‘Amongst some aHumans there is a saying that we come from and go to nothing, a lack like shadow that throws the sum of life into bright relief. And with the rHumans, something about dust to ashes.’
‘Do you think she would have minded being treated as a Dweller?’ Setstyin asked.
‘No,’ Fassin said. ‘I don’t think she would have minded. I think she would have felt honoured.’
‘Here, here,’ Y’sul muttered.
Valseir gave a small formal bow.
‘Well, Colonel Hatherence,’ Setstyin said, with what sounded like a sigh as he looked down at the body lying in the coffin. ‘You ascended to the age and rank of Mercatorial Colonel, which is a very considerable achievement for your kind. We think you lived well and we know you died well. You died with many others but in the end we all die alone. You died more alone than others, amongst people like you but alien to you, and far from your home and family. You fell and were found and now we send you down again, further into those Depths, to join all the revered dead on the surface of rock around the core.’ He looked at Fassin. ‘Seer Taak, would you like to say anything?’
Fassin tried to think of something. In the end he just said, ‘I believe Colonel Hatherence was a good person. She was certainly a brave one. I only knew her for less than a hundred days and she was always my military superior, but I came to like her and think of her as a friend. She died trying to protect me. I’ll always honour her memory.’
He signalled that he could think of nothing else. Setstyin roll-nodded and indicated the open coffin lid.
Fassin went forward and used a manipulator to close the casket’s iron hatch, then he lowered a little more and together he and Setstyin took one edge of the bier that the coffin lay on. They raised it, letting the heavy container slide silently off, over the edge of the balcony and down into the next bruise-dark layer of clouds, far below.
They all floated over the edge and waited until the coffin disappeared, a tiny black speck vanishing into the darkly purple wastes.
‘Great-cousin of mine, diving deep, got hit by one of those once,’ Y’sul said thoughtfully. ‘Never knew what hit him. Stone dead.’
The others were looking at him.
He shrugged. ‘Well? It’s true.’
Valseir found Fassin in a gallery, looking out at the deep night stream of gas, rushing quietly in infrared as the
Isaut
powered its way to who knew where.
‘Fassin.’
‘Valseir. Are we free to leave yet?’
‘Not that I’ve heard. Not yet.’
They watched the night flow round them together for a while. Fassin had spent time earlier looking at reports on the storm battle, from both sides. The Dwellers had high-selectivity visuals which made it look like the Dreadnoughts had won the day, not the
Isaut.
The little he’d got from the Mercatoria’s nets just gave dark hints that an entire fleet was missing, and included no visuals at all. Unseen was pretty much unheard-of. It appeared that everybody had instantly assumed there was some vast cover-up going on. Both sides were downplaying like crazy, implying that some terrible misunderstanding had taken place and they’d both suffered appallingly heavy losses, which was, when Fassin thought about it, somewhere between half and three-quarters true, and hence closer to reality than might have been expected in the circumstances.
‘So what did happen to this folder?’ Fassin asked. ‘If there was a folder.’
‘There was and is a folder, Fassin,’ Valseir told him. ‘I held on to it for a long time but eventually, twenty-one, twenty-three years ago, I gave it to my colleague and good friend Leisicrofe. He was departing on a research trip.’
‘Has he returned?’
‘No.’
‘When will he?’
‘Should he return, he won’t have the data.’
‘Where will it be?’
‘Wherever he left it. I don’t know.’
‘How do I find your friend Leisicrofe?’
‘You’ll have to follow him. That will not be so easy. You will need help.’
‘I have Y’sul. He’s always arranged--’
‘You will need rather more than he can provide.’
Fassin looked at the old Dweller. ‘Off-planet? Is that what you mean?’
‘Somewhat,’ Valseir said, not looking at him, gazing out at the onward surge of night.
‘Then who should I approach for this help?’
‘I’ve already taken the liberty.’
‘You have? That’s very kind.’
Valseir was silent for a while, then said, ‘None of this is about kindness, Fassin.’ He turned to look directly at the arrowhead. ‘Nobody in their right mind would ever want to be involved with something as momentous as this. If the slightest part of what you’re looking for has any basis in reality, it could change everything for all of us. I am Dweller. My species has made a good, long - if selfish - life for itself, spread everywhere, amongst the stars. We do not appreciate change on the scale we are here talking about. I’m not sure that any species would. Some of us will do anything to avoid such change, to keep things just as they are.
‘You have to realise, Fassin; we are not a monoculture, we are not at all perfectly homogenised. We are differentiated in ways that even now, after all your exposure to us, you can scarcely begin to comprehend. There are things within our own worlds almost entirely hidden from most of us, and there are deep and profound differences of opinion between factions amongst us, just as there are between the Quick.’
Factions
, thought Fassin.
Valseir went on, ‘Not all of us are quite so studiedly indifferent to events taking place within the greater galaxy as we generally contrive to appear. There are those of us who, without ever wanting to know the full details of your mission, in fact knowing that they’d be unable to square knowledge of its substance with their species loyalty, would help you nevertheless. Others… others would kill you instantly if they even began to guess what it was you’re looking for.’ The old Dweller floated over, came close to a kiss-whisper as he said, - And believe it or not, Fassin Taak, Drunisine is of the former camp, while your friend Setstyin is of the latter.
Fassin pulled away to look at the old Dweller, who added, - Truly.
After a few more moments, Fassin asked, ‘When will I be able to follow your friend Leisicrofe?’
‘I think you’ll know one way or the other before the night is out. And if we both don’t at least begin to follow Leisicrofe, we may both follow your Colonel Hatherence.’
Fassin thought this sounded a little melodramatic. ‘Truly?’ he asked, signalling amusement.
‘Oh, truly, Fassin,’ Valseir said, signalling nothing. ‘Let me repeat: none of this is about kindness.’
*
Saluus Kehar was not happy. He had his own people in certain places, his own ways of finding things out, his own secure and reliable channels of intelligence quite independent of the media and the official agencies - you didn’t become and stay a major military supplier unless you did - and he knew about as well as anybody did what had happened during the disastrous Nasqueron raid, and it was simply unjust to blame him or his firm.
For one thing, they’d been betrayed, or their intelligence or signals had been compromised, or at the very least they’d been out-thought (by Dwellers!). And because of that failing - which was unquestionably nothing to do with him - they’d been ambushed and out-outnumbered. Dozens of those heretofore un-fucking-heard-of super-Dreadnought ships had turned up when the incursionary force had been expecting no more than a handful - at most - of the standard ones, the models without the reactive mirror armour, the plasma engines and the wideband lasers. Plus the Dwellers had simply done a very good job of lying over the years - years? Aeons - presenting themselves as hopeless bumblers and technological incompetents when in fact - even if they couldn’t build anything very impressive from scratch any more - they still had access to weaponry of serious lethality.
The military had fucked up. It didn’t matter how good the tool was, how clever the craftsman had been, how well-made the weapon was; if the user dropped it, didn’t switch it on or just didn’t know how to use it properly, all that good work went for nothing.
They’d lost all the ships. All of them. Every single damn one, either on the raid or supporting it from space immediately above. Even a few of the ships not involved at all - those standing guard round Third Fury while the recovery and construction teams worked - had been targeted and annihilated by some sort of charged-particle-beam weapon, with two craft on the far side of the moon each chased by some type of hyper-velocity missile and blown to smithereens as well.
Unwilling to accept that they’d made a complete mess of the operation, the military had decided it mustn’t be their fault. Kehar Heavy Industries must be to blame. There must, to quote an ancient saying, be something wrong with our bloody ships. The sheer completeness of the catastrophe, and the frustrating lack of detail regarding exactly what had gone wrong, actually made it easier to blame the tool rather than the workman. All the ships had been made gas-capable by Saluus’s shipyards, all had been lost on their first mission using their new abilities, so - according to that special logic only the military mind seemed to appreciate - it must be a problem with the process of making them capable of working in an atmosphere that was responsible.
Never mind that the battlecruiser acting as Command and Control for the whole operation and both the Heavy-Armour Battery Monitors had been blasted to atoms just as effortlessly as the ships working in the planet’s clouds, even though they’d never been gas-capabled and were still in space at the time; that little detail somehow got rolled up into greater disaster and conveniently forgotten about in the hysteria.
So now they’d lost Fassin and they’d lost their lead to this Dweller List thing. Worse, they had a serious intelligence problem, because, basically, they’d been duped. The old Dweller Valseir must have suspected something or been tipped off. They knew this for the simple reason that the information he’d provided - almost the last data that had got relayed back to the top brass on Sepekte before everything went haywire - had proved, when checked later, to be a lie. The Dweller he’d told Fassin to look for in Deilte city didn’t exist. For the sake of this they’d lost over seventy first-rate warships for no gain whatsoever - ships they would seriously miss when the Beyonder-Starveling invasion hit home for real - and they’d thoroughly antagonised the Dwellers, who’d never been people it was advisable to get on the wrong side of even before they’d suddenly shown they still packed the kind of punch that could humiliate a Mercatorial fleet. As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.
In fact it was only that last item on the long list of calamitous consequences - dealing with the Dwellers’ subsequent actions and signals - that had worked out less badly than it might have. Finally, something positive.
Saluus was in a meeting. He hated meetings. They were an entirely vital part of being an industrialist, indeed of being a businessman in any sort of organisation, but he still hated them. He’d learned, partly at his father’s side, to get good at meetings, working people and information before, during and after them, but even when they were short and decided important stuff they felt like a waste of time.
And they were rarely short and rarely decided important stuff.
This one wasn’t even his meeting. Unusually, he wasn’t in control. He’d been summoned. Summoned? He’d been
brought before
them. That caught the mood better.
He far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter (though not always - if you had one where everybody was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on for ever too) and they were easier to control -- easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings - often, Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem important that meetings could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time problems and often far away. But then - this was the slightly weird bit - as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.
Maybe because it was a sign of how much you’d been able to delegate, maybe because it was a way of imposing your authority on those in the middle and upper-middle ranks beneath you, maybe because the things being discussed at high-level meetings were so important that you needed the very last nuance of physicality they provided over a holo conference to be sure that you were working with all the relevant information, including whether somebody was sweating or had a nervous tic.
This was the sort of stuff a good holo would show up, of course, though equally the sort of stuff a good pre-transmission image-editing camera would smooth away. In theory somebody in a conference call could be sitting there sweating a river and jumping like they’d been electrocuted, but if they had decent real-time image-editing facilities they could look the perfect epitome of unruffled cucumber-chill.