Fassin thought for a moment, trying to calm himself down. Remember this could be a joke. The very fact that a Complector’s authority had been invoked almost made it more likely that it was, it was just so preposterous.
On the other hand, he had the disquieting feeling, prompted by a half-remembered school lesson he probably ought to have been paying more attention to, that falsely invoking a Complector’s authority was potentially a capital offence.
Think, think. Forget the Complector; back to the moment. What assumptions might he be making here? Any of the ego? (He’d had this psychological check-sum routine drilled into him at college, where he’d scored high on what was usually called the Me-me-me! scale. Though not as high as Saluus Kehar.) Well, he could think of one egotistical assumption he might be making immediately.
“How many other people are being similarly summoned?” he asked.
“By emissarial projection, only yourself.”
Fassin sat back. Well, that certainly felt pleasing, but he suspected it was probably a much worse sign than it appeared.
“And by other means?”
“You will be joining a group of senior officials in Borquille, capital city of Sepekte, for further briefing. This group will number approximately thirty.”
“And what will be the subject of this briefing?”
“Information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”
“How long am I likely to be away from home? Do I just go to Sepekte, get ‘briefed’ and come back? What?”
“Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice.”
“So I should expect to be away a while?”
“Officers of the Shrievalty Ocula are expected to undertake extended missions with minimal notice. Further information regarding what you ask is not carried by this construct.”
Fassin sighed. “So is that it? You’ve been sent to tell me to go to Sepekte? All this… kerfuffle, for that?”
“No. You are to be informed that this is a matter of the utmost consequence and gravity, in which you may be asked to play a significant part. Also that information has come to light which indicates that there is a profound and imminent threat to Ulubis system. No further details concerning this are carried by this construct. You are commanded to report to the palace of the Hierchon in Borquille, capital of Sepekte, principal planet of the Ulubis system, for further briefing, no later than hour Fifteen tomorrow evening, the ninth of Duty, Borquille-Sepekte local time. Gchron, 6.61…’ The sphere started to restate the time of Fassin’s appointment at the Hierchon’s palace the following day in a variety of different formats, as if to remove any last excuse for him not getting there on time. Fassin sat, staring at a beige-blank section of polarised window on the far side of the chamber, trying to decide what the hell to make of all this.
Oh, fuck was the best he could come up with.
“…The eighteenth of November, AD 4034, rHuman,” the glowing orb concluded. “Transport will be provided. Baggage allowance is one large bag, carryable, plus luggage required to transport full formal court dress for your presentation to the Hierchon. A gee-suit should be worn for the outgoing journey. Any further questions?”
Verpych thought for a moment. “Military-grade hysteria.” Slovius shifted in his tub-chair. “Explain, please?”
“They are likely over-correcting for earlier dismissiveness, sir.”
“Somebody’s been telling them there’s a problem, they’ve been pooh-poohing it, then suddenly woken up to the threat and panicked?” Fassin suggested. Verpych nodded once.
“The decisional dynamics of highly rigid power structures make an interesting study subject,” Tchayan Olmey said. Fassin’s old tutor and mentor smiled across at him, a calm, gauntly grey presence. The four of them sat at a large round table in Slovius’s old study, Slovius himself supported in a large semi-enclosed device that looked like a cross between an ancient hip bath and a small flier. Fassin thought his uncle’s tusked, whiskered face looked more animated, and even more human, than it had for years. Slovius had announced at the start of the meeting that for the duration of whatever emergency they might be involved in, his slow demise was being halted; he was fully back in charge of Sept Bantrabal. Fassin had been appalled to find that there was some small, mean, self-aggrandising part of him which felt disappointed and even slightly angry that his uncle wasn’t going to keep slipping into the hazy, woozily uncaring senility that led to death.
“The phrase the projection used was ‘profound and imminent threat’,” Fassin reminded them. That was what had spooked him, he supposed, that was why he’d suggested this meeting, told them what he had. If there really was a threat to Ulubis system, he wanted, at the very least, Sept Bantrabal’s senior people to know about it. The only person missing from the conference was Fassin’s mother, who was on a year-long retreat in a Cessorian habitat somewhere in the system’s Kuiper belt, ten light days away and therefore profoundly out of the discussion. They had discussed whether she should be contacted and warned that there was some sort of system-wide threat, but without details this seemed premature and possibly even counter-productive.
Olmey shrugged. “The overreaction might well extend to the language used to describe the perceived problem,” she said.
“There has been a recent increase in Beyonder attacks,” Verpych said thoughtfully.
For the two centuries after the loss of its portal, the sporadic Beyonder assaults on Ulubis — as a rule against the system’s outskirts and military targets — had declined to such an extent they were barely even of nuisance value. Certainly there were far fewer attacks than there had been in the years before the wormhole’s destruction. For millennia, almost every system in the Mercatoria had been getting used to these generally irritating, rarely devastating raids — they tied up ships and materiel and kept the whole meta-civilisation slightly on edge but they had yet to produce any real atrocities — and it had come as something of a relief to the people of Ulubis, a kind of unlooked-for bonus, that for some perverse reason the system’s temporary isolation had so far been a time when the direct military pressure on it had seemed to decrease rather than been cranked up.
Over the last year or so, however, there had been a slight increase in the number of attacks — the first time in two centuries that the yearly number had risen rather than fallen — and those assaults had been of a slightly different nature compared to those that people had more or less got used to. The targets had not all been military units or items of infrastructure, for one thing: a comet-cloud mining co-op had been destroyed, some belt and cloud ships had disappeared or been discovered drifting, empty or slagged, one small cruise liner had just disappeared between Nasqueron and the system’s outermost gas-giant, and a single heavy-missile ship had appeared suddenly in the mid-system half a year ago, travelling at eighty per cent light speed and targeted straight at Borquille. It had been picked off with ease, but it had been an alarming development.
Slovius wobbled in his tub-chair again, slopping a little water onto the wooden floor. “Is there anything that you are not allowed to tell us, nephew?” he asked, then made a sound that sounded disturbingly like a chortle.
“Nothing specific, sir. I’m not supposed to talk to anybody about any part of this except to… further my mission, which at the moment consists of getting to Borquille by Fifteen tomorrow. Obviously, I’ve chosen to interpret this as allowing me to talk to you three. Though I would ask that it goes no further.”