In the meantime, one last throw, one final chance to find what they’d come for. All far too rushed and desperate, but — like all the greatest leaders — the Archimandrite knew that he was at his best when he was under pressure, when the odds were against him and victory was far from certain. Of course, this didn’t happen very often to him because he didn’t allow it to — always better to win easily — but he’d had his share of narrow victories and pressure situations in the past and come out on top, and he hadn’t forgotten and he certainly hadn’t lost his touch. He knew he would prevail. He always did. Victory was the only thinkable option.
He could do it. He just had to be decisive and determined. That was what he was best at. It was almost better this way; with so little time, with just the one chance, there was no question that it had to be an all-or-nothing, no-holds-barred approach. There was simply no time to go through all the other more “reasonable’ techniques. Forget playing it calm and quiet, fuck diplomacy, abandon all thought of being reasonable and hoping people would be reasonable in return. Just fucking do it.
The Archimandrite had made his preparations as best he could. The tacticians thought the first elements of the Summed Fleet could be hurtling past at near-light speed in less than a dozen days, with the rest not far behind. No more waiting. It was now or never.
They were in the belly of the great ship. The hideous, swirling, hallucinogenic face of Nasqueron lay beneath their feet, visible through diamond film. The Archimandrite had risked coming aboard the Luseferous VII for this. If there was some attack on it — unlikely, but not impossible, so far ahead of the main part of the Summed Fleet squadrons — then it would almost certainly have to come from above, and the sheer bulk of the vessel ought to protect them. He had the Rapacious waiting immediately underneath the main hull nearby, linked by a short ship-to-ship. He could be out of his impressively large seat, across the chamber and aboard and away in a minute. To be on the safe side, he had dressed in an emergency esuit, a thin, constrictive but reassuring presence beneath his formal robes. The collar-helmet was hidden by his cowl, which, like the rest of his outer garment, was made of tanned Voehn blizzardskin.
Cradled against the Rapacious, now that it had been fully checked for bugs and bombs, was the ship that the Liss woman had used to bring the man Saluus Kehar to him. The tech people were very impressed with it. They thought it could probably outrun any ship the other side had. Luseferous would have been more impressed if it could outrun any missile or beam the other side had.
They were here for a conference, a meeting ostensibly to discuss how the new regime in power within the rest of Ulubis system might liaise with the Dwellers.
The Hierchon Ormilla was present, as was the rest of the surviving Mercatoria top brass. There hadn’t really been time to start serious alterations on the Mercatorial power structure, and when he’d found that, as the Beyonders had reported, the Mercatoria was disliked and resented by most of its citizens\subjects, but not actively hated by them, Luseferous had left the bulk of the civil authorities in place. The main players had all pledged allegiance to him, apart from Fleet Admiral Brimiaice, who’d been killed in action, the Shrievalty colonel Somjomion, who’d disappeared and was probably on one of the ships that had run away, and the Cessorian Clerk-Regnant, Voriel, who’d chosen death rather than what he seemed to regard as the dishonour of recanting his religious vows. Idiot. Luseferous had shot him himself.
He’d had some of the people who’d been involved in the Dweller Embassy — set up a few months before the invasion -brief him on what to expect from the floats. Most of the Embassy people had been killed when the commander of the ship they were in had refused to surrender, but a few had survived. Luseferous wasn’t sure he trusted them, though.
Three of his own top half-dozen commanders were present too. The rest were engaged elsewhere, keeping an armed presence wherever it might be needed and preparing for the anticipated high-speed pass-through of the Summed Fleet’s advance units.
No Beyonders, of course. They were still in shock from his unconscionable behaviour in the matter of the single small city and a habitat full of artists, weirdos and do-gooders. He must tell them he’d only chosen the city — whatever it was called, he’d forgotten — because it was on the coast and sheltered by mountains, so that he could do his sculpting trick again. That would horrify them all over again, with luck.
The — delegates? representatives? whatever the fuck they were — from the Dweller side were an unprepossessing bunch. They looked big and impressive, especially in their giant wheel-like esuits, but there was the — apparently perennial — Dweller problem of finding somebody with sufficient authority to speak for a whole planet. He’d learned early on in his career that Dwellers were best avoided. Leave them alone and they’d leave you alone. He wouldn’t have chosen to have anything whatsoever to do with the damn floats if he could possibly have avoided it. But he couldn’t, so he was doing his best.
Present were three Dwellers. All were supposedly as senior as each other, and they were each alone — no aides or secretaries or underlings of any sort, which with any other species would have indicated that these were not serious people at all but with Dwellers meant nothing in particular.
They were Feurish, some sort of political scholar who spoke for the great red-brown equatorial band they could see beneath them, Chintsion, who was the current chief-of-chiefs of an umbrella organisation representing all their clubs and other voluntary organisations (sounded insulting, but allegedly their “clubs’ included their supposedly highly effective military) and Peripule, who was the City Administrator of their largest city, though this was not a capital city in the accepted sense, and apparently being voted to be City Administrator was regarded as an imposition, not an honour or a chance to enjoy power. They all had grandiose-sounding titles that didn’t really mean anything. All they did was tell you how old the Dwellers were.
The Archimandrite would have preferred more obviously senior people — if such a thing existed in Dweller society — and more of them, but he had to work with what was to hand, especially given the time constraints. They did have other Dwellers on the Luseferous VII, however — over three hundred of them. Two whole shiploads of adolescents and young adults had been welcomed aboard for an extended tour as part of what sounded like a school trip for grown-ups. An alien-ship enthusiasts club, apparently. He would never have allowed this normally.
Luseferous was fairly certain that he didn’t really have the Dwellers’ full attention. His alien-watching experts advised him that the majority of the population of Nasqueron was unconcerned about the small war that had just taken place and the presence of the invasion fleet. In fact, the majority didn’t even know what had happened and would be unlikely to care. The planet’s news services, such as they were, were full of reports concerning something called a Formal War taking place between two of the atmospheric bands. This appeared to be a form of extreme sport played out on a vast scale, rather than what Luseferous would regard as a proper war. They were playing.
Well, he would just have to see what he could do to make them take proper notice of him.
Suspended over the vast view, the attendees seemed to hang as though about to fall. Above them, on a network of gantries, Luseferous’s personal guard stalked in exoskels, the pads of their claw-feet stalking with a steady, silent precision.
“Let’s get to the point,” Luseferous said after some desultory inconsequentialities had gone on far too long. “We want the Seer Fassin Taak,” he told the Dwellers. “Even more to the point, we want certain information he’s supposed to have been looking for.”