“Seer Taak is a young man, though born centuries ago,” the image said. “He has spent a productive and dutiful career with the gas-giant Dwellers of the planet Nasqueron. I understand that many of you may have heard of him already. He has now been given the rank of major within the Shrievalty Ocula, for reasons which will become clear in due course.”
Fassin, still feeling very much looked-at, noticed that Colonel Somjomion, the human female who was acting chief of staff of the Shrievalty contingent in the Ulubis system, smiled cautiously at him from the podium across the chamber when the holo-gram said this. Unsure whether the Shrievalty saluted or not, Fassin rose fractionally in his seat, and nodded formally.
Oh, fuck, were his precise thoughts.
The image floating above the cooking-pot AI said, “The reason that Seer — Major — Taak is here today to hear what I have had to tell you all is that it was something which he discovered — stumbled over might be an equally accurate description, with no disrespect to Seer Taak — that has led to my being here in the first place.”
Oh, fucking hell. I always thought delving would be the death of me but I assumed it would be an equipment failure, not something like this. On the other hand, that smile from Colonel Somjomion had been restrained, even careful, not mean or mocking. Might live yet.
“Which brings us, of course, to the real, or at least the most pressing, reason for my appearance here, in this almost unprecedented form,” the hologram said, then made a show of taking a deep breath.
It looked around them all, slowly, before saying, “Ulubis, I’m sure we would all agree, is a pleasant and fairly favoured system.” It paused again.
Fassin was listening fairly hard at this point, and would have taken decent odds on the literal truth of the old you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop saying. “And,” the projection said with a smile, radiantly confident that it now had their full attention, “as a centre of Dweller Studies, it is not without significance galactically, unquestionably from an antiquarian and intellectual standpoint.” Another pause. It occurred to Fassin that an AI controlling a hologram could put a quite literal twinkle in its eye. “However, one might think it reasonable to ask — again, with no disrespect intended, or, I hope, taken — why Ulubis has attracted the attention of our new-found adversaries from Cluster Epiphany Five. One might even — knowing the importance that the Mercatoria attaches to reconnecting all the many, many systems which have been without Arteria access all these millennia — wonder why the expedition from Zenerre to Ulubis with a new portal was dispatched with such alacrity, given the arguably still greater claims that more populous, more classically strategically important and more at-the-time obviously threatened systems might have had upon the resources and expertise of our esteemed colleagues in the Engineering faculty.
“One might also pause to give thought to the reasons why the Engineership Est-taun Zhiffir is accompanied by those elements of the Summed Fleet of which my original has the honour of being part — why, indeed, the Eship Est-taun Zhiffir is escorted by such a preponderance of force at all.” The hologram raised its head, looked all around again. “It might not even be totally unreasonable to call into question the apparently unchallenged assumptions and settled conclusions concerning the destruction of the Ulubis portal by the Beyonders, over two centuries ago.”
That caused a little frisson in the chamber, Fassin noticed. Is any of this still about me and anything I might have found? he wondered. The more I hear, the more I hope it isn’t.
“There is one circumstance, one nexus of contingent information,” the image said with a broad, unamused smile and something like relish, “which is, we strongly suspect, behind all of this.” The projection turned to look directly at the Hierchon Ormilla. “Sir, at this point I must ask that those not specifically cleared to be present at this meeting be withdrawn. I believe we might make an exception for the troopers, providing their ear mikes are turned off, but I would be disobeying my orders if I continued with those not invited still present.”
“Admiral Quile,” the Hierchon boomed, with just sufficient emphasis, “I vouch for all those present who were inadvertently excluded from the clearance list you refer to. You may continue.”
“And were it up to me, sir, that would of course be more than enough reason to proceed without care or reservation,” the Admiral’s image said. “However, devastated though I may be at being seen to offer even the slightest suggestion of an insult to your esteemed court, I am specifically forbidden to continue, bound as I am by the orders of the Complector Council.”
Ouch, Fassin thought. He almost felt sorry for the Hierchon. He’d not just had rank pulled on him, he’d been made to look small. A Sarcomage outranked a Hierchon, and was in turn answerable to a Complector, any single one of which — supremely powerful as they were in every other exercise and iteration of power within the civilised galaxy — themselves had at least to take into account the will of the Complector Council. The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting round those.
Hierchon Ormilla took his defeat with a degree of grace and within a few minutes the chamber was emptied of half its earlier occupants. The stepped sequence of podia in front of the Hierchon’s imposing esuit now looked positively bare. All the court officials and courtiers had departed, with much muttering and the single highest quotient of affronted dignity Fassin had ever witnessed, by several factors. The military bigwigs were still present, but even their on-podium ranks had been depleted as Colonel Somjomion of the Shrievalty and Clerk-Regnant Voriel of the Cessoria were reduced to stepping down to floor level so that they could operate the two most important pieces of equipment monitoring the cooking-pot device embodying the AI. The mirror-finish troopers still stood in a wide circle beyond, armour locked in at-ease, deaf now.
While all this had been going on, Fassin had been left to sit there, not knowing what to think. He knew what he ought to be thinking; he ought to be thinking, What the fuck could I ever have stumbled across that possibly warranted this level of right-to-the-top paranoia and secrecy? It was, however, hard to know what to think. He also knew what he ought to feeclass="underline" fear. There, he was fine; he had a superabundance of high weapon-grade trepidation. “Thank you,” the image of the Admiral said. “Now then,” it said, looking round all those who remained. “I have a question for you. What do you know of something called the Dweller List?” It held up one hand. “Rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer. Those of you who wish, feel free to consult your screens or equivalent. Take a moment.”
There was a flurry of distant tapping. The Dweller List? thought Fassin. Oh, fucking hell; not that shit.
The hologram smiled. “Let me in due time tell you what we at this end — as we design and record this signal and projection — consider important regarding this subject.”
Fassin had heard of the Dweller List, of course; no Seer hadn’t. Unfortunately, lots of laypeople had heard of the List, too, and so it had become one of those tired, inward-groan-producing subjects that people tended to raise when they met a Seer at a party, along with other hoary old cliché-questions such as, “Do Dwellers really hunt their own children?” and, “Are they really as old as they say they are?”
The Dweller List was a collection of coordinates. It had turned up, as far as anyone could be sure, towards the end of the Burster War four hundred million years earlier, and was probably well out of date even then. Allegedly, the list detailed all the Dwellers’ own secret arteria portals. According to the story, these had been under development since the time of the Long Collapse, when the Dwellers had decided that the other species — or groups of species — with which they were forced to share the galaxy couldn’t be trusted to keep their own or jointly owned “hole networks safe, and so the Dwellers had better construct an arteria web which they controlled — and which preferably nobody else knew about — if they wanted to voyage from gas-giant to gas-giant reliably and without fuss.