Fassin had to search out a specialist alien-watcher service to find out that, starting about thirty-plus days earlier, the Ulubis system had been invaded and taken over by the Epiphany-5 Discon or Starveling Cult forces under the leadership of the Archimandrite Luseferous. The last significant, organised Ulubine Mercatorial resistance had ended just a dozen or so days ago following the formal surrender by the Hierchon Ormilla after the destruction of a city on Sepekte and a habitat in orbit around it. A counter-attack by several squadrons of the Summed Fleet was expected to commence within the next few dozen days or so. The latest was that a peace and cooperation conference was taking place about now in the Starveling ship Luseferous VII, in orbit about Nasqueron.
Fassin had sent a message which would at least attempt to find Valseir. He would wait a bit and see if that raised a reply. He’d thought of contacting Setstyin, but then he remembered, vaguely, that somebody had said something to him that had made him uneasy about the Dweller. No, wait, it had been the other way round, hadn’t it? Setstyin had always been a charming and helpful friend. Setstyin had warned him against the old Dweller who’d been in charge of the great spherical… thing that had risen out of the clouds and demolished the Mercatoria’s raiding force at the GasClipper regatta. Yes, that made more sense. He wondered why he couldn’t remember in more detail. It was strange. He’d always had a really good memory.
Quercer Janath seemed to be surrounded by well-wishers wanting to know more about the Voehn craft. The truetwin Dweller had seen Fassin looking at them through the crowd, and waved. Fassin had waved back.
He’d watched Y’sul being placed into the ambulance skiff and tried to work out what he knew and didn’t know, what he could and could not remember. He could have gone with Y’sul in the ambulance, he supposed, but he felt a need to get away for a while, to be alone for a time.
He’d come up here to see the stars, and wait, and think, and maybe do a bit of mathematical analysis.
He took the little image-leaf out of its locker in the gascraft’s flank. He looked at it. Since whatever had happened aboard the Protreptic, the little gascraft couldn’t see as well as it used to, but its close-up detail vision was good enough on one side for the image of blue sky and white clouds to be perfectly clear. He zoomed in, rechecking the image he had stored in the… The image wasn’t there in the craft’s memories.
That was strange. He had the feeling that he had recorded the image and already half-deciphered something that was hidden inside it. He was sure he had. It had seemed really important at the time, too, he was certain.
Fassin tried really hard to think back to what had occurred after they were attacked by the Voehn ship. He knew they’d been captured and interrogated and the Voehn had messed around with his brain and with the gascraft’s biomind and memories. Then a ship that the Ythyn had sent to rescue them had attacked the Voehn ship and — somehow — he and Y’sul and the truetwin had overpowered the surviving Voehn crew. They’d overpowered Voehn?
How had that happened? The Ythyn ship had been able to distract the Voehn, and the Velpin had played a part too, some sort of anti-piracy automatics kicking in and helping to take on the Voehn. Quercer Janath had been distinctly cagey about what sort of techniques their old ship had used against the Voehn. Fassin had no idea. Maybe it had happened the way they said, maybe not. Maybe the Velpin had had an AI aboard and that had wasted the Voehn, only Quercer Janath didn’t want people to know about it. They could have told him practically anything and he’d have believed them, the Voehn had messed with his memories so badly.
He remembered sitting on the steps of a temple looking out over a wide, slow-moving river, talking to an old… man? An old Dweller? This was quite a vivid image, rather than a linear strand of memory. That had to have happened in some form of VR, didn’t it? Maybe that old man had been the representation of the Velpin’s AI. Perhaps that was who or what he had been talking to, or at least met.
He tried to concentrate, and looked down at the image-leaf again. He’d been given this by Valseir. Was that right? It had been a sort of calling card, a letter of introduction, leading him to… He seemed to feel it had led him to Valseir, but that didn’t make sense.
No, wait: the house in the depths, and the old wandering Dweller. He’d given him the image-leaf. And it had led him, somehow, to Valseir. But there was something else. He’d discovered something else. He’d woken up thinking about this, before the wormhole transition. There was something hidden in the image-leaf. A message, a code.
Fassin looked round the empty platform. There was nobody else here. He let the little gascraft’s image processors drink in the view shown on the image-leaf in as much detail as it could offer. Various routines started running. In a few minutes, his gaze was torn away from the sparse but familiar-looking starscape above. He looked at the results.
There had been something in there.
It looked like alien algebra.
There was about a page and a half of it. It looked like one long equation, or maybe three or four shorter ones.
He felt very excited. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but he had an idea that this linked into the Dweller List. The details evaded him, but he knew that he’d been looking for the Transform that was supposed to open up the famous List, and maybe — just possibly — this piece of alien mathematics had something to do with it. Maybe what he had before him here was the Transform, though that was a little difficult to believe.
Fassin tried to figure out what the symbols in front of him might mean, but couldn’t even get started. The gascraft’s comprehensively mucked-around memories might once have contained something which would have sent him in the right direction, but they didn’t any more.
He linked with the city’s data nets, synched with an equatorial university library and looked up a data reservoir specialising in alien mathematics. He chose a couple of symbols at random and pinged them to the database. It answered immediately, with references.
What he was looking at was expressed in Translatory V, a pan-species, universal notation of just under two billion years age, devised by the long-extinct Wopuld from earlier Dweller elements. He downloaded a full translation suite.
He had to stop, and look out over the cloud tops. He was experiencing a strange mix of emotions.
This might be the thing he’d been sent to look for, the very object of his mission. Their mission, rather; he ought not to forget Colonel Hatherence. This could well be what he’d been looking for, all that time. And yet, if the Mercatoria, or at least the Ulubine part of it, had hoped that this would save them, then it hadn’t. He’d got back too late, and the invasion had already happened. It was all over.
And there was so much he seemed to have forgotten! What had the Voehn done to him? Y’sul had been badly injured but apart from the effects of his healing coma he seemed — and professed himself to be — fine, mentally. Quercer Janath didn’t seem to have suffered at all. Maybe that was just luck, or something to do with being a truetwin — he didn’t know.
Still, there was this to be done, this deciphering. It might still lead to something momentous. The invasion might have already happened but the counter-attack was still to take place, and anyway, there was his own take on the rights and wrongs of what was going on. He would still rather the Beyonders had the information, if there was any useful information to be had, in the equation.