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.
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 passenger\freight 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.