· You are saying we are stuck with this buffoon.
· We are. I know it’s hard to believe, but he’s one of the better ones.
· Core help us. Why waste time? I shall apply for my posthu-mous decoration immediately.
The Volunteer Guild of Guard-mentors existed to look after Dwellers visiting from other bands of the same planet, or, very rarely, from another gas-giant, usually one within the same stellar system. Dwellers — almost always alone — did make journeys from one stellar system to another, but it didn’t happen often and it usually meant that the individual concerned had been thrown out of their own home gas-giant for some particularly heinous crime or unforgivable character defect.
The Dwellers had pretty much stopped making deep space trips en masse after the Second Diasporian Age, when the galaxy had been half the age it was now. It was generally held that seven billion years’ lack of practice probably accounted for the sheer awfulness of Dweller spaceship design and building standards, though Fassin wasn’t convinced that cause and effect hadn’t been confused here.
They were due to leave for the war zone the following day. The interval since the frustrating audience with the City Administrator had been spent fending off Dweller journalists and their news remotes and trying to find out what they could about events in the wider system. Eventually they’d had to compromise and trade. One journalist got a very guarded but exclusive interview from Fassin (very guarded indeed — Colonel Hatherence kept coughing loudly whenever they approached any subject remotely to do with their mission) in return for news of the outside.
The Third Fury moon had been devastated and all on or in it had perished. There was no news of a drop ship surviving, though equally there was no news of any wreckage from such a ship being found. However, of course, if it had just dropped into the Depths… Many satellites had been destroyed or damaged. Those belonging to the Quick (this meant the Mercatoria) appeared to be either missing or out of action. Some warships belonging to the current local Quick species had spent an amount of time investigating the rubble of the moon Third Fury. The moon ’glantine appeared much as it always had. Stellar-system ship traffic appeared light, as it had for some days now, but not anomalous. A signal had been sent on the behalf of Oculan Colonel Hatherence, on the authority of Guard-mentor Y’sul of Hauskip, to the moon ’glantine. No reply had yet been received. Nothing untoward had happened to the transmitting station responsible following the transmission.
According to the journalist, this was all stuff they could have found out themselves, eventually. The trick was knowing where to look. The journalist seemed to feel miffed that they’d got the better end of the deal, too, because everything he’d told them was at least ninety per cent true, specifically to avoid upsetting them. He knew aliens could be funny that way.
“What, exactly, did your friend say?”
“He said they wanted him to… ‘to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for…’ I’m pretty certain those were his exact words. Then he seemed to realise he was saying too much, giving too much away, and he changed the subject. The… hesitation, that sudden change of subject made the earlier form of words all the more important. He realised he was speaking to somebody who spent a lot of his life in Nasqueron, who might not feel the same way he would about the implications of what he was talking about.”
“This was spoken in…?”
“Humanised G-Clear, very close to this. Meanings are pretty much identical, just altered pronunciation for the human voice.”
“No Anglish words involved?”
“None.”
“So, he said ‘gas-lined’ not ‘streamlined’ or ‘air-lined’?”
“One wouldn’t say ‘air-lined’ as far as I know. The normal form of words would be ‘streamlined’. He chose ‘gas-lined’ without thinking because it was more technically correct, because it has a narrower meaning. In this context it means altering a vacuum-capable craft so that it can also operate in an atmosphere like Nasqueron’s.”
“Which you take to mean that an invasion or large-scale destructive raid upon us is imminent?”
“I think some sort of raid is a distinct possibility.”
“This seems a thin thread to hang such a weighty fear upon.”
“I know. But please understand, the guy’s company builds and refits three-quarters of the system’s war craft. The phrase ‘gas-lined’ is quite specific and that sudden change of tack when he realised he was talking to somebody who might be sentimentally or emotionally attached to Nasqueron and sympathetic towards Dwellers is significant. I know this man, I’ve known him since I was a child. I know how his mind works.”
“Attempting to invade a gas-giant would, nevertheless, be a momentous action. In seven thousand years, the Mercatoria has done no such thing.”
“The situation is desperate for them locally. They are under threat of invasion within the year. A standard year, not one of yours. Help is at least one more standard year away beyond that. In fact, the invasion may already be beginning. The attacks on Third Fury and the Mercatoria’s other assets around Nasq. could be part of it.”
“And attempting to invade us helps them how?”
“They think there may be something here which will make a difference. Some information. That’s why I’m here, to look for it. But if they thought I was dead or not likely to succeed, the Mercatoria might intervene directly. Plus the invaders the Mercatoria is worried about might well think the same way with even less cause to hesitate. I get the impression the future continuance of Dweller Studies is kind of low on their set of priorities.”
“Fassin, what sort of information could possibly make such a course of action seem sensible?”
“Important information.”
“More specifically?”
“Very important information.”
“You are not willing to tell me.”
“Willing or able. Best you don’t know.”
“So you tell me.”
“If I thought the specifics would help convince you, I’d let you know,” Fassin lied.
He was talking to a Dweller called Setstyin. Setstyin liked to call himself an influence pedlar, which was a humble term for somebody with contacts extending as high as his went. Dweller society was remarkably flat in terms of social hierarchy — flat as the surface of a neutron star compared to the sheer verti-cality of the Mercatoria’s baroque monstrosity — but to the extent that there was a top and bottom of society, the suhrl Setstyin was in touch with both.
He was a society host and a part-time social worker, a hospital visitor and a friend to the great and good as far as either could be said to exist in Dweller terms; a sociable, clubbable creature intensely and genuinely interested in other people, more so even than in kudos (this made him very unusual, even strange, almost threatening). He was, in human terms, somewhere between a total geek and very cool. His geekiness was that bizarre failure to care about the one thing that everybody agreed really mattered: kudos, while his coolness came from the same source, because not caring about kudos — not obsessing about it, not chasing it down wherever it might be found, not constantly measuring one’s own coolness against that of one’s peers — was in itself kind of cool. As long as there was not the faintest shadow of a suspicion he was playing some weird back-game, deliberately pursuing kudos by pretending not to, so long as his lack of interest in it was seen as being the unaffected carelessness of a kind of wise naif, he was kudos-rich, though in a curiously unenviable way.
(It had been Slovius who had first explained to Fassin how kudos worked. Fassin had thought it was a bit like money. Slovius had explained that even money wasn’t like money used to be, but anyway kudos was sometimes almost an opposite. The harder you’d worked for your kudos, the less it was worth.) Setstyin was also one of the most sensible, level-minded Dwellers Fassin had ever encountered. And he treated a request by a mere human to wake up, speed up and converse over the phone with a degree of respect and seriousness that few other Dwellers would have.