The stampede of Dwellers from the access tube which Fassin was trying to push Valseir towards was slowly forcing the two of them back into the centre of the concourse. More people were flooding into the wide space from every other access point.
Somebody was screaming, “Look, look!”
One distant screen image was suddenly repeated across several more. At first it looked like a replay of the entrance of the first Dreadnought, the great nose bulging out through, the curtain of streaming cloud, dragging gas like long flags of war. Then the view pulled back and the screen showed the Storm Wall bulging in another place, then another and another and another, until a whole vertical forest of the great ships was visible, hurtling out of the storm and towards the great column of black circling spacecraft hanging like a giant pendulum over the spectating fleet.
The Dzunda shook, rippled and screamed like something alive as the shock wave of the earlier nuclear explosion seemed to pick it up and rattle it. Dwellers swung this way and that across the concourse, banging into each other, walls, floor and ceiling, filling the gas with oaths and debris. Another pair of screens cut out but enough remained to show the closing fleet of mercury-coloured Dreadnoughts livid with fire outgoing and incoming. Lasers sheened off, fans of interceptor projectiles and beams combed the gas and sundered darting, twisting missiles. Two more of the dark ships, then a third, exploded or crumpled and started to fall or spiral down, but two more of the giant Dreadnoughts disappeared in massive, screen-hazing detonations.
A couple more Dreadnoughts were suddenly caught in a fiercely bright beam from immediately above, from out of the clear yellow sky. The beam fell between them, making each massive ship wobble as if stumbling in the gas. Then it split into two parallel shafts, each violet rod narrowing in an instant and chopping through its targeted Dreadnought like an axe through a neck.
The concourse — half dark, filled with wild scents and the frenzied bellowing of Dwellers unsure whether to wail laments or shout huzzahs, lit by the spastic, spasming light of the battle views swinging wildly across the screens — achieved a sort of chaotic transcendence as very loud but defiantly soothing-sounding music started to play, product of some confused automatic guest-management system waking to insanity and trying to spread tranquillity.
“What,” Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, “the fuck is that?”
(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)
And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm’s dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.
A crumpled scrap falling towards this apparition — a ruined and smoking Mercatoria spacecraft — appeared to lend a scale to the huge sphere, seeming to be about to fall just behind it, making the quickly rising globe three or four klicks across.
The wrecked ship fell in front, instead, and upped that ready estimate by a factor of two.
A couple of filament-thin yellow-white beams suddenly joined with the massive globe and seemed to sink into it without effect. The violet beam from high above swung onto it, spreading briefly as though to measure the full seven or eight kilometres of its diameter before starting to narrow.
A pattern of black dots appeared on the surface of the giant globe.
The Dzunda shook again and again as further blast waves crashed into it. Fassin stared at the great rising sphere even as Dwellers on either side thudded into him and he lost his hold on Valseir.
There were maybe fifty or so of the black spots, spread as though randomly across the upper hemisphere of the huge globe. One appeared to be in the centre of the rapidly narrowing, focusing violet beam. Just as that ray grew too bright to see the ebony dot at its centre, it seemed to pulse and spread. Then it disappeared, just as each spot suddenly became the plinth for an intensely bright, thin column of pure white light. The beams lasted for an eye-blink, disappearing almost as soon as they’d been produced, only their image lasting, burned into any naked eyes and insufficiently buffered cameras trained on them.
Silence, even as another manic convulsion shook the Dzunda, making the whole concourse ripple and creak. More screens went out. The loud soothing music cut off. Two remaining screens nearby showed the dark ships, whole squadrons of them, entire flocks of them, reduced for most of their length to sparkling, wind-blown ash, only the long needle noses and tailed, finned rears remaining intact to fall like meteors, unreeling scrawny trails of smoke into the storm’s tenebrous depths.
The nearest screen showed the camera swinging across the sky, searching for an intact Mercatoria ship, only to find further drifts of smoke, new clouds of ash, already drifting on the wind.
The other screen’s view pivoted to the sky, where something glowing yellow was fading and disappearing as it cooled, at first still keeping station with the scene directly beneath, then starting to drift away to the east.
The huge sphere was still rising, though slowing now, coming gradually level with the remains of the spectating fleet. The remaining two dozen or so mirror-finish Dreadnoughts were decelerating, heaving-to on one side of the clumped and scattered ships.
A bellowing roar of utter — and unexpected — victory built quickly in every Dweller throat along the length of the concourse, swelling to a clanging, thunderous cacophony of mind-splitting, thought-warping sound.
Then a series of crashing, titanic shock waves pummelled the Dzunda like a gale whipping a flag. A barrage of noise like a troop of titans clapping entirely drowned out the hollering Dwellers.
All the screens went dark. The Blimper Dzunda lurched for one last time, then started to fall out of the sky. Those Dwellers not already heading swiftly for the exits immediately began to do so, the ones near Fassin sweeping him along with them, up the access tube he’d been trying to head for originally, out via a wide funnel port into a viewing gallery, through its massively shattered diamond roof and out into the bruised and battered skies of Nasqueron.
“You mean some of your ridiculous fucking fairy stories about secret ships and hyper-weapons are actually true?” Fassin said.
“Well,” Y’sul said, looking round. “So it would appear.”
They were somewhere inside the Isaut, the enormous spherical ship which had destroyed almost the entire Mercatorial fleet — space-based command-and-control plus heavy-weaponry bombardment back-up included — in the space of about half a second. The Isaut was something called a Planetary Protector (Deniable), not that Fassin or, apparently, anybody else rescued from the destroyed and damaged ships of the spectating fleet had ever heard of such a thing. That, as Y’sul had pointed out, was a pretty unarguably convincing brand of deniability.
There had, of course, been rumours and myths concerning secret Dweller martial capability and the general lack of wisdom of getting into a fight with such an ancient and widespread species for as long as people could remember, but — as most of these myths and rumours seemed to be spread by the Dwellers themselves — as a rule nobody ever really took them seriously. The Dwellers spent so much time huffing and puffing and telling people how completely wonderful and brilliant they were — and yet seemed so self-obsessed, so inward-looking and so careless of their distant fellows, so unconnected not just with the rest of the civilised galaxy but with their own vastly scattered diaspora — they were inevitably dismissed as vainglorious fantasists and their vaunted ships and weapons, at best, a sort of folk memory of earlier magnificence, long lost, entirely eclipsed.