The Algebraist

It had thought it would be safe out here, just one more ambiently black speck deep-chilled in the vast veil of icy debris wrapping the outer reaches of the system like a frozen, tenuous shroud of tissue. But it had been wrong and it was not safe.

It lay, slow-tumbling, and watched helplessly as the probing beams flickered across the pitted, barren motes far away, and knew its fate was settled. The interrogating tendrils of coherence were almost too quick to sense, too seemingly tentative to register, barely touching, scarcely illuminating, but they did their job by finding nothing where there was nothing to find. Just carbon, trace, and ice-water hard as iron: ancient, dead, and left undisturbed — no threat to anyone.

The lasers flicked off, and each time it felt hope rise, finding itself thinking, despite all rationality, that its pursuers would give up, admit defeat, just go away and leave it be, to orbit there for ever. Or perhaps it would kick away into a lonely eternity of less than light-slow exile, or drift into a closedown sleep, or… Or it might, it supposed — and this was what they feared, of course, this was why they hunted — plot and plan and gather and make and quicken and build and multiply and muster and — attack!… Claiming the vengeance that was so surely its, exacting the price its enemies all deserved to pay — by any algebra of justice under any sun you cared to name — for their intolerance, their savagery, their generacide.

Then the needle rays reappeared, fitfully irradiating the soot-ice-clinker of another set of barnacle-black detritus, a little further away, or a little closer, but always with a rapid, meticulous order to them, a militaristic precision and a plodding, bureaucratic systematicism.

From the earlier light trails, there were at least three ships. How many did they have? How many might they devote to the search? It didn’t really matter. They might take a moment, a month or a millennium to find their quarry, but they obviously knew where to look and they would not stop until they had either found what they were looking for or satisfied themselves that there was nothing there.

That it was so obviously in harm’s way, and that its hiding place, however enormous, was almost the first place they had chosen to search, filled it with terror, not just because it did not want to die, or be picked apart as they had been known to pick its kind apart before killing their victims utterly, but because if it was not safe in this place where it had assumed it would be, then, given that so many of its kind had made the same assumption, none of them would be safe either.

Dear Reason, maybe none of us are safe anywhere.

All its studies, all its thoughts, all the great things that might have been, all the fruits of change from the one great revelation it might have had, and now would never know the truth of, would never be able to tell. All, all for nothing now. It could choose to go with some elegance, or not, but it could not choose not to go.

No un-choosing death.

The needle rays from the needle ships flicked on\flicked off away across the frozen distances, and finally it could see the pattern in them, discerning one ship’s comb of scintillations from the others and so picking out the shape of the search grids, allowing it to watch, helpless, as the slow spread of that mortal inquiry crept slowly, slowly closer.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human\non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel — with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap — so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary’s head as a punchball.

Luseferous had long, sheen-black straight hair and a naturally pale complexion which had been skilfully augmented to make his skin nearly pure white. His eyes were artificially large, but just close enough to congenitally possible for people to be unsure whether they had been augmented or not. The whites beyond the black irises were a deep, livid red, and every one of his teeth had been carefully replaced with a pure, clear diamond, giving his mouth an appearance which varied from bizarre, mediaeval toothlessness to startling, glistening brilliance, entirely depending on angle and light.

In a street performer or an actor, such physiological departures might have been amusing, even a little desperate-looking; in somebody wielding the kind of power which Luseferous possessed, they could be genuinely disturbing, even terrifying. The same half-tasteless, half-horrifying effect might be claimed for his name, which was not the one he had been born with. Luseferous was a chosen name, selected for its phonetic proximity to that of some long-scorned Earth deity which most humans — well, most rHumans, at least — would vaguely have heard of in their history studies while probably not being entirely able to place when they had heard the word.

Again thanks to genetic manipulation, the Archimandrite was now and had been for some long time a tall, well-built man with considerable upper-body strength, and when he punched in anger — and he rarely punched in any other state — it was to considerable effect. The rebel leader whose head now hung upside down from Luseferous’s ceiling had caused the Archimandrite enormous military and political difficulties before being defeated, difficulties which had sometimes verged on being humiliations, and Luseferous still felt deep, deep resentment towards the traitor, resentment which easily and reliably turned itself to anger when he looked upon the man’s face, no matter how battered, bruised and bloody it might be (the head’s augmented healing functions were quick, but not instantaneous), and so the Archimandrite probably still whacked and smashed away at Stinausin’s head with as much enthusiasm now as he had when he’d first had him hung there, years earlier.

Stinausin, who had barely endured a month of such treatment before going completely mad, and whose mouth had been sewn up to stop him spitting at the Archimandrite, could not even kill himself; sensors, tubes, micropumps and biocircuitry prevented such an easy way out. Even without such extraneous limitations he could not have shouted abuse at Luseferous or attempted to swallow his tongue because that organ had been torn out when his head had been removed.

Though by now quite perfectly insane, sometimes, after an especially intense training session with the Archimandrite, when the blood trickled down from the one-time rebel chief’s split lips, re-broken nose and puffed-up eyes and ears, Stinausin would cry. This Luseferous found particularly gratifying, and sometimes he would stand, breathing hard and wiping himself down with a towel while he watched the tears dilute the blood dripping from the inverted, disembodied head, to land in a broad ceramic shower tray set into the floor.

Of late, though, the Archimandrite had had a new playmate to amuse himself with, and he would occasionally visit the chamber some levels below his study where the nameless would-be assassin whose own teeth were slowly killing him was held.

The assassin, a big, powerful-looking, leoninely human male, had been sent without weapons save for his specially sharpened teeth, with which, it had obviously been hoped by whoever had sent him, he could bite out the Archimandrite’s throat. This he had attempted to do, a half-year earlier at a ceremonial dinner held here in the clifftop palace in honour of the System President (a strictly honorary post Luseferous always made sure was filled by somebody of advanced age and retreating faculties). The would-be assassin had only failed to accomplish this task thanks to the Archimandrite’s near-paranoid forethought and intense — and largely secret — personal security.

The failed assassin had been both routinely, if savagely, tortured and then very carefully questioned under the influences of entire suites of drugs and electro-biological agents, but had given nothing useful away. Patently he had been equally carefully wiped of any knowledge that might incriminate whoever had sent him, by interrogational technicians at least as capable as those whom the Archimandrite commanded. His controllers had not even bothered to implant false memories incriminating anybody close to the Court and the Archimandrite, as was common in such cases.

Luseferous, who was that most deplorable of beings, a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination, had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be that his own teeth — the weapons he had been sent with, after all — should bring about his death. Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing, and reinserted. These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, punc- turing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head and, after a few months’ worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck, taking about the same time to meet the skin near the base of his throat.

Genetically altered not to stop growing even when they encountered such resistance, both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin’s body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man’s skull, the other set entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck. The tusks digging into the assassin’s neck caused great pain but were not immediately life-threatening; left to themselves they would reappear from the rear of his neck in due course. The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonisingly, kill him, perhaps in as little as another month or so.

The unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber with bands and shackles of thick stainless iron, his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants. His mouth had also been sewn up, like that of Stinausin. For the first few months of his captivity the assassin’s eyes had followed Luseferous around the chamber with a fierce, accusatory look that the Archimandrite eventually grew to find annoying, and so he’d had the man’s eyes stitched shut too.

The fellow’s ears and mind still worked, however Luseferous had been assured — and sometimes it amused him to come down and see for himself the progress that the teeth were making into the creature’s body. On such occasions, having what one might term a captive — yet necessarily discreet — audience, he sometimes liked to talk to the failed assassin.

“Good day,” Luseferous said pleasantly as the lift door rumbled shut behind him. The chamber deep below the study was what the Archimandrite thought of as his den. Here, as well as the nameless assassin, he kept assorted souvenirs of old campaigns, booty from his many victories, items of high art looted from a dozen different stellar systems, a collection of weapons both ceremonial and high-power, various caged or tanked creatures, and the mounted, profoundly dead heads of all those major enemies and adversaries whose end had not been so complete as to reduce their mortal remains to radiation, dust, slime or unidentifiable strips of flesh and shards of bone (or the alien equivalents thereof).

Luseferous crossed to a deep, dry tank part-set into the floor and looked in at the Recondite Splicer lying coiled and still on its floor. He slipped a thick elbow glove onto his arm, reached into a large pot standing on the broad, waist-high parapet of the tank and dropped a handful of fat black trunk-leeches into the tank.

“And how are you? Are you keeping well? Hmm?” he asked.

An observer would have been unsure whether the Archimandrite was talking to the human male pinned to the wall, the Recondite Splicer — now no longer still, but raising its blind, glistening brown head, sniffing the air while its long, segmented body twitched with anticipation — or indeed the trunk-leeches, thudding one by one onto the mossy floor of the tank and immediately flexing their way with a sort of sine-wave motion across the surface towards the nearest corner, as far away from the Recondite Splicer as it was possible to get. The brown mass of the Splicer began to shuffle massively towards them and they started trying to climb the sheer glass sides of the tank, climbing over each other and slipping back down as soon as they tried to haul themselves up.

Luseferous peeled the elbow glove off and looked round the vaulted, subtly lit space. The chamber was a comfortable, quiet sort of place set well within the cliff, with no windows or light shafts, and he felt safe and relaxed here. He looked over at the long, tawny shape that was the suspended body of the assassin and said, “Nowhere’s quite as nice as home, eh, is it?” The Archimandrite even smiled, though there was nobody to smile at.

There was a rasping noise and a heavy thump from inside the tank, followed by some almost inaudibly high keening sounds. Luseferous turned to watch the Recondite Splicer tear the giant leeches apart and eat them, violently shaking its great patchily brown head and tossing some bits of slimy black flesh all the way out of the tank. Once it had thrown a still-alive leech up and out of the tank and nearly hit the Archimandrite with it; Luseferous had chased the injured leech round the chamber with a shear-sword, cleaving deep slivers out of the dark red granite floor as he hacked and sliced at the creature.

When the show in the tank was over, the Archimandrite turned back to the assassin. He put the elbow glove back on, picked another trunk-leech from the pot and strolled over to the man attached to the wall. “Do you remember home, sir assassin?” he asked as he approached. “Is there any memory of it in your head at all, hmm? Home, mother, friends?” He stopped in front of the man. “Any of that stuff at all?” He waved the leech’s moist, seeking snout in front of the assassin’s face as he spoke. They sensed each other, the cold, writhing creature in the Archimandrite’s hand stretching out to try to fasten itself to the man’s face, the man sucking breath through his nostrils and turning his head as far as it would go, seeming to try and shrink back into the wall behind (this would not be the first time the assassin had been introduced to a trunk-leech). The tusks digging into his chest prevented him from moving his head very far.

Luseferous followed the movements of the man’s head with the leech, keeping it in front of his lightly furred, leonine face, letting him smell the straining, quivering mass.

“Or did they rip out all those memories when they cleaned you, before they sent you to try to kill me? Huh? Are they all gone? Eh?” He let the very tip of the trunk-leech’s mouth parts just touch the fellow’s nose, causing the failed assassin to wince and jerk and make a small, terrified whimpering noise. “What, eh? Do you remember home, eh, sport? A pleasant place to be, a place you felt safe and secure and with people you trusted, and who maybe even loved you? What do you say? Eh? Eh? Come on.” The man tried to turn his head still further, straining the puckered skin around the puncture points on his chest, one of which started to bleed. The giant leech trembled in Luseferous’s hand, stretching its mucus-tipped mouth parts still further as it tried to find purchase on the human male’s flesh. Then, before the leech could properly attach itself to the fellow, the Archimandrite pulled it back and let it hang from his half-outstretched arm, where it swung and twisted muscularly with what felt for all the world like genuine frustration.

“This is my home, sir assassin,” Luseferous told the man. “This is my place, my refuge, this, which you… invaded, despoiled, dishonoured with your… your plot. Your attempt.” His voice quaked as he said, “I invited you into my house, invited you to my table as… as hosts have guests for ten thousand human years and you… all you wanted to do was hurt me, kill me. Here, in my home, where I should feel safer than anywhere.” The Archimandrite shook his head in sorrow at such ingratitude. The failed assassin had nothing but a dirty rag to cover his nakedness. Luseferous pulled it away and the fellow flinched again. Luseferous stared. ‘They did make a bit of a mess of you, didn’t they?” He watched the failed assassin’s thighs quiver and twitch. He let the loincloth fall to the ground; a servant would replace it tomorrow.

“I like my home,” he told the fellow quietly. “I do, really. Everything I’ve had to do I’ve done just to make things safer, to make home safer, to make everybody safer.” He waved the trunk-leech towards what was left of the man’s genitalia, but the leech seemed listless and the man already exhausted. Even the Archimandrite felt like some of the fun had gone out of the situation. He turned smartly and strode to the pot on the broad rail over the tank, dumping the leech inside and peeling the thick elbow glove off.

“And now I have to leave home, mister assassin,” Luseferous said, and sighed. He gazed down at the long coiled shape of the once-again-still Recondite Splicer. It had changed colour from brown to yellow-green now, adopting the colours of the mosses it lay upon. All that was left of the trunk-leeches were some dark spots and smears on the walls, and a faint, tangy smell the Archimandrite had come to recognise as that of yet another species’s blood. He turned back to look at the assassin. “Yes, I have to go away, and for a very long time, and it would seem I have no choice.” He started to walk slowly towards the man. “Because you can’t delegate everything, because ultimately, especially when it comes to the most important things, you can’t really trust anybody else. Because sometimes, especially when you’re going far away and communications take so long, there’s no substitute for being there. What do you think of that? Eh? There’s a fine thing. Don’t you think? Me working all these years to make this place safe and now I have to leave it, still trying to make it even safer, even more powerful, even better.” He stepped up to the man again, tapping one of the curved fangs boring through the fellow’s skull. “And all because of people like you, who hate me, who won’t listen, who won’t do as they’re told, who don’t know what’s good for them.” He gripped the fang and pulled hard at it. The man mewed down his nose with pain.

“Well, not really,” Luseferous said, shrugging, letting go. “It’s debatable whether this will really make us safer or not. I’m going to this… this Ulubis… system or whatever it is because there might be something valuable there, because my advisers advise so and my intelligence people have intelligence to this effect. Of course nobody’s certain, nobody ever is. But they do seem uncommonly excited about this.” The Archimandrite sighed again, more deeply. “And impressionable old me, I’m going to do as they suggest. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” He paused, as though expecting an answer. “Do you? I mean, I realise you might not be entirely honest with me if you did have an opinion, but, all the same… No? You sure?” He traced the line of a scar along the side of the man’s abdomen, wondering idly if it was one of those that his own inquisitors had inflicted. Looked a bit crude and deep to be their work. The failed assassin was breathing quickly and shallowly but giving no sign that he was even listening. Behind his sealed mouth, his jaws seemed to be working.

“You see, for once I’m not absolutely sure myself, and I could use some advice. Might not make us all safer at all, what we’re planning to do. But it has to be done. The way some things just have to. Eh?” He slapped the man’s face, not hard. The man flinched all the same. “Don’t worry, though. You can come too. Big invasion fleet. Plenty of room.” He looked around the chamber. “Anyway, I feel you spend too much time stuck in here; you could do with getting out more.” The Archimandrite Luseferous smiled, though still there was nobody to smile at. “After all this trouble I’d hate to miss watching you die. Yes, you come with me, why don’t you? To Ulubis, to Nasqueron.”

“Eh? Oh, yes.” Uncle Slovius raised a flipper-like hand and waved it vaguely. “Please do.”

“Thank you.”

Fassin Taak hitched up his walking britches, gathered in his wide shirt sleeves and folded himself decorously into a sitting position at the side of the large circular pool of gently steaming and luminously blue liquid that his uncle floated within. Uncle Slovius had some years ago assumed the shape of a walrus. A beige-pink, relatively slim walrus, with tusks barely longer than the middle finger of a man’s hand, but a walrus nevertheless. The hands Uncle Slovius had once possessed were no more — they were flippers now, on the end of two thin, rather odd and ineffectual-looking arms. His fingers were little more than stubs; a scalloped pattern fringing the ends of his flippers. He opened his mouth to speak, but then one of the household servants, a black-uniformed human male, approached him, kneeling at the side of the pool to whisper something into his ear. The servant held his long pigtail out of the water with one many-ringed hand. The dark clothes, long hair and rings all indicated that he was one of the most senior functionaries. Fassin felt he ought to know his name, but couldn’t think of it immediately.

He looked round the room. The chamber of Provisional Forgetting was one of the rarely used parts of the house, only called into action — if you could call it that — on such occasions, when a senior family member was approaching their end. The pool took up most of the floor space of a large roughly hemispherical room whose walls were translucently thin agate inlaid with veins of time-dulled silver. This dome formed part of one bubble-wing of the family’s Autumn House, situated on the continent Twelve on the rocky planet-moon ’glantine, which orbited the gaudy, swirlingly clouded mass of the gas-giant Nasqueron like a pepper grain around a football. A tiny portion of the massive planet’s surface was visible through the transparent centre section of the dome’s roof, directly above Fassin and his uncle.

The part of Nasqueron that Fassin could see was presently in daylight, displaying a chaotic cloudscape coloured crimson, orange and rust-brown, the summed shades producing a deep red light which fell through the violet skies of ’glantine’s thinly breathable atmosphere and the dome’s glazed summit and helped illuminate the chamber and the pool below, where the black-clad servant was supporting Uncle Slovius while he supped on a beaker of what might have been either refreshment or medicine. Some dribbles of the clear liquid escaped Uncle Slovius’s mouth, trickling down his grizzled chin to the folds of his neck and dripping into the blue pool, where tall waves slopped to and fro in the half-standard gravity. Uncle Slovius made quiet grunting noises, his eyes closed.

Fassin looked away. Another servant approached him, offering a tray of drinks and sweetmeats, but he smiled and raised one hand in a gesture of rejection and the servant bowed and retreated. Fassin fixed his gaze politely on the dome’s roof and the view of the gas-giant, while watching from the corner of his eye as the servant attending his uncle dabbed at the old man’s lips with a neatly folded cloth.

Magisterial, oblivious, moving almost imperceptibly with a kind of tumultuous serenity, Nasqueron turned above them like some vast glowing coal hanging in the sky.

The gas-giant was the largest planet in the Ulubis system, which lay within a remote strand of Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs on the galactic outskirts, fifty-five thousand years from the galaxy’s nominal centre and about as remote as it was possible to get while still being part of the great lens.

There were, especially in the current post-War age, different levels of remoteness, and Ulubis system qualified as back-of-beyond in all of them. Being on the outermost reaches of the galaxy — and hanging well underneath the galactic plane, where the last vestiges of stars and gas gave way to the emptiness beyond — did not necessarily mean that a place was inaccessible, providing it was close to an arteria portal.

Arteria — wormholes — and the portals which were their exits and entrances meant everything in the galactic community; they represented the difference between having to crawl everywhere at less than the speed of light and making almost instantaneous transitions from one stellar system to another. The effect they had on a system’s importance, economy and even morale was similarly dramatic and rapid. Without one, it was as though you were still stuck in one small village, one dull and muddy valley, and might be there all your life. Once a wormhole portal was emplaced, it was as though you suddenly became part of a vast and glittering city, full of energy, life and promise.

The only way to get an arteria portal from one place to another was to put it in a spaceship and physically take it, slower than light, from one place to another, leaving the other end — usually — anchored where you’d started out. Which meant that if your wormhole was destroyed — and they could be destroyed, in theory at any point along their length, in practice only at their ends, at their portals — then you were instantly all the way back to square one, stuck in your isolated little village once again.

Ulubis system had first been connected to the rest of the galaxy over three billion years earlier, during what was then known as the New Age. It had been a relatively young, not-long-formed system at the time, just a few billion years old, but was already multiply life-supporting. Its arteria connection had formed part of the Second Complex, the galactic community’s second serious attempt at an integrated network of wormholes. It had lost that connection in the billion-year turmoil of the Long Collapse, the War of Squalls, the Scatter Anarchy and the Informorta breakdown, then — along with most of the rest of the civilised galaxy — slumbered as if comatose under the weight of the Second, or Major, Chaos, a time when only its Dweller population on Nasqueron had survived. The Dwellers, being numbered amongst the species meta-type known as the Slow, worked to a different timescale, and thought nothing of taking a few hundred thousand years to get from point A to point B; a billion years of nothing much happening was, they declared, merely like a long sabbatical to them.

Following the Third Diasporian Age (and much more besides — galactic history wasn’t really simple on any scale) another wormhole brought Ulubis back on-line to become part of the Third Complex. That arteria lasted for seventy million peaceful, productive years, during which several Quick species, none of them native to Ulubis, came and went, leaving only the Dwellers to bear consistent witness to the slow turn of life and events. The Arteria Collapse had plunged Ulubis into solitude once again, along with ninety-five per cent of the connected galaxy. More portals and wormholes disappeared during the War of the New Quick and the Machine War, and only the establishment of the Mercatoria — at least by the estimation of those who controlled it — brought about a lasting peace and the beginning of the Fourth Complex.

Ulubis had been reconnected early on in this slow, still-at-the-early-stages process and for six thousand years that latest arteria had made the system an easily reached part of the gradually recovering galactic community. However, then that worm-hole too had been destroyed, and for over a quarter of a millennium Ulubis’s nearest working access point had been fully two hundred and fourteen years away further down the increasing thickness of the Stream at Zenerre. That would change in about seventeen years or so, when the wormhole end-point currently being transported towards Ulubis system at relativistic speeds aboard the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir arrived and was emplaced, probably where the old portal had been, at one of the Lagrange points near Sepekte, the principal planet of the Ulubis system. For the moment, though, Ulubis, despite its importance as a centre for Dweller Studies, remained remote chronologically as well as physically.

Uncle Slovius waved the servant away with one flipper and drew himself up against the Y-shaped cradle which supported his head and shoulders above the blue glowing surface of the pool. The servant — Fassin recognised him now as Guime, the second-highest-ranking of his uncle’s retainers — turned back and tried to help Slovius in this manoeuvre. However, Slovius made hissing, tutting noises and slapped at the male with one flipper hand. Guime dodged the weak, slow blow easily and stepped back again, bowing. He stood nearby, by the wall. Slovious struggled to lift his upper body any further out of the pool, his tailed torso stirring sluggishly under the luminescent waves.

Fassin started to rise from his cross-legged position. “Uncle, do you want me to—?”

“No!” his uncle shouted in exasperation, still trying ineffectually to push himself further up the cradle. “I would like people to stop fussing, that’s all!” Slovius turned his head round as he said this, trying to look at Guime, but only succeeded in causing himself to slip further back into the liquid, so that he was even more horizontal than he had been before he started. He slapped at the pool surface, splashing. “There! See what you’ve done? Interfering idiot!” He sighed mightily and lay back in the wallowing waves, apparently exhausted, staring straight ahead. “You may adjust me, Guime, as you wish,” he said dully, sounding resigned.

Guime knelt on the tiles behind him, put a hand under each of Slovius’s armpits and hauled his master upwards onto the cradle until his head and shoulders were almost vertical. Slovius settled himself there, then nodded briskly. Guime retreated again to his position by the wall.

“Now then, nephew,” Slovius said, crossing his flipper hands over the pink expanse of his hairless chest. He looked up at the transparent, summit of the dome.

Fassin smiled. “Yes, uncle?”

Slovius seemed to hesitate. He let his gaze fall to his nephew. “Your… your studies, Fassin. How do they progress?”

“They progress satisfactorily, sir. In the matter of the Tranche Xonju it is still, of course, very early.”

“Hmm. Early,” Uncle Slovius said. He looked thoughtful, staring into the distance again. Fassin sighed gently. This was obviously going to take some time.

Fassin Taak was a Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. The Dwellers — Gas-Giant Dwellers, to give them a fuller designation… Neutrally Buoyant First Order Ubiquitous Climax Clade Gas-Giant Dwellers, to grant them a still more painfully precise specification — were large creatures of immense age who lived within the deliriously complex and topologically vast civilisation of great antiquity which was distributed throughout the cloud layers wrapping the enormous gas-giant planet, a habitat that was as stupendous in scale as it was changeable in aerography.

The Dwellers, at least in their mature form, thought slowly. They lived slowly, evolved slowly, travelled slowly and did almost everything they ever did, slowly. They could, it was alleged, fight quite quickly. Though, as far as anybody was able to determine, they had not had to do any fighting for a long time. The implication of this was that they could think quickly when it suited them, but most of the time it did not appear to suit them, and so — it was assumed — they thought slowly. It was unarguable that in their later years — later aeons — they conversed slowly. So slowly that a simple question asked before breakfast might not be answered until after supper. A rate of conversational exchange, it occurred to Fassin, that Uncle Slovius — floating in his now-quite-still pool with a trancelike expression on his tusked, puffy face — seemed determined to emulate.

“The Tranche Xonju, it concerns… ?” Slovius said suddenly. “Clutter poetry, Diasporic myths and various history tangles,”

Fassin answered.

“Histories of which epochs?”

“The majority have still to be dated, uncle. Some may never be, and possibly belong with the myths. The only readily identifiable strands are very recent and appear to relate to mostly local events during the Machine War.”

Uncle Slovius nodded slowly, producing small waves. “The Machine War. That is interesting.”

“I was thinking of attending to those strands first.”

“Yes,” Slovius said. “A good idea.”

“Thank you, uncle.”

Slovius lapsed into silence again. A ground-quake rumbled distantly around them, producing tiny concentric rings in the liquid of Slovius’s pool.

The civilisation which comprised the Dwellers of Nasqueron, with all their attendant fellow flora and fauna, itself formed but one microscopic fragment of the Dweller Diaspora, the galaxy-spanning meta-civilisation (some would say post-civilisation) which, as far as anyone could tell, preceded all other empires, cultures, diasporas, civilisations, federations, consocia, fellowships, unities, leagues, confederacies, affilia and organisations of like or unlike beings in general.

The Dwellers, in other words, had been around for most of the life of the galaxy. This made them at least unusual and possibly unique. It also made them, if they were approached with due deference and care, and treated with respect and patience, a precious resource. Because they had good memories and even better libraries. Or at least they had retentive memories, and very large libraries.

Dweller memories, and libraries, usually proved to be stuffed full of outright nonsense, bizarre myths, incomprehensible images, indecipherable symbols and meaningless equations, plus random assemblages of numbers, letters, pictograms, holophons, sonomemes, chemiglyphs, actinomes and sensata variegata, all of them trawled and thrown together unsorted — or in patterns too abstruse to be untangled — from a jumbled mix of millions upon millions of utterly different and categorically unrelated civilisations, the vast majority of which had long since disappeared and either crumbled into dust or evaporated into radiation.

Nevertheless, in all that flux of chaos, propaganda, distortion, drivel and weirdness, there were nuggets of actuality, seams of facts, frozen rivers of long-forgotten history, whole volumes of exobiography and skeins and tissues of truth. It had been the life-work of people like Chief Seer Slovius, and was the life-work of people like Chief Seer-in-waiting Fassin Taak, to meet with and talk to the Dwellers, to adapt to their language, thoughts and metabolism, to — sometimes virtually, at a remove, sometimes literally — float and fly and dive and soar with them amongst the clouds of Nasqueron, and through their conversations, their studies, their notes and analyses, make what sense they could of what their ancient slow-living hosts told them and allowed them to access, and so enrich and enlighten the greater, quicker meta-civilisation which presently inhabited the galaxy.

“And, ah, Jaal?” Slovius glanced at his nephew, who looked sufficiently surprised for the older male to add, “The, oh, what’s their name… ? Tonderon. Yes. The Tonderon girl. You two are still betrothed, aren’t you?”

Fassin smiled. “We are indeed, uncle,” he said. “She is returning from Pirrintipiti this evening. I’m hoping to meet her at the port.”

“And you are… ?” Slovius gestured with one flipper hand. “Still content?”

“Content, uncle?” Fassin asked.

“You are happy with her? With the prospect of her being your wife?”

“Of course, uncle.”

“And she with you?”

“Well, I hope so, I believe so.”

Slovius looked at his nephew, holding his gaze for a moment. “Mm-hmm. I see. Of course. Well.” Slovius used one of his flipper hands to wave some of the blue glowing liquid over his upper chest, as though he was cold. “You are to be wed when?”

“The date is fixed for Allhallows, Jocund III,” Fassin said. “Somewhat under half a year, body time,” he added helpfully.

“I see,” Slovius said, frowning. He nodded slowly, and the action caused his body to rise and fall slightly in the pool, producing more waves. “Well, it is good to know you might finally be settling down at last.”

Fassin considered himself to be a dedicated, hard-working and productive Seer who spent well above the average amount of time at the sharp end of delving, actually with the Nasqueron Dwellers. However, due to the fact that he liked to complete each interlude of this real, useful life with what he called a ‘proper holiday’, the older generation of Sept Bantrabal, and especially Slovius, seemed to think he was some sort of hopeless wastrel. (Indeed, Uncle Slovius seemed reluctant to accept the term ‘proper holiday’ at all. He preferred to call them “month-long blind-drunk stoned-out benders getting into trouble, fights and illicit orifices in the flesh pots of—” well, wherever; sometimes Pirrintipiti, the capital of ’glantine, sometimes Borquille, capital of Sepekte, or one of Sepekte’s other cities, sometimes one of the many pleasure habitats scattered throughout the system.)

Fassin smiled tolerantly. “Still, I shan’t be hanging up my dancing shoes just yet, uncle.”

“The nature of your studies over your last, say, three or four delves, Fassin. Have they followed what one might term a consistent course?”

“You confuse me, uncle,” Fassin admitted. “Your last three or four delves, have they been in any way linked thematically, or by subject, or through the Dwellers you have conversed with?”

Fassin sat back, surprised. Why ever would old Slovius be interested in this ? “Let me think, sir,” he said. “On this occasion I spoke almost exclusively with Xonju, who provided information seemingly at random and does not fully appear to understand the concept of an answer. Our first meeting and all very preparatory. He may be worth following up, if we can find him again. He may not. It might take all of the months between now and my next delve to work out—”

“So this was a sampling expedition, an introduction?”

“Indeed.”

“Before that?”

“A protracted conference, with Cheuhoras, Saraisme the younger, Akeurle Both-twins, traav Kanchangesja and a couple of minors from the Eglide adolescent pod.”

“Your subjects?”

“Poetry, mostly. Ancient, modern, the use of image in the epic, the ethics of boasting and exaggeration.”

“And the delve before?”

“With Cheuhoras alone; an extended lament for his departed parent, some hunting myths from the local near-past and a lengthy translation and disposition on an epic sequence concerning the adventures of ancient plasmatics voyaging within the hydrogen migration, perhaps a billion or so years ago, during the Second Chaos.”

“Before that?”

Fassin smiled. “My extended one-to-one with Valseir, the delve which included my sojourn with the Raucous Rascals of Tribe Dimajrian.” He imagined he didn’t need to remind his uncle of too many of the details of that particular excursion. This had been the protracted delve which had made his name as a gifted Seer, the six-year journey — by body-time; it had lasted nearly a century by outside reckoning — that had established his reputation both within Sept Bantrabal and the hierarchy of ’glantine Seers beyond. His exploits, and the value of the stories and histories he had returned with, had been largely responsible for his elevation to the post of Chief Seer-in-waiting in his Sept, and for the offer of marriage to the daughter of the Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon, the most senior of the twelve Septs.

“This takes us back how many years, in real?”

Fassin thought. “About three hundred… Two hundred and eighty-seven, if I recall correctly.”

Slovius nodded. “There was much of that delve released during its course?”

“Almost nothing, sir. The Raucous Rascals insisted. They are one of the more… unameliorated adolescent pods. I was allowed to report that I was alive once per year.”

“The delve before that?”

Fassin sighed and tapped the fingers of one hand on the fused glass at the side of the pool. What on old Earth could this be about? And could Slovius not simply look up the Sept records for such information? There was a big cantilevered arm thing stowed against the wall of the pool chamber with a screenpad on the end. Fassin had seen this device lowered into place in front of Slovius for him to peer at and prod the keys with his finger stumps. It was, patently, not a very rapid or efficient method of interrogating the house library, but it would answer all these questions. Or the old fellow could just ask. There were servants for this sort of thing.

Fassin cleared his throat. “Most of that was taken up with instructing Paggs Yurnvic, of Sept Reheo, on his first delve. We paid court to traav Hambrier, in one-to-one time with the Dwellers to allow for Yurnvic’s inexperience. The delve lasted barely three months, body-time. Textbook introductory, sir.”

“You found no time to pursue any studies of your own?”

“Little, sir.”

“But some, yes?”

“I was able to attend part of a symposium on deep poetics, with the university pod Marcal. To detail the other attendees I would have to inquire within the Sept records, sir.”

“What more? Of the symposium, I mean. Its subject?”

“If I recall, a comparison of Dweller hunting techniques with the actions of Machine War Inquisitories.” Fassin stroked his chin. “The examples were Ulubis-system local, some regarding ’glantine.”

Slovius nodded. He glanced at his nephew. “Do you know what an emissarial projection is, Fassin?”

Fassin looked up at the segment of gas-giant visible through the transparent roof panel. The night terminator was just starting to appear to one side, a line of increasing darkness creeping across the distant cloudscape. He looked back down at Slovius. “I may have heard the term, sir. I would not care to offer a definition.”

“It’s when they send a tuned suite of queries and responses to a physically remote location, by light beam. To play the part of an emissary.”

“ ‘They’, sir?”

“Engineers, the Administrata. Perhaps the Omnocracy.” Fassin sat back. “Indeed?”

“Indeed. If we are to believe what we are told, the object they send is something like a library, transmitted by signal laser. Suitably housed and emplaced within enabled equipment of sufficient capacity and complexity, this… entity, though it is simply a many-branched array of statements, questions and answers, with a set of rules governing the order in which they are expressed, is able to carry out what seems very like an intelligent conversation. It is as close as one is allowed to come to an artificial intelligence, post-War.”

“How singular.”

Slovius wobbled in his pool. “They are assuredly surpassing rare,” he agreed. “One is being sent here.”

Fassin blinked a few times. “Sent here?”

“To Sept Bantrabal. To this house. To us.”

“To us.”

“From the Administrata.”

“The Administrata.” Fassin became aware that he was sounding simple-minded.

“Via the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir.”

“My,” Fassin said. “We are… privileged.”

“Not we, Fassin; you. The projection is being sent to talk to you.”

Fassin smiled weakly. “To me? I see. When will—?”

“It is currently being transmitted. It ought to be ready by late evening. You may wish to clear your schedule for this. Did you have much arranged?”

“Ah… a supper with Jaal. I’m sure—”

“I would make it an early supper, and don’t tarry.”

“Well, yes. Of course,” Fassin said. “Do you have any idea, sir, what I might have done to deserve such an honour?”

Slovius was silent for a moment, then said, “None whatsoever.”

Guime replaced an intercom set on its hook and left his place by the agate wall to kneel and whisper to Slovius, who nodded, then looked at Fassin. “Major-Domo Verpych would like to talk to you, nephew.”

“Verpych?” Fassin said, with a gulp. The household’s major-domo, Sept Bantrabal’s most senior servant, was supposed to rest dormant until the whole sept moved to its winter lodgings, over eighty days from now. It was unheard of for him to be roused out of sequence. “I thought he was asleep!”

“Well, he’s been woken up.”

* * *

The ship had been dead for millennia. Nobody seemed to be sure quite how many, though the most plausible estimates put it at about six or seven. It was just one more foundered vessel from one or other of the great fleets which had contended the War of the New Quick (or perhaps the slightly later Machine War, or possibly the subsequent Scatter Wars, or maybe one of the brief, bitter, confused and untidy engagements implicit in the Strew), another forgotten, discarded piece from the great game of galactic power-mongering, civilisational competition, pan-species manoeuvring and general grand-scale meta-politicking.

The hulk had lain undiscovered on the surface of ’glantine for at least a thousand years because although ’glantine was a minor planet by human standards — slightly smaller than Mars — it was by the same measure sparsely populated, with fewer than a billion inhabitants, most of those concentrated in the tropics, and the area where the wreck had fallen — the North Waste Land — was a rarely visited and extensive tract of nothing much. That it had taken a long time for the local surveillance systems to return to anything like the sort of complexity or sophistication they’d exhibited before the commencement of hostilities also helped the ruins avoid detection. Lastly, for all the vessel’s hulking size, some portion of its auto-camouflage systems had survived the craft’s partial destruction, the deaths of all the mortals aboard and its impact on the planet-moon’s surface, and so had kept it disguised for all that time, seemingly just another fold of barren, rocky ejecta from the impact crater left by a smaller but much faster-travelling derelict which had crashed and vaporised in a deep crater ten kilometres away right at the start of the New Quick dispute.

The ship’s ruins had only been discovered because somebody in a flier had crashed, fatally, into one of its great curving ribs (perfectly holo-disguised at the time as sheer and shiningly inviting clear sky). Only then had the wreck been investigated, plundered for what little of its systems still worked (but which were not, under the new regime, proscribed. Which basically did not leave much.) and finally — the lifting of its hull and major substructures being prohibitively expensive to contemplate, its cutting-up and carting away difficult, also not cheap and possibly dangerous, and its complete destruction only possible with the sort of serious gigatonnage weaponry people tended to object strongly to when used in peacetime in the atmospheres of a small planet-moon, even in a wilderness area — it had been cordoned off and a series of airborne loiter-drones posted on indefinite guard above, just in case.

“No, this could be good, this could be positive,” Saluus Kehar told them, and swung the little flier low across the high desert towards the broken lands where the tattered-looking ribs of the great downed ship lay like folded shadow against the slowly darkening purple sky. Beyond the ruins, a vast, shimmering blue-green curtain of light flickered into existence, silently waving and rippling across the sky, then faded away again.

“Yeah, you would fucking say that,” Taince said, fiddling with the controls of the comms unit. Static chopped and surfed from the speakers.

“Should we be this close to the ground?” Ilen asked, forehead against the canopy, looking down. She glanced at the young man sharing the back seat of the little aircraft with her. “Seriously, Fass, should we?”

But Fassin was already saying, “The idea that his relentless positivism could ever produce feelings of negativity in others is a concept Sal’s still struggling with. Sorry, Len. What?”

“I was just saying—”

“Yeah,” Taince muttered, “get that goddam dirt-pinger on.”

“All I mean,” Saluus said, waving one hand around and taking the craft still lower, even closer to the sable blur of ground. Taince made a tutting sound and reached over to tap a screen button; there was a pinging noise and the craft rose a few metres and began tracking the ground more smoothly. Sal glared at her but didn’t turn the ground-avoidance device off as he continued, “Is that we’re still okay, we haven’t been blasted yet, and now we have an opportunity to explore something we wouldn’t be allowed to get anywhere near normally. Right place, right time, perfect opportunity. What’s not to be positive about there?”

“You mean,” Fassin drawled, glancing skyward, “aside from the unfortunate fact that some over-enthusiastic and doubtless deeply misunderstood Beyonders appear to be trying to turn us all into radioactive dust?”

Nobody seemed to be listening. Fassin made a show of stifling a yawn — nobody noticed that, either — and leaned back against the leather seat, stretching his left arm across the top of the couch in the general direction of Ilen Deste (still with her head against the canopy, staring as though hypnotised at the near-featureless sands speeding by beneath). He tried to look at least unconcerned and preferably bored. In fact, of course, he felt completely terrified, and more than a little helpless.

Sal and Taince were the dynamic couple in this group: Saluus the pilot, the dashing, handsome, headstrong but undeniably gifted (and, Fassin thought, just plain lucky) heir to a vast commercial empire, the unabashed son of a fabulously rich, buccaneering father. Greedboy, Fassin had christened Sal in their first year at college, a term that their mutual friends had only used behind the youth’s back until he got wind of it and adopted it enthusiastically as his personally approved tag. And Taince, co-pilot, navigator and comms supremo, as ever the knowing, abrasive commentator of the group (Fassin saw himself as the knowing, sarcastic commentator). Officer-in-Training Taince Yarabokin as she was supposed to be known now. Taince, the Milgirl — another of Fassin’s coinings — had top-percentiled her college classes but had already been halfway to being an officer in the Navarchy Military through Reservist credits gleaned after hours, at weekends and on vacations, even before she’d taken a short degree and gone to Military Academy for her final year; fast-tracked from pre-induction, bumped from years One to Two midway through term and rumoured, even at such an almost unprecedentedly early stage, to be in contention for a chance later to join the Summed Fleet, the directly Culmina-controlled overarching ultra-power of the whole galaxy. In other words as seemingly surely destined for martial eminence as Sal was scheduled for commercial prodigiousness.

They’d both been out-system, too, making the journey to the Ulubis-system portal at Sepekte’s trailing Lagrange point for the transition to Zenerre and the Complex, the network of wormholes threading the galaxy like a throw of dark lace beneath the tiny scattered lights of suns. Saluus’s father had taken him on a Grand Tour on his long vacation last year, girdling the middle galaxy, visiting all the great accessible sites, encountering some of the more outré alien species, bringing back souvenirs. Taince had been to fewer but in some cases further places, courtesy of the Navarchy, its exercises and distributed specialist teaching facilities. They were the only two of their year to have travelled so widely, putting them in a little bubble of exoticism all by themselves.

Fassin had often thought that if his young life was to be tragically cut short before he’d even decided what he wanted to do with it (join the family firm and become a Seer?… Or something else?), it would very likely be because of these two, probably when they were each trying to outdo the other in daring or élan or sheer outrageous showing-off in front of their long-suffering friends. Sometimes he succeeded in persuading himself that he didn’t particularly care if he did die anyway, that he’d already seen enough of life and love and all the crassness and stupidities of people and reality and would almost prefer to die a sudden, young, savagely beautiful death, with his body and mind as yet unspoiled and fresh and everything — as older relations still insisted on telling him — before him.

Though it would be a pity if Ilen — achingly beautiful, wanly pale, shamelessly blonde, effortlessly academically accomplished, bizarrely un-self-assured and insecure Ilen — had to perish in the wreck too, Fassin thought. Especially before they had fulfilled what he kept telling her — and what, frustratingly, he even sincerely believed — was their destiny, and established between the two of them some sort of meaningful but intense physical relationship. At the moment, though — head craned out over the side of the flier, nuzzling the canopy — it looked like the girl was thinking about throwing up.

Fassin looked away and attempted to distract himself from thoughts of imminent death and probably all too non-imminent sex by staring at the starry sweep emerging from the false horizon of Nasqueron’s shadowy, departing bulk and the quickly darkening sky being revealed beyond. Another burst of aurora activity sent shimmering shawls of light across the heavens, briefly fading out the stars.

Ilen was looking in the opposite direction. “What’s that smoke?” she cried, pointing beyond the half-collapsed nose of the fallen ship, where a tall, ragged strand of dark grey smoke leaned away from the breeze.

Taince glanced up and muttered something, then busied herself with the comms unit controls. The rest looked. Sal nodded. “Probably the guard drone that got zapped earlier,” he said, though sounding uncertain.

The speakers crackled and a calm female voice said, “—lier two-two-niner… —sition? —ave you… —seven-five-three… —outh of Prohibited Area Ei— … —peat you are now or wi— … —ortly be off-grid… —firm your…”

Taince Yarabokin leaned closer to the comms unit. “This is flier two-two-nine, we have no place safe to put down under cover as advised so we are making maximum speed at minimum altitude towards—”

Saluus Kehar reached over with one coppery-gold hand and clicked the comms unit off.

“Fuck you!” Taince said, slapping his hand away even as it went back to the flier’s control yoke.

“Taince, really,” Sal said, shaking his head but keeping his gaze on the rapidly approaching ship ruins, “you don’t have to tell them.”

“Cretin,” Taince breathed. She switched the comms back on. “Yes, see previous comment,” Fassin said, shaking his head. “Will you leave that alone?” Sal said, trying and failing to turn the comms unit off again as Taince searched for a working channel and kept slapping his hand away. (Fassin was about to say something to the effect that she was better practised at this form of behaviour than he’d ever have assumed. Then thought the better of it.) “Look,” Sal said, “I’m ordering you, Taince; leave the damn thing off. Who does this flier belong to, anyway?”

“Your dad?” Fassin suggested. Sal glanced back at him, reproachful. Fassin nodded forwards at the swiftly enlarging wreck of the ship. “Eyes ahead.”

Sal turned back. I’m ordering you, thought Fassin, with a sneer. Saluus, really. Had he used that form of words because Taince was in the military and he thought she’d just obey anything anybody called an order, even if it came from a civilian, or because he thought he could start throwing his dynastic weight around already? He was surprised that Taince hadn’t laughed in Sal’s face.

Oh well, they weren’t innocents any more, Fassin reminded himself, and the more you learned about the world, the galaxy and the Age they were growing up within, the more you realised it was all about hierarchy, about ranking and seniority and pecking order, from well, well below where they were all the way up to gloriously unseeable alien heights. Really they were like lab mice growing up together, rough-and-tumbling in the cage, learning their position in the litter, testing their own and the others’ abilities and weaknesses, working on their moves and strategies for later life, discovering how much leeway they might have or be granted as adults, mapping out the space for their dreams.

Taince snorted. “Probably not even daddy’s car, probably not even a company flier, more likely some complicated sale-and-leaseback deal and it’s owned by an off-planet, tax-opaque semiautomatic front company.” She growled and slapped the unresponding comms unit.

Sal shook his head. “Such cynicism in the young,” he said, then looked down at the butterfly shape of the control yoke. “Hey, this is vibrating! What—?”

Taince nodded at the ship ruins, now towering over them. “Proximity warning, ace. You might want to slow down, or peel and scrub.”

“How can you talk about exfoliating at a time like this?” Sal said, grinning. Taince punched his thigh. “Ow! That’s assault,” he said, pretending outrage. “I may sue.” She punched him again. He laughed, throttled back and air-braked, pushing them all forward against their restraints, until the little flier was down to about ten metres per second.

They passed into the shadow of the giant ship.

* * *

“Fassin Taak,” Major-Domo Verpych said, “what trouble have you landed us in now?” They were hurrying down a wide, windowless passageway under the centre of the house. Before Fassin could reply, Verpych nodded at a side corridor and strode towards it. “This way.”

Fassin lengthened his stride to keep up. “I am as ignorant as you are, major-domo.”

“Clearly your gift for understatement has not deserted you.”

Fassin absorbed this and thought the better of replying. He assumed what he hoped looked like a tolerant smile, though when he glanced at Verpych the major-domo wasn’t looking. Verpych was a small, thin but powerful-looking man with pale creamy skin, ubiquitously stubbled, giving his head the look of having been chiselled out of sandstone. He had a square, ever-clenched jaw and a perpetual frown. His head was shaved save for a single long ponytail that extended to his waist. He gripped the long obsidian staff which was his principal badge of office as though it was a dark snake he was trying to throttle one-handed. His uniform was the black of soot, like folded night.

As Chief Seer-in-waiting Fassin was, supposedly, in a position of complete authority over Verpych. However, somehow the Sept’s most senior servant still managed to make him feel like a child who’d only just escaped being discovered doing something extremely improper. Fassin could envisage the changeover when he finally assumed the post of Chief Seer being awkward for both of them.

Verpych turned on his heel and walked straight at a large abstract mural hanging on one wall. He waved his staff at the painting as though pointing out some detail of the brushwork, and the whole painting disappeared into a slot in the floor. Verpych stepped up into a dimly lit corridor beyond. He didn’t bother to look back as Fassin followed him, just said, “Short cut.”

Fassin glanced back as the painting rose out of the slot in the floor, cutting off most of the light in the corridor, which looked bare and unfinished after the passageway that they’d just left. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a utility corridor; probably when he’d been a child, exploring with his friends.

They stopped at a lift, its door open, a chime sounding. A boy servant stood in the elevator car, holding a tray full of dirty glasses with one hand and using the other to jab at the car controls, a puzzled, frustrated expression on his face.

“Get out, you idiot,” Verpych told the boy as he strode to the lift. “It’s being held for me.”

The servant’s eyes widened. He made spluttering noises and almost dropped the tray, hurrying to quit the elevator. Verpych tapped a button on the lift controls with the end of the staff, the doors closed and the lift — a plain metal box with a scuffed floor — descended.

“Have you recovered from your unscheduled awakening, major-domo?” Fassin asked.

“Entirely,” Verpych said crisply. “Now then, Seer Taak. Assuming my comedy troupe of technicians haven’t electrocuted themselves or stared into any light cables to check that they’re working and blinded themselves, we should be ready for you to hold your conversation with whatever it is they are beaming towards us about an hour before midnight. Is nineteen o’clock convenient for you?”

Fassin thought. “Actually, the lady Jaal Tonderon and I might—”

“The answer you are searching for is ‘Yes,’ Seer Taak,” Verpych said.

Fassin frowned down at the older man. “Then in that case why did you—?”

“I was being polite.”

“Ah. Of course. That cannot come easily.”

“Quite the contrary. It is deference that one sometimes struggles with.”

“Your efforts are appreciated, I’m sure.”

“Why, I live for nothing else, young master.” Verpych smiled thinly.

Fassin held the major-domo’s gaze. “Verpych, could I be in some sort of trouble?”

The servant looked away. “I have no idea, sir.” The lift began to slow. “This emissarial projection is unprecedented in the history of Sept Bantrabal. I have talked to some other major-domos and nobody can recall such a thing. We had all thought such phenomena restricted to the Hierchon and his chums in the sys-cap. I’ve sent a message to a contact I have in the palace asking for any guidance or tips they might have. There has been no reply so far.”

The lift doors opened and they stepped out; another corridor, quite warm, cut from naked rock, curving. The major-domo looked at Fassin with what might have been concern, even sympathy. “An unprecedented event might be of a benign nature, Seer Taak.”

Fassin hoped that he looked as sceptical as he felt. “So what do I have to do?”

“Present yourself to the Audience Chamber, top floor, at nineteen. Preferably a little before.” They came to a Y-junction and a wider corridor, where red-uniformed technicians were trundling a pallet loaded with complicated-looking equipment towards a set of open double doors ahead.

“I’d like Olmey to be there,” Fassin said. Tchayan Olmey had been Fassin’s mentor and tutor in his youth, and — had she not become a pure academic in the household library, researching and teaching to the exclusion of undertaking any delves of her own — might have been the next familias and Chief Seer.

“That will not be possible,” Verpych said, ushering Fassin through the double doors into the room beyond, which was hot, crowded with more red-uniformed technicians and dished, like a small theatre. Dozens of opened cabinets displayed intricate machinery, cables hung from the tall ceiling, snaked across the floor and disappeared into ducts in the walls. The place smelled of oil, singed plastic and sweat. Verpych stood at the top and rear of the room, watching the activity, shaking his head as two techs collided, spilling cable.

“Why not?” Fassin asked. “Olmey’s here. And I rather wanted Uncle Slovius to be able to look in as well.”

“That won’t be possible either,” Verpych told Fassin. “You and you alone have to talk to this thing.”

“I have no choice in this?” Fassin asked. “Correct,” the major-domo said. “None.” He returned his attention to the milling techs. One of the senior ones had approached to within a couple of metres, waiting for an opportunity to speak.

“But why not?” Fassin repeated, aware as soon as he said it that he was sounding like a small child.

Verpych shook his head. “I don’t know. To the best of my knowledge there is no technical reason. Perhaps whatever is to be discussed is too sensitive for other ears.” He looked at the red-uniformed man waiting nearby. “Master Technician Imming,” he said brightly. “Working on the principle that whatever can go wrong will, I have been weighing up the possibilities that our house automatics have rusted into a single unusable mass, crumbled to a fine powder or unexpectedly declared themselves sentient, necessitating the destruction by fusion warheads of our entire house, Sept and possibly planet. Which is it to be?”

“Sir, we have encountered several problems,” the technician said slowly, his gaze flicking from Fassin to Verpych.

“I do so hope the next word is ‘But’ or ‘However’,” Verpych said. He glanced at Fassin. “A ‘Happily’ would be too much to ask for, of course.”

The technician continued. “Thanks to our considerable efforts, sir, we believe we have the situation in hand. I would hope that we ought to be ready by the appointed hour.”

“We have the capacity to absorb all that is being transmitted?”

“Just, sir.” Master Technician Imming gestured to the equipment on the pallet being manoeuvred through the double doors. “We are using some spare capacity from the utility systems.”

“Is there any indication of the nature of the subject contained within the signal?”

“No, sir. It will remain in code until activated.”

“Could we find out?”

Imming looked pained. “Not really, sir.”

“Could we not try?”

“That would be nearly impossible, in the time frame, major-domo. And illegal. Possibly dangerous.”

“Seer Taak here is wondering what he is to be faced with. You can give him no clues?”

Master Technician Imming made a small bow to Fassin. “I’m afraid not, sir. Wish it were otherwise.”

Verpych turned to Fassin. “We seem unable to help you, Seer Taak. I am so sorry.”

* * *

“Whose was this, anyway?” Ilen asked, keeping her voice down. She looked up into the shadows high above. “Who did it belong to?”

They had swung in through the single great jagged fissure in the ship’s left flank, flying up between two massively curved rib-struts, the sky above framed by the twisted, buckled ribs, the sections of the hull they had supported turned to dissociated molecules and atoms seven millennia earlier. Sal had let the flier slip four hundred metres or so into the shadows under the intact forward portion of the hull — climbing gently all the time, following the mangled, buckled floors and collapsed bulkheads forming the terrain beneath them — until they could see only the slimmest sliver of violet, star-spattered sky outside and felt they ought to be safe from whatever spaceborne craft — presumably a Beyonder — had been attacking anything that moved or had recently been moving on the surface.

Sal had set the little craft down. The flier came to rest in a slight hollow on a relatively level patch of blackened, minutely rippled material, behind what might have been the remains of a crumpled bulkhead. The way ahead into the rest of the ship’s forward section was blocked fifty metres further in by the hanging, frozen-looking tatters of some twisted, iridescent material. Saluus had thought aloud about trying to nudge the flier through this suspended debris, but had been dissuaded.

The flier’s comms reception — even the distorted, jammed signal that they’d experienced outside — had just faded away almost as soon as they’d entered the wreck. For something supposed to pull in a signal through tens of klicks of solid rock, this was remarkable. The air inside the vast cave of the ruined craft felt cold and smelled of nothing. Knowing they were inside, the fact that their voices did not echo in the huge space was oddly disturbing, giving the sound a strange, hollow quality. The interior and running lights of the flier put them in a tiny pool of luminescence, emphasising their insignificance within the ancient fallen ship.

“Some dispute about exactly whose it might be,” Saluus said, also quietly, and also gazing upwards at the smoothly ribbed ceiling of the vessel, arching a third of a kilometre above them and still just visible in the gloaming. “Marked down as a Sceuri wreck — they sent their War Graves people to clean it out — but if it was then it must have been requisitioned or captured. And they reckon it had a highly mixed crew, though mostly swimmers: waterworlders. Could be Oerileithe originally, oddly enough. Has the design of a dweller-with-a-small-d ship. But some sort of war craft, certainly.”

Taince snorted. Sal looked at her. “Yes?”

“What it isn’t,” she said, “is a needle ship.”

“Did I say it was?” Sal asked.

“Rather a fat needle, if it was,” Fassin said, swivelling on his heel to follow the downward curve of the wrecked ship’s interior towards its crumpled, partially buried nose, over a kilometre away in the darkness.

“It’s not a needle ship,” Sal protested. “I didn’t call it a needle ship.”

“See?” Taince said. “Now you’ve confused people.”

“Anyway,” Sal said, ignoring this, “there’s a rumour they pulled a couple of Voehn bodies out of here, and that really does make it more interesting.”

“Voehn?” Taince burst out laughing. “Spiner stiffs?” Her voice dripped scorn. She was even smiling, which Fassin knew wasn’t something you saw every day. Pity, because her smooth, slightly square face — under a regulation military bald — looked kind of impishly attractive when she smiled. Come to think of it, that was probably why she didn’t do it often. Actually Fassin thought Taince looked pretty good anyway, in her off-duty fatigues. (The rest of them just wore standard hiking\outdoorsy gear, though naturally Sal’s was subtly but noticeably superior and doubtless wildly more expensive.) Tain’s fatigues kind of bagged out in odd locations but came back in at the right places to leave no doubt that she was definitely a milgirl, not a milboy.

They’d turned shadow-matt and dark in the surrounding gloom, too. Apparently even the NavMil’s off-duty fatigues for trainees came with active camo.

She was shaking her head, as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even Fassin, who’d pretty much shucked off the whole boy thing of obsessive interest in all things military and alien not long after the onset of puberty, knew about the Voehn. They were usually described in the media as living legends or near-mythical warriors, which kind of blanded what they really were; the crack troops and personal guards of the new galactic masters.

The Voehn were the calmly relentless, highly intelligent, omni-competent, near-indestructible, all-environments-capable, undefeated uber-soldiers of the last nine or so millennia. They were the martial pin-ups of the age, the speckless species peak of military perfection, but they were rare, few and far between. Where the new masters, the Culmina, were, the Voehn were too, but not in all that many other places, and — as far as anybody knew, Fassin had been given to understand — in all those millennia not one had even entered the Ulubis system to visit Sepekte, the principal planet, let alone come near Nasqueron, or deigned to have anything to do with its little planet-moon ’glantine, even in death.

There was, of course, a further resonance for humans in the Voehn name and reputation, whether one was aHuman or rHuman. It had been the actions of a single Voehn ship nearly eight thousand years earlier which had made the distinction and the two prefixes necessary in the first place.

“Voehn,” Sal said defiantly to Taince. “Voehn remains. That’s the rumour.”

Taince narrowed her eyes and drew herself up in her NavMil-issue fatigues. “Not one I’ve heard.”

“Yes,” Sal said, “well, my contacts are a few levels above the boot locker.”

Fassin gulped. “I thought they all got smeared in this thing, anyway,” he said quickly, before Taince could reply. “Just paste, gas and stuff.”

“They were,” Taince said through her teeth, looking at Sal, not him.

“Indeed they were,” Sal agreed. “But Voehn are real toughies, aren’t they, Tain?”

“Shit, yeah,” Taince said quietly, levelly. “Real fucking toughies.”

“Takes a lot to kill one, takes even more to paste it,” Sal said, seemingly oblivious to Taince’s signals.

“Notoriously resistant to fate and the enemy’s various unpleasantnesses,” Taince said coldly. Fassin had the feeling she was quoting. The gossip was that she and Sal were some sort of couple, or at least fucked now and again. But Fassin thought that, given the look in her eyes right now, that particular side of their relationship, if it had ever existed, might be in some danger of being pasted itself. He looked for Ilen, to catch her expression.

She wasn’t where she’d been, on the far side of the flier. He looked around some more. She wasn’t anywhere he could see. “Ilen?” he said. He glanced at the other two. “Where’s Ilen?” Sal tapped his ear stud. “Ilen?” he said. “Hey, Len?” Fassin peered into the shadows. He had night vision as good as most people, but with barely any starlight and only the soft conserve-level lights of the flier resting in its declivity, there wasn’t much to work with. Infrared showed next to nothing too, not even fading footstep-traces on whatever this strange material was.

“Ilen?” Sal said again. He looked at Taince, who was also scanning the area. “I can’t see shit and my phone’s out,” he told her. “You able to see any better than us?”

Taince shook her head. “Get those eyes in fourth year.” Shit, thought Fassin. He wondered if anybody had a torch. Probably not. Few people did these days. He checked his own earphone, but it was dead too; not even local reception. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. When did the archetype of this storyline date from? Four kids getting the use of dad’s chariot and losing a wheel just before nightfall near the old deserted Neanderthal cave? Something like that. Just wander off into the dark and get killed horribly, one by one.

“I’ll turn up the flier lights,” Sal said, reaching for the interior. “If ness, we can lift off and—”

“ILEN!” Taince shouted at the top of her lungs. Fassin jumped. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.

“…Over here.” lien’s voice came, very distantly, from further inside the wreck.

“Wandering off!” Sal shouted in the general direction Ilen’s voice had come from. “Not good idea! In fact, very bad idea! Suggest return immediately!”

“Peeing in front of peers problem,” the reply drifted back. “Bashful bladder syndrome. Relieved, returning. Speak normal now, or Len get Tain poke Sal eye out.”

Taince grinned. Fassin had to turn away. Sometimes, through all the almost wilfully unjustified reticence and uncertainty, and often at moments like this when you might least expect it, Ilen surprised him by doing or saying something like this. She made his insides hurt. Oh, don’t let me start to fall in love with her, he thought. That would just be too much to bear.

Sal laughed. A vaguely Hen-shaped blob appeared in IR sense fifty metres away, head first over a fold in the rippled floor like a shallow hill. “There. She’s fine,” Sal announced, as though he’d rescued her personally.

Ilen rejoined them, smiling and blinking in the soft lights of the flier, her white-gold hair shining. She nodded. “Evening,” she said, and grinned at them.

“Welcome back,” Sal told her, and hauled a pack out of one of the flier’s storage lockers. He swung the bag onto his back.

Taince glared at the pack, then at Sal’s face. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Sal looked innocent. “Going to take a look round. You can join me if—”

“Like fuck you are.”

“Tain, child,” he laughed. “I don’t need your permission.”

“I’m not a fucking child and yes, you fucking do.”

“And will you please stop swearing quite so much? There’s really no need to flaunt your newly acquired gruff military manner quite so conspicuously.”

“We stay here,” she told him, using the cold voice again. “Close to the flier. We don’t go wandering off into a prohibited alien shipwreck in the middle of the night with an enemy craft cruising overhead.”

“Why not?” Sal protested. “For one thing it’s probably on the other side of the planet by now or maybe even destroyed. And anyway, if this Beyonder ship, or battlesat, or drone, or whatever it is can see inside here, which I seriously doubt, it’s going to target the flier, not a few human warm-bods, so we’re safer away from the thing.”

“You stay with the craft, always,” Taince said, her jaw set.

“For how long?” Sal asked. “How long do these nuisance raids, these attacklets, usually last?” Taince just glared at him. “Half a day, average,” Sal told her. “Overnight, probably, in this case. Meantime we’re somewhere it’s not normally possible to be, through no fault of our own, with time to kill… why the hell not take a look round?”

“Because it’s Prohibited,” Taince said. “That’s why.” Fassin and Ilen exchanged looks, concerned but still amused. “Taince!” Sal said, waving his arms. “Life is risk. That’s business. Come on!”

“You stay with the craft,” Taince repeated grimly. “Will you step out of your programming just for a second?” Sal asked her, sounding genuinely annoyed and looking at the other two for support. “Can any of us think of one good reason why this place is prohibited, apart from standard authoritarian, bureaucratic, overreacting, territory-marking militaristic bullshit?”

“Maybe they know stuff we don’t,” Taince said.

“Oh, come on!’ Sal protested. “They always claim that!”

“Listen,” Taince said levelly. “Your point is taken regarding the likelihood of the flier’s systems being targeted by hostiles, and therefore I volunteer to walk out, every hour on the hour, to near the gap in the hull where a phone might work once the jamming sub-sats have been neutralised, to check for the all-clear.”

“Fine,” Sal said, digging into another of the flier’s lockers. “You do that. I’m seizing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a look round an intrinsically fascinating alien artefact. If you hear me screaming horribly it’ll just be me falling into the claws, suckers or… beaks of some unspeakable space-alien monster every single wreck-clearing team missed and which has chosen just this evening out of the last seven millennia to wake up and feel hungry.”

Taince took a deep breath, stepped back from the flier and said, “Okay, seems this must qualify as an emergency.” She dug into her black fatigues and when her hand reappeared it held a small dark grey device.

Sal stared at her, incredulous. “What the hell is that? A gun? You’re not planning to shoot me, are you, Taince?”

She shook her head and thumbed something on the side of the device. There was a pause, then Taince frowned and looked closely at the thing in her hand. “Actually,” she said, “at the moment I’m not even threatening to report you to the local Guard, not in real-time, anyway.” Sal relaxed a little, but didn’t pull whatever it was he’d been looking for out of the locker. Taince shook her head and looked up into the black spaces of the cavernous craft around them. She held the little grey device up to show the others. “This baby,” she said, “should be able to punch me through to a kid’s disposable on the far side of the planet, but it’s still searching for cosmic background.” She sounded more puzzled than embarrassed or angry, Fassin thought. (In similar circumstances, he’d have been mortified, and it would have shown.) Taince nodded, still staring upwards. “Impressive.” She put the hand-held away again.

Sal cleared his throat. “Taince, do you have a gun? It’s just that I’m about to pull one out of this locker and you looked kind of scary and trigger-happy just there.”

“Yes, I do have a gun,” she told him. “Promise I won’t shoot you.” She gave a smile that wasn’t really. “And if you are intent on traipsing into the bowels of this thing, I’m not going to try and stop you. You’re a big boy now. Your responsibility.”

“Finally,” Sal said with satisfaction, pulling a plain but businesslike-looking CR pistol out of the locker and attaching it to his belt. “There’s food and water and bedrolls and extra clothes and stuff in the rear lockers,” he told them, slapping a couple of low-light illuminator patches onto his jacket shoulders. “I’ll be back about dawn.” He multiple-tapped his ear stud, then smiled. “Yep, internal clock still working.” He glanced at each of them in turn. “Hey, there’s probably nothing to see; I could be back in an hour for all I know.” They all just looked at him. “Nobody else coming along, huh?” he asked. Ilen and Fassin glanced at each other. Taince was watching Sal, who said, “Well, don’t wait up,” and turned to go.

“You’re very well prepared for this,” Taince said quietly.

Sal hesitated, then turned towards her, open-mouthed. He looked at Fassin and Ilen, then stared with wide eyes at Taince. He gestured towards the distant hull gap, upwards as though to space, then shook his head. “Taince, Taince,” he breathed. He pushed one hand through his thick black hair. “Just how paranoid and suspicious do they insist you be in the military?”

“Your father’s company makes our battlecraft, Saluus,” she told him. “Wariness is a survival strategy.”

“Oh, cheap shot, Taince.” Sal looked mildly insulted. “But I mean, really. Seriously. Come on.” He slapped his backpack, exasperated. “Hell’s teeth, woman, if I hadn’t made sure the flier was equipped with emergency gear you’d have chewed my ear for making a deep-desert flight without the necessary supplies!” Taince stood looking at him, near-expressionless, for a few moments longer. “Mind how you go, Sal.”

He nodded, relaxing. “You too,” he said. “See you all soon.” He looked round them all one more time, grinning. “Nothing I wouldn’t do, and all that.” He waved his hand and tramped off.

“Hold on,” Ilen said. Sal turned back. Ilen pulled her little day-pack out of the flier. “I’ll come with you, Sal.”

Fassin stared, horrified. “What?” he said, in a small, shocked, little boy’s voice. Nobody seemed to hear. For once he was glad. Taince said nothing.

Sal smiled. “You sure?” he asked the girl. “If you don’t mind,” Ilen said. “Fine by me,” Sal said quietly. “Sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

“Well, you’re not supposed to go off exploring in dubious situations individually, are you?” Ilen said. “Isn’t that right?” She looked at Taince, who nodded. “You take care.” Ilen kissed Fassin’s cheek, winked at Taince and strode up the shallow slope to Sal. They waved and walked off. Fassin watched their footstep-traces in IR, each faint patch of brightness on the ground behind them fading after less than a second.

“Never understand that girl,” Taince said, sounding unconcerned. She and Fassin looked at each other. “Suggest you take a snooze now,” Taince told him, nodding at the flier. She picked her nose and inspected her finger. “I’ll wake you before I head out to the hull gap to check for signal.”

* * *

A fragrance bud popped somewhere in the darkened room, and — after a few moments — he smelled Orchidia Noctisia, a Madebloom scent he would always associate with the Autumn House. There was little air movement in the quiet chamber so the bud must have been floating nearby. He lifted his head gently and saw a tiny shape like a slim, translucent flower falling chiffon-soft through the air between the bed and the trolley which had brought their supper. He lowered his head to Jaal’s shoulder again.

“Mmm?” she said drowsily.

“Meet any friends in town?” Fassin asked, winding a long golden coil of Jaal Tonderon’s hair around one finger, then bringing his nose forward to nuzzle the nape of her brown-red neck, breathing in the smell of her. She shifted against him, moving her hips in a sort of stirring motion. He had slipped out of her some time ago, but it was still a good feeling.

“Ree and Grey and Sa,” she said, her voice starting out a little sleepy. “Shopping was accomplished. Then we met up with Djen and Sohn. And Dayd, Dayd Eslaus. Oh, and Yoaz. You remember Yoaz Irmin, don’t you?”

He nipped her neck and was rewarded with a flinch and a yelp. “That was a long time ago,” he told her.

She reached one hand behind her and stroked his exposed flank, then patted his behind. “I’m sure the memory is still vivid for her, dear.”

“Ha!” he said. “So am I.” This drew a slap. Then they settled in against each other once more; she did that thing with her hips again and he wondered if there would be time for more sex before he had to go.

She turned to face him. Jaal Tonderon’s face was round and wide and only just very beautiful. For two thousand years or so, rHuman faces had looked pretty much how the owners wanted them to look, displaying either satisfaction with or indifference to whatever womb-grown comeliness they had been born with, or the particular, amended look their owners had subsequently specified. The only ugly people were those making a statement.

In an age when everyone could be beautiful, and\or look like famous historical figures (there were now laws about looking too much like famous contemporary figures), the truly interesting faces and bodies were those which sailed as close to the wind of being plain or even unattractive as possible, and yet just got away with it. People talked about faces that looked good in the flesh but not in images, or good in lifelike paintings but not on a screen, or faces that looked unattractive in repose but quite stunning when animated, or merely plain until the person smiled.

Jaal had been born with a face that looked — she said herself — committee design: unharmonious, stuck together, nothing quite matching. Yet to almost everybody who had ever met her, she seemed outrageously attractive, thanks to some alchemy of physiognomy, personality and expression. Fassin’s private estimation was that Jaal’s was a face still waiting to be grown into, and that she would be more beautiful when she was middle-aged than she was now. It was one reason he had asked her to marry him.

They could look forward, Fassin had every reason to believe, to a long life together, and just as it had been sensible to marry within his profession — and to make a match that would meet with the enthusiastic approval of their respective Septs, strengthening the bonds between two of the most important Seer houses — so it had been only prudent to take that likely longevity into account.

Of course, as Slow Seers Fassin and Jaal’s shared future would be absolutely if not relatively longer than that of most of their contemporaries, and radically different; in the slow-time of a long delve, Seers aged very slowly indeed, and Uncle Slovius’s fourteen centuries, while short of the record and not yet (thankfully, naturally) his limit, should not be difficult to surpass. Seer spouses and loved ones had to schedule their slow-time and normal life carefully so as not to get too out of synch with each other, lest the protagonists lose touch emotionally. The life of Tchayan Olmey, Fassin’s old mentor and tutor, had hinged on just such an unforeseen discontinuity, leaving her stranded from an old love. “Anything wrong?” Jaal asked him.

“Just this, ah, interview thing.” He glanced at the antique clock across the room. “Who’s it with?”

“Can’t say,” he told her. He’d mentioned having an appointment for an interview later when he’d first met Jaal off her suborb shuttle at the house port in the valley below, but she’d been too busy telling him about the latest gossip from the capital and the scandal regarding her Aunt Feem and the Sept Khustrial boy to question him any further on the matter. Her shower, their supper and then more urgent matters had taken precedence thereafter.

“You can’t say?” she said, frowning, turning further round towards him, lifting and repositioning one dark breast on his light brown chest as she did so. There was something, he thought, not for the first time, about an aureola more pale than its surroundings… “Oh, Fass,” Jaal said, sounding annoyed, “it’s not a girl, is it? Not a servant girl? Fucking forfend, not before we’re married, surely?”

She was smiling. He grinned back. “Nuisance, but has to be done. Sorry.”

“You really can’t say?” She shifted her head, and blonde hair spilled over his shoulder. It felt even better than it looked.

“Really,” he said.

Jaal was staring intently at his mouth. “Really?” she asked.

“Well.” He licked his teeth. “I can say it’s not a girl.” She was still staring intently at his mouth. “Look, Jaal, have I got some sort of foreign matter lodged in there?”

She pushed her mouth slowly up towards his. “Not,” she said, “yet.”

“You are Fassin Taak, of the Seer Sept Bantrabal, ’glantine moon, Nasqueron gas-giant planet, Ulubis star and system?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You are physically present here and not any sort of projection or other kind of representation?”

“Correct.”

“You are still an active Slow Seer, domiciled in the seasonal houses of Sept Bantrabal and working from the satellite-moon Third Fury?”

“Yes, yes and yes.”

“Good. Fassin Taak, everything that will pass between you and this construct is in strictest confidence. You will respect that confidence and communicate to others no more of what we shall talk about than is absolutely necessary to facilitate such conduct as will be required of you in furtherance of whatever actions you will be asked to perform and whatever goals you will be asked to pursue. Do you do understand that and agree?”

Fassin thought about this. Just for an instant as the projection had started talking it had suddenly occurred to him that the glowing orb looked a lot like a Plasmatic being (not that he’d ever met one, but he’d seen images), and that moment of distraction had been sufficient for him to miss the full meaning of what had been said. “Actually, no. Sorry, I’m not trying to be—”

“To repeat…”

Fassin was in the main audience chamber at the top of the Autumn House, a large circular space with views in every horizontal direction and a dramatic transparent roof, all blanked out. For now its contents consisted of a single seat for him and a stubby, metallic-looking cylinder supporting a globe of glowing gas hovering above its centre. A fat cable ran from the squat cylinder to a floor flap in the middle of the chamber.

The gas sphere repeated what it had just said. It spoke more slowly this time, though happily with no trace of irritation or condescension. Its voice was flat, unaccented, and yet still seemed to contain the hint of a personality, as though the voice of a particular individual had been sampled and used as a template, from which most but not all expression had been removed.

Fassin heard it out, then said, “Okay, yes, I understand and agree.”

“Good. This construct is an emissarial projection of the Mercatorial Administrata, sub-Ministerial level, with superior-rank authority courtesy of the Ascendancy, Engineer division, Senior Engineer level, Eship Est-taun Zhiffir, portal-carrying. It is qualified to appear sentient while not in fact being so. Do you understand this?”

Fassin thought about this too and decided that he did, just. “Yep,” he said, then wondered if the projection would understand colloquial affirmatives. Apparently it did.

“Good. Seer Fassin Taak, you are hereby seconded to the Shrievalty Ocula. You will have the honorary rank—”

“Hold on!” Fassin nearly jumped out of his seat. “The what?”

“The honorary rank of—”

“No, I mean I’m seconded to the what?”

“The Shrievalty Ocula. You will have the honorary—”

“The Shrievalty?” Fassin said, trying to control his voice. “The Ocula?”

“Correct.”

The baroque, intentionally labyrinthine power structures of the latest, Culmina-inspired Age, incorporating the aspirations of and enforced limitations on at least eight major subject species and whole vast subcategories of additional Faring races as well as (by its own claim) “contextualising’ various lesser civilisations of widely varying scope and ambitions and, peripherally at least, influencing entire alien spectra of Others, held many organisations and institutions whose names the utterance of which people — or at least people who knew of such things — tended to greet with a degree of respect shading into fear.

The Shrievalty was probably the least extreme example; people might respect it — many would even find its purpose rather boring — but few would fear it. It was the paramilitary Order\discipline\faculty of technicians and theorists in charge of what had once been called Information Technology, and so it was also, though less exclusively, concerned with the acceptably restricted remnants of Artificial Intelligence technologies still extant in the post-War epoch.

The Machine War had wiped the vast majority of AIs out of existence throughout the galaxy over seven thousand years ago, and the Culmina-inspired — and enforced — peace which followed had stabilised around a regime which both forbade research into AI tech and demanded the active help of all citizens in hunting down and destroying what few scattered vestiges of AI might still exist. Organised on military lines with a bracing infrastructure of religious dogma, the Shrievalty was charged with the running, administration and maintenance of those IT systems which were anywhere near being sufficiently complex to be in danger of becoming sentient, either through accident or design, but which were considered too vital to the running of their various dependent societies to be shut down and dismantled.

Another Order, a rather more fear-inspiring one, the Lustrals of the Cessoria, had been formed to hunt down and destroy both AIs themselves and anybody who attempted to create new ones or protect, shelter or otherwise aid existing examples. But that had not prevented the formation within the Shrievalty of an Intelligence section — the Shrievalty Ocula — whose duties, methods and even philosophy significantly overlapped with those of the Lustrals. It was the Ocula, this somewhat shadowy, slightly grim-sounding unit which Fassin was being ordered to become part of, for no reason that he could immediately fathom.

“The Ocula?” Fassin said. “Me? Are you absolutely sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Technically, he had no choice. To be allowed to do what they did, the Seers had to be an officially recognised profession within the Miscellariat, the catch-all term for those useful to the Mercatoria who did not fit inside the more standard subdivi-sional categories, and as such all Seers were subject to full Mercatorial discipline and control, committed to obeying any order issued by anybody properly authorised and of a sufficiently superior rank.

Yet this virtually never happened. Fassin couldn’t remember anyone from Sept Bantrabal ever being seconded by order in peacetime, not in nearly two thousand years of Sept history. Why now? Why him?

“May this briefing continue?” the glowing orb asked. “It is important.”

“Well, yes, all right, but I do have questions.”

“All relevant questions will be answered where possible and prudent,” the orb told him.

Fassin was thinking, wondering. Did he really have to accept this? What were the punishments for disobeying? Demotion? Forced resignation? Banishment? Outlaw status? Death?

“To resume, then,” the gas globe said. “Seer Fassin Taak, you are hereby seconded to the Shrievalty Ocula. You will have the honorary rank of provisional acting captain for security clearance purposes, with exceptions made as required by authorised superiors, the principal honorary rank of major for seniority and disciplinary purposes, the honorary rank of general for reward purposes and the honorary rank of field marshal for travel-priority purposes. This construct is unable to negotiate regarding the aforesaid. Do you find the foregoing acceptable?”

“What if I say no?”

“Punitive actions will be taken. Certainly against you, probably against Sept Bantrabal and possibly against the ’glantine Slow Seers as a whole. Do you find the above mentioned secondment details acceptable?”

Fassin had to shut his mouth. This floating bladder of glowing gas had just threatened not only him, not only his Sept and entire extended family and all their servants and dependants, but the major focus of uniquely important work being done on the entire planet-moon, one of the three or four most important centres for Dweller Studies in the entire galaxy! It was so outrageous, so surely disproportionate, it almost had to be a joke.

Fassin thought back, desperately trying to fit all that had happened to him today, with Slovius, with Verpych, with everybody who would have to be in on the joke, into a scenario more plausible than the one he was apparently faced with: an appallingly high-level projection from a portal-carrying Eship still a dozen light years away ordering him to join an allegedly no-holds-barred intelligence unit answering to an Order and a discipline he knew no more about than any other lay person, and with the force of the Administrata and the Engineers behind it.

“Do you find the above-mentioned secondment details acceptable?” the orb repeated.

Or maybe, Fassin thought, Sept Bantrabal as a whole was being made fun of here. Maybe nobody here knew this was a practical joke. Would somebody go to all this trouble just to make him look foolish, to frighten him? Had he ever antagonised anybody with the resources to set something like this up? Well…

“Do you find the above-mentioned secondment details acceptable?” the orb said again.

Fassin gave in. If he was lucky this was a joke. If not, it might be very stupid and even dangerous to treat it as such when it wasn’t.

“Given your crude and objectionable threats, I don’t really have much choice, do I?”

“Is that an answer in the affirmative?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Good. You may ask questions, Seer Fassin Taak.”

“Why am I being seconded?”

“To facilitate the actions you will be asked to perform and to help achieve whatever goals you will be requested to pursue.”

“What would those be?”

“Initially, you are commanded to travel to Pirrintipiti, capital city of ’glantine planet-moon, there to take ship for Borquille, capital of Sepekte, principal planet of the Ulubis system for further briefing.”

“And after that?”

“You will be expected to carry out actions and pursue goals as detailed in said briefing.”

“But why? What’s behind all this? What’s this all about?”

“Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”

“Why the Shrievalty Ocula, specifically?”

“Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”

“Who has ordered this?”

“Information regarding what you ask is not—”

“All right!” Fassin drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat. Still, this projection had to have authority from somebody, it would have to know where it stood in the vast web of Mercatorial rank and seniority. “What rank was the person who ordered this?”

“Administrata: Shrievalty Army-Group Chief of Staff,” the orb said. (Well, that went right to the top, Fassin thought. Whatever piece of nonsense, military bullshittery or wild-goose chase this was all about, it was one being authorised by somebody with no excuses for not knowing better.) “Ascendancy: Senior Engineer,” the projection continued. (Ditto; Senior Engineer didn’t sound as Grand-High-Everything-Else impressive as Army-Group Chief of Staff, for example, but it was the highest rank in the Engineers, the people who made, transported and emplaced the wormholes that stitched the whole galactic meta-civilisation together. In terms of ultimate power, and regardless of species, an SE probably way out-wielded a CoS.) “Omnocracy:’ the orb said, with what sounded like a note of finality, “Complector.”

Fassin sat and stared. He blinked a few times. He was aware that his mouth was open, so he closed it. His skin had seemed to tighten, all over his body. A fucking Complector! he thought, already wondering if he hadn’t misheard. One of the Culmina ordered this?

A Complector sat at the clear undisputed pinnacle of the Mercatoria’s civil command structure. Each one held absolute power over a significant galactic volume, usually with a definable locus, like a stellar cluster or a minor or even a major galactic arm. The least senior of them would be in charge of hundreds of thousands of stars, millions of planets, billions of habitats and trillions of souls. As well as their subject Administrata, they commanded the chiefs of all the other Ascendancy divisions within their jurisdiction — Engineers, Propylaea, Navarchy and Summed Fleet — and they were always Culmina. The only thing which outranked a Complector was a bigger bunch of Complectors.

Fassin thought for a moment, trying to calm himself down. Remember this could be a joke. The very fact that a Complector’s authority had been invoked almost made it more likely that it was, it was just so preposterous.

On the other hand, he had the disquieting feeling, prompted by a half-remembered school lesson he probably ought to have been paying more attention to, that falsely invoking a Complector’s authority was potentially a capital offence.

Think, think. Forget the Complector; back to the moment. What assumptions might he be making here? Any of the ego? (He’d had this psychological check-sum routine drilled into him at college, where he’d scored high on what was usually called the Me-me-me! scale. Though not as high as Saluus Kehar.) Well, he could think of one egotistical assumption he might be making immediately.

“How many other people are being similarly summoned?” he asked.

“By emissarial projection, only yourself.”

Fassin sat back. Well, that certainly felt pleasing, but he suspected it was probably a much worse sign than it appeared.

“And by other means?”

“You will be joining a group of senior officials in Borquille, capital city of Sepekte, for further briefing. This group will number approximately thirty.”

“And what will be the subject of this briefing?”

“Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”

“How long am I likely to be away from home? Do I just go to Sepekte, get ‘briefed’ and come back? What?”

“Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice.”

“So I should expect to be away a while?”

“Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice. Further information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”

Fassin sighed. “So is that it? You’ve been sent to tell me to go to Sepekte? All this… kerfuffle, for that?”

“No. You are to be informed that this is a matter of the utmost consequence and gravity, in which you may be asked to play a significant part. Also that information has come to light which indicates that there is a profound and imminent threat to Ulubis system. No further details concerning this are carried by this construct. You are commanded to report to the palace of the Hierchon in Borquille, capital of Sepekte, principal planet of the Ulubis system, for further briefing, no later than hour Fifteen tomorrow evening, the ninth of Duty, Borquille-Sepekte local time. Gchron, 6.61…’ The sphere started to restate the time of Fassin’s appointment at the Hierchon’s palace the following day in a variety of different formats, as if to remove any last excuse for him not getting there on time. Fassin sat, staring at a beige-blank section of polarised window on the far side of the chamber, trying to decide what the hell to make of all this.

Oh, fuck was the best he could come up with.

“…The eighteenth of November, AD 4034, rHuman,” the glowing orb concluded. “Transport will be provided. Baggage allowance is one large bag, carryable, plus luggage required to transport full formal court dress for your presentation to the Hierchon. A gee-suit should be worn for the outgoing journey. Any further questions?”

Verpych thought for a moment. “Military-grade hysteria.” Slovius shifted in his tub-chair. “Explain, please?”

“They are likely over-correcting for earlier dismissiveness, sir.”

“Somebody’s been telling them there’s a problem, they’ve been pooh-poohing it, then suddenly woken up to the threat and panicked?” Fassin suggested. Verpych nodded once.

“The decisional dynamics of highly rigid power structures make an interesting study subject,” Tchayan Olmey said. Fassin’s old tutor and mentor smiled across at him, a calm, gauntly grey presence. The four of them sat at a large round table in Slovius’s old study, Slovius himself supported in a large semi-enclosed device that looked like a cross between an ancient hip bath and a small flier. Fassin thought his uncle’s tusked, whiskered face looked more animated, and even more human, than it had for years. Slovius had announced at the start of the meeting that for the duration of whatever emergency they might be involved in, his slow demise was being halted; he was fully back in charge of Sept Bantrabal. Fassin had been appalled to find that there was some small, mean, self-aggrandising part of him which felt disappointed and even slightly angry that his uncle wasn’t going to keep slipping into the hazy, woozily uncaring senility that led to death.

“The phrase the projection used was ‘profound and imminent threat’,” Fassin reminded them. That was what had spooked him, he supposed, that was why he’d suggested this meeting, told them what he had. If there really was a threat to Ulubis system, he wanted, at the very least, Sept Bantrabal’s senior people to know about it. The only person missing from the conference was Fassin’s mother, who was on a year-long retreat in a Cessorian habitat somewhere in the system’s Kuiper belt, ten light days away and therefore profoundly out of the discussion. They had discussed whether she should be contacted and warned that there was some sort of system-wide threat, but without details this seemed premature and possibly even counter-productive.

Olmey shrugged. “The overreaction might well extend to the language used to describe the perceived problem,” she said.

“There has been a recent increase in Beyonder attacks,” Verpych said thoughtfully.

For the two centuries after the loss of its portal, the sporadic Beyonder assaults on Ulubis — as a rule against the system’s outskirts and military targets — had declined to such an extent they were barely even of nuisance value. Certainly there were far fewer attacks than there had been in the years before the wormhole’s destruction. For millennia, almost every system in the Mercatoria had been getting used to these generally irritating, rarely devastating raids — they tied up ships and materiel and kept the whole meta-civilisation slightly on edge but they had yet to produce any real atrocities — and it had come as something of a relief to the people of Ulubis, a kind of unlooked-for bonus, that for some perverse reason the system’s temporary isolation had so far been a time when the direct military pressure on it had seemed to decrease rather than been cranked up.

Over the last year or so, however, there had been a slight increase in the number of attacks — the first time in two centuries that the yearly number had risen rather than fallen — and those assaults had been of a slightly different nature compared to those that people had more or less got used to. The targets had not all been military units or items of infrastructure, for one thing: a comet-cloud mining co-op had been destroyed, some belt and cloud ships had disappeared or been discovered drifting, empty or slagged, one small cruise liner had just disappeared between Nasqueron and the system’s outermost gas-giant, and a single heavy-missile ship had appeared suddenly in the mid-system half a year ago, travelling at eighty per cent light speed and targeted straight at Borquille. It had been picked off with ease, but it had been an alarming development.

Slovius wobbled in his tub-chair again, slopping a little water onto the wooden floor. “Is there anything that you are not allowed to tell us, nephew?” he asked, then made a sound that sounded disturbingly like a chortle.

“Nothing specific, sir. I’m not supposed to talk to anybody about any part of this except to… further my mission, which at the moment consists of getting to Borquille by Fifteen tomorrow. Obviously, I’ve chosen to interpret this as allowing me to talk to you three. Though I would ask that it goes no further.”

“Well,” Slovius said, with a noise like a gargle in his throat, “you shall have my own suborbship to take you to Pirrintipiti for transfer.”

“Thank you, sir. However, they did say that transport was being provided.”

“Navarchy’s filed an outgoing from here for half-Four tomorrow morning,” Verpych confirmed. “Going to have to shift if they’re getting you to Sepekte for Fifteen tomorrow,” he added, with a sniff. “You’ll need to suffer five or six gees the whole way, Fassin Taak.” Major-Domo Verpych smiled. “I suggest you start adjusting your water and solids intake accordingly now.”

“We shall have my vessel standing by in any case,” Slovius said, “should this transport fail to turn up, or be overly crude in form. See to this, major-domo.” Verpych nodded. “Sir.”

“Uncle, may I have a word?” Fassin asked as the meeting broke up. He’d hoped to catch Slovius before they’d begun, but his uncle had arrived with Verpych, Slovius looking energised and triumphant, Verpych appearing troubled, even worried.

Slovius nodded to his major-domo and Olmey. In a few moments Fassin and his uncle were left alone in the study.

“Nephew?”

“This morning, sir, when you were asking me about my most recent delves, while the emissarial projection was being downloaded—”

“How much did I know of the matter?”

“Well, yes.”

“I had had a simple, if highly encrypted, signal from the Eship myself, to tell me that the projection was following. It was in the form of a personal message from a First Engineer on the ship, an old friend. A Kuskunde — their bodily and linguistic nuances formed part of my collegiate studies, many centuries ago. They did not say so, nevertheless, I formed the impression that all this might be the result of a delve of yours.”

“I see.”

“Your emissarial projection gave no hint whether this might be correct or not?”

“None, sir.” Fassin paused. “Uncle, am I in trouble?”

Slovius sighed. “If I had to guess, nephew, I would surmise that you are not in direct trouble as such. However, I will confess to the distinct and unsettling feeling that very large, very ponderous and most momentous wheels have been set in motion. When that happens I believe the lessons of history tend to indicate that it is best not to be in their way. Even without meaning harm, the workings and progress of such wheels are on a scale which inevitably reduces the worth of individual lives to an irrelevance at best.”

“At best?”

“At best. At worst, lives, their sacrifice, provide the oil required to make the wheels move. Does my explanation satisfy you?”

“That might be one word for it, sir, yes.”

“Well then, it would appear we are equally in the dark, nephew.” Slovius consulted a little ring embedded in one of his finger stubs. “And in the dark, sleep can be a good idea. I suggest you get some.”

“Well, Fassin Taak,” Verpych said briskly, waiting for him outside the door. “Finally you’ve done something that I find impressive. Thanks to you, not only do we appear to be about to start living in interesting times, you have succeeded in bringing us to the attention of people in high places. Congratulations.”

* * *

They sat on half-inflated bedrolls, their backs against the sides of the flier. “He’s never told you about all that Severity School stuff?” Fassin asked.

Taince shook her head. “Nope.” She took out her little grey military communicator again, checking in vain for reception. She and Fassin had already walked out to the hull gap half an hour earlier, looking for a signal either on this device or their phones. They’d stood there in the bright, flickering glow of a heavy aurora display, Nasqueron a vast inverted dome above, dark but sheened with its own rippling auroras and specked with a random craquelure of lightning bursts. A series of small ground-quakes had vibrated through their boots, but for all this natural turmoil — and perhaps partially because of the magnetic activity in the case of the phones — they had heard nothing through their machines.

They’d tramped back, Fassin grumbling about Beyonders for attacking a planet best known for its peaceful Dwellers Studies faculties in the first place, and the Guard, Navarchy Military, Ambient Squadrons and Summed Fleet for not protecting them better. Taince tried to explain about the logistics of moving sufficient numbers of needle ships and other bits of materiel through “holes to where they’d be needed, and the equations which governed how many assets you would need fully to protect the many scattered systems of the Mercatoria. Even with the near-instantaneousness of portal-to-portal Arteria travel, it was an unfeasible, economically unsupportable number. The many enemy groupings might be collectively puny, but they were widely distributed and often working on an awkwardly extended timescale. The main thing was that ’glantine and Ulubis system as a whole were safe. Its own Squadrons were a match for any feasible Beyonder grouping, and behind them, just a few portal jumps away, lay the matchless superiority of the Summed Fleet.

None of this prevented Fassin from continuing to moan about the Beyonders’ nuisance attacks, so Taince had shifted the conversation to their classmates’ foibles, proclivities and eccentricities and before very long they’d got to Saluus.

“Well,” Taince said, “he’s mentioned going to Severity School but he’s never volunteered anything much about it and I’m not his interrogator.”

“Oh,” Fassin said. He wondered if maybe Saluus and Taince weren’t lovers after all. School, early life… that was the stuff of pillow talk, wasn’t it? He stole a glance at Taince. Though “lovers’ somehow didn’t seem like the right word anyway, not for Sal and Tain, assuming they were involved. They each seemed different from everybody else in their year, less obviously caught up in the whole dating, young love and experimental sex scene, as though they’d gone through all that already or were just, through natural predisposition or sheer determination, immune to it somehow.

Taince intimidated most boys her own age and a lot who were significantly older, but she didn’t care. Fassin had seen her turn down a couple of very nice, decent lads with a bruising degree of brusqueness, and then take off for what were pretty obviously one- or few-nighters with burly but boring guys. He had also known at least three girls in their school year who were hopelessly in love with Taince, but she hadn’t cared about that either.

Saluus had been in an even stronger position from the start; not just good-looking — anybody could be that — but easy with it, and assured, charming and funny as well. All that and money! A fortune to inherit, another beckoning world of even more finely graded superiority that existed alongside the monumental, bamboozling, hierarchic system that had surrounded them all since birth, presenting an alternative infrastructure of reward which was both younger and older than the Mercatoria’s colossal edifice, if ultimately entirely subordinate to it. Like the rest of the boys in his year — like most in the entire college — Fassin had long since come to terms with the fact that as long as Sal was around, you were always second-best.

And yet neither Taince nor Sal — especially Sal — took advantage of their chances. Except maybe with each other.

It was like they were adults before their time, with their own steely, determined agendas, and sex was no more than an itch that had to be scratched, an irritating unter-hunger which sporadically necessitated being dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible with the minimum of distractive fuss, so that the real, serious business of life could be attended to.

Weird.

“Why?” Taince asked. “Did you go to Sev School too, Fass?”

“Me?” Fassin said, astonished. “Shit, no!”

“Right,” Taince said. She was sitting with one leg stretched out, one folded, hand resting on her knee. “So,” she flapped her hand. “Tough, is it?”

“They hunt them!” Fassin told her.

Taince shrugged. “So I’ve heard. At least they don’t eat them.”

“Ha! They still die sometimes. I’m serious. These are just little kids. They fall off cliffs or out of trees or into crevasses or they kill themselves, they’re so stressed. Some get lost in the outwoods and get hunted and killed and eaten by real predators.”

“Mm-hmm. High drop-out rate, then.”

“Taince, doesn’t any of that bother you?” Taince grinned at him. “What, you mean arouse my maternal instincts, Fass?” He didn’t answer. She shook her head. “Well, it doesn’t. You want to ask me do I feel sorry for these junior members of the Acquisitariat? Yes, for the ones that don’t make it out. Or the ones that leave hating their parents. For the others, it does what it’s supposed to do, I guess; produces another generation of the truly selfish. Well, not my department. Don’t even think about them. If I did maybe I’d despise them, but I don’t so I don’t. Maybe I’d admire them. Sounds worse than basic training.”

“You have a choice with basic training. These little—”

“Not if you’re drafted.”

“Drafted?”

“Laws are still on the statute books.” She shrugged. “But your point is taken. It’s tough on those kids. But it’s legal and, well, the rich are another breed.” She sounded unconcerned. “Sal’s really never said anything?”

Something in his tone made Taince look at Fassin. “You mean, like,” she waggled her dark eyebrows, “‘afterwards’, Fassin?” He looked away. “As you will.”

Taince looked at him again. “Fass, is this really all about whether Sal and I fuck?”

“No!”

“Well, we do. Now and again, thank you for asking. That settled any bets? Made you any money?”

“Oh, please,” he said. Damn, he thought, I’m not sure I really wanted to know that, now that I do. Fassin quite enjoyed thinking about some of the potential or actual couples and other groupings of his class and year having sex — grief, he’d watched\been part of the real thing a few times — but the thought of Sal and Taince bumping bits was slightly grisly.

Taince hoisted one eyebrow. “Ask nicely and maybe sometime we’ll let you watch. That’s what you like, isn’t it?”

Fassin felt himself colouring despite his best efforts. “Why, I live for nothing else,” he said, attempting sarcasm.

“And no, he hasn’t mentioned Severity School,” Taince told him. “Not before, during or after. Unless I was a lot more distracted than I thought I was.”

“But it sounds horrific! Cold showers, hot-bunking, corporal punishment, deprivation, intimidation, denigration, and, for a holiday, you get to run for what might be your life!”

Taince snorted. “You end up paying good money for the sort of treatment your ancestors spent their short, brutal lives trying to avoid. That’s progress.”

“I think the guy’s been damaged by it,” Fassin said. “I’m serious.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Taince drawled, sounding bored. “Sal seems to be okay with it, all the same. Says it made him.”

“Yeah, but made him what?”

Taince grinned. “It’s all your people’s fault, anyway.”

“Oh,” Fassin sighed, “not this.”

“Well, it’s a Dweller thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah? And so fucking what?”

“Well, who brought that particular little nugget of information regarding kin-kid-hunting blinking into the light?” Taince asked, still grinning. “You guys, that’s who. Seers—”

“They weren’t—”

“Well, Dwellers Studies, whatever.” Taince waved her hand dismissively. “They hunt their children, they’re a long-term, widespread, successful species and they’re right on our doorstep. Some wizzer comes along looking for the latest way to fleece the rich. What sort of lesson do you think they’re going to take from that?”

Fassin shook his head. “The Dwellers have been around for most of the life of the universe, they’ve spread throughout the galaxy but despite their head start on everybody else they’ve had the good grace not to remake the whole place to suit themselves, they’ve formalised war to the point that hardly anybody ever dies and most of their lives’ work is spent tending the greatest accumulations of knowledge ever assembled—”

“But we were told—”

“Albeit in the galaxy’s most disorganised libraries which they show enormous reluctance to let anybody else into, yes, but all the same: they were peaceful, civilised and everywhere before Earth and the Sun even formed, and what’s the one lesson we’ve taken from them with any enthusiasm? Hunt your kids.”

“Your lecture notes are showing,” Taince told him. The Dwellers, notoriously, hunted their own young. The species was present in the majority — the vast majority — of the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and in every planetary society of theirs that had been sufficiently thoroughly investigated, it had been discovered that the mature Dwellers preyed upon their own children, hunting them singly or in packs (on both sides), sometimes opportunistically, as often in highly organised long-term hunts. To the Dwellers this was entirely natural. Just a normal part of growing up, absolutely a part of their culture without which they would not be themselves, and something they had been doing for billions of years. Indeed, some of those who could be bothered attempting to justify the practice to upstart alien busybodies claimed with some authority that young-hunting was precisely one of the many reasons that Dwellers were still around after all that amount of time to indulge in such harmless fun in the first place.

It wasn’t just their species that was long-lived, after all; individual Dwellers had, allegedly, lived for billions of years, so if they weren’t to use up even the colossal amount of living space provided by all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy (and, they’d sometimes hint, beyond), they had to keep numbers down somehow. And interfering outside species — especially those whose civilisations were inevitably so short-lived that they were called the Quick — would do well not to forget that the Dwellers doing the hunting had been hunted in their turn as well, and those being hunted would have their chance to become the hunters in the future. And anyway, if you had every prospect of living for hundreds of millions of years, being hunted for at most about a century and a bit was such a trivially insignificant detail that it was scarcely worth mentioning.

“They don’t feel any pain, Taince,” Fassin told her. “That’s the point. They don’t entirely understand the concept of physical suffering. Not emotionally.”

“Which I still beg to find unlikely. But, oh, so what? What are you saying? They’re not intelligent enough to feel mental anguish?”

“Even mental pain isn’t really what we understand as pain when there’s no physiological equivalent, no template, no circuitry.”

“That this year’s theory, is it? Exo-Ethics 101?”

A moderately powerful ground-quake shook the surface they were sitting on, but they ignored it. The huge, tattered strips of material hanging high above stirred.

“All I’m saying is, they’re a civilisation we could learn a lot more from than just how to abuse our young.”

“Thought they aren’t even a civilisation, technically”

“Oh, good grief,” Fassin sighed.

“Well?”

“Yeah, well, depends what definition you accept. To some they’re post-civilisational, because the individual groups on each gas-giant have so little contact with each other, to others they’re a diasporian civilisation, which is the same thing expressed more kindly, to others still they’re just a degenerate example of how to almost take over an entire galaxy and then fail, because they just lost interest, or they somehow forgot what the purpose of the operation was in the first place, or they misplaced their ruthlessness and came over all coy and conservational and decided it would only be fair to give everybody else a chance, too, or they were warned off by some higher power. All of which might be true, or nonsense. And that’s what Dweller Studies is all about. Maybe one day we’ll know for sure… What?” There was something about the way Taince was looking at him.

“Nothing. Just wondering. You still sticking to the line you haven’t decided what to do after college?”

“I might not become a Seer, Taince, or anything to do with Dweller Studies; it isn’t compulsory. We don’t get drafted.”

“Mm-hmm. Well,” she said, “time for another attempt to contact the real world.” She rose smoothly to her feet. “Coming?”

“Mind if I stay behind?” Fassin rubbed his face, looked around. “Bit tired. I think we’re safe enough here, yeah?”

“Guess so,” Taince told him. “Back soon.” She turned and tramped off into the darkness, quickly disappearing and leaving Fassin alone with the soft lights of the flier in the vast, unechoing space.

He did and didn’t want to fall asleep, and after a few moments alone thought that maybe he didn’t feel so secure here by himself after all, and nearly went after Taince, but then thought he might get lost, and so stayed where he was. He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.

* * *

He left in the false dawn of an albedo sunrise, Ulubis still well below the horizon but lighting up half the facing hemisphere of Nasqueron, flooding the Northern Tropical Uplands of ’glantine with a soft, golden-brown light. A small yellow auroral display to the north added its own unsteady glow. He’d already said various goodbyes to friends and family in the Sept the night before and left messages for those, like his mother, he couldn’t contact immediately. He’d left Jaal asleep.

Slovius, somewhat to Fassin’s surprise, came to see him off at the house port, a hundred-metre circle of dead flat granite coldmelt a kilometre downslope from the house, near the river and the gently rising edge of the Upland forest. Light rain fell from high, thin clouds moving in from the west. A sleek, soot-black Navarchy craft, maybe sixty metres long, sat on a tripod of struts at the centre of the circle, radiating heat and bannered by drifting steam.

They stopped and looked at it. “That’s a needle ship, isn’t it?” Fassin said.

His uncle nodded. “I do believe it is. You will be going to Pirrintipiti in some style, nephew.” Slovius’s own suborb yacht, a streamlined yet stubbier machine, half the size of the black Navarchy ship, lay on a circular parking pad just off the main circle. They walked on, Fassin in his thin one-piece gee-suit, worn under his light Sept robe, feeling as if he was walking with a sort of warm gel extending from ankle to neck.

Fassin carried the grip holding his formal wear. A pony-tailed servant had his other bag and held a large umbrella over Fassin. Slovius’s chair-tub had extended a transparent cover above him. Another servant held the sleeping form of Fassin’s niece Zab in her arms; the child — up scandalously late the evening before and somehow hearing of her uncle’s summons to Sepekte — had insisted she wanted to say goodbye to Fassin and wheedled her grandfather and parents into granting permission, but then had fallen back asleep almost as soon as they’d left the house in the little funicular which served the port.

“Oh, and my regards to my old friend Seer-Chief Chyne, of the Favrial,” Slovius said as they crossed to the Navarchy craft. “Should you see him. Oh, and most especially to Braam Ganscerel, of Sept Tonderon, naturally.”

“I’ll try to say hello to all who know you, uncle.”

“I should have come with you,” Slovius said absently. “No, maybe not.”

A grey-uniformed figure appeared from a drop-platform under the black ship and walked towards them. The officer, a fresh-faced, cheery-looking woman, took off her cap, bowed to Slovius, and to Fassin said, “Major Taak?”

Fassin stood looking at her for a moment, before recalling that officially he was now a major in the Shrievalty Ocula. “Ah, yes,” he said.

“First Officer Oon Dicogra, NMS 3304,” the young woman said. “Welcome. Please follow me.”

Slovius held out one flippery hand. “I shall try to remain alive until your return, Major Nephew.” He made a wheezing noise that was probably a laugh.

Fassin gripped Slovius’s finger stubs awkwardly. “I’m rather hoping this is a false alarm and I’ll be back in a few days.”

“In any event, take care. Goodbye, Fassin.”

“I shall. Goodbye.” He kissed the still-sleeping Zab lightly on the cheek, avoiding waking her, then followed the Navarchy officer to the platform, stepped up onto it and waved as the curve-bottomed slab raised them into the ship.

“We’ll be pulling about 5.2 Earth gees most of the way,” Dicogra said as Fassin’s robe and his luggage were secured in a brace-cabinet. “Are you happy with that? The physio profile we got on you says yes, but we have to check.”

Fassin looked at her. “To Pirrintipiti?” he asked. The local shuttles and suborbs accelerated a lot less sharply than that, and they did the trip in less than an hour. How tight was this schedule?

“No, to Borquille city,” Dicogra said. “Going straight there.”

“Oh,” Fassin said, surprised. “No, 5.2 is fine.”

The planet-moon ’glantine’s gravity was about a tenth of that, but Fassin was used to more. He thought about pointing out that his day job involved spending years at a time in a gravity field of over six Earth gees, but of course that was in a Dwellerine arrowship, pickled in shock-gel, and didn’t really count.

First Officer Dicogra smiled, wrinkled her nose and said, “Good for you. That physio report said you were quite a toughie. Still, we’ll spend nearly twenty hours at that acceleration, with only a few minutes weightless right in the middle, so do you need to visit the heads? You know, the toilet?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She gestured at his groin, where a bulge like a sports box was the only place on his body where the grey, centimetre-thick gee-suit didn’t hug the contours of his flesh. “Any attachments required?” she asked, smiling.

“No, thanks.”

“Drugs to let you sleep?”

“Not necessary.”

The ship’s captain was a whule, a species that always looked to Fassin like a cross between a giant grey bat and an even more scaled-up praying mantis. She greeted Fassin briefly via a screen from the bridge and he was settled into a steep-sided, semi-reclined couch in a gimballed ball pod near the centre of the ship by First Officer Dicogra and a fragile-seeming but dexterous whule rating who smelled, to the human nose, of almonds. The whule rating levered himself out with a snapping sound of wing membranes and Dicogra settled into the only other couch in the pod. Her preparations for a day of five gees continuous consisted of tossing her cap into a locker and adjusting her uniform underneath her.

The ship lifted slowly at first and Fassin watched on a screen on the curved wall opposite as the port’s circular landing ground fell away, the little figures there lifting their heads as the Navarchy craft rose. Zab might have waved one tiny arm, then the haze of clouds intervened, the view tilted and swung and the ship accelerated — the gimballed pod keeping him and Dicogra level in their seats — towards space.

* * *

Was that screaming? His eyes flicked open. His neck hairs were standing on end, his mouth was dry. Dark. Still inside the ruined alien ship, his back resting against the dimly lit flier. Taince gone, away to the gap to check for comms reception. Oh shit, those were screams, from behind. Maybe shouting, too. He scrambled to his feet, looking around. Little to see; just the faint traces of the warped landscape of destruction and collapse that was the interior of the wrecked ship, the tilted decks and bulkheads, the huge hanging strips of whatever-the-hell hanging from the invisibly dark and distant ceiling. The screams were coming from forward, from the interior, from the direction that Saluus and Ilen had walked in. He stood staring into that darkness, holding his breath to listen better. Sudden silence, then maybe a voice — Sal’s shouting, the words indistinct. Help? Taince? Fass?

What do I do? Run to help? Wait for Taince? Look for another torch, another gun if there is one?

A clattering noise behind him made him spin round.

Taince, bounding down from one gnarled level of the buckled wall. “You okay?”

“Yes, but—”

“Stay with me. Keep a few steps behind. Say if you can’t keep up.” She went past him at a slow run, her gun high in one hand. Later, he would remember that there was a grim sort of smile on her face.

They ran up the shallow slope leading deeper into the ship, over increasingly large ripples in the material beneath their feet until they were leaping from ridge to ridge, then jumped down through a tear in the floor and ran slightly uphill on a half-giving surface like thin rubber over iron, vaulting one-handed over enormous, thigh-high cables strung in an irregular net across the space. Fassin followed Taince as best he could, guided by the glow patches on her fatigues. She ran and leapt more fluidly with one hand filled with pistol than he did pumping both arms. The floor pitched up more steeply, then down.

“Taince! Fassin!” Sal shouted, somewhere ahead.

“Duck!” Taince yelled, suddenly running doubled-up.

Fassin got down just in time; his hair touched the hard fold of ink-black material above. They slowed down, Taince feeling her way one-handed along the dark ceiling, then slipping sideways through a narrow gap.

Fassin followed, the cold press of ungiving material on either side making him shiver.

Light ahead. A dim confusion of tilted floor and a half-open chaos of girders and tubes forming a ceiling, spikes like stalagmites and stalactites, thin hanging cables, a frozen downward explosion of some red substance like an enormous inverted flower. And there, crouching on a narrow ledge by a jagged, vaguely triangular hole in the floor a couple of metres across, staring into it, lit by the glow patches stuck to his jacket, was Sal.

He looked up. “Len!” he shouted. “She fell!”

“Sal,” Taince said sharply, “that floor safe for us?”

He looked confused, frightened. “Think so.”

Taince tested the way ahead with one foot, then knelt by the triangular hole, right at one apex. She motioned Fassin to stay back, lay on her front and stuck her head into the hole, then, muttering something about the edges being braced, signalled Fassin to the side of the hole opposite Saluus. There was more room on that side. He lay and looked in and down.

The triangle opened out into a darkly cavernous space beneath them, just vague glints of edged surfaces visible below; stepped collections of what looked like huge cooling fins. Fassin’s head seemed to swim, recognising how much of the wrecked ship was beneath the level they were on now. He remembered the flier climbing from the desert floor before entering the giant ship. How far had they climbed? A hundred metres? A little less? Plus the journey from the flier to here had been mostly uphill.

Ilen lay about six metres down, caught on a couple of arm-thick projections that stuck curving out from the nearest intact bulkhead beneath like two slim tusks. She lay on her front, her head, one leg and one arm hanging over the drop. Glow patches on her sleeves provided pale, greeny-blue light. The fractured ends of the two tusk-shaped protrusions were only centimetres from the side of her body. Off to one side at eight- or nine-metre intervals, several more sets of the tusklike shapes clawed out from the bulkhead like bony fingers grasping at the gaping space. The drop below Ilen looked fifty or sixty metres deep, down to the bladelike edges of the fins beneath.

The human mindset had had to adapt to places like ’glantine where gravity was weaker and a fall that would break both your legs on Earth was something you could walk away from. But given enough vertical space to accelerate into, a human’s body would be just as injured or dead after a sixty-metre drop here as it would after a thirty-metre fall on Earth.

“Any rope?” Taince asked.

Sal shook his head. “Oh God, oh fuck. No. Well, yes, but we left it back there.” He nodded further into the ship. He seemed to shiver, hugging himself then putting up the collar of his jacket, as though cold. “C-couldn’t undo the knot again.”

“Shit! She’s moving,” Taince said, then stuck her head into the hole and shouted, “Ilen! Ilen, don’t move! Can you hear me? Don’t move! Just say if you can hear me!”

Ilen moved weakly, her head and the arm dangling over the drop shaking and shifting. She looked to be trying to roll over, but was edging still closer to the drop.

“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sal said, his voice high and quick and strained. “She was behind me. I thought she was all right. I didn’t see anything, must have stepped over it. A hatch or something or it was just balanced and she must have knocked it and she was shouting, sort of balanced over it, one hand, and screaming, and I couldn’t get back in time and she fell. We didn’t even find anything, didn’t do anything! Just junk! Oh fuck! She was fine! She was just behind me!”

“Be quiet,” Taince said. Sal sat back, rubbing his mouth, shaking. Taince put the gun back into her fatigues, slapped a glow patch onto her forehead, then, with her hands on two sides of the triangular hole, lowered her head into the gap again, further this time. She levered herself out for a second and looked back at Fassin. “Hold my feet.”

Fassin did as he was told. Taince got her shoulders through the hole, then they heard her say, “Ilen! You mustn’t move!” She hauled herself back out, leaving the glow patch where it was on her forehead like some strange, shining eye. “Nothing to hold on to underneath here,” she told them. “She’s moving around. Must have hit her head. She’s going to fall.” She looked at Sal. “Sal, how far away is that rope? By time.”

“Oh fuck! I don’t know! Ten, fifteen minutes?”

Taince glanced back into the hole. “Shit,” she said quietly. “Ilen’ she shouted. “You must not move!” She shook her head. “Shit, shouting at her’s just making her move,” she said, as though to herself. She took a deep breath, looked at Saluus and Fassin. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “Daisy-chain rescue. Practised this, it’s doable.”

“Right,” Sal said, sitting forward, his face pale in the dim light. “What do we have to do?”

“One holds on at the top, somebody climbs down their body, holds on to their feet, last person climbs down both and picks up Ilen. I’ll do that bit.”

Sal’s eyes widened. “But the person at the top—”

“Will be you. You’re the strongest. Wouldn’t work on Earth; does here,” Taince told them. She slid over and grabbed Sal’s backpack. “Seen it done with four links. You two guys look in good enough shape. Fass, you’re in the middle. Plus person at the top gets tied on with these straps,” she said, glancing at Sal and then pulling a knife from her fatigues and slicing into one set of shoulder straps.

Sal knelt quaking at the side of the hole. “Fucking God, Taince,” he said, “we all want to rescue her, but this could get us all killed. Fuck, oh fuck. I don’t know. I don’t fucking believe this, I just fucking don’t. This isn’t happening, this is just not fucking happening!” He sat back again, visibly trembling. He looked at his shaking hands, turning them over and staring at them as though he didn’t recognise them. “I don’t know if I have any grip,” he said. “I really don’t.”

“You’ll be fine,” Taince told him, busy with the straps.

“Oh fuck, we’re all going to fucking die,” Sal said. “Fucking hell.” He shook his head hard. “No. Not. Not. No.”

“This will work,” Taince said, quickly tying the cut straps to those still joined to the pack.

I’m calm, thought Fassin. I’m probably in shock or something, but I feel calm. We might all be about to die, or it might be a close shave and a bonding thing we all remember for the rest of our long lives, but either way I feel calm. What will happen will happen and as long as we do our best and don’t let each other down, no matter what happens we’ll have been fine. He looked at his own hands. They were shaking, but not uncontrollably. He flexed them. He felt strong. He would do everything he could, and if that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t his fault.

Sal jumped up, wobbling dangerously close to the hole. “There’s more rope,” he said suddenly. His face was still grey-pale, but now almost expressionless. He moved past Taince.

Fassin looked at him, wondering what he was talking about.

“What?” Taince said, testing a square-section stalagmite extrusion on the floor then flipping the pack straps over it.

“Rope,” Sal said, pointing towards the outside and the flier. He took a backwards step in that direction. “There’s more. In the flier. I’ll go. I know where it is.” He backed off further.

“Sal!” Taince shouted at him. “There isn’t time!”

“No, there is, I’ll go,” Sal said, still backing off.

“Stay fucking here, Sal,” Taince said, dropping and deepening her voice. Sal seemed to hesitate but shook his head and turned and ran.

Taince leapt and made a grab for him but he’d moved too quickly. He vaulted a stalagmite and ran towards the gap Fassin and Taince had squeezed through earlier. Taince dropped to one knee and pulled the gun. “Stop, you fucking coward!”

There might, Fassin thought, have been half a second when Taince could have fired, but she dropped the gun and stashed it in her fatigues as Sal sprinted, ducking through the gap and away. Taince looked at Fassin. Now her face had gone blank, he thought. “Still a possibility,” she said, and quickly stepped out of her fatigues. She wore a one-piece underbody the same colour as her skin, so for just a moment she appeared to be naked. She reattached the top and trousers of the fatigues, snapping them tight to test that they held. “Right,” she said. “Now, this ties to your ankle.”

The straps on the backpack held, and Fassin did too, wrists tied to them but taking his own weight and Taince’s on his hands and fingers initially because he didn’t trust the straps, and the knot tying Taince’s trousers to his ankle held as well, and Taince was holding on fine as she shinned down over him and onto the fatigues and down with him twisting his neck and shoulders out and round so he could just about watch her progress and watch Ilen too, as though as long as he kept watching her she’d be all right, but then there was a ground-quake, shaking the ship, not badly, but enough to bring Fassin out in a cold sweat as he hung there, hands, palms, fingers slipping until it really was the straps and the straps alone holding him, and below him, below Taince, still just out of reach, Ilen moved one more time and fell over the edge and away into the darkness.

Taince made a lunge and Fassin felt the link between them jerk as she clutched vainly at the girl and made a noise like a gasp or a hiss. Ilen dropped away into the shadows, tumbling slowly, her hair and clothes fluttering like pale, cold flame.

Ilen must have still been mostly unconscious because she didn’t even scream as she fell, so that they heard her body hit the strip of vanes far below, long seconds later, and might even have felt the impact through the fabric of the ship.

Fassin had closed his eyes. Let Sal be right, let this not be happening. He tried to grip the edge of the hole again, to take the weight off the straps.

Taince just hung there for a while. “Lost her,” she said quietly, and the way she said it Fassin was suddenly terrified that she was going to let go too and drop after Ilen, but she didn’t. She just said, “Coming back up now. Hold on.”

She climbed up and over him and helped him out. They looked down but couldn’t see the body. They spent a few moments sitting side by side, breathing hard, with their backs against one of the stalagmites, a bit like they’d sat earlier, back at the flier. Taince untied her fatigues and put them on. She took the gun out.

Fassin looked at it as she stood up. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

She looked down at him. “Not kill the fuck, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She sounded calm now. She nudged one of his feet with her boot. “We should get back.”

He stood up, a little shaky, and she held him by one arm. “Did our best, Fass,” she told him. “Both of us did. We can grieve for Ilen later. What we do now is we go back to the flier, try to find Sal, see if we can get comms, get the fuck out of here and tell the authorities.”

They turned away from the hole.

“Why have you still got the gun out?” Fassin asked.

“Sal,” Taince said. “He’s never been this humiliated. Never let himself down like this. Not to my knowledge. Grief and guilt. Does things to people.” She was doing some sort of breathing-exercise thing, taking quick breaths, holding them. “Faint chance he’ll think… if no one ever knows what happened here…’ She shrugged. “He’s got a gun. He might wish us harm.”

Fassin looked at her, unbelieving. “You think? Seriously?”

Taince nodded. “I know the guy,” she told him. “And don’t be surprised if the flier’s gone.”

It was gone.

They walked out to the gap in the hull and found the flier there in the faint light of a false dawn coming from one thick sliver of sun-struck Nasqueron. Sal was sitting looking out at the chill expanse of desert. Before they approached, Taince checked her military transceiver again and found that she had signal. She called the nearest Navarchy unit and gave a brief report, then they walked across the sand to the flier. Their phones were still out.

Saluus looked round at them. “Did she fall?” he asked.

“We nearly got her,” Taince said. “Very nearly.” She was still holding her gun. Sal put one hand over his face for a while. In his other hand he was gripping a thin, twisted, half-melted-looking piece of metal, and when he took his hand away from his face he started turning the metal fragment over and over in both hands. His gun lay with his jacket, on the back seat. “Got through to the military,” Taince told him. “Alert’s over. Just wait where we are. There’s a ship on its way.” She got in the back, behind Sal.

“We were never going to save her, Tain,” he told her. “Fass,” he said as the other man got into the other front seat beside him, “we were just never going to save her. We’d only have got ourselves killed too.”

“Find the rope?” Fassin asked. He had a sudden image of taking the twisted piece of metal that Sal was playing with and sticking it into his eye.

Sal just shook his head. He looked dazed more than anything else. “Went over on my ankle,” he said. “Think it might be sprained. Barely made it back. Thought I could use the flier, get it through the stuff hanging above us and find a way over the top of all that wreckage, back to where it all happened, but the hanging stuff was more solid than it looked; came out here to try and signal.” The piece of twisted metal kept going round and round in his hands.

“What is that?” Fassin asked after a while.

Sal looked down at it. He shrugged. “From the ship. Just something I found.”

Taince reached round from behind him, wrenched the piece of metal from his hands and threw it away across the sand.

They sat there in silence until a Navarchy suborb showed up. When Taince went out to meet it, Sal got out of the flier and went, limping, to retrieve the fragment.