The place was called a retreat because it was owned by the Shrievalty, but as far as Saluus was concerned it was just a hotel and conference centre. The view was impressive, though, when there was sufficient daylight actually to see it properly. It had a certain severe appeal, Saluus was prepared to grant.
Saluus didn't like being here, all the same. He wasn't keen on places that he couldn't get away from easily - preferably, if the worst came to the worst, by just walking. To get away from here meant an air-car or a lift up or down the interior of the frozen fall to the landing ground on the ice of the solidified river above, or down to the vac-rail station on the shore of the frozen lake at the foot of the cliff. When he'd found out where the conference on the Dweller Embassy was to be held - at fairly short notice, for security reasons - he'd made sure to have a parasail packed with his luggage, just so that he had an emergency way out, if it came to it.
He knew that almost certainly there wouldn't be any emergency - or if there was it would be something so big and-or quick that there would be no getting away from it - but he felt better, safer having the parasail by the balcony window of his bedroom. Most of the other important attendees had suites far inside the fall, to be further away from anything that might come at them from outside, but Saluus had insisted on an outside suite, one with a view, a way out. He hadn't parasailed for decades but he'd rather risk his neck that way than cowering at the back of a suite, whimpering, just waiting for death.
He sometimes wondered where this obsession with being able to get away came from. It wasn't something he'd been born with or picked up as the result of some traumatic experience in childhood, it was just something that had sort of crept slowly up on him all the way through his adult life. One of those things, he supposed. He hadn't bothered wasting any time thinking really deeply about it.
All that mattered, Saluus supposed, was that the retreathotel was as safe a place to be as anywhere was, these days. The attacks on Ulubis system had gone on, never slackening off for very long, never really reaching any sort of peak. Many of the targets were obvious military ones, often attacked with bombs, missiles and relatively short-range weapons. These were usually blamed on the Beyonders. Other targets had cultural or morale value or were just big. These were the kind that were hit from deep space, with high-velocity, sometimes near-light-speed boosted rocks. The number of such attacks had increased even as the weight of assaults by drone craft carrying beam weapons and missiles had decreased.
Some of the strategists claimed that all this represented a failure by their enemies to attack when they'd expected to, though it seemed to Saluus that what they called the proof of this relied too much on simulations and shared assumptions.
It had all certainly gone on for a long time now. People had worked their way through the various stages of shock, denial, defiance, solidarity, grim determination and who-knew-what else; nowadays they were just tired of it. They wanted it all to end. They feared how that end might come about, but they were half broken by the erratic bombardment and the ever-present uncertainty.
Worse - in a way, because news had somehow leaked out of when the invasion by the Starveling Cult had been expected, and it had not yet materialised - people were starting to think that it might not now ever happen. The real conspiracy theorists believed that it had all been a huge military-industrial paranoid death-fantasy right from the start, that no real threat had ever existed, that most of the attacks were being carried out by the security forces themselves, either as part of an inter-service conflict or in a carefully planned series of cynical, deliberately self-sacrificial moves that would gain sympathy for the armed forces even as the mass of people lost the few remaining civil liberties they still had; that it was all just an excuse to turn the whole Ulubis system into a semi-fascist society, securing power in the hands of the privileged few.
Even those of a more moderate turn of mind chafed at the freedoms lost and the restrictions imposed, and had begun asking where exactly was this terrible threat they had been preparing for for the best part of a year? Shouldn't the sky have lit up by now with the invading fleet's drives as they decelerated into Ulubis near-space? People were starting to question the need for all the sacrifice and hardship and to wonder if too much was being done to counter a threat that so far hadn't materialised and not enough to deal with the ongoing attrition of small-scale but still intermittently devastating attacks.
The strategists were wondering where the E-5 Discon forces were, too. There had been wild arguments over what the best strategy was: go out to meet the invading fleet or fleets, hoping to gain a slight edge by a degree of surprise - and keeping at least some of the fighting out of the populated reaches of Ulubis system - or sit tight and wait, building up maximum forces where they were in the end most needed? Drone scout ships had already been dispatched in the general direction the invasion was coming from but so far none of them had found anything. A very literal long shot.
A giant magnetic rail gun was being constructed in orbit round G'iri, the smaller gas-giant beyond Nasqueron, built to scatter space in front of the oncoming fleet with debris: a huge blunderbuss supposed to throw a sleet of surveillance machines and a cloud of tiny guided explosive or just kinetic mines before the invading ships, but it was only now getting up to speed, months late, wildly over budget and plagued by problems. At least this latest failure couldn't be laid at the door of Kehar Heavy Industries. Saluus's firm had never been involved in the contract. They'd been the obvious people to build it but it had been handed over to a consortium of other companies partly just to show that KHI didn't have a monopoly and to give some of the others a shot at a big project.
The interim report on the Nasqueron debacle had pretty much cleared KHI, finding nothing worse than occasionally imprecise accounting, the sort of rush-resulted corner-cutting that was only to be expected in anything like the current emergency. The whole storm-battle farce had been a home-grown military fuck-up in other words, just as Saluus had maintained from the start. Partly as a result, he had become more integrated into the whole planning and strategic superstructure of the Ulubine Mercatoria and even, fairly regularly, the Emergency War Cabinet.
This made sense. It also appealed to Saluus's sense of importance, and he was self-aware enough to know and accept this. And, of course, it had the additional effect of tying him in tighter to the political hierarchy of the system, identifying him even more strongly with the ruling structures and individuals, giving him more of an incentive to fight to preserve Mercatorial rule. If the bad guys did sweep in and take things over it would be harder now for Saluus to wave his hands and claim to be just a modest shipbuilder, now humbly at the service of the new masters.
Still, proximity, access and even a degree of control over such power was something Saluus felt comfortable with and, if the worst did happen, he still wasn't as symbolically part of the old regime as the others in the War Cabinet, and his control of KHI would make him valuable to whoever ran the system. He'd play it by ear. Besides, he had an escape route mapped out. The longer the E-5 Discon invasion took to happen, the shorter would be the time to wait for the Mercatoria counter-attack, in which case he might be better off just disappearing while the bad guys settled in and prepared their own defences. (In theory they were supposed to be kept in the dark that the Mercatorial fleet was on its way, but news of that had leaked too and anyway their Beyonder allies would surely have told them.)
If it was simpler to hide then Saluus would hide. He'd try to get involved in some guerrilla activity, too, hopefully at a safe remove, so that when the Mercatoria did retake the system he would look like some sort of hero rather than a coward only interested in his own wealth. But keeping out of the way was sometimes the best strategy when things got messy. He had a very fast ship indeed being built in one of the secret yards, a prototype that he fully intended to make sure was never quite ready for active service or even military trial runs. It would be his way out, if he needed it.
> In all this, amazingly, the woman he had first known as Ko, when she'd been with Fassin Taak - her real name, the name she used now, was Liss Alentiore - had been a real help. He'd fallen for her, he supposed. In fact, he'd fallen for her to the extent that his wife - despite her own happily indulged and numerous dalliances - had, for the first and only time, shown signs of jealousy. (Liss herself had suggested a way out of this, though it had occurred, at least as a fantasy, to him as well. So now they had a very stimulating little menage a trois going.)
More to the point, Liss had proved a trustworthy confidante and reliable source of advice. There had been a few occasions over the last few crowded, sometimes desperate months when Salluus had not known which way to react and he'd talked it over with her, either in the semi-formality of his office, flier or ship or from pillow to pillow, and she'd known what to do, if not immediately then after a night or two's thought. She was canny in a sidelong, catlike way; she knew how people worked, how they thought, which way they would jump, almost tele-pathically sometimes.
He'd invented a post for Liss in his entourage and made her his personal private secretary. His social and business secretaries had both been quietly piqued, but were smart enough to accept the new face with a degree of feigned generosity and seemingly genuine grace, and without trying to do anything to undermine her. Saluus had a feeling that they had each anyway gauged Liss accurately, and realised that any attack they might try on her would likely rebound on themselves.
His own security people had been suspicious of her at first, finding all sorts of insalubrious stuff hinted at in her past, and then a sort of suspicious fuzziness. But ultimately there had been nothing damning, certainly nothing that was worse than what he'd got up to when he was her age. She'd been young, wild and she'd mixed with dubious types. So had he. So what? He'd quizzed her gently on her past himself and got an impression of hurt and trauma and bad memories. He didn't want to hurt her further by inquiring too deeply. It added to his feeling that, in some almost unbearably gallant way, he'd rescued her.
She'd been a middling journalist with a technical journal with a past in dance, acting, hostessing and massage work before; he'd taken her away from all that. She'd looked much younger than she was when he'd met her that night with Fassin - Saluus was a big fan of that whole wise head on young shoulders thing now, he'd decided - but she looked even better now, having taken him up on the offer of treatments she could never have had access to until they'd met. She was grateful to him. She never said so straight out - that would have imbalanced too much what they had - but he could see it in her eyes sometimes.
Well, he was grateful to her, too. She'd revitalised his private life and proved a significant new asset in his public one.
There was, also, just a hint of a feeling that he'd taken her away from Fassin, and that was quite a pleasant little sensation all by itself. Saluus had never exactly envied the other man -he didn't really envy anybody, indeed why should he, how could he? - but there was a sort of ease to Fassin's life that Saluus had always coveted, and so resented. To be part of a big family group like that, surrounded by people all doing the same steady thing, respected for their work intrinsically without constantly having to prove themselves through tender processes and balance sheets and shareholders' meetings and staff councils . . . that must have its own sweetness, that must give a sort of academic security, a feeling of justification. And then the fellow had gone and become some sort of hero figure, just by spending five years pickled in shock-gel in a miniature gascraft (not even built by KHI) knocking round with a bunch of degenerate Dwellers.
Had that fame attracted Liss to Fassin? Had she just traded Fassin in, traded up to Saluus because the opportunity had presented itself? Maybe so. It didn't bother him. Relationships were a market, Sal knew that. Only children and idiot romantics thought otherwise. You judged your own attractiveness -physically, psychologically and in terms of status - then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with the possibility of advancement, or settling for a more reliably stable life but never knowing what you might have achieved.
Saluus took a deep, cold breath.
The sun had disappeared, Ulubis dipping beneath tree-coated mountains far to the south-west. A few stars started to come out in the darkening purple sky. The broad scatter of orbital habs and factories shone like a handful of thrown, sparkling dust to the south-east, gradually stretching out across the sky after the retreating sunset like a distillation of the fading light. Saluus wondered which of those tiny scintillations belonged to him. Not as many as a year ago. Some had been moved away, just to get them out of old orbits where they could be more easily targeted. Two - big dock-ships, both of them, and cradling Navarchy vessels at the time - had been destroyed. Wreckage from one had fallen on Fessli City, killing tens of thousands, many more than had died in the initial attack. KHI was being sued for negligence, accused of not moving the dock-ships out of the way in time. A war on and everything controlled by the military but there was still room for that sort of shit. He was having words in appropriate ears, to get a blanket War Exemption Order proclaimed.
Saluus looked through his own exhaled breath for Nasqueron, but it was far below the horizon and probably all but invisible behind the shield of orbital scatter anyway, even if he had been in the right latitudes to see it.
Fassin. In all the preparations for war and invasion, you always had to make time to take account of whatever he might have got up to. Had he died in the storm battle? Reports from Nasqueron were ambiguous. But then reports from Nasqueron were never anything but ambiguous. He'd certainly disappeared, and was probably still on Nasqueron - though in the time between the destruction of the original satellite surveillance network round the planet at the time of the storm battle and the establishment of a new one after the founding of the Dweller Embassy, there had been a window when even quite big craft might have left Nasqueron's atmosphere - but who knew? And if Taak was still somewhere in the gas-giant, what was he doing?
If he was still alive, Saluus didn't envy him at all any more. To have your whole existence, never mind your whole family, wiped out like that . . . maybe Fassin had killed himself. He had been told, apparently, before the whole ghastly mess at the
GasClipper race. He knew they were dead. If he wasn't dead too, he was more alone than he'd ever been in his life, with nothing much to come back to. Saluus felt sorry for him.
His first thought had been that with Fassin so reduced, there would be no danger of Liss going back to him if he ever did reappear. But then he'd thought about how people could confound your expectations sometimes, and how women in particular could display a sort of theoretically laudable but harmfully self-sacrificial kind of misplaced charity when they saw somebody damaged. Luckily Jaal Tonderon was still alive. Sal and his wife had invited her to stay with them for a while. He wanted to encourage her to be strong for Fassin, if he ever did make it back, and they were all still there.
The Dweller Embassy had been a great success. The Dwellers had seemed keen to make up for the misunderstanding in the storm and the Ulubis Mercatoria had been desperate not to fight on two hopeless fronts at once. Another moon, Uerkle, had been designated as the new site for the Seers' Shared facility -construction was well under way - and a small fleet of ships had been welcomed into orbit around the gas-giant. Seers had started direct delving again - the equipment for remote delving was not yet all in place - and the Dwellers either didn't notice or didn't care that a lot of new so-called Seers were really Navarchy, Cessoria and Shrievalty scouts - spies, if you wanted to be blunt about it - searching for Fassin Taak, searching for the also-disappeared Dweller called Valseir, searching for any sign of those weapons used against the Mercatorial forces during the battle in the GasClipper storm race and searching too for any hints or traces of the Dweller List and anything remotely associated with it - so far, admittedly, all completely without success. Even these scout craft had to
be tagged and traceable and escorted by a Dweller guide, but it was a start.
Also in the preparatory - and to date unsuccessful - stages were the negotiations with the Dwellers to forge an alliance or get Mercatorial hands on Dweller weaponry. The Dwellers had shown themselves to possess offensive capabilities - well, strictly speaking, defensive capabilities, but that didn't matter - nobody had credited them with. If they could be brought into an alliance with the rest of Ulubis system, the whole balance of forces between the invaders and the defenders might be turned upside down. Even if the Dwellers only shared some of their military-technological know-how - or just lent out or hired some of the devices - that might make enough of a difference for Ulubis to resist the invasion on its own without having to wait for the Summed Fleet units to arrive.
And if that failed, then there was the delicate matter of how to get the Starveling invasion fleet to attack Nasqueron and so, with luck, dash itself to pieces against whatever hyper-weaponry had destroyed the Navarchy forces in the storm battle.
So much to think about.
Saluus was wearing a jacket but he'd come out without gloves and so had put his hands into his pockets to keep them warm. Liss slipped one arm through his, suddenly there at his side, nuzzled up to him, her skin-perfume seeming to fill his head. He looked down at her and she pressed closer to him, following his gaze out to the south and the stipple of light from the orbital structures.
He felt her shiver. She was dressed in light clothes. He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. He'd seen that in screen stories and it still made him feel good to do it. He didn't mind the cold, though it was worse than it had been, and a breeze was starting to blow from above. It was a part-katabatic wind, he'd been told by somebody: a current of cold air flowing down from the ice-locked wastes above, displacing warmer, less dense air below and driving gently but firmly downwards, spilling over the lip of the waterfall like a ghost of the frozen, plunging waters.
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