The last few of the earlier attackers immediately fled but were either destroyed or were disabled and then self-destructed.
Two days before the attack took place, Fassin had been sort of in space, sort of on Sepekte, sitting in a revolving restaurant at the summit of the Borquille Equatower having dinner with Taince Yarabokin, who was due to head back to the Summed Fleet Academy the following day after an extended compassionate leave following the death of her mother. Fassin had just come out of a month-long trawl through some of the seedier, less salubrious entertainment palaces of “skem, Sepekte’s second city. He felt jaded. Old, even.
He and Taince had kept in touch since the incident in the ruined ship, though they’d never become especially close, despite a night spent together shortly afterwards. Saluus had kind of drifted away from both of them subsequently, then headed off early to a finishing college half the galaxy away, then spent decades being a problem playboy son to his vexed father — behaving more or less continually on a galactic scale the way Fassin did only intermittently on a systemic one — and returning to Ulubis very occasionally for brief, unannounced visits.
A Guard Rescue suborb had arrived at the ruined ship lying crumpled on ’glantine’s North Waste Land a few minutes behind the Navarchy craft Taince had summoned. Its personnel had entered the alien ship and found Ilen’s broken body. There was an inquiry. Sal was fined by the civil authorities for violating the ship’s interior more than had been strictly required for the purposes of physical sanctuary from the external threat, while the Navarchy Military had awarded Taince extra course credits for her actions.
Fassin found himself copping for some sort of civil bravery award thanks to Taince’s testimony but managed to avoid the ceremony. He never did mention the piece of twisted metal that Sal had stolen from the wreck, but Taince had broached the subject herself over dinner in the Equatower. She’d known at the time, she just hadn’t found herself capable of being bothered enough to take it off Sal again. Let him have his pathetic trophy.
“Probably their equivalent of a door knob or a coat hook,” she said ruefully. “But one gets you ten, by the time it was sitting in Sal’s locker or on his desk it was the ship’s control yoke or the main-armament ‘fire’ button.”
Taince looked out at the distant horizon and near surface of Sepekte, sliding past as the restaurant revolved, providing the appearance of gravity in this gravity-cancelled habitat, anchored at the space limit of a forty kilo-klick cable whose other end fell to ground in Borquille, Sepekte’s capital city.
“Shit, you knew all the time,” Fassin said, nodding. “I suppose I should have expected that. Not much ever got past you.”
Taince had gone on to become a high-flier in every sense, carving a perfect career through the Navarchy Military and being chosen for the Summed Fleet, one of the Mercatoria’s highest divisions and one into which very few humans had ever been invited. Commander Taince Yarabokin looked young, had aged well.
The three of them had.
Sal, despite his multifarious debaucheries, could afford the very best treatments and plausibly access some supposedly forbidden to him, so he looked like he’d lived through a lot fewer of the hundred and three years which had actually elapsed since Ilen’s death. Lately there was even a rumour that he was thinking of settling down, becoming a good son, learning the business, applying himself.
Taince had spent decades at close to light speed pursuing the Beyonders’ craft and attacking their bases, fighting quickly, ageing slowly.
Fassin had joined the family firm and become a Slow Seer after all, so spent his own time-expanded decades conversing with and gradually extracting information from the Dwellers of Nasqueron. He’d had, like Saluus, his own wild years, been a roaring lad ripping through the highs and dives of ’glantine, Sepekte and beyond, taking in a not so Grand Tour of his own round some of the supposedly civilised galaxy’s more colourful regions, losing money and illusions, gaining weight and some small amount of wisdom. But his indulgences had been on a smaller scale than Sal’s, he supposed, and certainly took place over a shorter timescale. Before too long he came home, sobered up and calmed down, took the training and became a Seer.
He still had his wild interludes, but they were few and far between, if never quite enough of either for the taste of his uncle Slovius.
Even in the millennia-hallowed halls of Seerdom, he had kept on making waves, upsetting people. The trend over the last fifteen hundred years — the years of Uncle Slovius’s reign — had favoured virtual delving over the direct method. Virtual or remote delving meant staying comatose and closely cared-for in a clinic-clean Seer faculty complex on Third Fury, the close-orbit moon riding barely above the outer reaches of Nasqueron’s hazy atmosphere, to communicate from there with the Dwellers beneath by a combination of high-res NMR scanners, laser links, comms satellites and, finally, mechanical remotes which did the dirty dangerous bit, keeping close contact with the flights and flocks and pods and schools and individuals of the Dwellers themselves.
Fassin had been a ringleader in a small rebellion, insisting, with a few other young Seers, on sliding into cramped arrowhead gascraft, breathing in gillfluid, accepting tubes and valves into every major orifice and surrendering body and fate to a little ship that contained the Seer, accepted the gees and poison and radiation and everything else and took him or her physically into the gas-giant’s atmosphere, the better to earn the respect and confidence of the creatures who lived there, the better to do the job and learn the stuff.
There had been deaths, setbacks, arguments, bannings and strikes, but eventually, largely on the back of unarguably better delving results and more raw data (unarguably better delving results in the sense that they were manifestly superior compared with what had gone before, not unarguably better in the sense that the old guard couldn’t claim this would all have happened anyway if everybody had just stuck to their ways, which were probably what had really prompted this long-overdue improvement in the first place) the youngsters had triumphed, and delving the hard way, Real Delving, hands metaphorically dirty, became the norm, not the exception. It was, anyway, more exciting, more risky but also so much more rewarding, more fun for the Seer concerned, as well as being more viewer-friendly for those who chose to pick up the edited, distilled, time-delayed feed that the more progressive Seer houses had been putting out to the entsworks for the last half-millennium or so.
“You have made it into something like a sport,” Slovius had said sadly one day, when he and Fassin had been fishing together in a dust-boat on ’glantine’s Sea of Fines. “It used to be more of the mind.”
Nevertheless, from being a steadfast, heels-in critic of the whole Real Delve movement, Slovius, who had always been quick to seize any opportunity to advance the interests of his Sept, had become a sort of — appropriately — remote champion, supporting Fassin and eventually putting the full weight of Sept Bantrabal behind him and his fellow revolutionaries. That both Fassin and Slovius had been right, and their Sept flourished to become arguably the most productive and respected of the twelve Septs of Ulubis system — and so by implication one of the foremost Seer houses in the galaxy — had been the single most satisfying achievement of Slovius’s time as Chief Seer and paterfamilias of Sept Bantrabal.