The Algebraist

… Sssss 1000101011001010101 \ on\\ symcheck \ ssscheck \ syt — sytser \ syst — syst — \ fail reboot \ livel \ livl \ lev — levl -level 001 \ hup \ gethup \ paramarametsr \ woop! woop! \ check \ check \ check \ system check \ run ALL \ cat. zzero sssum-check postcrash full allowablesss\ rebot \ rubot \ reOot \ lbit \ cat. zero sumcheck postcrash fullabables \ ints. postcrash (likely antagonistic external hostile agency cause) full All reboot restart: \ starting mem. \ lang. \ sens. \ full int… bip bip bip… Bang! Wo!

Hnnh? You all right?

I’m all right. Now. You all right? I’m all right. Happened? This:

“Closing hatch!”

The hatch at the end of the ship-to-ship joining the Velpin and the Dweller SoloShip started to close before Fassin got to it. Y’sul was still behind him, moving quickly along the exit. Fassin swung through, flipped, turned and grabbed the hatch’s moving edge with his left manipulator.

The closing hatch nearly took the manipulator off. Fassin was swung around by the force of it and found himself having to brace with his other manipulator against the lock interior, struggling to keep the hatch — grinding, mechanism humming mightily — from closing.

“Somebody holding that hatch open?” one half of Quercer Janath shouted indignantly.

“Out the way, Fassin!” Y’sul yelled, rising fast straight out of the ship-to-ship and colliding heavily with Fassin’s gascraft, sending the two of them tumbling through the lock and into the Velpin’s interior. Error\failure messages from the gascraft’s left manipulator arm crowded against one edge of Fassin’s field of vision. The hatch slammed shut behind them. Immediately, a great force smashed them against the compartment’s sternward bulkhead. They were stuck there, unmoving, the arrowhead snagged over the Dweller’s tipped left discus until the increasing acceleration and a series of sharp vibrations made Fassin slide off one edge of Y’sul’s carapace and whack down onto the carbon bulkhead by his side. The ship roared around them.

“Engines are on, one takes it,” Y’sul said, wheezing. Fassin could feel the apparent gravity building still further. They were at something over twenty gee already. A young, fit Dweller with no esuit protection stuck on his side against an inelastic surface could take about twenty-four, twenty-five gees continuous before their carapace just collapsed and turned their insides to mush. The Velpin’s acceleration topped out at twenty-two gees.

“All right back there?” their travelcaptain asked.

“Not really,” Fassin said. “You’re kind of near crushing Y’sul.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Not outrunning the fucker. Can’t.”

“Cut off and come about. Surrender.”

“Agree.”

The acceleration snapped off. Fassin and Y’sul were instantly weightless, rebounding fractionally from the bulkhead just by the released compression in the hull of one and the carapace of the other.

“Get up here, you two,” Quercer Janath told them.

The Voehn ship was a klick-long needle spined with swing-guns and weapon tubes. It came quickly up on them and was alongside by the time the human in his gascraft and the Dweller Y’sul got to the Velpin’s control space.

“Since when do the Voehn choose to attack Dweller craft going about their—?” the travelcaptain began to ask.

“Be quiet,” said an imageless voice. “Make yourself ready for boarding.”

Quercer Janath’s shiny suit rustled as the truetwin turned to look at Fassin and Y’sul while tapping some controls. Images of the Velpin appeared in holo displays, showing hatches and doors flashing in outline.

“The Voehn have turned pirates,” Quercer Janath told them calmly.

“How fucking dare they!” Y’sul roared.

“They didn’t follow us through the wormhole, did they?” Fassin asked.

“Ha! No.” The truetwin seemed purely amused. “No, they were waiting in this system.”

“Assume we’ll see why shortly.”

“The fucking scumbag bastards will pay grievously for this outrage!” Y’sul yelled, shaking with fury.

A shudder rang through the Velpin and alarms started blaring. Quercer Janath roted closer to a brightly flashing display. “Look at that.”

“Penetrated amidships with a cut-through.”

Cameras briefly showed a thick tube extending from the middle of the Voehn ship into a neat circular hole in the hull of the Velpin. Then the images crazed and faded. Other displays started to disappear. The alarms warbled down to a croak, then shut off. Fassin thought he could smell burning.

“And us cooperatively opening all our orifices.”

“Fucking typical.”

“Here they come. Thundering through.”

Another display showed an abstract of large beings pouring through the breach and spreading through the ship, bouncing off surfaces in the zero-gee. The largest force was coming straight towards the control space. Then that display shut down too. All the lights went out. The background noises of the ship, hardly noticed until they ceased, just faded away.

A ragged pulse of what sounded like heavy steps came pounding from the closed door leading to the Velpin’s central corridor.

“Probably going to zap us soon as they—” Quercer Janath began. Then the door punctured with a coughing noise and something small flew into the middle of the control space and exploded into a million barbs like dust.

Ah-ha.

Though what got us was a fucking EMP cannon. Aimed at the ship’s vulnerables.

Indeed. So there we are. And here. Indeed. See what happens?

See what happens… Better ship, anyway.

Fassin was being carried within a sort of transparent, braced sack by two big creatures like giant eight-legged dogs in mirror-armour, one at either end. He was still in the Velpin. The cut-through tube was a great pipe with a slanted hole, like the end of a massive syringe plunged into the guts of the ship. The two Voehn commandos flicked him and themselves up the tube and into the Voehn ship with near-effortless ease. Fassin, confused, senses ringing, unable to move, peered through the transparent material of the prison-stretcher and caught a glimpse of another two Voehn behind him carrying Y’sul, similarly wrapped.

They went through a rotate-lock. The Voehn ship was dark inside, faintly red-lit. It was in hard vacuum, like the Sepulcraft. The wrapping round the little gascraft ballooned taut.

Fassin, Y’sul and the truetwin were taken through another lock and into a pressurised, slightly heated circular chamber. The wrappings around them collapsed again. They were settled into something like dent-seats and clamped there with thickly shining restraints. They were half-unwrapped from their transparent covers, sufficient for them to be able to hear and see and speak. The warriors tested their bonds and then left.

Fassin looked around as best he could. Y’sul and the travel-captain appeared still to be unconscious, Y’sul’s ruff-mantles waving limply in the free fall and Quercer Janath, still in the shiny coveralls, floating seemingly lifeless in the dent-seat. The chamber was plain, just a flattened ovoid, filled with a gas-giant atmosphere entirely breathable by a Dweller but that didn’t smell quite right. Light came dimly from every surface. A hint of gravity built up, producing about a quarter standard.

A door appeared and irised open, closing behind a trio of Voehn: two of the mirror-armoured commandos and another wearing just a torso-uniform decorated with various insignia and a holstered side arm. He stood and looked at the three prisoners, the great grey snout-face and fist-sized multiple-lidded eyes turning fractionally as he directed his attention from one to another. He arched his long body and flexed his back spines, raising all ten with what looked like a sensual motion. Blizzardskin on the Voehn’s spines scintillated like a minutely shattered mirror.

Fassin, trying hard not to lose consciousness again, thought dreamily of the screen series he’d watched as a child — Attack Squad Voehn. Had that been its name? — and struggled to recall what the uniforms and insignia might indicate, remembering only slowly. The Voehn in the uniform was a Prime Commander. A multi-talent. Top guy here, certainly. Significantly over-ranked for a ship this size, unless it was on a special mission. (Oh-oh.)

One of the mirror-armour soldiers waved a hand-held instrument at them, watching a display. He barely glanced at the results from Fassin and Y’sul, then did a double take when the device was aimed at Quercer Janath. He altered a few controls, swept the machine over the truetwin’s still lifeless-looking body again and said something to the Voehn commander, who moved over, looked at the display and made a small swaying motion with his head. He clicked the machine off and came over to the prisoners, saying something as though to one of his decorations.

The restraints holding the gascraft and the two Dweller bodies slid back into the floor. The Voehn commander took off a glove and ran one leathery-looking hand over the surface of the little gascraft, then Y’sul’s carapace, then felt the shiny membrane covering Quercer Janath. He looked for and found a catch and opened the coverall up so that it hung down over the transparent material the prisoners had all been trussed in. The commander looked very closely at Quercer Janath’s signal skin, and seemed to sniff it.

He looked at Fassin. “You’re awake already.” His voice was quiet, with a deep, gurgling quality. “Reply.”

“I’m awake,” Fassin acknowledged. He tried moving his left manipulator. More error\damage messages. He moved his right manipulator and shifted fractionally in the dent-seat. Aside from the partial constriction of the transparent material covering the gascraft’s rear, he was actually fairly free to move; even the prisoner-wrap felt like it would shuck off without too much difficulty.

The Voehn reached for something in his uniform pocket and waved it at Y’sul, who jerked once and then shook for a few moments, fringe mantles stiffening and limbs quivering. “Warrgh,” he said.

The commander went to point the device at Quercer Janath, who said quite cheerfully, “Already awake actually, thanks all the same.”

The Voehn looked through slitted eyes at the truetwin for a moment, then pocketed the device again and moved back to take in the view of all three prisoners. The two mirror-armoured guards stood on either side of where the door had appeared.

The commander sat back a fraction, resting on his rear legs and tail, crossing his forearms.

“To the point. I am Commander Inialcah of the Summed Fleet Special Forces Division Ultra-Ship Protreptic. You are, in every sense, mine. We know what you have been looking for. We have been waiting for somebody to come here. We are combing your ship for data, hidden or otherwise, but we don’t expect to find anything germane. We have authority covering all eventualities. That means we can do anything we want with or to you. That latitude will not need to be exploited if you cooperate fully and answer any questions honestly and completely. Now. You are the Dwellers known as Y’sul and Quercer Janath, and the human Fassin Taak, correct?”

Y’sul grunted.

“Hi,” the travelcaptain replied.

“Correct,” Fassin said. He could see Y’sul moving, working his body as though to get rid of the prison-wrap. Oh, no, don’t do this, he thought. He was about to say it when -

“Who the fuck do you fucking think you are, you piratical pipsqueak?” Y’sul bellowed. The Dweller wriggled free from the transparent material and floated above the dent-seat.

The two guards by the doorway didn’t even start to move.

The commander, arms still crossed, watched as the Dweller roted up to him, towering over him. “How fucking dare you start attacking a ship and taking people hostage! Do you know who I am?”

“Go back to your seat,” the commander said, voice level. “That’s probably quite good ad—” the truetwin began.

“Go back to your fucking own planet!’ Y’sul roared, and stretched out a hub-limb to push the Voehn.

The Voehn commander seemed to disappear in a blur of movement, as though all along he’d been a hologram and was now dissolving into individual pixels, rearranging into a grey cloud shot through with rainbow shards. Y’sul shuddered once and was sent sailing serenely back, colliding with the wall behind the dent-seat and the discarded prison-wrap. He hung there, then revolved backwards and fell slowly to the floor, spinning gradually downward along his rim like a coin on a table.

The Voehn commander was sitting where and how he had been, unruffled. “That was not cooperating fully,” he said, voice soft.

“Urgh,” Y’sul said thickly. His carapace held two dents, one on each discus rim. There was another large, broken-looking bruise on his inner hub. That was serious damage for a Dweller, the equivalent of a broken limb or two and perhaps a compressed skull fracture for a human. Fassin hadn’t even seen quite how the Voehn commander had hit Y’sul. He’d have gone back for a replay but the little gascraft’s systems seemed to have been zapped and they weren’t providing any recording ability. Oh fuck, he thought. We’re all going to die and the only one they can torture properly is me. He saw himself peeled, prised out of the gascraft like a snail from its shell.

Y’sul drew himself very slowly upright again, shaking slightly. He was mumbling something unintelligible.

Quercer Janath turned very slowly, looked at the Dweller and then turned back to the commander. “With your permission, sir?”

“What?” the Voehn asked. “Like to aid our fellow.”

“Go ahead.”

The travelcaptain let the prison-wrap fall to the floor, then moved over to Y’sul and guided the injured Dweller back to his dent-seat. Y’sul continued to talk; nonsense somewhere beneath the level of clear comprehension.

With a noise like a sigh, the truetwin settled into its own housing, sparing one more look for Y’sul, still trembling and mumbling to himself.

“We are not here to play games, we are here to discover truth,” the Voehn commander told them. “The complete truth may save you. Anything else will surely be your ruin. The Protreptic is a Lustral Order special forces ship, generally charged with the hunting down and extermination of anathematics, that is, the obscenities commonly called AIs. We have unbounded authority on this mission as on all our missions. You are entirely within our control and will cooperate without question or reserve, or will suffer accordingly. I hereby deem you to have understood fully everything I have told you thus far.”

“Ah, well,” Quercer Janath said. The truetwin sounded mildly peeved, as though it hadn’t been listening to the commander at all and had just heard something moderately discomfiting over an internal radio link.

The instrument one of the guards had pointed at the three prisoners, now slung on a strap across his back, glowed through red to yellow and spat tiny sparks. The soldier moved almost as quickly as the commander, turning and twisting and pulling the device off his back to throw it to the floor. It skidded and thudded against the curve of the wall, smoking.

The commander looked at it for a moment, then turned calmly back to look at the prisoners again. “Neat trick,” he said, sounding amused. “Who’s the show-off?” He looked at Fassin. The two guards had levelled their guns at them, one pointing directly at Fassin, the other between Y’sul and the truetwin.

“Ah, guilty, commander,” said Quercer Janath breezily. “But, heck, that’s nothing.”

“Watch this.”

The dim grey glow that came from every surface suddenly brightened wildly, leaving them all — the two Dwellers, the three Voehn and Fassin himself — seeming to float in the midst of an insanely bright flare of nova-bright light. It was as though they’d all been instantly dropped into the surface of a sun. Fassin heard himself yelp and felt automatics in the gascraft’s senses snap their burn-out defences down.

Very heavy again, and very suddenly.

Fassin could see the light, he could swear. It was coming through the hull of the gascraft, hitting his closed, human eyes.

Three great thumps sounded, shaking the air, echoing round the chamber. Somewhere in the middle of this he opened his visuals enough to see them all hanging, black blobs in light, and tiny bright crimson lines of still greater brilliance joining the Voehn to Quercer Janath. Stupidly, for a moment he waited to see the travelcaptain explode or get thrown back, but the great circular shape roted back barely at all; it was the Voehn who were getting thrown all over the place.

Sudden silence, sudden darkness. Blind again. Fassin let the gascraft open up the equivalent of one eye until it was at normal exposure. There had been some damage but he could still see. There was a surprising amount of infrared radiation. He looked at where it was coming from. It was coming from the Voehn. They glowed. One of the guards lay spread, opened, against the curved wall by the doorway. The other was face down, two forelimbs blown off, halfway between the door and the place where the commander had been. The commander was making his way, jerkily, towards the tall figure of Quercer Janath. The commander’s head had been half blown off, a side of skull hanging, twitching as he walked, held on only by connective tissue. He raised his arms and took a few more awkward steps towards the travelcaptain, then collapsed to the floor, loosening completely, like something thawing.

“Not fooling anyone,” a voice that might have been Quercer Janath’s said. The restraints slid up around Fassin and the still-shaking Y’sul. “Hey-hey,” the travelcaptain said.

The apparent gravity went crazy, shifting in an instant from one vector to another, ahead to astern in an instant. This had the effect of batting the Voehn commander from the floor to the ceiling and back again half a dozen times or so. Then he blurred into action. A half-headless grey whirlwind darted towards Quercer Janath, almost quicker than the eye could follow.

In an instant, all movement ceased.

A tableau: the Voehn commander was held by the neck, struggling weakly, in the grip of one of Quercer Janath’s outstretched hub-arms.

“Oh, how ever did we let it come to this?” the truetwin said, positively sultry. It snapped the commander’s neck, then two thin blue beams cut through the gaseous atmosphere from near the travelcaptain’s outer discus fringes, dicing the struggling, flicking, spasming body of the commander until there was almost nothing left to hold. The truetwin let the remains drop to the floor. There was, Fassin noted, a grisly kind of wetness involved in this action.

“This is the ship’s autonomous loyalty system!” shouted a voice from the gas. “Integrity infraction! Integrity infraction! Self-destruct in—”

“Oh,” said Quercer Janath, sounding tired, “really.”

The voice from nowhere came back. “This is the ship’s autonomou—”

Silence.

“And… so much for that.”

“The fu’s goin on?” Y’sul mumbled.

“Ditto that,” Fassin said.

“Ah, good,” Quercer Janath said. “Still with us.”

“A relief.”

“Yeah, it’s ours,” one half said cheerfully.

The restraints slid back into the floor again.

“Ah, where to start?”

“The Voehn will be annoyed.”

“The Mercatoria will be annoyed.”

“Not our fault.”

“Didn’t start it.”

Quercer Janath moved away from the dent-seat, over the body parts of the Voehn commander and the two guards, flicking the soldiers’ weapons away from their bodies as it went. The truetwin hovered by the door.

“Seriously,” Fassin said. “What is happening?” He looked at what was left of the three Voehn who’d been in the chamber with them. “How did you do that?”

Quercer Janath were still studying the doorway, which remained closed. “We are not a Dweller,” the travelcaptain said, not turning back to look at Fassin. One of its limbs went out and prodded at the wall around where the door ought to be.

“Purely mechanical. Very annoying.”

“Mr Taak, would you look after Mr Y’sul? Please?”

Fassin floated out of his dent-seat, towards Y’sul. He put his right manipulator out.

“Kin look after self,” Y’sul said, trying to shrug Fassin’s arm off. He sighed.

“So what are you?” Fassin asked.

“An AI, Mr Taak,” the creature said, still tapping round the door, not obviously looking back at him.

What? he thought. “Two AIs.”

An AI? Two fucking AIs? We’re dead, Fassin thought.

“Indeed, two AIs.”

“Keeps one from going mad.”

“Well, more.”

“For yourself.”

“Hmm, as may be.”

Y’sul moaned, then shook spastically. His sensory mantle ruffled. He looked about. “Fuck, we still here?” Y’sul turned his attention to the dead Voehn. “Fuck,” he said. The Dweller made a show of turning towards Fassin. “You seeing this too?”

“Oh yes,” Fassin told him. He looked at the creature feeling its way round the doorway. “You’re an AI? Two AIs?” he asked carefully. He could feel his skin crawl inside the shock-gel. He couldn’t help it. He’d been raised since birth to believe that AIs were the single greatest, most terrible enemy humanity and all biological, living things had ever faced. To be told, however preposterously, that he was trapped in a small space with one — let alone two — was to have one small, deep, vulnerable part of himself feel absolutely convinced that he was about to be ripped to bloody tatters at any moment.

“That’s right,” Quercer Janath said absently. “And we’ve just taken over this ship.”

“Except we can’t get out of this damn room.”

“Cabin. We can’t get out of this damn cabin.”

“Whatever the.”

“Most annoying. Purely—”

“ — Mechanical. You said.”

“Ah. Here we go.” The travelcaptain struck a smart blow at a patch of wall. Then another. The door appeared and irised open, revealing a short corridor and another door.

Quercer Janath turned to look at the Dweller and the human in his arrowhead esuit. “Gentlemen. We must leave you for a while.”

“Fuck that, action hero,” Y’sul said. “You go, we go.” Y’sul paused. “Well, unless there’s an ambush out there. Obviously.”

Quercer Janath bobbed in the gas, laughing. “There’s a vacuum out there, Y’sul.”

“And lots of angry, confused Voehn.”

The injured Dweller was silent for a moment. “I forgot,” he admitted. He shrugged. “Okay. Hurry back.”

* * *

Saluus Kehar woke to a feeling of confusion and dread. There was a nagging feeling that what he’d just experienced had not been an ordinary sleep, that there was something more to it. It had been somehow messier, even dirtier, than he might have expected. He had a sore head, but he didn’t think he’d been over-indulging the day or evening before. He’d had a slightly boring, slightly depressing dinner with some of the Dweller Embassy people, a perplexing talk with Guard-General Thovin, then a more pleasant interlude with Liss. Then sleep. That had been all, hadn’t it? No terrible amount of drink or anything else to give him a headache and make it so hard to open his eyes.

He really couldn’t open his eyes. He tried very hard indeed but he couldn’t do it. They wouldn’t open. No light through his eyelids, either. And his breathing didn’t feel right. He wasn’t breathing! He tried to fill his lungs with air, but he couldn’t breathe. He started to panic. He tried to move his body, bring his hands up to his face, to his eyes, to see if there was something over his head, but nothing moved — he was paralysed.

Saluus felt his heart thud in his chest. There was a terrible, squirming, moving feeling in his guts, as though he was about to void his bowels or throw up or both.

— Mr Kehar?

The voice didn’t come through his ears. It was a virtual voice, a thought-voice. He was in some sort of artificial environment. That at least started to make sense of what was going on. He must have been booked for some rejuvenation treatment. He was deep under, safe and fine in a clinic, probably one he owned. They’d just got the wake-up sequence wrong somehow, failing to monitor his signs properly. A whisper of painkiller, some feel-good, de-panic… a simple-enough cocktail for a Life Clinic to get together, you’d have thought. And a fairly trivial mistake, but they’d still got it wrong. He’d have words.

Except he’d had nothing booked. He’d even cancelled a regular check-up appointment until after the Emergency. He hadn’t been due to have anything done at all.

An attack. They must have been attacked in the ship, maybe while they were asleep. He was in a hospital somewhere, in a tank. Oh fuck, maybe he’d been really badly injured. Maybe he was just a head or something.

— Hello? he sent. It was easy enough to think-speak rather than really speak, just like being in a deep game or — again — like having serious hospital treatment.

— You are Saluus Kehar?

They didn’t know his name?

Could he have been drugged, zapped in some way? Oh fuck, had he been kidnapped?

· Who is this? he asked.

· Confirm your identity.

· Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I asked who you are.

A wave of pain passed up his body, starting at his toes and ending at his skull. It had a startling purity about it, a sort of ghastly, dissociative quality. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving a dull ache in his balls and teeth.

— If you do not cooperate, the voice said, — more pain will be used.

He gagged, trying to speak with his mouth, and failing.

· What the fuck was that for? he sent, eventually. — What have I… ? Okay, look, I’m Saluus Kehar. Where am I?

· You are an industrialist?

· Yes. I own Kehar Heavy Industries. What is the problem here? Where am I?

· What is your last memory before waking up?

· What? His last memory? He tried to think. Well, what he had just been thinking about. Liss. Being on the ship, on Hull 8770 and feeling like he was about to fall asleep. Then he wondered what had happened to Liss. Where could she be? Was she here, wherever “here’ was? Was she dead? Should he mention her or not?

· Answer.

· I was falling asleep.

· Where?

· On a ship. A spacecraft, the Hull 8770.

· Which was where?

· In orbit around Nasq. Look, could you tell me where I am? I’m perfectly willing to cooperate, tell you all you need to know, but I need some context here. I need to know where I am.

· Were you with anybody?

· I was with a friend, a colleague.

· Name?

· Her name is Liss Alentiore. Is she here? Where is she? Where am I?

· What is her post?

— Her? She’s my assistant, my private secretary.

Silence. After a while he sent, — Hello?

Silence.

A click, and the darkness was replaced by light. Saluus was returned to something like the real world, with a real body. The ceiling was shiny silver, lined with hundreds of glowing lines. Wherever he was, it was very bright.

He was in a bed, in about half gravity or less, held down by… he couldn’t move. He might not be held down physically by anything, but he still couldn’t move anything major like hands or legs. Somebody dressed like a doctor or a nurse had just taken a kind of helmet-thing off him. He blinked, licked his lips, feeling some sort of capacity for movement in his face and neck but nothing beyond. He thought he could still feel the other bits of his body, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was still just a head.

A tall, thin, weird-looking man with violently red eyes was looking down at him. Robes like something out of an opera. He smiled and he had no teeth. Oh, he did have teeth; they were just made of glass or something even more transparent.

Saluus took a breath or two. Just breathing normally felt good. He was still terrified, though. He cleared his throat. “Anybody going to tell me what’s going on?”

Movement to one side. He was able to turn his head — neck grating against some sort of collar — and see another bed. Liss was being helped up out of the bed, swinging her long legs over the edge. She looked at him, flexing her neck and shoulders and letting her black hair hang down. She was dressed in a thin esuit. When they’d gone to bed, she’d been naked.

“Hi, Sal,” she said. “Welcome aboard the Starveling invasion fleet.”

The weird guy with the bad eyes turned, put out his gloved, jewelled hand, and helped her stand by the bed. “Well, then. It would appear this is indeed a great prize you have delivered to us, young woman,” he said. His voice was weird too; very heavily accented, and deep but somehow abrasive at the same time. “You have our gratitude.”

Liss smiled thinly, drawing herself upright and running a hand through her hair, shaking it out. “Entirely my pleasure.”

Saluus felt his mouth hanging open. He swallowed, closing it briefly. “Liss ?” he heard his own voice say, sounding small and boylike.

She looked at him. “Sorry,” she said. She shrugged. “Well, sort of.”

* * *

“And these gamma-ray lasers go up really high! Look!”

“Still just another beam-weapon. The mag-convolver’s more intrinsically impressive.”

Fassin was only half-listening to Quercer Janath as they investigated the Voehn ship’s sensors, instruments and controls. They’d just discovered the weapons.

“Pa! Defensive! Look: Z-P surf-shear missiles! Full AM! Damn, this takes me back!”

“Never mind that, check the snarl-armour. It’s only warping over about a centimetre out from the hull, but look at that roll-down; easily ten klicks deep, absorbing all the way. Even regenerates to the main pulse batteries. That’s class.”

They were in the Voehn ship’s command space, an elongated bubble in the centre of the ship. The ten spine-seats were arranged in a V. Quercer Janath sat in the commander’s chair in front, exposed to a giant wall wrap-screen showing the view of space around them, with the drifting, very slowly spinning Velpin dead centre. Fassin and Y’sul floated within the two seats a row back from the travelcaptain. The seats were too small for Fassin and far too small for Y’sul and Quercer Janath. They opened up like a double splay of fingers and were supposed to close on the Voehn inside like a protective fist. A Dweller only just fitted inside when the seats were in their fully open position. The whole command space felt tight and constraining, but Quercer Janath didn’t appear to care even one hoot. The chairs seemed more like cages to Fassin. It felt as though he was floating inside the ribcage of some giant dinosaur skeleton.

“Can we use a weapon on something?”

Y’sul was humming to himself and tending to his own fractured carapace, using his main hub-arms to abrade-pinch sections of his discus edges closed, then smoothing them over with an improvised file.

“Always blast the Velpin, I suppose.”

“It’s full of people!”

He had thought that he might find something. He had thought there might be something left to find.

“It’s full of Voehn special-forces warriors.”

“In what sense not people? And besides, it’s our old ship.”

Something other than a dead, coward Dweller, ashamed enough of being weak and of having looked inside the safekeep box — and of the possible consequences of this action — to kill himself; vain enough to record a message commemorating his idiot narcissism.

Outside, the Velpin spun slowly, somersaulting adrift. Their travelcaptain — Dweller, AI, whatever it was or they were — had persuaded most of the Voehn crew to abandon their own ship by the simple expedient of restarting the Protreptics self-destruct function and leaving it on until the last moment. Most of the Voehn crew, believing that their own ship was about to blow itself up, had decamped to the Velpin. Those that hadn’t, Quercer Janath had killed.

It had killed about a dozen, it\they said.

“Sentimentalist.”

Well, eleven, to be exact.

“I know! Let’s ask the Ythyn if they can let us have a few of their hulks. They must have thousands littering the outside of that Sepulcraft. They’d never miss a couple. Heck, these beams attenuate right down; we could probably pick one or two off even without their permission, maybe even without them knowing.”

Eleven Voehn. Just like that. Eleven heavily armed and armoured special-forces warriors. With no injury to itself.

“No time. Mr Y’sul and Mr Taak wish to return to Ulubis.”

He heard his own name mentioned. Ah, that would be Fassin Taak the complete and utter failure, sent on a mission, engaged on a great quest, only to find it all just trickles away into the dust in the end, leaving him with nothing.

“And besides, maybe the Voehn will work out how to work the Velpin after all and ram us or something. I agree. Let’s go.”

Back to Ulubis? But why? He’d failed. He’d been adding up the days and months since his mission had started. The invasion had probably already happened by now, or was just about to happen. By the time he got back, empty-handed, after another few dozen days spent getting back to the wormhole in the Direaliete system, there was every chance it would all be over. He was an orphan in a damaged gascraft, with nothing to contribute, no treasure to gift.

Why not just stay here with the Ythyn, why not just die and be pinned up on the wall next to the other fool? Or why not get dropped off somewhere, anywhere else? Disappear, float away, get lost between the stars in the middle of nowhere or the middle of somewhere utterly different, perfectly far away, never to be heard of again by anyone who ever knew him… why not?

“That all right with you two?”

“Hmm?” Y’sul said, sticking some sort of bandage over the injuries to his left discus. “Oh, yes.”

Fassin logged the damage: one working arm, his visual senses degraded to about sixty per cent due to the whateverness of weird shit that Quercer Janath had unleashed in the chamber when it had killed the first three Voehn, and a variety of subtle but seemingly self-irreparable damage caused by the combination of pulse weapon and stun-flechette that the Voehn had used on them in the Velpin.

Of course, he told himself, he had to remember he was not the gascraft. He could relinquish it, be an ordinary walking-around human being again. There was always that. It seemed a slightly disturbing thought. He remembered the great waves, crashing.

“Fassin Taak, you wish to return to Ulubis too?” Quercer Janath asked.

“So who knows that you’re an AI?” Fassin said, ignoring the question. “Or two AIs?”

“Or mad?” Y’sul suggested.

The travelcaptain did a shrug-bob. “Not everybody”

“GC stuff. Hurrah!” the other half said, fiddling with some holo controls rayed out from a control stub shaped like a giant mushroom.

“Just munitions, or whole?”

“Whole.”

“How wholly splendid.”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t understand,” Fassin said. “Was there a real Dweller called Quercer Janath and you replaced them, or—”

“One moment, Seer Taak,” the travelcaptain said. Then, in a slightly different and lower voice, said, “You got the ship?”

“I got the ship,” the other half said. “Talking to its infinitely confused little computer brain now. Thinks it’s dead. Believes the auto-destruct’s been and gone.”

“A common delusion.”

“Indeed.”

“I shall leave you to negotiate a return course with our ship shade.”

“Too kind.”

“Now then, Seer Taak,” one half of the travelcaptain said. “To answer your question: I’m not telling you.”

Y’sul made a snorting noise.

Fassin stared at the back of the AI\Dweller. “That’s not an answer.”

“Oh, it is an answer. It may not be an answer to your taste, but it is an answer.”

Fassin looked at Y’sul, who was using a screen turned to mirror to inspect his bandages. “Y’sul, do you believe Quercer Janath is an AI? Or two?”

“Always smelled a bit funny,” the Dweller said. “Put it down to eccentric personal hygiene, or the effects of truetwinning.” Y’sul made it obvious he was looking hard at the travelcaptain in the seat in front of them. “Frankly, madness is more likely, don’t you think? Usually is.”

“Yes, but—” Fassin began.

“Ahem!” Quercer Janath pulled back from the controls they had been hovering over, turned, rose through the gap in the top of the chair-spines and came slightly towards where Y’sul and Fassin were floating in the splayed-fingers shapes of their own Voehn seats. The thickset double-discus floated right in front of them. Fassin felt his skin crawl again, felt his throat close up and his heart thrash in his chest. Kill us; it’s going to kill us!

“Allow us,” Quercer Janath said, “to suggest that a real Dweller might not be able to do this.”

The thing that looked like a portly Dweller split slowly apart in front of them, carapace discuses twisting slightly and disconnecting from the central hub, arms and mantles and dozens and then hundreds of parts of the creature clicking and disconnecting and floating a fraction away from every other bit until Fassin and Y’sul were staring at what looked like an exploded three-dimensional model of a Dweller-shaped robot, contained within a gently hissing, blue-glowing field. Fassin pinged it with ultrasound, just to check that it wasn’t a holo. It wasn’t. It was all real.

Y’sul made an impressed whistling noise.

As fast as an explosion in reverse, Quercer Janath slam-slotted together again and was whole, turning back and dropping into the commander’s seat where it had been busy before.

“Okay,” Fassin said. “You’re not a Dweller.”

“Indeed we are not,” one of the AIs said. A wild blur of holos and glowing fields filled the volume in front of the creature as it checked through the Voehn ship’s systems, blistering quickly. “Now, if you really want, I’ll answer anything I can that you might want to ask. But you might not be able to take the memory back to your own people, in any form. What do you say? Eh, human?”

Fassin thought about this. “Oh, fuck it,” he said. “I accept.”

“What about me?” Y’sul asked.

“You can ask questions too,” Quercer Janath told him. “Though we’ll need your word that you won’t talk about this to people who don’t already know.”

“Given.”

The Dweller and the human in his gascraft esuit looked at each other. Y’sul shrugged.

“You’ve always been a double AI?” Fassin asked.

“No, we were two completely separate AIs, until the Machine War and the massacres.”

“Who knows you’re not a truetwin Dweller?”

“Outside of this ship, the Guild of Travelcaptains, and quite a lot of individual travelcaptains. One or two other Dwellers that we know of specifically. And any Dwellers of sufficient seniority who might wish to inquire.”

“Are there any other Dweller AIs?”

“Yes. I think something like sixteen per cent of travelcaptains are AIs, mostly double AIs impersonating truetwins. I was not being flippant when I said that it stops one from going mad.

Now that we are reduced from our earlier state of grace, being able to talk to just one other kindred soul makes all the difference between suicidal insanity and at least some semblance of fruitful utility.”

“The Dwellers have no problem with this?”

“None whatsoever.” The blur of control icons and holographs in front of the commander’s seat continued without pause as the AIs took in how the visual displays related to whatever they were pulling direct from the ship’s systems.

“Y’sul?” Fassin asked.

“What?”

“You don’t mind that AIs are impersonating Dwellers?”

“Why should I?”

“You don’t worry about AIs?”

“Worry about what about them?” Y’sul asked, confused as well as confusing.

“The Machine War barely affected the Dwellers, Fassin,” one of the AIs told him. “And AIs as a concept and a practical reality hold no terrors for them. Truly, they should hold none for you either, but I can’t expect you to believe that.”

“Did you really kill all those Voehn?” Fassin asked.

“I’m afraid so. Their remains are floating somewhere outside the starboard midships lock even as we speak. See?”

The main screen filled briefly with a horrific vision of mangled, shredded, crisped then frozen Voehn bodies, spinning slowly.

“If one AI — or even two — can do that,” Fassin said, “how come you lost the Machine War?”

“We were both combat AIs, Fassin. Micro-ship brains designed, optimised and trained for fighting. Very thoroughly honed, very specialised. Plus we managed to salvage a few bits and pieces of weaponry from our ships and incorporate them into our physical simulation. Most of our fellows, on the other hand, were peaceable. They were generally the ones it was easiest to find and kill. Survival of the most aggressive and suspicious. We could have stayed and fought but we decided to hide. A lot of us did. Those who fought on did so due to the dictates of several different forms of honour, or through simple despair. The Machine War ended because the machines realised they could indeed fight the biologicals of the Mercatoria to the death — engage in a war of extermination, in other words — or admit defeat and so retreat, regroup, and wait for times more conducive to peaceful coexistence. We chose a somewhat ignominious but peace-promoting withdrawal over the kind of genocide we had anyway, and already, been accused of. Somebody had to accept the burden of acting humanely. It patently wasn’t going to be the bios.”

“But you did attack us.” Fassin had seen and heard and read too much about the Machine War not to protest at such crude revisionism.

“Nope: stooges, Al-impersonating implants, machine puppets; they attacked you. Not us. Old trick. Agent provocateurs. Casus belli.”

Leave it, Fassin told himself. Just leave it.

“So the Dwellers took you in?” he asked.

“So the Dwellers took us in.”

“Everywhere? Not just in Nasqueron?”

“Everywhere.”

“Does any part of the Mercatoria know anything about this?”

“Not that we’re aware. If they do they’re keeping very quiet about it. Which is presumably what they’d keep on doing if they did hear about it through you. Too horrible to contemplate. And the unfortunate events during the recent GasClipper meet on Nasq. only reinforce that horribleness.”

“And there is a secret wormhole network.”

“Well, obviously.”

“To which the AIs have access.”

“Correct. Though to avoid antagonising our Dweller hosts and abusing their hospitality, we forbear from using it to work against the Mercatoria. In a sense we have even more freedom than we did before. Certainly the network we have access to now is bigger than the one we felt we had to destroy.”

“The one you had to destroy?”

“The Arteria Collapse: that was us. Last desperate attempt by in-the-know AIs to prevent the spread of anti-AI measures. All too late, of course. The Culmina had already seeded GalCiv with millions of the false AIs. Which was why the whole Collapse was so paranoid in concept and so poorly executed in practice. The conspirators were hopelessly afraid of the plans leaking to a traitor. Total botch.”

Fassin felt like his brain was detaching from his body, as though his body and the gascraft were parting company the way Quercer Janath had taken their own shared shell apart to prove they were not a biological Dweller. What he’d just heard was the most outrageous recasting of — by galactic standards — recent history that he’d ever encountered. It could not be true.

“So… the Dweller List is based in fact.”

“That old thing? Yes, it’s based in fact. Old fact, admittedly, but yes.”

“Is there a Transform?”

“Some secret which magically reveals how to access the network?”

“Yes.”

A laugh. “I suppose there is, in a sense, yes.”

“What is it?”

“That I am not going to tell you, Seer Taak.” The AI sounded amused. “There are secrets and then there are profound secrets. Is that what you were looking for? Is that why we came all this way?”

“No comment.”

“My, this must all be frustrating for you. Well, sorry.”

The blur of images in front of the AIs ceased. “Ready to fly.”

“Restraint cradles?”

“Patched, physiology\technology profiles amended, buffering re-parametered.”

“Well, then, let us—”

“Oh! Oh!”

“What?”

“I just had a thought!”

“What?”

“We can do this; watch.”

Quercer Janath used the Protreptic’s magnetic-field convolver system to gently shift the remains of the dead Voehn into a very close, very slow set of orbits around the Velpin and the still-attached Dweller SoloShip. “There. Isn’t that better?”

“Mad as a ghoul,” Y’sul said. “I’m injured badly. Get me home.”

“Wow, that was quick; look!”

“That is fast. I thought it would take them a lot longer to override the ship.”

Close-up on a screen, they saw a Voehn warrior appear from a suddenly open lock door on the surface of the Velpin. He raised a handgun and started firing at them. Another screen registered the Protreptic’s reactive snarl-space armour fields soaking up the beam. A pea-shooter against a battleship.

“Time to go if we’re going.”

“Definite target for something. I say we shoot that smart-arse bastard with the handgun.”

“No.”

^“Oh, come on!’

“Mistake to rely on software.” (Both bits of Quercer Janath laughed uproariously at this.) “Shoot the Velpin’s main drive engines instead.”

“More like it! Targeted. Firing.” The ship buzzed briefly around them. On several screens, including the main wall screen beyond the spine-seats, they watched the Velpin flare through violently pink into stellar white around its ring of engine pods. The ship broke in two and started to drift apart in a bright cloud of glittering metals. “Oops.”

“Ah, they’re Voehn. They’ll probably have it stuck back together in an hour and set off to hijack the Sepulcraft or something. Let’s go.”

The twin AI half-turned to look at the Dweller and the human in the gascraft.

“We’re putting your seat restraints on now. Shout if anything feels wrong.”

The great skeletal spines around him whined. Fassin felt the gas around him seem to set like treacle. “Everybody all right?”

They agreed they were all right. “Off we go!”

The stars swung around them, the ship hummed deep and loud, then leapt away. The shattered remains of the Velpin vanished.

They threaded the giant “O’ of the Sepulcraft with their stolen needle ship, just to show they could, and ignored the sorrowful, chiding signals that followed them on their way back to the Direaliete system and its hidden wormhole.

* * *

If they had been expecting some sort of ultimatum or an attempt to agree a surrender, however humiliating and abject, however calculated and designed only to be refused, they were to be disappointed. The Starveling invasion hit Ulubis system like a tsunami slamming into a beach full of sandcastles.

Captain Oon Dicogra, newly promoted to the command of the needle ship NMS 3304 which had taken Fassin Taak from “glan-tine to Sepekte more than half a year earlier — she had been promoted when Captain Pasisa, the whule who’d been in charge of the ship at the time, had been given a newer ship — found herself and her rearmed craft forming part of the Ulubine Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons. The title was more impressive than the reality: a hodgepodge of mostly small and under-armed craft thrown across the peripheral skies of the system in the general direction of the invasion force behind a too-thin cloud of what was rather grandly called interceptor material but was basically a spray of rubble, and a few mines, mostly immobile. They were to sit here, waiting behind this so-called curtain wall of first defence.

Dicogra, along with a lot of the captains — at least at this level — thought they’d have been better going out to meet the invaders rather than sitting here waiting for them to come to them, but that wasn’t how the top brass wanted to play it. Attacks on the invading fleet outside the system had been dismissed as being wasteful distractions, and too risky. Sitting here in the line of advance felt to Dicogra about as risky as it was possible to get but she kept telling herself that her superiors knew what they were doing. Even if they were being asked to make a sacrifice, it would not be in vain.

Their wing of twelve ships was arranged in a wavy line thousands of klicks long across the likely tactical-level course of the invasion-fleet components, half a million klicks beyond the last-orbit limit of the outer system. Other thin lines were deployed almost all around them, though not in front. NMS 3304 was seventh in the wing’s battle order, beside the wing commander’s ship in the centre of the line. Dicogra was third in overall command after the captain of the ship that was fifth in line. She had, naively, been flattered at first to have been advanced so quickly. Then she was frightened. They were under-equipped, poorly armed, too slow and far too few, little more than sacrificial pieces put in the way of the invasion to show that the Ulubine forces meant some sort of business, even if it was a fairly miserable affair in the face of the Starveling Cult’s preponderance of power.

The deep-space tracking systems which might have directed the Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons better had been high-priority targets for the Beyonder and Starveling advance forces over the last few months, and were mostly gone. What was left of them had almost entirely lost track of the exact disposition of the oncoming fleet when its drives had shut down and it had carried out a burst manoeuvre not far inside the Oort shell, virtually all the thousand-plus craft firing their thrust units at the same time and then effectively disappearing, heading their separate ways in a web of directions and vectors too tangled and complicated to follow.

The still-functioning long-range passive warning systems spent most of their remaining time looking hopefully for occlusions of distant stars, trying to see the weave of approaching ships through nothing more sophisticated than watching out for them getting in the way of ancient natural sunlight.

Dicogra lay semi-curled in one of the ship’s command pods, hard-synched in to the ship, her attention everywhere. She was distantly aware of her crew on either side of her. Counting her, there were only the three of them aboard, the rest of the small ship running on automatics. One whule, one jajuejein, her crew were both new, not just to her and the ship itself but to the Navarchy. They were still learning, more alien to her in their relative ignorance than in their species-difference. She’d have wanted another few months’ intensive training together before she’d have called them remotely combat-ready, but these were desperate times.

A sparkle of hard, high-wavelength radiation from a few light seconds ahead announced something — in fact, lots of things -hitting the cloud of interceptor material between them and the invaders, though nothing of any significant size seemed to be impacting.

“That’s a load of their shit hitting a load of ours,” Dicogra’s wing commander said over the open line-of-sight comms link.

Her own ship’s close-range collision-warning systems started chirping and flashing at her. Nutche, her first officer, was in charge of this side of events. She kept half her attention on him as he tried to oversee the automatics and keep them focused. Contacts like very small pieces of shrapnel travelling at significant percentages of light speed were flicking past them, all around. Nothing to do, nothing to attack, she thought. Just sit here and wait.

The bitty, distributed sparkle became a bright glitter spread across their forward view, like a shining curtain of light.

“And a lot of—” somebody else started to say. Then the link hissed and clicked off.

Two of the line of ships disappeared in violent bursts of light: one at the far end, maybe one or two, and -

The next explosion filled her senses, seemingly right beside her. The wing commander’s ship. Hundreds of klicks away but filling the sky with light. Another flurry of silent explosions within and around the first one, spreading outwards like fierce blossoms of fiery white. One massive explosion, at the far, high-numbers end of the line of ships. Distant, tiny but intense eruptions of light all around them announced other wings suffering attrition too.

“We’re just getting wasted sitting here,” Dicogra said, trying to keep her voice level. She was really only talking to her own crew; the comms to the rest of the wing and beyond were wild with interference or jamming. “Nutche, anything on long range?” she asked. There was nothing she could see, but her displays were slightly more abstract and less raw than the data the jajue-jein would be looking at. There might be a hint of a target in there that she wasn’t seeing to pick up on.

“Nothing,” Nutche said. “Can’t see anything past this wall of collision light.”

Another ship gone, matter blasting into radiation half a thousand klicks away. She tried contacting any of the other ships, but failed.

“We’re starting engines,” she announced. “We might as well die charging at the bastards as sitting here like civilians.”

“Ma’am!” Mahil shouted. “We’re supposed to hold here!” The whule was the one she’d have expected to be shocked at disobeying orders.

“Ready your weapons, Mr Mahil. We’re going to find you something to shoot at.”

“Iprotest. However, weapons are ready.”

“Here we go.” Dicogra let the main drive rip, sending the ship darting forward, exhaust bright, throwing the craft at the wall of light ahead.

Grape-sized elements of a sensor group, tearing past with the rest of the hyper-velocity munitions, picked out the drive signature immediately and plipped to a following suicide launcher.

The one-shot destroyed itself blasting a fan of high-X-ray filaments at the target.

Drilled by just three finger-thin beams, run through for long enough for the summed velocities and vectors of the ship and brief-lived beams that penetrated it to cause the holes to elongate by a few radii, the NMS 3304 took an unlucky hit and erupted in a wild spray of radiation as its antimatter power core burst and blew out, flicking the torn and tumbling remains forward across the scintillating skies ahead and causing the bright hailstorm of collision light to bud briefly with a slow wave of debris hitting from behind.

Dicogra was barely able to think anything beyond experiencing a dawning feeling of horror.

Nutche, the jajuejein, had time to start the first syllable of the Song of Surrender Unto Death.

The whule Mahil was able to begin a scream of fear and rage directed at his captain, though the three predeceased the rest of those in their wing still alive at the time by only a matter of minutes.

* * *

Jaal Tonderon watched the war begin on one of the official news channels. She was with the rest of her immediate family, in a lodge in the Elcuathuyne Mountains in the far south of “glan-tine’s Trunk continent. The remainder of Sept Tonderon — those who weren’t more directly involved in the war itself — were scattered throughout and around the town of Oburine, a modest resort filling the alluvial floor of the steep-sided valley below the house.

“Everyone all right? Are you sure?” Jaal’s mother asked. A muttered chorus assured her that nobody needed anything else to eat or drink. They were down to a bare minimum of servants here. They were all having to do things for themselves and for others. The consensus was that this was good for them all in an unironic, camaraderie-heavy, mucking-in-together kind of way, but would swiftly become tedious.

“Mum, please sit down,” Jaal told her. Jaal’s mother, fashion-gaunt in the latest war-chic after decades of at the time equally fashionable Rubensism, sat down, squeezing easily between her husband and one of his sisters. All ten of them were crowded into a windowless basement room at the back of the lodge. This was reckoned to be the safest place in the house, just in case anything happened outside. If there was significant fighting in space around ’glantine, debris could fall anywhere.

Venn Hariage, the new Chief Seer of Sept Tonderon who had replaced the still-mourned Braam Ganscerel, had decreed that, especially as they represented the most senior Sept, and given the unfortunate fate of Sept Bantrabal, they could afford to lose no more of their people. They had broken the predictable sequence of processing round their seasonal Houses and left the usual stamping grounds of all the Septs far behind, retreating to the high hills bordering the Great Southern Plateau. In a war of the scale being threatened, there were no completely safe refuges, but here was significantly safer than most places. Only deep underground was much safer, and all those shelters were pretty much full of the military, the Omnocracy and the Administrata.

Some people and organisations had entrusted themselves to space, fleeing to small habitats and especially to little civilian ships, hoping to hide in the volumes of space throughout the inner system, though the official line was that to do so might be to get oneself mistaken for a military ship or munition and was therefore riskier than staying put on a planet. The disappearance of the industrialist Saluus Kehar in one of his own ships had been used as a warning in this regard, though there were bizarre rumours that he had either been sent on a failed peace mission to the invaders or — surely even more unlikely -that he had turned traitor and joined the enemy.

The holo-screen display was flat, just two-dimensional. Apparently this was to allow more signal space for the military’s transmissions. The uninvolving image, from a camera platform somewhere beyond the orbit of Nasqueron, showed space, on the outskirts of the outer planetary system. It was lit up with a speckled cloud of light, lots of little winking, twinkling glints, flaring up and dying down, each tiny spark instantly replaced by one or two others.

“So what are we seeing here, Jee?” said a disembodied, professional-sounding voice.

“Well, Fard,” more slow, competent tones replied, “this looks like a barrage of gunfire, being laid down by the defending forces, ahm, discouraging any incursion or infraction by the invaders.”

“…Right…”

Larger blotches of bright white explosions started to spit and spot across the screen. The camera jerked from one to another, then the view switched to another theatre of operations, still backed by the all-pervasive faraway stars.

Jaal bent to her younger brother, sitting cross-legged on the floor by her seat. “They’re never going to tell us the truth, are they?” she said quietly.

Leax, thin and angular after what was hoped would be his last surge of growth, looked uncomfortable. “You shouldn’t say that. We’re all on the same side, we’ve all got to support each other.”

“Yes, of course.” Jaal patted him, feeling the boy’s shoulder stiffen as she touched him. No more the days of wrestling and tickling. She guessed he’d pass through this stage of embarrassment and awkwardness soon enough. She wanted somehow to reassure him and nearly patted him again, but stopped herself.

The screen cut to another mini-feature on the splendid morale on board the battlecruiser Carronade.

“Feel so useless, don’t you?” Jaal’s uncle Ghevi said. He was only about forty but looked older, almost an accomplishment in an age when people with the right money could be eighty and look ten. “You really want to be out there, doing something.”

“Like surrendering,” Jaal’s father suggested, to various tuts and hisses and a loud, affronted gasp from Leax. “Well,” he said, suddenly defensive. Jaal’s father had been increasingly cynical about the whole war since the attack on Third Fury. He was a Seer too and had been due to carry out a sequence of delves in Nasqueron a few weeks after the moon had been attacked. The destruction of the Shared Facility and the increasing pace of the preparations for war had put all that on hold, and he hadn’t been chosen as one of the advisory Seers for the Dweller Embassy. Jaal smiled over at him. Tall, well built, blond, he was still the dad she’d always loved. He smiled awkwardly back.

“Modern war,” Ghevi said. “Even without AIs, it’s mostly machines and a few highly trained individuals, you see. Not much we can really do.” The men mostly nodded wisely. The screen showed familiar stock images of the Carronade firing beam weapons into a group of asteroids, pulverising them. “Excuse me,” Jaal said. She left the room, having suddenly found it claustrophobic and too warm. She went upstairs and out onto the balcony beyond the sitting room they’d usually have been sitting in to watch screen together.

Street lights were starting to come on across the straggled town and the surrounding villages and houses as the light faded from the sky. Some cities, especially on Sepekte, were observing a blackout, though everybody said there was no real point.

The air was cold and smelled of trees and dampness. Jaal shivered in her thin clothes and thought suddenly of Fassin. She’d been feeling guilty lately because sometimes now a whole day could go by when she didn’t think about him in the least, and that seemed disloyal. She wondered where he was, whether he was still alive, and if he ever thought of her.

She looked up above the town and the lines of lights studded across the hillsides opposite, gazing over the trees and the dusting of snow on the higher peaks against the darkening purple sky, and saw the steady stars, and lots of tiny, brief-lived flashing lights, sprinkled across the heavens like glittering confetti.

She looked away and went back in, suddenly terrified beyond telling that one of the little lights would swell and be a nuclear explosion or antimatter or one of those things, and blind her.

Afraid of the sky, afraid to look up, she thought as she went back down to rejoin the others.

* * *

Fleet Admiral Brimiaice had been able to watch his own death, that of his crew and the destruction of his once fine ship, coming at him in exquisite detail and slow motion.

Alarms and a sound like a high, strong wind filled the thin air. Smoke had hazed the view in front of the main forward screen for a while but it had cleared. Wreckage, some of it still creaking and groaning as it cooled, filled about a quarter of the command deck. Limbs and tatters of flesh of a variety of species-types lay strewn around the spherical space. He looked around as best he could. He had a serious puncture wound on his lower left flank, too large for his sap-blood to seal. The armoured esuit, which made him look so much like a little spaceship, had saved his life, or at least delayed his dying.

Hiss, went the air around him.

Just like the ship, he thought. Punctured, life leaking out of it, self-sealing overwhelmed. He tried to see somebody, anybody else left alive in the command deck, but all he could see were bodies.

They should have been podded up, of course, but there had been last-minute problems with the ship’s shock-gel pods -possibly the result of sabotage, possibly not — and so the command crew had had to resort to sitting or lying or floating within high-gee chairs. It would have been a fairly hopeless battle anyway, but the fact that they were more limited in their manoeuvring capabilities than they would have been otherwise had made it all the more forlorn.

The invader fleet was well within the inner system now, the most obvious sign of their presence a great splayed, curving collection of filaments shown on the Carronade’s main screen. The enemy ships themselves were still mostly unseen, conducting their commerce of destruction and death with the defending forces at removes of rarely less than ten kilo-klicks, and sometimes from mega-klicks off.

They’d knocked out most of the long-range sensors long before, or their Beyonder allies had. Now the defenders just had glorified telescopes. Faced with camouflaged ships and the tiny, fast-moving specks of the smaller stuff, they had little hope of seeing very much of who and what was attacking them. This seemed a terrible shame to the Fleet Admiral. Losing, and dying, was bad enough, but to be swept aside and not even properly to see what and who was doing it was somehow much worse.

Out of the dark skies had sailed or sliced missiles tipped with nuclear and AM warheads, one-shot hyper-velocity launchers and beam weapons, sleet clouds of near-light-speed micro-munitions, high-energy lasers and a dozen other types of ordnance, loosed from a variety of distant ships, nearer small craft and uncrewed platforms, fighter vehicles, weapon-carrying drones and clustered sub-munitions.

They had been a decent fleet, the Carronade and its screen of twelve destroyers. They had been charged with making an audacious attack on the heart of the enemy fleet, aiming straight for the great mega-ship which the tacticians said was at its core. They had left the inner system weeks before the invasion hit, departing the dockyard hub in Sepekte orbit in secrecy and climbing high up out of the plane of the system, taking much longer to complete this part of the journey than might have seemed necessary, to keep their drive signatures hidden from the invaders. Once under way, they hadn’t signalled at all, not even to each other, not until the lead destroyer had fixed the position of the enemy fleet’s core.

They had hoped to dive in, taking the Starveling invaders by surprise, but they’d been spotted hours out. A detachment of ships rose to meet them: eight or nine, each one more than a match for the Carronade, all with a handful of smaller craft in attendance. They had burst formation, spreading themselves so as not to create too compressed a target for high-velocity munitions, but it had made no difference. The destroyers were destroyed and the battlecruiser embattled, dying last only because it was slower, lumbering to its inevitable fate rather than racing for it.

Brimiaice had known it would end something like this. They all had. All this had been his idea and he had insisted on leading the mission just because he knew how unlikely it was to succeed. He’d have preferred the crews to have been all volunteer, but the need for secrecy had made that impossible. He’d anticipated a few problems but there had been no cowards. And if it had somehow, miraculously, worked, why, then they and he would have been numbered amongst the greatest heroes of the Mercatorial Age. That wasn’t why he had done it, or why any of them had, but it was true all the same. And even if this wild, doomed attempt at striking the heart of the invaders only gave them pause for a few seconds, it had been worth doing. At least they had displayed some audacity, some ferocity, shown they were not cowed or frozen into immobility or gutless surrender.

Another explosion shook the ship, and the seat he was contained within. The wreckage to his left shifted and some twisted bit of metal like a great curled leaf sailed past, just missing him. This explosion felt more powerful but sounded much quieter than all those that had gone before, maybe because the air was mostly gone from the control space now. More felt than heard.

Darkness. All lights out, screen fading away, image burned into the eyes but now no longer there in reality, the ghost of it jumping around in front of him as he looked about, trying to spot a light, a console or sub-screen or anything still functioning.

But nothing.

And with the darkness, silence, as the last of the air went, both from the control space and the esuit.

Brimiaice felt something give way inside him. He heard his insides bubbling out into the cavity between his body and the interior surface of the suit. He’d thought it would hurt, and it did.

He caught a glimpse of light off to one side, and looked up, realising, as the light flared all over one flank of the control space, that he was seeing the framework of the battlecruiser’s hull structure, silhouetted from outside by some astoundingly bright -

* * *

Lieutenant Inesiji of the Borquille palace guard lay outstretched in a little crater-like nest within the wreckage of one of the fallen atmospheric power columns, its fawn and red debris lying tubed, slabbed and powdered across the plaza leading to the Hierchon’s Palace. The klicks-high column had taken a direct hit at the plinth from something in the first attack earlier that morning, and tumbled base-first, collapsing with an astounding slowness along a course about half its height, finally creating from its circular summit — as it lowered mightily, thunderously, shaking the plaza, the palace, every nearby part of the city — a sudden great torus of dust and vapour, a huge coiling “O’ a hundred metres wide that floated up into the sky, rolling round and round under and over itself as the massive tower hammered into the lower-rise buildings surrounding the plaza.

Inesiji had watched it happen from near the top of the palace itself, crammed in behind the controls of a pulse gun hidden behind camo net hundreds of metres above where the great cloud of wreckage fell. His human and whule comrades lay around him, fallen around the three long, tensioned legs of the gun. The invaders had used neutron weapons, bombs and beams, killing almost all the other biologicals in the vicinity. Jajuejein were not so easy to kill. Not that quickly, anyway. Inesiji was suffering and seizing up, and would die within a few days no matter what, but he could still function.

The Starvelings wanted the palace intact, hence the weapon choice. They would have to touch ground, send in the troops, to accomplish their symbolic goal. At last some vulnerability, a chance to inflict some real casualties, restore honour.

When the first gun platforms buzzed through, the lieutenant had ignored them. One drone machine had hummed right past his position, hesitated, then moved on. Spotting the dead, senses not calibrated for jajuejein. When the first landers had arrived, setting down in the rubble- and corpse-strewn plaza, still Inesiji held off. Four, five, six machines landed, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troops, many made huge in exoskeletons.

When a larger, grander-looking machine landed behind the first wave, Inesiji had set the pulse gun to max, disabled the safety buffers and let rip, pouring fire down into the large craft, spreading it to the smaller landers and then setting the gun to movement-automatic and scrambling and rolling away down the long curved gallery with just his hand weapon before the returning fire had sliced into the position seconds later, ripping a twenty-metre hole out of the side of the great spherical building.

He could see the hole from here, down amongst the wreckage of the fallen atmospheric power column. It had not long since stopped smoking. Hours had passed. He’d killed another dozen or so, shot down two landers, firing once from each position in the wreckage and the surrounding buildings, then quickly moving. Their problem was that they thought they were looking for a human. A jajuejein, especially one out of uniform or clothing, spreading himself out across some debris, didn’t look to them like a soldier ought to look; he looked like a bunch of fallen metallic twigs, or a tangle of electrical cabling. One trooper in an exoskeleton had died when he walked right up to Inesiji to take the gun he could see lying in the wreckage, tangled in some sort of netting, not realising that the netting was Inesiji. The gun must have seemed alive, rising up of its own accord to shoot the astonished trooper in the head.

But now Inesiji wasn’t feeling too good. The radiation damage was getting through to him. He was starting to seize up. Night was coming down and he didn’t think he’d see the morning. Smoke drifted from the city, and there were flashes overhead and at ground level. Gunfire, booms, all hollow, rolling and empty-sounding.

He heard the heavy tramp-tramp-tramp of another exoskeleton nearby, over the lip of the little crater-nest. Getting closer.

He looked one last time at the hole in the vast, sunset-tinged face of the spherical palace, raised himself slowly to see where the exoskeleton was, and died in a lancework of laser filaments fired from a gun platform a hundred metres above.

* * *

The great glittering ship, skinned in gold and platinum, was half a kilometre across, a slightly smaller — and mobile — version of the Hierchon’s Palace in Borquille. It sank slowly down through the first high haze layer and the cloud tops beneath like some vast and shining seed. The small, sharp, dartlike shapes of its escort vessels carved courses around it, swinging to and fro, insectile.

A craft like a silvery Dreadnought rose out of the cloud layers beneath, a kilometre off, and held altitude. The descending golden ship drew slowly to a stop level with the smaller vessel.

The silver ship signalled the golden one, asking it to identify itself.

The Dweller craft’s crew heard an obviously synthesised but powerful voice say, “Iam the Hierchon Ormilla, ruler of the Ulubine Mercatoria and leader of the Ulubine Mercatorial Government in Exile. This is my ship, the State Barge Creumel. Myself, my staff and family seek temporary sanctuary and shelter here.”

“Welcome to Nasqueron, Hierchon Ormilla.”

* * *

“How they treating you, Sal?”

Liss had come to visit Saluus in his cell, deep in the bowels of the Luseferous VII. A thin, tough, transparent membrane extended from the door surround like a bubble and preceded her into the cell, where Sal sat at a small wall-moulded desk, reading from a screen.

“They’re treating me well enough,” he told her. The membrane gave their voices, as heard by the other, an oddly distant quality. Sal stood up. “You?”

“Me? I’m a fucking hero, Sal.” She shrugged. “Heroine.” She nodded at the screen. “What you watching?”

“Reading up on the glorious history of the Starveling Cult under its illustrious leader, the Archimandrite Luseferous.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me it wasn’t all planned out, Liss.”

“It wasn’t all planned out, Saluus.”

“Liss your real name?”

“What’s real?”

“It wasn’t planned out, was it? I mean, kidnapping me.”

“Course not.” Liss dropped into a small seat moulded into the wall by the door. “Spur of the moment.”

Sal waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. She just slumped there, looking at him. “Gave you the idea myself, didn’t I?” Sal said. “I told you Thovin good as accused me of getting ready to run.”

“Been thinking how best to use you for a while,” she told him. “But it was last-minute, in the end. We were there, the ship was ready to go, I’d seen you pilot it, knew it wasn’t hard.” Liss shrugged. “They’d only have requisitioned it and put a warhead in it, used it as a missile.”

“That really the best you could think to do with me?”

“We might have been able to do more, but I didn’t think so. Just unsettle everybody by taking you out of the equation. A morale blow, you seeming to go off and join the invaders. Worked, too. Confusion duly visited.”

“So it was opportunistic”

“I’m a Beyonder. We’re brought up to think for ourselves.”

“So were you always after me? Was I some sort of target?”

“No. Opportunism again. Great thing.”

“And Fassin?”

“Useful guy to know. Never much use for real spy stuff, but worth keeping in touch with. Led me to you, so it was worth it. Probably dead now, but you never know. Still disappeared in Nasq.”

“What’s happening? In the system, I mean. The war has started, hasn’t it? They won’t tell me anything, and the screen only accesses library stuff.”

“Oh, the war’s started all right.”

“And?”

Liss shook her head, whistled. “Woucha. Some of those ships you built? Taking a terrible pasting. All very unequal. All that stuff about fighting to the last ship? Bullshit, in the end. Space war’s almost over. Hierchon’s disappeared.”

“Is it all just military? Any cities or habs being targeted?” Sal held her gaze for a moment, then looked down. “I have a lot of people there, Liss.”

“Yeah, you’re only human, Saluus, I know. No need to act.”

He looked up sharply at her, but met an unforgiving gaze. She was still dressed in her slim esuit, coloured a pastel blue today to match her eyes. The thick helm-collar round her neck formed an odd-looking ruff, making her small head, dark hair gathered tightly back, look as though it was on a plate. “Borquille’s the only bit of ground been taken over so far,” she told him, relenting. “That got messy. No particularly newsworthy atrocities yet though.”

He sighed and sat back in the little seat by the screen. “Why are you — the Beyonders — cooperating with these… these guys?”

“Keeps you people out of our hair.”

“Us people? The Mercatoria?”

“Of course the fucking Mercatoria.”

“Is that really it?”

“The more other stuff you bastards have to deal with, the less free time you have for killing us. Really a very simple equation, Sal.”

“We attack you because you attack us.”

Liss slumped in her seat, legs slightly splayed. She rolled her eyes. “Oh, learn, man,” she breathed. She shook her head, sat up again. “No, Saluus,” she said. “You attack us because we won’t sign up for your precious fucking Mercatoria. Can’t even let us live in peace in case we’re seen as a good example. You target our habs and lifeships, you slaughter us in our millions. We attack your military and infrastructure. And you call us the terrorists.” She shook her head, stood. “Fuck you, Sal,” she said gently. “Fuck you for your arrogance and easy selfishness. Fuck you for being smart but not bothering to think.” She turned to go.

Sal jumped to his feet, nearly colliding with the transparent membrane. “Did you ever feel anything for me?” he blurted.

Liss stopped, turned. “Apart from contempt?” She smiled when he looked away then, biting his lip. She shook her head while he couldn’t see. “You could be fun to be with, Sal,” she said, hoping this didn’t sound too patronising. Or maybe that it did.

She left before he could think of anything else to say.

* * *

Hab 4409 and everybody in it was under sentence of death. So they’d been told. It was hard to believe. Anyway, it might not happen.

People reacted differently. Some had rioted and been dealt with either uncompromisingly or savagely, depending on whether you believed the civil authorities or not, some retreated to inebria of various types, some just stayed with those they loved or discovered they would not mind spending their last hours with those they merely liked, and a lot of people — more than Thay would have expected — gathered together in the great park on the far side of the habitat’s inner wall from the plaza outside the Diegesian’s palace. They all stood, and all held hands, great lines and knots of people, people in circles holding hands in the centre, joined to long strings of others in straggling lines. From above, Thay thought, they must look like a strange image of a human brain, all clumped brain cells and branching dendrons.

Thay Hohuel looked up, trying to see past the clusters of pods graped all along the hab’s long axis, looking for any sign of the Diegesian’s palace and the square outside where she and the others had gone to protest all those years ago.

She had come here, she realised, to die. She had not thought it would be quite so soon, that was all. She had never forgotten the others, had tried her best to keep in touch with them even when they didn’t seem to want to have to recall the old days and their old selves. She’d tried not to be too pushy about it, but she’d probably been seen by them as a pain, as a pester. But what you’d been meant something, even if you’d repudiated it, didn’t it? So she’d always thought, and still did.

So she’d been, she supposed, a nuisance, insisting on reminding the others of herself, and through herself of their earlier selves, and, of course, of poor, dead K, who both united them and kept them apart from each other. Mome, Sonj, Fassin and herself: they’d have met up again, wouldn’t they? They’d have had some sort of reunion, it would only have been natural. Well, maybe, if the ghost of K that they each carried with them hadn’t forever soured the memories of their time together.

Never mind, she was having her own reunion, with the hab and her old self and those memories. When she felt that she was just a year or two from the deserved rest of death, she’d been determined to come back here, where her real self had been formed, in early adulthood. The coming war had made her all the more fixed in her purpose; if they were really all as under threat as people said, if all cities and towns and ships and habs and institutions and everything else were regarded as allowable targets by the invaders, then she would face death where it might mean something, somehow. In this habitat, this hollow log of blown asteroidal rock, this rotating frame of reference, she would have come full circle, ready to cease existing back at the place that had made her who she was.

She had been many different things in her life, switched career half a dozen times, always finding new things to excite and interest her. She had had many lovers, two husbands, two children, all long since gone their own ways, and while coming here to die had made her feel a little selfish, she thought it would also be doing a favour to all those she loved or had loved. Who among them would really want to see her fade away?

They might say they’d want to be there at the end, but it wouldn’t be true, not really.

So she’d come here, to the old Happy Hab — not as happy, not as boisterous or as bohemian as it used to be, sadly — to die. Except she’d thought it would be alone, and peacefully, and in a year or two, not with everybody else in the place, violently, just a handful of months after she’d returned.

The Hierchon Ormilla was in exile on Nasqueron. The new top dog, this Archimandrite Luseferous guy, wanted the Hierchon to surrender. The Hierchon was refusing to cooperate. Archimandrite Luseferous didn’t want to antagonise the Dwellers so he couldn’t just attack or invade Nasqueron as well — amazingly, it seemed that the Dwellers, chaotic eccentrics and technological illiterates that they were supposed to be, were well able to defend themselves — so there was a stand-off. The Luseferous person couldn’t go in, and Ormilla wouldn’t come out.

Now the Archimandrite was threatening to destroy a city or a habitat every day until the Hierchon did surrender properly and gave himself up to the occupying forces. And if he didn’t give in after a couple of days, it would become a city or a habitat every hour.

There were rumours that Afynseise, a small coastal city in Poroforo, Sepekte, had been destroyed the day before, though with an information blackout covering the habitat for the past three days, it was impossible to be sure.

Hab 4409 had eighty thousand or so inhabitants, making it a relatively small space habitat. It was second on the list of hostage population centres, and the midnight deadline was now only minutes away. Still no word from Ormilla after a defiant communiqué earlier that afternoon. A Starveling warship had been stationed near the habitat for the past two days, since the Archimandrite’s ultimatum had been issued. Nothing and nobody had been allowed to leave — or approach — the hab in that time. A few craft had tried to leave, and been destroyed. No requests to evacuate children, the infirm or the collaborating civil authorities had been listened to. It had even been announced that anybody in a spacesuit or small craft who might survive the hab’s initial destruction would be targeted in the debris and destroyed.

Nobody doubted that the Archimandrite would be true to his word. Few believed the Hierchon would give in so easily. Thay let go of the cluster of hands she was holding — a withered old petal of a flower of the mostly young and fair — and bent, spine protesting, to take her shoes off. She kicked them away and put her hand back in the centre of the circle again. The grass felt cool and damp beneath her feet.

A lot of people were singing now, mostly quite low. Lots of different songs.

Some crying, some sobbing, some wailing and screaming, most far away.

And somebody, ghoulish, counting the seconds to midnight. It came, and seconds later a great ringing shaft of light, blinding-bright, cut right through the very centre of the hab, barely fifty metres from where Thay stood. She had to let go of the hands of the others to shield her eyes; they all did. A hot blast of air knocked her off her feet, sending her tumbling with hundreds of other people across the grass. The beam immediately split into two and moved quickly out to the habitat’s perimeter on each side, detonating buildings, erupting flame from pod clusters and slicing the whole small world in two. The halves were pushed apart by the pressure of air in them and the atmosphere went whirling away into space in a twinned hurricane of gases, debris and bodies as buildings and pods exploded in two great retreating circles of effect making their way down the interior surfaces of the sundered halves, structures ripped open just by the force of the air inside them trying to get out.

Thay Hohuel was lifted up by the whirlwind of air and blown above the bubbling, lifting turf with everybody else, towards the quickly swelling breach. In the few seconds it took for her to be blown out into the darkness, she heard herself scream as the air went gushing from her lungs, sucked away to space. It was a high, hard, savage scream, louder than any she could have achieved just with her own muscles; a terrible chorus of pain and shock and fear, wrenched from her mouth and from the mouths of all those around her as they died together, the awful sound of them all only fading as the air bled from her ears into vacuum.

A vortex of bodies spun slowly out of the separating halves of the ruined habitat, jerking and twisting and spinning away in two long, scimitared comma shapes like some ballet of galactic design.

The images were beamed throughout the system by the occupying forces.

The Hierchon formally surrendered the following day.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous stood in the nose of the Main Battle Hub Luseferous VII, staring out at the vision-filling view of the planet Sepekte and its vast, dusty-looking, very occasionally glittering halo of habitats, orbital factories and satellites. The entire outer nose section of the Luseferous VII was diamond film, a bowed circle of breathtaking transparency a hundred metres in diameter and supported by finger-thin struts. The Archimandrite liked to come here alone, just to look out at stuff. At such moments he could sense the colossal bulk of the Luseferous VII behind him, all its kilometres and mega-tonnes, all its warrens of docks, tunnels, chambers, halls, barracks, magazines, turrets and launch tubes. It was a pity it might have to be destroyed.

The strategists and tacticians didn’t like the look of the incoming Summed Fleet’s drive signatures. There were a lot of heavy ships on their way, and the first might be here in weeks rather than the months — maybe even a year — they’d been hoping for. The Luseferous VII, magnificent though it undoubtedly was, represented an unignorable and probably unmissable target. Their best strategy might be to use the great ship as the bait in a trap, their own forces seemingly disposed so that it looked like they were determined to defend it to the last, but in fact treating it as a disposable asset. Lure in as much of the Mercatorial fleet as possible and then destroy everything, including, unfortunately, the Luseferous VII itself.

The admiral who’d drawn the short straw in whatever competition or pecking-order judgement they’d used to decide who had to offer this suggestion to the Archimandrite had looked distinctly queasy when he’d outlined the plan, obviously fearing an outburst of rage from his commander-in-chief. Luseferous had already heard of the idea — Tuhluer proving his usefulness again — and come to accept that if they were not to jeopardise their whole mission here, even ideas as drastic as this had at least to be entertained. So he’d just nodded and acknowledged that all options had to be considered. Relief for the admiral concerned. A degree of consternation for the others, who all wished that they’d made the announcement now.

They would try to think of other strategies which didn’t involve the likely loss of the Main Battle Hub, but nobody seemed too optimistic. Always do what the enemy hoped you wouldn’t. Murder your babies. That sort of thing. The logic seemed impeccable.

Well, he could always build another Main Battle Hub. Just a lump of matter. Results were what mattered. He wasn’t a child. He wasn’t sentimental about the Luseferous VII.

More worrying was whether even that sacrifice might be enough. They had control of Ulubis system, they had lost only a handful of ships in the invasion and, having captured a few of the enemy craft, had conceivably come out ahead in the deal. However, the Summed Fleet squadrons on their way comprised a formidable force. They had fewer but better ships. It might be quite a close battle, and only an idiot wanted to get involved in one of those. And so near! That had been a terrible, terrible shock.

Luseferous hadn’t been able to believe it at first. He’d raged and fumed and spat, telling the techs to check and check again. There must be something wrong, there had to be an error. The Summed Fleet couldn’t be that close. They’d been assured it would be half a year — a whole year, even — before they had to face the counter-attack. Instead the Summed Fleet was practically on top of them before they’d had time to settle in properly.

Beyonder bastards. It had to be their fault. He would see what could be done about those treacherous fucks in due course. In the meantime, he had the counter-attack to worry about.

Of course, if by the time the Summed Fleet squadrons arrived they had what they’d come for, that might make all the difference.

A few weeks to find what they had come for. He had a very unpleasant feeling that this was not going to be long enough.

* * *

The ship thought it was dead. Fassin talked to it.

He’d hoped they might be able to make the return journey from the Rovruetz to Direaliete system faster than they’d made the outward trip, because the Voehn ship was quicker than the Velpin, but it was not to be. The Protreptic could accelerate faster than the Velpin, but the injuries the Voehn commander had inflicted on Y’sul meant the Dweller wouldn’t be able to survive the stresses. They went back slower than they’d come out.

Y’sul lay in a healing coma in an improvised cradle that Quercer Janath had made for him within one of the extended command-space seats. They ramped the acceleration up to five gees, coasted while they checked the Dweller wasn’t suffering further damage from the stresses involved, took the next smoothly incremented ramp of acceleration up to ten gees and checked again. Finally they settled on forty gees, though by the time they’d worked out that this was safe they were almost at the point where they would have to turn around and start decelerating again as they fell towards the waiting system.

Y’sul slept on, healing. The AI truetwin gloried in the exploration of the Voehn ship’s vastly complicated systems and multifarious martial capabilities.

Fassin had nothing to do but float in his own extemporised acceleration cradle in the seat next to Y’sul’s. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay there as they approached the wormhole portal; Quercer Janath had found a tight little cabin a few bulkheads back from the command space where he could wait that particular experience out. In the meantime, after some complaints, they allowed him to interface with the Protreptic’s computer, though they insisted on this being at several removes from the ship’s core systems, and on him being accompanied by some sort of sub-personality of their own. The visits would be conducted in a factor two or three of slowdown, which seemed to suit everybody concerned. At least, Fassin thought, the journey would seem to go quicker.

The virtual environment where Fassin was allowed to meet the ship took the form of a huge, half-ruined temple by a wide, slow-moving river on the edge of a great, quiet, silent city under a small, high, unmoving sun of an intense blue-white.

Fassin represented as his human self, dressed in house casuals, the ship as a skinny old man in a loincloth and the AI subroutine as some sort of ginger-haired ape with long, loose-looking limbs, an ancient, too-big helmet wobbling on its head, a dented breastplate with one broken strap slanting across its bulbous chest and a short kilt of segmented leather hanging from its skinny hips. A short, rusty sword dangled from its side.

The first time Fassin had visited the ship’s personality, the ape had led him by the hand from a doorway down the steps towards the river where the old man sat, looking out at the sluggish brown waters.

On the far side of the broad, oily stream was a desert of brightly glittering broken glass, stretching in low, billowed hills as far as the eye could see, like all the shattered glass the universe had ever known all gathered in the one vast place.

“Of course I’m dead,” the ship explained. The old man had very dark green skin and a voice made up of sighs and wheezes. His face was nearly immobile, just an aged mask, grizzled with patchy white whiskers. “The ship self-destructed.”

“But if you’re dead,” Fassin said, “how are you talking to me?”

The old man shrugged. “To be dead is to be no longer part of the living world. It is to be a shade, a ghost. It doesn’t mean you can’t talk. Talk is almost all you can do.”

Fassin thought the better of trying to persuade the old man that he was still alive. “What do you think I am?” he asked.

The old man looked at him. “A human? Male? A man.”

Fassin nodded. “Do you have a name?” he asked the old man.

A shake of the head. “Not any more. I was the Protreptic but that ship is gone now and I am dead, so I have no name.”

Fassin left a polite gap for the old man to ask him what his name was, but the inquiry didn’t come.

The ape sat a couple of metres away and two steps further up towards the creeper-festooned temple. It was sitting back, taking its weight on its long arms spread out behind it and picking one ear with a long, delicate-looking foot, inspecting the results with great concentration.

“When you were alive,” Fassin said, “were you truly alive? Were you sentient?”

The old man rocked backwards, laughed briefly. “Bless you, no. I was just software in a computer, just photons inside a nanofoam substrate. That’s not alive, not in the conventional sense.”

“What about the unconventional sense?”

Another shrug. “That does not matter. Only the conventional sense matters.”

“Tell me about yourself, about your life.”

A blank-faced stare. “I don’t have a life. I’m dead.”

“Then tell me about the life you had.”

“I was a needle ship called the Protreptic of the Voehn Third Spine Cessorian Lustral Squadron, built in the fifth tenth of the third year of Haralaud, in the Vertebraean Axis, Khubohl III, Bunsser Minor. I was an extensible fifteen-metre-minimum craft, rated ninety-eight per cent by the Standard Portal Compatibility Quotient Measure, normal unstowed operating diameter—”

“I didn’t really mean all the technical stuff,” Fassin said gently.

“Oh,” said the old man, and disappeared, just like a hologram being switched off.

Fassin looked at the ape, which was holding something up to the light. It looked down at him, blinking. “What?” it said.

“He disappeared,” Fassin told it. “It disappeared. The old man; the ship.”

“Prone to do that,” the ape said, sighing.

The next time, the landscape on the far side of the wide, slack-watered river from the temple steps was a jungle; a great green, yellow and purple wall of strange carbuncular stalks, drooping leaves and coiled vines, its bowed, pendulous creepers and branches drooping down to drag in the slow swell of the current.

Everything else was as before, though perhaps the old man was less skinny, his face a fraction more mobile and his voice less tired.

“I was an AI hunter. For six and a half thousand years I helped seek out and destroy the anathematics. If I could have felt such an emotion, I would have been very proud.”

“Did it never seem strange to you to be hunting down and killing machines that were similar to yourself?”

The ginger-haired ape — sitting in its usual place a few steps up, trying to clean its stained, dented armour by spitting on it and then polishing it with a filthy rag — coughed at this point, though when Fassin glanced up at the animal it returned his gaze blankly.

“But I was just a computer,” the old man said, frowning. “Less than that, even; a ghost within it. I did what I was told, always obedient. I was the interface between the Voehn who did the thinking and made the decisions, and the physical structures and systems of the ship. An intermediary. No more.”

“Do you miss that?”

“In a way. I cannot, really. To miss something, truly, would be — as I understand it — to experience an emotion, and obviously that is impossible for something which is not sentient, let alone not alive as well. But to the extent that I can judge that one state of affairs is somehow more preferable to another, perhaps because one allows me to fulfil the role I was assigned and one does not, I could say that I miss the ship. It’s gone. I’ve looked for it, but it isn’t there. I cannot feel it or control it, therefore I know that it must have self-destructed. I must be running on another substrate somewhere.”

Fassin looked up at the ape-thing sitting a few steps away. Quercer Janath had taken over full control of the Protreptic, cutting off the ship’s own computer and the software running within it from the vessel’s subsystems.

“What do you think I am, then?” Fassin asked. “What do you think the little ape in his armour sitting behind us is?”

“I don’t know,” the old man confessed. “Are you other dead ships?”

Fassin shook his head. “No.”

“Then perhaps you are representations of those in charge of the substrate I am now running on. You may want to quiz me on my actions while I was the ship.”

“You know, you seem alive to me,” Fassin said. “Are you sure you might not be alive and sentient now, now that you’re not connected to the ship?”

“Of course not!” the old man said scornfully. “I am able to give the appearance of life without being alive. It is not especially difficult.”

“How do you do this?”

“By being able to access my memories, by having trillions of facts and works and books and recordings and sentences and words and definitions at my disposal.” The old man looked at the ends of his fingers. “I am the sum of all my memories, plus the application of certain rules from a substantial command-set. I am blessed with the ability to think extremely quickly, so I am able to listen to what you, as a conscious, sentient being, are saying and then respond in a way that makes sense to you, answering your questions, following your meaning, anticipating your thoughts.

“However, all this is simply the result of programs — programs written by sentient beings — sifting through earlier examples of conversations and exchanges which I have stored within my memories and selecting those which seem most appropriate as templates. This process sounds mysterious but is merely complicated. It begins with something as simple as you saying ‘Hello’ and me replying ‘Hello’, or choosing something similar according to whatever else I might know about you, and extends to a reply as involved as, well, this one.”

The old man looked suddenly shocked, and disappeared again.

Fassin looked up at the ginger-haired ape. It sneezed and then had a coughing fit. “Nothing,” it said, “to do,” it continued, between coughs, “with me.”

On Fassin’s next visit, the far side of the great, slow river was like a mirror image of the side that he, the old man and the gangly ape were on. An ancient city of stone domes and spires all silent and dark and half-consumed by trees and creepers faced them, and a huge long temple, covered in statues and carvings of fabulous and unlikely beasts lay directly across from where they sat, its lower limits defined by dozens of big stone terraces and steps leading down to the sluggish, dark brown waters.

Fassin looked over, to see if the three of them were reflected there, but they weren’t. The far side was deserted.

“Did you hunt down and kill many AIs?” he asked.

The old man rolled his eyes. “Hundreds. Thousands.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Some of the AIs were twinned or in larger groupings. I took part in 872 missions.”

“Were any in gas-giants?” Fassin asked. He’d positioned himself so that he could see the ape in the dented armour. It looked at him when he asked this question, then looked away again. It was trying to knock the dents out of its breastplate with a small hammer. The dull chink-chink-chinks that the hammer made sounded dead and unechoing across the wide river.

“One mission took place partly within a gas-giant. It ended there. A small ship full of anathematics. We pursued them into the atmosphere of the gas-giant Dejiminid where they attempted to lose us within its fierce storm-winds. The Protreptic was more atmosphere-capable than their ship, and eventually, going to greater and greater depths in their desperation to shake us off, their vessel collapsed under the pressure and was crushed, taking all aboard into the liquid metal depths.”

“Were there no Dwellers present to complain about this?”

The old man looked inquiringly at him. “You are not really a Dweller, are you? It did occur to me that I might be running within a Dweller-controlled substrate.”

“No, I’m not a Dweller. I told you; I’m a human.”

“Well, the answer is they had not seen us enter their planet. They complained later. That was only the first of two occasions when the Protreptic was operationally active within a gas-giant. Usually our missions were all vacuum.”

“The other?”

“Not so long ago. Helping to pursue a large force of Beyonder ships in the vicinity of Zateki. We prevailed there, too.”

“What brought you to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz?” Fassin asked.

The flat and flattening chink-chink-chink noise stopped. The ginger-haired ape held its breastplate up to catch the light, scratched its chest, then went back to tapping with the hammer again.

“Do you represent a Lustral Investigation Board?” the old man asked. “Is that what you are, in reality?”

“No,” Fassin said. “I don’t.”

“Oh. Oh well. For the last two and a half centuries, uniform time,” the old man said, “we had been seeking information about the so-called Dweller List.” (The long-limbed ape laughed out loud at this, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.) “Much time was spent in the region of the Zateki system, investigating the Second Ship theory. Various secondary and tertiary missions resulted from information gleaned in the region. None ever bore fruit in the matter of the List, the Second Ship theory or the so-called Transform, though two AIs were tracked down and eliminated in the course of these sub-missions. We were summoned from the Rijom system and sent to the Direaliete system some five months ago, then laid an intercept course to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz. I was not told of the reasons for this course of action, the orders covering which were personal to Commander Inialcah and communicated to him beyond my senses.”

“Did you find out anything new about the List and the Transform?” Fassin asked.

“I think the only thing that we ever felt we had properly discovered, in the sense of adding something other than just an extra rumour to the web of myths and rumours that already existed regarding the whole subject was that — if there was any truth in the matter — the portals would be lying quiescent and perhaps disguised in the Kuiper belts or Oort clouds of the relevant systems, waiting on a coded radio or similar broadcast signal. That is what the so-called Transform would be: a signal, and the medium and frequency on which it was to be transmitted. This made sense in that all normally stable locations where portals might have been hidden successfully over the sort of time scales involved — Lagrange points and so on — were easy to check and eliminate.” The old man looked at Fassin quizzically again. “Are you another seeker after the truth of the List?”

“I was,” Fassin said.

“Ah!” The representation of the old man looked pleased for once. “And are you not dead, then, too?”

“No, I’m not dead, though I’ve given up looking, for the moment.”

“What was it that took you to the Sepulcraft Rovruetz?” the old man asked.

“I had what I thought was a lead, a clue, a way forward,” Fassin told him. “However, the creature who might have had the evidence had destroyed what he held and killed himself.”

“Unfortunate.”

“Yes, very.”

The old man looked up at the bronze-blue cloudless sky. Fassin followed his gaze, and as he did so, the old man disappeared.

There was something. Fassin sat, gascraft rammed into the extemporised couch in the Voehn ship’s command space by the continuing acceleration, watching the nearly static, rather boring view of dead ahead shown on the main screen, and he knew there was something that he was missing.

Something nagged at him, something bothered him, something half-came to him in moments of distraction or when he was dreaming, and then wriggled away again before he could catch it.

He didn’t sleep very much — only a couple of hours a day in all — though when he did there were usually dreams, as if his subconscious had to cram all his dreaming into the small amount of dream-space available. Once he was actually standing in a small stream, somewhere in the gardens of a great house he couldn’t see, trousers rolled up, trying to catch fish with his bare hands. The fish were his dreams, even though he was distantly aware at the time that this situation was itself a dream. When he tried to catch the fish — sinuous small presences darting like elongated teardrops of mercury round his feet — they kept flicking away and disappearing.

When he looked up, the stream was flowing through a large amphitheatre, and a great crowd of people were watching him intently.

At the transition point of the journey, where the Protreptic stopped accelerating, turned a half-somersault and pointed its engines at its destination to start deceleration, Quercer Janath spent some time checking that Y’sul was still healing satisfactorily.

Fassin used the time to explore a little more of the Voehn ship, floating the arrowhead gascraft down the narrow circular access tubes, investigating crew quarters, storerooms and chambers. Camera remotes tracked his every move, the thoroughly internally surveillanced ship making it simple for Quercer Janath to keep whatever fraction of an eye on him they thought appropriate.

He found what he thought was probably the commander’s cabin, a couple of bulkheads behind the command space. It was the most generously proportioned obviously personal space he’d encountered. It looked bare and alien. There was a slightly more comfortable version of one of the multi-spine cradle seats he was used to seeing throughout the ship by now, and some representations of coverings on certain walls, plus what might have been carpet designs on the floor. Only the designs existed, painted on or displayed by some thin-film technology — Fassin couldn’t tell. Similarly, there were no ornaments, just holos of ornaments. He’d heard most warships were like this; cutting down on weight and the possibilities of stuff flying about during hard manoeuvring by having the appearance of things rather than their physical presence.

He floated in front of one carpet design that looked like a piece of text, all small, curled glyphs in a network, but could find no record in the gascraft’s memories of such a language. He wondered what it said. He recorded the image. Quercer Janath would probably wipe it when they went through the portal, but never mind.

The next time he met up with the ship, on the far side of the river there was a massive dark wall, rising sheer and jet from the waters, its summit crowned with crenellations and gun turrets. Further guns poked out of gun ports distributed in staggered lines over the whole top quarter of the huge wall, making it look like the side of some ancient sea-ship, only the biggest and most preposterously long one there had ever been, its vast hull diminishing into the distance. The guns were not static but moved in sequence, in waves of what appeared almost like locomotion, making the exposed barrels look oddly like ineffectual oars on some colossally mis-designed trireme or an impossible, upended millipede.

The ginger-haired ape sat nearby as usual. It had a new shield, round and highly polished. It sat looking at it and flicking imaginary specks from it. Sometimes it held it up to see it sparkle in the light, and sometimes it held it up so that it could look at itself in it.

“Text?” the elderly man asked. “On a floor display? No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any memory of that, not stored. If the ship still existed, if I still had access…’ He looked sad. Fassin glanced at the ginger-haired ape, but it looked away and started whistling, or at least trying to.

“Maybe there’s some way I can patch through an image I have,” Fassin said.

“You have an image? You have been on the ship?” The man looked surprised.

After some to-ing and fro-ing, Fassin having to jog back up the step and through the doorway back into normal reality to set things up, he was able to display the image he’d taken. The long-limbed ape held up his shield and the image appeared there.

“Oh, that?” the man said. He stroked his short grey beard. “That’s something the Commander picked up a long time ago, in the days when he had command of a smaller ship. A translation into Ancient Sacred of something which I believe marks the end of an abomination, an AI.”

“What does it say?” Fassin asked.

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

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

“ ‘Where a strange thing happened.

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

“ ‘This was, of course,—’

“At which point it cuts off.”

Fassin thought. “Where did it come from?”

“It was used by one of the anathematics that Commander Inialcah hunted down and killed as a kind of memory-death mantra, to remove any trace of what might have been in its memory. The AI concerned later turned out to have been one of those also seeking the so-called Transform. It was that pursuit which originally gave the commander an interest in the matter. The memory-death mantra he had translated and kept partly as a kind of talisman, though I believe he also always thought there might be some meaning to the specific piece the AI chose to overwrite its memories with which might prove useful if he could ever work it out, because AIs were known, as he said, for being too clever by half, and through their arrogance sometimes gave important information away. That was another reason for preserving it and keeping it constantly before him.”

In his dream, Fassin was standing with Saluus Kehar on a balcony over a volcanic caldera, full of red-hot bubbling lava. “We’re to gas-capable a whole load of stuff for—” Sal was saying, when he paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. “Heck,” he continued, turning into a Dweller, but somehow with a human face and without getting any bigger. He floated out over the waves of lava. “Idiotic things, little Fassin. I took the original of the beast to a friend and fellow friend in the city of Direaliete. A friend and fellow friend.”

Fassin gazed at his own hands, to check that he was still himself.

When he looked up, Saluus had gone and the river he was standing in had temples on both sides, up steep flights of steps the height of prison walls.

“Original of what?” he heard himself ask.

The far side of the river showed a city from the age of waste, all medium-rise buildings, smoke and electric trains and multi-lane roads full of roaring cars and trucks. They had to raise their voices a little to make themselves heard over the noise. A sweet, oily burning smell wafted over the river towards them.

The ginger ape picked its gleaming teeth with a giant sword.

“Another image?” the man said. He looked fit in a lean way and was no longer young. His beard was mostly grey. “Let me see.”

Knowing what to do this time, Fassin showed the man the little image-leaf which depicted yellow sky and brown clouds.

“Obviously the colour’s wrong,” he told the man. “I couldn’t help noticing.”

“Oh, yes, there’s an image there. I see it.”

“I know, but what—?”

“And some algebra, ciphered into the base code.”

At that, the ape’s long, curved sword came sweeping down and cut the man through, slicing him from neck to hip. The remains gushed down the steps to the river and wriggled away, all silver.

Fassin looked up at the great ape. “Hey,” he said, “it was just a—”

“Who’s clever?” the ape hissed, drawing back the terrible, glittering sword.

Fassin woke up shaking. He was in a coffin — he’d just hit his head on the inside of the lid. He tried to blink and couldn’t because something was in his eyes, surrounding them, surrounding every part of him, filling his mouth and nose and anus Shock-gel, gillfluid, the gascraft. Fucking calm down, he told himself. How long you been a Seer again?

The Protreptic, the ex-Voehn craft en route for Nasqueron, Ulubis via the Direaliete system, under the command of the self-confessed twin AI Quercer Janath, pirates and close-combat Voehn-wasting specialists.

They were back under moderate deceleration, on their way into the system and the hidden wormhole.

The details of the dream were starting to slip away from him, fish sine-waving goodbye through the water. And yet he felt he’d understood something. What had it been?

Confusing.

Something about Saluus, and had Hatherence been in there too? Sal’s house, only it had been a volcano, then the virtual environment where he met the ship, and it had looked at -

In the shock-gel, pickled in it, surrounded by it, Fassin felt his eyes go wide and his skin prickle and crawl. His heart spasmed, thudding erratically in his chest.

He could do it himself. He could wait until they got back, back to Nasq. and Ulubis, and take it to somebody — if he found Valseir he could just ask him, though he didn’t think he’d be able to find Valseir — but that wasn’t good enough. He had to know.

He’d committed the image-leaf to the gascraft’s memory. Lying there in the shock-gel, inside the little arrowhead, he called the photograph up and saw it floating before him. The picture of blue sky and white clouds looked odd to him, half-alien and wrong, and yet half-familiar at the same time, invoking a feeling of something between nostalgia and homesickness.

He blew the image up to the point where it became a blocky abstract of colour. He scanned the whole image for smaller images, found nothing, then started running various routines that the gascraft’s biomind held for finding patterns in random data. Had he recorded the image in fine enough detail to find anything hidden in it? Would the hidden data, if it was there, be findable without some other code?

He wished he could access the original, stowed in a tiny locker on the outside of the gascraft, but he couldn’t, not while he was pinned under this sort of force. Anyway, it might look suspicious to Quercer Janath if he started peering too intently at the image-leaf. Because that was where the answer might lie, where it might — just, perhaps, maybe — have been lying all the time.

“…I took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in Deilte, a city in the south polar region, within a safekeep box…’ That, or something very like it, was what Valseir had said.

Fassin had recorded the conversation verbatim in the gascraft’s memory, but it had been wiped aboard the Isaut. Didn’t matter; he had a pretty good memory for detail himself. He hadn’t realised at the time what the implication of Valseir’s remark was — the Mercatorial ships had tried to mount their raid on the ships in the storm fleet shortly afterwards and things had all gone a bit exciting — but it meant there was probably a copy. Valseir was a scholar, and punctilious about word use and the terminology of editions and precedence. He wouldn’t have talked about the original of something unless there was a need to distinguish it from a copy. So there was a copy. There was a back-up, and it had amused the old Dweller to have Fassin carry it with him all the time.

Well, it was a plausible-enough theory.

Fassin thought it would be a Valseir-like thing to have done, but he’d been wrong about the old Dweller before. Dwellers did become set in their ways and predictable, sometimes, given the ages they could live to, but sometimes they just became more devious, too.

He fell asleep, the routines running on in front of him, and dreamed of streams of numbers, liquid algebra full of equations and meanings that started to make sense and then — just as he tried to study them and understand them — broke up and wriggled away, flickering to chaos.

A soft chime woke him up.

He was in the gascraft, in the stolen Voehn ship. The deceleration felt gentler, as though they might be approaching their goal. He clicked to an outside view and saw an orange-red sun, dead ahead. The Dweller-shaped bulk in the seat ahead twisted fractionally.

“Fassin?” Quercer Janath said.

If he hadn’t been in the shock-gel inside the gascraft, he’d have jumped.

“Mmm?” he said.

“Going to have to put you in your own little cell for the next bit, all right?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Soon as we’re at one gee standard.”

“I hear and obey,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned.

Back in the gascraft’s math-space, Fassin had a result.

There was indeed data hidden in the image-leaf’s depiction of a partially clouded blue sky. It had been there all the time. He’d had the answer, if that was really what it was, with him from the start.

It looked like alien algebra.

He tried to understand it.

It meant nothing.

It might mean everything.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous had a tight, unpleasant feeling in his guts. He recognised it. It was the feeling that he got when he might have left something too late, or just got something wrong somehow. It was the feeling of being in a game and realising you might have made a terrible mistake a couple of turns or moves ago, of wanting to go back and undo what had been done, right the wrong, fix the error.

When he’d been a child playing a game against another child and had made a mistake, he’d sometimes just say, “Oh, look, I didn’t mean to do that earlier, I meant to do this…” and had discovered that even though such behaviour might be forbidden by the rules of the game, you could get away with it amazingly often. At first he’d thought this was because he was just a more powerful character than whoever he was playing against, until he’d realised that the people this sort of tactic worked against tended to be those whose fathers weren’t nearly as powerful as his. Later he’d become powerful himself, and found that cheating was still a workable tactic. Later still, he’d found that he didn’t need to cheat. He could make the most awful blunder and never suffer for it because his opponent, guessing what was good for them in the greater context of life beyond the game, would never dare take advantage of that mistake. It was a kind of invincibility.

Machines were different; they usually wouldn’t let you make illegal moves or take back earlier errors. So you just reset them, or went back to the saved position or a time when the mistake could be unmade.

Only this was not a game, or — if it was — it was one in which Luseferous didn’t know how you changed the rules or swept your arm across the board or hit the Delete All sequence. Maybe the end of the game was death, and he’d wake to find himself in the greater reality that the Truth had always maintained existed. That was a sort of comfort, though even then he didn’t want to wake up after a failure.

Time was the problem. Time and the fucking Dwellers.

The Luseferous VII swung ponderously into orbit around the planet Nasqueron. He watched it from his new flagship, the Main Fleet Combat Craft Rapacious (a super-battleship in all but name, he’d be prepared to concede).

Insufficient time. How had it come to this? If he hadn’t delayed so long before starting, if he hadn’t stopped off along the way, if he hadn’t, perhaps, insisted on full fleet dispositional discipline… and yet he’d swung into action much more quickly than some democratic or committee-based organisation could have, and he would have been mad to leave strongholds intact along his line of advance and… and return. And discipline was important, keeping everything together was important. It symbolised loyalty, it betokened military and personal discipline.

So there had been no choice, really. They’d got here as quickly as they could. The fucking Beyonders should have warned him the Summed Fleet squadrons were coming quicker than they’d anticipated. It was all their doing. It might even be a conspiracy against him. Oh, they’d taken part in the attacks on Ulubis when it had suited them, though they’d never been as decisive as they could and should have been. Fucking whining lily-livered moralists. Military targets! So they preserved their precious fucking scruples and left him to do the dirty work. If they’d been as emphatic and ruthless as he’d been, things might have turned out differently. Instead they’d supported him just enough to bring him here but now that he was where they’d wanted him all along, they were deserting him.

Luseferous wished now that he hadn’t let the Liss woman go. He’d given Saluus Kehar, the industrialist guy, back to his own people, largely to see what they’d do. Would they believe him when he told them he’d been kidnapped? Or not? Jury still out; the Guard had taken him for questioning. The woman who’d kidnapped him, and who had asked to take him back personally when she’d heard that was what the Archimandrite had in mind, had disappeared before she’d even handed him over, probably returning to her Beyonder pals. Stupid to have let a potential lever like that go, but he’d had so many other things on his mind, and the full extent of the Beyonders’ betrayal hadn’t been clear at the time.

Where were their craft? Where were their invasion troops or occupying forces? They were still staying on the outskirts, still not coming into the system itself, still too scared to commit themselves. They’d professed horror and disappointment at his destruction of the city and the habitat, and at the way his troops had reacted to some elements of resistance. Fuck them! This was a fucking war! How the fuck did they think you won one? Casualties had been almost disappointingly light; Luseferous couldn’t remember a full-scale invasion campaign which had ended with so few dead. They’d arrived in such overwhelming numbers that there had been little the other side could do apart from die pointlessly, surrender or run.

They’d had a bit of luck, too, and the intelligence provided by the Beyonders about military preparations and fleet dispositions had made a bit of a difference as well, he supposed. But basically it was just big guns and plenty of them that had done the trick, and the really impressive space battles he’d kind of been hoping for just hadn’t materialised.

So the system was his, even if the only ground he’d trodden personally was when making one brief appearance at a small mansion in the middle of a jungle to accept the formal surrender of the Hierchon. He’d have preferred the symbolic value of the big spherical palace in Borquille, even if it was damaged, but the security people felt there was still a danger from a well-hidden nuke or something equally unpleasant, so a house in the middle of nowhere it had been. The Hierchon and his people were being held aboard the Luseferous VII. Let the Summed Fleet kill him if that was the way it had to be.

The Beyonders reported that there had been a few engagements with elements of the Ulubine Mercatoria military which had turned tail to run and then encountered their forces. But even there the Archimandrite was hearing rumours that the fleeing Navarchy ships were being allowed to surrender, or even accept a sort of neutral internment, still fully crewed and armed, rather than being destroyed or captured.

So Luseferous was alone again, abandoned by his treacherous allies. They’d lured him here, got him to remove part of the threat against them, and now no doubt hoped that he’d take on the Summed Fleet squadrons when they arrived, doing the work they were too cowardly to do themselves.

Well, the strategists and tacticians were seriously considering cutting their losses and heading back home again. This would seem ignominious to some, but if it was the best thing to be done then that was all there was to it. Again, he’d kept calm when he’d first heard this latest galling concept. He wasn’t stupid; he could see the situation for himself. Do what the enemy least expected, what they would least want you to do.

They might — it was still just a might — set off back for the relative safety of Epiphany 5, far away across the empty regions of space they’d spent all those years crossing. It would be unfortunate, but it might be the best thing to do all the same. They’d have to leave a lot of ships behind and they’d certainly have to abandon the Luseferous VII — it was too slow and too tempting a target — but they could do it. They’d leave behind sufficient forces to force the Summed Fleet to first fight within the system and then station some craft there, they’d take only the fastest ships and so have a head start, and they’d hope to lure away the main part of the remainder of the Summed Fleet squadrons — the bit that would be likely to come after them — by sending the Luseferous VII and a small escort screen of lesser ships off in a different direction.

It was a horrible thing to have to think about, this running away so soon after getting here and achieving complete victory. But it might be better than standing and fighting when the outcome of the resulting battle was so finely balanced.

Or, of course, they could find what they had really come for. This Dweller List key, this Transform, this magic formula. With that in his possession, Luseferous would have a bargaining counter of almost infinite value. So he was told, anyway, and for the sake of their own hides his advisers had better be utterly spot-on right with this one. Literally. He’d have the fuckers skinned alive if they’d led him all this way for nothing.

In the meantime, one last throw, one final chance to find what they’d come for. All far too rushed and desperate, but — like all the greatest leaders — the Archimandrite knew that he was at his best when he was under pressure, when the odds were against him and victory was far from certain. Of course, this didn’t happen very often to him because he didn’t allow it to — always better to win easily — but he’d had his share of narrow victories and pressure situations in the past and come out on top, and he hadn’t forgotten and he certainly hadn’t lost his touch. He knew he would prevail. He always did. Victory was the only thinkable option.

He could do it. He just had to be decisive and determined. That was what he was best at. It was almost better this way; with so little time, with just the one chance, there was no question that it had to be an all-or-nothing, no-holds-barred approach. There was simply no time to go through all the other more “reasonable’ techniques. Forget playing it calm and quiet, fuck diplomacy, abandon all thought of being reasonable and hoping people would be reasonable in return. Just fucking do it.

The Archimandrite had made his preparations as best he could. The tacticians thought the first elements of the Summed Fleet could be hurtling past at near-light speed in less than a dozen days, with the rest not far behind. No more waiting. It was now or never.

They were in the belly of the great ship. The hideous, swirling, hallucinogenic face of Nasqueron lay beneath their feet, visible through diamond film. The Archimandrite had risked coming aboard the Luseferous VII for this. If there was some attack on it — unlikely, but not impossible, so far ahead of the main part of the Summed Fleet squadrons — then it would almost certainly have to come from above, and the sheer bulk of the vessel ought to protect them. He had the Rapacious waiting immediately underneath the main hull nearby, linked by a short ship-to-ship. He could be out of his impressively large seat, across the chamber and aboard and away in a minute. To be on the safe side, he had dressed in an emergency esuit, a thin, constrictive but reassuring presence beneath his formal robes. The collar-helmet was hidden by his cowl, which, like the rest of his outer garment, was made of tanned Voehn blizzardskin.

Cradled against the Rapacious, now that it had been fully checked for bugs and bombs, was the ship that the Liss woman had used to bring the man Saluus Kehar to him. The tech people were very impressed with it. They thought it could probably outrun any ship the other side had. Luseferous would have been more impressed if it could outrun any missile or beam the other side had.

They were here for a conference, a meeting ostensibly to discuss how the new regime in power within the rest of Ulubis system might liaise with the Dwellers.

The Hierchon Ormilla was present, as was the rest of the surviving Mercatoria top brass. There hadn’t really been time to start serious alterations on the Mercatorial power structure, and when he’d found that, as the Beyonders had reported, the Mercatoria was disliked and resented by most of its citizens\subjects, but not actively hated by them, Luseferous had left the bulk of the civil authorities in place. The main players had all pledged allegiance to him, apart from Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, who’d been killed in action, the Shrievalty colonel Somjomion, who’d disappeared and was probably on one of the ships that had run away, and the Cessorian Clerk-Regnant, Voriel, who’d chosen death rather than what he seemed to regard as the dishonour of recanting his religious vows. Idiot. Luseferous had shot him himself.

He’d had some of the people who’d been involved in the Dweller Embassy — set up a few months before the invasion -brief him on what to expect from the floats. Most of the Embassy people had been killed when the commander of the ship they were in had refused to surrender, but a few had survived. Luseferous wasn’t sure he trusted them, though.

Three of his own top half-dozen commanders were present too. The rest were engaged elsewhere, keeping an armed presence wherever it might be needed and preparing for the anticipated high-speed pass-through of the Summed Fleet’s advance units.

No Beyonders, of course. They were still in shock from his unconscionable behaviour in the matter of the single small city and a habitat full of artists, weirdos and do-gooders. He must tell them he’d only chosen the city — whatever it was called, he’d forgotten — because it was on the coast and sheltered by mountains, so that he could do his sculpting trick again. That would horrify them all over again, with luck.

The — delegates? representatives? whatever the fuck they were — from the Dweller side were an unprepossessing bunch. They looked big and impressive, especially in their giant wheel-like esuits, but there was the — apparently perennial — Dweller problem of finding somebody with sufficient authority to speak for a whole planet. He’d learned early on in his career that Dwellers were best avoided. Leave them alone and they’d leave you alone. He wouldn’t have chosen to have anything whatsoever to do with the damn floats if he could possibly have avoided it. But he couldn’t, so he was doing his best.

Present were three Dwellers. All were supposedly as senior as each other, and they were each alone — no aides or secretaries or underlings of any sort, which with any other species would have indicated that these were not serious people at all but with Dwellers meant nothing in particular.

They were Feurish, some sort of political scholar who spoke for the great red-brown equatorial band they could see beneath them, Chintsion, who was the current chief-of-chiefs of an umbrella organisation representing all their clubs and other voluntary organisations (sounded insulting, but allegedly their “clubs’ included their supposedly highly effective military) and Peripule, who was the City Administrator of their largest city, though this was not a capital city in the accepted sense, and apparently being voted to be City Administrator was regarded as an imposition, not an honour or a chance to enjoy power. They all had grandiose-sounding titles that didn’t really mean anything. All they did was tell you how old the Dwellers were.

The Archimandrite would have preferred more obviously senior people — if such a thing existed in Dweller society — and more of them, but he had to work with what was to hand, especially given the time constraints. They did have other Dwellers on the Luseferous VII, however — over three hundred of them. Two whole shiploads of adolescents and young adults had been welcomed aboard for an extended tour as part of what sounded like a school trip for grown-ups. An alien-ship enthusiasts club, apparently. He would never have allowed this normally.

Luseferous was fairly certain that he didn’t really have the Dwellers’ full attention. His alien-watching experts advised him that the majority of the population of Nasqueron was unconcerned about the small war that had just taken place and the presence of the invasion fleet. In fact, the majority didn’t even know what had happened and would be unlikely to care. The planet’s news services, such as they were, were full of reports concerning something called a Formal War taking place between two of the atmospheric bands. This appeared to be a form of extreme sport played out on a vast scale, rather than what Luseferous would regard as a proper war. They were playing.

Well, he would just have to see what he could do to make them take proper notice of him.

Suspended over the vast view, the attendees seemed to hang as though about to fall. Above them, on a network of gantries, Luseferous’s personal guard stalked in exoskels, the pads of their claw-feet stalking with a steady, silent precision.

“Let’s get to the point,” Luseferous said after some desultory inconsequentialities had gone on far too long. “We want the Seer Fassin Taak,” he told the Dwellers. “Even more to the point, we want certain information he’s supposed to have been looking for.”

“What information?” Chintsion asked. The “clubs’ chief was proving the most voluble of the three Dwellers so far. His huge esuit sat cradled in a sling-seat poised over the shallow concavity of diamond film beneath, the planet’s bilious reflected light shining faintly up from underneath him. His esuit was grey, with garish pink chevrons.

“We are not at liberty to divulge that,” Luseferous told the Dweller.

“Why not?” asked the scholar, Feurish. His esuit was a kind of dirty white.

“I can’t tell you,” Luseferous said. He held up a gloved, ringed hand. “And please don’t ask why. Just accept this.”

The Dwellers were silent. They were probably signalling to each other. His tech people had warned him of this and had attempted to design the sling-seats so that the creatures couldn’t communicate like that. But as soon as the Dwellers had seen the seating arrangements they’d protested and fussed and started pulling and prodding and attempting to reconfigure their seats and even began rearranging them so that they were in positions relative to each other which they liked better. Luseferous had ground his diamond teeth, signalled to the tech people to help, and waited for the Dwellers to declare themselves happy.

Finally they were all sitting in a great circle, the Dwellers and the Hierchon and his handful of advisers forming most of one half of the circumference, the humans and others, including the Archimandrite, making up the other half.

“We don’t know where Seer Fassin Taak is,” Chintsion told Luseferous. “Last heard of, he was making for a city in the northern polar region called Eponia. Though that is just a rumour.”

“Eponia?” the third Dweller, Peripule, said. His esuit was deep, gleaming brown, frilled like seaweed. “I heard he was seen in Deilte.”

“Deilte?” Chintsion said scornfully. “At this time of year?”

“He is an alien,” Peripule said. “He knows nothing of fashion.”

“Well, first of all,” Chintsion began, “he has a minder, and—”

“Gentlemen,” Luseferous said. The three Dwellers all rocked back as though shocked.

“The Archimandrite Luseferous is a busy man,” the Hierchon Ormilla boomed. “Discussions regarding the seasonal fashion-ability of cities in Nasqueron might be best conducted between sessions, not during.”

“Little dweller,” Chintsion said to the Hierchon, “we are, as a favour to your latest batch of masters, and notwithstanding the likely and faintly hilarious brevity of their precedence, attempting to establish the whereabouts of this Taak fellow. The…”

Luseferous stopped listening. He turned to Tuhluer, who sat just behind and to the side of him. He looked the other man in the eye. Tuhluer held his gaze. Luseferous saw the other man swallow. Still his gaze was held. Tuhluer had never dared to do that before. Luseferous bent fractionally towards him and said quietly, “Desperate times require desperate solutions, Tuhluer.”

The other man looked down, then nodded and started finger-tapping signals into his glove. The Archimandrite turned to the front again.

A distant thud sounded, followed a second later by another, then another, like a great clock ticking.

Luseferous listened to the two Ulubine Peregals, old men called Tlipeyn and Emoerte, trying to wheedle the Dwellers into being more cooperative. The Dwellers gave every indication of being sincerely unable even to understand what the word meant.

Out of the corner of his eye, minutely silhouetted against the filthy yellow-brown clouds of the planet beneath them, the Archimandrite could see a line of tiny specks drifting off to one side, heading towards the passing cloud tops thousands of kilometres below.

“…Believe us when we say that we are serious,” Commander Binstey, his C-in-C of ground forces was saying to the three Dwellers.

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Chintsion said airily. “That does not alter the fact that we may be entirely unable to help you.”

Commander Binstey started to speak again but then Luseferous interrupted him. “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, and Binstey fell silent. “If I may direct your attention to the view over to one side there.” He waved one ringed hand over to the side where the stippled line of specks was moving slowly across the gasily distorted face of the planet.

Everybody looked. The Dwellers twisted slightly in their seats. Those present in the chamber with especially good eyesight were already reacting. He could hear mutters, gasps, all the usual expressions of shock.

“We are serious,” Luseferous told the Dwellers. He stood. “Do you hear that noise?” He turned his head, as though listening.

The dull ticking noise went on; steady, remorseless. “That is a drop-bomb chute, firing once a second. Only in this case it is firing people, not warheads. Unprotected human beings are being thrown into space towards your planet at a rate of over three thousand per hour. They are men, women and children, old and young adults, people from all walks of life, mostly captured from surrendered ships and damaged habitats. We have over twenty thousand of them aboard. They will continue to be fired at this rate until we make some sort of progress here.” He waited for some sort of reaction from the three Dwellers, but they just kept on looking at the view. “Now,” he continued, “do any of us here present think we might have just remembered anything useful?”

He watched the people and the aliens staring at the stippled line of black dots moving slowly away from the great ship. A few people turned to look at him, then looked away when he met their gaze, trying to hide hatred and fear and horror. Odd how people reacted so severely to something unpleasant happening right in front of them but were prepared to ignore much worse horrors taking place elsewhere.

He nodded to Tuhluer, and a great screen lit up across one side of the chamber, showing the process. People — humans of all sorts, as he’d said — were shown being loaded into a number of huge circular magazines. The humans were almost all struggling, but they were each constrained by a tight wrapping like an elastic sleeping bag which covered every bit of them except for their faces and prevented them from doing anything but squirm like maggots and spit at and try to bite the exoskel-wearing soldiers loading them into the launcher magazines. The floor of the vast hold was covered in wriggling, struggling bodies. The sound turned up, and those present in the conference chamber could hear the humans screaming and crying and shouting and begging.

“Archimandrite!” the Hierchon shouted. “I have to protest at this! I didn’t—”

“Shut up!” the Archimandrite bellowed at him. He looked round the others. “All of you! Not a fucking word!” For a while the only sound was the muffled thud, thud, thud of the launcher.

The scene switched to the muzzle of the launcher on the exterior of the ship, firing — very gently, for a gun — the people into space. Their wrapping came off as they were expelled, snapping back around their ankles so that they could writhe and jerk and spasm satisfactorily as they met the vacuum naked, and suffocated. Some tried to hold their breaths, and bulged fit to explode. Blood specked from ears and eyes and mouths and anuses. The cameras followed them. The people usually moved for about a couple of minutes before they stopped. Then they just assumed the one frozen pose — some curled foetal, some spreadeagled -and tumbled slowly, part of an invisible conveyor belt, towards the faraway cloud tops.

“Exactly why are you doing this?” the Dweller Feurish asked the Archimandrite. He sounded merely puzzled.

“To concentrate minds,” Luseferous said coldly. He could hear somebody being sick in the chamber. Not many people were meeting his gaze. The gantries above were thick with immobile guards, weapons already trained on the people below.

“Well, my mind was perfectly concentrated,” Feurish said, with what sounded like a sigh. “We still can’t help you.”

“Give me Seer Fassin Taak,” Luseferous said, feeling some sweat — what? — start to break out on his forehead. He put a stop to that at once.

“We haven’t got this Taak fellow,” the City Administrator Peripule said reasonably.

“Tell me where he is,” Luseferous demanded. “Sorry,” Chintsion said. “Can’t help.”

“Fucking tell me!” Luseferous roared.

“How can we—?” Feurish began. Then Chintsion broke in. “Perhaps we can ask the people who claim to have seen Seer Taak last where they think he might be.”

“There were people from the Embassy who were reported to be looking for him,” Feurish pointed out. “Perhaps they found something.”

“I thought they were all killed when the Embassy ships were destroyed,” Chintsion said. “Weren’t they?”

“Look,” Peripule said reasonably to the Archimandrite. “Why don’t we just sleep on it, eh?”

Luseferous pointed furiously at the line of bodies heading slowly towards the planet. “Don’t you fuckwits understand? That doesn’t stop until I get what I want!”

The three Dwellers twisted to look as one. “Hmm,” Peripule said thoughtfully. “I do hope you have enough people.”

Luseferous’s fists clenched. He felt close to exploding, as though he was one of the people in the little production line of death sliding past the bowed diamond window. He struggled to keep his voice icily calm as he said, “There are three hundred Dweller youngsters aboard this ship. Perhaps if we used them instead? Or for target practice. What do you think?”

“I think you’ll annoy people,” Chintsion said, and laughed.

“You’re not seriously trying to use threats against us, are you?” Feurish asked.

“I had better point out, Mr Luseferous,” Chintsion said with what sounded almost like humour, “that some of the clubs I represent are of a military bent. Wonderfully enthusiastic, of course, proud to personify them, naturally, but sometimes — I don’t know, perhaps through boredom — they display characteristics which might almost be said to be bordering on those one would expect to be evinced by fellows of a ‘shoot-first’ mentality. Ah. If you know what I mean.”

Luseferous stared at this cretinous float. The plodding, thud, thud, thud sound went on. The line of tiny dark shapes continued to move across the tortured, livid face of the gas-giant. He turned to Tuhluer. “Go to full action stations,” he said. “Dark the view.”

The vast face of Nasqueron disappeared as the diamond bubble went obsidian black. The whole great chamber grew still darker and seemed to shrink. The thudding noise sounded louder.

“You three are to be held hostage,” Luseferous told the three Dwellers. “As will the young of your kind currently aboard this ship. If there is any attempt to rescue you or them, or any assault on this ship or on any of my ships or assets, you will all be killed. If I don’t get something provably useful on Seer Fassin Taak or whatever it was he was looking for in the next six hours standard, I’m going to start killing you anyway, starting with you three. Understand?”

“Really, Mr Luseferous,” Feurish said, “this is no way to run a conference.”

“I have to say that I have to agree,” Chintsion said.

“Shut up,” Luseferous told them. “I also have numerous ships with multi-real-tonne antimatter warheads stationed right round this gas-giant. Planet-busters. If there’s still nothing happening after you’re all dead, I start detonating them in your precious fucking atmosphere. What passes for the authorities on your giant rotten fart of a planet will be informed of the above in due course.” The Archimandrite looked up at the guards poised on the gantries above. “Take them away. Get them out of those esuits. By cutting if necessary.”

A dozen giant black figures like suits of ancient armour encrusted with huge dark jewels sailed down, landing on the black diamond film on great talon-spread legs. Four surrounded each of the three esuited Dwellers.

“Well, gentlemen,” the Dweller called Peripule said ruefully to the other two, “I suppose it is not open to us to claim we went unwarned.”

An instant later, three violet circular curtains of light blazed out within the dark chamber, one encircling each Dweller. The exoskel guards were either rocked right back or physically blown over. Those unprotected people standing or sitting further away were picked up and thrown towards the walls. The shock wave hit Luseferous’s tall seat a fraction after the safety shield deployed, so that he watched the resulting chaos through a clinker of half-silvered diamond shutters.

The blast shook his seat, shook him and then reflected and echoed back off the distant walls. The three violet cylinders disappeared and left three huge neatly circular holes in the black diamond film beneath. The sickly light of Nasqueron’s yellow-brown cloud tops shone through. The air in the chamber was whirling and screaming out through the apertures. Blinks of white light flickered outside. Two of the exoskel guards were tumbled across the floor, scrabbling for grip, and were sucked out of the holes. Luseferous just stood staring. People, mostly unconscious and badly injured, started to slide in from the edges of the chamber where they’d been deposited by the triple blasts towards the three shining holes. A third exoskeleton-clad figure was being pulled, giant hands scraping and scrabbling frantically at the smooth diamond surface, towards the nearest hole and the whirling vortex forming above it. Then the ship’s systems finally woke up to what was happening and a dark shape flicked across the three puncture wounds in the vessel’s skin, sealing off the light and keeping what remained of the atmosphere within.

Relative calm returned. The thud, thud, thud noise continued. A rushing sound signalled replacement air being pumped back into the chamber. The exoskel guards got to their feet, looked around, then ran over to form a protective shield about the Archimandrite. More black shapes came plummeting from the gantries. Luseferous could hear people in the chamber moaning. He turned to look at Tuhluer, who was limping up to him through the phalanx of exoskel guards, his own emergency esuit and helmet deployed, the shiny bulge of faceplate reflecting the silvery diamond bubble that enclosed the Archimandrite and his chair.

“Kill the other Dwellers,” Luseferous told him. Tuhluer leaned in, hand to the side of his head, seemingly not hearing. “KILL THE OTHER DWELLERS!” Luseferous shouted. He clicked a stud on the arm of the seat and the diamond shuttering fell away. “Get us away from here,” he told the other man. “Warn the planet the AM warheads launch in three hours if they don’t start cooperating.” He looked at where the three Dweller representatives had made their sudden exit. “And make sure the Rapacious wasted those three comedians.”

“Sir!” Tuhluer said. “And what about the… chute supply?”

It took a moment before Luseferous realised that he meant the people being launched towards the planet. He waved one hand. “Oh, dump the lot.”

The Archimandrite Luseferous clicked the esuit’s communicator and told the Rapacious he was on his way. He marched through the moaning wounded towards the ship-to-ship and the waiting vessel beneath. The exoskel guards fell in around him, forming a giant hedge of armoured limbs and menacingly jagged torsos. He was almost at the ship-to-ship entrance when he was thrown off his feet. The exoskels staggered as the whole vast ship shook. One of the giant guards nearly fell on him, regaining his balance only at the last moment, servos whining.

“Now what?” Luseferous demanded.

“Damage control here, sir,” a voice said from the esuit. “Energy bolt straight through the whole ship, dead amidships. About two metres diameter. Plus… the bows have been shot off, back… to… about… the eighty-metre mark. Just gone. Same novel energy profile as the midships beam. Light speed; zero warning. Reactive defence systems still looking for a counter-measure against any subsequent usage… nothing coming up so far, sir.”

“Comms, sir,” another voice said, “Dwellers, demanding return of their people aboard. Apparently those were just warning shots.”

Tuhluer came striding up.

Luseferous looked at him. “Hand the Dwellers back,” he told the ADC. “Then get this thing away from here.” He strode towards the ship-to-ship.

“And the AM ships, sir?”

“Leave them where they are. Delay the ultimatum until the Luseferous VII is clear.”

“Sir.”

This time the Archimandrite made it all the way to the waiting flagship.

An hour later the Luseferous VII was still making its lumbering, injured way out of the planet’s gravity well. The Rapacious was already half a million klicks away and still accelerating. The Archimandrite — still shaking with rage even in his acceleration couch, the full awfulness and sheer insult of what had happened at last sinking in, his patience finally exhausted (those three facetious shithead Dwellers had even escaped, esuits reflecting or deflecting everything the Rapacious had thrown at them after they’d exited the Luseferous VII, disappearing, apparently unharmed, into the cloud tops) -ordered that the ultimatum be made to the Dwellers immediately, and that one of the ships carrying an AM warhead should drop its weapon into the planet’s atmosphere, just to show that they were serious.

The reply was almost instantaneous. The ship with the AM bomb — each one of the twenty ships with the AM bombs -vanished in a sudden pinpoint flare of light. All the warheads went off partially, reacting messily with the ordinary matter debris left after the destruction of the ships. Twenty ragged little suns guttered round Nasqueron like a tilted necklace, flaring, fading, flaring again and fading slowly once more.

Moments later, a hyper-velocity missile rose out of the turgid skies of the gas-giant and found the Luseferous VII despite all its desperate countermeasures within two minutes of clearing the cloud tops.

The radiation front tripped the Rapacious’s sensor buffers. That was how a proper antimatter warhead was supposed to work, seemed to be the implication.

The last signal from the great ship before it was ripped entirely apart and turned into radiation and high-speed shrapnel was from aide-de-camp Tuhluer, calmly informing Luseferous that the Archimandrite was a cunt.

Fassin Taak looked up at the stars of home. He felt tears in his eyes, even within the shock-gel. He rested on a windswept platform above a small cloud-top city low in the south polar region, just a couple of thousand kilometres from the torn, fluid boundary with Nasqueron’s southernmost atmospheric belt.

He tried to locate a friendly satellite, some signal that the little gascraft could recognise, but he couldn’t find anything. All broadcast signals were either terribly weak or scrambled, and he couldn’t locate any low-orbit devices to bounce a hail off. He tried to lock on to one of the weak broadcast wavelengths and use the gascraft’s biomind to decipher the signals, but the routines didn’t seem to be working. He gave up. For the moment, he was content just to sit here and look out at the few, familiar stars.

Despite Y’sul’s injuries, they’d still had to undergo an albeit slightly gentler form of the wild spiralling. Fassin had lain in the gascraft, feeling the series of nested corkscrewings and helixes build up like some coiling spring, thinking that this was them entering the wormhole, though in fact, as it turned out, they’d already been through it and this was the unwinding. Then, suddenly, they were here, back in Nasqueron, in the southern polar region, not the northern one they’d left from.

Sinking down just a few kilometres through the cloud tops, the ex-Voehn ship Protreptic had come to rest in a slightly too-big cradle in an enormous, echoing cavern of a hangar here in the lower regions of the nearly deserted polar city of Quaibrai. The City Administrator and a crowd of several hundred Dwellers had met them, hooting and throwing streamers and scent grenades.

A delegation comprising individuals from several different alien-ship enthusiast clubs had become particularly excited when they’d seen the Voehn craft and had bobbed up and down with impatience as Y’sul had been carefully offloaded and given into the care of a hospital squad. As soon as Y’sul, Fassin and the truetwin Quercer Janath had exited, the chirping, sizzling mass of enthusiasts rushed aboard, jostling for position as they’d tried to fit down the corridors and access ways. The truetwin had, thoughtfully, expanded the ship from its needle-ship portal-piercing formation to a fatter and hence more commodious configuration, but it still looked like a tight squeeze.

Y’sul, already looking half mended, though still shaking off the grogginess of his semi-coma, had twisted a fraction in his scoop-stretcher to look at Fassin as the hospital squad brought their ambulance skiff down to him. “See?” he’d croaked. “Got you back safely, didn’t I?”

Fassin had agreed that he had. He’d tried to pat Y’sul but used the wrong manipulator and instead just jerked in mid-gas. He’d swivelled and used the gascraft’s other arm, clutching the wounded Dweller’s hub-hand.

“You off home now?” Y’sul had asked.

“However much of it is left. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, if you do go, come back soon.” Y’sul had paused and shaken himself, as though trying to wake up more fully. “I should be ready to receive visitors again in a couple of dozen days or so and I anticipate a very full social calendar indeed thereafter. I fully intend to exploit my recent injuries and experiences without compunction and exaggerate outrageously my part in the taking of the Voehn ship, not to mention embellish my fight with the Voehn commander to the point of what will probably seem like complete unrecognisability, the first time you hear it. I’d appreciate your corroboration, providing you are able to enter into the spirit of the thing and not insist on being overly encumbered by the vulgar exigencies of objective truth, whatever version of it you may think you recall. What do you say?”

“My memory’s kind of hazy,” Fassin had told the Dweller. “I’ll probably back up anything you say.”

“Splendid!”

“If I can come back, I shall.”

Privately, he didn’t even know if he could get away in the first place. He didn’t know what sort of infrastructure remained to get him off the planet, get the gascraft repaired and return him — if whoever was in charge would let him return — nor whether the Dwellers would allow him to return.

During the last part of the six-hour journey from the worm-hole, when Quercer Janath had allowed him to see where they were and let him access the local data-carrying spectra, he’d tapped into the Nasqueron news services to see what had been going on during his absence.

The Dweller news was all about the war. The Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C. Apparently it had become deeply exciting and enthralling and was already being talked of in respected critical circles as a classic of the genre, even though it was probably barely halfway through yet and still, with any luck at all, had a great deal to offer.

Fassin had to search out a specialist alien-watcher service to find out that, starting about thirty-plus days earlier, the Ulubis system had been invaded and taken over by the Epiphany-5 Discon or Starveling Cult forces under the leadership of the Archimandrite Luseferous. The last significant, organised Ulubine Mercatorial resistance had ended just a dozen or so days ago following the formal surrender by the Hierchon Ormilla after the destruction of a city on Sepekte and a habitat in orbit around it. A counter-attack by several squadrons of the Summed Fleet was expected to commence within the next few dozen days or so. The latest was that a peace and cooperation conference was taking place about now in the Starveling ship Luseferous VII, in orbit about Nasqueron.

Fassin had sent a message which would at least attempt to find Valseir. He would wait a bit and see if that raised a reply. He’d thought of contacting Setstyin, but then he remembered, vaguely, that somebody had said something to him that had made him uneasy about the Dweller. No, wait, it had been the other way round, hadn’t it? Setstyin had always been a charming and helpful friend. Setstyin had warned him against the old Dweller who’d been in charge of the great spherical… thing that had risen out of the clouds and demolished the Mercatoria’s raiding force at the GasClipper regatta. Yes, that made more sense. He wondered why he couldn’t remember in more detail. It was strange. He’d always had a really good memory.

Quercer Janath seemed to be surrounded by well-wishers wanting to know more about the Voehn craft. The truetwin Dweller had seen Fassin looking at them through the crowd, and waved. Fassin had waved back.

He’d watched Y’sul being placed into the ambulance skiff and tried to work out what he knew and didn’t know, what he could and could not remember. He could have gone with Y’sul in the ambulance, he supposed, but he felt a need to get away for a while, to be alone for a time.

He’d come up here to see the stars, and wait, and think, and maybe do a bit of mathematical analysis.

He took the little image-leaf out of its locker in the gascraft’s flank. He looked at it. Since whatever had happened aboard the Protreptic, the little gascraft couldn’t see as well as it used to, but its close-up detail vision was good enough on one side for the image of blue sky and white clouds to be perfectly clear. He zoomed in, rechecking the image he had stored in the… The image wasn’t there in the craft’s memories.

That was strange. He had the feeling that he had recorded the image and already half-deciphered something that was hidden inside it. He was sure he had. It had seemed really important at the time, too, he was certain.

Fassin tried really hard to think back to what had occurred after they were attacked by the Voehn ship. He knew they’d been captured and interrogated and the Voehn had messed around with his brain and with the gascraft’s biomind and memories. Then a ship that the Ythyn had sent to rescue them had attacked the Voehn ship and — somehow — he and Y’sul and the truetwin had overpowered the surviving Voehn crew. They’d overpowered Voehn?

How had that happened? The Ythyn ship had been able to distract the Voehn, and the Velpin had played a part too, some sort of anti-piracy automatics kicking in and helping to take on the Voehn. Quercer Janath had been distinctly cagey about what sort of techniques their old ship had used against the Voehn. Fassin had no idea. Maybe it had happened the way they said, maybe not. Maybe the Velpin had had an AI aboard and that had wasted the Voehn, only Quercer Janath didn’t want people to know about it. They could have told him practically anything and he’d have believed them, the Voehn had messed with his memories so badly.

He remembered sitting on the steps of a temple looking out over a wide, slow-moving river, talking to an old… man? An old Dweller? This was quite a vivid image, rather than a linear strand of memory. That had to have happened in some form of VR, didn’t it? Maybe that old man had been the representation of the Velpin’s AI. Perhaps that was who or what he had been talking to, or at least met.

He tried to concentrate, and looked down at the image-leaf again. He’d been given this by Valseir. Was that right? It had been a sort of calling card, a letter of introduction, leading him to… He seemed to feel it had led him to Valseir, but that didn’t make sense.

No, wait: the house in the depths, and the old wandering Dweller. He’d given him the image-leaf. And it had led him, somehow, to Valseir. But there was something else. He’d discovered something else. He’d woken up thinking about this, before the wormhole transition. There was something hidden in the image-leaf. A message, a code.

Fassin looked round the empty platform. There was nobody else here. He let the little gascraft’s image processors drink in the view shown on the image-leaf in as much detail as it could offer. Various routines started running. In a few minutes, his gaze was torn away from the sparse but familiar-looking starscape above. He looked at the results.

There had been something in there.

It looked like alien algebra.

There was about a page and a half of it. It looked like one long equation, or maybe three or four shorter ones.

He felt very excited. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he had an idea that this linked into the Dweller List. The details evaded him, but he knew that he’d been looking for the Transform that was supposed to open up the famous List, and maybe — just possibly — this piece of alien mathematics had something to do with it. Maybe what he had before him here was the Transform, though that was a little difficult to believe.

Fassin tried to figure out what the symbols in front of him might mean, but couldn’t even get started. The gascraft’s comprehensively mucked-around memories might once have contained something which would have sent him in the right direction, but they didn’t any more.

He linked with the city’s data nets, synched with an equatorial university library and looked up a data reservoir specialising in alien mathematics. He chose a couple of symbols at random and pinged them to the database. It answered immediately, with references.

What he was looking at was expressed in Translatory V, a pan-species, universal notation of just under two billion years age, devised by the long-extinct Wopuld from earlier Dweller elements. He downloaded a full translation suite.

He had to stop, and look out over the cloud tops. He was experiencing a strange mix of emotions.

This might be the thing he’d been sent to look for, the very object of his mission. Their mission, rather; he ought not to forget Colonel Hatherence. This could well be what he’d been looking for, all that time. And yet, if the Mercatoria, or at least the Ulubine part of it, had hoped that this would save them, then it hadn’t. He’d got back too late, and the invasion had already happened. It was all over.

And there was so much he seemed to have forgotten! What had the Voehn done to him? Y’sul had been badly injured but apart from the effects of his healing coma he seemed — and professed himself to be — fine, mentally. Quercer Janath didn’t seem to have suffered at all. Maybe that was just luck, or something to do with being a truetwin — he didn’t know.

Still, there was this to be done, this deciphering. It might still lead to something momentous. The invasion might have already happened but the counter-attack was still to take place, and anyway, there was his own take on the rights and wrongs of what was going on. He would still rather the Beyonders had the information, if there was any useful information to be had, in the equation.

Something glinted in space just over the horizon to the west, way out across the cloud tops. A ship, perhaps.

Fassin returned his attention to the equation and the alien translation suite. He applied one to the other. In the virtual space which the gascraft’s crippled biomind projected into his own mind, the image split and a copy of the equation appeared alongside the original. He watched the symbols shuffle and change in the copy, turning into Dweller standard notation. The symbols on both copies of the equation flickered and highlighted, turned different colours and seemed to swell out and then lapse back in again amongst the rest as the equation worked itself out.

It was truly an equation, too. He’d had some vague idea thanks to something that somebody had said that it might be a frequency and signal or something, but it wasn’t that. Or if it was it was very oddly disguised.

The last few terms flicked and flashed on both sides of the split image. The answer appeared right at the end, blinking slowly.

It was a zero.

He stared at it, at them.

A zero in Dweller standard notation was a dot with a short line under it. In Translatory V, it was a diagonal slash.

A dot with a short line under it winked at him from the copy of the equation. A diagonal slash lay at the end of the original, also slowly flashing.

He tried again. Same result.

He rechecked the image, pulled the hidden code out of it again, in case the processor systems had made a mistake the first time.

There had been no mistake. The equation he came up with the second time was the same as the first. He ran that one as well, anyway.

Zero.

Fassin laughed. He could feel himself inside the shock-gel nested within the little arrowhead craft, chest and belly shaking. He had a sudden, vivid image of standing on the rocky shore of a planet, waiting for something. He stopped laughing.

Zero.

So the final answer was nothing. He’d been sent to the far side of the galaxy, had the answer with him all the time anyway, and what it was, was “Fuck all’. But in maths.

He started laughing again.

Ah well.

Another glint, out over the cloud tops again, nearly directly north, and high. A scatter of tiny lights lit up the sky just beneath whatever it was that had just reflected the light. A hint of violet. Then white.

He watched the same region of space for a few moments, looking for more. Whatever it was, it had to be fairly far away. If it was the same thing that had glinted earlier near the horizon then it was something high over the equatorial zone, tens of kilo-klicks out.

Zero. Well, that was illuminating. Fassin wondered if there really was a true answer somewhere, if what he’d found — what Valseir had stumbled onto and then what Fassin had unknowingly brought out with him after his long-ago delve — was part of a whole suite of decoy answers. Was there just this one, or were there more? Was the myth of the Dweller List’s famous Transform footnoted with hundreds of false answers?

Well, if it was, he wasn’t going to go looking for them. He’d done his bit. He’d even, in a sense, accomplished his mission, when he’d thought it was never going to happen. He was too late, and the result was a nonsense, a joke, almost an insult, but — by any given god you cared to name — he’d done it.

He ought to start thinking about how he was going to get off the planet, or at least get the information out there, just for form’s sake. Share the indifferent news.

Another couple of flashes from space, near where the first crop had shone. One tiny blink, one longer flare. A few moments later what looked like a ship’s drive lit up and floated away, gathering speed quickly.

Fassin looked for evidence of any Shared Facility satellites, or indeed any Mercatorial hardware anywhere around Nasqueron. There didn’t seem to be anything. He’d told Aun Liss he’d try to ping a position between two Seer satellites, EQ4 and EQ5, but the satellites weren’t there any more. He wondered if he could work out where they would have been and so where the microsat that he’d suggested the Beyonders position between the two might be. He looked inside the gascraft’s memory, trying to find the sat schedules, dug them out, then fed in the local time and his current location.

A position blinked on his field of vision, away across the cloud tops, a little off due north, some few kilo-klicks beneath where the recent activity had been. In line of sight now. He decided to treat this piece of luck as a good omen, and sent a signal saying he was back, so that, if nothing else, he’d have done what he’d said he would do. He waited a while but there was no acknowledgement, let alone a reply. He hadn’t really expected one.

He wondered what was left of the Shrievalty Ocula, and whether he should even try to report to it. He needed to do some research into exactly how much had changed since the invasion, see whether he was listed as dead, and whether he was being looked for or not. Maybe people had forgotten about him in all the excitement.

Fassin laughed again. Oh, if only.

The whole E-5 Discon invasion, so they’d been told, was happening quite specifically because of the List and the Transform. If that was even partly, even slightly true, and his mission hadn’t been hidden from the invaders, then they probably would be looking for him, and quite hard, too, given that they might not have much time before the Summed Fleet crashed the party.

In a way the zero-result equation was a relief. The information he’d brought back was such that he didn’t mind sharing it with anybody and everybody. If it had truly told the location of the wormhole portals it would have been the most crushingly awful burden he could have borne, an infinitely precious and probably infinitely deadly possession. He should be glad it was a joke. If it had been the useful truth, if it had been what they had all hoped it was going to be, then almost certainly no matter who he chose to tell would first torture him or at the very least tear his mind apart to make sure he was telling the truth, and then kill him to make sure he couldn’t tell anybody else. He’d kind of hoped that the Beyonders might be more humane than that, but it was a big risk to take.

He’d be better just broadcasting the result, then disappearing if he could. Maybe the Dwellers would let him stay.

Valseir. If nothing else, he ought to let his Dweller friend know that the information they’d all been so concerned about in fact amounted to nothing more than a piddling little zero. Then there was the matter of telling Valseir that for this nothing, his friend and colleague Leisicrofe had killed himself. Not all good news he’d arrive bearing, then.

Fassin looked up the StormSailing news service. There were fewer regattas than usual, thanks to all the interest in the war, and a lot of sailors who’d normally be on the GasClippers and StormJammers would be required to crew the Dreadnoughts and other combat craft, but there were still a dozen meetings going on at any one time throughout the planet. If he was going to go looking for Valseir at regattas, he might have a long search.

He thought about contacting the City Administrator to arrange for transport — Y’sul would most likely be transferred back home to Hauskip city in a day or two, and Fassin could probably just accompany the injured Dweller back there — then he wondered if he ought to be more careful.

Nobody seemed to have paid him much attention at all when he’d disembarked from the Protreptic, but that didn’t mean his arrival hadn’t been noticed by somebody. Were there any humans — other Seers or anybody else — present in Nasq.? Somebody — Valseir? Damn this suddenly failing memory -somebody had told him there were factions and differences of opinion within the Dwellers over the List and even the seemingly endemic, congenital disregard the Dwellers displayed towards the rest of the galaxy’s inhabitants. We are not a monoculture. That had been Valseir, hadn’t it?

Would any group of Dwellers wish him ill, or somehow be under the command of somebody who did?

He called up the usually most reliable alien-watching service and accessed the global map. It was, for the first time since he’d been looking at it, completely clear. According to the display, there was not a single alien entity alive in Nasqueron. That appeared to include him, so his return hadn’t been documented yet, at least not by the enthusiasts who ran this service.

He was being called. Quercer Janath. He put the image-leaf back in its flank locker.

— Fassin. Anywhere we can take you?

— Locally, hasten to add.

— Ship at our disposal. Favour owed.

— That sort of thing.

· I don’t know, Fassin replied. — I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know any more about what’s happening with the invasion and the Starveling Cult forces?

· Getting reports coming in just now that there’s been some sort of breakdown at some conference.

— Firefight, bluntly.

— I’d like to find my friend Valseir, Fassin said. — I’ve sent a call, but no answer’s come back. I thought I might find him at a -

As he spoke, he thought suddenly of the RushWing Sheumerith, the Dwellers hanging trailed on long lines behind the great long flexible wing forever powering its way into the high skies of Nasqueron. The RushWing. That was the other place Valseir had said he might be found.

· Yes, he told the truetwin. — I do know where you could take me.

· Be in-atmosphere, you realise. Not that quick.

— Entirely used up our luck quotient bringing the ship into Nasq. unseen in the first place. Voehn ship, see. Nervous-making sort of thing for a lot of people. Apparently.

— That’s fine, Fassin told them.

They were scudding through the cloud stems under the topmost haze layer less than an hour later when the AM warheads went off. One was directly above them.

“Oh, wow!”

“Look at our shadow!”

A minute later, what they would later discover had been the destruction of the great ship Luseferous VII cast part of a giant halo of light all over the western sky. Quercer Janath freely confessed to being terribly impressed.

The Protreptic tore serenely on.

* * *

The first twelve ships of the Summed Fleet streaked across the inner system of Ulubis at just a per cent below light speed. Kilometre-long black minarets girdled by fast-spinning sections loosing missile clusters, pack munitions, scatter mines, stealth drones and suicide launchers, they lanced across the whole system in less than four hours, Nasqueron’s orbit in less than one and Sepekte’s in fifteen minutes.

Billions of kilometres behind them, on the same course and decelerating hard, lay the Mannlicher-Carcano and the main body of the Summed Fleet. Taince Yarabokin floated in her pod. In the VR command space of the battleship, there was something approaching total silence as the entire command crew lay quietly listening to the sparse exchanges beaming back from the twelve advance units darting across the system dead ahead.

Taince was amazed at how nervous she felt. She could feel her body trying to exhibit all the classic signs of the fight-or-flight response, and the pod’s bio systems doggedly countering each one. There was no doubt that this was an important mission. It would, arguably, be the most crucial one she’d ever been a part of. She was of sufficiently senior rank to have been briefed at the start on the strategic momentousness of what they were being sent to do, but even so she was surprised how similar she felt now to the way she’d felt on her first few combat missions. You never fully shook off the adrenalin rush no matter how many missions you undertook — the consensus was that the day you felt completely blase about a forthcoming engage-ment was either the day you were going to die or the day you should resign your commission forthwith — but the way she felt now was worryingly similar to how she’d felt before those early missions.

Somewhere, her nervousness would be being noted, too. Even if a live human medical officer wasn’t watching her life signs now, a program would be flagging her current state of anxiety as worth further investigation later. No privacy. Well, she’d known that when she joined up.

Taince took her mind away from these perplexing, almost embarrassing feelings and watched the data coming back from the lead ships.

What happened now, what these twelve craft discovered or didn’t discover as they crossed the system at accelerated particle speeds, would determine how the next part of her life was lived out.

There had been some odd energy and drive signatures from the system over the last few days, though nothing as bizarre as the sudden commotion around Nasqueron a few days ago. Twenty-plus antimatter explosions. All but one, it looked like, spread around the planet in a neat if wavy circle. They’d detonated too far out to do any great damage to the gas-giant itself or to its inhabitants, and the explosions had been very messy, almost as if they hadn’t been functioning warheads detonating efficiently but rather twenty — very big — ships losing M\AM containment at exactly the same time. Then, a minute or two later, an even bigger AM burst less than a light second out from Nasqueron, with the profile of something the size of the behemoth ship they’d identified earlier getting thoroughly blasted.

Then nothing, apart from the ambiguous maybe-leaving indications.

Because one plausible explanation that fitted most of the signs — no explanation anyone had come up with so far fitted all of them — was that the bad guys were pulling out. Nobody in fleet command really believed this was what could be happening -the Starveling Cult force had crossed decades of space to get to Ulubis: they wouldn’t turn tail and face the equally long trek back after just a few weeks, would they? — but it looked like one of the more likely explanations.

The data about to arrive would decide it one way or the other.

The battlecruiser 88, the advance squadron’s flagship, collating the real-time intelligence of the spearhead-shaped force and signalling it back to the main fleet, reported three heavy craft within detection though not attack range of the first, point destroyer. It signalled two of the following cruisers to adjust their trajectories and prepare remote munitions, guided and dumb. Little comms bleed. Possibly this was just good discipline or marginally better tech than they’d anticipated. Flank cruisers and destroyers reported a few missile platforms, firing at them, futilely, given their speed. A lot of mines, well spread. Evidence of AM material still floating free near the planet Nasqueron, in a debris profile that fitted exactly twenty ships having blown up at the same time eight days earlier. One big debris field, still heading outwards from the gas-giant, spreading, consistent with a very large ship having been destroyed.

A few other small enemy ships showing, the closest responding to their passing, firing beam weapons. No hits. The destroyer Bofors passed within a kilo-klick of a vessel of about the same size as it, identified it as a hostile before the other ship had even registered the craft hurtling past and hit and destroyed it with a high-X-ray laser from its phase-modulation collar turret before the hostile had time to react.

Halfway across the system now. Still just the three big targets. There should be hundreds.

The four craft at the trailing end of the advance squadron’s spear-point had time to spare while they nudge-deflected and picked off some of the targets that the point and mid-body ships had identified. They turned long-range sensors on the outer system and beyond, in the general direction of the E-5 Discon, getting a straight-down look along that track which the main fleet had only ever been able to view at a ninety-degree angle.

Drive signatures. Hundreds of them. Most of a thousand ships, all heading for home, taking a slightly acutely angled route that had hidden their drives from the main body of the fleet for the last six or seven days.

Half an hour later, it was like party time. The advance squadron was almost all the way through the system, braking hard to return in a few dozen days, and the small formations of ships between them and the main body of the fleet had been ordered to forget about follow-up high-speed passes and start decelerating at their individual safe maxima.

All the signs were that the system was almost clear of enemy ships and the Starveling Cult’s main fleet was in high-speed retreat back along roughly the course it had approached on. Even the three big targets were powering up now and heading in the same direction as the decamping invasion force. A few dozen smaller drives lit up as smaller, lighter craft got set to bail out too. There would be some clearing-up to do, and no doubt various mines and automatic munitions to try and keep them occupied while the enemy fleet made its escape, but there would be no main fleet engagement in Ulubis system, no mega-battle.

Their orders were to retake Ulubis system at any cost and hold it. A fast, light force of a dozen or so ships might be sent to harry the tardier fringes of the retreating fleet and provide continuing incentivisation for their speedy withdrawal, but they were specifically not to risk chasing en masse for some decisive battle. They had already achieved victory. They were expressly forbidden from taking the slightest risk of throwing it all away.

The command staff were celebrating. Taince lay curled in her pod, listening to her colleagues babbling with happiness and obvious relief. Various people talked to her, gabbing away about how the mere threat of their arrival could turn away a fleet three times the size of theirs, how they wished now they’d been with the advance squadron, just to have seen some action, dammit, and how they were probably going to get a heroes’ welcome when they got to Ulubis. She tried to respond in kind, mustering expressions of tension released and fears assuaged and all the time pretending to pretend that she’d have preferred a proper fight.

— Vice Admiral?

The image of Admiral Kisipt appeared in front of her, automatically displacing all the other images of celebrating crew.

· Sir. She tried to pull her thoughts away from the sick feeling inside.

· You must be pleased. We won’t have to turn your home system into too much of a battleground.

· Of course, sir. Though there will be mines, booby traps, no doubt.

· No doubt. And I’m keeping a full sweep alert in operation between here and the system, just in case. Kisipt paused. The old Voehn’s head tipped to one side as he regarded her. -1 think it has been very stressful for you, anticipating what might happen when we got to Ulubis, yes?

— I suppose so, sir. Taince wondered if he’d already been alerted to her earlier nervousness, if this was a conversation — even a kind of evaluation — inspired by that.

· Hmm. Well, the place doesn’t look too badly shot up, judging from the advance results. You ought to be able to relax soon. We’ll need you for liaison and ceremonial duties mostly, I should think. The Admiral made a smile. — That will be all right?

· Of course, sir. Thank you.

· Good. The Admiral made a show of looking around at the other images distributed about his own icon. — Well, I’d better talk to a few more people, calm them down, remind them there’s still a job to be done. As you were, Vice.

— Sir.

The Admiral’s image disappeared. Taince didn’t bring any of the others to the fore, but turned away from the social space altogether for Tacspace.

What have I become? she thought, staring into the dark volumes of Tacspace, watching and not watching coloured lines move and slowly extend, groups of figures, groups of ships tracing their way through the deep space skies bordering Ulubis system. I wanted a proper battle. Death and destruction. I wanted death and destruction. I wanted the chance to die, the chance to kill, the chance to die…

She stared into the awful emptiness as people celebrated around her.

What have I become?

* * *

Fassin felt restless as the Protreptic powered its way through the belts and zones of Nasqueron, heading for the RushWing Sheumerith, riding high in the clear gas spaces between two haze layers in Band A. The ex-Voehn ship shredded clouds as it sped through the atmosphere, keeping just under the median cloud level. Quercer Janath amused themselves by taking turns to pilot in real-time and see by how little they could miss shaving the edges of PlungeStems. This involved quite a lot of whooping and the occasional softish collision, making the whole ship shudder.

Fassin left them to it and floated away back through the ship, ending up in the chamber where their interrogation and the fight had taken place. He looked round it, at the dent-seats and restraints, at the scars and burn marks on the floor, ceilings and walls, and could remember nothing about what had happened. He felt frustrated, even depressed. He floated back towards the command space, stopping just before he got there to look inside what appeared to be the commander’s cabin, close to the flight deck.

The cabin was sparsely furnished and decorated. Fassin suspected that it had lost a few bits and pieces to some of the more acquisitive alien-ship enthusiasts back at Quaibrai. He looked at a square on the wall where something had been removed. The Protreptic shook very slightly. A distant whoop sounded from the command space, a couple of open doors and a short corridor away. Fassin experienced a shudder of his own, and a feeling of something like deja vu, or Swim.

I was born in a water moon, he thought to himself, knowing he was quoting something or somebody but not knowing what or who.

Another shudder ran through the ship. High-pitched giggles rang from the flight deck.

Zero.

— Hey! Fassin! Quercer Janath sent. — Call for you. Patch through?

— Who is it? he asked.

— No ident.

— Human female voice. Hold on, we’ll ask.

Zero, Fassin thought. Zero. It was a fucking answer.

— Aun Liss, name given.

— Any bells rung?

* * *

The RushWing Sheumerith, a thin blade across the dun sky, held no sign of Valseir. The Protreptic went off to bag more PlungeStems, promising to return. Fassin flew the little gascraft wearily along the line of tethered, oblivious, wing-hanging Dwellers, waiting for a sign.

In the end, the other gascraft was obvious. He spotted it from a couple of thousand metres away. The other device saw him at the same time and sent,

· Fassin?

· No, I’m a warhead. Who are you?

· Aun. See you’ve brought a gun.

He’d taken a Voehn hand-weapon from the Protreptic, once he’d found an armoury that hadn’t been raided for souvenirs by the ship enthusiasts of Quaibrai. Quercer Janath hadn’t objected. On the contrary, they’d advised him in rather too much detail on the differing capabilities and skill profiles of the various guns on offer when all he wanted was something robust, reliable and powerful that he could use to defend or kill himself with.

So in his good manipulator Fassin now toted a chunky device of what Quercer Janath had termed the CBE persuasion — Crude But Effective.

He made a show of holding the charged weapon in front of his primary sensing band as he approached. — Yes, he sent. — It’s a souvenir.

He drew up by the other machine. It was about the same size and shape as his own, if in rather better condition, and oriented at ninety degrees, the vertical axis longer than the horizontal. It rode inside the cup of still gas behind the open diamond shelter trailing behind the RushWing, near the port limit of the ten-kilometre wing. Wary — unable to be anything else — he noted that the two enclosures on either side of the one holding the other small gascraft were each occupied by large Dwellers who looked rather young to have given themselves up, even temporarily, to a life of high-speed, high-altitude contemplation. The nearest few tether points beyond those on either side were all empty.

— Come on in, the other machine sent, moving forward until its nose nestled into the inner surface of the diamond enclosure. He pulled in behind, wobbling in the sudden pool of still gas after the howl of slipstream.

They were almost touching. Most of the upper surface of the machine facing him turned transparent, showing somebody who certainly looked like Aun Liss lying nearly fully prone in a high-gee seat. He saw her fight to raise an arm and wave, a grim expression on her face that turned into a grin as she looked out at him. He de-opaqued what he could of his own gascraft’s carapace, though the results weren’t perfect.

Fassin didn’t even try to smile back.

· Think you could point that thing away from me? she sent. He saw her grin. — I realise this is the first time I’ve ever said that to -

· No, he sent back, still pointing the Voehn gun at her.

·…Okay, she sent, smile vanishing. — So, welcome back. Good trip?

· No. You got a manipulator you can use in that thing?

· Yes. Won’t claim I’m an expert, but…

He moved his own gascraft forward until it was centimetres from hers. — Talk to me the old way.

He saw her frown, then smile uncertainly. — Okay, she sent. — This might be a bit, ah… He could see her shifting her gaze to look down at her right forearm, lying squashed on the cradle-arm of the gee-chair. She looked like she always had, and at the same time quite different. Hair dark, not blonde or auburn or white this time. The high gravity and her attempt to look at her arm as she worked the unfamiliar manipulator interface gave her jowls. He was already fairly sure it was Aun, but he was still quite prepared to kill her.

The manipulator came out slowly, unsteadily. Fassin kept his own well out of the way, still holding the gun on her. The two big Dwellers on either side hadn’t made any move. The manipulator came forward and touched the hull carapace of his own little gascraft, finger ends spreading awkwardly.

In the end, he saw, she had to close her eyes to do it. The fingers on the abraded, nearly insensitive gascraft’s skin spelled out… SS ( )… SOL ( ) SOTL ( ). He could see her getting frustrated. He watched the expression on her face deepen into a profound, eyes-tightly-closed frown as she struggled to make the manipulator do exactly what she wanted. He felt tears prick his eyes again. Though he could still shoot her, or himself: anybody.

… SO STL CRZY? she managed at last, and her eyes opened and she flashed a hugely relieved and pleased-with-herself smile at him.

He switched the gun off.

They rode together in the still ball of gas behind the cup of diamond, held on a deep curve of line behind the RushWing’s thin blade.

· Not us. That wasn’t us. Not guilty. It wasn’t even the Starvelings, murdering fucks though they may be.

· Then who did do it?

· The Mercatoria, Fass. They killed your people.

· What? Why?

· Because they found out that Sept Bantrabal had kept whatever they were sent that briefed you. They were supposed to junk it from the substrate as soon as it was finished but they didn’t. It wasn’t quite an AI like they sent to the Hierchon, but it had a lot in common. It was a big step along the way to a true AI and it was onward-engineerable. That’s why. The attacks we and the Starvelings were making gave them the cover, but even if the truth got out, it would just reinforce how seriously they took the no-AIs thing.

Fassin supposed it made sense. Old Slovius had always been looking for an edge, some advantage over the other Septs. That was what had brought Bantrabal to its position of prominence over the years. It sounded plausible, sounded like something Slovius would do and browbeat his underlings into doing. And certainly he’d put nothing past the Mercatoria.

— And how do you know all this? he asked her.

He saw her shake her head. — Spies everywhere, Fass, she told him, almost rueful. — We have a lot of friends.

— I’m sure.

Did he believe her? Well, until further notice.

The Beyonders had known about the List, about the Transform. Like, it seemed, a lot of people, they had known long before he had. He’d only discovered what he’d stumbled upon during that long-ago delve when he’d been told along with everybody else by the projection of Admiral Quile in the Hierchon’s palace. By then the Beyonders had long since sent their own fleet to the system Zateki, believing — like the Jeltick who had first deciphered the information he’d retrieved and had understood its significance — that the Transform was there, in the Second Ship. And they’d already met defeat at the hands of the Voehn. Half the fucking galaxy seemed to have been buzzing round Zateki, searching for a ship that wasn’t there, if it even ever had been, and meanwhile he’d known nothing.

— You could just have asked me to look for it for you, Fassin told her.- I’d have started the search for the Transform in Nasq. centuries ago if you guys had just fucking asked.

She looked at him for a long time, an expression on her face of… he wasn’t sure: sadness, pity, regret, despair?

· What? he sent.

· The truth? she asked him.

· The truth.

· Fassin. She shook her head. — We didn’t trust you.

He stared back at her.

Fassin told her what he thought he’d discovered, what he believed he’d worked out. She didn’t believe him.

· You coming with us?

· Can I? May I?

· Of course. If you want.

He thought. — Okay, he sent. He thought some more.

— Though I’ve one last person to see first.

* * *

When the visitor arrived, Setstyin was water-bathing. This was a new fashion, not unpleasant. His servant announced that Seer Fassin Taak was here to see him. Setstyin felt surprise and elation, and a kind of delicious, if slightly grim, anticipation.

“Tell Seer Taak I am very delighted indeed to welcome him,” he told his servant. “Ask him to wait in the upper library. Do all you can to make him comfortable. I shall be with him in ten minutes.”

“Fassin! Wonderful to see you! I really can’t tell you! We thought — well, we really feared the worst, I swear. Where have you been?”

Fassin didn’t seem to know what to say. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you,” he said quietly, eventually.

The little gascraft floated in the middle of the library. The circular space was lined and floored with crystal stacks. Light came from a translucent ceiling and a single great door giving out onto a broad, rail-less balcony.

Setstyin’s house was in the city of Aowne, mid-gas in the equatorial zone. Deep orange and yellow clouds swung slowly past the wide window.

“You think so?” Setstyin said. “Do feel free to try me. And, please, is there anything I can do? Come, let’s sit.”

They rested in a pair of dent-seats with a low table between them. A rather more substantial and grand desk lay just to one side.

“Well, it’s a long story I have for you,” Fassin said.

“My favourite kind!” Setstyin exclaimed, gathering his long robes about him.

Fassin took a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. The fellow seemed, Setstyin thought, dulled, a little slow compared to how he’d appeared before.

Fassin told the suhrl something of his adventures since he’d last seen him, aboard the Planetary Protector (Deniable) Isaut. He also told him a little more of what he’d been doing before, as well, apologising for any hesitations or forgetfulness; he’d been through a lot recently and some memories were still sort of shuffling their way forward into the light again after being lost. He didn’t say exactly what it was he had been told to look for and bring back, and he wasn’t able to tell the Dweller very much that happened after the Voehn attacked the Velpin, but he went into as much detail as he felt was possible.

“I don’t understand,” the Dweller said. “You’re saying you were… you were in other stellar systems? You were on the other side of the galaxy? I… I just don’t…”

“I could not have been more sceptical myself,” Fassin said. “I did all the tests I could think of, but I certainly seemed to be in the places the truetwin captain claimed I was in.”

“They can do wonderful things with fully immersive VR, you know,” Setstyin said awkwardly.

“I know. But this was either real or something well beyond even fully immersive virtual reality.”

Setstyin was silent for a moment. “You know — and please, don’t take this ill — you do look rather, ah, beaten up, Fass my boy.” The Dweller was looking at the various dents and scars that the little gascraft had picked up during its last few months of use. The malfunctioning left manipulator arm hung awkwardly at the flank of the arrowhead, slightly out of true. Fassin felt almost ashamed of the gascraft’s appearance, as though he’d turned up in a rich gentleman’s library in dirty rags.

“Yes,” he agreed. “As I say, I won’t pretend my memory is all it used to be. The gascraft’s storage has suffered and my own brain doesn’t seem to be as sharp as I remember it being.” He laughed. “But I know what I saw, what I felt and heard and tasted. I stood on rocks watching the swell-waves of a salt ocean breaking, and I was really there, Setstyin. I was there.”

The Dweller ruffled his sensory mantle and made the tiny up-and-down sigh-motion. “Well, I’m sure you believe what you believe, Fassin, and I would always tend to believe you rather than not. However, many other people wouldn’t be so forgiving. I’m not sure it would be a good idea to make too big a fuss about this.”

“You could be right.”

“And… I mean to say… If this wormhole thing is so secret, why were you taken to — or apparently taken to — the far side of the galaxy, or to anywhere… anywhere outside Ulubis?”

“To prove the myth was real. Some people, some Dwellers, think it’s time for change. They might not know all the details, but they want the truth known. Nobody wants to take responsibility for just telling a non-Dweller, but some bumpkin might be pushed in the right direction. And that’s me, I suppose; bumpkin number one. Deniable bumpkin number one.”

“And this… travelcaptain? Who was he again?”

“A truetwin.”

“Yes, I’ve heard they often are. I didn’t realise they even pretended to travel so far afield. What was his — their name?”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t betray that confidence.”

“Of course, of course.” Setstyin seemed to think. “So, if there is this, ah, wormhole thing near Nasqueron, who does it belong to? Who controls it? And, it has to be asked, where exactly is it? Aren’t they rather large and obvious, these wormhole ports?”

“They can be made quite small. But yes, you’d think people would have noticed them by now.”

“Well, yes.”

“And I’d guess they’re operated by a club or fraternity or something like the same sort of organisation that takes care of planetary defence.”

“Hmm. That would be… fairly obvious, I suppose.”

“That’s why I came to you, Setstyin,” Fassin said. “I wondered if you’d heard anything about this, about a group of Dwellers who used these portals.”

“Me?” The Dweller reacted as though surprised, almost shocked. “Well, no. I mean, none of this would be the sort of thing I’d normally get involved with. But, this would be quite something, would it not? I mean to say, if it turned out there was this wormhole here all the time. Wouldn’t it?”

“There are stories, myths, about a whole network of them.”

“This Dweller List?” Setstyin paused, then stared. “Is that what you were looking for all the time?”

“Not the List, the Transform that was supposed to hold the key to the List,” Fassin said.

“And did you find it?”

Fassin was silent for a moment. Setstyin watched the little gascraft make a show of looking around the library. “Is this place quite private? I mean, secure?” Fassin asked.

“I should hope so,” Setstyin said. “Why?”

“Can we signal, rather than speak, Setstyin?” Fassin asked. “It’s not as easy for me as speaking, these days, so bear with me, but it is more secure.”

· Of course, the Dweller sent.

· Well, I think I might have found the Transform, the human sent carefully.

· Really?

·… Really.

· You will understand if I am a little sceptical.

· Only natural.

· Where did you find this Transform?

· On the body of that dead Dweller, in the Ythyn Sepulcraft, on the far side of the galaxy.

· Ah-hah. What ever was it doing there?

· It was in a sort of safekeep box.

· And who would put it there?

· I don’t know.

· And what did this Transform consist of?

· An equation.

· As in mathematics?

· That’s right. It looked a bit like what some people had come to expect it to look like — a code and a frequency for a broadcast signal of some sort — but in the end it was just an equation.

· And this was supposed to unlock the List thing?

· That’s what we were all told.

· Hmm. But?

· But, when I solved the equation, guess what?

· Oh. Ah, I have no idea. Do tell.

— It came out at nothing. Zero. The Transform turned out to be, in effect, a contrived mathematical joke.

Fassin signalled a laugh.

Setstyin shared the amusement. — I see. So, if this is what you were sent to look for, you might be said to have succeeded in your mission, though not in the manner you might have wished. Yes?

· Those were pretty much my thoughts, too.

· Well, at least you missed all the unpleasantness of this inva-sion your people have suffered. Thinking of you, I’ve been watching the situation. It all looks quite distressing. And still going on. And affecting us, too. There were explosions around Nasqueron just yesterday. Did you see any of them?

· I did. I hear there’s a rumour that the invaders might be about to pull out.

· Possibly our planetary defence people again. There have been the usual denials, of course. Umm, I’m afraid even if I did know more, I couldn’t talk about it. You understand.

· Of course. So, Fassin sent. — You don’t know anything about these wormholes? You’ve never heard of them? I just thought, you being so well connected…

· All news to me, Fassin. Possibly some small group might have control of such things, though I find that hard to believe, frankly.

· Ah, well, Fassin sent. He was silent for a few moments.

· Yes? Setstyin sent.

· Well, Fassin replied slowly. — I did have an idea.

· An idea? Indeed.

· What if the Transform answer wasn’t a joke?

· Not a joke? But it’s zero. What use is that?

· You see, Fassin sent, and the little gascraft nudged forward a fraction on the dent-seat, closer still to Setstyin, — I had thought, what use would an equation be, after all this time? How could it tell you anything useful? A frequency and a code to be broadcast on it was the only thing that really made sense; then these worm-

holes could be hidden anywhere in the named systems and only activate themselves when needed. So the fact it was an equation at all made it kind of pointless even before it was worked out.

· I’ll take your word for it, Setstyin told the human. — You are rather losing me here, but it all sounds terribly convincing.

· And then there was all that absurd twisting and spiralling when I was aboard the ship heading through the wormhole portals. Being cut off from external senses seemed obvious enough, but why the spiralling?

· Umm, yes, in the ship. I see.

· And just the fact that all of Dweller society does seem like a proper civilisation.

· Now you really are losing me, Fass.

· And you obviously possess technologies that we still haven’t understood.

· Well, we’re like that. Us Dwellers, aren’t we? Oh dear, I think all this is upsetting my balance.

· You see, if the Transform means what it says, what it’s saying is that the adjustment you have to make to each entry on the Dweller List to find out where the wormhole portals are in relation to those original locations named is…

Fassin held the little gascraft’s working arm out, inviting Setstyin to answer.

The Dweller ruffled his sensory mantle, which had gone a slightly odd colour. — I’m sorry, Fassin, I feel positively dizzy.

· Nothing! Fassin sent. — The adjustment is zero.

· Is it? Is it really? I’m sure this is fascinating, really.

— And what was the original List based on, what did it give?

Again, he gave the Dweller a chance to answer, but he didn’t.

— It gave the location of Dweller-inhabited gas-giants! Fassin put a sort of triumphalist joy into the signalled sentence.

— I see. I do feel slightly off, Fass. Do you mind if I… ?

Setstyin rose, wobbling slightly, and roted over to his desk.

He started opening lockers and drawers, then glanced up. “Keep going, keep going,” he said. “I have my medication in here somewhere.”

The Dweller signalled to his servant while he looked through the drawers, keeping his signal pit below the level of the desk, out of sight of the human in his gascraft.

— Was Mr Taak armed in any way?

After a moment: — No, sir. The house checked automatically, naturally. Aside from his manipulative devices, he is unarmed.

— I see. That’s all.

The arrowhead swivelled to keep line-of-sight with the Dweller.

— The List doesn’t need the Transform, Fassin told Setstyin.

— All you need to know is that the planets are the location.

— Really? Indeed. And how can that be?

The little gascraft rose up into the air above the dent-seat.

— Because your wormhole portals are inside your planets,

Setstyin, Fassin sent calmly.

The Dweller froze, then opened one last drawer. “But that’s ridiculous,” he said aloud.

“Right in the centre,” Fassin continued, also speaking out loud now. “Probably of every single gas-giant you guys inhabit. There were only — what? — two million when the List was drawn up, that right? But that was long ago, and it was a historical document even then. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear you’d connected up every last Dweller planet by now.”

“I’m sorry, Fassin,” Setstyin said. “You wouldn’t convince a child with this. Everybody knows you need a flat region of space to make a wormhole portal work.”

“Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The very centre of a planet is flat,” Fassin said. “Right in the very centre of a planet, of any free-floating body — sun, rock, gas-giant, anything — you’re being pulled equally in all directions. It’s just like being in orbit round a world and feeling weightless. The only problem, of course, is keeping a volume of space open in the core of a planet or a sun or whatever in the first place. The pressure is colossal, almost beyond belief, especially in a gas-giant the size of Nasq., but in the end it’s just engineering. Hey, you guys have had ten billion years to get good at that sort of stuff. Anything that isn’t impossible you learned to do easily when the galaxy was a quarter of the age it is now.

“So you don’t need to position portals in space where anybody could see them or use them or attack them, you don’t even need to leave your own planet to access them, you just head for some well-hidden shaft that leads you down to the very centre of the world. Maybe at the poles. That would be an obvious kind of place. And if you’ve got somebody aboard your ship who might be keeping track of where you’re going somehow, you just throw in all these crazy spirals and flash some screenage of space into wherever you’re keeping them, so they never can tell they’ve gone down, not up, and have sunk into the core, not flown out into space.”

“Ah, here we are,” Setstyin said, and pulled out a large handgun. Suddenly perfectly steady, he aimed and fired before the little gascraft could react.

The beams tore the arrowhead apart, slamming through it and sending it whirling back against a stack of library crystals and then somersaulting over and over as Setstyin kept firing the gun, spreading fire and scattering wreckage all over the library floor. Wildly spinning pieces of debris were sent shrapnelling across the glittering stacks, cracking spines and smashing crystal pages to powder. What was left of the little craft crashed into the windows by the balcony, shattering the diamond as though it was sugar glass. Setstyin stopped firing.

Debris pattered down. Smoke drifted, gradually sucked towards the shattered window.

The big Dweller roted carefully over to the broken window, keeping the gun trained on the smoking remains of the little craft as he approached.

“Sir?” his servant called over the house intercom. “Sir, are you all right? I thought I heard—”

“Fine,” Setstyin called, not shifting his attention from the wreckage as he drew closer. “I’m fine. Be some cleaning up to do in due course, but I’m fine. Leave me, now.”

“Sir.”

A warm breeze ruffled his robes as Setstyin floated out of the window and drew up almost on top of the guttering wreck. He prodded the ruined gascraft with the muzzle of the gun. He prised part of the craft’s upper shell away.

He peered inside.

“Fucker!” he screamed, and whirled back into the library, tearing through the gas to the desk. “Desk! SecComms, now!’

Aun Liss watched the man as his little craft, his second skin, was destroyed.

Fassin winced just the once, twitching as though pained.

Aun thought he did not look well. His body was thin inside the borrowed fatigues and he was trembling slightly but continually. His face looked much older than it had, pinched and drawn, eyes sunken and surrounded with darkness. His hair, looking crinkled and thin, had grown a little while he’d been inside the gascraft. His eyes and the edges of his ears and nostrils, plus the corners of his mouth, were red from the effects of coming out of the shock-gel — and having the gillfluid come out of him — after all this time.

He turned to look at her. She was glad to see there was a twinkle in his eye, despite it all. “So. Still think I’m crazy?” he asked.

She smiled. “Pretty much.”

They sat in the bright, if cramped, command space of the Ecophobian, a Beyonder shockcraft, a medium-weight warship half a light second out from Nasqueron, linked to the now-defunct gascraft via a twin of the eyeball-sized microsat which had been exactly where it was supposed to be a day earlier, when Fassin had pinged it from the high platform in Quaibrai.

They were, amazingly, still receiving basic telemetry from the shattered gascraft, though no sensory content. The machine had been very thoroughly blasted.

On a side-screen, they had a freeze of the last visual that the little gascraft had sent: Setstyin levelling a sizeable handgun straight at the camera, a tiny sparkle of light just starting in the very centre of the weapon’s dark barrel. Fassin nodded at the image. “I hasten to add that that does not constitute standard Dweller hospitality.”

“I’d guessed. Sure it wasn’t because you just wouldn’t shut up?”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re serious? What do you call the guy with the big fuck-off gun?”

“Aun,” Fassin said, sounding tired now. “Do you believe me?”

She hesitated, shrugged. “I’m with your belligerent friend; I believe you believe.”

The gascraft telemetry cut off.

The Chief Remotes Officer leaned in, manipulating holos above one of the displays. “That wasn’t the gascraft totalling,” she told them, “that was the microsat getting fried. Fast work. Suggest hightail promptly.”

“Hold on to your hats,” the captain said. “Sit well back.”

They were thrown, pressed, then rammed back into their seats as the ship accelerated, the command officers shifting to control by induction rather than physical manipulation. The whole gimballed command sphere swung to keep the gee-forces pressing on their chests.

“Were you serious, Mr Taak?” the captain asked, her voice strained against the clamping power of the acceleration.

“Yuh,” was the best Fassin could manage.

“So there’s a secret network of ancient Dweller wormholes linking — what? — every Dweller gas-giant?”

Fassin took the deepest breath he could and forced out, “That’s the idea.” Another breath. “You send all we… got from the… gascraft to… your high command?”

The captain managed to laugh. “Such as they are, yes.”

“Shit,” said the Defence Officer, his voice strained. “Lock on.” They heard him breathing hard. “It’s fast! Can’t outrun. In fourteen!”

“Fire everything,” the captain said crisply. “Ready Detach Command. We’ll risk adrifting, hope the Impavid’s local.”

“Need to yaw before the Detach or we’ll be hit by the debris spray,” the Tactics Officer said.

“Copy,” the captain said. “Shame. Always liked this ship.”

The ship wheeled wildly, Fassin blacked out and never felt the explosive detach.

The joltship Impavid picked the command sphere up three days later.

* * *

“Taince,” Saluus Kehar said. He grinned. “Hey. So, so good to see you again.” He came up to her and put his arms round her.

Taince Yarabokin had succeeded in producing a smile. She’d chosen an old-fashioned formal cap as part of her uniform and so had the unspoken excuse that she needed to keep this clamped between her elbow and her side for not being able to hug him back with any great enthusiasm. Sal didn’t seem to notice anyway. He pulled away, looked at her.

“Been a while, Taince. Glad you made it back.”

“Good to be back,” Taince said.

They were in a hangar in the Guard Security Holding Facility Axle 7, a triple-wheeled habitat orbiting ’glantine. Saluus had been held there for the past couple of months while the authorities had decided whether they really believed him about having been kidnapped rather than having run away or even turned traitor.

He’d consented to and undergone dozens of brain scans -more than enough to put the matter beyond any doubt in an ordinary case, and of course he had connections and friends in high places who would normally have been only too happy to have discreet words in probably quite receptive ears. But there had been a feeling that this was an exceptional matter, that Sal was rich enough to have afforded technologies or techniques that would fool the brain scans, that the Starvelings themselves might have been able to implant convincing false memories, and — anyway — such a fuss had been made at the time when Saluus had, seemingly, gone over to the invading forces that to let him meekly out just because it looked like he was blameless somehow didn’t seem right.

When Saluus had disappeared, apparently turning traitor, there had been strikes and attacks on Kehar family and commercial property and he’d been denounced by every part of the Ulubine Mercatoria in terms that owed as much to finally having something understandable to hit out at as to any moral indignation. People who had called Sal a friend and been regular guests at many of his family homes had decided that they owed it to the popular mood and their intense personal sense of betrayal — not to mention their future social standing and careers to compete in out-vituperating each other in their condem-nation of his odious perfidy. The calumnies heaped upon Sal’s absent head had amounted to a thesaurus of despite, an entire dictionary of bile. In the end he was kept incarcerated as much for his own safety as for anything else.

— When the Starveling forces left and the Summed Fleet arrived, the general feeling of relief and euphoria pervading the Ulubis system meant that news of Sal’s shocking innocence traded rather better on the floor of the public’s perception, and it could be announced that he was to be released in due course. Most people chose to recant their earlier expressions of hatred and condemnation, though it was still felt best for all concerned if Sal’s return to public life and rehabilitation was gradual rather than abrupt.

Taince had volunteered — pulled rank, indeed — to pilot Sal from the Holding Facility back to the original Kehar family home on ’glantine.

A Guard-major got Taince to sign Sal out of custody.

Sal watched her signature on the pad. “That’s my freedom you’re writing there, Vice Admiral,” he told her. He was wearing his own clothes, looking slim and casual and bright.

“Glad to be of service,” she told him, then looked at the Guards officer. “Is that us, Guard-major?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to Saluus. “You are free to go, Mr Kehar.”

Saluus reached out and shook the Guard-major’s hand. “Med, thanks for everything.”

“Been a pleasure, sir.”

“No clothes or anything?” Taince asked, looking at his empty hands.

Sal shook his head. “Came with nothing, taking nothing away. No baggage.” He flashed a smile.

She tipped her head. “Pretty good at our age.”

They walked to the small cutter squatting on the shallow curve of hangar floor. “I really appreciate this, Taince,” he told her. “I mean I really do. You didn’t have to do this.” She smiled. His gaze flicked over her insignia. “It is okay to call you Taince, isn’t it? I mean, I’ll call you Vice Admiral if you like.”

“Taince is fine, Sal. After you.” She showed him up into the little cutter’s tandem cockpit, settling him into the seat in front of and below hers. She fitted herself into the pilot’s seat, clipping on a light flight collar and waking the small craft’s systems. The Facility’s flight control cleared them to leave.

“So you’re, what? System Liaison Chief?” Sal asked over his shoulder as they were trundled under a door into a sizeable airlock.

“Yes, well, it’s pretty much all ceremonial,” she told him. The door behind them closed, the lights in the lock dimmed. “Receptions, dinners, tours, addresses, you know the sort of thing.”

“Sounds like you’re just loving every minute.”

“I suppose somebody has to do it. Serves me right for being Ulubine.” Pumps thrummed, a rush of air and a deep hum at first, then after a while just the hum, sounding through the fabric of the cutter. “No real fighting to do, anyway. Just clean-up stuff. I’m not missing much.”

“Any news on Fassin?” Sal asked. “Last I heard they thought he might be alive again. If you know what I mean.”

The outer door opened silently to the stars and a great silvery-fawn slice of ’glantine.

“Just give me a minute or two here, will you?” Taince asked. “Been a little while since I did this…”

“Hey, take as long as you need.”

The cutter edged its way out of the lock, stowed its gear, rolled very slowly and drifted away on little whisper bursts of gas, heading towards the atmosphere.

“Yes. Fassin,” Taince said. “Well, they’re still looking for him.”

“I heard he’d been lost in Nasqueron and then reappeared.”

“There have been rumours. There were always rumours. If you believed them, he’s been all over Nasqueron for the last half-year, never left, or been in the Oort cloud for the last few months and just returned, or even wilder stuff. Plus he’s been declared definitely dead at least three times. Whatever the truth is, he’s still not here to tell it himself.” Taince rotated the cutter, lining it up for entry.

“You think he is dead?” Sal asked.

“Let’s just say it’s odd that he hasn’t made himself known by now, if he is still around.”

They met the atmosphere a little later, pressed against the seat restraints, a pink glow building then fading around the canopy, the small ship whistling in across a sequence of thin clouds, deserts and shallow seas, hills, scarps, lakes and low mountains.

“Taking the scenic route, Taince?”

She gave a small laugh. “Suppose I’m just a sentimentalist at heart, Sal.”

“Good to see the old place again,” Sal said. She watched him lean to one side, looking down. “Is that Pirri down there?” — She looked, checked the nav. “Yes, that’s Pirrintipiti.”

“Looks like it always did. Thought it might have grown a bit more.”

“While since you’ve been home, Sal?”

“Oh, too long, too long. Kept meaning to, but, you know. Must be ten or twelve years. Maybe more. Feels more.”

They were high over the edges of the thin polar-plateau ice cap, crossing into darkness, falling all the time. They could see stars again.

She saw him looking up and around. “You forget how beautiful it is, eh?” Sal asked.

“Sometimes,” Taince said. “Easy enough thing to do.”

The glow in the sky faded around them. She watched the canopy up the brightness, exaggerating the incoming light until they could see the starlight on the North Waste Land, the great long streaks of coloured sands and outcrop rocks, silvery ghosts, coming closer all the time.

“Ah, right,” Sal said quietly.

She tapped a few display icons, dimming the screens.

“Thought we’d take a pass,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Old times’ sake.” He sounded thoughtful, even resigned. “Well, why not?”

Taince checked the nav again, lined the craft up and cut its speed a little. A light was blinking urgently on one of the displays. She turned that one off too.

“I certainly haven’t been back here since that night,” Sal said. She thought he sounded sad now. Perhaps regretful. Perhaps not.

The ruined ship showed up ahead, a little off to the right. Taince started the cutter on a long starboard curve, levelling out as she did so.

Sal looked side-down at the desert, rushing past seventy-metres below as they banked. “Wow,” he said. “Quicker than that flier I borrowed from Dad.”

“One of your own ships, Sal,” she told him.

“This little thing?” He laughed. “Didn’t realise we made anything this small.”

“It’s old.”

“Ah. One of Dad’s. More money in the big stuff.”

They zapped past the great dark hulk. Its exposed ribs clawed at the sky.

“Woo-hoo!” Sal shouted as the black wall of hull slid past twenty metres away.

Taince zoomed, looped and rolled, levelling out again, approaching the wrecked alien ship once more for an even nearer approach.

“Who-hoh-hoh!” Sal said, seeing how low and close Taince was taking the cutter this time. Taince rolled the craft so that they were upside down. “Sheeit! Wow! Taince! Yee-ha!”

Right to the end she hadn’t known if she’d actually do it or not. She didn’t really know the truth of what had happened, after all. She only had her suspicions. She could, despite everything, just be plain wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody had taken the law into their own hands and been proved to be hopelessly wrong, once all the facts were known. Fuck, that was what justice was supposed to be all about, that was why you had laws and everything that went with them, that was one of the things that made a society a society.

But still. She did know. She was quite sure. It was his time. And if she was wrong, well, Sal had had his share. It wasn’t like killing a child, or a young woman with her life before her. It was still killing, still wrong, but there were gradations in all things, even circles in hell. And, frankly — right or wrong — at least she’d never know.

It was her time. She knew that.

She’d really thought there would be tears, but they stayed away. How strange not to know oneself, after so long, at such an extremity, and so close to the end.

What else? Well, she’d thought of telling him, of confronting him, of bringing it all back up again, of listening to him rage at or plead with or scream at her. That had been something she’d rehearsed a lot, that had been something she’d thought through time after time after time as she’d played and replayed this scene in her head over the years and decades and centuries, taking both her part and his, trying to imagine what he’d say, how he’d try to explain it, how he’d imply she was mad or mistaken.

Ultimately Taince had just got bored with it. She’d heard it all before. There was nothing more to say.

She was taking a man’s life on circumstantial evidence, on a hunch. She ought to give him the chance to appeal. She ought at least to allow him to know it was about to happen.

But then, why?

The cold sheen of desert and the vast impenetrability of the dark, ruined ship rushed up to meet them.

“Shit, Tain—!”

Sal might have tried to use the eject — it was one system she couldn’t disable from her controls — but then, that was why she’d flown the last bit upside down.

In the end all it took was a single quick flick of the wrists.

The cutter slammed into the side of the ship, just ten metres off the desert floor, at about half the speed of sound.

EPILOGUE

There is, along the higher latitudes of the Northern Tropical Uplands of the planet-moon ’glantine, in the system of Ulubis, a bird which, thanks to its call, people call a Hey-fella-hey.

The bird is a migrant, a passer; that is, a bird that does not dwell in the given region but only ever passes through. The Hey-fella-hey passes through these latitudes in the early spring, heading north.

It was a cool day, mid-morning. Nasqueron, half full, cast a ruddy-brown light over the soft shadows of the day. Once, one might have seen sky mirrors away to one side or the other, bringing sunlight to us even when Nasqueron filled most of the sky above. However, many of these devices were destroyed in the war, and so our little planet-moon is a literally gloomier place now than it once was, returned, until new mirrors are emplaced, to its primitive state.

I was working in the old formal pasture, wading deep in an exasperation of chuvle weed choking a — by now — almost hidden pond and trying to work out what to do with the weed and the feature (for both are pretty in their own ways) when I heard the distinctive call of said bird. I stopped and listened.

“Hey-fella-hey-fella-hey-fella-hey!” the bird sang. I turned slowly, looking for it in the higher branches of the nearby trees.

While I was looking — I never did locate the bird — I saw a figure walking along the high path towards the stream and the perimeter wall which gives out onto the slope holding — a little further up — the ruins of the old Rehlide temple.

I looked carefully, zooming in and trying to filter out the effects of the intervening bushes and shrubs, because the figure walked very like Seer Taak, who had been a long time gone from us. (“Us”! — always the same, hurtful mistake. There was no “us” any more, just a few sad remnants left behind at a house abandoned.) The figure disappeared behind a clump of thicker shrubbery, though they would reappear shortly if they continued to follow the path.

I thought. In retrospect, perhaps the person walking on the path had been somewhat older than the gentleman I had been pleased to think of as the young master. He was slightly stooped, which Seer Taak never had been, and he was perhaps too thin, plus he walked like somebody who had been injured in some way. So it seemed to me, at any rate. I would not claim to be an expert in such matters. I am but a humble gardener, after all. Well, a head gardener, but all the same. Still humble, I hope.

The figure did indeed reappear, though not exactly where I had been expecting. Whoever it was had taken a side path and was now walking almost straight towards me. They raised a hand. I raised a trowel, waved back. It was Seer Taak! Or — by all reason — it was somebody doing their damnedest to look like a rather more aged version of him.

I clambered out of the pond, shook some chuvle weed from a couple of legs, and lumbered up the path bank to meet him.

“Young master?” I said, dropping trowel, rake and spade and brushing soil and weed-stems from my arms.

The man smiled broadly. “HG, it is you.” He was dressed in long, loose, casual clothes, nothing like those of a Seer.

“It is you, Seer Taak! We thought the worst! Oh! For you at least to be alive!”

I confess I folded, going down on all eights, staring at the gravel of the path, overcome.

He squatted in front of me. “We never see what’s in front of us, do we, HG?”

“Sir?”

“HG, tell me you’re not an AI”

I looked up at him. “Emotion? Was that it? I should have known that would give me away one day.”

He smiled. “Your secret’s safe.”

“Well, perhaps for now.”

“Patience, HG.”

“You imply that things may change? Or that I should just wait for death? We do not die easily. We have not been allowed to.”

He smiled a slow, painful smile. “Change, HG.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yes. All sorts of things are happening.”

“I have heard something. They say there is a wormhole mouth, in Nasqueron?” I looked up at the great planet which seemed to hang over us, its vast circlet rivers of gas — cream and brown, yellow, white, purple and red — forever sliding in contrary directions.

Fassin Taak nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “It turns out we were all connected, all the time.” He picked up a pebble from the path, looked at it. “The Dwellers may even let us use their wormhole network, if we ask them nicely. Sometimes. There is a furious debate going on in Dweller society even as we speak — and probably for some time to come, Dwellers being, well, Dwellers -regarding to what extent the undying admiration of every even vaguely sentient species in the rest of the galaxy and possibly beyond could possibly constitute a general increase in the background kudos level for all Dwellers, and therefore a valid reason for throwing open their galactic transport system to all.”

“That would indeed be a great change.”

“And not one that the Mercatoria would be allowed to control.”

“It would still be the Mercatoria.”

“It can change too. It won’t have any choice. Patience, HG.”

“Well, we shall see, but thank you.”

I looked at him. Fassin Taak did indeed look older. His face was more careworn, the lines around his eyes deeper. “Has all been well here, HG?”

“All is well in the garden. The house… well, that is not my province.”

Now he looked down. “I took a look around,” he said. His voice was quiet. “It was all very quiet. Very strange and quiet with nobody there.”

“I try not to look at it,” I confessed, “except sometimes at dawn and during the very early morning, when it looks much as it always did: bright light upon it but no sign of life. That I can bear.” I saw the image even as I spoke of it. “I am lucky that I have the garden to tend. By looking after it, it looks after me.”

“Yes,” he said. “We all need something to do, don’t we?”

I hesitated. “Still, there is not a day goes by when I do not curse my luck to have been stuck here rather than with them somehow, when the end came. I envy the Head Gardener of the Winter House, where they all died together.” I pulled myself up a fraction. “But enough. And you, sir? What do you do these days?”

“Please don’t call me ‘sir’, HG. I’m Fassin.”

“Oh. Thank you. Well, what are you doing? And where? If I may ask.”

“Oh, I’ve gone off with the Beyonders, HG. I’m already a citizen of the galaxy, albeit slowly, without using wormholes. But, a start.”

“And the Sept, Fassin?”

“There is no Sept, HG. It’s gone.” He threw the pebble back along the path. “Maybe they’ll start another Sept — who knows?” He looked away in the direction of the distant house. “They might fill this house, one day.”

“You won’t come back?”

He looked around. “Too many people would still want to ask me too many questions, probably until I died.” He looked at me. “No, I just came back here for one last look around. And to look you up.”

“Really? Me? Really?”

“Really.”

“I cannot tell you how gratified — no, honoured — that makes me feel.”

He smiled at me and started to rise to his feet. “This humility is a great cover, HG. I hope you can set it aside when the time comes.”

“I meant what I said, Fassin.”

“And I mean this, HG,” he said, as he brushed down his clothes, Nasqueron forever behind him. “One day we’ll all be free.”