'May I be frank, Archimandrite?'
He gave her a good wide look at his deep red eyes. 'I expect no less.'
'We are concerned at the possible level of civilian casualties if Ulubis is assaulted over-aggressively.'
Now why would she say that? Luseferous thought to himself with a sort of inward chuckle.
He looked at his private secretary, then at his generals and admirals. 'Marshal,' he said reasonably, 'we are going to invade them. We are going to attack them.' He smiled broadly, and could see his admirals and generals grinning along with him. 'I think aggressiveness is ... essential, yes?'
He could hear light laughter from one or two of his top brass. People thought that having people so in awe of you that they were frightened to tell you bad news and always laughed when you laughed (and so on) was a bad thing, and supposedly insulated you from what was really going on, but if you knew what you were doing, it didn't. You just had to adjust your perceptions. Sometimes everybody laughed, sometimes only a few, and sometimes who kept quiet and who made a noise told you a lot more than when you asked them to just speak out and tell you the truth. It was a sort of code, he supposed. He was just lucky to be naturally adept at it.
'Aggression and judgement are both required, Archimandrite,' the marshal said. 'We know you to possess both, of course.' She smiled. He did not smile back. 'We merely seek an assurance that your troops will act in a manner which will bring you further praise and greater fame.'
'Praise?' the Archimandrite said. 'I inspire terror, marshal. That's my strategy. I've found that to be the quickest and most effective way of ensuring that people learn what is good both for them and for me.'
For glory, then, Archimandrite.'
'Be merciful for glory?'
The marshal thought about this for a moment. 'Ultimately, yes.'
'I shall conquer them as I see fit, marshal. We are partners in this. You don't tell me what to do.'
'I am not trying to, Archimandrite,' the marshal said quickly. 'I accept what you must do, I am merely delivering a request regarding the manner in which it is done.'
'And I have heard your request and I will pay it all due heed.' This was a form of words Luseferous had heard somebody use once - he couldn't remember who or where - which, when he'd thought about it, he thought was rather good, especially if you said it slightly pompously: slowly, gravely even, keeping a straight face so that the person you were talking to thought you were taking them seriously and might even hope that you would do as they had asked rather than - at best - ignore them completely. At worst - as far as they were concerned - you'd do the opposite of whatever they asked, just to spite them, precisely to prove you wouldn't be pushed around . . . though that got tricky; then people might try to make you do one thing by pretending to favour another, and even without that complication you were still altering your behaviour because of something they had said, which was giving them a sort of power over you, when the whole point of everything the Archimandrite was doing was so that nobody could say they had any power over him.
Power was everything. Money was nothing without it. Even happiness was a distraction, a ghost, a hostage. What was happiness? Something people could take away from you. Happiness too often involved other people. It meant giving them power over you, giving them a hold on you that they could exercise whenever they wanted, taking away whatever it was that had made you happy.
Luseferous had known happiness and he'd had it taken away. His father, the only man he'd ever admired - even while hating the old bastard - had got rid of Luseferous's mother when she became old and less attractive, replacing her, when Luseferous was barely into his teens, with a succession of young, erotically desirable but soulless, uncaring, selfish young women, women he'd wanted for himself but despised at the same time. His mother was sent away. He never saw her again.
His father had been an Omnocrat for the Mercatoria, in the industrial complexes of the Leseum Systems. He'd started out at the bottom, as a Peculan (cynically, the very name implied that the office-bearer would need to be corrupt to make any sort of decent living, so incurring a history of criminality that could always be dredged up against them if they ever stepped out of line later). He'd become an Ovate, worked his way through the many gradations of that estate, then ascended to the office of Diegesian, in charge of a district of a city, then a small industrial city, then a medium-sized city, then a large city, then a continental capital. He became an Apparitor when his immediate superior died in the arms of a shared lover. That lover did very well for a while - his consort, in effect - then grew demanding and met an untimely end too.
His father had never told him if he'd had her killed. Equally, he'd never told his father that the woman had lately become his lover, too.
From Apparitor his father rose to Peregal, in charge of first an orbiting fabhab cluster, then a continent, then a sizeable moon, with all the trappings of power and wealth and glamour such a post presented in a thriving, connected set of systems such as Leseum. At this point, for the first time in his life, his father had appeared finally to appreciate the position he'd reached. He'd seemed to relax and start enjoying life.
It ended there. Finally setting himself up for the next jump, to Hierchon, his father, who had amassed a great fortune dispensing charters and contracts to the merchants and manufacturers of the many systems, took pity on a favoured Apparitor who was somewhat down on his luck, cut him in on a deal and a kickback he didn't really need to and found himself denounced, tried and beheaded for gross corruption within a month. The same young Apparitor then took his position.
Luseferous, convinced from early on that he could never compete with his father in his own sphere, and anyway always intrigued by the nature of religion and faith, had joined the Cessoria a few years earlier. He'd been a Piteer, a junior priest, at the time of his father's trial. They had made him one of his father's confessors, and he'd accompanied him to the execution ring. His father had been brave at first, then he'd broken. He'd started crying, begging, promising anything (but only all the things he'd already lost). He clutched at Luseferous's robes, howling and beseeching, burying his face. Luseferous knew they were watching him, that this moment was important for his future. He pushed his father away.
His rise through the Cessoria was swift. He would never be as powerful as his father, but he was clever and capable and respected and on an upward course within an important but not too dangerous part of one of the greatest meta-civilisations the galaxy had seen. He might have been content with that, and never put himself in a position of weakness the way his father had.
Then the Disconnect happened. A swathe of portal destruc- tion had swung across the million-star volume all around Leseum back in the time of the Arteria Collapse, leaving only the bunched Leseum systems themselves connected inside a vast volume of backwardness. The system of Leseum9 had been important, seemed vital and felt unthreatened until their own disconnect came millennia later, courtesy of some vast bicker within the ongoing chaos of the Scatter Wars, an essentially meaningless difference of opinion between three pretending sides which until then practically nobody had heard of. By the time it was all over, nobody would hear of those sides again, save as history. The damage was done, though; the portal near Leseum9 had been destroyed and an enormous volume around it had been cut off from the rest of the civilised galaxy.
Everything changed then, including what you had to do to retain power, and who might contest for absolute power.
His father, nevertheless, had taught Luseferous everything, one way or another, and one of the most important things was this: there was no plateau. In life, you were either on your way up or on your way down, and it was always better to be on your way up, especially as the only reliable way to keep going up was to use other people as stepping stones, as platforms, as scaffolding. The old saying about being nice to people on the way up so that they'd be nice to you when you were on your way back down was perfectly true, but it was a defeatist's
saying, a loser's truism. Better to keep going up for ever, never to rest, never to relax, never to have to descend. The thought of what might happen to you at the hands of those you'd already offended, exploited and wronged on the way up - those that still lived - was just another incentive for the serious player never even to think about easing off the pace, let alone starting to fall back. The dedicated competitor would keep presenting himself with new challenges to take on and conquer, he would seek out new levels to ascend to, he would always look for new horizons to head towards.
Treat life like the game it was. This might be the truth behind the Truth, the religion Luseferous had been raised within as an obedient member of the Mercatoria: that nothing you did or seemed to do really mattered, because it was all - or might be all - a game, a simulation. It was all, in the end, just pretend. Even this Starveling cult he was titular head of was just something he'd made up because it sounded good. A variation of the Truth with added self-denial every now and again, the better to contemplate the gullibility of people. People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.
So you seemed cruel. So people died and suffered and grew up hating you. So what? There was at least a chance that none of it was real.
And if it was all real, well, then life was struggle. It always had been and it always would be. You recognised this and lived, or fell for the lie that progress and society had made struggle unnecessary, and just existed, were exploited, became prey, mere fodder.
He wondered to what extent even the supposedly feral and lawless Beyonders understood this basic truth. They let women rise to the pinnacle of their military command structure; that didn't bode particularly well. And the marshal didn't seem to have realised that when he'd said he'd heard her request and would pay it all due heed, it meant nothing.
'Well, thank you, Archimandrite,' she said.
Still, he smiled. 'You will stay? We shall have a banquet in your honour. We have had so little to celebrate out here, between the stars.'
'An honour indeed, Archimandrite.' The marshal gave that little head nod again.
And we shall try to pick each other's brains over dinner, he thought. My, what highbrow fun. Give me a planet to plunder any day.
*
- Do you have any idea where we are? the colonel signalled, using a spot-laser. They reckoned this was their most secure form of comms.
- Zone Zero, the equatorial, Fassin sent. - Somewhere ahead of the latest big storm, about ten or twenty kilo-klicks behind the Ear Festoon. I'm checking the latest update they loaded before the drop.
They were floating in a slow eddy around a gentle ammonia upwell the diameter of a small planet, about two hundred klicks down from the cloud tops. The temperature outside was rela-tively balmy by human standards. There were levels, places in almost all gas-giants where a human could, in theory, exist exposed to the elements without any protective clothing at all. Of course they would probably need to be prone and lying in a tub of shock-gel or something similar because weighing six times what their skeleton was used to coping with would make standing up or moving around problematic, their lungs would have to be full of gillfluid or the like, to let them breathe within a mix of gases which included oxygen only as a trace element, and also to let their ribs and chest muscles work under the pressure of that gravitational vice, plus they wouldn't want to be exposed to a charged-particle shower, but all the same: by gas-giant great-outdoors standards, this was about as good as it humanly got.
Colonel Hatherence found it a bit hot, but then as an oerileithe she would be more at home closer to the cloud tops. She had already loudly pronounced her esuit undamaged and capable of protecting her anywhere from space-vacuum down to Nasqueron's ten-kilo-klick level, where the pressure would be a million times what it was here and the temperature somewhat more than half what it was on the surface of Ulubis star. Fassin chose not to join in a mine's-better-than-yours competition; his own gascraft was also space-capable in an emergency but untested at those depths.
He'd tried contacting Apsile in the drop ship but had come up with static. The passive positioning grid cast by the equatorial satellites was functioning but both scale-degraded and patchy, indicating there were some satellites gone or not working.
Knowing where you were in Nasqueron or any gas-giant was important, but still less than half the story. There was a solid rocky core to the planet, a spherical mass of about ten Earth-sized planets buried under seventy thousand vertical kilometres of hydrogen, helium and ice, and there were purists who would call the transition region between that stony kernel and the high-temperature, high-pressure water ice above it the planet's surface. But you had to be a real nit-picker even to pretend to take that definition seriously. Beyond the water ice - technically ice because it was effectively clamped solid by the colossal pressure, but at over twenty thousand degrees, confusingly hot for the human image of what ice was supposed to be like – came over forty thousand vertical kilometres of metallic hydrogen, then a deep transition layer to the ten-kilo-klick layer of molecular hydrogen which, if you were of an especially imaginative turn of mind, you might term a sea.
Above that, in the relatively thin - at a mere few thousand kilometres - but still vastly complicated layers reaching up towards space, were the regions where the Dwellers lived, in the contra-rotating belts and zones of rapidly spinning gases which - dotted with storms great and small, spattered with eddies, embellished with festoons, bars, rods, streaks, veils, columns, clumps, hollows, whirls, vortices, plume-heads, shear fronts and subduction flurries - girdled the planet. Where the Dwellers lived, where everything happened, there was no solid surface, and no features at all which lasted more than a few thousand years save for the bands of gas forever charging past each other, great spinning wheels of atmosphere whirling like the barely meshed cogs in some demented gearbox a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across.
The convention was that the equatorial satellites followed the averaged-out progress of the broad equatorial zone, establishing a sort of stationary parameter-set from which everything else could be worked out relatively. But it was still confusing. Nothing was fixed. The zones and belts were relatively stable, but they shot past each other at combined speeds of what humans were used to thinking of as the speed of sound, and the margins between them changed all the time, torn by furiously curling eddies writhing this way and that, or thrown out, compressed and disturbed by giant storms like the Great Red Spot of the Solar System's Jupiter, riding between a zone travelling one way and a belt going the other like a vast squashed whirlpool caught in some mad clash of violently opposed currents, developing, raging and slowly dissipating over the centuries that humanity had been able to watch it. In a gas-giant, everything either evolved, revolved or just plain came and went, and the whole human mindset of surfaces, territory, land, sea and air was thrown into confusion.
Add the effects of a vastly powerful magnetic field, swathes of intense radiation and the sheer scale of the environment -you could drop the whole of a planet the size of Earth or Sepekte into a decent-sized gas-giant storm - and the human brain was left with a lot to cope with.
And all this before one took into account the - to be generous - playful attitude which the Dwellers themselves so often exhibited to general planetary orientation and the help, or otherwise, conventionally seen as being fit and proper to be extended to directionally challenged alien visitors.
- I thought we'd be in the midst of them, the colonel sent.
- Dwellers? Fassin asked, studying the complex schematic of who and what might be where at the moment.
- Yes, I imagined we would find ourselves in one of their cities.
They both looked around at the vast haze of slowly swirling gas, extending - depending on which frequency or sense one chose to experience it in - a few metres or a few hundred kilometres away on ever
y side. It felt very still, even though they were part of the equatorial zone and so being spun around the planet at over a hundred metres a second, while swirling slowly around the upwelling and rising gradually with it too.
Fassin felt himself smiling in his wrapping of shock-gel.
- Well, there's a lot of Dwellers, but it's a big planet.
It seemed odd to be explaining this to a creature whose kind had evolved in planets like this and who surely ought to be familiar with the scale of a gas-giant, but then oerileithe, in Fassin's admittedly limited experience of them, often did display a kind of half-resentful awe towards Dwellers, entirely consistent with a belief that the instant you dropped beneath the cloud tops you'd find yourself surrounded by massed ranks of magisterial Dwellers and their astoundingly awesome structures (a misapprehension it was hard to imagine any Dweller even considering correcting). The oerileithe were an ancient people by human standards and by those of the vast majority of species in the developed galaxy, but - with a civilisation going back about eight hundred thousand years - they were mere mayflies by Dweller standards.
A thought occurred to Fassin. - You ever been in a Dweller planet before, colonel?
- Indeed not. A privilege denied until now. Hatherence made a show of looking about. - Not unlike home, really.
Another thought occurred. - You did receive clearance? Didn't you, colonel?
- Clearance, Seer Taak?
- To come down. To enter Nasq.
- Ah, the colonel sent. - Not as such, I do confess. It was thought that I would be remote delving with you and your colleagues, from the Shared Facility on the Third Fury moon. Braam Ganscerel himself took the time to assure me of this personally. No objection was raised regarding such a presence. I believe that permission was in the process of being sought for me to accompany you physically into the atmosphere if that became necessary - as indeed it now has - however, the last that I heard in that regard indicated that the relevant clearances had yet to materialise. Why? Do you envisage there being a problem?
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