The Algebraist

Uncle Slovius took him up on his shoulders. They were going to watch the bad machine being killed. He put his hands over Uncle Slovius’s forehead and got him to crinkle it, which felt funny and made him squirm and wriggle and laugh and meant Uncle Slovius had to hold his ankles tight to stop him falling off.

“Fass, stop wriggling.”

“I fine, honest.”

He already knew you were supposed to say, “I’m fine,” or, “I am fine,” but saying things like “I fine’ was better because it made adults smile and sometimes hug. Sometimes it made them put a hand on your head and make a mess of your hair, but never mind.

They went through the port door. It was spring and so that was the house they were in. He was big. He’d lived in all the houses except the Summer House. That one came next. Then he would have lived in them all. Then you started again. That was how it worked. Uncle Slovius ducked as they went through the doorway so he didn’t bash his head.

“Umm, mind your head,” he heard his dad say quietly somewhere behind him.

His mum sighed. “Oh, stop fussing. Dear.”

He couldn’t see his mum and dad because they were behind him and Uncle Slovius but he could hear them.

“Look, I wasn’t fussing, I was just—”

“Yes, you—”

He got that funny feeling in his tummy he got when Mum and Dad talked like that. He did a slap-a-slap-slap on Uncle Slovius’s forehead and said, “More about history! More about history!” as they walked down to the flier.

Uncle Slovius laughed. The shake came up through Uncle Slovius’s shoulders into his bottom and whole body. “My, we are a keen student.”

“One word for it,” his mother said.

“Oh, come on,” his dad said. “The boy’s just inquisitive.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right,” his mum said. You could hear her breath through her words. “My mistake. Pardon me for expressing an opinion.”

“Oh, now, look, I didn’t mean—”

“More about Voerin!”

“Voehn,” Uncle Slovius said.

“I’ve got a Voerin! I’ve got a big one that talks and climbs and swims and jumps or can walk under the water too. It’s got a gun that shoots other toys. And I’ve got lots of little ones that just move. They’ve got guns too but they’re a bit small to see but they can make each other fall over. I’ve nearly a hundred. I watch Attack Squad Voerin all the time! My favourite is Captain Chunce cos he’s clever. I like Commander Saptpanuhr too and Corporal Qump cos he’s funny. Jun and Yoze both like Commander Saptpanuhr best. They’re my friends. Do you watch Attack Squad Voerin, Uncle Slovius?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever caught it, Fass.”

Fassin frowned, thinking. He decided this probably meant “No’. Why didn’t adults just say no when they meant no?

They sat in the flier. He had to come down off Uncle Slovius’s shoulders but he got to sit beside him in the front. He didn’t even need to tell people he’d be sick if he sat in the back any more. A servant sat on the other side of him. Great-uncle Fimender was behind with two old ladies who were girlfriends. He was laughing and they were too. His mum and dad were further back, talking quiet. His mum and dad were old but Uncle Slovius was really old and Great-uncle Fimender was really, really old.

The flier went up into the air and went through the air making a noise like the Attack-ship Avenger did in Attack Squad Voerin. His model of the Attack-ship Avenger flew but only in Supervised Areas Outdoors and shot guns and missiles and made the same noise. He’d wanted to bring it with him, but not been allowed, even after he’d shouted. He hadn’t been allowed to bring any toys. No toys at all!

He pulled at Uncle Slovius’s sleeve. “Tell me about the Voerin!” He tried to think what had made Uncle Slovius laugh. “More about history!”

Uncle Slovius smiled.

“The Voehn are the Culmina’s bully boys, child,” said Great-uncle Fimender from the seat behind. He was leaning over. His breath had that funny sweet smell like it usually did. Great-uncle Fimender was fond of a drink. His voice was funny also sometimes, like all the words were sort of one big word. “I wouldn’t fixate too enthusiastically on the scum that stole our species birthright.”

“Steady, now, Fim,” Uncle Slovius said. He looked round at Great-uncle Fimender but looked first at the servant except the servant didn’t move or look back or anything. “If the wrong person took you seriously you might find yourself joining this rogue AI. Hmm?” He made a smile at Great-uncle Fimender, who sat back again in the seat between the old-lady girlfriends and took a glass with a drink in it from a picnic tray.

“Be an honour,” he said in a quiet voice.

Uncle Slovius smiled down at Fass. “The Voehn went to Earth a long, long time ago, Fassin. Before humans made spaceships — before they made sea ships, almost.”

“How long ago?”

“About eight thousand years ago.”

“4051BCE,” Great-uncle Fimender said, though only just loud enough to hear. Uncle Slovius didn’t seem to hear. Fassin wasn’t sure if Great-uncle Fimender was disagreeing with Uncle Slovius or not. Fassin stored 4051 BCE away as an Important Number anyway.

“They met human people on Earth,” Uncle Slovius said, “and took them away with them on their ship, to other stars and planets.”

“Kidnapping the prims!” Great-uncle Fimender said. “Sampling the barbs, with prejudice! Eh?” He didn’t sound like he was talking to him and Uncle Slovius. Fass didn’t understand what Great-uncle Fimender was saying anyway. The old-lady girlfriends were laughing.

“Well,” Uncle Slovius said, with a small smile, “who’s to say whether humans were kidnapped or not? People in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and China were too primitive to know what was going on. They probably thought the Voehn were gods, so they might have gone with them without being kidnapped and we don’t even know that the Voehn took whole people. Maybe they just took their cells.”

“Or babies, or foetuses, or excised a few thousand fertilised eggs,” Great-uncle Fimender said. Then, “Oh, thank you, my dear. Oops! Steady, there.”

“In any event,” Uncle Slovius said, “the Voehn took some human people and put them down on planets far away from Earth and the human people grew up with other people, and the Culmina had the other people help the humans so that they became civilised quickly, and invented all the things humans back on Earth ever invented, but these human people on the other planets always knew they were part of a galactic community, hmm?” Uncle Slovius looked at him with a question-look on his face. Fass nodded quickly. He knew what a galactic community meant: everybody else.

“Anyway, people on Earth kept on inventing things, and eventually invented wormholes and portals—”

“The Attack-ship Avenger goes through wormholes and portals,” he told Uncle Slovius.

“Of course,” Uncle Slovius said. “And so when human people went out and met other alien people and joined their worm-hole up with everybody else’s wormhole, they found out that they weren’t the first humans the alien people had met or had heard of, because the humans who had been taken away to the other planets by the Voehn were already quite well known.”

“Remainder humans,” Great-uncle Fimender said from the seat behind. His voice sounded funny, like he might be going to burst out laughing or something.

Uncle Slovius looked round at him for a short bit. “Well, the terms don’t matter too much, even if they might sound a little harsh sometimes.”

“Carefully chosen to keep us in our place, remind us we owe them, either way,” Great-uncle Fimender said.

“The Culmina tell us they had people look after Earth after the Voehn took the humans away to the other stars. They made sure that nothing bad happened to Earth, like it being hit by a big rock.”

Great-uncle Fimender made a sort of cough-laugh. “Easy to claim.”

Fass looked round at Great-uncle Fimender. He sort of wanted Great-uncle Fimender to be quiet so he could listen to Uncle Slovius but sort of didn’t because the things Great-uncle Fimender was saying, even if he didn’t always understand all of them, seemed to be saying things about the things Uncle Slovius was saying. It was like they sort of agreed and didn’t agree at the same time. Great-uncle Fimender winked at him and gestured towards Uncle Slovius with his glass. “No, no; listen!”

“So, people from Earth got into the stars at last and found that there were aliens everywhere,” Uncle Slovius told him. “And some of them were us!” He smiled a broad smile.

“And there were a lot more of the alien humans than there were of the ones who thought they were humanity,” Great-uncle Fimender said. It sounded like he was sneering. Uncle Slovius sighed and looked ahead.

The flier was flying over mountains with snow on them. In front was a big bit of desert like a circle. Uncle Slovius shook his head and didn’t seem to want to say anything but Great-uncle Fimender did so Fass turned round in his seat and listened to him.

“And they were more technically advanced, these so-called aHumans. Advanced but cowed. Servant species, just like everybody else. While all Earth’s dreams of wild expansion were made to look like so much belly-gas. The answer to ‘Where is everybody?’ turned out to be, ‘Everywhere’, but the stake at the galactic poker game is a wormhole and so we had to fund our own and bring that to the table. Then discover that Everywhere really meant Everywhere, and every damn thing you could see and every damn thing you couldn’t belonged to some bugger: every rock, every planet, moon and star, every comet, dust cloud and dwarf, even the bloody null-foam of space itself was somebody’s home. Land on some godforsaken cinder, pull out a shovel thinking you could dig something, build something or make something of it and next thing you know an alien with two heads was poking both of them out of a burrow and telling you to fuck off, or pointing a gun at you. Or a writ — ha! Worse still!”

He’d never heard Great-uncle Fimender talk so much. He wasn’t sure that Great-uncle Fimender was really talking to Uncle Slovius or to him or even to his two old-lady girlfriends because he wasn’t looking at any of them, he was looking at the picnic table hinged down from the seat in front, maybe looking at the glass and the decanter bottle on it, and looking sad. The two old-lady girlfriends patted him and one smoothed his hair which was very black indeed but still looked old.

“Prepping, they call it,” he said, maybe to himself or maybe to the picnic table. “Bloody kidnapping.” He snorted. “Putting people in their place, holding them there. Letting us build our dreams then puncturing them.” He shook his head, and drank from his shiny glass.

“Prepping?” Fass asked, to make sure he had the word right.

“Hmm? Oh, yes.”

“Well, it’s something that’s gone on for as long as anybody can remember,” Uncle Slovius said. He sounded gentle, and Fass wasn’t sure if Uncle Slovius was talking to him or to Great-uncle Fimender. He sort of half-listened while he pulled out one of the flier’s screens. If he’d been allowed to bring any toys he’d definitely have brought his BotPal and just asked, but now these damn adults were making him use a screen. He stared at the letters and numbers and things (Uncle Slovius and Great-uncle Fimender were still talking).

He didn’t want to have to talk, he wanted to tap-in like adults did. He tried a few buttons. After a while he got a lots-of-books symbol with a big kid standing next to it and an ear symbol. The big kid looked scruffy and was holding a drug bowl and his head was surrounded with lines and little moving satellites and flying birds. Oh well.

“Prepping,” he said, but pressed Text. The screen said:

Prepping. A very long-established practice, used lately by the Culmina amongst others, is to take a few examples of a pre-civilised species from their home world (usually in clonoclastic or embryonic form) and make them subject species\slaves\mercenaries\mentored so that when the people from their home world finally assume the Galactic stage, they are not the most civilised\advanced of their kind (often they’re not even the most numerous grouping of their kind). Species so treated are expected to feel an obligation to their so-called mentors (who will also generally claim to have diverted comets or otherwise prevented catastrophes in the interim, whether they have or not). This practice has been banned in the past when pan-Galactic laws (see Galactic Council) have been upheld but tends to reappear in less civilised times. Practice variously referred to as Prepping, Lifting or Aggressive Mentoring. Local-relevant terminology: aHuman rHuman (advanced and remainder Human).

And that was just the start. He scratched his head. Too many long words. And this wasn’t even an adult pedia. Maybe he should have found the not-so-big kids’ site.

They were landing. Wow! He hadn’t even noticed they were near the ground. The desert was covered with fliers of different sizes and there were lots in the air too and lots of people.

They got out and walked across the sand though a lot of people stayed in their fliers. He got to go on Uncle Slovius’s shoulders again.

Away in the distance in the centre of a big circle was a tower with a big blob on top and that was where the bad machine was which had been found hiding in a cave in the mountains and caught by the Cessoria. (The Cessoria and the Lustrals caught bad machines. He’d tried watching Lustral Patrol a few times but it was too much for old people with talk and kissing.)

The bad machine in the blob on top of the big tower was allowed to make a speech but it was too full of long words. He was getting bored and it was very hot. No toys! Uncle Slovius said “Shush’ at him, twice. He sort of tried to pretend-strangle Uncle Slovius with his thighs and knees to get back at him for going “Shush’ twice, but Uncle Slovius didn’t seem to notice. Mum and Dad were still talking quietly, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads at each other as usual. Great-uncle Fimender and the two old-lady girlfriends had stayed in the flier.

Then Lustrals in a flier — humans and a whule like a big grey bat — said things, then at last it was time and the bad machine was killed but even that wasn’t very good, the blob on top of the tower just went red and made lots of smoke and then there was a big bright flash but not that big or bright and then there was a bang and bits fell down, with smoke, and some people cheered but mostly there was silence, just the bang being an echo round the mountains.

When they got back to the flier Great-uncle Fimender had very red eyes and said in his opinion they had just seen a terrible crime committed.

* * *

“Ah, young Taak. Now then, what is this nonsense about not being able to delve properly, by which of course one means remotely?”

Braam Ganscerel, Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon and therefore the most senior Seer of all — and Fassin’s future paterfamilias-in-law — was tall and thin and maned in white hair. He looked younger than he was, but then he was nearly seventeen hundred years old by the most obvious way of reckoning such matters. He had a sharp, angular face with a large nose, his skin was pale, waxy and translucent and his fingers and hands were long and fragile-seeming. He habitually walked and stood with his head back and chest out, as though he had long ago vowed not to appear stooped as he grew into great old age and had gone too far in the other direction. This curious stance meant that his head was angled so far back on his neck that he had no choice but to look down his splendidly monumental nose at those he talked with, to or at. He held two long shining black staffs as though just returned from — or about to set off for -some particularly fashionable ski slopes.

With his long, bunned white hair, pale complexion and simple but elegantly cut Seer robes — black puttees, pantaloons and long jacket — he contrived to look appealingly frail, sweetly elderly, breathtakingly distinguished and only a little less authoritative than a supreme deity.

He swept into the senior officers’ mess of the heavy cruiser Pyralis in a clatter of clicks from his twin staffs and boot heels, attended by a pale train of half a dozen junior Seers — half of them men, half of them women, all of them greyly deferential — and, bringing up the rear, the gangly, smiling form of Paggs Yurnvic, a Seer whom Fassin had helped teach but who, having spent less time subsequently in the slowness of actual delving than Fassin had, was now older in both adjusted time and appearance.

“Chief Seer,” Fassin said, standing and executing a formal nod that just avoided being a bow. The heavy cruiser was taking their party to Third Fury, the close-orbit moon of Nasqueron from which they would delve — either all remotely, or, if Fassin had his way, through a combination of remote and direct presences.

Braam Ganscerel had insisted that his years and frailty made a high-gee journey to the moon out of the question — esuits, life-pods and shock-gel notwithstanding — and so the ship was making a gentle standard one gee, creating what felt like about twice ’glantine’s gravity and a fraction less than Sepekte’s. Even this standard gee, Braam Ganscerel let it be known, necessitated that he use both his staffs to support himself. This was, however, in the current grave circumstances, a sacrifice he felt it was only right and proper and indeed required that he make. Fassin thought it made him look like a stilter, like a whule.

“Well?” the Chief Seer demanded, stopping in front of Fassin. “Why can’t you remote delve, Fassin? What’s wrong with you?”

“Fear, sir,” Fassin told him.

“Fear?” Braam Ganscerel seemed to experiment with putting his head even further back than it already was, found it was possible, and left it there.

“Fear of being shown up by you, sir, as a merely competent Slow Seer.”

Braam Ganscerel half-closed one eye. He looked at Fassin for a while. “You’re mocking me, Fassin.”

Fassin smiled. “I delve better direct, Braam. You know that.”

“I do,” Ganscerel said. He turned with a sort of staccato grace and let himself flop into the couch where Fassin had been sitting, watching screen news. Fassin sat too. Paggs perched on one arm of the next-nearest couch and the rest of Braam Ganscerel’s retinue sited themselves nearby according to some arcane pecking order.

Fassin nodded at Paggs. “Seer Yurnvic,” he said with a smile and a formality he hoped Paggs wouldn’t take seriously.

Paggs grinned. “Good to see you, Fass.” That was all right, then.

“However, we must do this together, I believe,” Braam Ganscerel said, looking ahead at the wall screen, where the news went silently on. The funerals were taking place of some more of the Navarchy people who’d died in the attack on the dock-habitat at Sepekte’s trailing Lagrange. Ganscerel had let one of his twin staffs rest on the couch beside him, but still held the other. He waved it at the screen and it obligingly went back to being a bulkhead again. The heavy cruiser’s senior officers’ mess was a large space, but much broken up by vertical columns and diagonal reinforcing struts. Like the rest of the vessel it was quite comfortable by human standards, though Colonel Hatherence had had to be content with a cabin that was extremely cramped for an oerileithe. She had been offered passage on an escorting cruiser with more suitable accommodation but had declined.

“We can be together,” Fassin said. “You and Paggs remotely, the Colonel and I directly. That way we’re backed up so if anything happens to either group—”

“Ah,” Ganscerel said. “You see, young Taak, this is the point. If we are all on Third Fury, with this fine vessel and its escort craft to protect us, we shall all be safe. You wish to take a tiny gascraft into the unending violence of the planet’s atmosphere. A dangerous enterprise at the best of times. In wartime, positively foolhardy.”

“Braam, the old portal was protected by an entire fleet and it still got blasted. Third Fury might move, but it moves very predictably. If somebody did want to attack it they could accelerate a small rock to just under light speed and send it on an intercept course. If that happens, the only way a heavy cruiser is going to help is if by some million-to-one chance it happens to be in the way at the time and takes the hit itself. As nobody’s going to surround the entire moon with a shell of ships, I think it’s unwise to rely on a few war craft to protect us from something there’s almost no defence against.”

“Why would anybody target a moonlet like Third Fury?” Paggs asked.

“Indeed,” Ganscerel said, as though he had been just about to ask that very question.

“No good reason,” Fassin said. “But then a lot of places there’s been no good reason to hit have been getting attacked recently.”

“This might well include Nasqueron itself,” Ganscerel pointed out.

“Which can absorb a lot more punishment than Third Fury.”

“You might still be targeted.”

“If I’m in there in a gascraft, even with Colonel Hatherence riding shotgun, I should be effectively untraceable,” Fassin told them.

“Unless,” Paggs said, “she’s supposed to be in constant touch with her superiors.”

“And that might be the real reason we are all expected to stay together on Third Fury, delving remotely,” Ganscerel said, sighing. He looked at Fassin. “Control. Or at least the illusion of it. Our masters are fully aware how important this mission is, even if they think themselves for the moment above explaining its precise nature to all who need to know. They are naturally terrified that if it goes wrong some of the blame will stick to them. Really, it is all up to us: a bunch of academics they’ve never particularly cared about or for, even though -’ Ganscerel looked round the assembled junior Seers “- being a centre of Dweller Studies represents the only thing which makes Ulubis in any way remarkable.” He directed his gaze on Fassin again. “There is very little they can do, therefore they will attend with extreme diligence to what trivial matters they are able to affect. With us all apparently safe on Third Fury protected by a small fleet of warships, they will feel they are doing all they can to assist us. If they let you go down into Nasqueron, and something does go wrong, they will be blamed. In that they are right.”

“It won’t work, Braam.”

“I think we have to try,” the older man said. “Look.” He patted Fassin’s arm. Fassin was dressed in his Shrievalty major’s uniform and feeling awkward amidst fellow Seers. “Have you tried remote delving recently?”

“Not for a long time,” Fassin admitted.

“It’s changed,” Paggs said, nodding. “It’s much more lifelike, if you know what I mean; more convincing.” Paggs smiled. “There have been a lot of improvements over the last couple of centuries. Largely thanks to the Real Delving movement, frankly.”

Oh, Paggs, flattery? Fassin thought.

Ganscerel patted his arm again. “Just try it, will you, Fassin? Will you do that for me?”

Fassin didn’t want to say yes immediately. This is all beside the point, he thought. Even if I didn’t know there was a potential threat to Third Fury, the argument that matters is that the Dwellers we need to talk to just won’t take us seriously if we turn up in remotes. It’s about respect, about us taking risks, sharing their world with them, really being there. But he mustn’t seem intransigent. Keep some arguments back; always have reserves. After a moment he nodded slowly. “Very well. I’ll do that. But only as a trial delve. A day or two. That’ll be enough to feel any difference. Then we have to make a final decision.” Ganscerel smiled. They all did.

They had a very pleasant dinner with the senior officers of the small fleet taking them to Third Fury.

Fassin got Ganscerel alone at one point. “Chief Seer,” he said. “I will do this remote delve, but if I feel it’s not good enough I’m going to have to insist on going direct.” He gave Ganscerel space to say something, but the old man just looked him in the eye, head thrown back. “I do have authority,” Fassin continued. “From the briefing, from Admiral Quile and the Complector Council. I realise it’s been compromised by people in-system coming to their own conclusions about the best way to tackle this problem, but if I think I need to, I’ll go as high and wide as I can to get my way.”

Ganscerel thought for a while, then smiled. “Do you think this delve — or delves, this mission — will be successful?”

“No, Chief Seer.”

“Neither do I. However, we must make the attempt and do all we can to make it successful, even so, and even though failure is probably guaranteed. We must be seen to do what we can, attempt not to offend those above us, and aim to protect the good name and the future prospects of the Slow Seers in general. These things we can definitely do. You agree?”

“So far, yes.”

“If you genuinely believe that you must delve directly, I shall not stand in your way. I shall not back you, either, because to do that in my position would be to tie myself too directly to a course of action I still regard as fundamentally foolhardy. In any other set of circumstances I would simply order you to do as your most senior Chief Seer tells you to do. However, you have been instructed from on high — from extremely on high -Fassin Taak, and that does alter things somewhat. However. Try this remote delve. You might be surprised. Then make your own mind up. I won’t stand in your way. The responsibility will be entirely yours. You have my full support in that.” With a wink, Ganscerel turned away to talk to the heavy cruiser’s captain.

Fassin reflected that being given full support had never felt so much like being hung out to dry.

The Pyralis blazed with its own trailed aurora as it entered the protective magnetombra of Third Fury, a little twenty-kilometre-wide ball of rock and metal orbiting just 120,000 kilometres above Nasqueron’s livid cloud tops. The gas-giant filled the sky, so close that its rotund bulk took on the appearance of a vast wall, its belts and zones of tearing, swirling, ever-eddying clouds looking like colossal contra-rotating, planet-wide streams of madly coloured liquid caught whirling past each other under perfectly transparent ice.

Third Fury had no appreciable atmosphere and only the vaguest suggestion of gravity. The heavy cruiser could almost have docked directly with the Seer base complex on the side of the little moon which always faced Nasqueron. However, a troop landing craft took them from one to the other. The Pyralis lay a few kilometres off, effectively another temporary satellite of the gas-giant. Its escort of two light cruisers and four destroyers took up station a few tens of kilometres further out in a complicated cat’s cradle of nested orbits around the moon, slim slow shadow shapes only glimpsed when they passed in front of the planet’s banded face.

Third Fury had been constructed, or converted, from an already existing moonlet, billions of years earlier, by one of the first species to pay homage at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. Given that Dwellers were the most widespread of the planet-based species of the galaxy, with a presence in almost all gas-giants — themselves the most common type of planets — the fact that out of those ninety million-plus Dweller-inhabited super-globes there were exactly eight with populations willing to play host to those wishing to carry on more than the most fleeting conversation with their inhabitants spoke volumes — indeed, appropriately, libraries — about their almost utter lack of interest in the day-to-day life of the rest of the galactic community.

It was, though, only almost utter; the Dwellers were not perfectly anything, including reclusive. They sought, gathered and stored vast quantities of information, albeit with no discernible logical system involved in the acquisition or the storage, and when quizzed on the matter seemed not only completely unable to present any obvious or even obscure rationale for this effectively mindless accumulation of data, but even genuinely puzzled that the question should be asked at all.

There had also, throughout recorded time — even discounting the notoriously unreliable records kept on such matters by the Dwellers themselves — always been a few of their populations available for discourse and informational trading, though this was invariably only granted on the eccentric and capricious terms of the Dwellers. Since the end of the First Diasporian Age, when the galaxy and the universe were both around two and a half billion years old, there had never been no working centres of Dwellers Studies, but in the following ten and a half billion years there had never been more than ten such centres operating at any one time either.

Acceptable companions came and went.

The Dwellers were of the Slow, the category of species that stuck around in a civilised form for at least millions of years. The people they let come and visit them and talk to them, and with whom they were prepared to trade information, were usually numbered amongst the Quick, the kind of species that often counted its time as a civilised entity in tens of thousands of years, and sometimes not even that long. The Dwellers would tolerate and talk to other Slow species as well, though normally on a less regular and frequent basis. The suspicion was that the Dwellers, for all their fabled patience — no species colonised the galaxy at speeds averaging less than one per cent of the speed of light (not counting stopovers) unless it was supremely patient — could get bored with the species that came to talk to them, and by selecting only those numbered amongst the Quick they ensured that they would never have to endure for too long a time the attentions of people they only looked forward to seeing the back of. Just wait a bit and — in a twinkling of an eye by Dweller standards — their troublesome guests would evolve out of nuisancehood.

For the last sixteen hundred years or so — barely half a Dweller eye-twinkling — humans had been adjudged as acceptable confidants for the Dwellers of Nasqueron in the system of Ulubis, their presence mostly tolerated, their company usually accepted, their safety almost always guaranteed and their attempts to talk to the Dwellers and mine their vast but defiantly imaginatively organised and indexed data shales met with only the most formal of obstructiveness, the lighter forms of derision and the least determinedly obfuscatory strategies.

That such playful coynesses, such nearly-too-small-to-measure diffidences and such gentle, barely-meriting-the-name hindrances appeared to the humans concerned to be obstacles of monumental scale, hideous complexity and inexhaustibly fiendish invention just went to show who’d been doing this for most of the lifetime of the universe and who for less than two thousand years.

Other approaches had, of course, been tried.

Bribing creatures who found the concept of money merely amusing tended to tax even the most enterprising and talented arbitrageur. The Dwellers clove to a system in which power was distributed, well, more or less randomly, it sometimes seemed, and authority and influence depended almost entirely on one’s age; little leverage there.

Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered — independently, amazingly often — did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to themselves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.

Dwellers were almost everywhere and had been there practically for ever. They had learned a few things about making war over that time, and while their war machines were believed to be as customarily unreliable — and eccentrically designed, built and maintained — as every other piece of technology they deigned to involve themselves with, that didn’t mean they weren’t deadly; usually for all concerned, and within a disconcertingly large volume.

Other species had prevailed against Dwellers on occasion. Entire planetary populations of them had been wiped out and whole gas-giants dismantled to provide the raw material for one of those monstrous megastructure projects that Quick species in particular seemed so keen on building, apparently just because they could. But the long-term results were, to date, inevitably unhappy.

Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and — when it suited them — single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when — or even geological ages after when — you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of “What the fu—?” before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.

Retaliation, where it was still possible, and on the few occasions it had been tried, led without fail towards a horribly messy war of attrition, whereupon the realisation of the sheer scale of the Dweller civilisation (if one could even call it that) and its past — and therefore probably future — longevity more often than not had a sobering effect on whatever species had been unwise enough to set themselves against the Dwellers in the first place.

Attempting to hold your local Dweller population hostage in the hope of influencing another one — or a group of others — was an almost laughably lame and even counter-productive strategy. Dwellers of any given gas-giant thought little enough of their own collective safety; giving them an excuse to show how little solidarity they felt with any other group of their own kind only led to events of particular and spectacular grisliness, for all that the genetic and cultural variation between Dweller populations was much less than that displayed by any other galaxy-wide grouping.

The long, long-arrived-at consensus, particularly amongst those still nursing civilisational bruises from earlier encounters with what was arguably one of the galaxy’s most successful species, or those with the images of what had happened to others still fresh in their data banks, was that, on balance, it was best just to leave the Dwellers alone.

Left to themselves the Dwellers disturbed nobody except occasionally themselves and those who thought too deeply about what they really represented. Their history, after all, like that of the galaxy as a whole, was one of almost but not quite uninterrupted peace and tranquillity: billions and billions of years of thankfully nothing much happening at all. In over ten billion years of civilisation there had been only three major Chaoses and the number of genuine galaxy-spanning wars didn’t even make it into double figures. In base eight!

That was a record that the Dwellers seemed to feel everybody concerned ought to feel mildly proud of. Especially themselves.

“Welcome all! Chief Seer, good to see you! Seer Taak, Seer Yurnvic. Young friends. And this must be Colonel Hatherence. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.” Duelbe, the bald, nearly spherical major-domo of the Third Fury Shared Facility, greeted them in the transit hall as the military troop carrier disengaged and turned back towards the Pyralis. A couple of the youngest Seers, who had patently never encountered the positively ball-like form of Duelbe before, stared. It was as a rule at such moments that comparisons regarding the similarity in shape of Third Fury and the major-domo of its Shared Facility came to mind. Happily, on this occasion, if they were thought they went unvoiced.

Servants took charge of luggage pallets. Hatherence shooed away retainers who offered to help her manoeuvre in the relatively confined space — the dome-like hall, like the rest of the mostly underground facility, had been rebuilt on a human scale since the departure of the last species to be granted Seer status, with little spatial concession to other, effectively larger species. Colonel Hatherence was happy to float where she could without assistance, thank you, using trim-vanes on the outside of her discus of esuit to propel her from place to place.

“Ah!” Braam Ganscerel announced loudly, bouncing along the hall’s floor in long floating strides, idly fending himself off the ceiling above with casual prods of one staff like some strangely graceful, if inverted, pole vaulter. “That’s better! One rarely appreciates gravity so much as when faced with so little of it, eh, Duelbe?”

The major-domo smiled broadly, even though Fassin knew he must have heard the old man say this a dozen times or more. The retinue of junior Seers apparently hadn’t, and gave every impression of being barely able to contain their hearty guffaws within their aching sides.

The three double discs soared above a great curved canyon of cloud sliced deep within what looked like a convex bank of blood-red snow a hundred kilometres high. Much further above, a sky of rushing yellow streamers afforded brief glimpses of a wanly cerise sky, dotted with the spike-points of stars and, occasionally, a single, visibly sky-crossing moon like a soft brown snowball. The formation of flying machines curved across towards the blood-red bank of vapour and disappeared into it.

Senses shifted. He felt himself reaching out with a slick effortlessness into mag and rad, grav-grad and radio, pulling in a composite picture of his environment thousands of kilometres in diameter and hundreds deep, placing him with pin-sharp clarity in a great reticulated accumulation of magnetic fields, radiation and gravitational gradient, all overlaid on the wide-light image still available and the jelly-like ghost-vista of sound-scape.

Still taking the lead from Paggs, leading the trio, they dived towards a sharp thermocline coming into view a dozen klicks down.

They flew out into a wide bubble of relative sight-clarity, then into a squall of water snow. They dived deeper, through a band of pressure and temperature where water rain fell, pattering hard against the skins of their whirling double discs, then on down, down into even wide-light darkness, down to the warm hydrogen slush where the discs floated like giant double-cone yo-yos, bobbing, steaming, flickering signals to each other.

· So, what do you think, young Taak? Good to be home?

· A fascinating experience, Fassin agreed. — We’re, what? He double checked his internal navigation instrumentation. — Two equatorial sats along and a band up?

· Now, Fass, Paggs began.

· So if I do this — Fassin sent, and lunged his double disc towards Paggs’s. Paggs had guessed what was coming and already started to move away, flinching backwards and up. Fassin’s machine seemed to dart towards the other Seer’s remote craft, then draw back, stopping just short of where Paggs’s machine had been. — You’ve got just enough time to get out of the way, Fassin pointed out reasonably.

· Seer Taak… Braam Ganscerel began.

· Whereas if I did something similar on the far side of the planet, Fassin continued, — at the far end of a whole chain of sats, the best part of a full light second away even without any processing delays, we might both now be listening to our remotes telling us that, at best, I just voided their warranties.

· Fassin, Ganscerel sent with a sigh. — I think we’re all aware of the speed of light and the diameter of the planet. And these remotes are anyway not completely stupid, or unprotected. They have an extremely sophisticated collision-avoidance system built into them. One we had to clear specifically with your friends in the Shrievalty to have built in, it’s so close to… to being clever.

· But if a Dweller points a laser at you for fun, Fassin asked,

— just to see if you’ll flinch, what good is any collision-avoid-ance system to you then?

· Perhaps, Ganscerel suggested mellowly, — one ought not to mix with the kind of Dweller who would be likely to act in such a manner in the first place.

Except they’re the ones that are most likely to share interesting stuff with you, old man, not the desiccated, harmless but clueless pixie-brains you tend to spend your time flattering, Fassin thought. He was fairly certain that it was just a thought. People always worried that in theory in VR you might say something you only meant to think, but he wasn’t so rusty in the techniques of remote delving that he was truly concerned. It might, anyway, even do Braam Ganscerel some good to hear a few politely unspeakable things now and again.

· Perhaps, indeed, Chief Seer, was all he said.

· Hmm. Let’s step out, shall we?

They returned to the reality of a remote-send suite buried deep in the Third Fury Facility, blinking in the light as technicians helped to unclip them from the couches, pushing themselves forward to clear the half-domes of the NMR assemblages, handing back earpieces and simple black velvet blindfolds, flexing and stretching as though they’d been under for a genuinely long delve rather than a mere hour or so at a one-to-one time ratio.

Paggs worked his fingers, undoing the last couple of soft tabs that connected him to the thin pneumo-tubes which had both sensed his movements and would have prevented him from throwing himself right off the couch in the event that he’d performed any especially energetic actions.

Ganscerel lay with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and letting the technicians detach him from the machinery.

Paggs glanced over. “Are we convincing you at all, Fass?”

“You’re convincing me it’s even easier to remote delve these days than it used to be.” Fassin levered himself from the couch with the steady application of force from one small finger and let himself float very gently towards the floor. “I would have taken your word for it.”

“So, you only got one-third of the volumes concerned, young Taak,” Ganscerel said.

Fassin was giving a very private briefing in an engineering store off the secondary ship hangar. Ganscerel had wanted it conducted in his quarters but there wasn’t a way of squeezing the colonel in there. Present were Fassin, Ganscerel, Paggs and Colonel Hatherence. Fassin wanted them each to know as much as he did — or at least as much as he thought they ought to know — about what he had found on his long-ago delve and what they would be looking for on the one they were hoping to begin the following day.

“Yes,” he said. “I traded some high-definition images of Earth Twentieth-Century European Expressionist paintings for -amongst a lot of other stuff — what was catalogued as a tri-trans-lated text of a pre-Third Chaos Lutankleydar epic poem, a private, unpublished work by — or perhaps commissioned by -a Doge of the Enigmatics. It was all double-encrypted and compressed but it was known to be in three volumes. I got three volumes from Valseir, only — as it turned out years later, when it was finally de-mangled by the Jeltick — what I’d been given wasn’t Volumes One, Two and Three. It was Volume One, three times over, in three separate languages. And it wasn’t by an Enigmatic Doge either.

“One of the volumes was in a previously known but untranslatable Penumbral language from the time of the Summation. When the translation was made it acted as a Rosetta; gave the key to a lot of other stuff, and that sidetracked everybody for a while. Then some pin-eyed Jeltick scholar spotted a note at the end, buried in the appendices in a crude but related slang-language, obviously added later, but not much later, that basically said the whole thing had been written during the Long Crossing of the Second Ship, by an Outcast Dweller skilled in the Penumbral language, and that, yes, of course there was a Dweller List, they — the ship, or its crew — had the key to it, and it would be included in Volume Two or Three of this epic poem. It was also, of course, in the ship, and the ship was heading for the Zateki system. That’s why the Jeltick sent an expedition straight there as soon as they had the translation.”

“Why not come here, to Nasqueron, where they might have found the Third Volume?” Paggs asked, smiling.

“Because the Shrievalty hadn’t told them where the data had come from. Whether this was oversight or deliberate we haven’t been told. The Jeltick may have guessed it was from a Dweller Studies centre but they couldn’t be sure whether it was or not and, if so, which one. They probably did start making inquiries, but they didn’t want to alert anybody else to the importance of what they had. Don’t forget, the information had been copied and re-copied — it was lying about in data reservoirs all over the civilised galaxy. Quite possibly people had even already translated and read the main text but just hadn’t got round to the appendices, where the all-important note was. The slightest hint that there was anything of strategic interest in that tranche and everybody else would have dusted it off, read it and — bang — the Jeltick would have lost their edge. So they fuelled and tooled and set sail for Zateki instead.”

“This could all be a hoax, you know,” Ganscerel said, snorting. He adjusted his robes, frowning deeply. “Ido believe I detect the laboured and tortuous signature of Dweller humour here. This could just be a joke at the expense of anyone foolish enough to fall for it.”

“It could indeed, sir,” Fassin agreed. “But we have our orders and we have to make the effort, just in case it is all true.”

“So we are looking for the remaining two volumes of this… what is it called, exactly?” Colonel Hatherence asked.

“Best translation,” Fassin said, “is, The Algebraist. It’s all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home… all that stuff.”

“And what is or was this Long Crossing?” Ganscerel asked irascibly. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“The voyage back home from what humans used to call the Triangulum Nebula,” Fassin said, with a small smile.

“Well,” Ganscerel said, frowning once more. “We are not really much further forward, are we? And what, pray, do we call the Triangulum Nebula now, Seer Taak?”

“We call it the Lost Souls II Galaxy, Chief Seer. The crossing was called the Long Crossing because it took thirty million years. The outward journey allegedly took almost no time, because it was conducted through an intergalactic wormhole, the portal location of which is amongst those included in the Dweller List.”

Hervil Apsile, Master Technician of the Third Fury Shared Facility, ran the ultrasonic hand-held over the gascraft’s starboard nacelle one more time, smiling with some satisfaction at the smooth line on the screen. Above his head, one of the Shared Facility’s drop ships stood on extended legs, a squat lifting-body shape, hold doors open. To one side, the main hangar’s transparent dome showed a vast darkness, fitfully illuminated by long lighting flashes like sheets of tipped diamond catching the light of a dim blue sun.

“Checking for scrits, Hervil?” Fassin asked, approaching by bounce along the fused-rock floor.

Apsile grinned at the sound of Fassin’s voice but watched the hand-held’s screen until he’d got to the end of the seam he was inspecting. He switched the machine off and turned to Fassin. “Just the standard varieties detected so far, Seer Taak.”

Scrits were the almost certainly mythical creatures which Dwellers blamed when anything went badly wrong anywhere in their vicinity. The humans who had lately taken up the baton of Dweller Studies had adopted early on the idea of scrits to account for the high degree of malfunctions any interaction with — or indeed near — the Dwellers seemed to involve. It was either that or accept that the Dwellers’ endemic technological carelessness and congenital lack of enthusiasm for keeping machinery in reliably working order was somehow contagious.

Fassin patted the dark flank of the fat, arrowhead-shaped gascraft. This was his own machine, designed specifically for and partly by Fassin himself. It was about five metres long, four across the beam if you included the outboard manoeuvring nacelles and a little under two metres in height. Its smooth form was broken only by the shut lines of its various manipulators and manoeuvring impellers, a few sensor bulges, and the rear power assembly, vanes currently stowed. Fassin rubbed his hand over its port tail fin. “All prepped and ready, Herv?”

“Entirely,” Apsile said. He was Nubianly black, slim but muscled, sleekly bald. Only a few lines round his eyes made him look remotely as old as he was, which was very. Every year or so, before his annual depilatory treatment — he thought gene treatment too invasive — a white micro-stubble would start to appear on his scalp, giving his head the appearance of a bristling star field. “And you?” he asked.

“Oh, prepped and ready too,” Fassin told him. He’d just come from the day’s final briefing, with the Dweller Current State people. It was their challenging brief to try and keep abreast of what was going on in the sheer and utter chaos that was Dweller society and, as a sideline, keep track of where the major Dweller structures, institutions and — especially — Individuals Of Interest were at any given moment.

The news was not good: a formal war was brewing between Zone two and Belt C, at least one long-term storm structure between Zone one and Belt D was collapsing while two were building elsewhere, and the movements of IOIs recently had been particularly fluid. One might even say capricious. As for the whereabouts of choal Valseir, well. Nobody had seen anything of the fellow for centuries.

Dwellers had always been hard to follow. In the past people had tried setting drone remotes on individuals to keep tabs on them. However, Dwellers regarded this as a gross intrusion on their privacy and had an uncanny ability to spot and destroy any such platforms, micro-gascraft or bugs, no matter how small or clever they were. Dwellers also sulked. When people had the temerity to try anything so underhand, cooperation was withdrawn. Sometimes over an entire population. Sometimes for years.

The Slow Seers of Nasqueron had a pretty good relationship with the local Dwellers. By Dweller Studies standards it was almost close, but only because the Seers tried to interfere as little as possible with Dweller life. In return the Dwellers were relatively cooperative, and broadcast a daily update on the location of their most important cities, structures and institutions. This eight-and-a-bit-hourly bulletin was a byword for trustworthiness — almost a legend — in Dweller Studies, on occasion approaching accuracy rates of very nearly ninety per cent. “Things fine with Sept Bantrabal?” Apsile asked. “All well. Slovius sends his regards.” Fassin had talked to his uncle a few hours earlier, still trying to persuade him to leave the Autumn House. The time delay between Third Fury and ’glantine made a normal conversation just about possible. He’d caught up with Jaal too, on the other side of ’glantine, at her Sept’s Spring House. Life appeared relatively normal back on ’glantine, the new Emergency affecting people there less than it seemed to on Sepekte.

Apsile flicked a roll-screen from his sleeve and tapped a few patches. He looked casually up at the lifter ship poised above the little gascraft, ready to accept the smaller vessel inside its open hold and take it down to the gas-giant’s atmosphere. Fassin followed the Master Technician’s gaze. He looked at a dark shape already hanging inside the cargo space, protruding downwards from it like a thick wheel. He frowned. “That looks a lot like Colonel Hatherence,” he said.

“Not many places she’ll fit,” muttered Apsile. “Eh?” A voice bellowed. Then, quieter: “My name? Oh. Yes, that’s me. Seer Taak. Major Taak, I should say. Hello. Sorry; asleep. Well, you know, one does. Thought I’d try out this space here for size. Fits very well, must say. I shall be able to be transported to the atmosphere of Nasqueron most ably by this vessel, if needs be. Well, so I think. Think you so too, Master Technician?”

Apsile smiled broadly, revealing teeth as jet as his skin. “I think so too, ma’am.”

“There we are agreed, then.” The giant hanging discus dropped fractionally from its mountings inside the delta-shaped transporter, so that it could turn and twist towards them. “And so. Major Taak. How goes your attempt to persuade Chief Seer Braam Ganscerel that you ought to be allowed to delve directly?”

Fassin smiled. “It goes like a long-term delve, colonel; exceeding slow.”

“A pity!”

Apsile thumbed a patch on his roll-screen, clicked the screen back into his sleeve and nodded at the little gascraft. “Well, she’s ready. Want to put her up?” he asked.

“Why not?” It had become something of a tradition that Apsile and Fassin lifted the craft into the carrier. They stooped, took an end each and — very slowly at first — hoisted the arrowhead into the space above, letting their feet lift off the floor at the end to slow it down. The gascraft weighed next to nothing in Third Fury’s minuscule gravity, but it massed over two tonnes and the laws regarding inertia and momentum still applied. They were carried three metres up inside the drop ship’s hold, towards the opened arms of the waiting gascraft cradle. The Colonel’s esuit took up the space of two of the little gascraft, but that still left room for another five in the drop ship’s hold. The arrowhead snicked into place alongside the tall discus that held Colonel Hatherence. Satisfied that the arrowhead was correctly fastened in, the two men let themselves fall back to the floor. The colonel drifted down alongside them.

Fassin looked up at the sleek lines of the gascraft. How small it looks, he thought. Tiny space to spend years in… decades in… even centuries… They landed. Apsile, more experienced, got his knee-flex just right; Fassin bounced.

The giant esuit had to tilt to clear the carrier ship’s opened hold doors, toppling then coming upright again with a burr of vanes and a whoosh of air. “Imust say I myself would prefer to enter the atmosphere directly, that is to say, in fact. Indeed, in reality,” the colonel shouted.

“Yes,” Fassin said. “I would too, colonel.”

“Good luck in that!” the oerileithe boomed.

“Thank you,” Fassin said. “I suspect good luck will be necessary, if not sufficient.”

A few hours later he had just about enough time to reflect that it was bad luck which produced the opportunity they had both been looking for, before he had to flee for his life.

* * *

The others persuaded him eventually. Thay, Sonj and Mome were all going. Why not him? Not nervous, surely? Maybe just too lazy?

He wasn’t nervous or — quite — that lazy. He just wanted to stay back at the nest and bland with K, who was coming to the end of a tream, socked into a traumalyser and a linked-up subsal. She floated, lightly tethered, in the gentle stream blowing out of the air chair, slim graceful body semi-foetal, arms waving, her long, end-tied chestnut hair blossoming above her like a cobra hood, wrapping over her head then wafting back again. The NMR net was like a hand with twenty-plus slim silver fingers grasping her head from the back. The subsal’s transparent tube disappeared into a tiny neuro-taplet just behind her left earlobe. K’s eyes moved languidly behind their lids and her face seemed set in a smile.

At this stage, coming out of a long tream, it was as though she had been diving in some abyssal depths and was now swimming slowly back in through a few kilometres of sunlit shallows. You could wade out to meet the person coming in without surrendering yourself to the whole para-lucid chemical-NMR-holo-induced dream state, you could sort of snorkel with them while they still gilled, heading for the beach that was mundane reality.

· Hey, Fass! she’d sent when he first dipped in to join her, slipping on a small NMR collar and becoming part of the slowly evaporating tream. She’d been away for a day and a half; a long one. — You came to meet me? Thanks, part!

· Have fun? he asked.

— More than fun. Guess where I’ve been?

He sent a shrug. — Faintest.

— I did a delve! I treamed a delve like Seers do, into Nasqueron! Well, it wasn’t really Nasq, it was another gas-giant called Furenasyle. That’s where the chip must have been templated. You heard of Furenasyle?

· Yeah, it’s another place they do Dweller Studies. So you treamed you were there? Delving, yeah?

· Surely did. You make it sound so amazing. And, Fass, it was great! Best tream… well, second-best tream I’ve ever had! K sent a kind of complicit, sexy smirk in his direction. He guessed the tream she was referring to. They’d experienced it together. A love-tream, a joint immersion in what they felt for each other. Well, supposedly. Love treams were tacky in some ways — you could still lie about your feelings in them, and if you selected the right template from the traumalyser device and suitable accompanying chemicals from the subsal, you could pretty much guarantee a tream of surpassing, wide-eyed heart-throbbing bliss even between two people who basically hated each other. But it had been good, between the two of them. Good, but not something that he’d wanted to do again. He supposed he was suspicious of the whole Virtual Reality experience, and treaming, especially with a synched-in subsal providing appropriate synthesised chemicals for delivery to the brain, was the most immersive VR you could find. Legally or semi-legally, anyway.

· You should try it! Really! It would be like practice, don’t you think?

· I suppose. If delving is what I’m going to end up doing. I take it you’d recommend it.

· If it’s like that, sure!

Sure was what he was not. He was still young, still undecided. Should he become a Slow Seer, like everybody seemed to expect him to become, even including the people he shared the nest with on Hab 4409 (’The Happy Hab!’)? Or should he do something else entirely? He still didn’t know. The very fact that everybody thought he would become a Seer eventually, after a few wild years — and these were surely wild years, not something that you ever imagined could go on for ever or even for very long — made him all the more determined not to do what was expected of him… well, maybe “determined’ was too strong a word, he admitted. Reluctant. Made him more reluctant. He supposed that was better. Still, he might surprise them all. He might go off and do something entirely, utterly and excitingly different. He just had to experience Jots of different things until he found the right thing, was all.

· Listen, I’m probably going with the others to the protest.

Well, unless you need me, you know…

· Good for you! I don’t mind. You go. I’d come too, but I need to ramp out of this shallow. That last time I steeped really crawled. Ugh!

— Okay. See you.

— Later, part!

He left the nest.

The nest — a low-gee pod of forty or so mostly small spherical rooms housing a kind of commune of (all human) gappers, nopers, treamers, trustafarians, zealers and zonkers — was in a big bunch of living spaces up near the hab’s long axis, near the (rather arbitrarily termed) “west’ end, not far beneath the suntube. The nest allegedly belonged to the mother of one of the trustafarians, though unofficially it was the Immaturian People’s Republic of Whateverness (and had semi-official paperwork and software to prove it, too).

Hab 4409 was one of a few hundred thousand habitats orbiting Sepekte. It was average size, a cylinder of re-formed asteroid material fifty kilometres long and ten across, spinning to create about two-thirds of a gee at its internal diameter surface. It turned in the unending sunlight like a giant garden roller flattening photons. Two twelve-kilometre mirror-lens systems — one at either end — faced Ulubis star like a pair of vast, unbearably thin flowers. Further mirror complexes funnelled the captured sunlight through two windows of diamond sheet into the hab’s long axis, where a final set of mirrors — moving up and down the suntube to create something like the feel of a planetary day — finally directed the light towards the internal surface. Or at least finally directed the light towards the internal surface if there wasn’t something like one of the grape-bunch-like nest complexes in the way (more mirrors).

Many more people lived in the habs than lived on planets in the system and most of the habs were somewhere near Sepekte. Hab 4409 had been a fairly liberal, free-flowing, laissez-faire, who-cares kind of place almost since its inception — as part of a horrendously intricate incumbent species asset-swap write-off dodge — two millennia earlier. Even its ultimate ownership had never fully been settled, and several generations of lawyers had gone to their plush retirements — having followed the saga of Hab 4409’s provenance and title since their days as articled clerks — still lacking a sense of closure re the above.

So the place attracted drifters, artists, misfits, natural exiles, political and other eccentrics and slightly deranged or badly messed-up people of more or less every sort, and always had. Most were from Ulubis but some were more exotic and from further afield, generally trustafarians and-or gappers portaling in from the rest of the Mercatoria, taking time out between education and responsibility to relax a little. The place produced good art, it was an unofficial — but tax-deductible — finishing school for the aforesaid children of the rich (give the darling brats true freedom and let them see how empty it was, was the idea), it was a way station for those heading out to disgrace or back from perdition, and it was a halfway house for those who might or might not ever again contribute anything useful to society but who just might galvanise it fundamentally. (And, if you wanted to be really paranoid about stuff, it was — as far as the authorities were concerned — a relatively easy-to-watch and even easier-to-close-down sump for dangerous ideas: a radical trap.) It was useful, in other words. It fulfilled a purpose, if not several. In a society as large as that which existed around Ulubis, somewhere had to provide that sort of service.

People were people. Some would always be straight, some would always be a bit twisted, but they all had some sort of part to play, and they were all in some sense valuable, were they not?

But now the fucking Mercatoria, the fucking Ascendancy or fucking Omnocracy, or whatever they fucking were, the fucking Hierchon (more likely, one of his new rotational crop of advisers who saw a way to make some money and gain some extra power), or the Peregal below him or Apparitor below him or just the Diegesian gimplet who was actually nominally the governor or mayor or whatever he was supposed to fucking be (his post, his presence and his protecting bully boys only here at all thanks to an earlier dispute over who controlled what, resulting in a grubby, century-old compromise), anyway the fucking big boys, the fucking people who owned fucking everything or thought some fucker ought to own fucking everything had decided, decreed, deemed that proprietorship of the whole fucking place — and that of lots of other similar habs in similar situations of disputed\uncertain\dubious\happily contingent ownership — should pass to what they called a properly accredited and responsible authority. Which basically meant them. Or if not them, their chums. Somebody who took things like ownership and rent-gathering and petty law-enforcement and so on seriously. It was the law-makers, the law-givers, being outlaws, and it would not be allowed to stand, it would not be allowed to pass, it would not go unchallenged, it would not go into the local statutes without a serious fucking challenge. These people, for whatever fuckwit reason, were destroying part of what was good about the habs, about Sepekte-Orbit, about Ulubis system, about the society they were all in the end a part of. Ultimately they were being stupid and self-destructive, and all that was required was that the people who could see all this clearly — because they were right here, at the sharp end, at the cutting edge — pointed this out to them. They were all on the same side in the end, it was just that sometimes the fuckers in authority got too far away from the reality of life as the mass of people lived it, and that was when you had to make a stand, make a point and make yourself heard.

So they went to the protest, down the friction tubes and the bungees and along the tramways to the central plaza and the makings of a great crowd.

“You just have to think about it,” Mome said as they walked the last street into the plaza. “The Beyonders never attack habs, never attack whole cities, never attack anything big and easy and defenceless. They attack the military and the authorities and big infrastructure stuff. Their attacks, their violence, their military strategy is a discourse amenable to analysis if one is prepared to approach it shorn of propagandistic preconceptions. And the message is clear: their argument, their war is with the Mercatorial system, with the Ascendancy and the Omnocracy and the Administrata and not with the common people, not with us.”

“Resent being called common!” Sonj protested. “Erring on the side of generosity including you in the category ‘people’, Sonj,” Mome shot back. Mome was a little guy, pale, intense and always slightly hunched, as though perpetually preparing either to pounce or duck. Sonj was huge; a big bumbling dark brown geezer of changeable moods and intensely curly short red hair who only looked at home or even slightly graceful in low gee.

“Doesn’t necessarily make them the good guys,” Fassin insisted.

“Makes them people open to reason, people capable of indulging in meaningful dialogue,” Mome said. “Not just mad fuckers to be put down like vermin, which is pretty much what we’re told they are.”

“So what’s stopping them talking to us?” Fassin asked.

“Us,” Mome said. “Takes two to talk.”

They all looked at him. Mome was known to talk a lot. Sometimes to audiences who had, basically, long since fallen asleep. He shrugged.

“My cousin Lain—” Thay said.

“Another one?” Mome asked, feigning incredulity.

“Sister of cousin Kel, half-sister of cousin Yayz,” Thay explained patiently. She was Sonj’s part, also generously made; awkward in low gee but bouncily agile on the hab’s internal surface at two-thirds of a gee. “My cousin Lain,” she continued determinedly, “the one in the Navarchy, says that she reckons the reason the Beyonders attack so much at all is because if they don’t the Navarchy and the Summed Fleet goes after them. And we don’t just attack military stuff. She says we hit their habs. Kill millions of them. Lot of offs unhappy with—”

“Lots of whats unhappy with?” Mome asked.

“Lots of offs,” Thay repeated.

“I got the word,” Mome repeated with a sigh, “I just didn’t get the meaning.” He snapped his fingers. “Wait. Short for ‘officers’, right?”

“Correct.”

“Brilliant. Carry on.”

“Lot of offs unhappy with this,” Thay said again, “so the “yonds — the Beyonders — just attack us to keep us on the defensive.” She nodded once. “That’s what my cousin Lain says.”

“Ayee! Crazy “yonding talk,” Mome said, putting his hands over his ears. “Get us all arrested.” They laughed.

“At least we have the freedom to say this sort of thing,” Fassin pointed out.

Mome did his special Hollow Laugh.

In the central plaza, Fassin greeted people, drank in the sense of solidarity and slightly edgy fun — lots of inventive costumes, towering floss-sculptures and buzzing balloonderers (trailing slogan banners, yelling chants and scattering narconfetti) — but still felt oddly apart from it all. He looked up and around, ignoring for the moment the people — mostly human — and the circle of domed and gleaming buildings.

The hab was a giant, verdant city rolled up into a spinning tube, with small hills and many lakes and criss-cross avenues between low-rise hanging-garden apartments and winding rivers and spindly towers, some arched like bows and reaching all the way up to the suntube, where they curved — or needle-eyed -round to meet towers on the far side. Bunches of nests -surrounded by mirrors, trailed with friction tubes like jungle creepers — clustered near the long axis, and dirigiblisters floated like strange, semi-transparent clouds beneath them.

Then Fassin heard some sort of shout at one edge of the crowd, nearest the palace of the Diegesian, which was the focus for the protest. He might have smelled something strange, but then that was probably just one of the cruising balloonderers disseminating some drug that Fassin’s immedio-immune system hadn’t recognised. Then he realised maybe it wasn’t, because all the balloonderers dropped suddenly, as one, out of the air. Also, the sun in the suntube went out. Which never happened. He heard lots of odd noises, some of which might have been screaming. It seemed to get cold very quickly. That was odd too. People were hitting him, with their shoulders mostly, as they went running past him, then they were falling over him, and he realised he was Fassin?, realised he was Fassin lying down, then he was Fassin getting hit again, but he was Fassin trying to get up and stand again, and he was Fassin, he was Fassin, he was on his knees and he was Fassin just about to get up from his knees onto his feet — swaying, feeling very strange, wondering what all the people were doing lying down around him — when — Fassin — he was knocked down again. By a man in armour, steel grey, with a big trunchbuster club and no face and a couple of little buzz-drones at each shoulder, spraying gas and making a high, terrible keening noise that he — Fassin! — wanted to get away from, but his nose and eyes and everything else stung and hurt and he didn’t know what to do, he was Fasssin! just standing there and the guy with the big club thing as long as a spear came up to him and he Fasssin? stupidly thought he might ask him what was going on and what was wrong with Faaassssiiinnn? wrong when the man swept his club-spear trunchbuster thing round and into his face, knocking some teeth out and sending him spinning to “Fassin?”

His name finally jolted him awake. “Back with us? Good.”

The speaker was a small man in a large chair across a cramped-looking metal desk. The room — or whatever — was too dark to see into, even with IR. The sound of the man’s voice in the space suggested it was not a big space. Fassin was aware that his face and especially his mouth hurt. He tried to wipe his mouth. He looked down. His hands could not move because his forearms were — he tried to think of the right word — shackled? They were shackled to the seat he was sitting in. What the hell was this? He started laughing.

Somebody hit him in his bones. It was like his entire skeleton was a wind chime and his flesh and muscles and organs were somewhere else, only nearby but still connected somehow and some fucker — actually, some very large group of fuckers — had taken a whole load of hammers and whacked each one of his bones really hard at the same time. The pain went almost as quickly as it arrived, leaving just a weird sort of echo in his nerves.

“What the fuck was zhat?” he asked the little man. His voice sounded comical with some of his teeth knocked out. His tongue probed the gaps. Felt like two out, one loose. He tried to remember how long it took adult teeth to grow back. The little man was quite a jolly-looking soul, with a plump, amused-seeming face and chubby, rosy cheeks. His hair was black, cropped. He wore a uniform of a type that Fassin didn’t recognise. “Are you shucking torturing me?” Fassin asked.

“No,” the little man said in a very reasonable tone of voice. “I’m just doing this to get your attention.” One of his hands moved on the desk’s surface.

Fassin’s bones clattered as though played upon again. His nerves, having experienced this twice now, decided that really this was no joke, and in fact felt extremely sore.

“All right! All right!” he heard himself saying. “Itake the shucking point. Fucking point,” he said, working out how to adapt his pronunciation to his new dental layout.

“Don’t swear,” the little man said, and hurt him again.

“Okay!” he screamed. His head hung. Snot dripped from his nose, saliva and blood from his mouth.

“Please don’t swear,” the little man said. “It indicates an untidy mind.”

“Just tell me what the f — what you want,” Fassin said. Was this real? Had he been in some sort of weird VR dream ever since he’d joined K for the coming-out-of-the-shallows end-of-tream thing earlier? Was this what happened when you got tream templates cheap, or illegally copied or something? Was this real? It felt painful enough to be real. He looked down at his legs and the hems of his shorts, all covered in blood and mucus and snot. He could see individual hairs on his legs, some standing, some plastered to his skin. He could see pores. Didn’t that mean it was real? But of course it didn’t. Treams, simcasts, VR, all depended on the fact that the mind could really only concentrate on one thing at a time. The rest was illusion. Human sight, the most complicated sense the species possessed, had been doing that for millions of years, fooling the mind behind the eyes. You thought you had colour vision, and in some detail, over this wide angle but really you didn’t; accurate colour vision was concentrated within a tiny part of the visual field, with only vague, movement-wary black-and-white awareness extending over the rest.

The brain played tricks on itself to pretend that it saw as well away from the centre of its visual target as it did right at that bull’s-eye. Smart VR used that same deception; zoom in on a detail and it would be created for you in all its pinpoint exactitude, but everything else you weren’t attending to with such concentration could safely be ignored until your attention swung that way, keeping the amount of processing power within acceptable limits.

Fassin dragged his attention away from his blood-spattered leg. “Is this real?” he asked.

The little man sighed. “Mr Taak,” he said, glancing down at a screen, “your profile indicates that you are from a respectable family and may one day even become a useful member of society. You shouldn’t be mixing and living with the sort of people you have been mixing and living with. You’ve all been very foolish and people have suffered because of that stupidity. You’ve been living in a kind of dream, really, and that dream is now over. Officially. I think you ought to go back home. Don’t you?”

“Where are my friends?”

“Mr Iifilde, Mr Resiptiss, Ms Cargin and Ms Hohuel?”

Fassin just stared at him. Shit, in all the last few months he’d been staying here he’d only known them by their first names. He supposed those were Thay, Sonj and Mome’s last names, but really he’d no idea. And there had been four, hadn’t there? Did that mean they were counting K as well? But she hadn’t been to the protest.

“They’re being held elsewhere, or they’ve been processed and released, or we’re still looking for them.” The little man smiled.

Fassin looked down at his arms, held within metal hoops. He tried to move his legs, then leaned over and looked down. His legs were shackled too. Or manacled or whatever. His mouth felt very odd. He ran his tongue round where his teeth had been, checking again. He supposed he’d have to get false ones until the new ones grew back. Or sport a piratical grin. “Why am I being treated like this?” he asked.

The little man looked incredulous. He appeared to be about to hurt Fassin again, then shook his head in exasperation. “Because you took part in a violent demonstration against the Diegesian, that’s why!” he said.

“But I wasn’t violent,” Fassin said.

“You personally may not have been. The demonstration you took part in most certainly was.”

Fassin would have scratched his head. “Is that all it takes?”

“Of course!”

“Who started the violence?” he asked.

The little man jerked his arms out to each side. His voice went very high. “Does it matter?”

Fassin had meant which side, but he could tell the little man thought he’d meant which demonstrator. He sighed. “Look, I just want to get back to my friends, to my nest. Can I go? I didn’t do anything, I got my teeth knocked out, I can’t tell you anything, or… anything…’ he said. He sighed again.

“You can go when you sign this.” The little man swivelled the screen around so Fassin could see. He looked at what he was supposed to sign, and at the fingerprint pad and camera patches on the screen which would record that it had really been him signing (or, more to the point, make a fake document take up a fraction more storage space).

“I can’t sign this,” he said. “It basically says my friends are all Beyonder agents and deserve death.”

The little man rolled his eyes. “Read it carefully, will you? It just says you have suspicions in that regard. You don’t seriously think your word would be enough to convict anybody of anything, do you?”

“Well then, why get me to—?”

“We want you to betray them!” the little man shouted, as though it was the most obvious thing ever. “We want you to turn your back on them and become a productive member of society. That’s all.”

“But they’re my friends.” Fassin coughed, swallowed. “Look, could I get a drink of water?”

“No. You can’t. And they’re not your friends. They’re just people you know. They’re barely acquaintances. You got drunk with them, got stoned with them, talked a bit with them and slept with some of them. You’ll all go your separate ways soon enough anyway and probably never keep in touch. They are not your friends. Accept that.”

Fassin thought better of debating what being a friend meant, in the circumstances. “Well, I’m still not betraying them.”

“They’ve betrayed you!”

The little interrogator swung the screen round, clicked on a few patches and swung it back. Fassin watched Thay, Sonj and Mome — all stuck in seats like the one he was secured in, and Sonj looking pretty beaten-up — say they thought that Fassin held Beyonder sympathies and was a danger to society who needed watching. They each mumbled something to that effect, signed the screen and pressed a thumb against the print patch (Sonj’s left a smear of blood).

The screenage shook him. It had probably been faked, but all the same. He sat back. “You faked that,” he said, unsteadily. The little man laughed. “Are you mad? Why would we bother?”

“I don’t know,” Fass admitted. “But I know my friends. They wouldn’t—”

The little man sat forward. “So just sign this and in the highly unlikely event that it ever crops up, just say yours has been faked.”

“So why not fake it anyway?” Fassin shouted.

“Because then you won’t have betrayed them!” the little man yelled back. “Come on! Sign and you can go. I’ve got better things to do.”

“But why do any of this?” Fassin said, wanting to cry. “Why make anybody betray anybody?”

The little man looked at him for a moment. “Mr Taak,” he said, sitting back, sounding patient. “I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they’re nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they’ll be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.”

“But—”

“Be quiet. The idiotic issue you chose to complain about -ownership of a habitat — really has nothing to do with you. It’s a legal matter, an ownership thing. You weren’t even born here and you wouldn’t have stayed beyond a few more months anyway, admit it. You should have kept out of it. You chose not to, you put yourself in harm’s way and now you’re paying the price. Part of that price is letting us know that you have made an effort to dissociate yourself from the people you were complicit with. Once you do that, you can go. Home, I would suggest. I mean to ’glantine.”

“And if I say no?”

“You mean not sign?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Then it’s taken out of my hands. You’ll go to meet people who enjoy doing this sort of thing.”

This time, when the little man moved his hand over the desk, Fassin screamed with the pain. He must have bitten his tongue. There was a taste of iron and his mouth filled with fresh blood and hot saliva.

“Because I,” the little man said wearily, “don’t.”

In the end Fassin signed. He’d kind of known he would.

The little man looked happy, and a couple of big female guards came in and helped Fassin from the chair, his bonds unfastened.

“Thank you, Mr Taak,” the little man said, and grasped his hand and shook it before they took him out of the room. “I hate all that unpleasantness, and it is always so good to see somebody being sensible. Try not to think too badly of me. Good luck to you.”

They got him showered down and fixed up and he left after a medical and a cup of soup, dressed in paper-thin overalls. He looked around when they ushered him through the doorways into what passed for outside in a hab. He’d been somewhere inside the Diegesian’s palace.

Back at the nest, turmoil. The place had been raided, trashed, everything in it broken or sprayed with stinking, vomit-inducing crowd-control goo. They went to a bar instead and didn’t really talk about anything after the protest and the crackdown. They talked instead of rumours of people being killed and others disappearing.

K wasn’t there. She’d been beaten up when the troopers came to turn the nest over. She was in a prison hospital ship for three weeks, then killed herself with a broken glass the day she was released.

It was months before Fassin learned the truth. K had been sent into a nightmare tream. Somebody who’d come with the law officers — maybe just one of them who happened to know how to handle tream gear — had found her still floating, not yet out of the delving tream, and altered the settings on the traumalyser and the subsal while some others had held her down and worked her over. Whoever did the thing with the traumalyser must have carried that sort of template chip around with them, just for such eventualities. Then they’d left her, bloody and bound, to some speeded-up nightmare of horror, rape and torture.

They were all split up, doing other, mostly more responsible things when they pieced all this together. They talked about a complaint, an investigation, a protest.

Fassin went back to ’glantine and booked a place on the Seer induction course for the term after next. Then he returned to the habs, and then to Sepekte’s Boogeytown, to the roaring life, the drink and drugs and fucking and fun, and — after a while, gradually, carefully — made a few inquiries, hung out in the right places, and met certain people. Apparently he passed a few tests without realising he’d been taking them, and then one night he was introduced to a girl who called herself Aun Liss.

* * *

“Fassin!”

His name jolted him awake. Third Fury; cabin. Still night-dark. Clanging noise. The screen showed hour Four. The screen was red and flashing. Had somebody spoken?

“What?” he said, tearing the restraints away and levering himself out of bed, floating towards the centre of the cabin.

“Herv Apsile,” said a voice. Sounded like Apsile. Sounded like Apsile in a state of some excitement or distress. “We have a situation. Looks like an attack.”

Oh, shit. Fassin pulled on clothes, called up full lights. “That fucking horrendous clanging noise the alarm?”

“That’s right.”

“You in Facility Command?”

“Yes.”

“Who do we think?” A light flashed over a storage locker and it revolved, revealing an emergency esuit.

“Don’t know. Two naval units vaporised already. Get suited and—”

The lights — all the lights — flickered. The screen did not come back on. A tremor made the cabin shake. Something broke in the bathroom with a sharp crack.

“You feel that? You still there?” Apsile said.

“Yes to both,” Fassin said. He was looking at the esuit.

“Suit up and take a drop shaft to the emergency shelter.” Apsile paused. “You got that?” Another pause. “Fass?”

“Here.” Fassin started pulling all his clothes off again. “That what you’re going to do, Herv?”

“That’s what we’re both supposed to do.”

Another tremble made the whole cabin rattle. The air seemed to quake like jelly.

The alarm shut off. Somehow, though, not in an encouraging way.

The screen flashed once, screeched.

Fassin hauled the esuit out of its locker. “How’s the main hangar?” he asked.

“Intact. Whatever’s hitting us seems to be coming in from the Nasq spin-side, slightly retro.”

“So heading into the centre’s going to be putting us closer,” Fassin said. Was that a draught? He could hear a hissing sound. He clipped the esuit collar round his neck and let the gel helmet deploy. It turned everything hazy and quiet for a moment, then decided the situation wasn’t too dire yet, and opened slits for him to breathe, talk and hear through. The face-mask section thinned to near-perfect transparency.

“For now,” Apsile agreed. “If the direction of the hostile fire stays constant we’ll be coming round to face it full on in two hours.”

Fassin stepped into the esuit and pulled it up, letting it connect with the collar, adjusting to his body, huffing and settling. Very comfortable, really. “That what you want to do, Herv? Sit in a huddle with everybody else like mice in a hole hoping the cat goes away?”

“Standing orders.”

“I know. Want to guess what I want to do?” There was a pause. Another more violent tremor shook the cabin. The main door popped open, wobbling inwards, revealing the companionway outside. The pause went on. “Herv?” he asked. He looked round for anything he might want to take with him. Nothing. “Herv?”

“I’ll see you there.”

Something blazed hard and blue-white against Nasqueron’s side-lit face, turning the hangar into a harsh jagged jumble of fiercely shining surfaces and intensely black shadows. Fassin flinched. The light faded quickly, turning to yellow and orange; a small fading sun shone between the moon and Nasqueron.

Herv Apsile had got there ahead of him. He gave a quick wave and easily jumped the eight metres to the open nose-blister of the carrier craft, disappearing inside. The nose-blister closed.

“Herv?” Fassin said, trying the suit’s emergency comms. No answer. He made slow bounds for the open hold. Colonel Hatherence was already there, the tall discus of her esuit floating a fraction above the floor directly beneath the place she’d filled earlier.

“Seer Taak! I rather thought you might adopt this course!” she shouted.

Shit, Fassin thought. He’d kind of hoped the colonel would have made her way to the emergency shelter in the moon’s core, ten kilometres down, along with everybody else, like they’d all been told to. There was one drop shaft big enough, wasn’t there? Oh well. He came to a stop beneath the little arrowhead gascraft hanging in its cradle directly above. “Colonel,” he said, nodding.

Would she try to stop him? No idea. Could she? No doubt about that.

“Not sure whether to be relieved or terrified,” the colonel yelled. A manipulator arm creased out from the side of the oerileithe esuit, unfolding towards Fassin. Oh, fuck, he thought. Here we go.

“After you!” the colonel said, her arm indicating the space above.

Fassin smiled and jumped. She rose with a whirr beside him. Stopped and then braced by the ceiling of the hold, he flipped open the cockpit of the little gascraft, revealing a vaguely coffin-shaped space. He shucked the suit and unclipped the helmet.

“Out of uniform, major,” the colonel said jovially, voice echoing in the enclosed space of the upper hold. Fassin let the suit fall slowly to the floor beneath and stepped into the foot of the little arrowhead’s cockpit. “Gracious!” Hatherence said. “Are all human males of this form?”

“Just the handsome ones, colonel,” he assured her. He lowered himself carefully into the cool gel. The cockpit cover closed over him. He wriggled in the darkness, getting his neck positioned over the scanner collar. A soft light and a gentle chime confirmed all was well. He reached for the double nozzle of the gillfluid root, took a deep breath, let it out, then placed the nozzles at his nostrils.

Fassin lay back, zoning out as best he could, fighting the urge to panic, the gag response of fear as the gillfluid poured into his nose, throat and lungs like the coldest drink anybody had ever taken.

A moment of confusion, disorientation. Then the collar nestling closer against his neck and the warming gel closing over his body, tendrils seeking out ears, mouth, penis and anus. Twin stings of pain on his forearms, then another pair, one under each ear, as the blood slides went in.

“Set?” said the voice of Herv Apsile, gurgling through the still calibrating gel in his ears.

— Thoroughly, he sent back just by thinking. — And the colonel?

“I am set, also!” Even over comms, it seemed, Colonel Hatherence tended to shout.

Fassin had been wondering if they could leave her behind somehow. Probably not, then.

“Hold doors closing. Ready to go,” Apsile said.

Fassin started to become his little gascraft. It covered him, embraced him, multiply penetrated him, and in those acts offered itself up to him completely. The light from below disappeared as the hold doors closed. He could see Colonel Hatherence’s esuit hanging beside him, sense its cold and read its electromagnetic signature, just as he could feel the systems of the drop ship readying, flexing, preparing, changing as the ship nudged itself off the floor. Other senses registered an unusual wash of radiations, a faint gravity well set in a much greater, deeper one, a slather of meaningless comms shards, confused transmissions and EM signals from the Shared Facility base itself — and a sudden jolt, a transmitted faint but massive thud followed by a strange sideways, upwards-sucking movement.

He waited for Apsile to talk to them, meanwhile trying to work it out himself. Distant whirr and hiss of the carrier tanking the air in its hold.

“Sorry about that,” Apsile said mildly. “Back in control. Unconventional method of opening the hangar to vacuum there. No idea who to thank.”

— We okay? Fassin asked.

“NSD,” Apsile said, sounding mildly distracted. “No Significant Damage.”

— Let you get on with it, Fassin sent.

“Thanks.”

“Cancel relief, emphasise terror,” the colonel said.

Fassin hoped she was talking only to him. He checked through all the little gascraft’s settings and systems, settling into it as its life-support tendrils settled into him. Something like a wide array of lights seen from the bottom corner of the eye swung into focus in front of him. He called up a few read-outs and started a couple of subroutines to check that everything was working. Seemed to be.

He felt the carrier accelerate away from the moon. Patch-through to the larger ship’s senses suddenly appeared as an option on his controls and he took it.

Now he could experience pretty much what Apsile could.

Nasqueron filling the sky ahead and up, the grey-brown surface of Third Fury disappearing fast below and behind. Debris clouds. Comms shards. More than there ought to be in a properly organised fleetlet like the one that had brought them here and that had been guarding the moon. No sign of illuminating radar or other targeting give-away. Not that a civilian ship like the carrier would be able to spot any but the most glaringly obvious. No current damage flags, just records of a few small hull impacts, little more than pitting. Ship drive traces.

A sudden flare of radiation as a ship turned hard a couple of hundred klicks away, dying away. Outgoing signal loop, broadcasting their unarmed condition, claiming lifeboat status. Flash! From right behind. A near-semicircular debris cloud rising glittering from a new glowing crater maybe half a klick across on the surface of Third Fury. Three smaller craters coming into view, recent but cooled down to orange and red heat. The view twisted, overlays of lines and grids and drive symbols flickering into being.

Apsile pointed the carrier’s nose straight at Nasqueron and started a long, purposefully irregular corkscrew towards the gas-giant, accelerating the drop ship as hard as its engines would allow.

The drop ship was no sort of high-performance military unit; all it was supposed to do was take the gascraft from the Facility to the gas-giant and pick them up later. It was rugged, able to take the strain of operating inside Nasqueron’s gravity well and its various pressure environments down to the liquid-hydrogen level, and it had the power to lift itself and its charges easily enough out of Nasqueron’s grip. But it was not especially manoeuvrable, carried no armament or defensive systems and far from being stealthed had been designed from its invitation-to-tender spec, onwards to be as easy to see with as many different senses as it was possible to imagine, just so that no mischievous Dweller could crash something into it and then claim, sorry, they hadn’t seen it.

“How you doing down there?” Apsile asked. He sounded in control, unworried.

“Fine, for myself,” the colonel said.

— Ditto, Fassin sent. — Got an ETA yet?

Trips from Third Fury to Nasq. usually took about an hour. Fassin hoped they could do it in less than half that.

“With the main drive maxed we should make turnaround in about ten minutes,” Apsile said, “then decelerate for another ten and then take… hmm, another handful — five at most, I’d hope — to get deep enough into the atmosphere.”

He meant deep enough into the atmosphere to be beyond any but the most scary weapons. Obviously not counting the scary weapons the Dwellers possessed.

— Anything we can clip off that? Fassin asked.

“Maybe we could make it down in less time once we hit the cloud tops,” Apsile said. “Steeper, carrying more speed. Maybe. Hmm.” Fassin got the impression somehow that the man was rubbing his chin. “Yes, maybe, if we let the heat and stress levels creep just a tad beyond tolerance.” A pause. “Though of course that’s always assuming that the ship didn’t take any damage we don’t know about when the hangar dome got blown.”

— Always assuming, Fassin agreed.

“Master Technician,” Colonel Hatherence said, “are we being pursued or under unit-specific attack?”

“No, colonel.”

“Then I suggest we adopt your first entry profile.”

— Decision’s yours alone, Herv, Fassin sent.

“Copy.”

“Can you access any military comms traffic, Master Technician?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am, not unless they choose to target us with a clear beam or broadcast.”

“That is unfortunate. What seems to be happening?”

“Looks like there’s been some sort of firefight. Still going on, possibly. Drives spreading away from the moon, heading in the direction the hostile munitions appeared to be coming from. Woh!”

The flash attracted Fassin’s second-hand attention as well; another, even larger crater glowing white on the surface of Third Fury.

“What of the people still back within the Third Fury moonlet?” the colonel asked.

“Been listening,” Apsile said. “I’ll try and contact them direct. Give me a moment.”

Silence. Fassin watched space wheel around them through the carrier ship’s sensors. He checked the drop ship’s system profile, oriented, then searched for and found ’glantine; a tiny shining dot, far away. The sensors let him zoom in until the planet moon was a shining gibbous image, scintillating with magnification artefacts, hints of its topography just about visible. Could that be the uplands? There, that light patch — the Sea of Fines? A spark. There, back up… A tiny flash? Had he seen that?

Something colder and more invasive than any gel tendril seemed to invade him, clutching at his stomach and heart. No, surely not. Just another artefact of the system. He looked for the sensor-replay controls.

“Shit, there’s a fucking wreckage—” Apsile said, then the craft bucked and swung. Fassin, turning his focus of attention back to what Apsile was looking at saw it too now: a field of dark specks across the face of the planet ahead of them like a ragged flock of birds far in the distance. They were at near-maximum velocity. The carrier started to turn.

A rush of dark scraps, tearing by on all sides like a thin shell of soot-black snow flakes. Fassin felt his arms, held by the cloying shock-gel, attempt to draw themselves in towards his body, instinctively trying to make himself a smaller target. Then they were through. No impacts.

After a moment, Fassin felt the drop ship start to swing round to present its drive tubes towards the planet, ready to begin deceleration. “I think,” Apsile said cautiously, “that we just about got away with—”

Something slammed into them. The ship lurched — there was a concussive snap! that Fassin felt through the carrier ship, through the gascraft, even through the shock-gel. He lost the patch-through connection with the drop ship. He was back in his own little arrowhead again. They were whirling. And there was light, synched with the whirling. Light?

It was coming from below, where the hold doors were. He could see Colonel H’s esuit, hanging alongside him. Oh-oh…

The ship began to come out of the spin, steadying. The light from below faded but did not go away. It had the spectrum to be light reflected from Nasqueron. Light from the gas-giant coming in through supposedly closed doors. Fassin flipped the gascraft’s sensor ring to look straight down at the doors.

“Oh fuck,” he tried to say. There was a small but ragged hole, stuff hanging like spilled guts. The Nasqueron light was reflecting in off some polished-looking surfaces.

Force, building; very like the main drive decelerating them more or less on schedule. He retried the intercom, then broadcast a radio signal. — Herv?

“Here. Sorry about that. Hit something after all. Got her straight and rearward. Back on track. No read-outs from the hold at all, though. Including the door.”

· Think that’s where it hit. I can see a hole.

“How big?”

· Maybe a metre lateral by two.

“I too can see the hole,” the colonel told them, also joining in the radio-broadcast fun. “It is as Seer Taak describes.”

“Too small for you guys to get out of,” Apsile said.

— How’s the rest of the ship? Fassin sent.

“Holding together for now. Can’t see where whatever hit us exited, or just went on to hit inside.”

“I suspect it hit me,” Hatherence said. “My esuit casing, that is to say. Probably.”

A pause. Then Apsile said, “And… are you all right?”

“Perfectly fine. Your hold doors took most of the energy out of it and my esuit is of exceptional quality, durability and damage-tolerance. Scarcely a scratch.”

— If we can’t open the doors, we can’t get out and the whole thing’s pointless, Herv, Fassin sent.

“We can still hide in the carrier, under the clouds,” Apsile said. “I’m not getting much from the Facility. That last hit looked like it must have shaken them pretty hard. We might still be safer under the gas than hanging around out here in clear view of whoever.”

Nothing comprehensible was coming out of the Shared Facility on Third Fury, and no military vessels were talking on civilian frequencies. Interference on EM bands, a problem at the best of times anywhere near Nasqueron, was especially intense. Apsile raised a couple of the Facility’s equatorial relay satellites, but, exceptionally, could not through-patch via their transceivers and could get only static and meaningless rubbish out of them. He even tried some Dweller mirror sats, where the surprise would have been getting anything other than drivel, but there the service was perfectly normal. “Ouch,” they heard him say. “Third Fury just took another hit. We’re going in. Fairly slowly, to allow for the damage, but we’re going in.”

“Whatever you think is best, Master Technician,” the colonel said.

The carrier craft began to shudder as it met the upper atmosphere of Nasqueron, carving a glowing trail above the cloud tops. They slowed. Weight began to return to them. And kept on increasing. Creaks and ticking sounds came through the solids joining them to the drop ship. The buffeting decreased, grew and fell away again; soft whumps and crisp bangs also communicated through the drop ship’s structure announced debris being torn off the ragged surrounds of the breach in the hold doors, which glowed and sparked as the space around them filled with gas and Fassin began to detect sound in the hold again. They were getting heavy, really heavy now. Fassin could feel the shock-gel tightening around him, like the sound of snow cramping beneath your feet. He could almost sense any remaining gas bubbles in his body pancaking like blood cells. Good and heavy now…

“Master Technician,” the colonel said suddenly.

“Hold on,” Apsile said. “That—”

The whole ship shook once, then rolled suddenly.

— Herv? Fassin sent.

“Got some sort of targeting—” Apsile began, then broke off as the craft shook again and slewed wildly across the sky.

“We are indeed being targeted by something,” Hatherence announced. “Master Technician,” she shouted across the frequencies. “Are you yet able to release us?”

“Eh? What? No! I—”

“Master Technician, attempt to perform a roll or part of an internal loop on my command,” Hatherence told him. “Ishall release us.”

“You will?” Apsile shouted.

“I shall. I will. I carry weapons. Now, excuse me, and good luck.”

— Wait a minute, Fassin began.

“Seer Taak,” the colonel said tersely, “shield your senses.” The big discus hanging beside him sent a pulse of blinding blue-white light straight downward at the doors, which blew away in a brief gout of sparks. Rushing yellow-brown clouds spun by outside. Fassin’s little arrowcraft was seeing spots. It got busy shuffling its damaged sensors round for working ones. He guessed he hadn’t shielded his senses in time. He shut them down now. “Releasing in three seconds,” the colonel said. “Make your manoeuvre now if you please, Master Technician.”

A blast of radiation and a spike of heat from above coincided with a sudden roll. The cradle holding Fassin in the drop ship gave way, sending him shooting from the hold like a cannon ball. The colonel in her oerileithe esuit came whirling after him a moment later, quickly drawing level. He glimpsed the drop ship above, still rolling, then saw a violet ray appear suddenly to one side, slicing through the gas around them, searing his barely mended vision. The beam just missed the carrier craft, then clouds of yellow fog rolled quickly up between them and the drop ship and it was just him and the colonel, a tiny arrow shape and a spinning coin of dirty grey, hurtling down into the vast chaotic skies of Nasqueron.

* * *

“ ‘It is a given amongst those who care to study such matters that there is, within certain species, a distinct class of being so contemptuous and suspicious of their fellow creats that they court only hatred and fear, counting these the most sincere emotional reactions they may hope to excite, because they are unlikely to have been feigned.’ ” The Archimandrite Luseferous looked up at the head on the wall. The head stared straight across the cabin, eyes wide with pain and terror and madness.

The assassin had died not long after they’d set out on their long journey towards Ulubis, the upper set of fangs finally penetrating his brain deeply enough to produce death. The Archimandrite had had the fellow’s eyelids slit open again when the medical people said death was likely within a few days; he’d wanted to see the look on the man’s face when he died.

Luseferous had been asleep when death had finally come for the nameless assassin, but he’d watched the recording many times. (All that happened was that the man’s face stopped contorting, his eyes rolled backwards and then came slowly back down, slightly cross-eyed, while the life-signs read-out accompanying the visuals registered first the heart stopping and then a few minutes later the brain flat-lining. Luseferous would have preferred something more dramatic, but you couldn’t have everything.) He’d had the fellow’s head removed and mounted near that of the rebel chief Stinausin, pretty much in the first head’s eye line, so that was what Stinausin had to look at all day.

The Archimandrite glanced up at the staring, nameless head. “What do you think?” He looked over the passage again, lips moving but not actually reading it aloud. He pursed his lips. “I think I agree with what’s being said, but I can’t help feeling there’s a hint of criticism implied at the same time.” He shook his head, closed the ancient book and glanced at the cover. “Never heard of him,” he muttered.

But at least, he reflected, this holier-than-thou intellectual had a name. It had come to annoy Luseferous rather a lot that he didn’t have a name for the failed assassin. Yes, the fellow had failed, yes, he had paid dearly for his crime, and yes, he was dead and now reduced to a mere trophy. But somehow the fact that his name had never been revealed had begun to strike Luseferous as almost a kind of triumph for the assassin, as though successfully withholding this nugget of information meant that Luseferous’s victory over the wretch would never quite be complete. He had already sent word back to Leseum to have the matter investigated more thoroughly.

His chief personal secretary appeared behind the sheet of mirrored diamond forming the main inner door of the stateroom-study.

“Yes?”

“Sir, the Marshal Lascert, sir.”

“Two minutes.”

“Sir.”

He saw the Beyonder marshal in the primary stateroom of the Main Battle Craft Luseferous VII, his fleet flagship. (Luseferous thought terms like “battleship’ and “fleet carrier’ and so on sounded old-fashioned and too common.) He’d had the craft remodelled to provide accommodation befitting his rank, but there had come a point where the naval architects had actually started to cry because letting what they called “voids’ grow beyond a certain volume weakened the ship too much. The result was that the stateroom wasn’t really as extensive or as intimidating as he’d have liked, so he’d had some mirrors installed and a few holo projectors which made it look bigger, though he always had the nagging feeling that people could see through the illusion. The style he’d chosen was New Brutalist: lots of exposed faux concrete and rusty pipes. He’d taken a fancy to the name but had gone off the look almost immediately.

He entered with only his private secretary going before him. Guards, courtiers, admin, army and naval people bowed as he strode past.

“Marshal.”

“Archimandrite.” The Beyonder marshal was a woman, dressed in light armour which looked like it had been polished up but still gave off an impression of practicality and scruffiness. She was tall, slim and proud-looking, if somewhat flat-chested for Luseferous’s taste. Bald women always repelled him anyway. She gave a formal nod that was probably the very least acknowledgement of his status that anybody who didn’t patently hate him and-or was about to die had given him for several decades. He couldn’t decide whether he found it insulting or refreshing. Two senior officers behind her were jajuejein, currently in their standard tumbleweed configuration, no part of their glittering plate armour higher than the marshal’s waist. He suspected that the woman had been selected because she was human, just because he was; almost all the Beyonder High Command were non-human.

He sat. It wasn’t really a throne, but it was an impressive seat on a dais. The Beyonder marshal could stand. “You wanted to talk, Marshal Lascert.”

“I speak on behalf of the Transgress, the True Free and the BiAlliance. We have wanted to talk to you for some time,” the marshal said smoothly. Deep voice for a woman. “Thank you for agreeing to this meeting.”

“A pleasure, I’m sure. So. How goes your end of our little war? Last you heard, obviously.”

“It goes well, as far as we know.” The marshal smiled. Lights reflected on her bald scalp. “I understand your own campaign has gone from victory to victory.”

He waved a hand. “The opposition has been light,” he said. “Your main fleet should be at the outskirts of Ulubis system in, what? One more year?”

“Something like that.”

“This is somewhat later than we had all planned for.”

“It is a big invasion fleet. It took time to put together,” Luseferous said, trying to show that he resented her implied criticism while also giving the impression that what she thought was of no great importance to him.

They were behind schedule, though. He had personally assured these — temporary — allies of his that he would be ready to invade nearly a full half-year earlier than it now looked would be possible. He supposed it was his fault, if fault it was. He liked to keep his fleet together rather than let it split up according to speed and then re-form as needed for the invasion proper. His admirals and generals insisted (though not too strongly if they knew what was good for them) that they didn’t need all units of the fleet to be together at all times, but Luseferous preferred it. It seemed more cohesive, more impressive, just more tidy and pleasing somehow.

It also meant that the Beyonders would shoulder rather more of the responsibility for preparing Ulubis system for invasion than they might have expected, so that the invasion fleet’s job would be all the easier and the Beyonders’ — hopefully much-depleted — forces would be in a position of weakness relative to his own mass of ships.

“Still,” Lascert said, “we imagine your advance units may be attacking even now.”

“We’ve had some automated scout-warning ships and highspeed drone attack craft there or on their way for a while now,” Luseferous told her. “Always best to be prepared for any eventuality. Some needed reprogramming but we believe they should be effective in beginning the softening-up process.” He smiled. He watched her react to the clear diamond teeth. “I am a great believer in the usefulness of spreading a little panic, marshal. Better still, a lot of panic. After a long-enough exposure, people will welcome any power that brings an end to uncertainty, even if they might have resisted it before.”

The marshal smiled too, though it looked like she was making an effort. “Of course. And we thought now might be an appropriate moment to talk in more depth about what you see your strategy being once you reach Ulubis.”

“I intend to take it, marshal.”

“Indeed. Of course, it may be quite well defended.”

“I expect it might. That’s why I’ve brought such a big fleet with me.”

They were between systems, way out in the empty wilderness of near-nothingness less than a year from Ulubis. The Beyonder fast cruiser and its two escort destroyers had rendezvoused with his own fleet only hours earlier, skid-turning and matching velocities with a grace and rapidity that he could see his own naval people envied. Fine ships, indeed. Well, they had the ships and he had the systems; just another opportunity to trade, maybe. Now those three fast ships lay embedded in a fleet of over a thousand craft, even if they were rather plodding in comparison.

“May I be frank, Archimandrite?”

He gave her a good wide look at his deep red eyes. “I expect no less.”

“We are concerned at the possible level of civilian casualties if Ulubis is assaulted over-aggressively.”

Now why would she say that? Luseferous thought to himself with a sort of inward chuckle.

He looked at his private secretary, then at his generals and admirals. “Marshal,” he said reasonably, “we are going to invade them. We are going to attack them.” He smiled broadly, and could see his admirals and generals grinning along with him. “I think aggressiveness is… essential, yes?”

He could hear light laughter from one or two of his top brass. People thought that having people so in awe of you that they were frightened to tell you bad news and always laughed when you laughed (and so on) was a bad thing, and supposedly insulated you from what was really going on, but if you knew what you were doing, it didn’t. You just had to adjust your perceptions. Sometimes everybody laughed, sometimes only a few, and sometimes who kept quiet and who made a noise told you a lot more than when you asked them to just speak out and tell you the truth. It was a sort of code, he supposed. He was just lucky to be naturally adept at it.

“Aggression and judgement are both required, Archimandrite,” the marshal said. “We know you to possess both, of course.” She smiled. He did not smile back. “We merely seek an assurance that your troops will act in a manner which will bring you further praise and greater fame.”

“Praise?” the Archimandrite said. “I inspire terror, marshal. That’s my strategy. I’ve found that to be the quickest and most effective way of ensuring that people learn what is good both for them and for me.”

For glory, then, Archimandrite.”

“Be merciful for glory?”

The marshal thought about this for a moment. “Ultimately, yes.”

“I shall conquer them as I see fit, marshal. We are partners in this. You don’t tell me what to do.”

“I am not trying to, Archimandrite,” the marshal said quickly. “I accept what you must do, I am merely delivering a request regarding the manner in which it is done.”

“And I have heard your request and I will pay it all due heed.” This was a form of words Luseferous had heard somebody use once — he couldn’t remember who or where — which, when he’d thought about it, he thought was rather good, especially if you said it slightly pompously: slowly, gravely even, keeping a straight face so that the person you were talking to thought you were taking them seriously and might even hope that you would do as they had asked rather than — at best — ignore them completely. At worst — as far as they were concerned — you’d do the opposite of whatever they asked, just to spite them, precisely to prove you wouldn’t be pushed around… though that got tricky; then people might try to make you do one thing by pretending to favour another, and even without that complication you were still altering your behaviour because of something they had said, which was giving them a sort of power over you, when the whole point of everything the Archimandrite was doing was so that nobody could say they had any power over him.

Power was everything. Money was nothing without it. Even happiness was a distraction, a ghost, a hostage. What was happiness? Something people could take away from you. Happiness too often involved other people. It meant giving them power over you, giving them a hold on you that they could exercise whenever they wanted, taking away whatever it was that had made you happy.

Luseferous had known happiness and he’d had it taken away. His father, the only man he’d ever admired — even while hating the old bastard — had got rid of Luseferous’s mother when she became old and less attractive, replacing her, when Luseferous was barely into his teens, with a succession of young, erotically desirable but soulless, uncaring, selfish young women, women he’d wanted for himself but despised at the same time. His mother was sent away. He never saw her again.

His father had been an Omnocrat for the Mercatoria, in the industrial complexes of the Leseum Systems. He’d started out at the bottom, as a Peculan (cynically, the very name implied that the office-bearer would need to be corrupt to make any sort of decent living, so incurring a history of criminality that could always be dredged up against them if they ever stepped out of line later). He’d become an Ovate, worked his way through the many gradations of that estate, then ascended to the office of Diegesian, in charge of a district of a city, then a small industrial city, then a medium-sized city, then a large city, then a continental capital. He became an Apparitor when his immediate superior died in the arms of a shared lover. That lover did very well for a while — his consort, in effect — then grew demanding and met an untimely end too.

His father had never told him if he’d had her killed. Equally, he’d never told his father that the woman had lately become his lover, too.

From Apparitor his father rose to Peregal, in charge of first an orbiting fab\hab cluster, then a continent, then a sizeable moon, with all the trappings of power and wealth and glamour such a post presented in a thriving, connected set of systems such as Leseum. At this point, for the first time in his life, his father had appeared finally to appreciate the position he’d reached. He’d seemed to relax and start enjoying life.

It ended there. Finally setting himself up for the next jump, to Hierchon, his father, who had amassed a great fortune dispensing charters and contracts to the merchants and manufacturers of the many systems, took pity on a favoured Apparitor who was somewhat down on his luck, cut him in on a deal and a kickback he didn’t really need to and found himself denounced, tried and beheaded for gross corruption within a month. The same young Apparitor then took his position.

Luseferous, convinced from early on that he could never compete with his father in his own sphere, and anyway always intrigued by the nature of religion and faith, had joined the Cessoria a few years earlier. He’d been a Piteer, a junior priest, at the time of his father’s trial. They had made him one of his father’s confessors, and he’d accompanied him to the execution ring. His father had been brave at first, then he’d broken. He’d started crying, begging, promising anything (but only all the things he’d already lost). He clutched at Luseferous’s robes, howling and beseeching, burying his face. Luseferous knew they were watching him, that this moment was important for his future. He pushed his father away.

His rise through the Cessoria was swift. He would never be as powerful as his father, but he was clever and capable and respected and on an upward course within an important but not too dangerous part of one of the greatest meta-civilisations the galaxy had seen. He might have been content with that, and never put himself in a position of weakness the way his father had.

Then the Disconnect happened. A swathe of portal destruc- tion had swung across the million-star volume all around Leseum back in the time of the Arteria Collapse, leaving only the bunched Leseum systems themselves connected inside a vast volume of backwardness. The system of Leseum9 had been important, seemed vital and felt unthreatened until their own disconnect came millennia later, courtesy of some vast bicker within the ongoing chaos of the Scatter Wars, an essentially meaningless difference of opinion between three pretending sides which until then practically nobody had heard of. By the time it was all over, nobody would hear of those sides again, save as history. The damage was done, though; the portal near Leseum9 had been destroyed and an enormous volume around it had been cut off from the rest of the civilised galaxy.

Everything changed then, including what you had to do to retain power, and who might contest for absolute power.

His father, nevertheless, had taught Luseferous everything, one way or another, and one of the most important things was this: there was no plateau. In life, you were either on your way up or on your way down, and it was always better to be on your way up, especially as the only reliable way to keep going up was to use other people as stepping stones, as platforms, as scaffolding. The old saying about being nice to people on the way up so that they’d be nice to you when you were on your way back down was perfectly true, but it was a defeatist’s saying, a loser’s truism. Better to keep going up for ever, never to rest, never to relax, never to have to descend. The thought of what might happen to you at the hands of those you’d already offended, exploited and wronged on the way up — those that still lived — was just another incentive for the serious player never even to think about easing off the pace, let alone starting to fall back. The dedicated competitor would keep presenting himself with new challenges to take on and conquer, he would seek out new levels to ascend to, he would always look for new horizons to head towards.

Treat life like the game it was. This might be the truth behind the Truth, the religion Luseferous had been raised within as an obedient member of the Mercatoria: that nothing you did or seemed to do really mattered, because it was all — or might be all — a game, a simulation. It was all, in the end, just pretend. Even this Starveling cult he was titular head of was just something he’d made up because it sounded good. A variation of the Truth with added self-denial every now and again, the better to contemplate the gullibility of people. People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.

So you seemed cruel. So people died and suffered and grew up hating you. So what? There was at least a chance that none of it was real.

And if it was all real, well, then life was struggle. It always had been and it always would be. You recognised this and lived, or fell for the lie that progress and society had made struggle unnecessary, and just existed, were exploited, became prey, mere fodder.

He wondered to what extent even the supposedly feral and lawless Beyonders understood this basic truth. They let women rise to the pinnacle of their military command structure; that didn’t bode particularly well. And the marshal didn’t seem to have realised that when he’d said he’d heard her request and would pay it all due heed, it meant nothing.

“Well, thank you, Archimandrite,” she said.

Still, he smiled. “You will stay? We shall have a banquet in your honour. We have had so little to celebrate out here, between the stars.”

“An honour indeed, Archimandrite.” The marshal gave that little head nod again.

And we shall try to pick each other’s brains over dinner, he thought. My, what highbrow fun. Give me a planet to plunder any day.

* * *

— Do you have any idea where we are? the colonel signalled, using a spot-laser. They reckoned this was their most secure form of comms.

— Zone Zero, the equatorial, Fassin sent. — Somewhere ahead of the latest big storm, about ten or twenty kilo-klicks behind the Ear Festoon. I’m checking the latest update they loaded before the drop.

They were floating in a slow eddy around a gentle ammonia upwell the diameter of a small planet, about two hundred klicks down from the cloud tops. The temperature outside was rela-tively balmy by human standards. There were levels, places in almost all gas-giants where a human could, in theory, exist exposed to the elements without any protective clothing at all. Of course they would probably need to be prone and lying in a tub of shock-gel or something similar because weighing six times what their skeleton was used to coping with would make standing up or moving around problematic, their lungs would have to be full of gillfluid or the like, to let them breathe within a mix of gases which included oxygen only as a trace element, and also to let their ribs and chest muscles work under the pressure of that gravitational vice, plus they wouldn’t want to be exposed to a charged-particle shower, but all the same: by gas-giant great-outdoors standards, this was about as good as it humanly got.

Colonel Hatherence found it a bit hot, but then as an oerileithe she would be more at home closer to the cloud tops. She had already loudly pronounced her esuit undamaged and capable of protecting her anywhere from space-vacuum down to Nasqueron’s ten-kilo-klick level, where the pressure would be a million times what it was here and the temperature somewhat more than half what it was on the surface of Ulubis star. Fassin chose not to join in a mine’s-better-than-yours competition; his own gascraft was also space-capable in an emergency but untested at those depths.

He’d tried contacting Apsile in the drop ship but had come up with static. The passive positioning grid cast by the equatorial satellites was functioning but both scale-degraded and patchy, indicating there were some satellites gone or not working.

Knowing where you were in Nasqueron or any gas-giant was important, but still less than half the story. There was a solid rocky core to the planet, a spherical mass of about ten Earth-sized planets buried under seventy thousand vertical kilometres of hydrogen, helium and ice, and there were purists who would call the transition region between that stony kernel and the high-temperature, high-pressure water ice above it the planet’s surface. But you had to be a real nit-picker even to pretend to take that definition seriously. Beyond the water ice — technically ice because it was effectively clamped solid by the colossal pressure, but at over twenty thousand degrees, confusingly hot for the human image of what ice was supposed to be like — came over forty thousand vertical kilometres of metallic hydrogen, then a deep transition layer to the ten-kilo-klick layer of molecular hydrogen which, if you were of an especially imaginative turn of mind, you might term a sea.

Above that, in the relatively thin — at a mere few thousand kilometres — but still vastly complicated layers reaching up towards space, were the regions where the Dwellers lived, in the contra-rotating belts and zones of rapidly spinning gases which — dotted with storms great and small, spattered with eddies, embellished with festoons, bars, rods, streaks, veils, columns, clumps, hollows, whirls, vortices, plume-heads, shear fronts and subduction flurries — girdled the planet. Where the Dwellers lived, where everything happened, there was no solid surface, and no features at all which lasted more than a few thousand years save for the bands of gas forever charging past each other, great spinning wheels of atmosphere whirling like the barely meshed cogs in some demented gearbox a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across.

The convention was that the equatorial satellites followed the averaged-out progress of the broad equatorial zone, establishing a sort of stationary parameter-set from which everything else could be worked out relatively. But it was still confusing. Nothing was fixed. The zones and belts were relatively stable, but they shot past each other at combined speeds of what humans were used to thinking of as the speed of sound, and the margins between them changed all the time, torn by furiously curling eddies writhing this way and that, or thrown out, compressed and disturbed by giant storms like the Great Red Spot of the Solar System’s Jupiter, riding between a zone travelling one way and a belt going the other like a vast squashed whirlpool caught in some mad clash of violently opposed currents, developing, raging and slowly dissipating over the centuries that humanity had been able to watch it. In a gas-giant, everything either evolved, revolved or just plain came and went, and the whole human mindset of surfaces, territory, land, sea and air was thrown into confusion.

Add the effects of a vastly powerful magnetic field, swathes of intense radiation and the sheer scale of the environment -you could drop the whole of a planet the size of Earth or Sepekte into a decent-sized gas-giant storm — and the human brain was left with a lot to cope with.

And all this before one took into account the — to be generous — playful attitude which the Dwellers themselves so often exhibited to general planetary orientation and the help, or otherwise, conventionally seen as being fit and proper to be extended to directionally challenged alien visitors.

· I thought we’d be in the midst of them, the colonel sent.

· Dwellers? Fassin asked, studying the complex schematic of who and what might be where at the moment.

· Yes, I imagined we would find ourselves in one of their cities.

They both looked around at the vast haze of slowly swirling gas, extending — depending on which frequency or sense one chose to experience it in — a few metres or a few hundred kilometres away on every side. It felt very still, even though they were part of the equatorial zone and so being spun around the planet at over a hundred metres a second, while swirling slowly around the upwelling and rising gradually with it too.

Fassin felt himself smiling in his wrapping of shock-gel.

— Well, there’s a lot of Dwellers, but it’s a big planet.

It seemed odd to be explaining this to a creature whose kind had evolved in planets like this and who surely ought to be familiar with the scale of a gas-giant, but then oerileithe, in Fassin’s admittedly limited experience of them, often did display a kind of half-resentful awe towards Dwellers, entirely consistent with a belief that the instant you dropped beneath the cloud tops you’d find yourself surrounded by massed ranks of magisterial Dwellers and their astoundingly awesome structures (a misapprehension it was hard to imagine any Dweller even considering correcting). The oerileithe were an ancient people by human standards and by those of the vast majority of species in the developed galaxy, but — with a civilisation going back about eight hundred thousand years — they were mere mayflies by Dweller standards.

A thought occurred to Fassin. — You ever been in a Dweller planet before, colonel?

— Indeed not. A privilege denied until now. Hatherence made a show of looking about. — Not unlike home, really.

Another thought occurred. — You did receive clearance? Didn’t you, colonel?

· Clearance, Seer Taak?

· To come down. To enter Nasq.

— Ah, the colonel sent. — Not as such, I do confess. It was thought that I would be remote delving with you and your colleagues, from the Shared Facility on the Third Fury moon. Braam Ganscerel himself took the time to assure me of this personally. No objection was raised regarding such a presence. I believe that permission was in the process of being sought for me to accompany you physically into the atmosphere if that became necessary — as indeed it now has — however, the last that I heard in that regard indicated that the relevant clearances had yet to materialise. Why? Do you envisage there being a problem?

Oh, shit.

· The Dwellers, Fassin told her, — can be… pernickety about that sort of thing. Pernickety, he thought. They were liable to declare the colonel an honorary child, give her a half-hour start and set off to hunt her. — They take their privacy quite seri-ously. Unauthorised entries are severely discouraged.

· Well, I’m aware of that.

· You are? Good.

· I shall throw myself upon their mercy.

· Right. I see.

You are either quite brave and possessed of a decent sense of humour, Fassin thought, or you really should have done more homework.

· So, Seer Fassin Taak, in which direction ought we to proceed?

· Should be a CloudTunnel about four hundred klicks… that way, Fassin sent, turning the gascraft to point more or less south and slightly down. — Unless it’s moved, obviously.

· Shall we? the colonel said, drifting in that direction.

· Going to ping one of our sats, let them know we’re alive,

Fassin told her.

· This is wise?

Was it wise? Fassin wondered. There had been some sort of attack on the Seer infrastructure around Nasqueron, but that didn’t mean the whole near-planet environment had been taken over. On the other hand…

· How fast can that esuit go? he asked the colonel.

· At this density, about four hundred metres per second.

About half that, on sustained cruise.

Fassin’s arrowcraft could just about keep pace with that. Disappointing. He was still hoping to give the colonel the slip at some point. It looked like he wasn’t going to be able to just outrun her.

— Ping sent, he told Hatherence. — Let’s go.

They went, quickly. They’d got about a hundred metres away when a flash of violet light ripped the cloud apart behind them and a stark, short-lived beam-cluster splayed through the volume of gas they’d been floating within a few seconds earlier. Further beams radiated out from the initial target point, pulsing through the atmosphere in slowly spreading semi-random stabs. One flicked into existence about fifty metres from them, booming and crackling. All the rest were much further away and after a minute or so they ceased altogether.

· Somebody would seem to be ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak, the colonel sent as they flew through the gas.

· So it would appear.

The flash and EMP came a couple of minutes after that. A low, rumbling concussion caught up with them some time later.

· Was that a nuke? Fassin sent. His instruments seemed to leave no other interpretation, but he still found it hard to believe.

· I am unaware of any phenomenon able to mimic one so convincingly.

· Fucking hell.

· I float corrected. Somebody would seem to be extremely ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak.

· The Dwellers are not going to be happy, he told Hatherence. — Only they’re allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere, he explained. — And it isn’t even fireworks season.

They found the CloudTunnel about where Fassin had thought it ought to be, only a hundred kilometres out laterally and two kilometres further down: bang on by Nasqueron standards. The CloudTunnel was a bundle of a dozen or so carbon-carbon tubes like some vast, barely braided cable-cluster floating in the midst of an unending cloudscape of gently billowing yellow, orange and ochre. The CloudTunnel’s two main tubes were about sixty metres in diameter, the smallest — basically comms and telemetry wave guides — less than half a metre. The whole cluster had looked thread-thin when they’d first caught sight of it, tens of kilometres away, but up close it looked like a hawser fit to tether a moon. A great, deep rushing sound rumbled from inside the two main pipes.

· What now? the colonel sent.

· We see if my vicarious kudos credit is still good.

Fassin used one of the arrowcraft’s manipulators to prod one of the wave guides, working the filaments through the tube’s protective sheath without breaking it. A hair-thin wire extended into the matrix of light filling the narrow tube. Information streamed from the far end of the wire, into the gascraft’s biomind, its transitional systems and then into Fassin’s head, forming a coded chaos of babbling sound, wildly scintillating visuals and other confused sensory experiences. The interruption in the light streams had already been noticed and allowed for. A pulse of information aimed right at the filament sent an identity request and inquired whether assistance was required, otherwise stop interfering with a public information highway.

— A human, Fassin Taak, privileged to be Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, he sent. — I’d like some assis-tance in the shape of transport at the given location, bound for Hauskip City.

He was told to wait.

“Fassin Taak, Out-Bander, Stranger, Alien, Seer, Human! And… what’s this?”

“This is Colonel Hatherence of the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula, an oerileithe.”

“Good day, Dweller Y’sul,” Hatherence said. They had switched to using ordinary sound-speech.

“A little dweller! How fascinating! Not a child, then?”

Y’sul, a sizeable mid-adult a good nine metres or so in diameter, rolled through the gas and, extending one long spindle-arm, clunked a fist-bunch (bink-bink-bink!) on the esuit of the Colonel.

“Hellooo in there!” Y’sul said.

Hatherence’s discus of esuit leaned to one side under the rain of not-so-gentle blows. “Pleased to meet you,” she replied tersely.

“Not a child,” Fassin confirmed.

They were in a giant bowl-like room, roofed with slate-diamond micrometres thin, in a Thickeneers’ Club in Hauskip City.

Hauskip lay within the equatorial zone of Nasqueron, one of the hundred thousand or so major conurbations in that particular atmospheric band. Seen from the right angle in a sympa-thetic light, it looked a lot like the internal workings of an ancient mechanical clock, multiplied and magnified several thousand times. From far enough away, or just seen in a schematic, it resembled millions of toothed-looking wheels caught up in amongst each other, with larger sets of wheels interconnecting with them through hubs and spines and spindles, themselves linking up with still greater sets of wheels. The whole mighty, slowly gyrating and spinning assemblage, easily a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, floated within a thick soup of gas a hundred kilometres beneath the cloud tops.

The city was the hub for several CloudTunnel lines. Once an empty car had made its way to the access hatch nearest to where Fassin and Hatherence pitched up alongside the CloudTunnel, it had taken two changes of line, riding in the same car, for Fassin and the colonel to get there through the network of partially evacuated, high-speed transit tubes. The whole journey had taken one of Nasqueron’s short day-night cycles. They had each slept for most of the time, though just before Fassin had dozed off, the colonel had said, “We go on. You agree, major? We continue our mission. Until we are ordered to cease.”

“Iagree,” he said. “We go on.”

The TunnelCar had docked, sphinctered its way through a TunnelBud wall in Hauskip’s Central Station and sped through the gelatinous atmosphere straight to the equatorial Eighth Progression Thickeneers’ Club, where Y’sul, Fassin’s long-time guide-mentor-guard had been attending a party to celebrate the Completion and Expulsion Ceremony of one of the club’s members.

Dwellers started out looking like anorexic manta rays — this was in their brief, occasionally hunted childhood phase — then grew, fattened, split most of the way down the middle (adolescence, kind of), shifted from a horizontal to a vertical axis and ended up, as adults, basically, resembling something like a pair of large, webbed, fringed cartwheels connected by a short, thick axle with particularly bulbous outer hubs onto each of which had been fastened a giant spider crab.

Part of the transition from recent- to mid-adulthood involved a period called Thickening, when the slim and flimsy discs of youth became the stout and sturdy wheels of later life, and it was customary for Dwellers to join a club of their approximate contemporaries while this was taking place. There was no specific reason for Dwellers to band together at this point in their lives, they just in general enjoyed joining clubs, sodalities, orders, leagues, parties, societies, associations, fellowships, fraternities, groups, guilds, unions, fractionals, dispensationals and recreationalities, while always, of course, leaving open the possibility of taking part in ad hoc non-ceremonial serendipitous one-time gatherings as well. The social calendar was crowded.

Y’sul had invited them to this private book-crystal-lined library room in his Thickeneers’ Club rather than to his home so that, as he explained, if they were too boring or in too great a hurry, he could get back without an over-great delay to his chums taking part in the ceremonial dinner and spree in the banqueting hall below.

“So, Fassin, good to see you!” Y’sul said. “Why have you brought this little dweller with you? Is she food?”

“No, of course not. She is a colleague.”

“Of course! Though there are no oerileithe Seers.”

“She is not a Seer.”

“Then not a colleague?”

“She has been sent to escort me, by the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula.”

“I see.” Y’sul, dressed in his best smart-but-casual finery, all brightly coloured fringes and lacily ornate ruffs, rocked back, rotating slightly, then came forward again. “No, I don’t! What am I saying? What is this ‘Ocula’?”

“Well…”

It took a while to tell. After about a quarter of an hour — this all, thankfully, in real-time, with no slow-down factor — Fassin thought he’d pretty much briefed Y’sul as well and as completely as he could without giving too much away. The colonel had contributed now and again, not that Y’sul seemed to have taken any notice of her.

Y’sul was about fifteen thousand years old, a full-adult who was perhaps another one or two millennia away from becoming a traav, the first stage of Prime-hood. At nine metres vertical diameter (not including his semi-formal dinner clothes, whose impressive body ruff added another metre), he was about as large as a Dweller ever got. His double disc was nearly five metres across, the modestly clothed central axle barely visible as a separate entity, more of an unexpected thinning between the two great wheels. Dwellers shrank very slightly as they aged after mid-adulthood and slowly lost both hub and fringe limbs until, by the time they were in their billions, they were often nearly limb-disabled.

Even then they could still get about, as a rule. Their motive force came from a system of vanes extending from the inner and outer surfaces of their two main discs. These extended to beat — sometimes twisting to add extra impetus or to steer -and lay flat on the backstroke, so that a moving Dweller seemed to roll through the atmosphere. This was called roting. Very old Dwellers often lost the use of — or just lost — the vanes on the outside of their discs, but usually retained those on the inside so that no matter how decrepit they might get, they could still wheel themselves around.

“It boils down,” Y’sul said at the end, “to the fact that you are looking for the choal Valseir, to resume subject-specific studies in a library within his control.”

“Pretty much,” Fassin agreed.

“I see.”

“Y’sul, you have always been a great help to me. Can you help me in this?”

“Problem,” Y’sul said.

“Problem?” Fassin asked.

“Valseir is dead and his library has been consigned to the depths, or split up, possibly at random, amongst his peers, allies, families, co-specialists, enemies or passers-by. Probably all of the above.”

“Dead?” Fassin said. He let horror show on the signalling carapace of the gascraft; a quite specific whorl pattern which indicated being intellectually and emotionally appalled at the demise of a Dweller friend\acquaintance not least because they had died in the course of pursuing a line of inquiry that one was oneself deeply fascinated by. “But he was only a choal! He was billions of years from dying!”

Valseir had been about a million and a half years old and on the brink of passing from the Cuspian level to that of Sage. Choal was the last phase of being a Cuspian. The average age of progressing from Cuspian-choal to Sage-child was over two million years but Valseir had been judged by his elders and allegedly betters as being ready even at such a modest count of time. He was, or had been, a one-and-a-half-million-year-old prodigy. He had also, last time Fassin had seen him, seemed strong, vigorous and full of life. Agreed, he spent most of his life with his rotary snout stuck in a library and didn’t get out much, but still Fassin could not believe he was dead. The Dwellers didn’t even have any diseases he could have died of. How could he be dead?

“Yachting accident, if I recall,” Y’sul said. “Do I?” Fassin sensed the Dweller radioing an inforequest to the patch-walls of the library room. “Yes, I do! Yes, a yachting accident. His StormJammer got caught in a particularly vicious eddy and it came apart on him. Skewered with a main beam or a yard arm or something. On a brighter note, they salvaged most of the yacht before it descended to the Depths. He was a very keen sailor. Terribly competitive.” .

“When?” Fassin asked. “I heard nothing.”

“Not long ago,” Y’sul said. “Couple of centuries at the most.”

“There was nothing on the news nets.”

“Really? Ah! Wait.” (Another radioed inforequest.) “Yes. I understand he left instructions that in the event of his death it was to be regarded as a private matter.” Y’sul flexed his hub-mounted spindle-arms on either side. All of them. Right out. “Quite understand! Done the same myself.”

“Is there any record of what happened to his library?” Fassin asked.

Y’sul rocked back again, a pair of giant conical wheels rotating slowly away, then pitching forward once more. He hung in mid-gas and said, “D’you know what?”

“What?”

“No, there isn’t! Is that not strange?”

“We… I would really like to look into this matter further, Y’sul. Can you help us in this?”

“I most certainly… ah, talking about news nets, there is something about an unauthorised fusion explosion not far from the point you accessed the CloudTunnel from. Anything to do with you?”

Oh, shit, Fassin thought, again. “Yes. It would appear that somebody is trying to kill me. Or possibly the colonel here.” He waved at Hatherence’s esuit, still floating next to him. She had been silent for some time. Fassin was not certain this was a good sign.

“I see,” Y’sul said. “And talking about the good colonel, I am struggling to discover her authorisation. For being here at all, I mean.”

“Well,” Fassin said, “we were forced to take refuge in Nasqueron, some time before we imagined it would be necessary, due to unprovoked hostile action. The colonel’s permissions were being sought some time before we left but had not yet come through when we had to make our emergency entry. The colonel is, technically, here without explicit permission, and therefore throws herself upon your mercy as a shipwreckee, a wartime asylumee and a fellow gas-giant dweller in need of shelter.” Fassin turned and looked at the colonel, who shifted about her vertical axis to return his gascraft-directed gaze. “She claims sanctuary,” he finished.

“Provisionally given, of course,” Y’sul said. “Though the precise meaning of ‘unprovoked’ might be challenged in a wider context, and the exact definition of ‘shipwreckee’, equally, could well be open to dispute if one wished to be picky. That aside, though, do I understand there is some sort of dispute in progress, out amongst you people?”

“You understand correctly,” Fassin told the Dweller.

“Oh, not another one of your wars, please!” Y’sul protested, with a rolling-back of his whole body which was actually relatively easy for a human to interpret, correctly, as an equivalent of rolling one’s eyes. (Though, to be fair, there was quite a lot of Dweller gestures with this translation.)

“Well, pretty much, yes,” Fassin told him.

“Your passion for doing each other harm never ceases to amaze, delight and horrify!”

“I’m told there is to be a Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C,” Fassin said.

“I too am told that!” Y’sul said brightly. “Do you really think it will happen? I’m not optimistic, frankly. Some appallingly good negotiators have been drafted in, I understand… Ah. Your hull carapace, doing the job of standing in, feebly, for the body you so sadly lack, bears marks upon it which I take to mean you were being sarcastic earlier.”

“Never mind, Y’sul.”

“Right then, shan’t. Now then: Valseir. There is a point of congruency”

“There is?”

“Yes!”

“With what? Between what and what?”

“His demise and this war we’ve been promised!”

“Really?”

“Yes! His old study — it is in the current zone of disputation, I believe.”

“But if it’s already been broken up—” Fassin began.

“Oh, there are bound to be back-ups, and I’m not even sure the old fellow has been finally put to rest.”

“After two hundred years?”

“Come now, Fassin, there were matters of probate.”

“And it’s in the war zone?”

“Very likely, yes! Isn’t it exciting? I think we ought to go there immediately!” Y’sul waved all his limbs at once. “Let’s form an expedition! We shall go together.” He looked at Hatherence. “You can even bring your little friend.”

— I have been considering whether to attempt to communicate with your Shared Facility, via your satellites or directly, the colonel told him.

· I wouldn’t, Fassin sent. — But if you decide you must, tell me before you try. I want to be well out of the volume.

· You think the same sort of attack directed against us following your “ping’ might be directed against us here?

· Probably not here, in a Dweller city. But then, why risk it? We don’t know that whoever’s been shooting at us quite understands what they’d be letting themselves in for, so they might just waste us and have to deal with the consequences later.

We won’t be around to jeer.

— We need to find out what is going on, Major Taak, Hatherence informed him.

— I know, and I’m going to send a request for information up to a sat from a remote site as soon as I’ve checked out what’s been going on via the local nets.

The colonel floated over to look at the enormous though ancient and highly directional flat screen which Fassin was using in his attempt to find out what had been happening. They were in Y’sul’s home, a ramshackle wheel-house in a whole vast district of equally shabby-looking wheel-houses hanging on skinny spindles underneath the city’s median level like a frozen image of an entire junkyard’s worth of exploded gearboxes.

Y’sul had escorted them back from his club in a state of some excitement. Then he’d left them alone, taken his servant Sholish and gone off in search of a decent tailor — his usual tailor had most inconveniently taken it into his mind to change trades and become a Dreadnought rating; probably trying to get in on the ground floor of this upcoming war.

— What have you found? the colonel asked, watching the flat screen fill with an image of the Third Fury moon. — Hmm. The moon appears almost undamaged.

— This is an old recording, Fassin explained. — I’m trying to find an updated one.

— Any mention of the hostilities?

— Not very much, Fassin told her, using a manipulator to work the massive, stiff controls of the old screen. — There’s been a mention on a minority radio news service, but that’s it.

— It is regarded as news, though? This is encouraging, I think?

— Well, don’t get too excited, Fassin sent. — We are talking about a station some amateurs run for the few people like themselves who are actually interested in things happening in the rest of the system; maybe a few thousand Dwellers out of a planetary population of five or ten billion.

· The number of Dwellers in Nasqueron is really that uncer-tain?

· Oh, I’ve seen estimates as low as two billion, as high as two hundred, even three.

· I encountered this degree of uncertainty in my research, Hatherence said as Fassin switched manually between channels, data sets and image-trails. — I recall thinking it must be a mistake. How can one be two base-ten orders of magnitude out? Can’t one just ask the Dwellers? Don’t they know themselves how many they are?

· You can certainly ask, Fassin agreed. He put some humour into his signal. — An old tutor of mine used to say of questions like this that the answers will prove far more illuminating regarding Dweller psychology than they will concerning their actual subject.

· They lie to you or they don’t know themselves?

· That is a good question too.

· They must have an idea, the Colonel protested. — A society has to know how many people it contains, otherwise how would it plan infrastructure and so on?

Fassin felt himself smiling. — That’s how it would work in pretty much any other society, he agreed.

· There are those who would assert that Dwellers are not in fact civilised, the colonel said thoughtfully, — that they could scarcely be said to possess a society in any single planet, and on a galactic scale cannot be said to constitute a civilisation at all. They exist rather in a state of highly developed barbarism.

· I’m familiar with the arguments, Fassin told her.

· Would you agree?

· No. This is a society. We are in a city. And even just in the one planet, this is a civilisation. I know the definitions will have changed over the years and you might take a different view from me, but in the history of my planet we’d refer to a civilisation based around a single river system or on a small island.

· I forget how small-scale one has to think when dealing with planets with solid-surface living-environments, the colonel said, apparently without meaning to insult. — But even so, the defi-nition of a civilisation has to move on when one ascends to the galactic stage, and the Dwellers, taken as a whole, might seem deficient.

· I think it comes down to one’s own definition of the terms, Fassin said. — Hold on; this looks promising.

He swung back from a mosaic of sub-screens to a single moving image. Third Fury again, though this time looking hazier, less defined, and shot from some distance away. The shallow domes of the Shared Facility were obvious if not clear, down near one tipped edge of the little moonlet. A flash on the surface away to one side, and a semi-spherical cloud of debris, spreading. A glowing crater left where the flash had come from.

· This looks like yesterday, Hatherence said.

· Does, doesn’t it? Fassin agreed. — Looks like it was taken from high up on Belt A or the south of Zone 2. Just some amateur pointing a camera. Fassin found how to spin the stored recording back and then forward, then discovered how to zoom in. — And that’s us.

They watched a cerise spot appear on a glittering blister near the edge of the Shared Facility, and could just make out the grainily defined debris of the hangar dome blowing outward in front of a sudden haze of quickly dissipating mist. A tiny dark grey dot rose from the shattered dome and crawled away: the drop ship, making its desperate dive for the planet.

Fassin spun the recording forward. The moon’s position altered quickly, flying away across the dark sky as Third Fury continued on its orbit and whoever was recording the images was whirled away in the opposite direction by the twenty-thousand-kilometre-wide jet stream beneath them. — Definitely Band A, Fassin said.

A brilliant white flash washed out the whole screen. It faded, and a crater kilometres across was left. Debris spread everywhere like a flower’s seed-head, just ready to shed, caught in a sudden hurricane. The interior of the crater was white, yellow, orange, red. The debris continued to spread. It looked like most of it would stay in more or less the same orbit as Third Fury itself.

They both watched in silence. The moon had changed shape. It wobbled, seemed to partially collapse in on itself, slowly, plastically resuming a spherical form after losing so much of its earlier mass. Yellow cloud tops came up in a near-flat line to meet it and the small glowing globe spun under the horizon.

Fassin let the recording play out and start to loop. He stopped it. The screen froze on the recording’s first image of Third Fury, almost overhead, just after the first impact.

· That did not look like a survivable event, the colonel sent.

Her sent voice sounded quiet.

· I think you’re right.

· I am very sorry. How many people would have been in the Shared Facility base?

· A couple of hundred.

· I saw no sign of your Master Technician’s craft, or of the attacks on us once we quit the drop ship.

Fassin compared the recording’s time code with the gascraft’s own event list. — Those happened after what we saw here, he told the colonel. — Over the horizon from where this recording was taken, anyway.

— So much for back-up or reinforcements. The colonel turned towards him. — We still go on, though, yes?

— Yes.

· So, now what, Fassin Taak?

· We need to talk to some people.

“So you want to communicate with your own kind?” Y’sul asked. “Via a relay at a remote site,” Fassin said.

“Why haven’t you done so already?”

“I wanted to get your permission.”

“You don’t need my permission. You just find a remote dish and send away. I suspect any vicarious effect on my kudos level will be too small to measure.”

They were in an antechamber of the city’s Administrator. The antechamber was a sizeable room furnished with wall hangings made from ancient CloudHugger hides, all yellow-red and whorled. A few sported the holes where the creatures had been punctured. One curved section of wall was a giant window, looking out over the vast floating scape of wheels that was Hauskip. Evening was starting to descend and lights were coming on throughout the city. Y’sul floated over to the window and caused it to hinge down by the unsubtle tactic of bumping into it reasonably hard. He then floated out over the impromptu bow of balcony so produced, muttering something about liking the view and maybe moving his own house up here. A breeze blew in, ruffling the old CloudHugger hides as though their long-dead occupants were still somehow fleeing from their hunters.

Colonel Hatherence leaned over towards Fassin. — This kudos thing, then, she sent. — It is really how they calculate their worth?

· I’m afraid so.

· So it’s the truth! I thought it was a joke.

· Distinguishing between the two is not a Dweller strong point.

Y’sul wandered back, failing to shut the window. His vanes made a quiet burring noise as he roted through the gas towards them. “Give me the message,” he said. “I’ll forward it.”

“Via an out-of-the-way transceiver?” Fassin asked.

“Of course!”

“Well, just send to Sept Bantrabal, letting them know I’m all right and asking whether they’re okay at their end. I imagine they already know what happened to the Third Fury moon. You might ask them whether anything has been heard of Master Technician Apsile and the drop ship which escaped the moon’s assault, and what happened to the ships supposed to be protecting Third Fury.”

“Ahem,” the colonel said.

They both looked at her. “Is this wise?” she asked.

“You mean should I pretend to be dead?” Fassin said.

“Yes.”

“That did occur to me. But there are people I’d like to know I’m alive.” He thought of that glimpse of a flash which might have been something hitting ’glantine while Third Fury was being bombarded. “And I’d like to know my friends and family are all right.”

“Of course,” the colonel said. “However, I wonder if it might be more sensible for me to communicate with my superiors first. We might ask Dweller Y’sul here to let me use this remote relay. Once a more secure link had been established, perhaps via one of the warships, which I assume are still somewhere around the planet, a message might be sent to your Sept to let them know you are well. None of which need take long.”

While Hatherence had been speaking, Y’sul had floated right up to her, seemingly intent on peering through the front plate of her esuit, which was in fact completely opaque, and indeed armoured. Eventually he was within a centimetre of her, towering above the oerileithe. The colonel did not retreat. One of Y’sul’s rim limbs tapped — more delicately this time — on the colonel’s esuit casing.

“Would you mind not doing that, sir?” she said frostily.

“Why are you still inside that thing, little dweller?” Y’sul asked.

“Because I am evolved for higher, colder levels with a different gas-mix and pressure gradient, Dweller Y’sul.”

“I see.” Y’sul drew back. “And you have a very strange accent and way with grammar. I swear this human speaks better than you do. What were you saying again?”

“I was asking you kindly to refrain from making physical contact with my esuit.”

“No, before that.” .

“I was suggesting I make contact with my superiors.”

“Military superiors?”

“Yes.”

Y’sul turned to Fassin. “That sounds more interesting than your plan, Fassin.”

“Y’sul, two hundred of my people died yesterday. If not more. I’d like—”

“Yes yes yes, but—”

“I might have to signal ’glantine direct, if no satellites are left,” Hatherence was saying, as a tall door swung up in one wall and a Dweller in ceremonial clothes poked its rim out.

“I’ll see you now,” said the City Administrator.

The Administrator’s office was huge, the size of a small stadium. It was ringed with holo-screen carrels. Fassin counted a hundred or so of the study stations, though only a few were occupied by Dwellers, mostly fairly young. There were no windows but the ceiling was diamond leaf, with most of the sections slid round to leave the place open to the rapidly darkening sky. Floatlamps bobbed, casting a soft yellow light over them as they followed the Administrator to her sunken audience area in the centre of the giant room.

“You are pregnant!” Y’sul exclaimed. “How delightful!”

“So people keep telling me,” the Administrator said sourly. Dwellers were, for want of a better term, male for over ninety-nine per cent of their lives, only changing to the female form to become pregnant and give birth. Becoming female and giving birth was regarded as a social duty; the fact that the obligation was more honoured than not made it unique in Dweller mores. It contributed mightily to one’s kudos tally and anyway had a sort of sentimental attraction for all but the most determinedly misanthropic members of the species (statistically, about forty-three per cent). Still, it was undeniably a burden, and very few Dwellers went through the experience without complaining mightily about it.

“I myself have thought of becoming female, oh, several times!” Y’sul said.

“Well, it’s overrated,” the City Administrator told him. “And particularly burdensome when one had an invitation to the forthcoming war that one is now apparently morally obliged to turn down. Please; take a dent.”

They floated to a series of hollows in the audience area and rested gently within them.

“Why, I too hope to be going to the war!” Y’sul said brightly. “Well, somewhere very near it, at least. I have only just now returned from my tailor’s after being measured for the most lately fashionable conflict attire.”

“Oh, really?” the Administrator said. “Who’s your tailor? Mine just left for the war.”

“Not Fuerliote?” Y’sul exclaimed.

“The same!”

“He was mine also!”

“Just the best.”

“Absolutely.”

“No, I had to go to Deystelmin.”

“Is he any good?”

“Weeeelll.” Y’sul waggled his whole double-discus. “One lives in hope. Good mirror-side manner, as it were, but will it translate into a flattering cut? That’s the question one has to ask oneself.”

“I know,” agreed the Administrator. “And off to become a junior officer on a Dreadnought!”

“Not even that! A rating!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Very lowly, for someone so distinguished!”

“I know, but a smart move. Getting in as a rating before the recruitment window even properly opens makes sense. The smoking-uniform effect.”

“Ah! Of course!”

Fassin tried making a throat-clearing noise in the midst of all this, but to no effect.

· The smoking-uniform effect? The colonel light-whispered to him.

· Dead men’s shoes, Fassin explained. — They only promote from within once hostilities have begun. If he’s lucky this tailor’s Dreadnought will suffer heavy damage and lose a few officers and he’ll end up an officer after all. If he’s really lucky he could rise to admiral.

Hatherence thought about this. — Would a tailor, however distinguished, necessarily make a good admiral?

— Probably no worse than the one he’d be replacing.

The problem was that to the Dwellers all professions were in effect hobbies, all posts and positions sinecures. This tailor that Y’sul and the City Administrator were babbling on about would have had no real need to be a tailor, he was just somebody who’d found he possessed an aptitude for the pastime (or, more likely, for the gossiping and fussing generally associated with it). He would take on clients to increase his kudos, the level of which would increase proportionally the more powerful were the people he tailored for, so that somebody in a position of civil power would constitute a favoured client, even if that position of power had come about through a lottery, some arcanely complicated rota system or plain old coercive voting — jobs like that of City Administrator were subject to all those regimes and more, depending on the band or zone concerned, or just which city was involved. The City Administrator, in return, would be able to drop casually into just the right conversations the fact she had such a well-known, high-kudos tailor. Obviously Y’sul had had sufficient kudos of his own to be able to engage the services of this alpha-outfitter too. People further down the pecking order would have employed less well-connected tailors, or just got their clothes from Common, which was Dweller for, in this particular case, off-the-peg, and in general just meant mass-produced, kudos-free, available-as-a-matter-of-right-just-because-you’re-a-Dweller… well, pretty much anything, up to and including spaceships.

Though having seen round a few Dweller spaceships, Fassin thought the stack-’em-high-and-give-them-away-free approach had its limitations.

“Indeed,” Y’sul was saying. “My own bid for JO status has been languishing for centuries and wasn’t even mentioned this time round. Entering as a rating seems demeaning, but it could pay off big if there are casualties.”

“Of course, of course,” the Administrator said, then fastened her gaze on the colonel. “What’s this?”

“An oerileithe, a little dweller,” Y’sul said, with what sounded like pride.

“Gracious! Not a child?”

“Or food. I asked.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the colonel said with as much dignity as she could muster. An oerileithe, it appeared, attracted even less respect amongst Dwellers than Fassin — and, he suspected, the colonel herself — had expected. The oerileithe had evolved relatively recently, quite independently of the vast, unutterably ancient mainstream of galactic Dwellerdom and as such were seen by their more venerable co-gas-giant-inhabitants as something between an annoying collective loose end and a bunch of impudent, planet-usurping interlopers.

“And this must be the Slow Seer.” The Administrator looked briefly at Fassin’s gascraft before returning her gaze to Y’sul. “Do we need to talk slowly for it?”

“No, Administrator,” Fassin said before Y’sul could reply. “Iam running on your timescale at the moment.”

“How fortunate!” She flicked to one side and stabbed at a screen remote, her frontal radius edge lit up by the holo’s glow.

“Hmm. I see. So all the mayhem of the last day or two is your fault, then?”

“Has there been much mayhem, ma’am?”

“Well, the partial destruction of a close-orbit moon would fit most people’s definition of mayhem,” the Administrator said pleasantly. “An attractive feature in the sky whenever one ventured towards the cloud tops. Been there millions of years, slagged within a few per cent of breaking up completely, a ring of debris scattered round its orbit, that orbit itself changed significantly, causing everything else up there to have to shuffle round to accommodate the alteration, a small bombardment of debris across three bands, some chunks narrowly missing several items of infrastructure with more than sentimental value and others setting off automatic planetary-defence laser batteries, a cascade of satellite destruction that has yet to be put entirely right. Oh, and an unauthorised fusion explosion. Middle of nowhere, granted, but still. None of this, happily, within my jurisdiction, but trouble does appear to be rather following you around, human Taak, and here you are in my city.” The Administrator rolled fractionally towards Fassin’s gascraft. “Thinking of staying long?”

“Well—” Fassin began.

“The human is under my protection, Administrator!” Y’sul interrupted. “I vouch for it entirely and will continue to accept all kudos consequences regarding its actions. I shall take all steps necessary to safeguard it from whatever hostile forces may wish it ill. May I count on your support for the expedition the human insists on making into the war zone?”

“Given,” the Administrator said.

“How splendid! We can be ready to leave within a couple of days. Especially if the tailor Deystelmin is persuaded to prioritise my combat-clothing order.”

“I’ll have a word.”

“Too kind! I swear I shall never nominate you for a coercive vote again!”

“My gratitude knows no bounds.”

If Dwellers could grit their teeth, Fassin thought, the Administrator’s words would have been spoken through them. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.

“Yes, human Taak?”

“Have you any word on events elsewhere in the system?”

“As I say, the various rings and moons are shifting fractionally in their orbits to accommodate—”

“I think he means the stellar system, not that of Nasqueron,” Colonel Hatherence said.

The two Dwellers turned to look at her. Dwellers had sensing bands all the way round their outer rims, plus eye bubbles low on their outer hubs. They were not known as the best glarers in the galaxy but they were always willing to give it their best shot. To a Dweller, their own planet was pretty much everything. Most gas-giants had many more moons than the average stellar system possessed planets, and most radiated a lot more energy than they received from the star they orbited, their heat-transfer systems, weather and ecology arising largely from processes internal to the planet itself, not dependent on sunlight. Their inhabitants had to pay close attention to the skies, basically to watch out for incoming, but even that consideration led to an obviously gas-giant-centred way of thinking. The local star and the rest of its planetary system was of relatively little interest to the average Dweller.

“That is not quite what I meant,” Fassin told them quickly. “The moon ’glantine, for example; has it been harmed?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the Administrator said, with another stern look at Hatherence.

“And the military ships that were in orbit around Third Fury?” the colonel asked.

(- Shh! Fassin signalled Hatherence.

— No! she sent back.)

“What ships?” the Administrator said, apparently mystified.

“How about the planet Sepekte?” Fassin said.

“I have no idea,” the Administrator told him. She fixed her gaze on Fassin. “Is this why you wished to see me? To ask after the welfare of moons and distant planets?”

“No, ma’am. The reason that I wanted to see you is that I am worried that there may be a threat to Nasqueron.”

“You are?” blurted Y’sul.

“Really?” the Administrator said with a sigh.

Even Hatherence was turned to look at him.

“There is a war beginning amongst the Quick, ma’am,” Fassin told the Administrator. “It is going to come to Ulubis and it is not impossible that some of the forces taking part may wish to involve Nasqueron and its Dwellers in that war in some way.”

The Administrator rolled fractionally back and sucked her outer trim-frill in, the Dweller equivalent of a frown.

(- Major? the colonel sent. — You said nothing of this. What do you base this on? Is there something you’re not telling me?

— A hunch. Just trying to get their attention. And I should point out that it’s considered impolite to signal-whisper like this.)

The Administrator continued to look at Fassin for a moment, then turned to Y’sul. Ts this human normally mad?”

Y’sul made a sucking sound. “Down to definitions.”

“Nasqueron might be vulnerable to a further bombardment,” Fassin persisted. “Even to some sort of raid.”

“Ha!” Y’sul laughed.

“We are not defenceless, human Taak!” the Administrator said loudly.

No, but your spaceships are leaky antiques and your planetary defences are set up for dumb rocks, Fassin thought wearily. You talk a good defence, but if the Epiphany 5 invaders decide to attack, or the Mercatoria decides I’m dead and they plump for a more obvious way to get hold of whatever might be in Valseir’s library, you won’t be able to do much to stop them. Going on what I’ve seen, a single Navarchy Military destroyer could lay waste to your whole planet, over time.

“Of course not,” he agreed. “But I would ask you to pass this information on to the relevant authorities. You will be still better defended if you are prepared.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” the Administrator told him levelly.

Oh shit, Fassin thought. You’re going to do fuck all. You aren’t going to bother telling anybody.

Y’sul was looking up. “What’s that?” he asked.

Fassin experienced a moment of horror. He looked up too. A stubby vaned cylinder a couple of metres high was hovering vertically above them in the darkness outside the ceiling’s still-open diamond petals. It was pointing something long and dark at them.

The Administrator groaned. “Oh no,” she said. “That is the press.”

“Sholish! My good cuirass, you witless rind-nibbling waste of gas!”

Y’sul threw a piece of armour across the room at his servant.

The camo-painted carbon plate spun through the gas, changing colours rapidly as it tried to adapt, narrowly missed several other Dwellers — the large room was crowded and people had to duck, bob or dodge — just avoided Sholish and embedded itself in a FloatTree panel, producing a distinct thunk. Before it had much of a chance to blend in, Sholish tugged it out of the wall and disappeared into a side chamber, muttering.

“Excuse me,” Colonel Hatherence said sharply to a Dweller who’d just bumped into her in the general shuffling that had spread through the room to give the thrown piece of armour a clear trajectory.

“Excused!” the Dweller said, then continued his conversation with another of Y’sul’s relations.

Y’sul was getting ready to quit Hauskip and leave for the war along with his charges, Fassin and the oerileithe. His new combat clothing had arrived just that morning (kudos-enhancingly quickly!) along with various gifts from friends and family, most of whom, it seemed, had thought it best to show up in person to present their mostly useless or positively dangerous gifts and offer vast amounts of generally contradictory but extremely loudly proffered advice.

Y’sul, flattered and excited to be the centre of so much attention, had invited them all into his dressing room for snacks and whatever while he tried on all his new clothing, checked that his antique, inherited familial armour still more or less fitted and played with all the new bits and pieces he’d been given. Fassin counted over thirty Dwellers in the chamber, which was one of the larger spaces in the wheel-shaped house. There was a saying to the effect that one Dweller constituted an argument-in-waiting, two a conspiracy and three a riot. Quite what a gathering of thirty-plus was supposed to represent he wasn’t sure, but it would assuredly have nothing to do with silence or subtlety. The noise rang off the curved walls. The clothing competed for loudness. Expressive patterns spread across exposed carapace skin like flip-books of geometric artwork. Magnetic chatter swirled, infrasound bounced confusion from one wall to another and a heady mix of pheromones bathed the place in frantic currents of Dweller hilarity.

— Are there other guides-cum-guards we might employ beside this one? Hatherence asked, pressing up to the wall beneath where Fassin floated as another Dweller bearing gifts arrived and pushed his way through the throng towards Y’sul.

— Not really, Fassin told her. — Y’sul suffered a significant kudos-loss within the Guard-mentors Guild taking on an alien outworlder, back when he agreed to be Uncle Slovius’s mentor. He got that back eventually but it was a brave thing to do. Few of them will accept that kind of loss. Starting from scratch to find somebody new would take years, even if Y’sul did agree.

Something small, round, pink and gooey bumped into the top of the colonel’s esuit, and stuck. She batted it away. — What are all these things? she said, exasperated.

— Just hospitality, Fassin sent, with a resigned expression.

Floating, drifting round the room were bobfruits, flossballs, chandelier-gumbushes and wobbling breezetrays loaded with sweetmeats, mood-balloons, narcopastes and party-suppositories. The guests helped themselves, eating, ingesting, snorting, rubbing and inserting away as appropriate. The noise seemed to be swelling by the minute, as was the collision rate — always a sure indicator that Dwellers were getting out of it (lots of loud bumps, hasty cries of “Excuse me!’, sudden, alarming tiltings, and bursts of the sort of especially raucous laughter which invariably accompanied the realisation by a Dweller that one of its companions had lost control of their buoyancy).

· Oh dear, Fassin said. — I do believe this is turning into a party.

· Are these people intoxicated? Hatherence asked, sounding genuinely shocked.

Fassin looked at her, letting his incredulity show. — Colonel, he told her, — they are rarely anything else.

There was a bang and a yelp from somewhere near where Y’sul floated. A bobfruit exploded in mid-gas and fell limply to the floor. People nearby wiped foamy pieces of fruit off their clothes.

“Oops!” Y’sul said, amidst widespread laughter.

· He can’t be the only guide! the colonel protested. — What about other Seers? They must have guides too.

· They do, but it’s a one-to-one thing, an exclusive relationship. Abandoning your Guard-mentor would be a terrible insult. They’d lose all kudos.

· Major Taak, we cannot afford to be sentimental here! If there is even a possibility that we might find a better, less idiotic guide, we ought at least to start looking.

— The Guard-mentors are a Guild, colonel. They run a closed shop. If you dumped one of them, none of the rest would touch you. You’d certainly then find some clown who’d offer to act as a guide, mentor, guard, whatever — in fact they’d probably have to form a queue — but they’d be very young and stupid, or very old and, ah, eccentric, and they’d assuredly get you into far more trouble than they were ever likely to get you out of. The Guard-mentors Guild would harass them from the start, for one thing, and the vast majority of other Dwellers wouldn’t talk to you at all. Librarians, archive-keepers, antiquarians, exo-specialists — all the people we most need to talk to, in other words — in particular would not even give you the time of day.

They made room for Y’sul’s servant, Sholish, returning from the side chamber with a two-piece, highly polished, mirror-finished cuirass. Sholish was an adolescent, only a few hundred years old, barely three-quarters grown and skinny. Personal servants, always at least two generational stages younger than their masters, were fairly common in Dweller society, especially where the senior Dweller was bothering to pursue a hobby-cum-profession which actually involved a degree of study and\or training, when the servant had a fighting chance of picking up the basics of the given trade. The better masters regarded their servants more as apprentices than servants and the occasional especially aberrant ones treated their underlings almost as equals.

Y’sul had yet to fall prey to such sentimentality.

“And about time, you custard-brained phlegm-wart!” Y’sul yelled, snatching the cuirass from Sholish’s grasp. “Did you have to forge and weave the armour yourself? Or did you start gazing at your own reflection and lose all track?”

Sholish mumbled, retreated.

— I refuse to accept that we are as powerless as you imply, major, the colonel told Fassin.

He turned to look at the oerileithe. — We are here very much on sufferance, colonel. The Dwellers can go off entire species of Seers, for no accountable reason. Nobody’s ever worked out a pattern to this. You just suddenly find that you and your kind aren’t welcome any more. It doesn’t usually happen while they’re still getting to know a new-to-civilisation species, but even that’s no guarantee. They certainly get fed up with individuals — I’ve seen it happen — and that’s equally random. Every time I come down here I have to accept that no matter how friendly and helpful everybody might have been during my last visit — (the colonel gave a sceptical laugh) — they might have nothing more to do with me this time or ever again. In fact, they might tell me I’ve got a day to get out or become the object of a hunt. And a Seer faces that prospect every single time they delve, either remotely or directly. We just have to get used to it. They don’t even need to have met you; there are records of Seers-to-be who’ve spent decades getting trained up, who’ve been part of respected Seer Septs going back millennia who’ve been about to go on their very first delve and been told not to bother and to stay away for ever. It’s a minor miracle they’ve accepted you the way they have. And don’t forget the only reason you’re not constantly being challenged as an interloper is because Y’sul is on record as vouching for you.

· You are saying we are stuck with this buffoon.

· We are. I know it’s hard to believe, but he’s one of the better ones.

· Core help us. Why waste time? I shall apply for my posthu-mous decoration immediately.

The Volunteer Guild of Guard-mentors existed to look after Dwellers visiting from other bands of the same planet, or, very rarely, from another gas-giant, usually one within the same stellar system. Dwellers — almost always alone — did make journeys from one stellar system to another, but it didn’t happen often and it usually meant that the individual concerned had been thrown out of their own home gas-giant for some particularly heinous crime or unforgivable character defect.

The Dwellers had pretty much stopped making deep space trips en masse after the Second Diasporian Age, when the galaxy had been half the age it was now. It was generally held that seven billion years’ lack of practice probably accounted for the sheer awfulness of Dweller spaceship design and building standards, though Fassin wasn’t convinced that cause and effect hadn’t been confused here.

They were due to leave for the war zone the following day. The interval since the frustrating audience with the City Administrator had been spent fending off Dweller journalists and their news remotes and trying to find out what they could about events in the wider system. Eventually they’d had to compromise and trade. One journalist got a very guarded but exclusive interview from Fassin (very guarded indeed — Colonel Hatherence kept coughing loudly whenever they approached any subject remotely to do with their mission) in return for news of the outside.

The Third Fury moon had been devastated and all on or in it had perished. There was no news of a drop ship surviving, though equally there was no news of any wreckage from such a ship being found. However, of course, if it had just dropped into the Depths… Many satellites had been destroyed or damaged. Those belonging to the Quick (this meant the Mercatoria) appeared to be either missing or out of action. Some warships belonging to the current local Quick species had spent an amount of time investigating the rubble of the moon Third Fury. The moon ’glantine appeared much as it always had. Stellar-system ship traffic appeared light, as it had for some days now, but not anomalous. A signal had been sent on the behalf of Oculan Colonel Hatherence, on the authority of Guard-mentor Y’sul of Hauskip, to the moon ’glantine. No reply had yet been received. Nothing untoward had happened to the transmitting station responsible following the transmission.

According to the journalist, this was all stuff they could have found out themselves, eventually. The trick was knowing where to look. The journalist seemed to feel miffed that they’d got the better end of the deal, too, because everything he’d told them was at least ninety per cent true, specifically to avoid upsetting them. He knew aliens could be funny that way.

“What, exactly, did your friend say?”

“He said they wanted him to… ‘to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for…’ I’m pretty certain those were his exact words. Then he seemed to realise he was saying too much, giving too much away, and he changed the subject. The… hesitation, that sudden change of subject made the earlier form of words all the more important. He realised he was speaking to somebody who spent a lot of his life in Nasqueron, who might not feel the same way he would about the implications of what he was talking about.”

“This was spoken in…?”

“Humanised G-Clear, very close to this. Meanings are pretty much identical, just altered pronunciation for the human voice.”

“No Anglish words involved?”

“None.”

“So, he said ‘gas-lined’ not ‘streamlined’ or ‘air-lined’?”

“One wouldn’t say ‘air-lined’ as far as I know. The normal form of words would be ‘streamlined’. He chose ‘gas-lined’ without thinking because it was more technically correct, because it has a narrower meaning. In this context it means altering a vacuum-capable craft so that it can also operate in an atmosphere like Nasqueron’s.”

“Which you take to mean that an invasion or large-scale destructive raid upon us is imminent?”

“I think some sort of raid is a distinct possibility.”

“This seems a thin thread to hang such a weighty fear upon.”

“I know. But please understand, the guy’s company builds and refits three-quarters of the system’s war craft. The phrase ‘gas-lined’ is quite specific and that sudden change of tack when he realised he was talking to somebody who might be sentimentally or emotionally attached to Nasqueron and sympathetic towards Dwellers is significant. I know this man, I’ve known him since I was a child. I know how his mind works.”

“Attempting to invade a gas-giant would, nevertheless, be a momentous action. In seven thousand years, the Mercatoria has done no such thing.”

“The situation is desperate for them locally. They are under threat of invasion within the year. A standard year, not one of yours. Help is at least one more standard year away beyond that. In fact, the invasion may already be beginning. The attacks on Third Fury and the Mercatoria’s other assets around Nasq. could be part of it.”

“And attempting to invade us helps them how?”

“They think there may be something here which will make a difference. Some information. That’s why I’m here, to look for it. But if they thought I was dead or not likely to succeed, the Mercatoria might intervene directly. Plus the invaders the Mercatoria is worried about might well think the same way with even less cause to hesitate. I get the impression the future continuance of Dweller Studies is kind of low on their set of priorities.”

“Fassin, what sort of information could possibly make such a course of action seem sensible?”

“Important information.”

“More specifically?”

“Very important information.”

“You are not willing to tell me.”

“Willing or able. Best you don’t know.”

“So you tell me.”

“If I thought the specifics would help convince you, I’d let you know,” Fassin lied.

He was talking to a Dweller called Setstyin. Setstyin liked to call himself an influence pedlar, which was a humble term for somebody with contacts extending as high as his went. Dweller society was remarkably flat in terms of social hierarchy — flat as the surface of a neutron star compared to the sheer verti-cality of the Mercatoria’s baroque monstrosity — but to the extent that there was a top and bottom of society, the suhrl Setstyin was in touch with both.

He was a society host and a part-time social worker, a hospital visitor and a friend to the great and good as far as either could be said to exist in Dweller terms; a sociable, clubbable creature intensely and genuinely interested in other people, more so even than in kudos (this made him very unusual, even strange, almost threatening). He was, in human terms, somewhere between a total geek and very cool. His geekiness was that bizarre failure to care about the one thing that everybody agreed really mattered: kudos, while his coolness came from the same source, because not caring about kudos — not obsessing about it, not chasing it down wherever it might be found, not constantly measuring one’s own coolness against that of one’s peers — was in itself kind of cool. As long as there was not the faintest shadow of a suspicion he was playing some weird back-game, deliberately pursuing kudos by pretending not to, so long as his lack of interest in it was seen as being the unaffected carelessness of a kind of wise naif, he was kudos-rich, though in a curiously unenviable way.

(It had been Slovius who had first explained to Fassin how kudos worked. Fassin had thought it was a bit like money. Slovius had explained that even money wasn’t like money used to be, but anyway kudos was sometimes almost an opposite. The harder you’d worked for your kudos, the less it was worth.) Setstyin was also one of the most sensible, level-minded Dwellers Fassin had ever encountered. And he treated a request by a mere human to wake up, speed up and converse over the phone with a degree of respect and seriousness that few other Dwellers would have.

Fassin had told Hatherence he needed time to let his human brain and body sleep, and his arrowcraft self-repair and recharge itself. He’d retreated to the long spoke room he’d been allocated in Y’sul’s house. This was a dark and dusty gallery littered with piles of discarded clothes, lined with ancient wardrobes and floored with out-of-favour paintings and crumpled wall hangings. There was a double-dent Dweller bed in there too and a treefoam-lined cubby by one wall, so it kind of constituted a bedroom, not that Fassin or his gascraft really needed such a thing.

Fassin had secured the door, used the little arrowcraft’s sonic senses to locate a removable ceiling panel and exited through the double skin roof into a breezy and relatively dark night.

Like all Dweller cities, Hauskip was situated in a historically calm patch within its atmospheric volume, but cities still had weather. They experienced pressure differentials, squalls, fog, rain, snow, crosswinds, upwellings, down draughts, lateral force and spin, all depending on the state of the gas stream around them. Moderately buffeted, half-hidden by the shreds of thicker gas scudding across the lamplit night, Fassin had made his way up and out across the sheen of rooftops.

Sky traffic had been relatively light — most travel would be within the spindles and spokes linking the city’s main components — but there had been a few Dwellers roting about in the distance, and enough small craft — packet-delivery machines, mostly — for Fassin to hope he was going unremarked.

Distant lightning had flickered deep below.

Fassin had come to a dangling wave-guide cable a few centimetres thick, followed it up to a deserted public plaza like a vast, empty bowl circled with dim, attenuated lights, and found a public screen booth.

Setstyin was also in the equatorial band, though on the other side of the planet. Fassin might therefore have hoped to find him awake at such a time, but Setstyin had been sleeping off the effects of an especially good party he’d hosted the night before. Dwellers could go for tens of their days without sleep but when they did sleep they tended to do so on a prodigious scale. Fassin had begged and pleaded with Setstyin’s servant to have him woken and even then it had taken a while. Setstyin looked and sounded groggy, but it appeared that his mind was fully awake inside there somewhere.

“And you would like me to do what?” Setstyin asked. He scratched at his gill fringe with one spindle arm. He was wearing a light sleep collar round his mid-hub, which was regarded as a polite minimum when addressing someone other than a close friend or family member over the phone. Dwellers were hardly self-conscious about showing their inner-hub mouth parts and pleasure organs, but there was a degree of decorum in such matters, especially when confronted with an alien. “What shall I say, Fassin, and to whom?”

A gust of wind made the arrowcraft’s vanes purr to hold it in place as Fassin looked into the camerascreen. “Convince whoever you can, preferably as high as you can reach, preferably discreetly, that there really is a threat. Give them time to decide what they’re going to do if there is a raid. It may be best just to let it happen. What you don’t want to do is have an unthinking hostile reaction that leads to some maniac Quick nuking a city or two to try to teach you a lesson.”

Setstyin looked confused. “How would that benefit anybody?”

“Please, just trust me — it’s the sort of thing Quick species do.”

“You want me to talk to politicians and military people, then, yes?”

“Yes.” Politicians and military people in Dweller society were as much amateurs and dilettantes as gifted tailors or devout party-throwers like Setstyin — possibly a little less dedicated -but you had, Fassin reflected, to work with what you were presented with.

Setstyin looked thoughtful. “They’re not going to go with an invasion.”

This was true, Fassin supposed. In the full sense of the word an invasion was impossible. The Ulubis forces were hopelessly inadequate for the task of occupying a volume as great as Nasqueron or any other gas-giant, even if it had been inhabited by a congenitally peaceful, naturally subservient and easily cowed species rather than, well, Dwellers. Attempting to control the place with Dwellers around would be like peeing into a star. The danger was that, in carrying out a raid to secure a given volume for long enough to hunt down the information they were looking for, the Mercatoria would cause the Dwellers to react as though they were undergoing a full-scale invasion. It seemed to be part of Dweller psychology that if something was worth reacting to, it was even more worth overreacting to, and Fassin dreaded to think what that might imply for all sides.

“Stress an extended raid and temporary site occupation with aggressive patrols that might be mistaken for an invasion.”

“Whereabouts?” Setstyin asked. “Or are you really going to tell me you have no idea?”

“I understand we’re going to be looking in or very near the new Formal War zone.”

Setstyin let his hub arms droop down at his side. This was something like a human rolling their eyes. “Well, of course, where else?”

“I don’t suppose there’s the slightest possibility that the war might be cancelled or postponed?”

“There is always a chance, but it certainly won’t have anything to do with a mere party animal like myself having a word in even the highest-placed ear. Think: there might be the possibility of genuine hostile action against us, an act of alien aggression within the winds of Nasqueron itself and the suggestion is we call off a Formal War? More likely we’ll start a few more to show how jolly fierce we are and get some practice in.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

“When do you set off for the war zone?”

“Tomorrow morning, Hauskip local time.”

“There you are. In plenty of time for the war’s opening ceremony”

“I may have other things on my mind.”

“Hmm. You realise that me having a word on high may well result in you being tracked, watched by interested parties?”

“Whereas that would never happen normally? But yes, I realise that.”

“Well, I wish you well, Fassin Taak.”

“Thanks.”

Setstyin peered at the camerascreen, looking at Fassin’s surroundings. “Y’sul out of kudos with the phone operators?”

“I have an additional Guard-mentor in the shape of an oerileithe Mercatoria military colonel. She might not understand my concern. I sneaked out to make the call.”

“Very cloak, very dagger. Good luck with your quest, Fassin. Do keep in touch.”

* * *

“If you’re watching this, Sal, then I’m dead. Obviously I don’t know what the circumstances of that death may have been. Like to think I died bravely and honourably in combat. Kind of don’t think you’ll be watching this because my clogs were popped peacefully in my sleep because I don’t mean for that to happen, at least not until something’s happened that involves you. Dying peacefully… actually, hopefully, that would mean you’re already dead.

“The thing that involves you sort of involves Fass, too, though not in the same way. Involves you and me and Fass and Ilen. Poor dead Ilen. Ilen Deste, Sal. You remember her? Maybe you don’t. It’s been so long, for all of us, for all these strange different reasons that end up being just the same. You with your treatments, Fass with his slowtime, me all Einsteined out with too much time near light speed. Time hasn’t ever caught up with any of us, has it, Sal?

“But I’m thinking you probably do remember Ilen and what happened to her, because it was all so traumatic for us, wasn’t it? You don’t forget anything about something that dramatic and horrible, not really. How can you? You have nightmares about it, it sneaks up on you even in the day sometimes, too. Do you find that? I get that. Sometimes it’s something really obvious, like seeing something on screen of somebody hanging by their fingertips over a drop, especially if it’s a woman. Of course in the screen they usually get rescued. Not always, but usually. But then other times what happened just… ambushed me. I’ll be doing something completely normal, with no… cues, no… stimulus that you can see any logical reason would trigger the memories, and suddenly I’m there, I’m back again, back in that big old motherfucker of a ship, with you and Fass and Ilen.

“Do you get that? I get it still, even after all these years. You’d have thought it would have stopped happening by now, wouldn’t you? Hell, even without all those stolen years near c, you’d have thought it should have, you know, withered, fallen away? Look at me; sixty-one years old, body-time, they tell me. Fitter than ever, still bedding guys a third my age, and — do I look sixty? Hope not. But I should have got over the whole thing by now, don’t you think? Time a great healer and all that. Just hasn’t happened.

“So, do you get anything similar? Is this ringing any bells at all? Really, I’d like to know. Maybe we’ll find out, one day. Maybe I’ll have got to ask this and you’ll never get to see this but we’ll have found out together. Maybe somebody else will get to see this. It isn’t really meant for anybody else, but, well, this is a high-risk occupation, and who knows what’ll happen after this is made?

“Anyway, point is: I know what happened, and I intend to kill you, Sal. Or, I did. As I say, if it is you who’s watching this, I’m dead and you’re still alive. But I want you to know it isn’t going to end there. Got serious intentions of pursuing you from beyond the grave, Sal, old son. Won’t be easy, realise that, but I’ve spent my entire career getting myself into a position of power. Making myself so powerful within the Navy that I can click my fingers and battleships power up, set course and ship out. Building networks, making friends, finding allies, taking lovers, taking exams, running risks, all so that I’ll have the power one day to challenge a man who, oh, must nearly own the system by now. The portal collapse nearly threw me — put my plans back a long way — but I reckon you’ll still be alive and loving life when I finally do get home, or when what’s planned to happen in the event of my death starts happening.

“Can’t tell you too much, obviously. No reason to give you any sort of warning at all. And all the advantages are on your side already, aren’t they? Well, maybe apart from surprise. You surprised now? If you’re listening to this, watching this? Wondering what’s going to happen?? Well, wonder away. Wonder away, Sal, and don’t stop wondering, don’t stop being frightened, because being frightened might keep you alive a bit longer. Not too long. Definitely not too long, but long enough.

“I suppose that’s enough now, don’t you think? Definitely the longest speech either of us ever delivered even while we were together, way back when, wouldn’t you say? Maybe almost more than we ever said to each other put together. Well, almost.

“Let me explain, in case you still haven’t got it: I saw the marks, Sal. I saw the three red lines on your neck, before you put your jacket collar up. Remember that? Remember pretending to shiver and saying, ‘C-collar,’ or whatever it was? Remember? Just one of those little false notes that you don’t notice at the time because of all the fear and adrenalin, that doesn’t start to nag at you until long afterwards. Kept that collar up afterwards, too, didn’t you? Kept the jacket on like some sort of comfort blanket until you could get to a bathroom and a first-aid kit, didn’t you? I remember. And when I was reaching down to Ilen, I saw her fingernails. With the blood under them. Saw them very distinctly. Fass didn’t; still has no idea, even yet. But I saw them. I wasn’t entirely sure about the marks on your neck, but then I checked. Remember that last farewell fuck, a couple of weeks later? Just checking. They were very faint by then, of course, but they were there all right.

“You always wanted her, didn’t you, Sal? Always so desired the beautiful Ilen. Did you think because she went into the ship with you she was saying yes? Did you? Did she, then changed her mind? Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I saw what I saw.

“You know what’s funny, too? I was there, even if you weren’t. Ilen and I. Just the once, but that’s something else I’ll never forget, either. Oh, you’d have loved to have been there for that, wouldn’t you? Bet you would. I slept with Fass, too, afterwards, just to complete the set. Much better than you, by the way.”

The uniformed figure sat forward, right up to the camera, staring into it, voice going quiet and low.

“Iwas coming to get you, Sal. If you’re watching this then I didn’t make it, not personally, but even from beyond the grave, I’m still fucking coming to get you.”

The image froze, then faded. A hand, shaking only slightly, reached out and turned the viewer off.