“Slow them down too much, apparently!” Fassin yelled back.
The Dreadnought’s captain had cut the starboard-most engine-set to quarter-power to give the slave-children a better chance of completing their repairs without too many casualties. The ship’s giant rudders, mounted on the octiform tailplane assembly just aft of the engines, were appropriately deployed to compensate for the resulting skewed distribution of thrust.
Fassin glimpsed an escort cruiser through a short-lived break in the clouds a few kilometres away. Other Dreadnoughts and their escorting screens of minor craft were spread out around them in a front a hundred kilometres across and thirty deep. A slave-child near one of the vane tips lost its grip and whirled off the end with a distant shriek, crashing into the inner edge of the outer prop guard. Its scream cut off and the limp body was caught in the combined prop wash and sent whirling back, narrowly avoiding a further collision with the tail assembly. It disappeared behind a giant vertical fin. When it came back into sight it was already starting to spiral slowly down into the enveloping cloud haze. None of the skiff-riding Dwellers spared it a second glance. The dozens of remaining slave-children continued to inch their way along the giant blades.
Fassin looked at the colonel. “Woops,” he said.
They were hitching a ride to the war zone.
A TunnelCar had taken them from Y’sul’s house — well, two TunnelCars, a second proving necessary to carry all Y’sul’s baggage and extra clothing, plus Sholish — to the Central Station. From there they joined a long-distance train of ninety or so cars making its way towards the border of Zone Zero — the equatorial zone — and Band A, twenty thousand kilometres away. Y’sul spent a large part of the journey complaining about his hangover.
“You claim to have been around in your present form for ten billion years and you still haven’t developed a decent hangover cure?” Hatherence had asked, incredulous.
They’d been floating in a restaurant car, waiting for the galley to figure out the exact chemical composition of oerileithe food.
Y’sul, his voice muffled, issuing from within a translucent coverall that was the Dweller equivalent of dark glasses, had replied, “Suffering is regarded as part of the process, as is the mentioning of it. As is, one might add, the sympathy one receives from one’s companions.”
The colonel had looked sceptical. “I thought you felt no pain?”
“Mere physical pain, no. Ours is the psychic pain of realising that the world is not really as splendid as it seemed the evening before, and that one may have made something of a fool of oneself. And so on. I wouldn’t expect a little dweller to understand.”
They’d detrained at Nuersotse, a sphere city riding mid-altitude in the boiling ragged fringes of the equatorial Belt’s northern limits. Nuersotse was barely thirty kilometres in diameter, relatively dense by Dweller city standards and built for strength and manoeuvrability. High-speed transport craft left in convoys every hour or so, as one of the Band Border Wheels swung near.
They’d crossed on the Nuersotsian-Guephuthen Band Border Wheel One, a colossal, articulated structure two thousand kilometres across held rotating on the border of two atmospheric gas-giant bands, protruding a kilo-klick into each, its whole enormous mass spun by the contra-rotating gas-streams on either side. Band Border Wheels were the largest moving structures most gas-giant planets possessed, if one discounted the globe-girdling CloudTunnel networks. These only moved in the trivial sense of being whisked round the globe at a few hundred klicks an hour like everything else within a planetary band. To a Dweller that was stationary.
Band Border Wheels really spun, transferring transport and materials from one band to another with minimal turbulence and in relative safety, with the added bonus that they produced prodigious amounts of electricity from their spindle drive-shafts. These protruded from the upper and lower hubs, vast hemispheres whose lower rims were pocked with microwave dishes hundreds of metres across, geared up to tear round at blurring, mind-numbing speeds and beaming their power to an outer collecting ring of equally enormous stationary dishes which then pumped the energy into docked bulk accumulator carriers.
The Wheel and the city had been caught in the outer edges of a small boundary-riding storm when they’d arrived, though both were being moved out of the way as quickly as they could be. Everything, from the planet itself to Fassin’s teeth, had seemed to vibrate around them as the turbulence-hardened transfer ship hurried them empodded from the CloudTunnel station to the Wheel, engines labouring, wind screaming, ammonia hail pelting, lightning flashing and magnetic fields making various parts of Y’sul’s baggage and accoutrements buzz and fizz and spark.
Hurled round in the giant centrifuge of the Wheel, stuck against its inner perimeter, the time that they’d spent inside had seemed almost calm by comparison, even allowing for the wild, wavelike bucking as they’d crossed the zone\belt border shear-face itself.
The storm had been affecting Guephuthe more severely than Nuersotse. The outer equatorial ring of the city was spinning hard, parts of its peripheral suburbs and less well-maintained districts coming apart and peeling away in a welter of thrown-out shrapnel. Their transfer had to buck and weave to dodge the wreckage, then take them straight to a TunnelCar marshalling yard beyond the city proper, a splay of cable filaments waving slowly in the gale like a vast anemone.
Another multi-kiloklick CloudTunnel journey through the vastness of Belt A, the Northern Tropical, another Wheel transfer — calmer this time — into Zone 2, and finally, crossing the mid-line of the Zone, they’d started to encounter more military traffic than civilian, the cars and trains packed with people, supplies and materiel all heading for the war.
At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition — nay, a quest! — he was undertaking with these -yes, these, two — famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species reputation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooperation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting…
They’d floated in the TunnelBud, watching the train of cars pulling out. Sholish had darted around the echoing space trying to round up all the floating and fallen pieces of just-ejected luggage.
Fassin and Hatherence had looked, glowering, at Y’sul.
He’d finished dusting himself down and straightening his clothing, then done a double take at their aggregated gaze and announced, defensively, “I have a cousin!”
The cousin was an engineering officer on the Dreadnought Stormshear, a thirty-turreter with the BeltRotationeers’ 487th “Rolling Thunder’ Fleet. Bindiche, the cousin, bore a longstanding familial grudge against Y’sul and so naturally had been only too happy to accept a great deal of kudos from an inwardly mortified, outwardly brave-facing, hail-cuz-bygones-now Y’sul by doing him the enormous, surely never-to-be-forgotten favour of vouching for him and his alien companions to his captain and so securing passage into the war zone, though even that only happened after a quick suborb flight in a nominally freight-only moonshell pulsed from High Tolimundarni to Lopscotte (again covered by cousin Bindiche and his endlessly handy military connections, said vile spawn of a hated uncle amassing anguished Y’sul-donated kudos like the Stormshear’s mighty capacitors accumulated charge), scudding over the cloud tops, briefly in space (but no windows, not even any screen to see it), listening to Y’sul complain about the uncannily hangover-resembling after-effects of the fierce acceleration in the magnetic-pulse tube and the fact that he’d had to leave behind most of his baggage, including all the war-zone presents his friends had given him and the bulk of the new combat attire he’d ordered.