A third missile seemed to take the nearby explosion as a sign that it ought to perform an upward loop and head straight back at the Stormshear. “Oh-oh,” Y’sul said.
The oncoming missile settled into a flat, steady course, becoming a small but rapidly enlarging dot, aimed straight at the nose of the Dreadnought.
“They do have destructs, don’t they?” Hatherence said, glancing at Fassin.
Some Dwellers started looking at each other, then made a dash for the access tube to the Stormshear’s armoured nose, creating a jam around the door. Slave-children, also trying to escape, either got through ahead of the rush or were thrown roughly out of the way, yelping.
The dot in the sky was getting bigger.
“They can just order it to blow up, can’t they?” the colonel said, roting backwards. A high, whining noise seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the colonel’s esuit. The yelling, cursing knot of Dwellers round the exit didn’t seem to be shifting. The Stormshear was starting to turn, hopelessly slowly.
“In theory they can destruct it,” Fassin said uneasily, watching the still unshifting melee around the exit. “And they do have close-range intercept guns.” Another frantic slave-child was ejected upwards from the scrum by the door, screaming until it slapped into the ceiling and dropped lifeless to the slowly tilting deck.
The missile had real shape now, no longer a large dot. Stubby wings and a tailplane were visible. The Stormshear continued to turn with excruciating slowness. The missile plunged in towards them on a trail of sooty exhaust. Hatherence rose from her dent-seat but moved closer to the diamond-sheath nose of the observation blister, not further away.
— Stay back, major, she sent. Then a terrific tearing, ripping noise sounded from above and behind them, a net of finger-fine trails filled the gas ahead of the ship’s nose and the missile first started to disintegrate and then blew up. The interceptor machine gun somewhere behind continued firing, scoring multiple hits on the larger pieces of smoking, glowing missile wreckage as they tumbled on towards the Stormshear, so that when the resulting shrapnel hit and punctured the observation blister it caused relatively little damage, and only minor wounds.
The Dreadnought took them as far as Munueyn, a Ruined City fallen amongst the dark, thick gases of the lower atmosphere where slow coils of turbulence roiled past like the heavy, lascivious licks of an almighty planetary tongue, a place all spires and spindles, near-deserted, long unfashionable, a one-time Storm-Centre now too far from anything to be of much interest to anybody, a place that might have garnered kudos for itself had it been near a war zone, but could hope for almost none at all because it was within one. A wing-frigate took them from the Dreadnought and deposited them in the gigantic echoing hall of what had once been the city’s bustling StationPort, where they were greeted like returning heroes, like gods, by the local hirers and fliers. They found a guest house for negative kudos. They were, in effect, being paid to stay there.
“Sir!” Sholish said, rising from the mass of petitioners in the small courtyard below. “A hostelier of impeccable repute with excellent familial connections in the matter of wartime travel warrants beseeches you to consider his proposal to put at your disposal a veritable fleet of a half-half-dozen finely arrayed craft, all in the very best of condition and working order and ready to depart within less than an hour of their arrival.”
“Which will be when, precisely, banelet of my already too-long life?”
“A day, sire. Two, at the most. He assures.”
“Unacceptable! Utterly and profoundly so!” Y’sul proclaimed, frilling the very idea away with a shudder. He was nestled within a dent on a flower-decked terrace outside and above the Taverna Bucolica, close enough to the city’s central plaza to smell the mayor’s desperation. He dragged deep of a proffered pharma cylinder and with the exhalation breathed, “Next!”
Fassin and the colonel, floating nearby, exchanged looks. Hatherence floated closer.
· We could just take off, you and I.
· All by ourselves?
· We are both self-sufficient, we are both capable of making good time.
· You reckon?
The colonel made it obvious that she was looking his arrow-craft over. — I think so.
I think you called up the specs on this thing before we left Third Fury and know damn well so, he thought.
He sent, — So we go haring off into the clouds together, just we two.
— Yes.
· There is a problem.
· Indeed.
· In fact, there are two problems. The first one is that there’s a war on, and we’ll look like a pair of warheads.
· Warheads? But we shan’t even be transonic!
· There are rules in Formal War regarding the speed that warheads can travel at. We’ll look like warheads.
· Hmm. If we went a little slower?
· Slow warheads.
· Slower still?
· Cruise mines. And before you ask, any slower than that and we’ll look like ordinary monolayer float mines.
Hatherence bobbed up and down, a sigh. — You mentioned a second problem.
· Without Y’sul it’s unlikely that anybody will talk to us.
· With him it is unlikely that anybody else will get a word in.
· Nevertheless.
They needed their own transport. More to the point, they needed transport that would be allowed to pass unchallenged in the war zone. Whatever remained of Valseir’s old dwelling lay far enough off the CloudTunnel network to make roting or floating their way there too long-winded. Y’sul had agreed to fix things — with his equatorial, big-city connections, escorting exotic aliens, he was bound to positively exude kudos towards all those who might help him — but then had got caught up in the whole process just due to the numbers of people who wanted to be the ones who helped him, and so became unable, seemingly, to make up his mind. Just as it seemed likely he was about to settle on one outrageously generous offer, another would appear over the horizon, even more enticing, necessitating a further reappraisal.
Finally, after two days, Hatherence could take no more and hired her own ship, on terms slightly better than the ones just rejected by Y’sul.
In their suite at the Taverna, Y’sul protested. “Iam doing the negotiating!” he bellowed.
“Yes,” the colonel agreed. “Rather too much of it.”
A compromise was arrived at. The colonel confessed to their hirer that she was legally unable to commit to a firm contract and Y’sul then remade it on the exact same terms while the appalled shipmaster was still drawing breath to protest. That day, the day the war officially got under way, ceremonially beginning with an opening gala and Formal Duel in Pihirumime, half the world away. A day later they sailed — taking the next downward eddy that also swirled in the right horizontal direction — aboard the Poaflias, a hundred-metre twin-hull screw-burster of unknown but probably enormous age. It boasted a crew of just five apart from its captain and was rotund and slow, but was — for some reason lost in the mists of Dweller military logic — still registered as an uncommitted privateer scout ship and so cleared to make her way within the war zone and, one might hope, liable to pass any consequent challenge save one conducted by opening fire prior to negotiations.
Their captain was Slyne, an enthusiastic youngster barely arrived at Adulthood, still very much a Recent and behaving more like a Youth. He’d inherited the Poaflias on the death of his father. The Dwellers clove to the idea of Collective Inheritance, so that, when one of them died, any private property they could fairly claim to have accumulated went fifty per cent to whoever they wanted it to go to and fifty per cent to whatever jurisdiction they lived within. This was why only one hull of the twin-hulled Poaflias was fully owned by Slyne. The city of Munueyn owned the other half and was renting it to him, accumulating kudos. The less Slyne could actually do with the ship, the more control he would lose, until ultimately the city could reasonably claim it was all theirs; then, if he wanted to stay aboard, he’d more or less have to do whatever the city asked him to do with the ship. This expedition, however, conducted under his own auspices, ought to go a long way towards securing his ownership rights over the whole vessel.