

“Thirty-four thousand light years, standard. Roughly. Apologies for any confusion.”

“I already said that.”

“Know. Different person, different confusion.”

They were in another system, another solar system, another part of the galaxy altogether; they had, if they were being told the truth, left Ulubis — system and star — thirty-four thousand light years behind. There was a working portal in Ulubis system linked via a wormhole to this distant stellar system neither Fassin nor Y’sul had ever heard of.

The Clouder being Hoestruem was a light year across. Clouders were — depending who you talked to — sentient, semi-sentient, proto-sentient, a-sentient or just plain not remotely sentient -though that last extreme point of view tended to be held only by those for whom it would be convenient if it were true, such as those who could do useful, profitable things with a big cloud of gas. Providing it wasn’t alive. Arguably closer to vast, distributedly-smart plants than any sort of animal, they had a composition very similar to the clouds of interstellar gas which they inhabited\were (the distinction was moot).

Clouders were part of the Cincturia, the collection of beings, species, machine strains and intelligent detritus that existed -generally — between stellar systems and didn’t fit into any other neat category (so they weren’t the deep-space cometarians called the Eclipta, they weren’t drifting examples of the Brown Dwarf Communitals known as the Plena, and they weren’t the real exotics, the Non-Baryonic Penumbrae, the thirteen-way-folded Dimensionates or the Flux-dwelling Quantarchs).

Valseir’s friend Leisicrofe was a scholar of the Cincturia. The research trip he was making was a field trip, visiting actual examples of Cincturia — Clouders, Sailpods, Smatter, Toilers and the rest — throughout the galaxy. He had come to visit Hoestruem because it was one of the few Clouders anywhere near a worm-hole portal. Only it wasn’t a wormhole or a portal that anybody in the Mercatoria or the rest of what called itself the Civilised Galaxy knew anything about.

The star Aopoleyin was only a dozen light days away. The Clouder Hoestruem — much larger than the stellar system as measured to its outermost planet — was passing partly through the outer reaches of the system, intent (if that was not too loaded a word) on its slow migration to some far-distant part of the great lens. The Dweller Leisicrofe was somewhere here, in his own small craft, or at least had been. The Velpin set out to look for him.

“How long were we really under?” Fassin asked Quercer Janath. They were floating in the Velpin’s control space, watching the scanners chatter through their sweeps, searching for anything that might be a ship. The progress was slow. The Dwellers had long had an agreement with the Clouders that meant their ships made very slow speed when moving through one. Clouders were resilient, but their individual filaments, the wispy bands and channels of tenuous gas that formed their sensory apparatus and nervous systems, were surpassing delicate, and a ship the size of the Velpin had to move slowly and carefully amongst the strands of Clouder substance to avoid causing damage. The Velpin was broadcasting a signal hail looping a request for Leisicrofe to get in touch, though Quercer Janath was not optimistic this would raise their quarry; these academics were notorious for turning off their comms.

The truetwin looked genuinely puzzled. The double-creature shook itself, rustling the shiny crinkles of the mirror-finish coveralls. “How long were you under what?”

“How long were we really unconscious?” Fassin asked.

“Some days.”

“And then some more days.”

“Seriously,” Fassin said.

“And what’s this ‘we’?” Y’sul protested. “I wasn’t unconscious!”

“There.”

“You see?”

“Your friend disagrees.”

“Some days, you said,” Fassin quoted.

“Some days?” Y’sul said. “Some days? We weren’t unconscious for some days, any days, a single day!” He paused. “Were we?”

“The process takes some time, requires forbearance,” the truetwin Dweller said. “Sleep is best. No distractions.”

“How could we possibly keep you amused?”

“And then there’s the security aspect.”

“Of course.”

“I was only briefly drowsy!” Y’sul exclaimed. “I shut my eyes for a moment, in contemplation, no more!”

“About twenty-six days.”

“We were unconscious for twenty-six days?” Fassin asked. “Standard.”

“Roughly.”

“What?” Y’sul bellowed. “You mean we were kept unconscious?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“In a manner of speaking!” a plainly furious Y’sul roared. “What we said.”

“And what manner of speaking would that be, you kidnapping piratical wretches?”

“The manner of speaking complete truth.”

“You mean you drugged or zapped us unconscious?” Y’sul fairly howled.

“Yes. Very boring otherwise.”

“How dare you?” Y’sul shrieked.

“Plus it’s part of the terms for using the tube.”

“Conditions of Passage,” the left side of Quercer Janath intoned.

The other side of the truetwin made a whistling noise.

“Oh, yes! Those Conditions of Passage; they’ll get you every time.”

“Can’t be helpful with them.”

“Can’t use the tube without “em.”

“Don’t — What? — You — Condi — !” Y’sul spluttered.

“Ah,” Fassin said, signalling to Y’sul to let him speak. “Yes. I’d like to ask you some questions about, ah, tube travel, if you don’t mind.”

“Absolutely.”

“Ask away.”

“Make the questions good, though; the answers may well be baloney.”

“…Never heard anything so disgraceful in all my…’ Y’sul was muttering, drifting over to a set of medium-range scanner holo tanks and tapping them as though this would aid the locating of Leisicrofe’s ship.

Fassin had known they’d been under for more than an hour or two. His own physiology, and the amount of cleaning-up and housekeeping the shock-gel and gillfluid had had to do had told him that. Finding out that it had been twenty-six days left him more relieved than anything else. Certainly losing that amount of time when you hadn’t been expecting to and hadn’t been warned about it was disconcerting and left one feeling sort of retrospectively vulnerable (and would it be the same on any way back?) but at least they hadn’t said a year, or twenty-six years. Fate alone knew what had happened in Ulubis during that time — and of course, with all his gascraft’s systems switched off, Fassin had no way of checking whether this really was the amount of time they had spent unconscious — but it looked like at least one small part of the Dweller List legend was true. There were secret wormholes. There was one, for sure, and Fassin thought it unlikely in the extreme that the one between Ulubis and Aopoleyin was the only one. It was well worth losing a couple of dozen days to find that out.

Fassin felt himself try to draw a breath inside the little gascraft. “We did come through a wormhole?” he asked.

“Excellent first question! Easily answerable in every sense! Yes.”

“We did. Though we call them Cannula.”

“Where is the Ulubis end — the Nasqueron end — of the worm-hole, the Cannula? Where is the Adjutage?” Fassin asked.

“Ah! He knows the terminology.”

“Most impressive.”

“And a very good question in one sense.”

“Couldn’t agree more. Phenomenally hopeless in another.”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Security.”

“Sure you understand.”

“Of course I understand,” Fassin said. Getting a straight answer to that one would have been too good to be true. “How long has the wormhole existed?” he asked.

The truetwin was quiet for a moment, then said,

“Don’t know.”

“For sure. Billions of years, probably.”

“Possibly.”

“How many others are there like it?” Fassin asked. “Imean wormholes; Cannula?”

“Ditto.”

“Ditto?”

“Ditto as in — again — don’t know.”

“No idea.”

“Well, some.”

“All right, some idea. But can’t tell. Conditions of Passage again.”

“Drat those Conditions of Passage.”

“Oh yes, drat.”

“Are there any other wormholes from Ulubis — from anywhere near Ulubis system, say within its Oort radius — to anywhere else?”

“Another good question. Can’t tell you.”

“More than our travelcaptaincy’s worth.”

“This one, to Aopoleyin; does it link up with a Mercatoria wormhole? Does one of their wormholes have a portal, an Adjutage, here too?”

“No.”

“Agree. Straight answer. What a relief. No.”

“And from here, from Aopoleyin,” Fassin said. “Are there other wormholes?”

Silence again for a moment. Then, “Seems silly, but can’t tell you.”

“Like anybody’s going to have just one stupid tube to this place.”

“But still.”

“Can’t say.”

“And that’s official.”

Fassin signalled resignation. “Conditions of Passage?” he asked.

“Catching on.”

“But why me?” Fassin asked. “Why you?”

“Why you what?”

“Why have I been allowed to travel here, to use the worm-hole?”

“You asked.”

“More to the point, Valseir, Zosso and Drunisine asked on your behalf.”

“How could we refuse?”

“So I couldn’t just have asked on my own behalf?” Fassin said. “Oh, you could have asked.”

“Best leave that hanging.”

“Attempt not to insult passengers.”

“Unwritten law.”

“Do you know of any other humans who’ve been allowed to use Dweller wormholes?”

“No.”

“No, indeed. Not that we’d know, necessarily.”

“Any other Seers?”

“Not to our knowledge.”

“Which is admittedly vague.”

“Okay,” Fassin said. He could feel his heart thudding in his chest, deep inside the little gascraft. “Do you make journeys through the wormhole often?”

“Define ‘often’.”

“Let me rephrase: how many times have you used the worm-hole in the last ten years standard?”

“Easy question.”

“To sidestep.”

“But — say — a few hundred.”

“Excuse our vagueness. Conditions of Passage.”

“A few hundred?” Fassin asked. Good grief, if that was true these guys were running round the galaxy in their hidden worm-hole system like subway trains under a city.

“No more, assuredly.”

“Are there many other ships like… ? No, let me rephrase: how many other ships in Nasqueron make regular wormhole journeys?”

“No idea.”

“Haven’t the haziest.”

“Not even roughly? Would there be dozens, hundreds?”

The left side of Quercer Janath briefly turned its shiny overalls transparent and flashed a pattern of high amusement over its signal skin.

The right side made the whistling noise again.

Fassin gave them time for a spoken answer, but it didn’t appear. “Are there a lot?” he asked.

Silence a while longer.

“There are a few.”

“Not a few.”

“Make what you will.”

“Again, vagueness to be excused. Conditions of Passage.”

“Thousands?” Fassin asked. No response from the truetwin Dweller. He felt himself gulp. “Tens of—?”

“No point going pursuing numbers uppage.”

“See last answer given above.”

He had no idea. There just couldn’t be all that many ships, could there? No matter how impressive your stealth tech, surely out of hundreds or thousands of ship movements within a system every year a few had to betray itself on some sort of sensor, now and again. No system was perfect, no technology never failed. Something had to show up. How far out did portals have to be? Fassin wasn’t an expert on the physics, but he was fairly certain that you needed relatively flat space, well away from a gravity gradient as steep as that round a gas-giant. Could their portals be as near to the planet as a close-orbit moon?

“And Nasqueron?” he asked. “Would it be a typical sort of Dweller planet in this regard?”

“All Places of Dwelling are special.”

“Nasqueron — Nest of Winds — no less special than any.”

“But yes.”

Yes. Fassin felt that if he’d been standing up in normal gravity asking these questions and getting these answers, he’d have had to sit down some time ago. Or just plain fallen over.

“Have you ever been here before, to Aopoleyin?” he asked.

Silence. Then, “No.”

“Or if yes, can’t remember.”

Fassin got something like Swim, that feeling of intense disconnection when the sheer implicatory outlandishness of a situation suddenly hit home to the unprepared human.

“And if — when — we go back to Nasqueron, am I free to just tell people where I’ve been?”

“If you remember.”

“Then yes.”

“Is there a reason I might not remember?”

“Cannula travel plays strange tricks, Seer Taak.”

“You’d try to remove the memory from my brain?” Fassin felt his skin crawl. “Human brains are difficult to do that sort of thing to without harming them.”

“We’ve heard.”

“Working on assumption nobody will believe you.”

“Don’t distress.”

“Might believe me!” Y’sul said, suddenly turning away from the screens he’d busied himself with earlier.

Quercer Janath bobbed dramatically, like they’d forgotten he was there.

“You’re not serious!”

“Not serious!” they yelped, nearly together.

Y’sul snorted and flashed high amusement. ‘Course not.” He turned back to the screens, muttering while chuckling, “What you take me for. Like life too much anyway. Hang on to my memories, thank you…”

* * *

The search went on. Fassin tried interrogating the Velpin’s systems to discover if it carried its own Dweller List, its own map of the unknown wormhole network, or even just the location of the portal they’d entered in Ulubis system to get here. The ship’s computers — easily accessed, barely shielded — seemed completely free of anything but the most basic star charts. The greater galaxy was mapped down to a scale that showed where all the stars and major planets should be, and that was it. No habs and no traces of megastructures were shown, and only the vaguest indications of Oort and Kuiper bodies and asteroid belts were given. It wasn’t like a proper star-chart set at all, it was more like a school atlas. The little gascraft had a more detailed star map. Fassin searched the ship electronically as best he could without making it too obvious, but found nothing else more detailed.

He supposed the real stuff must be hidden away somewhere, but had an odd, nagging feeling that it wasn’t. The Velpin seemed a well-built ship — by Dweller standards exceptionally well-built — with relatively sophisticated but elegantly simple engines and lots of power, no weapons and some carrying capacity. No more. The rudimentary star data somehow fitted.

Fassin tried to work out a way to commandeer the ship, just take it over. Could he hijack the Velpin? He’d spent enough time in the cluttered sphere of the ship’s command space to see how Quercer Janath controlled the vessel. It didn’t look difficult. He had, even, just asked.

“How do you navigate this thing?”

“Point.”

“Point?”

“Get to the general volume and then point in the right direction.”

“Secret is plenty of power.”

“Delicate finessing of delta-V is sign you haven’t really got enough power.”

“Power is all.”

“You can do a lot by just pointing.”

“If you’ve got enough power.”

“Though sometimes you have to sort of allow a bit for deflection.”

“That’s a technical term.”

Fassin couldn’t work out how to take the ship over. Dwellers could, if they were determined, go years without experiencing anything a human would recognise as sleep, and Quercer Janath claimed that they could get by without any at all, not even little slow-down style snoozes. His gascraft had no weapons apart from the manipulators, he had never trained to use the arrowhead as a close-combat device and anyway an Adult Dweller was bigger and probably more powerful -except in top speed — than the little gascraft. Dwellers were, anyway, generally regarded as being very hard to disable and\or kill.

He remembered Taince Yarabokin talking about her close-combat briefings. The basic advice when confronting a Dweller who meant you harm — if you, as a human, were in a conventional spacesuit, say — was to make sure you had a big gun. There was no known way an unarmed human, even in an armoured suit, could take on a fit young Dweller. If you didn’t have a big gun, then Run Away Very Quickly was the best advice. Of all the Mercatorial species, only the Voehn were known to be able to tackle a Dweller unarmed, and even then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Fassin supposed he could just ram Quercer Janath. Crashing the little gascraft into them nose first might knock them out or disable them, but he wasn’t sure there was sufficient room to work up enough speed for such a manoeuvre in any single part of the ship. He’d need to start a few compartments back and come slamming into the command space, hoping for a lucky hit, and that they wouldn’t hear him coming and just rote out of the way to leave him to smash into the instruments. He wondered what Hatherence would have done. He wondered if she’d have been allowed to come in the first place. Almost certainly not with any weapons. On the other hand there was that standard Dweller casualness about such things. On the other hand, this ship didn’t seem that casual.

Even if he could get Quercer Janath out of the way, what about Y’sul? He didn’t think the older Dweller would conspire or even cooperate. Y’sul had made it very clear that he was an entirely loyal Dweller who was simply being a good guide and mentor, not some treacherous human-lover in league with or harbouring any sympathy for the Mercatoria, an entire power structure and civilisation he professed neither to understand nor care about.

And even if Fassin could somehow get control of the ship by himself, tricking both Dwellers — or all three, depending how you looked at it — what then? He still hadn’t been able to find any sign of a hidden navigational matrix on the ship. Where was he supposed to go? How did he find the wormhole portal that had brought them here? When he found it, how did he get through, assuming it was in any way guarded or just administered? Mercatorial portals were some of the most intensely monitored and heavily guarded locations in the galaxy. Even allowing for the semi-chaotic indifference that Dwellers tended to display regarding such matters, could he really expect to fly unchallenged through one of their portals as though it was just another patch of space?

He’d tried to find out more about the whole process of finding and traversing a Dweller wormhole portal — an Adjutage — from Quercer Janath, but they had, to even his surprise, given their conspicuous gift for the technique, comprehensively out-vagued themselves on the matter, surpassing their most studiedly unhelpful earlier replies by some margin.

Fassin had been allowed out of the ship. He’d floated free of it as it cruised gently through the tenuous, near-vacuum body of the Clouder Hoestruem. He wanted to check as best he could that this was not all faked somehow. How, after all, did he really know that he was where Quercer Janath said he was? They’d told him. He’d seen information displayed on some screen and in or out of some holo displays. It could all be a joke, or a way of setting him up for something. So he had to check.

Outside the Velpin, keeping pace with the ship as it slid through the allegedly self-aware interstellar cloud, he used the little gascraft’s senses to gauge whether he was in some vast artificial environment.

As far as Fassin could tell, he wasn’t. He genuinely was in a chemical\dust cloud on the edge of a planetary system a quarter of the way round the galaxy from his home and halfway in towards the galactic core. The stars looked completely different. Only the distant galaxies still aligned. If it wasn’t really the edge of deep space, it was a brilliant simulation of it. He used up a little of his reaction mass — water, basically — to fly a few kilometres away from the Velpin, and still encountered no wall, no giant screen. So either he was in a truly prodigious VR space, or it was all being done directly, through his brain, or through the gascraft’s own collar, somehow uprated to one hundred per cent immersion, beyond check.

He thought back to something Valseir had said once: Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

Valseir had been talking about the Truth and other religions, but Fassin felt he was in a similar situation here. He had no real choice but to act as though all this was genuine. Even so, he had to keep the idea that it wasn’t at the back of his head, just in case. Because if all this was real then he was, maybe, on the brink of the most astounding discovery in all human history, a revelation that could do untold harm or bring inestimable benefits to any combination of the Mercatoria, its adversaries and just about every other space-faring species in the galaxy. He remembered confronting the emissarial projection, what seemed like an age ago, back in the Autumn House. Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a setup, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.

He ran every check he could while he was outside the hull of the Velpin. He was in space. Everything checked out. Or he was in a sim so complete that there was no disgrace in being taken in by it. Back to the Truth again. Hatherence would have appreciated the dilemma.

He could, if he really wanted, he supposed, just try and run away. The gascraft would support him indefinitely, it was capable of independent entry into a planetary atmosphere, and if he used almost all his reaction mass he could be in the inner system of this star Aopoleyin in a few years. He could even sleep most of the way and hardly notice the journey. But then what? He’d never heard of the place. It was somewhere in the Khredeil Tops (whatever those were) according to the gascraft’s rudimentary star atlas, but it wasn’t listed as a human or Mercatorial inhabited system and there was no mention of it having any inhabitants at all. That didn’t mean there was nobody there — everywhere seemed to support somebody who called it home — but it meant that he’d probably be no further forward trying to get back home.

He came back to the ship when Quercer Janath signalled excitedly that they’d found something. It wasn’t Leisicrofe’s ship; it was the delicate ball of gas and chemicals — a lacework ball of cold and dirty string open to the vacuum, held together by just a trace of gravity — that was the Clouder’s mind.

… Looking for… ?

— A Dweller. A gas-giant Dweller, called Leisicrofe.

… Image…

· Image?

… Told image expect… specific image…

— Ah. I have an image with me. How… ? Where, I mean what do I show it to, so you can see it?

… No… describe…

— Okay. It’s an image of white clouds in a blue sky.

… Accords…

— So you can tell me? Where Leisicrofe is?

… Went…

· When did he go?

… Measure time how you… ?

— Standard system?

… Known… being Leisicrofe went 7.35 x 10° seconds ago…

Fassin did the calculation. About twenty years earlier.

He was nestled into the outer regions of the Clouder’s mind, the little gascraft resting gently between two broad strands of gas a fraction less cold than the surrounding chill of deep space. He was, in effect, delving, stopped right down to talk to something that made a deep, slow-timing Dweller look like a speed-freak. Clouders thought surpassingly slowly.

A signal from outside, from the Velpin. To the Clouder he sent,

— Where did Leisicrofe go?

Then he clicked up to normal speed.

“Are you going to be much longer?” Y’sul asked, sounding irritable. “I am rapidly running out of patience with this bilateral monomaniac. It’s been ten days, Fassin. What’s happened? Fallen asleep?”

“I’m going as fast as I can. Only been a few tens of seconds for me.”

“You could just stay and think at normal speed, you know. Give us all time to mull over whatever this gas-brain’s saying. No need to go doing this show-off delving stuff.”

“Less of a conversation that way. This shows respect. You get more out of people if you—”

“Yes yes yes. Well, you just carry on. I’ll try and find more games to keep this split-personality cretin occupied. You rote off and commune with this space-vegetable. I’ll do the real hard work. Sorry I came along now. If I’ve missed any more good battles while I’ve been away…’ His voice faded into the distance.

Fassin descended into extreme slow-time again. The Clouder still hadn’t replied.

At least this time there was no insane spiralling. There was the same fuzzy, low-reliability screen to distract them as they wafted away from the Clouder and made for the hidden wormhole mouth, and the doors out of the passenger compartment were just as locked, but there was no fierce spinning. Fassin let Quercer Janath take over the gascraft remotely and turn off its systems. He didn’t bother to clear any of the shock-gel or turn the faceplate clear this time, he just put himself into a trance. It was easy, a lot like preparing to go down into slow-time. And it meant he couldn’t see or hear Y’sul complaining about the ignominy of being zapped unconscious just because they were going on a space journey.

They were making for somewhere called Mavirouelo — yet another place Fassin had never heard of. This was where Hoestruem had said that Leisicrofe was going next. The Clouder hadn’t known if this was a system, a planet, another Clouder or what. Quercer Janath had gone silent for a moment when they heard the name, and Fassin had sensed them consulting the ship’s crude galactic atlas. They declared that they knew the place. A planet, in the Ashum system. (Fassin, or at least the gascraft’s memory, did know of this place. It was even connected, with its own Mercatorial-controlled wormhole, though Fassin suspected they wouldn’t be using it.) Total travel time to be expected was “a few days’.

As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin’s thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about…

* * *

Saluus stood on a balcony of ice and metal, looking out at the view, his breath misting in the air before him.

The Shrievalty retreat was embedded in and partially sculpted from the frozen waterfall Hoisennir, a four-hundred-metre-high, klick-wide cliff of ice marking where the river Doaroe began its long fall from the high semi-arctic plateau towards the tundra and plains beyond. A low winter sun provided a grand display of Sepektian clouds and a fuzzy purple-red sunset, but nowhere near enough heat to start melting the ice.

Sepekte wobbled slowly and not especially significantly. Its arctic and antarctic circles, where the sun alternately never set or never rose during the heights of summer and depths of winter, were less than a thousand kilometres in diameter. Officially classed as a hot\temperate planet by human standards, its winters were longer but less severe than those of Earth and their worst effects were confined to smaller areas than on humanity’s original home. But the Hoisennir waterfall was far north and high up in the arctic-shield mountains, and the Doaroe spent standard years at a time entirely frozen.

The place was called a retreat because it was owned by the Shrievalty, but as far as Saluus was concerned it was just a hotel and conference centre. The view was impressive, though, when there was sufficient daylight actually to see it properly. It had a certain severe appeal, Saluus was prepared to grant.

Saluus didn’t like being here, all the same. He wasn’t keen on places that he couldn’t get away from easily — preferably, if the worst came to the worst, by just walking. To get away from here meant an air-car or a lift up or down the interior of the frozen fall to the landing ground on the ice of the solidified river above, or down to the vac-rail station on the shore of the frozen lake at the foot of the cliff. When he’d found out where the conference on the Dweller Embassy was to be held — at fairly short notice, for security reasons — he’d made sure to have a parasail packed with his luggage, just so that he had an emergency way out, if it came to it.

He knew that almost certainly there wouldn’t be any emergency — or if there was it would be something so big and-or quick that there would be no getting away from it — but he felt better, safer having the parasail by the balcony window of his bedroom. Most of the other important attendees had suites far inside the fall, to be further away from anything that might come at them from outside, but Saluus had insisted on an outside suite, one with a view, a way out. He hadn’t parasailed for decades but he’d rather risk his neck that way than cowering at the back of a suite, whimpering, just waiting for death.

He sometimes wondered where this obsession with being able to get away came from. It wasn’t something he’d been born with or picked up as the result of some traumatic experience in childhood, it was just something that had sort of crept slowly up on him all the way through his adult life. One of those things, he supposed. He hadn’t bothered wasting any time thinking really deeply about it.

All that mattered, Saluus supposed, was that the retreat\hotel was as safe a place to be as anywhere was, these days. The attacks on Ulubis system had gone on, never slackening off for very long, never really reaching any sort of peak. Many of the targets were obvious military ones, often attacked with bombs, missiles and relatively short-range weapons. These were usually blamed on the Beyonders. Other targets had cultural or morale value or were just big. These were the kind that were hit from deep space, with high-velocity, sometimes near-light-speed boosted rocks. The number of such attacks had increased even as the weight of assaults by drone craft carrying beam weapons and missiles had decreased.

Some of the strategists claimed that all this represented a failure by their enemies to attack when they’d expected to, though it seemed to Saluus that what they called the proof of this relied too much on simulations and shared assumptions.

It had all certainly gone on for a long time now. People had worked their way through the various stages of shock, denial, defiance, solidarity, grim determination and who-knew-what else; nowadays they were just tired of it. They wanted it all to end. They feared how that end might come about, but they were half broken by the erratic bombardment and the ever-present uncertainty.

Worse — in a way, because news had somehow leaked out of when the invasion by the Starveling Cult had been expected, and it had not yet materialised — people were starting to think that it might not now ever happen. The real conspiracy theorists believed that it had all been a huge military-industrial paranoid death-fantasy right from the start, that no real threat had ever existed, that most of the attacks were being carried out by the security forces themselves, either as part of an inter-service conflict or in a carefully planned series of cynical, deliberately self-sacrificial moves that would gain sympathy for the armed forces even as the mass of people lost the few remaining civil liberties they still had; that it was all just an excuse to turn the whole Ulubis system into a semi-fascist society, securing power in the hands of the privileged few.

Even those of a more moderate turn of mind chafed at the freedoms lost and the restrictions imposed, and had begun asking where exactly was this terrible threat they had been preparing for for the best part of a year? Shouldn’t the sky have lit up by now with the invading fleet’s drives as they decelerated into Ulubis near-space? People were starting to question the need for all the sacrifice and hardship and to wonder if too much was being done to counter a threat that so far hadn’t materialised and not enough to deal with the ongoing attrition of small-scale but still intermittently devastating attacks.

The strategists were wondering where the E-5 Discon forces were, too. There had been wild arguments over what the best strategy was: go out to meet the invading fleet or fleets, hoping to gain a slight edge by a degree of surprise — and keeping at least some of the fighting out of the populated reaches of Ulubis system — or sit tight and wait, building up maximum forces where they were in the end most needed? Drone scout ships had already been dispatched in the general direction the invasion was coming from but so far none of them had found anything. A very literal long shot.

A giant magnetic rail gun was being constructed in orbit round G’iri, the smaller gas-giant beyond Nasqueron, built to scatter space in front of the oncoming fleet with debris: a huge blunderbuss supposed to throw a sleet of surveillance machines and a cloud of tiny guided explosive or just kinetic mines before the invading ships, but it was only now getting up to speed, months late, wildly over budget and plagued by problems. At least this latest failure couldn’t be laid at the door of Kehar Heavy Industries. Saluus’s firm had never been involved in the contract. They’d been the obvious people to build it but it had been handed over to a consortium of other companies partly just to show that KHI didn’t have a monopoly and to give some of the others a shot at a big project.

The interim report on the Nasqueron debacle had pretty much cleared KHI, finding nothing worse than occasionally imprecise accounting, the sort of rush-resulted corner-cutting that was only to be expected in anything like the current emergency. The whole storm-battle farce had been a home-grown military fuck-up in other words, just as Saluus had maintained from the start. Partly as a result, he had become more integrated into the whole planning and strategic superstructure of the Ulubine Mercatoria and even, fairly regularly, the Emergency War Cabinet.

This made sense. It also appealed to Saluus’s sense of importance, and he was self-aware enough to know and accept this. And, of course, it had the additional effect of tying him in tighter to the political hierarchy of the system, identifying him even more strongly with the ruling structures and individuals, giving him more of an incentive to fight to preserve Mercatorial rule. If the bad guys did sweep in and take things over it would be harder now for Saluus to wave his hands and claim to be just a modest shipbuilder, now humbly at the service of the new masters.

Still, proximity, access and even a degree of control over such power was something Saluus felt comfortable with and, if the worst did happen, he still wasn’t as symbolically part of the old regime as the others in the War Cabinet, and his control of KHI would make him valuable to whoever ran the system. He’d play it by ear. Besides, he had an escape route mapped out. The longer the E-5 Discon invasion took to happen, the shorter would be the time to wait for the Mercatoria counter-attack, in which case he might be better off just disappearing while the bad guys settled in and prepared their own defences. (In theory they were supposed to be kept in the dark that the Mercatorial fleet was on its way, but news of that had leaked too and anyway their Beyonder allies would surely have told them.)

If it was simpler to hide then Saluus would hide. He’d try to get involved in some guerrilla activity, too, hopefully at a safe remove, so that when the Mercatoria did retake the system he would look like some sort of hero rather than a coward only interested in his own wealth. But keeping out of the way was sometimes the best strategy when things got messy. He had a very fast ship indeed being built in one of the secret yards, a prototype that he fully intended to make sure was never quite ready for active service or even military trial runs. It would be his way out, if he needed it.

In all this, amazingly, the woman he had first known as Ko, when she’d been with Fassin Taak — her real name, the name she used now, was Liss Alentiore — had been a real help. He’d fallen for her, he supposed. In fact, he’d fallen for her to the extent that his wife — despite her own happily indulged and numerous dalliances — had, for the first and only time, shown signs of jealousy. (Liss herself had suggested a way out of this, though it had occurred, at least as a fantasy, to him as well. So now they had a very stimulating little menage a trois going.)

More to the point, Liss had proved a trustworthy confidante and reliable source of advice. There had been a few occasions over the last few crowded, sometimes desperate months when Salluus had not known which way to react and he’d talked it over with her, either in the semi-formality of his office, flier or ship or from pillow to pillow, and she’d known what to do, if not immediately then after a night or two’s thought. She was canny in a sidelong, catlike way; she knew how people worked, how they thought, which way they would jump, almost tele-pathically sometimes.

He’d invented a post for Liss in his entourage and made her his personal private secretary. His social and business secretaries had both been quietly piqued, but were smart enough to accept the new face with a degree of feigned generosity and seemingly genuine grace, and without trying to do anything to undermine her. Saluus had a feeling that they had each anyway gauged Liss accurately, and realised that any attack they might try on her would likely rebound on themselves.

His own security people had been suspicious of her at first, finding all sorts of insalubrious stuff hinted at in her past, and then a sort of suspicious fuzziness. But ultimately there had been nothing damning, certainly nothing that was worse than what he’d got up to when he was her age. She’d been young, wild and she’d mixed with dubious types. So had he. So what? He’d quizzed her gently on her past himself and got an impression of hurt and trauma and bad memories. He didn’t want to hurt her further by inquiring too deeply. It added to his feeling that, in some almost unbearably gallant way, he’d rescued her.

She’d been a middling journalist with a technical journal with a past in dance, acting, hostessing and massage work before; he’d taken her away from all that. She’d looked much younger than she was when he’d met her that night with Fassin — Saluus was a big fan of that whole wise head on young shoulders thing now, he’d decided — but she looked even better now, having taken him up on the offer of treatments she could never have had access to until they’d met. She was grateful to him. She never said so straight out — that would have imbalanced too much what they had — but he could see it in her eyes sometimes.

Well, he was grateful to her, too. She’d revitalised his private life and proved a significant new asset in his public one.

There was, also, just a hint of a feeling that he’d taken her away from Fassin, and that was quite a pleasant little sensation all by itself. Saluus had never exactly envied the other man -he didn’t really envy anybody, indeed why should he, how could he? — but there was a sort of ease to Fassin’s life that Saluus had always coveted, and so resented. To be part of a big family group like that, surrounded by people all doing the same steady thing, respected for their work intrinsically without constantly having to prove themselves through tender processes and balance sheets and shareholders’ meetings and staff councils… that must have its own sweetness, that must give a sort of academic security, a feeling of justification. And then the fellow had gone and become some sort of hero figure, just by spending five years pickled in shock-gel in a miniature gascraft (not even built by KHI) knocking round with a bunch of degenerate Dwellers.

Had that fame attracted Liss to Fassin? Had she just traded Fassin in, traded up to Saluus because the opportunity had presented itself? Maybe so. It didn’t bother him. Relationships were a market, Sal knew that. Only children and idiot romantics thought otherwise. You judged your own attractiveness -physically, psychologically and in terms of status — then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with the possibility of advancement, or settling for a more reliably stable life but never knowing what you might have achieved.

Saluus took a deep, cold breath.

The sun had disappeared, Ulubis dipping beneath tree-coated mountains far to the south-west. A few stars started to come out in the darkening purple sky. The broad scatter of orbital habs and factories shone like a handful of thrown, sparkling dust to the south-east, gradually stretching out across the sky after the retreating sunset like a distillation of the fading light. Saluus wondered which of those tiny scintillations belonged to him. Not as many as a year ago. Some had been moved away, just to get them out of old orbits where they could be more easily targeted. Two — big dock-ships, both of them, and cradling Navarchy vessels at the time — had been destroyed. Wreckage from one had fallen on Fessli City, killing tens of thousands, many more than had died in the initial attack. KHI was being sued for negligence, accused of not moving the dock-ships out of the way in time. A war on and everything controlled by the military but there was still room for that sort of shit. He was having words in appropriate ears, to get a blanket War Exemption Order proclaimed.

Saluus looked through his own exhaled breath for Nasqueron, but it was far below the horizon and probably all but invisible behind the shield of orbital scatter anyway, even if he had been in the right latitudes to see it.

Fassin. In all the preparations for war and invasion, you always had to make time to take account of whatever he might have got up to. Had he died in the storm battle? Reports from Nasqueron were ambiguous. But then reports from Nasqueron were never anything but ambiguous. He’d certainly disappeared, and was probably still on Nasqueron — though in the time between the destruction of the original satellite surveillance network round the planet at the time of the storm battle and the establishment of a new one after the founding of the Dweller Embassy, there had been a window when even quite big craft might have left Nasqueron’s atmosphere — but who knew? And if Taak was still somewhere in the gas-giant, what was he doing?

If he was still alive, Saluus didn’t envy him at all any more. To have your whole existence, never mind your whole family, wiped out like that… maybe Fassin had killed himself. He had been told, apparently, before the whole ghastly mess at the GasClipper race. He knew they were dead. If he wasn’t dead too, he was more alone than he’d ever been in his life, with nothing much to come back to. Saluus felt sorry for him.

His first thought had been that with Fassin so reduced, there would be no danger of Liss going back to him if he ever did reappear. But then he’d thought about how people could confound your expectations sometimes, and how women in particular could display a sort of theoretically laudable but harmfully self-sacrificial kind of misplaced charity when they saw somebody damaged. Luckily Jaal Tonderon was still alive. Sal and his wife had invited her to stay with them for a while. He wanted to encourage her to be strong for Fassin, if he ever did make it back, and they were all still there.

The Dweller Embassy had been a great success. The Dwellers had seemed keen to make up for the misunderstanding in the storm and the Ulubis Mercatoria had been desperate not to fight on two hopeless fronts at once. Another moon, Uerkle, had been designated as the new site for the Seers’ Shared facility -construction was well under way — and a small fleet of ships had been welcomed into orbit around the gas-giant. Seers had started direct delving again — the equipment for remote delving was not yet all in place — and the Dwellers either didn’t notice or didn’t care that a lot of new so-called Seers were really Navarchy, Cessoria and Shrievalty scouts — spies, if you wanted to be blunt about it — searching for Fassin Taak, searching for the also-disappeared Dweller called Valseir, searching for any sign of those weapons used against the Mercatorial forces during the battle in the GasClipper storm race and searching too for any hints or traces of the Dweller List and anything remotely associated with it — so far, admittedly, all completely without success. Even these scout craft had to be tagged and traceable and escorted by a Dweller guide, but it was a start.

Also in the preparatory — and to date unsuccessful — stages were the negotiations with the Dwellers to forge an alliance or get Mercatorial hands on Dweller weaponry. The Dwellers had shown themselves to possess offensive capabilities — well, strictly speaking, defensive capabilities, but that didn’t matter — nobody had credited them with. If they could be brought into an alliance with the rest of Ulubis system, the whole balance of forces between the invaders and the defenders might be turned upside down. Even if the Dwellers only shared some of their military-technological know-how — or just lent out or hired some of the devices — that might make enough of a difference for Ulubis to resist the invasion on its own without having to wait for the Summed Fleet units to arrive.

And if that failed, then there was the delicate matter of how to get the Starveling invasion fleet to attack Nasqueron and so, with luck, dash itself to pieces against whatever hyper-weaponry had destroyed the Navarchy forces in the storm battle.

So much to think about.

Saluus was wearing a jacket but he’d come out without gloves and so had put his hands into his pockets to keep them warm. Liss slipped one arm through his, suddenly there at his side, nuzzled up to him, her skin-perfume seeming to fill his head. He looked down at her and she pressed closer to him, following his gaze out to the south and the stipple of light from the orbital structures.

He felt her shiver. She was dressed in light clothes. He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. He’d seen that in screen stories and it still made him feel good to do it. He didn’t mind the cold, though it was worse than it had been, and a breeze was starting to blow from above. It was a part-katabatic wind, he’d been told by somebody: a current of cold air flowing down from the ice-locked wastes above, displacing warmer, less dense air below and driving gently but firmly downwards, spilling over the lip of the waterfall like a ghost of the frozen, plunging waters.

They stood in silence for a while, then Liss reminded Saluus that he was supposed to meet with Peregal Emoerte for a private talk before dinner that evening. There was still time, though. He felt cold now, close to shivering. He would wait until he did shiver before he went in. He stared up into the near-complete darkness directly overhead, watching the spark of a close-orbit satellite pass above them. He felt Liss stiffen at his side, and pulled her closer.

“What’s that?” she said after a few more moments.

He looked where she was pointing, to the low west, where only the vaguest, dimmest hint of purple near the horizon showed where Ulubis had set.

A little above that horizon, in the sky below, beyond and above the thickest strands of reflected orbital light, new lights were flickering to life. They were a sprinkle of bright blue, scattered across a rough circle of sky the size of a large coin held at arm’s length, and increasing in number with every passing second. The blue points wavered, gradually strengthening. More and more were lighting up, filling the little window of sky with a blue blaze of cold fire, barely twinkling in the chill, still air out over the frozen plains.

Saluus felt himself shiver, though not from the cold. He opened his mouth to speak but Liss looked up at him and said,

“That’s them, isn’t it? That’s the Starveling Cult guys, the E-5 Discon. That’s the invasion fleet, braking.”

“Fraid so,” Sal agreed. His ear stud was pinging and the comms in the suite was warbling plaintively. “We’d better go in.”

* * *

Groggy again. Still in the passenger\freight compartment of the Velpin. He brought the little gascraft’s systems back up. The wall-screen crazed, came clear, showed stars fixed, then swinging, and finally settled on a greeny-blue and white planet. Fassin’s first reaction on seeing it was that the place looked alien, unsuitable for life without an esuit. Then he realised that it looked like ’glantine or Sepekte; like images of Earth, in fact. Going gas-giant native, he told himself. Thinking like a Dweller. It didn’t usually happen so quickly.

“Oh, fuck!” Y’sul said angrily, staring at the image on the screen. “It’s not even a proper fucking planet!”

The waves came booming in like blindness, like stubbornness bundled and given liquid form, an unending slow launching against the ragged fringe of massively sprawled rocks, each long, low rough ridge of water heaving skywards to tumble like some ponderously incompetent somersaulter, rolling up and falling forward, hopeful and hopeless at once, disintegrating, exploding in spray and foam, coming to pieces amongst the fractured bone-yard of rock.

The waters drained after each assault, rattling boulders, stones and pebbles between the massive jabs and points of granite, sloughing like a watery skin and falling away again, that stony chattering speaking of a slowly aggregated success, the waves -the ocean — rubbing away at the land, breaking up and breaking away, using rock against rock, tumbling it and crashing it and cracking it, abrading over centuries and millennia to a kind of stubborn accomplishment.

He watched the waves for some time, admiring their vast mad pounding, reluctantly impressed by such sheer clamorous inces-sancy. The salt spray filled his hair and eyes and nose and lungs. He breathed in deeply, feeling joined, feeling linked to and part of this wild, unceasing elemental battle.

A low, golden light struck out across the ruffled nap of sea, sunlight swinging slow beneath a great piled series of cloud escarpments to the west, layers of vapour draped over distant peaks and spires of rock disappearing into the long misted curve of north-facing shore.

Seabirds wheeled across the wind and waves, diving, flapping away, clutching slim fish like wet slices of rainbow.

It had felt strange, at first, coming out of the little gascraft. It always did, it always had, but this time seemed different, more intense somehow. This was an alien homeland, a familiar yet utterly different place; closer to what ought to be home, further from what was. Eleven thousand light years away from Ulubis this time, though they had travelled further than the last time to get here. And just twelve days’ travel.

When he’d opened the gascraft’s hatch and stood, he’d staggered and swayed, needed holding up by Y’sul. He’d coughed and nearly retched, feeling scrawny and weak and thin and hollowed-out, shivering in the strange ultra-nakedness of returning to the basic human condition, as slimed and wet and naked as a newborn, and even the retreating tendrils of the gill-fluid and shock-gel tubes there too, umbilical links to image birth. He felt lighter and heavier at once, blood draining, bones complaining.

Then, after a while, being naked — even naked in ordinary clothes — started to feel normal again. Every now and again, though, he shivered. The Velpin’s pattern-follower had done its best to make human wearable clothes, but still the results felt strange and slick and cold.

They were on Mavirouelo, a ninety per cent Earthlike not far from the galactic outskirts, though less isolated than Ulubis. A Waterworlder-colonised planet, a Sceuri world.

Waterworlds were the single most common type of rocky planet in the galaxy, even though you never saw the rock, which was, on average, a metal-rock core about the size of Earth buried under five thousand kilometres of pressure-ice, finally topped by a hundred klicks of ocean. Such planets provided the next most common planetary environments after the near-ubiquitous gas-giants themselves, and had given the Mercatoria three of its eight principal species: the Sceuri, the Ifrahile and the Kuskunde.

Mavirouelo was not a classic waterworld — it wasn’t even as water-covered as Earth itself — but it had been colonised by the Sceuri before any native animal — of air, land or sea — had developed sufficiently to claim it as their own, and so had become one of the Sceuri far-worlds, an outpost of their own semimperia within the greater commonwealth of the Mercatoria.

The Sceuri weren’t conventional waterworlders, either. They were Cetasails, resembling sea mammals but with backs ridged by spinnaker spines which they could hoist to the wind and so sail as well as swim across their worlds.

Y’sul, in his esuit, rose out of the sea like a submarine conning tower, frightening the seabirds. He floated up and out and made his way across the turmoil of waves to the low cliff where Fassin stood. The human was suddenly reminded of the time he had stood with Saluus Kehar, watching Hatherence, in her esuit, float out across the chaos of artificial surf surrounding the waterspout house.

“Fassin!” Y’sul boomed, floating, dripping and humming, in the air ten metres above him. “No sign yet?”

“No sign yet.”

Y’sul held up a mesh basket of glistening, flapping, wriggling stuff. “Look what I caught!” He brought the basket in front of his forward mantle to look at it. “Think I’ll take it back to the ship.”

Y’sul flew over Fassin, dropping water and small shells on top of him, then headed inland a couple of hundred metres to the ship-section resting on the scrubby ledge of vegetation fringing the jagged ranks of cliffs, pinnacles and mountains beyond. The fifty-metre-long lander made up the nose section of the Velpin, the rest of which, with Quercer Janath aboard, was still in orbit.

Fassin watched the Dweller go, then turned back to the ocean. He was here to meet with a Sceuri who had seen the Dweller Leisicrofe, who had been here until, they’d been told, twelve years ago.

They hadn’t met a Sceuri yet. The Velpin had been challenged by the planet’s orbital traffic control and targeted by several military units and so had had to reveal something of its reasons for being there.

“Looking for some Dweller geezer called Leisicrofe,” had been Quercer Janath’s exact words.

They’d been told to go into orbit and stay there. Targeting beams never left them. They were regarded as suspicious because their ship looked “hole-capable and they hadn’t come through the local portal.

“Sceuri,” Quercer Janath had told Fassin and Y’sul. “Suspicious.”

“Paranoid.”

They’d spent three days watching the planet revolve beneath them. Y’sul had muttered about how flat and boring the storms looked, Fassin had found endless fascination in the great snowflake city-structures spread across water and land, and the truetwin passed the time inventorying ship-stuff they’d forgotten about and playing noisy image-leaf games. They answered questions from planetary traffic control about where they’d come from -Nhouaste, the largest of the system’s four gas-giant planets, was the answer given — and then a signal had come through. A scholar named Aumapile of Aumapile had had the honour of playing host to the Dweller scholar Leisicrofe and would be flattered to be allowed to extend the same courtesies to these new arrivals.

Another step along the way, another step closer, perhaps, to finding the wandering Dweller and the data he carried. If he still lived, if he still had the data, if the data was what it was supposed to be, if Valseir had been telling the truth, if it was not all utterly out of date, without point, overtaken by the seeming certainty that there was a network of secret wormholes accessible only to Dwellers, but they weren’t sharing it and it might have nothing to do with the Dweller List.

Fassin was looking for something that might lead him to what he had already used, twice. He had already been through at least two wormholes, travelled across half the galaxy, and yet he wasn’t really any closer to finding the key to this system of trapdoors and secret passages. He could be carried unconscious through them like a fey maiden under the influence of a sleeping draught in some Gothic romance, but he wasn’t allowed to know the secret behind it all.

He was still trying to think of ways to commandeer the Velpin, but with no real hope of success. There would still be the problem of accessing the hidden wormholes. Just thinking of a way to stay awake while they made these wild transitions would be a start, but he had no idea how to do that either.

If he could go back in time to Apsile and the Shared Facility in Third Fury and ask him to build some subset of systems into the gascraft that would keep working when the main ones were shut down, making it look like the machine had entirely stopped functioning when in fact he was still sense-connected and aware, maybe it would be possible. But even the Dwellers didn’t claim to have time machines, and Fassin didn’t have the expertise to undertake such an amendment to the gascraft’s systems himself, even if he had had the time and the facilities to do it, neither of which he did have.

Maybe he should have gone back to the Mercatoria, acted as a real major in the Ocula would have done and retreated, reported to his superiors, told them what had happened and awaited new or renewed orders. But the Ocula meant nothing to him and never had, and most of what had mattered before to him was also gone now.

He might even have tried to get in touch with the Beyonders, but until he had the key to the Dweller List, what was the point in that? And anyway — what if they had been behind the Sept’s destruction, even at a remove? Just how magnanimous was he prepared to be?

What point, indeed, was there in going back at all, perhaps. Seventy days standard had elapsed since Fassin had first gone tumbling into the atmosphere of Nasqueron. It was over two old Earth months since the battle in the storm. Who knew how much longer he’d have to keep looking for Leisicrofe, chasing him round the galaxy, perhaps ever coming closer to him, maybe never quite catching up with him? Maybe he’d get his precious data and return to find it was all over, the system taken, or utterly laid waste to, every surface like the surface of Third Fury, just slag and heat, destroyed by one side or another or by both, fighting for something that wasn’t even there any more.

It should still, in theory, be the most important piece of information that a human had ever carried. But somehow, even if the key to the Dweller List did exist, the fact that Dwellers could use this secret network under the noses of the rest of the galaxy — and had been so doing for who alone knew how many billions of years — made it seem much less likely that any scrap of data, any proof-size patch of algebra was going to make that much of a difference.

And yet, still, despite everything, all he could do, all that he could even think of doing, was to press on and try to find what everybody wanted him to find, and hope that it might do some good somehow.

Fassin breathed in, tasting salt.

He no longer doubted that this was real, or a virtual environment there was no disgrace in being fooled by. There wasn’t even anywhere like this — this coarse, storm-sundered coast -anywhere in Ulubis system. And the stars were completely different, again.

Something caught Fassin’s attention. A few kilometres out into the ocean, the water was rising in a great shallow dome, flowing everywhere down from a huge flattened hemisphere of foam-streaked darkness rising like a never-breaking explosion from the depths, still spreading and still rising and causing a great slow swell of disturbed waves to come pulsing forward, towards the cliffs as the apparition — a double saucer-shape two kilometres wide — finally broke free of the sea entirely and came slowly towards the shore, sheets and veils of salt rain falling from beneath it, flattening the shadow-bruised surface of the waters.

Y’sul floated up, nodding forward. “Ride’s here, then.”

They floated, stood and hovered in a half-drained crystal hall within the great saucer ship. Aumapile of Aumapile floated in the water, a fat eel the size of an orca with a great folded fan of sail ridging its back. Fassin stood on a broad ledge, still slick with salty water, while Y’sul and the truetwin Quercer Janath -cajoled down eventually, bulked out with a twin-skin overall of extreme shininess that doubled as an esuit — hovered in the air above the great pool of water. Fassin found himself thinking about the Autumn House again, and Slovius in his pool.

Aumapile of Aumapile — The Aumapile of Aumapile, apparently, according to the servant who had escorted them down a broad water-filled tube to the audience chamber, the human and the Dwellers in a bubble of air enclosed by a sphere of diamond — was not merely a justly famous scholar of the Cincturia, it was a vastly rich justly famous scholar of the Cincturia.

A high, warbling, seemingly interminable song sounded from an underwater sound system. “A Song of Welcoming For Those From Afar’, apparently.

“Song for making you want to go straight back there again,” Y’sul had asided to Fassin, as they’d accepted reasonable impersonations of something to drink and\or inhale.

They talked of Leisicrofe. Their host, speaking through a small hovering speaker sphere, said they had missed him by some years and then Y’sul mentioned following him.

“Oh,” the Sceuri said, “but you must take me with you.”

“Must?”

“Must?”

“But I know where he went,” the Sceuri said, as though this explained everything.

“Couldn’t you just tell us?” Y’sul asked plaintively.

“Just point us in the right direction.”

“And we’ll be on our way”

The Sceuri wriggled in the great pool, sending water sloshing. It laughed. A soft, tinkling sound from the hovering speaker. “Oh, I could, but I always had the feeling my friend Leisicrofe had travelled even more widely than I have, especially into the gases of Nhouaste. I think you may be heading there, as you did not come through the wormhole portal, and he did not depart through it. You see? I have my sources. I know what goes on. You can’t fool me. I am not so stupid. You and your little Squanderer friend will be heading back to Nhouaste.”

“Doubt it,” the Dweller travelcaptain said, snorting.

Fassin was the little Squanderer friend. The Sceuri took great pride in having become a technological, space-faring species, given the obstacles they’d had to overcome. A classic water-world environment had almost no easily available metals. Any metal-bearing ores that a waterworld possessed tended to be locked away under all that ice, deep in the planet’s inaccessible rocky core. Waterworlders had to do what they could with what fell from the sky in the shape of meteorites, and in this shared a developmental background with gas-giant Dwellers.

To get into space in the face of such a paucity of readily available raw materials was not easy, and the Sceuri regarded themselves as deserving considerable recognition and respect for such a triumph of intellect over scarcity. Accomplishing the same feat when you came from a rock-surface planet was a relatively trivial, expectable, even dismissible trick. The Sceuri called people from such planets Squanderers as a result, though not usually to their face or other appropriate feature.

“Please make clear, oh great A of A,” the other half of Quercer Janath said.

Fassin suspected that he already knew what the Sceuri was thinking. The local gas-giant, Nhouaste — inhabited by Dwellers, of course — was, like the vast majority of Dweller gas-giants, not a world that welcomed Seers or anybody else apart from other Dwellers. Aumapile of Aumapile had probably been told where Leisicrofe was heading next and assumed that as the Dweller had not gone through the Mercatorial wormhole — and assuming he hadn’t headed into deep space at STL speeds — he must have gone to look for whatever it was he was looking for in the one place that even being fabulously rich and corruptly well-connected couldn’t gain you access to, in this system or any other: a Dweller-inhabited gas-giant.

“I think the Toilers our mutual friend sought have found a new niche, no longer in space, but in gas, you see?” the Sceuri said. Even through the speaker sphere, the creature’s voice sounded pleased with itself.

“Toilers?” Y’sul said.

“Known.”

“Benign semi-swarm devices,” the other half of Quercer Janath announced. “Infra-sentient. Known for randomly building inscrutable space structures, best guess for purpose of which being as preparatory infrastructure for an invasion that never took place on behalf of a race long gone and thoroughly forgotten. Distribution very wide but very sparse. Numbers fluctuate. Rarely dangerous, sometimes hunted, no bounty.”

“So there.”

Y’sul looked surprised. “Really?” he asked,

“Oh, stop being so coy!” their host chided, creating sinuous splashing patterns in the water, as though tickled. “Of course! As though you didn’t know.” The Aumapile of Aumapile blew jets of water from each end. A scent of something vaguely rotten filled Fassin’s nose. “But I know where our friend was going to next, and you don’t. However, I shall be willing to tell you if you take me along, once I am aboard your ship. Such large places, gas-giants! And of course we have four. One thinks, Oh, who can say, where would one’s quarry be?” The Sceuri flicked its tail. Fassin got splashed. “And what do you say, sirs?”

Y’sul looked at Fassin and quietly rippled his mantle, the Dweller equivalent of a head-shake.

The travelcaptain was silent for a moment or two, then said,

“If we do take you with us…”

“Ah! But I have my own ship! Indeed, you are in it!”

“Won’t work.”

“Have to come with us in ours.”

“I have smaller ships! Many of them! A choice!”

“Makes no difference. Has to be ours.”

“Conditions of Passage.”

“Well…’ the Sceuri said.

“Passengers travel unconditionally.”

“Unconditionally.”

“What does that mean?”

“Trust us.”

“Yes. No matter what.”

“Means you get zapped unconscious every time we travel, is what it means,” Y’sul told their host. Quercer Janath made a hissing noise. “Plus,” Y’sul added, oblivious, “you may not end up where you thought you were going to.”

“How primitive! Why, of course!”

* * *

Eleven hundred ships. They were facing eleven hundred ships. All of them had to be beyond a certain size, capable of crossing the great gulf of space between the E-5 Discon and here in reasonable time, and they would probably all be armed. Ulubis could muster less than three hundred true space-capable war-craft, even after their frenzy of building. The Summed Fleet on its way to their rescue was of similar size, but its ships would be of another order of magnitude in hitting power: a full mix of destroyers, light, medium and heavy cruisers, plus the real big guys, the battlecruisers and battleships.

Ulubis had frigates, destroyers and light cruisers, and one old battlecruiser, the Carronade. They’d built a significant fleet in the centuries following the destruction of the portal, and a few more ships in the half year since the news of the coming invasion, but nothing like enough to offer the invaders serious opposition.

They’d lost about a sixth of their total fighting force in the few minutes of action in the storm on Nasqueron, months earlier, including their only other battlecruiser. Those had mostly been light units, but it had been a grievous loss.

The latest bit of bad news was that the consortium working on the rail gun had fallen so far behind schedule that it was highly doubtful they’d even get to the trials stage before the invasion took place. The giant gun was being dismantled so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Starveling Cultists. There was something almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had been.

Kehar Heavy Industries and the other manufacturers had worked as hard as they could to construct, repair, upgrade and modify as many warships as they could, and had militarised dozens of civilian craft. But there was only so much they could do and it was never going to be enough. They were outnumbered. They could go down fighting, but they were going down.

“It couldn’t be any worse!” Guard-General Thovin spluttered, practically spraying his drink. They were on a requisitioned ex-cruise liner, one of the Embassy support ships, rolling in orbit around Nasqueron. Saluus and the Propylaea sub-master Sorofieve had been sent by the rest of the War Cabinet to add, if it were possible, an extra note of urgency to the talks with the Dwellers. Thovin, seconded from his Guard duties to be Commander-in-Chief, Ulubis Orbital Forces, was there in charge of the very lightly armed escort detachment because he was out of the way and couldn’t do too much harm. The grandeur of his new title seemed to almost entirely make up for the lack of viable military hardware at his disposal.

“We can’t even surrender to the Starvelings because if we do the Summed Fleet will clobber us when they arrive,” he said. “We’re going to get fucked-over twice!” He threw back his drink.

Saluus didn’t like Thovin — he was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel.

“There is no need to talk of surrender,” sub-master Sorofieve said quickly, and, to Sal’s amusement, actually looked round, glancing left and right to make sure nobody else had heard the “S’ word in the old cruise ship’s lounge, which was deserted apart from a few bar staff, the three men and a half-dozen or so of their closest staff. (Liss was there, looking darkly beautiful, mostly silent, occasionally talking quietly with one or other of the other assistants, secretaries and ADCs. When the Propylaea sub-master did his glancing-around act, her gaze met Sal’s; she smiled and flexed her eyebrows.)

If there were any spies here, Sal thought, they weren’t lurking behind the furniture in the shadows, they were sitting right here, around them. The indispensable aides and helpers they all relied on to run their so-important lives were the obvious candidates for the post of spy. If anything ever got back to the Hierchon — or any other more lowly but still important branch of the Ulubine Mercatoria — regarding talk of surrender or anything else deemed Unspeakable it would probably be one of these people they’d have to thank.

Saluus knew one could never be one hundred per cent certain, but he was pretty sure that the lovely Liss wasn’t working for anybody else. He’d seemingly let slip a couple of things early on in their relationship which he’d have expected to come back to him if she’d been in the pay of somebody else. It had been a sort of recommendation that she’d come via Fassin and he’d obviously known her from decades earlier. That was far too long a game just to get to an industrialist, even Saluus Kehar.

“No need?” Thovin said, turning to his secretary, holding up his glass and winking theatrically. “It’s what we’d be talking about if the Summed Fleet wasn’t on its way. Be the rational thing to do.” He snorted. “I’m not saying we should surrender. Been ordered not to, been ordered to fight to the last, but if the Fleet wasn’t coming and we weren’t looking for this… this thing, supposedly somewhere on Nasq.” (The fabled Transform, of course, Saluus thought. The mythical magic bullet which Fassin, if he was still alive, might be chasing yet.) “What else would we be doing but thinking how to not all get ourselves killed?”

“We are prepared, we are forewarned,” sub-master Sorofieve said, smiling desperately. “We shall give a good account of ourselves, I am sure. We are fighting for our homes, for our honour, for -’ the man looked round again “- for our very humanity!” Ah, Sal realised, Sorofieve had been checking there were no aliens present whom he might be offending. “We have millennia of Mercatorial, ah, wisdom and martial ability behind us. What are these Starveling renegades in comparison?”

Eleven hundred ships, that’s what they were, Saluus thought. Eleven hundred to our three hundred, and a balance of forces the strategists say is way up the force-yield spectrum compared to ours, too: medium-heavy to our light. Plus one mega-ship, to our one antique battlecruiser.

They had had another meeting with some of the Dweller representatives just that afternoon. They went down these days in person, reclined in human-form spacesuits held in small circular gascraft of two or three seats, congregating in a great hall in one of a whole fleet of giant Dreadnought-sized craft the Dwellers had dedicated to the purpose. With the gascraft canopies hinged open it was possible to sit\lie there in some comfort and talk directly to the Dwellers, face-to-hub or whatever it was.

Saluus wouldn’t want to spend more than a day like that in multiple gees, but it was worth doing. The Dwellers seemed to appreciate it and — thanks to some cram-coaching by the senior Seers who also came down with them to the meetings and stayed with them for all but the most delicate and high-security-clearance matters — Saluus was even starting to get the hang of Dweller expressions and nuances of meaning and demeanour, both as put across in speech and as displayed on their signal skin. Probably all too late, and — so far — to no avail whatsoever. But at least it felt like he was doing something — the shipyards of KHI were basically on autopilot, working flat out and so synched-in to what the military wanted that they’d effectively become part of a command economy. He’d just been getting in the way.

“This is a threat to the whole of Ulubis system,” Sorofieve said. Sal suppressed a sigh. This was only Sorofieve’s third day in this latest round — he’d replaced First Secretary Heuypzlagger, who’d found the high gravity too wearing — and he was talking to a Dweller called Yawiyuen who was also new to the process, but even so. They’d been circling over this same ground for weeks now.

“These Starveling Cult people will show no respect for Nasqueron’s neutrality,” the sub-master concluded.

“How do you know?” Gruonoshe, another of the Dwellers, asked. They were nine in all: the two human negotiators and a couple of assistants each — Liss was there in a seat behind Sal, having declared herself quite happy in the high gravity — Chief Seer Meretiy of Sept Krine, and just the two Dwellers, both in ceremonial half-clothes, ribboned and jewelled.

“Know what?” Sorofieve asked.

“Know that these Starveling Cult people will show no respect for Nasqueron’s neutrality,” Gruonoshe said, innocently.

“Well,” Sorofieve said, “they are invaders, warmongers. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, they are barbarians. They respect nothing.”

“Still, it does not follow that they’d quarrel with us,” Yawiyuen said, signal skin showing reasonableness.

“They want to take over the whole system,” Sorofieve said, looking to Saluus for help. “To them that would include Nasqueron.”

“We have heard of the Starveling Cult,” Yawiyuen told them. (- Wonder from where? Liss sent to Saluus via his ear stud.) “It appears to be an unremarkable Quick hegemonist diffusion, concerned with conquering its own kind and species-type-suitable environments, uninterested in attacking gas-giants.”

“The point here,” Saluus said smoothly, his amplified voice sounding rich and powerful, “is that they are only attacking Ulubis system to get to Nasqueron.”

“Why?” Gruonoshe asked.

“We’re not entirely sure,” Saluus said. “We are sure they want something from Nasqueron, something they can’t get from any other gas-giant, but exactly what that may be, we can’t say. But we are quite positive that that is why they are mounting this attack in the first place.”

“Why are you sure?” Gruonoshe again.

“We intercepted intelligence to that effect,” Sorofieve replied.

“What intelligence?” Yawiyuen asked.

“The intelligence,” Sorofieve said, “came from the personal diary of the Supreme Commander of the Starveling Cult invasion fleet sent to the Ruanthril system nearly eighteen years ago. The fleet was intercepted by a Mercatorial force. The captured records show that the enemy commander complained specifically about the need to divert so many of the E-5 Discon’s forces to somewhere as out of the way and strategically unimportant as Ulubis, just for some item or piece of information in Nasqueron.”

“Nasqueron was mentioned by name?” Gruonoshe asked.

“It was,” Sal said.

He half-expected a little voice in his ear to say something like “Good lie’ but then remembered that even Liss hadn’t been told the full truth about the Dweller List and the mythical Transform. She would have an idea, as a lot of people close to the epicentres of power did, that Fassin had been sent on a secret mission to look for something valuable in Nasqueron, and that the object of this search might have some bearing on the war, but that was about all. She hadn’t been present at the briefing by the AI projection of Admiral Quile, hadn’t been let in on the secret subsequently by some of those who had been there — as Sal had — and so didn’t know the details of the intelligence they’d been given.

“Well then,” Yawiyuen said reasonably, “you should let the Starveling Cult attack us and we will deal with them.”

This, of course, was exactly what the Emergency War Cabinet hoped would happen.

— Can we just say yes here? Liss sent.

“Wouldn’t you then want some help from us?” Sorofieve asked.

“Oh, no!” Gruonoshe exclaimed, as though the idea was just too preposterous even to think about.

“As sub-master Sorofieve has said,” Saluus said, “we are quite certain that the Starveling Cultists intend to take the entirety of Ulubis system, including Nasqueron. We’re all under threat. That’s why it would make sense for you and us to organise our defence together.”

“A common threat requires a common response,” Sorofieve told the Dwellers.

“Or maybe a pincer movement,” Yawiyuen suggested brightly.

Saluus wanted to sigh again. These two guys were supposedly top-grade negotiators with the authority to speak provisionally — in advance of some sort of still undefined plebiscite procedure — for the entire Dweller society on Nasqueron, but they frequently sounded like children. “Well, perhaps,” he said. “Providing we can, at the very least, coordinate our actions.”

“And of course,” Sorofieve said, “it may be that we can share defence technologies.”

“Oh!” Yawiyuen said, rising above his dent-seat a fraction. “Good idea! What do you have that we might want?” He appeared guilelessly enthusiastic.

“Our strengths would lie more in intelligence, in knowing how these Starveling Cultists will think,” Saluus said. “They’re basically humans, too. For all our differences, we think pretty much the same way they do. Our contribution would be to try to anticipate them, to out-think them.”

“And ours?” Yawiyuen asked, settling back down in his seat again.

“Weaponry, I bet,” Gruonoshe said, sounding unimpressed.

“As we have discovered, very much to our cost,” Saluus said, “you have the better of us in offensive capability, certainly—”

“Defensive capability,” Gruonoshe interrupted. “Surely?”

Sal did his best to move his helmeted head in an acknowledging nod, straining his neck muscles in the high gravity. “Defensive capability, as you say,” he said. “If we were able to share some of your knowledge of—”

“Weapons technology is not something we are going to share,” Gruonoshe said crisply.

“We could say we wanted to,” Yawiyuen told them. “We could even mean it — you might argue us round, somehow, to said point of view — but those who control the weapons themselves would not permit it.”

“Well, can we perhaps talk to them?” Saluus asked.

Yawiyuen bobbed over his seat. “No.”

“Why would that be?” Sorofieve asked.

“They don’t talk to aliens,” Yawiyuen told them bluntly.

“They barely talk to us,” Gruonoshe admitted.

“How might we be able to—?” Saluus began.

“We are not the Mercatoria,” Gruonoshe said, interrupting Saluus again. This was not an experience he was used to. He could see how it might get annoying. “We are not the Mercatoria,” the Dweller repeated. He sounded indignant. “We are not one of your states or mercenary- or irrationality-inspired groupings or forces.”

— Bit of stress there, Sal heard in his ear.

“If I may,” Chief Seer Meretiy began. The Seers were under instruction only to take a part in the talks when they felt there was some sort of basic misunderstanding taking place. Meretiy obviously felt that was happening now, but he didn’t get a chance to take his point further.

“What is meant, one believes,” Yawiyuen said, “is that things do not work with us the way that they work with you. We are delegated to speak to you, and what we take from here will be shared with all who wish to take notice. We are not in a position to order other Dwellers to do or not do certain things. No Dweller is, not in the hierarchical sense that you may be used to. We can share information. The information regarding the approach of the Starveling Cultists has been made available to whoever it may concern, as was the information regarding the build-up of Mercatorial forces immediately prior to the unfortunate incident which took place within C-2 Storm Ultra-Violet 3667. Those in charge of the relevant defensive systems will doubtless have taken note of said information. That is really all we can share with you. Our colleagues in charge of the defensive systems would not consider talking to outsiders and there is no precedent for sharing, lending, leasing or giving such technologies to others.”

“You talk of your colleagues in charge of the defensive systems,” Sorofieve said. “But who is in charge of them?”

— And so to the point.

Yawiyuen gave a little bob-shrug. “Nobody is.”

“Somebody has to be,” Sorofieve insisted.

“Why?”

“Well,” Sorofieve said, “how do they know what to do?”

“Lots of training,” Yawiyuen told him.

“But when? When do they know what to do? Who directs them, who decides when it’s time to stop talking and start shooting?”

“They do.”

“They do?” Sorofieve sounded incredulous. “You let your military decide when to go to war?”

— Our sub-master hasn’t done his homework, has he? Sal sent to Liss.

— He may have read, she replied. — He didn’t believe.

Saluus had done as much research as he could into the Dwellers. Amazing how little he’d known. He was smart, well-educated and extremely well-connected and yet he’d been near-shamed by how little he’d known about the creatures that his own species shared the system with. It was as though, having realised how little the Dwellers were concerned with or cared about them, Ulubine humanity had decided to pay them back in the same coin. And this in a Seer system, with more inter-species contact than any save another half-dozen or so similarly favoured, scattered through the galaxy. Yet even here most people didn’t know or want to know much of anything about the Dwellers. There was a large minority who did, but they were seen as slightly embarrassing — nerdy alien-fans. Facing the threat they were, desperately needing the Dwellers’ help, how short-sighted they all seemed now.

And reading up on Dweller society proved the truth of one old cliche for sure: the more you learned, the more you realised how little you knew. (An image of the planet, Liss had suggested when he’d first tried to articulate this feeling; unending depths.)

“Of course our military decide when we go to war,” Gruonoshe said, calm again. “They’re the experts.”

“I think that, if I might be allowed to ‘butt in’,” Chief Seer Meretiy said from his gascraft, “the point at issue is our different ways of looking at our two societies’ military capacity. We -that is, humans, and perhaps one might even presume to speak in this for the whole Mercatoria — regard our military as a tool, to be used by our politicians, who of course rule in the name of all. Conversely, our Dweller friends regard their military as an ancient and venerable calling for those with the relevant vocation, an institution to be honoured for its antiquity which has, almost as an afterthought, the duty of defending Dweller planets from any outside threat. As such, they are like what one might term a ‘fire brigade’, and a volunteer fire brigade, at that, for which no political clearance or oversight is required for it to spring into action, you see? Their raison d’etre is to respond as quickly as possible to emergencies, no more.”

— Fuck me, that actually made a sort of sense, Liss sent.

Just those first two words, delivered in her voice, with her so close behind him, gave Sal the start of an erection. He wondered how strong gravity had to be for hard-ons to become impossible.

“Fire brigades have… leaders, captains, don’t they?” Sorofieve said plaintively, looking from Meretiy to Saluus. “We might talk to them. Mightn’t we?”

Yawiyuen did the little bob-shrug again. “Absolutely not.”

“But we need to!” Sorofieve almost wailed.

“Why?”

“That thing even looks fast,” Guard-General Thovin said, gazing out at the sleek, dark ship from one of the requisitioned liner’s viewing galleries. The stars swung around them. “It have a name?”

“Hull 8770,” Saluus told him. “The military will give it a proper name when it’s time to hand it over. Though it’s a prototype, probably not suitable for full military service.”

“Desperate times,” Thovin said, shrugging, picking something from between his teeth. “Probably get used for something. Even if it’s just a missile.”

That’s what you think, Sal thought. “We haven’t quite got to that stage yet,” he said. They were alone. Thovin had suggested a stroll through the mostly empty ex-civilian ship.

“Think we’re wasting our time here, Kehar?” Thovin swung round to look at Saluus, his near-neckless head raised and tilted to him.

“Talking to the Dwellers?”

“Yes. Talking to the fucking Dwellers.”

“Probably. But then our friend Fassin Taak is probably wasting his time — if he’s still alive — looking for this Transform that probably doesn’t exist.”

“He was your friend, wasn’t he?” the Guard-General said, eyes narrowing. “Old school pals. Right, isn’t it?”

“Yes, we went to school and college together. We’ve kept in touch over the years. Matter of fact, probably the last bit of R and R he got before delving into Nasq. was at my house on Murla.”

“Straight to Guard academy for me,” Thovin said, changing tack again and looking away at the dartlike ship floating in space just outside. “That your escape route, is it, Kehar?” he asked innocently.

Not quite as stupid as you look, are you? Sal thought. “Where to?” he asked, smiling.

“The fuck out of harm’s way, that’s where,” Thovin said. “Keep your head down during the Starveling occupation. Return when it’s safe.”

“You know, I hadn’t thought of that,” Sal said. “Why, are you going to make me an offer for it?”

“Wouldn’t know how to fly it. “Course, you do, that right?”

It was no secret that Saluus had flown the Hull 8770 here himself. He was a capable enough pilot. Anybody could be with a little training and a modicum of computer help.

“Frees one of our brave boys for the front line,” he told Thovin, deadpan.

“Be funny if we won against the invaders, or the Summed Fleet lost. Eh?”

“Hilarious.”

“Think we’ll get anything out of the floats?”

“I think our Dweller pals have probably given us all we’re ever going to get, but it’s still worthwhile keeping on looking.”

“Uh-huh? You think?”

“Maybe the crew of one of their hyper-weapons will suddenly decide it’d be fun to defend Sepekte just for the sheer hell of it, or one of the scouts down in Nasq. will find the Transform, or Fassin Taak will just appear with it and we can all escape down a wormhole or bring in Summed Fleet ships from wherever we want. Who knows?”

“So we’re not wasting our time here?”

“No, probably we are. But what else could we be doing? Filling sandbags?”

Thovin almost smiled. ‘Course, if they did suddenly turn up with some fancy super-weapon ship, maybe we wouldn’t need to build warships any more, eh?”

“I’m sure Kehar Heavy Industries could happily switch to building nothing but cruise ships.” Sal looked round the viewing gallery they stood in. “I can see a few areas fit for improvement just standing here.”

Thovin nodded out at the slim, dark ship cradled outside. “You would hand that over to the Hierchon for his personal yacht if he asked for it, wouldn’t you?”

Sal thought for a moment. “I’d almost sooner destroy it,” he said.

Thovin turned and looked at him, expression open, waiting.

“I’m not kidding. It really is a prototype,” Sal said, smiling. “You wouldn’t put the head of state of an entire system in something as untried as that, certainly not if you meant to take it up to anything near top speed, which would kind of have to be the only reason for choosing it in the first place, right? I’ll entrust myself to the thing, but I couldn’t let the Hierchon take it. What if it killed him? Think of the publicity. Good grief, man, think of our share price.”

Thovin nodded for a few moments, looking back at the ship. “Missile, then,” he said.

“Me too,” Liss said quietly in the darkness. “I thought he was just an idiot kicked upstairs.”

“I think he does a good idiot act,” Sal said. “Actually, I think he’s probably as genuinely stupid as our Dweller negotiators are genuinely naive. Maybe Thovin should take over the talks. Doubt he could do any worse.”

They were lying in bed on board the prototype ship. It was more secure than staying on the liner or one of the other Embassy support ships, if also far less luxurious and much more cramped. There was no absolute guarantee that somebody hadn’t sneaked a bug aboard during the ship’s construction, but Saluus had had the craft built by his most trustworthy people and supervised the work as closely as he could; it was as safe as anyplace to say things that you might not want others to hear.

“Do you think he was trying to make a deal, get himself included if you did decide to escape?”

Saluus hesitated. This was not something he’d ever discussed straight out even with Liss. He was quite sure she’d guessed that using the ship as a way out was a possibility — so, for that matter, had Thovin, apparently, which kind of made you wonder who else might regard it as obvious (there was a slightly sweat-inducing idea) — but there was nothing to gain for either of them in saying it out loud.

“No,” Sal said, deciding against bringing that particular truth blinking into the light. “You know, I actually thought that maybe Thovin’s a kind of spy himself.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he reports to the Hierchon direct, or at least to the big guy’s top intelligence people. I think all this rough-as-bricks bluff stuff is just a way of getting people to drop their guard with him. Fucker could be a traitor-sniffer.”

Liss fitted her long body against his, rubbing slowly, gently. “He didn’t sniff you, then?”

“How could he?” Sal said. “For I am straight and true.”

“Ah, yes.”

Sometimes, if she was still holding him when she was falling asleep, he would feel her fingers making strange patterns on his side or back, as though her hands were trying to spell out some secret code of love. Then she would be asleep and stop, or jerk awake, as though embarrassed, and roll away and curl up.

* * *

Groggy again. Aboard the Velpin. Still. No idea yet how long they had taken. The truetwin had just told the three of them that it would take “some days’ to get to where they were going. Then, to Fassin and Y’sul when the Sceuri couldn’t see, they had signal-whispered, “That thing about Just Trust Us applies to you two, too. But shh, right?”

Y’sul and Fassin had exchanged looks.

Some days. The travel time was near-instant, of course, portal to portal. It was the getting to and from the portals at either end that took days. That and, perhaps, some sleight-of-course manoeuvres to fool anybody watching or following and trying to spot the hidden portals that way. Who knew? Quercer Janath did, of course, but they weren’t telling, wouldn’t even contemplate any arguments about letting him or even just Y’sul stay awake during these bizarre, so casually-taken galaxy-spanning transfers.

Watching, following. How could you have all those ship movements and never be seen? Telescopes of every wavelength, gravity sensors, neutrino patternisers, something somewhere in practically every developed system that kept a devastatingly detailed close eye on every sort of signal that ever emanated from space close, near, mid or far: something had to show up. Or did they only have portals in undeveloped systems, so that they had less chance of being observed?

No, they had them in Ulubis and Ashum.

Watching, following. Followed by something small enough to be even less visible, perhaps? Somebody, something must have followed a Dweller ship in-system, somewhere, and suddenly found itself plunging into a secret wormhole… And yet, apparently, nobody and nothing ever had.

So casual, so lackadaisical, so la-la-la; could it all be a perfect, never-failing act? Could the Dwellers all really be geniuses at acting, brilliant at stealth, flawless exponents of the disciplines required to keep complete discipline for every single solitary journey-transfer-jump-whatever? Dear reason and fate, they’d had ten billion years to get perfect at anything they wanted. Who knew what skills they’d developed to perfection in that time? (Yet there was still chaos, extreme chance, the simple stacking-up of odds that something had to go wrong sometime, no matter how close to perfection you could get…)

Coming round, slowly. Rovruetz, Direaliete. Shit, more names to deal with, more places to take in, another damn step along the way. He would die forever following this elusive fuck of a Dweller, or accumulate such dislocation, accrue so much summed grogginess that he’d forget what the whole insane quest was for, and find Leisicrofe one day, finally, when it was all too late anyway, and just stare at the fellow, utterly unable to recall what it was he wanted to ask him or what it might be that the Dweller could possibly have that would be remotely interesting or important to him.

The passenger compartment of the Velpin was mostly taken up by the esuit of the Sceuri called the Aumapile of Aumapile: a huge white-stippled black lozenge like a strange distorting viewport into space. Fassin, waking slowly, feeling grubby and sore as usual, couldn’t even see Y’sul or the anyway useless screen on the far wall.

“Urgh!” the giant black esuit exclaimed. “So that is unconsciousness? How disagreeable. And I strongly suspect inherently so.”

Fassin was glad that somebody agreed. He started checking out the arrowhead’s systems as he warmed them up again. The left manipulator arm was proving sticky, the self-repair mechanisms reaching the limits of their abilities. On past form it would sort of half-work, jerkily, for a few real-time months and then jam completely. He supposed he was lucky he’d got this far without any equipment failure, especially given the punishment the little gascraft had taken since the flight from Third Fury.

“And yet interesting!” the Sceuri announced, voice booming round the near-full space. The Aumapile of Aumapile was even louder than Y’sul. “Hmm,” it said. “Yes, interesting, more than certainly. Are you two awake yet or am I first up? Ha-ha!”

“Either awake or having a very noisy nightmare,” Y’sul said testily and unseen from the creature’s other side.

“Ditto,” said Fassin.

“Super! So, are we there yet?”

They were.

And they weren’t.

When the fuzzy screen cleared, it showed they were in the middle layers of a gas-giant atmosphere. The Velpin had done some high-speed spinning after all, and the zapping-unconscious had been more rough and ready than before. They had taken two days to get where they were going.

This, their travelcaptain assured them, was Rovruetz, Direaliete, a weather district and gas region of Nhouaste, the system’s own gas-giant.

The Aumapile of Aumapile was delighted. Just as it had thought! It fairly bounced out of the Velpin’s gaslock into the vast, shaded scape of towering RootClouds and horizon-spanning RayCanopies. It twirled like a centrifuge from sheer happiness. They spent another day, perfectly undisturbed by any native Dwellers, investigating the supposedly Toiler remains, which actually looked remarkably like an abandoned Dweller globe-city sitting on top of a damaged and discarded mega-klick BandTurbine. All very impressive, but not, Fassin and Y’sul both realised, what or where they were really looking for.

· This is not Rovruetz, Direaliete, is it? Fassin asked the truetwin shortly after they arrived, while the Aumapile of Aumapile dashed to and fro throughout the ruins, calibrating instruments and grabbing screenage.

· Are you mad? Of course not.

— Direaliete’s on the far side of the galaxy.

· Take days to get there.

· A system? Fassin asked.

· A system.

· I’ve no record of it, Fassin told the truetwin.

· You wouldn’t. Direaliete is its name in the Old Language.

— Well, variant thereof.

· So, Fassin sent, — this is just a trick.

· Correct.

— Our friend has what it wanted, we have what we wanted. Two out of two. One of our more successful missions.

— Meanwhile, Fassin sent, — we’re wasting time.

— Time wastes itself.

— Who are we to float in its way?

After offering to leave the breathless Sceuri scholar behind and come back for it — it wasn’t quite that easily fooled — and then telling it they really needed to be getting back now — it declared there was too much it still had to look for — Quercer Janath just abandoned the Sceuri, waiting until it had whirred off into the centre of the abandoned city before telling Fassin that the Aumapile of Aumapile had finally seen sense and was coming aboard in a moment for the trip back, getting the human and Y’sul secured, and then closing the external doors and taking off, warning their passengers there was some fairly intense spiralling ahead.

— What the fuck? Fassin signalled to Y’sul before the gascraft’s systems were shut down. — What about the Sceuri?

The Dweller had been in on it.

— A good joke, eh? he sent back, laughing.

Fassin signalled at the wall-screen, getting through to Quercer Janath in the command space.

— Did you warn the Aumapile you were about to leave?

— Yes.

Fassin waited. No more came. After a few moments he sent, -And?

— Didn’t believe us.

— Laughed.

· So you’re just abandoning this fabulously wealthy, appar-ently politically well-connected, Dweller-naive idiot in a gas-giant in its home system?

· About sums it up.

— Can’t say we didn’t warn him. It.

· Conditions of Passage.

· Don’t you think it might get hunted or just die anyway?

Fassin asked. — Or get back home, eventually, deeply annoyed?

· Suppose it’s a possibility.

— Keep going?

— Get back home, eventually, deeply annoyed with all Dwellers? And that that might be a bad thing for the Dwellers who live in Nhouaste?

— Point.

— Could cause friction.

— Kudos loss!

— Maybe we should have warned somebody we were leaving the flop-backed suck-puncture behind.

— Thinking. Suggestion. Know! We’ll send a signal.

— Happy?

Fassin didn’t even get time to reply.

— No more talk time. Switch off now, start spiralling.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous reviewed his forces. The nearest parts were right here, within the curved, concentric hulls of the Main Battle Craft Luseferous VII: they were his space and ground crack troops, all stood at attention by their sleek all-environments attack craft and high-skill-spec weaponry. The warships, support craft, troop carriers, landers, bombardment monitors, harrier drones, missile carriers, scout and surveillance machines and other vessels plus miscellaneous heavy devices he could discern — stretching as far as the unaided eye could see into the distance — were just projections. But they were live, real-time, and mostly clustered within a few light seconds of the invasion fleet’s core, whose absolute, steely heart was the Main Battle Craft Luseferous VII.

This was, in a way, the Archimandrite’s favourite bit. He had made a tradition of reviewing his forces like this before every major engagement, and especially before every system invasion, simply because it was such an astoundingly rewarding experience. Even the feeling of victory achieved — of having crushed and overcome, of having utterly prevailed — was hardly any better than this, when all the forces that would soon be thrown into the unavoidable mess and untidiness of battle — getting killed and shot up and dirty and lost and damaged and so on -stood or sat or lay or hovered or flew in perfect formation before him, gleaming, serried, grouped, exactly aligned, neatly laid out, symmetrically and systematically arranged, all just glistening with power and threat and promise.

He stood on the reviewing balcony at one end of the vast curved series of halls that formed the layered outer hulls of the giant ship, and took a series of deep breaths, eyes wide, heart pounding. God or Truth, it was a beautiful sight. This was, in a way, genuinely better than sex.

They were coasting in now, most of the deceleration completed, just one final burst of a few days’ weight and discomfort to come. Another week and they would be in the system, finally attacking. They had encountered little opposition so far, partly due to the high, angled course they’d taken. Any mine clouds and drone flocks that might have been set out to trap them would have been thrown across the more direct approaches, and by taking this longer but safer line they’d avoided them all so far. The only danger had lain in their mid-course correction, subjective years earlier, when their drives might have shown up on any deep-space monitoring systems in Ulubis, had they been turned in the right direction. The risk had been slight and as far as they could tell they’d got away with it.

At any rate, no fleet had emerged from Ulubis to do battle; they had decided to wait and fight on their own doorsteps. His tacticians thought this indicated that Ulubis was prepared but weak. They might encounter some probe and destroyer-level . craft, but that would probably be all until they hit the mid- and inner system. His admirals were confident their laser ships and close defence units could deal with anything else that might have been sent out to get in their way.

Luseferous became aware of noises at his back, where some of his more senior commanders were permitted to stand, backed in turn by his personal Guards. There were whispers, and hushing noises of fear and exasperation. He felt his body stiffen. Now would not be a good time to bother him with anything other than the imminent destruction of the whole fleet. They had to know that. The people behind him quieted down.

He relaxed, stood more upright in the spin-produced three-quarter gravity, and breathed deeply again, gazing out at the assembled men and materiel. Oh, this was a sweet and beautiful sight indeed, this was the very image of invincibility, an utterly thrilling spectacle of power made solid and real and uncompromising. This was his, this was him.

The imminent destruction of the whole fleet… He imagined that happening, imagined it happening right now; some cataclysmic hyper-weapon of the ancients wiping out the entire invasion force without anyone being able to do anything to stop them. Nonsense — well, vanishingly unlikely, anyway — but just think of it! He’d be able to watch everything here just blink out of existence, one by one, or explode in flames or bright blasts of light. He’d be able to watch it all being destroyed around him!

The idea made him shiver, half in horror, half in delight. It was never going to happen, of course, but the image alone was terrifyingly exciting. And a sort of warning, of course. Not from any god or from some program running the universe as the Truth saw it, but from something more trustworthy and direct; from inside himself. His subconscious, or some monitoring part-personality playing the part of the fool who always stood at Caesar’s side in a Triumph, reminding him that all was vanity. That sort of thing. The thoughts of destruction were just him reminding himself to take nothing for granted, to concentrate and take full control, to prosecute the coming war with his usual ruthlessness and ignore any internal whining voices preaching moderation or unwarranted mercy. Be cruel and merciful always for a purpose, never just to satisfy some self-image. Somebody had said that. He would never forget it.

One last deep breath. So, prepared. And forearmed. Still, the mood had sort of been broken. No real damage done by the hint of interruption earlier. He would be justified, all the same, in being angry, if he needed to be. Better see what all the fuss had been about. He swivelled on his heels, pulled himself up to his full height — always have senior commanders you could look down on — and said, loudly, “Yes?”

He loved to see these proud, vainglorious men flinch, these men used to being obeyed instantly and without question cower, even fractionally, before him.

Tuhluer, perhaps his least annoying aide-de-camp and lately something of a favourite, came forward, smiling and frowning at the same time. “Sir, sorry about the disturbance a moment earlier.” He gave a tiny flex of the eyebrows, as if to say, Not my fault — you know what some of these guys are like. “Ops alert just in: high-speed craft coming direct from Ulubis, signalling unarmed, no warhead, one or two human occupants, wanting to talk. Already slowing to match with us in ten hours. On its current course that will leave it a hundred klicks off fleet centre, left-level.”

The Archimandrite glared over Tuhluer’s head at the others. “And this required my intervention?”

“Warhead worries, sir,” Tuhluer said smoothly, with a small smile. “The craft was passing the leading units of the fleet’s forward destroyer screen at the time and was about to go out of their effective beam-weapon range. Question was whether to shoot or not. Now moot. The ship will be in range of the second defensive layer in half an hour. Or there are missiles, of course. A drone missile-carrier has already been launched in pursuit.”

The Archimandrite Luseferous paused a moment, then smiled. He could see them all relax. “Well then,” he said. “Everything appears to be functioning as it should and I did not need to be disturbed, did I?”

“Indeed not, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed ruefully.

“And what is the alleged status of this human or humans, if indeed that is what the thing contains?”

“The claim is that there’s a man aboard, a high-ranking industrialist called Saluus Kehar.”

* * *

The grogginess again, the tired, gritty, grubby feeling. Fassin was sure he was coming round more and more slowly each time, and finding himself duller, slower and more confused with each new reawakening. Over forty days’ travel on this transition, to the other side of the galaxy, fully ninety kiloyears from Ulubis, not that such measurements meant much. The in-wormhole time would still have been trivial. The extra days and weeks had been taken up by the flight from the portal to the ship they were looking for, deep in interstellar space.

Some days. A distance. All just more time gone, more distance between him and whatever he was trying to accomplish, while events back at Ulubis moved on without him.

He tested the arrowhead’s faulty left manipulator arm, flexing and tensing it, then forced himself to look at the screen on the far wall. Stars swung, as ever, then became just the backdrop to a vast dark gnarled craft, a giant torus-shaped ship two hundred kilometres in diameter, all black gleaming ribs and fractured facets, glinting in the weak light of a far-distant sun like a great rough crown of wet coal: the Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz, a vessel of the Ythyn’s vastly dispersed Greater Expiratory Fleet, a Death-Carrier.

Y’sul studied the image on the screen from the far side of the chamber for a moment, then shook his mantles. “We must mix amongst Morbs,” he said, sounding sleepy, grumpy and resigned all at once. “Oh, great.”

— So what happened to the Toilers? Fassin asked. — I thought Leisicrofe was supposed to be investigating Toilers next.

· Obviously they toiled in vain, Y’sul sent.

— A mis-lead.

— A bluff.

The Velpin hung above a graveyard of ships scattered across the outer rim of the Death Carrier while Y’sul and Fassin crossed to the giant ship. The Ythyn had suggested that the Velpin might enter the Rovruetz. Quercer Janath had demurred with what looked convincingly like a shiver of horror inside their silvery overall. Fassin got the impression that just being close to the Sepulcraft and its ancient collection of crumbling, lifeless ships was bad enough for them.

The Ythyn were a Scavenger species with a speciality: they collected the dead. They did nothing with them, just stored them sorted roughly by category, type and size, and they usually only collected those bodies — and sometimes the ships and other devices they arrived on — that nobody else wanted. But it was still an irredeemably macabre habit and as a result they shared a generic nickname with other death-obsessed species, having become known as Morbs.

Fassin and Y’sul were welcomed in the cavernous, gently lit entrance hall by a Ythyn officer, a great dark avian three metres tall in a glistening, near-transparent slick-suit over skin like dark blue parchment. Tightly bound double wings, which fully stretched would have spread a dozen metres, indicated the Ythyn was a junior. It stood on an uneven tripod of legs: one thick limb to the rear, two thinner ones in front. The creature’s lipped beak was inlaid with precious metals, glittering under the gel of the slick-suit. Its two eyes were huge roundels of black. Thin, curved pipes led from its nostril gratings to sets of small tanks on its back like spherical eggs of tarnished silver. There were no atmosphere-locks on an Ythyn ship; the crew, like their dead charges, spent their entire time in hard vacuum. Exposed only to that hushed nothingness, enclosed by the great ship and so kept within a few degrees of absolute zero, the bodies of the dead could lie undisturbed and uncorrupted by nothing more than whatever had killed them and by the effects of their slow or sudden freezing, for aeons.

· You are welcome, the Ythyn officer told them in a flat, unaccented signal, prefixed only by formal signifiers for sadness and reverence. — You are Mr Taak and you are Mr Y’sul, yes?

· Yes, Fassin sent.

· I am Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian. I am happy and honoured to be known as “Ninth’ or just “Duty’. Tell me, have either of you two gentlemen made any arrangements for the treatment or disposal of your bodies, after death?

* * *

The Ythyn had been collecting the dead for a billion years, the result of a kind of gruesome techno-curse visited upon them by a species they had fought against and been utterly defeated by. They had lost their small empire, lost their few planets, lost their major habitats and most of their ships and they had even lost themselves, coerced into a programme of genetic amendment that turned them from intellectually rounded beings into creatures utterly obsessed with death.

The cruelty and cleverness of their vanquishers had lain in identifying and choosing a latent weakness congenital to the Ythyn. They had always been a little overly fascinated with mortality compared with the norm of vaguely similar species, but not to the stage of serious abnormality and certainly not to the point that it in any way defined them. And if they had been so grotesquely psychologically disfigured in the process of making them so excessively morbid that they ceased to be iden-tifiably themselves there would have been no artistry, no fitness in their punishment. Instead, by this subtle but significant tweaking of their own bodies’ instruction set, they became what they might have become anyway had some bizarre shiftings in their environment and circumstances so decreed. Those who had not taken their own lives and refused to submit to the inheritable amendment were killed or hunted down and forced to undergo the treatment anyway, though most of those so treated killed themselves as well.

The survivors became wanderers, one of the dozens of planet-evolved species denied or — in a few cases — eschewing any sort of home world. They built massive cold, dark ships and accrued enormous libraries and data reservoirs filled with the subject of death. They haunted the sites of great battles, terrible massacres and awful disasters. Over time, they began to gather the unclaimed dead from such sites, storing them more or less as they found them in their great airless ships, each carrying a cargo of collected death, plodding from one end of the galaxy to the other or gradually spiralling around it. Too big for wormhole travel, loath even to approach too close to a star, the Sepulcraft depended on smaller ships to harvest the dead. Even these rarely used wormholes these days. The Propylaea, which had charge of all the Mercatoria’s portals, was not a charity, and demanded money for passage. The Ythyn had little to offer in payment.

They collected ships from those bringing the dead — or themselves, to die — but those were usually hulks, wrecks or near the end of their useful working lives and anyway regarded by the Ythyn as sacred, amongst the dead themselves. There were occasional donations and bequests from many different societies but they were few and far between. When they could afford to, and there were bodies to be got from the far end of a wormhole, an Ythyn ship would spend the little collateral it had accumulated and send a needle craft to make the collection. But usually they just physically followed the galaxy’s generally sporadic instances of mass death.

That they had long since dutifully gathered up the remaining bodies of the now-extinct species which had inflicted their punishment upon them and could therefore relatively easily and without resistance have re-amended themselves back to their original selves, but had chosen not to, was either their most poignant tragedy of all, or a recognition that they had found a place within the galactic scheme of things that suited them better than might any other.

— We are on our way to the Chistimonouth system, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian told the Dweller and the human as they made their way along a vast curved corridor deep within the giant ship. The tall birdlike being used one of its two thin forelegs to manipulate the controls of a small cagelike car that carried them in perfect silence along a monorail set in the centre of the wide tunnel. It was perfectly dark, too. They were having to use active sensing to illuminate the seemingly never-ending corridor. — We seek the mortal remains of a newly contacted Serpenterian civilisation, a possible offshoot of the Desii-Chau (themselves, lamentably, no more; extinct, or, at the very best, deep within the fifth category of abatement), unadopted, which fell prey, sadly, to a series of solar flares some centuries ago. The sole inhabited planet was sorely affected. Of the single sentient species thereon, it is believed that no living trace remains. It will be our privilege and our duty, when we arrive there in another few decades, to inter within these hallowed halls as many of the still-unburied as we are able.

— How will they be unburied? Y’sul asked. — Do they float? Won’t they all have sunk into their own depths? Into water or mud or dissolved rock or something?

The corridors were lined with the dead: stapled, pinned, stitched or ice-welded to the tubular surface (the concept of floors, walls and ceilings had some meaning while the ship was under power, but it was temporary). A few body types were best preserved in cavities, alcoves sealed with diamond leaf.

· Those happily buried will be left where they lie, underground, Duty told them. — Some remains are expected in structures, even after all this time. The reports we have had from scouter species indicate that there may be many unclaimed cadavers still in space, at Lagrange points.

· What if they’re all gone? Y’sul asked. — What if somebody’s beaten you to it and… eaten them or recycled them or something?

· Then we will make our way to the next location where we may honour the dead, the dark bird told them, imperturbable.

· Come to think of it, Y’sul said brightly, — there might be a few bods to pick up in a place called Ulubis fairly soon.

Fassin looked at the Dweller but he wasn’t paying any attention.

· Ulubis, Duty said. — I have not heard of this place. Is it a planet?

· System, Y’sul said. — Home of the planet Nasqueron. In Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs.

· Ah, yes. Rather far away from here.

· Lots of humans there and another lot on their way, Y’sul said. — Probably going to be a war. Lot of deaths, I’d imagine. You collect humans?

· We have difficulties only with certain Cincturian species, the bird-creature told them. — Humans we have heard of and accommodated in the past, though not on this craft. I shall pass on your information at the earliest opportunity to our most proximate Sepulcraft. They may well be aware already, of course,

and possibly on their way even as we speak. However, we are grateful for your thoughtfulness.

— My pleasure, Y’sul said, sounding pleased with himself. He glanced at Fassin. — What?

Fassin looked away. They were passing bodies spread against the tunnel’s surface like small solidified explosions of rock. -Palonne, their guide informed them. — Ossile, obviously. Victims of war. Subject to a parasitic stone-rot virus of some sort.

— Fascinating, Y’sul said. — Are we nearly at this Leisicrofe fellow yet?

Duty looked at a small display clipped to one of his cinched-in wings. — Another few hundred metres.

· What’s he up to here, anyway? Y’sul asked.

· Up to? The Ythyn sounded uncertain.

· Just… studying you people, is he?

· Why, no. No, of course not. The Ythyn officer was silent for a moment. — Oh dear.

Fassin and Y’sul exchanged looks.

Fassin said, — You’re not saying he’s dead, are you?

— Well, yes. Of course. This is a Sepulcraft, gentlemen. I was under the impression that you simply wanted to see the body.

* * *

The news came while she was asleep. Taince watched an hours-old recording of the faint, sideways-seen, blue-shifted glimmers approaching from the direction of the E-5 Discon as the Starveling invasion fleet started braking for its arrival in Ulubis system. The invaders would take nearly three months to reach Ulubis. The Summed Fleet was still four months’ travel away, including its own, more dramatic deceleration regime, due to start in a little more than eighty days. The Fleet tacticians had learned quite a lot just from the braking profile of E-5 Discon’s fleet.

First, it was big: a thousand ships or more, unless there was something outlandishly clever going on with dummy drive signatures. Second, it was staying ninety-five per cent together, with only a few dozen smaller ships venturing ahead of the main fleet. This might imply a significant straight-through, braking-beyond force still hidden, though from the rest of the profile this didn’t look so likely. The size, definition and shifted-frequency signatures of the drives themselves revealed a relatively slow, old-tech vessel-capability envelope. Basically all but the lightest craft in the Summed Fleet force would be able to take on all but the heaviest of the invaders’ ships with a better than average chance of prevailing, and anything that couldn’t be outfought could be outrun (for whatever that was worth when there was nowhere to run to).

And there was one behemoth in there, a giant ship, probably a command-and-control lander- and troop-carrier plus facili-ties-and-repair vessel. At least a billion tonnes, klicks across, doubtless very heavily armoured and armed and escorted, but a classic grade-A high-value target, a possible king-piece, a back-breaker, if it could be successfully engaged and destroyed or taken out of action or even captured. Just posting a powerful-enough guard-ship screen to try and keep it safe in the event of a serious attack threat would significantly sap the invading\ occupying force’s abilities, cut down their dispositional options and drastically curtail their split-regroup capacity.

The Fleet tacticians had been positively cruel about this dinosaur of a ship. A vanity piece, they called it, an Idiot Aboard! sign hung round the neck of the enemy fleet. Every space-faring species that built warcraft quickly found out one way or another — often the hard way — that big ships just didn’t work except as a hideously expensive way of impressing the more credulous type of native. Flexibility, manoeuvrability, low unit risk-cost, distributed inherent damage resistance, fully parsed battle-space side-blind denotation control grammar… these and other even more arcane concepts were what really mattered in modern space warfare, apparently, and a Really Big Ship just didn’t sit too comfortably with any of them.

The tacticians pretty much spoke their own language, were mostly very intense, and blinked a lot.

“So a strong point that’s really a weak point,” Taince had suggested at one of their briefings.

“That would be a viable alternative definition,” one of them said, after a moment or two’s thought.

Since just a week ago, though, relatively little evidence of further activity.

Well, the Discon invaders had arrived later than anticipated, and the Summed Fleet forces were arriving earlier. Deliberate, on their part, of course. The invaders would have quickly found out when Ulubis had been told to expect the Summed Fleet’s arrival, and it was always prudent to keep the enemy off balance, to upset their assumptions. Let them think they had so much time and then arrive early before they’d got everything prepared.

Smiting. It was all about smiting. That was one of Admiral Kisipt’s favourite words. The Voehn Fleet Commander knew it in several hundred different languages, including Earth Anglish. Be ready at all times to smite the enemy. Strike with speed, decisiveness and weight.

Taince found herself lightly smitten with one of the junior male officers, discovered it was mutual and took part in some invasive tussling of her own.

The time displays ticked down steadily towards the point where they’d have to get back into their lonely little individual pods again for the deceleration burn that would bring them down from near-light speed to something close to Ulubis-zero, for the start of the attack.

* * *

The Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz spun very slowly beneath the Velpin, still gently accelerating for its distant target system and its unburied cargo of the long-dead. The Velpin was tracking round the outer rim of the giant craft, senses primed. Fassin and Y’sul were back aboard. They had been shown to the lifeless body of Leisicrofe, ice-welded to the side of the great dark corridor in the company of a half-dozen other dead Dwellers.

· Very well preserved, as you see, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian had pointed out. — I hope you feel this setting is appropriate. The Ythyn officer had still been upset at the earlier misunderstanding.

· So he just died, then? Y’sul had asked.

· Very suddenly, apparently. We found him drifting — rolling along in his esuit, actually — a few days after he arrived. He had expressed an interest in mapping the distribution of bodies of different species and species-types while he was here. We saw no reason not to allow him to do so.

They weren’t permitted to use reaction motors inside the Sepulcraft. Y’sul had used his esuited spine-arms to push himself over to the side of the tunnel. He’d landed awkwardly by the Dweller’s body, which was naked save for a small hub-cloth.

— I have no idea whether this is this Leisicrofe guy or not, frankly, Y’sul had said. — But it is a Dweller, probably from Nasqueron and he is most certainly dead.

— Any sign of… anything? Fassin asked.

Y’sul had inspected the body, using lights and radar-sense, finding nothing. He’d unclipped the corpse’s hub-cloth and shaken it. Fassin had sensed their Ythyn host preparing to object, but a moment later Y’sul had replaced the hub-cloth and was looking round the back of the body where ice attached it to the tunnel wall.

— Nothing, he’d sent back.

“There,” one half of Quercer Janath said.

On one of the Velpin’s screens, a flickering outline appeared around one of the abandoned ships littering the carbuncularly irregular outer hull of the Sepulcraft.

Fassin looked at the craft. It was a simple black ellipsoid, maybe sixty metres long. Deep-space cold, lifeless.

“That it?” Y’sul asked. “You sure?”

“It’s a Dweller Ail-Purpose, Single-Occupancy Standard Pattern SoloShip,” the truetwin told them. “And it pings recent.”

“Can you wake its systems?” Fassin asked. “Find out where it was last, where it came from?”

The travelcaptain looked at him. “Doesn’t work like that.”

“Pay attention.”

They got permission from the Ythyn to lift the SoloShip and join it to the Velpin. They warmed it up and introduced a standard gas-giant atmosphere. There was just about enough room for Y’sul and Fassin to board together. Quercer Janath had already laser-synched the little ship’s closed-down computer matrix to that of the Velpin. The screens, tanks, surfaces and other displays flickered, steadied and shone. The craft beeped and clicked around them. It still felt cold.

Y’sul knocked and tapped a few of the more obviously delicate-looking bits of machinery with his hub-arms.

“You getting anything?” he asked. The truetwin was staying on board the larger craft.

“There’s stuff in the log,” one half told them. “That’s sailor-talk for diary.”

“No saying!” Y’sul said.

“Truly. But it’s not accessible from here. You’ll have to input from there.”

“How, exactly?” Fassin asked.

“How should we know?”

“Not our ship.”

“Experiment.”

They experimented. The correct technique involved Y’sul pressing in to a Dweller-shaped double-alcove sensory nook and pressing four glyphboard icons on four different glyph-boards at once. The main screen stopped showing stars and the darkly glittering hull of the Sepulcraft and started showing what looked like the interior of a small library instead. Y’sul reached out into the virtual space and pulled down a book whose spine said Log. He opened it.

A motionless Dweller hub faced them in close-up.

“Well,” Y’sul said, “that certainly looks like the stiff in the big space hearse.”

“We can see him. Should be a Play button.”

“Try hitting it.”

“Gee,” Y’sul said. “Thank fuck you guys are there.” He hit Play.

* * *

Taince Yarabokin woke from a light sleep to a low-level alarm, telling her not even to think about instigating a pod-quit regime. She swung to the exterior fore-view display and looked out. Ulubis glowed sharp and blue ahead, a tiny sun amongst the surrounding scrape of stars, at last. The blueness was a function of the ship and the fleet’s colossal speed, hammering into the light waves, compressing wavelength. Taince switched from LR Sensors to ship-state. A fierce and terrible force pulled at everything. They’d started their final deceleration burn. The majority of the fleet was losing speed hard, piling up a hundred or more gravities as it braked for the approach to and arrival at Ulubis system, still over a month away.

Another group of ships — one full squadron of sixty vessels -was not decelerating so rapidly. A dozen were not slowing at all and would maintain full speed all the way to and most of the way through the system, their crews and systems trained over hundreds of simulations for an ultra-high-speed pass across Ulubis planetary system which would last for less than four hours. In that time, less than twenty days from now, they would have to collect and evaluate all the data they could on the then-current state of the system and then both signal their intelligence back to the ships behind and choose a suite of attack profiles from a vast menu of possibilities they carried in their data banks before loosing all the munitions they could against whatever hostiles they had identified. They hoped the pickings would be rich for them. They’d be arriving with little warning only a month after the Starveling fleet had struck. With luck the situation would be fluid and the E-5 Discon forces wouldn’t have had time to organise their defences properly.

Then, even before those advance ships were all the way through the system, they would begin their own still more violent deceleration, to come to a stop a light month beyond, and get back to Ulubis weeks after the main fleet had arrived: at best to help with the mopping up, at worst to deliver a retaliatory hammer-blow.

The remainder of the Advance-attack Squadron would pass through the system in small groups of ships, their arrival staggered, unpredictable, distributed, their tactics in part defined by whatever the high-speed craft had discovered. With luck, with what they hoped and trusted was a good battle-plan, the waves of war craft, each able to spend more fighting time in the system than its immediate predecessor, would deliver a succession of softening-up blows against the enemy: rocking it, unbalancing it, confusing and bloodying it. The main body of the fleet, arriving like a bunched fist, would just provide one final massive knockout punch.

Their drive light would precede them, of course. There would be no complete surprise.

The Starveling invasion had given the defenders of Ulubis even more warning, not that there was much they could have done with it. The E-5 Discon fleet had slowed right down, shut its drives off almost as one while still a few days out, well within the system’s Oort shell, then slowed further as its lead ships crossed the boundary into the planetary system.

For the next few weeks after the drive signatures meshed with the Ulubis system and shut off, when the invasion must have been at its height, there had been a lot of weapon-blink. Much of it had been around the planets Sepekte and Nasqueron.

* * *

“My name is Leisicrofe of Hepieu, Nasqueron equatorial. This is my last testament. I will presume that whoever you are you have followed me for the data which I carried on behalf of my fellow Dweller, the scholar Valseir of Schenehen. If you have not, and this recording has fallen to you in what one might term a casual manner, it may be of little interest. If, however, you do seek the data I held, then I must tell you now that you are going to be disappointed.”

Something in Fassin seemed to break and fall away.

“Uh-oh,” Y’sul said.

“This may seem unfortunate and may make you angry. However, I have most likely done you a considerable favour, as it is my sincere and firm belief that what I was asked to carry was something I should not have been, and something that nobody should have been or should be asked to take responsibility for. It was not something I was supposed to know about, of course, and it was not really Valseir’s fault that I came into possession of the knowledge of what it represented.”

“Talks a lot, doesn’t he?” Y’sul said.

“To my shame, I think I must be more shallow than my friend Valseir gave me credit for. He gave me the data sealed in a safe-keep box and asked me not to open it. I said I would not. He did not even ask me for my word, thinking, I am sure, that simply asking a friend and fellow scholar such a thing, and receiving such an assurance, was guarantee enough. However, I am not like Valseir. I am inquisitive by nature, not as the result of an intellectual fascination with any particular subject. I resisted the urge to open the safekeep box for many years while I was on my travels, but eventually I surrendered to temptation. I opened the safekeep, I began to read what was inside, and realised its importance. Even then I might have stopped reading, closed the box and put it away again, and had I done that I would still be alive. Instead, I carried on reading — and this has resulted in my death. I can only claim that perhaps I was in a sort of trance of disbelief at the time.”

“More likely taken some recreational substances,” Y’sul snorted.

“And so I came to hold within myself the knowledge, the meaning of that which I had been asked to keep safe, rather than just having charge of the medium containing it. Realising what I now knew, and comprehending that it was of inestimable value, I came to the conclusion that I could not be trusted with it. While not entirely understanding what I had read, I could not forget it. I could tell others, and it was not impossible that I might be made to tell what I knew through the use of drugs or more direct intervention with my brain and mind.”

“Nutter,” Y’sul said.

“What’s that?” one of Quercer Janath said distantly over the open link to the Velpin.

“Hmm. Don’t know.” It didn’t sound like they were paying attention to what was being said by the recording of Leisicrofe. “I will not pretend that I had not been thinking of my own death for some time. However, it was habitually within the context of having completed my studies into the many differing forms of the Cincturia and publishing a learned — I had even hoped an at-the-time definitive — work on this, my chosen and beloved field of study. Knowing what I now know, I have thought it best, however reluctantly, to curtail my studies forthwith and kill myself as soon as may decently be achieved. I shall do so here, in the Ythyn Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz, where my death will at least appear to have a fraction more meaning than it might have had elsewhere.”

“Looks like, or…” Fassin heard over the open channel.

“Ping it?”

“No! Are you… ? Shut off that—”

The open channel closed. Fassin looked back to the access hatch and the short ship-to-ship connecting them to the Velpin. Leisicrofe was still speaking.’… Will forgive me. You should. If you know what it is you are looking for, then all I will say is that it looked more like a code and frequency, not what I believe was expected. But it is quite gone now. Destroyed, along with the safekeep box itself, thrown into the sun called Direaliete. I know of no other copy. If none of this makes any sense to you, then please respect an old, and — as it turns out -foolish, Dweller’s last wish, and leave him here in peace.” The recording froze and an end-message signal flashed.

Fassin stared at the image of the dead Dweller. It was over. He’d failed. Maybe now there was no way ever to find out whether the Dweller List meant anything or even had ever meant anything.

“Totally mad,” Y’sul said, with something like a sigh. He fiddled with the glyphboard controls. “Looks like that’s our lot.”

He turned to Fassin. “Doesn’t sound too hopeful, does it, young human-me-lad?”

The open channel from the ship clicked on suddenly. “Get out!” Quercer Janath screamed. “Ten seconds to get off there and back in the Velpin!’

“Being attacked! Must run!”

Fassin shook himself out of his shock and started backing towards the open hatch leading to the Velpin.

Y’sul pulled out of the sensory-nook, began to follow, one hub-limb scratching at his mantle. “This madness is obviously contag—”

“Fucking Voehn ship! Out, now!”

“Engines in five, four, three…”