The Mercatoria — largely but not entirely made up the galaxy’s current crop of oxygen breathers — inhabited its own galaxy, then, as did all the other categories of life, and all these different galaxies existed alongside every other one, each interpenetrating the rest, surrounded by and surrounding the others, yet hardly affecting or being affected by them, except, sometimes, through the inestimably precious and all too easily destroyed wormhole network.
Us? Oh, we were like ghosts in the cabling.
* * *
Slave-children were crawling along the giant blades of one of the Dreadnought’s main propellers, packing welding gear, back-sacks of carbon weave and heavy glue-throwers. The pulsing drone of the vessel’s engines and main propulsion thrummed through the wrap-cloak of brown, billowing mist, filling the slipstreamed gas and the structure of the huge ship with buzzing, building, rising and fading harmonics like a vast unending symphony of industrial sound.
Fassin and the colonel watched from an open gantry overlooking the ring of giant engines as the two teams of Dweller infants crawled along the massive blades to the warped and flapping blade ends.
The starboard-most propeller had been hit by a section of DewCloud root. The root had fallen out of the clouds above, probably from a dying DewCloud floating and decomposing tens of kilometres above. DewClouds were enormous, foamy plants anything up to ten kilometres across and five or six times that in height. Like all gas-giant flora, they were mostly gas -a Dweller in a hurry could probably rip right through the canopy of one, hardly noticing they were in the midst of a plant, not an ordinary cloud. To a human they looked like some monstrous cross between an elongated mushroom and a jellyfish the size of a thunder cloud. Part of an Ubiquitous clade, found wherever Dwellers were, they harvested water condensation out of Dwellerine gas-giant atmospheres, using their dangling, thick and relatively solid roots to exploit the temperature difference between the various atmospheric layers.
When they approached the ends of their lives they floated up to the cold cloud tops and the higher haze layers, and bits broke off. The Dreadnought had prop guards to stop floating\falling\ rising stuff interfering with its main propulsion units, but the section of root had slipped in between the guard and the propeller itself, wreaking brief havoc with the thirty-metre-long vanes before being chewed up and thrown out. Now the child-slaves had to climb out along the blades, from the hubs to the tips, to make repairs. Shaped like slim deltas with thin, delicate-looking tentacles which had to both clamp them on to the still-revolving blades and hold the various repair materials, the infants were making heavy weather of it. Dweller officers in motor skiffs rode nearby, bellowing orders, threats and imprecations at the young.
“They could just stop the fucking propeller,” the colonel shouted to Fassin. The open gantry they were holding on to was four-fifths, of the way back from the bulbous nose of the giant ship, an ellipsoid a little over two kilometres in length and four hundred across the beam. The Dreadnought’s twenty-four giant engine-sets protruded from near its rear in a monumental collar of pylons, wires, tubular prop guards and near-spherical engine pods. The wind howled round Hatherence’s esuit and Fassin’s little arrowcraft.
“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.