At any rate, no fleet had emerged from Ulubis to do battle; they had decided to wait and fight on their own doorsteps. His tacticians thought this indicated that Ulubis was prepared but weak. They might encounter some probe and destroyer-level . craft, but that would probably be all until they hit the mid- and inner system. His admirals were confident their laser ships and close defence units could deal with anything else that might have been sent out to get in their way.
Luseferous became aware of noises at his back, where some of his more senior commanders were permitted to stand, backed in turn by his personal Guards. There were whispers, and hushing noises of fear and exasperation. He felt his body stiffen. Now would not be a good time to bother him with anything other than the imminent destruction of the whole fleet. They had to know that. The people behind him quieted down.
He relaxed, stood more upright in the spin-produced three-quarter gravity, and breathed deeply again, gazing out at the assembled men and materiel. Oh, this was a sweet and beautiful sight indeed, this was the very image of invincibility, an utterly thrilling spectacle of power made solid and real and uncompromising. This was his, this was him.
The imminent destruction of the whole fleet . . . He imagined that happening, imagined it happening right now; some cataclysmic hyper-weapon of the ancients wiping out the entire invasion force without anyone being able to do anything to stop them. Nonsense - well, vanishingly unlikely, anyway - but just think of it! He'd be able to watch everything here just blink out of existence, one by one, or explode in flames or bright blasts of light. He'd be able to watch it all being destroyed around him!
The idea made him shiver, half in horror, half in delight. It was never going to happen, of course, but the image alone was terrifyingly exciting. And a sort of warning, of course. Not from any god or from some program running the universe as the Truth saw it, but from something more trustworthy and direct; from inside himself. His subconscious, or some monitoring part-personality playing the part of the fool who always stood at Caesar's side in a Triumph, reminding him that all was vanity. That sort of thing. The thoughts of destruction were just him reminding himself to take nothing for granted, to concentrate and take full control, to prosecute the coming war with his usual ruthlessness and ignore any internal whining voices preaching moderation or unwarranted mercy. Be cruel and merciful always for a purpose, never just to satisfy some self-image. Somebody had said that. He would never forget it.
One last deep breath. So, prepared. And forearmed. Still, the mood had sort of been broken. No real damage done by the hint of interruption earlier. He would be justified, all the same, in being angry, if he needed to be. Better see what all the fuss had been about. He swivelled on his heels, pulled himself up to his full height - always have senior commanders you could look down on - and said, loudly, 'Yes?'
He loved to see these proud, vainglorious men flinch, these men used to being obeyed instantly and without question cower, even fractionally, before him.
Tuhluer, perhaps his least annoying aide-de-camp and lately something of a favourite, came forward, smiling and frowning at the same time. 'Sir, sorry about the disturbance a moment earlier.' He gave a tiny flex of the eyebrows, as if to say, Not my fault - you know what some of these guys are like. 'Ops alert just in: high-speed craft coming direct from Ulubis, signalling unarmed, no warhead, one or two human occupants, wanting to talk. Already slowing to match with us in ten hours. On its current course that will leave it a hundred klicks off fleet centre, left-level.'
The Archimandrite glared over Tuhluer's head at the others. 'And this required my intervention?'
'Warhead worries, sir,' Tuhluer said smoothly, with a small smile. 'The craft was passing the leading units of the fleet's forward destroyer screen at the time and was about to go out of their effective beam-weapon range. Question was whether to shoot or not. Now moot. The ship will be in range of the second defensive layer in half an hour. Or there are missiles, of course. A drone missile-carrier has already been launched in pursuit.'
The Archimandrite Luseferous paused a moment, then smiled. He could see them all relax. 'Well then,' he said. 'Everything appears to be functioning as it should and I did not need to be disturbed, did I?'
'Indeed not, sir,' his aide-de-camp agreed ruefully.
'And what is the alleged status of this human or humans, if indeed that is what the thing contains?'
'The claim is that there's a man aboard, a high-ranking industrialist called Saluus Kehar.'
*
The grogginess again, the tired, gritty, grubby feeling. Fassin was sure he was coming round more and more slowly each time, and finding himself duller, slower and more confused with each new reawakening. Over forty days' travel on this transition, to the other side of the galaxy, fully ninety kiloyears from Ulubis, not that such measurements meant much. The in-wormhole time would still have been trivial. The extra days and weeks had been taken up by the flight from the portal to the ship they were looking for, deep in interstellar space.
Some days. A distance. All just more time gone, more distance between him and whatever he was trying to accomplish, while events back at Ulubis moved on without him.
He tested the arrowhead's faulty left manipulator arm, flexing and tensing it, then forced himself to look at the screen on the far wall. Stars swung, as ever, then became just the backdrop to a vast dark gnarled craft, a giant torus-shaped ship two hundred kilometres in diameter, all black gleaming ribs and fractured facets, glinting in the weak light of a far-distant sun like a great rough crown of wet coal: the Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz, a vessel of the Ythyn's vastly dispersed Greater Expiratory Fleet, a Death-Carrier.
Y'sul studied the image on the screen from the far side of the chamber for a moment, then shook his mantles. 'We must mix amongst Morbs,' he said, sounding sleepy, grumpy and resigned all at once. 'Oh, great.'
- So what happened to the Toilers? Fassin asked. - I thought Leisicrofe was supposed to be investigating Toilers next.
- Obviously they toiled in vain, Y'sul sent.
- A mis-lead.
- A bluff.
The Velpin hung above a graveyard of ships scattered across the outer rim of the Death Carrier while Y'sul and Fassin crossed to the giant ship. The Ythyn had suggested that the Velpin might enter the Rovruetz. Quercer & Janath had demurred with what looked convincingly like a shiver of horror inside their silvery overall. Fassin got the impression that just being close to the Sepulcraft and its ancient collection of crumbling, lifeless ships was bad enough for them.
The Ythyn were a Scavenger species with a speciality: they collected the dead. They did nothing with them, just stored them sorted roughly by category, type and size, and they usually only collected those bodies - and sometimes the ships and other devices they arrived on - that nobody else wanted. But it was still an irredeemably macabre habit and as a result they shared a generic nickname with other death-obsessed species, having become known as Morbs.
Fassin and Y'sul were welcomed in the cavernous, gently lit entrance hall by a Ythyn officer, a great dark avian three metres tall in a glistening, near-transparent slick-suit over skin like dark blue parchment. Tightly bound double wings, which fully stretched would have spread a dozen metres, indicated the Ythyn was a junior. It stood on an uneven tripod of legs: one thick limb to the rear, two thinner ones in front. The creature's lipped beak was inlaid with precious metals, glittering under the gel of the slick-suit. Its two eyes were huge roundels of black. Thin, curved pipes led from its nostril gratings to sets of small tanks on its back like spherical eggs of tarnished silver. There were no atmosphere-locks on an Ythyn ship; the crew, like their dead charges, spent their entire time in hard vacuum. Exposed only to that hushed nothingness, enclosed by the great ship and so kept within a few degrees of absolute zero, the bodies of the dead could lie undisturbed and uncorrupted by nothing more than whatever had killed them and by the effects of their slow or sudden freezing, for aeons.
-
You are welcome, the Ythyn officer told them in a flat, unaccented signal, prefixed only by formal signifiers for sadness and reverence. - You are Mr Taak and you are Mr Y'sul, yes?
- Yes, Fassin sent.
- I am Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian. I am happy and honoured to be known as 'Ninth' or just 'Duty'. Tell me, have either of you two gentlemen made any arrangements for the treatment or disposal of your bodies, after death?
-
The Ythyn had been collecting the dead for a billion years, the result of a kind of gruesome techno-curse visited upon them by a species they had fought against and been utterly defeated by. They had lost their small empire, lost their few planets, lost their major habitats and most of their ships and they had even lost themselves, coerced into a programme of genetic amendment that turned them from intellectually rounded beings into creatures utterly obsessed with death.
The cruelty and cleverness of their vanquishers had lain in identifying and choosing a latent weakness congenital to the Ythyn. They had always been a little overly fascinated with mortality compared with the norm of vaguely similar species, but not to the stage of serious abnormality and certainly not to the point that it in any way defined them. And if they had been so grotesquely psychologically disfigured in the process of making them so excessively morbid that they ceased to be iden-tifiably themselves there would have been no artistry, no fitness in their punishment. Instead, by this subtle but significant tweaking of their own bodies' instruction set, they became what they might have become anyway had some bizarre shiftings in their environment and circumstances so decreed. Those who had not taken their own lives and refused to submit to the inheritable amendment were killed or hunted down and forced to undergo the treatment anyway, though most of those so treated killed themselves as well.
The survivors became wanderers, one of the dozens of planet-evolved species denied or - in a few cases - eschewing any sort of home world. They built massive cold, dark ships and accrued enormous libraries and data reservoirs filled with the subject of death. They haunted the sites of great battles, terrible massacres and awful disasters. Over time, they began to gather the unclaimed dead from such sites, storing them more or less as they found them in their great airless ships, each carrying a cargo of collected death, plodding from one end of the galaxy to the other or gradually spiralling around it. Too big for wormhole travel, loath even to approach too close to a star, the Sepulcraft depended on smaller ships to harvest the dead. Even these rarely used wormholes these days. The Propylaea, which had charge of all the Mercatoria's portals, was not a charity, and demanded money for passage. The Ythyn had little to offer in payment.
They collected ships from those bringing the dead - or themselves, to die - but those were usually hulks, wrecks or near the end of their useful working lives and anyway regarded by the Ythyn as sacred, amongst the dead themselves. There were occasional donations and bequests from many different societies but they were few and far between. When they could afford to, and there were bodies to be got from the far end of a wormhole, an Ythyn ship would spend the little collateral it had accumulated and send a needle craft to make the collection. But usually they just physically followed the galaxy's generally sporadic instances of mass death.
That they had long since dutifully gathered up the remaining bodies of the now-extinct species which had inflicted their punishment upon them and could therefore relatively easily and without resistance have re-amended themselves back to their original selves, but had chosen not to, was either their most poignant tragedy of all, or a recognition that they had found a place within the galactic scheme of things that suited them better than might any other.
- We are on our way to the Chistimonouth system, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian told the Dweller and the human as they made their way along a vast curved corridor deep within the giant ship. The tall birdlike being used one of its two thin forelegs to manipulate the controls of a small cagelike car that carried them in perfect silence along a monorail set in the centre of the wide tunnel. It was perfectly dark, too. They were having to use active sensing to illuminate the seemingly never-ending corridor. - We seek the mortal remains of a newly contacted Serpenterian civilisation, a possible offshoot of the Desii-Chau (themselves, lamentably, no more; extinct, or, at the very best, deep within the fifth category of abatement), unadopted, which fell prey, sadly, to a series of solar flares some centuries ago. The sole inhabited planet was sorely affected. Of the single sentient species thereon, it is believed that no living trace remains. It will be our privilege and our duty, when we arrive there in another few decades, to inter within these hallowed halls as many of the still-unburied as we are able.
- How will they be unburied? Y'sul asked. - Do they float? Won't they all have sunk into their own depths? Into water or mud or dissolved rock or something?
The corridors were lined with the dead: stapled, pinned, stitched or ice-welded to the tubular surface (the concept of floors, walls and ceilings had some meaning while the ship was under power, but it was temporary). A few body types were best preserved in cavities, alcoves sealed with diamond leaf.
- Those happily buried will be left where they lie, underground, Duty told them. - Some remains are expected in structures, even after all this time. The reports we have had from scouter species indicate that there may be many unclaimed cadavers still in space, at Lagrange points.
- What if they're all gone? Y'sul asked. - What if somebody's beaten you to it and . . . eaten them or recycled them or something?
- Then we will make our way to the next location where we may honour the dead, the dark bird told them, imperturbable.
- Come to think of it, Y'sul said brightly, - there might be a few bods to pick up in a place called Ulubis fairly soon.
Fassin looked at the Dweller but he wasn't paying any attention.
- Ulubis, Duty said. - I have not heard of this place. Is it a planet?
- System, Y'sul said. - Home of the planet Nasqueron. In Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs.
- Ah, yes. Rather far away from here.
- Lots of humans there and another lot on their way, Y'sul said. - Probably going to be a war. Lot of deaths, I'd imagine. You collect humans?
- We have difficulties only with certain Cincturian species, the bird-creature told them. - Humans we have heard of and accommodated in the past, though not on this craft. I shall pass on your information at the earliest opportunity to our most proximate Sepulcraft. They may well be aware already, of course,
and possibly on their way even as we speak. However, we are grateful for your thoughtfulness.
- My pleasure, Y'sul said, sounding pleased with himself. He glanced at Fassin. - What?
Fassin looked away. They were passing bodies spread against the tunnel's surface like small solidified explosions of rock. -Palonne, their guide informed them. - Ossile, obviously. Victims of war. Subject to a parasitic stone-rot virus of some sort.
- Fascinating, Y'sul said. - Are we nearly at this Leisicrofe fellow yet?
Duty looked at a small display clipped to one of his cinched-in wings. - Another few hundred metres.
- What's he up to here, anyway? Y'sul asked.
- Up to? The Ythyn sounded uncertain.
- Just . . . studying you people, is he?
- Why, no. No, of course not. The Ythyn officer was silent for a moment. - Oh dear.
Fassin and Y'sul exchanged looks.
Fassin said, - You're not saying he's dead, are you?
- Well, yes. Of course. This is a Sepulcraft, gentlemen. I was under the impression that you simply wanted to see the body.
*
The news came while she was asleep. Taince watched an hours-old recording of the faint, sideways-seen, blue-shifted glimmers approaching from the direction of the E-5 Discon as the Starveling invasion fleet started braking for its arrival in Ulubis system. The invaders would take nearly three months to reach Ulubis. The Summed Fleet was still fo
ur months' travel away, including its own, more dramatic deceleration regime, due to start in a little more than eighty days. The Fleet tacticians had learned quite a lot just from the braking profile of E-5 Discon's fleet.
First, it was big: a thousand ships or more, unless there was something outlandishly clever going on with dummy drive signatures. Second, it was staying ninety-five per cent together, with only a few dozen smaller ships venturing ahead of the main fleet. This might imply a significant straight-through, braking-beyond force still hidden, though from the rest of the profile this didn't look so likely. The size, definition and shifted-frequency signatures of the drives themselves revealed a relatively slow, old-tech vessel-capability envelope. Basically all but the lightest craft in the Summed Fleet force would be able to take on all but the heaviest of the invaders' ships with a better than average chance of prevailing, and anything that couldn't be outfought could be outrun (for whatever that was worth when there was nowhere to run to).
And there was one behemoth in there, a giant ship, probably a command-and-control lander- and troop-carrier plus facili-ties-and-repair vessel. At least a billion tonnes, klicks across, doubtless very heavily armoured and armed and escorted, but a classic grade-A high-value target, a possible king-piece, a back-breaker, if it could be successfully engaged and destroyed or taken out of action or even captured. Just posting a powerful-enough guard-ship screen to try and keep it safe in the event of a serious attack threat would significantly sap the invading occupying force's abilities, cut down their dispositional options and drastically curtail their split-regroup capacity.