Thovin nodded out at the slim, dark ship cradled outside. “You would hand that over to the Hierchon for his personal yacht if he asked for it, wouldn’t you?”
Sal thought for a moment. “I’d almost sooner destroy it,” he said.
Thovin turned and looked at him, expression open, waiting.
“I’m not kidding. It really is a prototype,” Sal said, smiling. “You wouldn’t put the head of state of an entire system in something as untried as that, certainly not if you meant to take it up to anything near top speed, which would kind of have to be the only reason for choosing it in the first place, right? I’ll entrust myself to the thing, but I couldn’t let the Hierchon take it. What if it killed him? Think of the publicity. Good grief, man, think of our share price.”
Thovin nodded for a few moments, looking back at the ship. “Missile, then,” he said.
“Me too,” Liss said quietly in the darkness. “I thought he was just an idiot kicked upstairs.”
“I think he does a good idiot act,” Sal said. “Actually, I think he’s probably as genuinely stupid as our Dweller negotiators are genuinely naive. Maybe Thovin should take over the talks. Doubt he could do any worse.”
They were lying in bed on board the prototype ship. It was more secure than staying on the liner or one of the other Embassy support ships, if also far less luxurious and much more cramped. There was no absolute guarantee that somebody hadn’t sneaked a bug aboard during the ship’s construction, but Saluus had had the craft built by his most trustworthy people and supervised the work as closely as he could; it was as safe as anyplace to say things that you might not want others to hear.
“Do you think he was trying to make a deal, get himself included if you did decide to escape?”
Saluus hesitated. This was not something he’d ever discussed straight out even with Liss. He was quite sure she’d guessed that using the ship as a way out was a possibility — so, for that matter, had Thovin, apparently, which kind of made you wonder who else might regard it as obvious (there was a slightly sweat-inducing idea) — but there was nothing to gain for either of them in saying it out loud.
“No,” Sal said, deciding against bringing that particular truth blinking into the light. “You know, I actually thought that maybe Thovin’s a kind of spy himself.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he reports to the Hierchon direct, or at least to the big guy’s top intelligence people. I think all this rough-as-bricks bluff stuff is just a way of getting people to drop their guard with him. Fucker could be a traitor-sniffer.”
Liss fitted her long body against his, rubbing slowly, gently. “He didn’t sniff you, then?”
“How could he?” Sal said. “For I am straight and true.”
“Ah, yes.”
Sometimes, if she was still holding him when she was falling asleep, he would feel her fingers making strange patterns on his side or back, as though her hands were trying to spell out some secret code of love. Then she would be asleep and stop, or jerk awake, as though embarrassed, and roll away and curl up.
* * *
Groggy again. Aboard the Velpin. Still. No idea yet how long they had taken. The truetwin had just told the three of them that it would take “some days’ to get to where they were going. Then, to Fassin and Y’sul when the Sceuri couldn’t see, they had signal-whispered, “That thing about Just Trust Us applies to you two, too. But shh, right?”
Y’sul and Fassin had exchanged looks.
Some days. The travel time was near-instant, of course, portal to portal. It was the getting to and from the portals at either end that took days. That and, perhaps, some sleight-of-course manoeuvres to fool anybody watching or following and trying to spot the hidden portals that way. Who knew? Quercer Janath did, of course, but they weren’t telling, wouldn’t even contemplate any arguments about letting him or even just Y’sul stay awake during these bizarre, so casually-taken galaxy-spanning transfers.
Watching, following. How could you have all those ship movements and never be seen? Telescopes of every wavelength, gravity sensors, neutrino patternisers, something somewhere in practically every developed system that kept a devastatingly detailed close eye on every sort of signal that ever emanated from space close, near, mid or far: something had to show up. Or did they only have portals in undeveloped systems, so that they had less chance of being observed?
No, they had them in Ulubis and Ashum.
Watching, following. Followed by something small enough to be even less visible, perhaps? Somebody, something must have followed a Dweller ship in-system, somewhere, and suddenly found itself plunging into a secret wormhole… And yet, apparently, nobody and nothing ever had.
So casual, so lackadaisical, so la-la-la; could it all be a perfect, never-failing act? Could the Dwellers all really be geniuses at acting, brilliant at stealth, flawless exponents of the disciplines required to keep complete discipline for every single solitary journey-transfer-jump-whatever? Dear reason and fate, they’d had ten billion years to get perfect at anything they wanted. Who knew what skills they’d developed to perfection in that time? (Yet there was still chaos, extreme chance, the simple stacking-up of odds that something had to go wrong sometime, no matter how close to perfection you could get…)
Coming round, slowly. Rovruetz, Direaliete. Shit, more names to deal with, more places to take in, another damn step along the way. He would die forever following this elusive fuck of a Dweller, or accumulate such dislocation, accrue so much summed grogginess that he’d forget what the whole insane quest was for, and find Leisicrofe one day, finally, when it was all too late anyway, and just stare at the fellow, utterly unable to recall what it was he wanted to ask him or what it might be that the Dweller could possibly have that would be remotely interesting or important to him.
The passenger compartment of the Velpin was mostly taken up by the esuit of the Sceuri called the Aumapile of Aumapile: a huge white-stippled black lozenge like a strange distorting viewport into space. Fassin, waking slowly, feeling grubby and sore as usual, couldn’t even see Y’sul or the anyway useless screen on the far wall.
“Urgh!” the giant black esuit exclaimed. “So that is unconsciousness? How disagreeable. And I strongly suspect inherently so.”
Fassin was glad that somebody agreed. He started checking out the arrowhead’s systems as he warmed them up again. The left manipulator arm was proving sticky, the self-repair mechanisms reaching the limits of their abilities. On past form it would sort of half-work, jerkily, for a few real-time months and then jam completely. He supposed he was lucky he’d got this far without any equipment failure, especially given the punishment the little gascraft had taken since the flight from Third Fury.
“And yet interesting!” the Sceuri announced, voice booming round the near-full space. The Aumapile of Aumapile was even louder than Y’sul. “Hmm,” it said. “Yes, interesting, more than certainly. Are you two awake yet or am I first up? Ha-ha!”
“Either awake or having a very noisy nightmare,” Y’sul said testily and unseen from the creature’s other side.
“Ditto,” said Fassin.
“Super! So, are we there yet?”
They were.
And they weren’t.
When the fuzzy screen cleared, it showed they were in the middle layers of a gas-giant atmosphere. The Velpin had done some high-speed spinning after all, and the zapping-unconscious had been more rough and ready than before. They had taken two days to get where they were going.