'Which will be when, precisely, banelet of my already too-long life?'
'A day, sire. Two, at the most. He assures.'
'Unacceptable! Utterly and profoundly so!' Y'sul proclaimed, frilling the very idea away with a shudder. He was nestled within a dent on a flower-decked terrace outside and above the Taverna Bucolica, close enough to the city's central plaza to smell the mayor's desperation. He dragged deep of a proffered pharma cylinder and with the exhalation breathed, 'Next!'
Fassin and the colonel, floating nearby, exchanged looks. Hatherence floated closer.
- We could just take off, you and I.
- All by ourselves?
- We are both self-sufficient, we are both capable of making good time.
- You reckon?
The colonel made it obvious that she was looking his arrow-craft over. - I think so.
I think you called up the specs on this thing before we left Third Fury and know damn well so, he thought.
He sent, - So we go haring off into the clouds together, just we two.
-Yes.
- There is a problem.
- Indeed.
- In fact, there are two problems. The first one is that there's a war on, and we'll look like a pair of warheads.
- Warheads? But we shan't even be transonic!
- There are rules in Formal War regarding the speed that warheads can travel at. We'll look like warheads.
- Hmm. If we went a little slower?
- Slow warheads.
- Slower still?
- Cruise mines. And before you ask, any slower than that and we'll look like ordinary monolayer float mines.
Hatherence bobbed up and down, a sigh. - You mentioned a second problem.
- Without Y'sul it's unlikely that anybody will talk to us.
- With him it is unlikely that anybody else will get a word in.
- Nevertheless.
They needed their own transport. More to the point, they needed transport that would be allowed to pass unchallenged in the war zone. Whatever remained of Valseir's old dwelling lay far enough off the CloudTunnel network to make roting or floating their way there too long-winded. Y'sul had agreed to fix things - with his equatorial, big-city connections, escorting exotic aliens, he was bound to positively exude kudos towards all those who might help him - but then had got caught up in the whole process just due to the numbers of people who wanted to be the ones who helped him, and so became unable, seemingly, to make up his mind. Just as it seemed likely he was about to settle on one outrageously generous offer, another would appear over the horizon, even more enticing, necessitating a further reappraisal.
Finally, after two days, Hatherence could take no more and hired her own ship, on terms slightly better than the ones just rejected by Y'sul.
In their suite at the Taverna, Y'sul protested. ‘Iam doing the negotiating!' he bellowed.
'Yes,' the colonel agreed. 'Rather too much of it.'
A compromise was arrived at. The colonel confessed to their hirer that she was legally unable to commit to a firm contract and Y'sul then remade it on the exact same terms while the appalled shipmaster was still drawing breath to protest. That day, the day the war officially got under way, ceremonially beginning with an opening gala and Formal Duel in Pihirumime, half the world away. A day later they sailed - taking the next downward eddy that also swirled in the right horizontal direction — aboard the Poaflias, a hundred-metre twin-hull screw-burster of unknown but probably enormous age. It boasted a crew of just five apart from its captain and was rotund and slow, but was - for some reason lost in the mists of Dweller military logic - still registered as an uncommitted privateer scout ship and so cleared to make her way within the war zone and, one might hope, liable to pass any consequent challenge save one conducted by opening fire prior to negotiations.
Their captain was Slyne, an enthusiastic youngster barely arrived at Adulthood, still very much a Recent and behaving more like a Youth. He'd inherited the Poaflias on the death of his father. The Dwellers clove to the idea of Collective Inheritance, so that, when one of them died, any private property they could fairly claim to have accumulated went fifty per cent to whoever they wanted it to go to and fifty per cent to whatever jurisdiction they lived within. This was why only one hull of the twin-hulled Poaflias was fully owned by Slyne. The city of Munueyn owned the other half and was renting it to him, accumulating kudos. The less Slyne could actually do with the ship, the more control he would lose, until ultimately the city could reasonably claim it was all theirs; then, if he wanted to stay aboard, he'd more or less have to do whatever the city asked him to do with the ship. This expedition, however, conducted under his own auspices, ought to go a long way towards securing his ownership rights over the whole vessel.
'This is why we are confined to the single hull?' Hatherence asked the captain. They were on the foredeck, a slightly ramshackle sprouting of fibres and sheet protruding over the craft's battered-looking nose. Y'sul had spotted a harpoon gun on the foredeck and challenged his companions to a coarse shoot the next time they traversed a promising volume. Apparently where they were now, just two days out of Munueyn, constituted just such a happy hunting ground - however, nobody had seen anything worth harpooning so far.
'That's right!' Slyne bobbed eagerly over the deck. 'Less I use the other hull, less I owe the city!' Captain Slyne was hanging on to some rigging, floating above everybody else to get a good view and act as lookout and target spotter. They were making a decent speed through the dim crimson gases. The slipstream would have blown Slyne aft if he hadn't been holding on. A decent speed in this case meant less than a quarter of the velocity of the Dreadnought Stormshear on cruise, but the gas down here was thicker and the slipstream's force was all the greater.
'There's something!' Slyne yelled, pointing up and to starboard.
They all looked.
'No! Wrong,' Slyne said cheerfully. 'Beg pardon.' Slyne was taking his captain's role seriously, accoutred with lots of mostly useless ancient naval paraphernalia like spyglasses, an altimeter, a museum-piece radio, a scratched-looking hail visor, a shining antique holster-cannon and a radiation compass. His clothing and half-armour looked very new but based on designs that were very old. He had a couple of pet foetuses tethered to each of his Hub girdles.
The foetuses were Dweller young who hadn't even been allowed to progress to the stage of being children. The usual reason they existed was because a Dweller-turned-female of particular impatience had decided she couldn't be bothered going to full term, and had aborted. The results made good pets. Dwellers could survive on their own almost from conception, they just didn't progress intellectually and had nobody to protect them while they were completely helpless.
Slyne's quadruplets - it would have been impolite to inquire whether they were actually his own - looked like little bloated manta rays, pale and trailing almost useless tentacles, forever bumping into their master or each other and getting themselves tangled in their tethers. The effect, for a human, was inevitably slightly grisly, though Fassin had the added, depressing feeling that the foetuses were the equivalent of a parrot in ancient Earth terms.
'There's something this time!' Slyne shouted, pointing down to starboard. A small, black object was rising from the deep red depths of gas a couple of hundred metres away.
‘Ihave it!' Y'sul yelled, bump-kicking the gun platform on its counterweights. It swung up above the deck to an elevation that let him depress the harpoon gun sufficiently.
'A tchoufer seed!' Sholish exclaimed. 'It's a tchoufer tree seed, sir!'
'Wait a moment, Y'sul,' Fassin said, rising from the deck. 'Just let me go and check.' He gunned the little gascraft away from the Poaflias, curving out and down towards the still slowly rising black sphere.
'Keep out of the way!' Y'sul bellowed to the human. Fassin had taken a curved course deliberately, having witnessed Y'sul's marksmanship before.
'Just hold, will you?' he shouted back.
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Y'sul gave a shake and sighted the gun on the black sphere, maniples grasping the trigger.
Slyne craned forward in the rigging. Two of the foetuses wrapped themselves round a stay, entangling him. He looked up, tutted, and brought his spyglass up to a receptor-dense portion of his sensory frill, scanning the rising black orb. 'Ah, actually—' he began.
Hatherence bobbed up suddenly. 'Y'sul! Stop!'
'Ha-ha!' Y'sul said, twisting the trigger and firing the harpoon. The mounting shook, the gun leapt and banged, the harpoon's own twin rocket motors sprang out and erupted as soon as it was a safe distance away and the thin black line attached to the main body came whipping and whistling out of a locker just beneath the gun mounting. The harpoon rasped through the gas towards where the black object would be in a few seconds' time. 'Hmm,' Y'sul said, sounding slightly surprised. 'One of my better—'
'It's a mine!' Slyne screamed.
Sholish just screamed.
- Fassin, get away from that thing! Hatherence sent.
The little gascraft instantly started to turn and speed up, rotors blurring in the air.
'Eh? What?' Y'sul said.
Slyne drew his holster-cannon and aimed at the harpoon. He got one shot off before the gun jammed.
'Could that be nuclear?' the colonel shouted. A high, keening noise sounded from the colonel's esuit.
'Definitely!' Slyne spluttered. He shook his gun and cursed, then slapped at his radio. 'Engines! Full astern!' He shook the gun again, desperately. 'Fucking scrits!'
Hatherence moved quickly to one side.
Y'sul looked out at the harpoon, dropping smoothly right on course for the black ball, then at the gun mounting. 'Sholish!' he barked. 'Grab that line!'
Sholish leapt for the thrumming dark curtain of cord being jerked from the locker under the gun, caught hold of it and was instantly whipped towards the gunwales, smashing through stanchions and snapping to a stop, tangled in the hawser, before the slipstream brought him thudding back into the deck behind them. Free of the encumbering line, the harpoon just picked up speed, still heading for the mine. Hatherence got clear of the Poaflias. Fassin's arrowcraft was still turning, still picking up speed, still even closer to the mine than the ship was.
'Oh, fu—' Y'sul said.
A crimson flash seemed to wash out the gas all around them.
Dead, Fassin had time to think.
For an instant, a tight fan of searing pink-white lines joined Colonel Hatherence's esuit and the full length of the harpoon, which vanished in a blast of heat and light. A visible shock-sphere pulsed out from the detonation, rocking the mine . . .
. . . Which seemed to stop and think for a moment, before continuing to ascend smoothly on its way. The shock wave shook them and the ship. Fassin felt it too. He slowed and turned back.
The Poaflias was scrubbing off speed following Slyne's last order. The slipstream was lessening but still sufficiently strong to clunk Sholish's battered carapace off the deck as he floated tangled in the dark mass of wire.
Y'sul looked. 'Sholish?' he said in a small voice.
'The species of the Faring are more divided by their sense of time than anything else. We Dwellers, being who and what we are, naturally encompass as much of the spectrum of chronosense as we are able, covering most of it. I exclude the machine-Quick.' A hesitation. 'You still abhor those, I take it?'
'Yes, we most certainly do!' the colonel exclaimed.
'Positively persecuted,' Fassin said.
'Hmm. They are different again, of course. But even within the limits of the naturally evolved, the manifold rates at which time is appreciated are, some would argue, collectively the single most telling distinction that might be made between species and species-types.'
The speaker was an ancient Sage called Jundriance. Dweller seniority nomenclature stretched to twenty-nine separate categories, starting with child and ending, no less than two billion years later (usually much more) at Child. In between came the short-lived Adolescent and Youth stages, the rather longer Adult stage with its three sub-divisions, then Prime, with four subdivisions, Cuspian with three and then, if the Dweller had survived to that age (one and a quarter million years, minimum) and was judged fit by his peers, Sagehood, which then repeated all the subdivisions of the Adulthood, Prime and Cuspian stages. So, technically, Jundriance was a Sage-prime-chice. He was forty-three million years old, had shrunk to only six metres in diameter - while his carapace had darkened and taken on the hazy patina of Dweller middle age - had already lost most of his limbs and he was in charge of what was left of the house and associated libraries of the presumed deceased Cuspian-choal Valseir.
The view from the house was motionless and unchanging at normal time, a hazy vista of deep brown and purple veils of gas within a great placid vertical cylinder of darkness that was the final echo of the great storm that the house had once swung about like a tiny planet around a great, cold sun. In appearance the house-library complex itself was a collection of thirty-two spheres, each seventy metres or so in diameter, many girdled by equatorial balconies, so that the construction looked like some improbably bunched gathering of ringed planets. The bubble house hung, very slowly sinking, in that great calm of thick gas, deep down in the dark, hot depths only a few tens of kilometres above the region where the atmosphere began to behave more like a liquid than a gas.
'This is his house, then, yes?' the colonel had asked when they'd first seen it from the foredeck of the Poaflias.
Fassin had looked around, using sonosense and magnetic to search for the section of the derelict CloudTunnel that the house had once been anchored to, but couldn't find it anywhere nearby. He'd already checked the Poaflias's charts. The stretch of CloudTunnel no longer showed up on the local holo maps, implying that it had either drifted much further away - which was unlikely - or had fallen into the depths.
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, looks like it.'
They'd had to turn the Poaflias around and return to Munueyn. Sholish, badly injured, had been taken to hospital. The surgeons had given him an even chance of surviving. He'd heal best left in a drug coma for the next few hundred days. There was nothing more they could do.
Y'sul could have taken on any number of Youths and Adolescents eager to take his crippled servant's place, but he'd turned them all down - a decision he'd regretted just a day or so later once they'd set out again, when he'd realised he had nobody to shout at.
They'd avoided challenges, other ships and mines of all sorts, finally making the journey in ten days. The Sage Jundriance was attended by a couple of burly Prime servants, Nuern and Livilido, each dressed in fussily ornate and ill-fitting academic robes. They were sufficiently senior to have servants of their own; a half-dozen highly reticent Adults who looked like identical sextuplets. They were big on scurrying but almost autistically shy.
The senior of the two elder servants, Nuern - a mouean to Livilido's one-rank-more-junior suhrl - had welcomed them, allocated rooms and informed them that his master was engaged in the task of cataloguing the remaining works in the libraries - as Y'sul had warned, a significant proportion of the contents had been given away since Valseir's accident. Probably only the remoteness of the house had prevented more scholars showing up to pick over the remains. Jundriance was, however, in slow-time, so if they wanted to speak to him they would have to slow to his thought-pace. Fassin and the colonel had agreed. Y'sul had announced he was having none of this and took the Poaflias on a cruise to explore the local volume and see what there might be to hunt.
'Your duty should be to wait for us,' the colonel had informed him.
'Duty?' Y'sul had said, as though hearing the word for the first time.
They had a half-day or so, at least, while Jundriance was informed by a message on his read-screen that he had visitors. If he would see them immediately, they could go in before dark. Otherwise it could be some long time . . .
'Colonel,' Fassin had said, 'we will have to go into slowdown for s
ome time. Y'sul might be as well amusing himself nearby -' Fassin had turned to look at Y'sul to emphasise the word '- as mooching about this place for who knows how long.'
- He'll get into trouble.
- Probably. So, better trouble close to home, or trouble further away?
Hatherence had made a rumbling noise and had told Y'sul, 'There is a war on.'
'I've checked the nets!' Y'sul had protested. 'It's kilo-klicks away!'
'Really?' Nuern had said, perking. 'Has it started? The master doesn't allow connections in the house. We hear nothing.'
'Began a dozen days ago,' Y'sul had told the servant. 'We've been in the thick of it already. Barely avoided a smart mine on the way here. My servant got himself injured, may die.'
'A smart mine? Near here?'
'You are right to be concerned, my friend,' Y'sul had said solemnly. 'The presence of such ordnance hereabouts is another - the real - reason why I'll take my ship on patrol around you.'
'And your servant, injured. How terrible.'
‘I know. War is. Other than that, elsewhere in the hostilities, barely a spineful of deaths so far. Couple of Dreadnoughts crippled on each side. Far too early to tell who's winning. I'll keep a fringe cocked, let you know what's happening.'
'Thank you.'
'Not at all.'
- You're right, Hatherence had signal-whispered to Fassin as this exchange was taking place. - Let's just let him go.
- You can signal the ship from your esuit while still in slowdown?
-Yes.
-Okay.
'You will stay nearby?' Fassin had asked Y'sul. 'You won't let the Poaflias venture too far out?'
'Of course! I swear! And I shall ask our two fine fellows here to extend you every courtesy on my behalf!'