They stood in silence for a while, then Liss reminded Saluus that he was supposed to meet with Peregal Emoerte for a private talk before dinner that evening. There was still time, though. He felt cold now, close to shivering. He would wait until he did shiver before he went in. He stared up into the near-complete darkness directly overhead, watching the spark of a close-orbit satellite pass above them. He felt Liss stiffen at his side, and pulled her closer.
'What's that?' she said after a few more moments.
He looked where she was pointing, to the low west, where only the vaguest, dimmest hint of purple near the horizon showed where Ulubis had set.
A little above that horizon, in the sky below, beyond and above the thickest strands of reflected orbital light, new lights
were flickering to life. They were a sprinkle of bright blue, scattered across a rough circle of sky the size of a large coin held at arm's length, and increasing in number with every passing second. The blue points wavered, gradually strengthening. More and more were lighting up, filling the little window of sky with a blue blaze of cold fire, barely twinkling in the chill, still air out over the frozen plains.
Saluus felt himself shiver, though not from the cold. He opened his mouth to speak but Liss looked up at him and said,
'That's them, isn't it? That's the Starveling Cult guys, the E-5 Discon. That's the invasion fleet, braking.'
"Fraid so,' Sal agreed. His ear stud was pinging and the comms in the suite was warbling plaintively. 'We'd better go in.'
*
Groggy again. Still in the passengerfreight compartment of the Velpin. He brought the little gascraft's systems back up. The wall-screen crazed, came clear, showed stars fixed, then swinging, and finally settled on a greeny-blue and white planet. Fassin's first reaction on seeing it was that the place looked alien, unsuitable for life without an esuit. Then he realised that it looked like 'glantine or Sepekte; like images of Earth, in fact. Going gas-giant native, he told himself. Thinking like a Dweller. It didn't usually happen so quickly.
'Oh, fuck!' Y'sul said angrily, staring at the image on the screen. 'It's not even a proper fucking planet!'
The waves came booming in like blindness, like stubbornness bundled and given liquid form, an unending slow launching against the ragged fringe of massively sprawled rocks, each long, low rough ridge of water heaving skywards to tumble like some ponderously incompetent somersaulter, rolling up and falling forward, hopeful and hopeless at once, disintegrating, exploding in spray and foam, coming to pieces amongst the fractured bone-yard of rock.
The waters drained after each assault, rattling boulders, stones and pebbles between the massive jabs and points of granite, sloughing like a watery skin and falling away again, that stony chattering speaking of a slowly aggregated success, the waves -the ocean - rubbing away at the land, breaking up and breaking away, using rock against rock, tumbling it and crashing it and cracking it, abrading over centuries and millennia to a kind of stubborn accomplishment.
He watched the waves for some time, admiring their vast mad pounding, reluctantly impressed by such sheer clamorous inces-sancy. The salt spray filled his hair and eyes and nose and lungs. He breathed in deeply, feeling joined, feeling linked to and part of this wild, unceasing elemental battle.
A low, golden light struck out across the ruffled nap of sea, sunlight swinging slow beneath a great piled series of cloud escarpments to the west, layers of vapour draped over distant peaks and spires of rock disappearing into the long misted curve of north-facing shore.
Seabirds wheeled across the wind and waves, diving, flapping away, clutching slim fish like wet slices of rainbow.
It had felt strange, at first, coming out of the little gascraft. It always did, it always had, but this time seemed different, more intense somehow. This was an alien homeland, a familiar yet utterly different place; closer to what ought to be home, further from what was. Eleven thousand light years away from Ulubis this time, though they had travelled further than the last time to get here. And just twelve days' travel.
When he'd opened the gascraft's hatch and stood, he'd staggered and swayed, needed holding up by Y'sul. He'd coughed and nearly retched, feeling scrawny and weak and thin and hollowed-out, shivering in the strange ultra-nakedness of returning to the basic human condition, as slimed and wet and naked as a newborn, and even the retreating tendrils of the gill-fluid and shock-gel tubes there too, umbilical links to image birth. He felt lighter and heavier at once, blood draining, bones complaining.
Then, after a while, being naked - even naked in ordinary clothes - started to feel normal again. Every now and again, though, he shivered. The Velpin's pattern-follower had done its best to make human wearable clothes, but still the results felt strange and slick and cold.
They were on Mavirouelo, a ninety per cent Earthlike not far from the galactic outskirts, though less isolated than Ulubis. A Waterworlder-colonised planet, a Sceuri world.
Waterworlds were the single most common type of rocky planet in the galaxy, even though you never saw the rock, which was, on average, a metal-rock core about the size of Earth buried under five thousand kilometres of pressure-ice, finally topped by a hundred klicks of ocean. Such planets provided the next most common planetary environments after the near-ubiquitous gas-giants themselves, and had given the Mercatoria three of its eight principal species: the Sceuri, the Ifrahile and the Kuskunde.
Mavirouelo was not a classic waterworld - it wasn't even as water-covered as Earth itself - but it had been colonised by the Sceuri before any native animal - of air, land or sea - had developed sufficiently to claim it as their own, and so had become one of the Sceuri far-worlds, an outpost of their own semimperia within the greater commonwealth of the Mercatoria.
The Sceuri weren't conventional waterworlders, either. They were Cetasails, resembling sea mammals but with backs ridged by spinnaker spines which they could hoist to the wind and so sail as well as swim across their worlds.
Y'sul, in his esuit, rose out of the sea like a submarine conning tower, frightening the seabirds. He floated up and out and made his way across the turmoil of waves to the low cliff where Fassin stood. The human was suddenly reminded of the time he had stood with Saluus Kehar, watching Hatherence, in her esuit, float out across the chaos of artificial surf surrounding the waterspout house.
'Fassin!' Y'sul boomed, floating, dripping and humming, in the air ten metres above him. 'No sign yet?'
'No sign yet.'
Y'sul held up a mesh basket of glistening, flapping, wriggling stuff. 'Look what I caught!' He brought the basket in front of his forward mantle to look at it. 'Think I'll take it back to the ship.'
Y'sul flew over Fassin, dropping water and small shells on top of him, then headed inland a couple of hundred metres to the ship-section resting on the scrubby ledge of vegetation fringing the jagged ranks of cliffs, pinnacles and mountains beyond. The fifty-metre-long lander made up the nose section of the Velpin, the rest of which, with Quercer & Janath aboard, was still in orbit.
Fassin watched the Dweller go, then turned back to the ocean. He was here to meet with a Sceuri who had seen the Dweller Leisicrofe, who had been here until, they'd been told, twelve years ago.
They hadn't met a Sceuri yet. The Velpin had been challenged by the planet's orbital traffic control and targeted by several military units and so had had to reveal something of its reasons for being there.
'Looking for some Dweller geezer called Leisicrofe,' had been Quercer & Janath's exact words.
They'd been told to go into orbit and stay there. Targeting beams never left them. They were regarded as suspicious because their ship looked 'hole-capable and they hadn't come through the local portal.
'Sceuri,' Quercer & Janath had told Fassin and Y'sul. 'Suspicious.'
'Paranoid.'
They'd spent three days watching the planet revolve beneath them. Y'sul had muttered about how flat and boring the storms looked, Fassin had found endless fascination i
n the great snowflake city-structures spread across water and land, and the truetwin passed the time inventorying ship-stuff they'd forgotten about and playing noisy image-leaf games. They answered questions from planetary traffic control about where they'd come from -Nhouaste, the largest of the system's four gas-giant planets, was the answer given - and then a signal had come through. A scholar named Aumapile of Aumapile had had the honour of playing host to the Dweller scholar Leisicrofe and would be flattered to be allowed to extend the same courtesies to these new arrivals.
Another step along the way, another step closer, perhaps, to finding the wandering Dweller and the data he carried. If he still lived, if he still had the data, if the data was what it was supposed to be, if Valseir had been telling the truth, if it was not all utterly out of date, without point, overtaken by the seeming certainty that there was a network of secret wormholes accessible only to Dwellers, but they weren't sharing it and it might have nothing to do with the Dweller List.
Fassin was looking for something that might lead him to what he had already used, twice. He had already been through at least two wormholes, travelled across half the galaxy, and yet he wasn't really any closer to finding the key to this system of trapdoors and secret passages. He could be carried unconscious through them like a fey maiden under the influence of a sleeping draught in some Gothic romance, but he wasn't allowed to know the secret behind it all.
He was still trying to think of ways to commandeer the Velpin, but with no real hope of success. There would still be the problem of accessing the hidden wormholes. Just thinking of a way to stay awake while they made these wild transitions would be a start, but he had no idea how to do that either.
If he could go back in time to Apsile and the Shared Facility in Third Fury and ask him to build some subset of systems into the gascraft that would keep working when the main ones were shut down, making it look like the machine had entirely stopped functioning when in fact he was still sense-connected and aware, maybe it would be possible. But even the Dwellers didn't claim to have time machines, and Fassin didn't have the expertise to undertake such an amendment to the gascraft's systems himself, even if he had had the time and the facilities to do it, neither of which he did have.
Maybe he should have gone back to the Mercatoria, acted as a real major in the Ocula would have done and retreated, reported to his superiors, told them what had happened and awaited new or renewed orders. But the Ocula meant nothing to him and never had, and most of what had mattered before to him was also gone now.
He might even have tried to get in touch with the Beyonders, but until he had the key to the Dweller List, what was the point in that? And anyway - what if they had been behind the Sept's destruction, even at a remove? Just how magnanimous was he prepared to be?
What point, indeed, was there in going back at all, perhaps. Seventy days standard had elapsed since Fassin had first gone tumbling into the atmosphere of Nasqueron. It was over two old Earth months since the battle in the storm. Who knew how much longer he'd have to keep looking for Leisicrofe, chasing him round the galaxy, perhaps ever coming closer to him, maybe never quite catching up with him? Maybe he'd get his precious data and return to find it was all over, the system taken, or utterly laid waste to, every surface like the surface of Third Fury, just slag and heat, destroyed by one side or another or by both, fighting for something that wasn't even there any more.
It should still, in theory, be the most important piece of information that a human had ever carried. But somehow, even if the key to the Dweller List did exist, the fact that Dwellers could use this secret network under the noses of the rest of the galaxy - and had been so doing for who alone knew how many billions of years - made it seem much less likely that any scrap of data, any proof-size patch of algebra was going to make that much of a difference.
And yet, still, despite everything, all he could do, all that he could even think of doing, was to press on and try to find what everybody wanted him to find, and hope that it might do some good somehow.
Fassin breathed in, tasting salt.
He no longer doubted that this was real, or a virtual environment there was no disgrace in being fooled by. There wasn't even anywhere like this - this coarse, storm-sundered coast -anywhere in Ulubis system. And the stars were completely different, again.
Something caught Fassin's attention. A few kilometres out into the ocean, the water was rising in a great shallow dome, flowing everywhere down from a huge flattened hemisphere of foam-streaked darkness rising like a never-breaking explosion from the depths, still spreading and still rising and causing a great slow swell of disturbed waves to come pulsing forward, towards the cliffs as the apparition - a double saucer-shape two kilometres wide - finally broke free of the sea entirely and came slowly towards the shore, sheets and veils of salt rain falling from beneath it, flattening the shadow-bruised surface of the waters.
Y'sul floated up, nodding forward. 'Ride's here, then.'
They floated, stood and hovered in a half-drained crystal hall within the great saucer ship. Aumapile of Aumapile floated in the water, a fat eel the size of an orca with a great folded fan of sail ridging its back. Fassin stood on a broad ledge, still slick with salty water, while Y'sul and the truetwin Quercer & Janath -cajoled down eventually, bulked out with a twin-skin overall of extreme shininess that doubled as an esuit - hovered in the air above the great pool of water. Fassin found himself thinking about the Autumn House again, and Slovius in his pool.
Aumapile of Aumapile - The Aumapile of Aumapile, apparently, according to the servant who had escorted them down a broad water-filled tube to the audience chamber, the human and the Dwellers in a bubble of air enclosed by a sphere of diamond - was not merely a justly famous scholar of the Cincturia, it was a vastly rich justly famous scholar of the Cincturia.
A high, warbling, seemingly interminable song sounded from an underwater sound system. 'A Song of Welcoming For Those From Afar', apparently.
'Song for making you want to go straight back there again,' Y'sul had asided to Fassin, as they'd accepted reasonable impersonations of something to drink andor inhale.
They talked of Leisicrofe. Their host, speaking through a small hovering speaker sphere, said they had missed him by some years and then Y'sul mentioned following him.
'Oh,' the Sceuri said, 'but you must take me with you.'
'Must?' 'Must?'
'But I know where he went,' the Sceuri said, as though this explained everything.
'Couldn't you just tell us?' Y'sul asked plaintively.
'Just point us in the right direction.' 'And we'll be on our way'
The Sceuri wriggled in the great pool, sending water sloshing. It laughed. A soft, tinkling sound from the hovering speaker. 'Oh, I could, but I always had the feeling my friend Leisicrofe had travelled even more widely than I have, especially into the gases of Nhouaste. I think you may be heading there, as you did not come through the wormhole portal, and he did not depart through it. You see? I have my sources. I know what goes on. You can't fool me. I am not so stupid. You and your little Squanderer friend will be heading back to Nhouaste.'
'Doubt it,' the Dweller travelcaptain said, snorting.
Fassin was the little Squanderer friend. The Sceuri took great pride in having become a technological, space-faring species, given the obstacles they'd had to overcome. A classic water-world environment had almost no easily available metals. Any metal-bearing ores that a waterworld possessed tended to be locked away under all that ice, deep in the planet's inaccessible rocky core. Waterworlders had to do what they could with what fell from the sky in the shape of meteorites, and in this shared a developmental background with gas-giant Dwellers.
To get into space in the face of such a paucity of readily available raw materials was not easy, and the Sceuri regarded themselves as deserving considerable recognition and respect for such a triumph of intellect over scarcity. Accomplishing the same feat when you came from a rock-surface planet
was a relatively trivial, expectable, even dismissible trick. The Sceuri called people from such planets Squanderers as a result, though not usually to their face or other appropriate feature.
'Please make clear, oh great A of A,' the other half of Quercer & Janath said.
Fassin suspected that he already knew what the Sceuri was thinking. The local gas-giant, Nhouaste - inhabited by Dwellers, of course - was, like the vast majority of Dweller gas-giants, not a world that welcomed Seers or anybody else apart from other Dwellers. Aumapile of Aumapile had probably been told where Leisicrofe was heading next and assumed that as the Dweller had not gone through the Mercatorial wormhole - and assuming he hadn't headed into deep space at STL speeds - he must have gone to look for whatever it was he was looking for in the one place that even being fabulously rich and corruptly well-connected couldn't gain you access to, in this system or any other: a Dweller-inhabited gas-giant.
'I think the Toilers our mutual friend sought have found a new niche, no longer in space, but in gas, you see?' the Sceuri said. Even through the speaker sphere, the creature's voice sounded pleased with itself.
'Toilers?' Y'sul said.
'Known.'
'Benign semi-swarm devices,' the other half of Quercer & Janath announced. 'Infra-sentient. Known for randomly building inscrutable space structures, best guess for purpose of which being as preparatory infrastructure for an invasion that never took place on behalf of a race long gone and thoroughly forgotten. Distribution very wide but very sparse. Numbers fluctuate. Rarely dangerous, sometimes hunted, no bounty.'
'So there.'
Y'sul looked surprised. 'Really?' he asked,
'Oh, stop being so coy!' their host chided, creating sinuous splashing patterns in the water, as though tickled. 'Of course! As though you didn't know.' The Aumapile of Aumapile blew jets of water from each end. A scent of something vaguely rotten filled Fassin's nose. 'But I know where our friend was going to next, and you don't. However, I shall be willing to tell you if you take me along, once I am aboard your ship. Such large places, gas-giants! And of course we have four. One thinks, Oh, who can say, where would one's quarry be?' The Sceuri flicked its tail. Fassin got splashed. 'And what do you say, sirs?'
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