Even now, having just seen the results of the Isaut’s intervention with his own eyes — or at least through the little gascraft’s sensors — Fassin could not entirely believe what he’d witnessed.
“Well, this is a strange place to be,” Valseir said, looking about the spherical space he, Y’sul and Fassin had been shown to.
They had rendezvoused quite quickly in the general gas-borne confusion of survivors from the Dzunda. Fassin’s arrrowhead-shaped craft, though smaller than all the surrounding Dwellers, was a sufficiently different shape for Valseir and Y’sul to spot him quite without difficulty and head in his direction.
“Why is everybody else giving me such a wide berth?” Fassin had asked when they’d each drifted up to him in the after-battle calmness. It was true; all the other Dweller survivors were keeping a good fifty metres or so away from him.
“Worried you’re going to be a target,” Y’sul had said, checking his various pockets and pouches to see what he might have lost in the excitement. Around them, various long smoky columns were drifting in the breeze like anaemic stalks rooted in the dark storm base far below, and great dumb-bell-shaped clouds — all that was left of the nuclear explosions — were twisting and slowly tearing apart, their round, barely rolling heads still climbing into higher and higher levels of atmosphere, being caught in differential wind streams and casting vast hazy shadows across the again-quiet skies of the storm’s eye. Hovering to one side, the vast banded sphere which had risen from the Depths floated like a miniature planet caught in the eye of the great storm.
To one side, in the Storm Wall, the GasClipper fleet seemed to be trying to regroup. Tumbling out of the sinking Dzunda with the rest of the survivors, only a lifelong exposure to Dweller insouciance — both congenital and feigned — had prevented Fassin gasping in disbelief at the sound of various people around him quite seriously discussing whether the GasClipper race would just continue, be restarted or declared void, and passing opinions regarding the status of already existing bets in the light of this suite of likely choices.
The less damaged spectating and other craft were picking up the various free-floating Dwellers. Ambulance skiffs from the surviving craft in the silver Dreadnought fleet and hospital vessels from the nearest port facilities were rescuing the more seriously injured and burned individuals.
Fassin had indeed been targeted, but not by weaponry. A trio of skiffs had emerged from the giant sphere and made straight for the little group formed by Fassin and his two Dweller friends. They’d been taken aboard and the skiffs returned immediately to the enormous globe, ignoring the outraged yells of the Dwellers who until moments before had been studiously avoiding Fassin.
The lead skiff, crewed by a jolly pair of remarkably old-looking Dwellers — they didn’t volunteer their names, ranks or ages, but they each looked at least as old as Jundriance — had deposited them somewhere deep inside the giant spherical craft, way down a dark tunnel into a broad sphere of reception space, complete with washing facilities and what Y’sul had taken one look at and sniffily dismissed as a snackateria. Before they’d left again in their skiff, it had been one of these unnamed Dwellers who, in response to a question of Fassin’s, had told them the name and category of the great craft they’d been brought inside. Fassin had warned him that his gascraft had been in contact with Mercatoria nanotech and he might be contaminated, which did not surprise or alarm anybody aboard as much as he’d been expecting. The skiff’s crew scanned the little gascraft and told him, well, he wasn’t contaminated any more.
“Where is your little friend the Very Reverend Colonel?” Y’sul asked Fassin, making a show of looking around the reception space. “She jumped out of her seat and raced off just before all the fun started.”
“She’s dead,” Fassin told him.
“Dead?” Y’sul rolled back. “But she seemed so well armed!”
“She shot what turned out to be a Mercatorial… device,” Fassin said. “One of the first of their craft on the scene seemed to assume this meant she was a hostile and wasted her.”
“Oh,” Y’sul said, sounding downcast. “That was the Mercatoria, was it? Not these Disconnected people. You sure?”
“I’m fairly sure,” Fassin said.
“Damn,” Y’sul said, sounding annoyed. “Might sort of look like I’ve lost a bet, in that case. Wonder how I can get out of it?” He floated off, looking deep in thought.
Fassin turned to Valseir. “You sure you’re all right?” he asked. The old Dweller had looked a little shaken when they’d rendezvoused in the gas above the sinking Blimper, though apart from a few carapace abrasions picked up in the welter of people rushing to escape the sinking ship, he was uninjured.
“I am fine, Fassin,” he told the human. “And you? You have lost your colonel friend, I heard.”
Fassin had a sudden reprise of his last image of Hatherence, that dark manta shape twisting in the air — to a Dweller she would have looked like one of their young — firing a hand weapon at the craft that had ripped her out of her esuit, then dying in the returning splash of fire. “I’m getting used to anybody who gets close to me dying violently,” he said.
“Hmm. I consider myself warned,” Valseir said.
“She was my superior, Valseir,” Fassin told him. “She was my bodyguard but she was also my guard in another sense. I’d be surprised if she hadn’t been given orders to kill me if the relevant circumstances arose.”
“Do you think she would have carried out those orders?”
Fassin hesitated, suddenly feeling bad about what he’d just said, even though he still thought it was the truth. It was as though he’d insulted Hatherence’s memory. He looked away and said, “Well, we’ll never know now, will we?”
A door in the centre of the ceiling swung back. They all looked up. Two Dwellers entered. Fassin recognised one of them as Setstyin, the self-confessed influence pedlar he’d talked to by phone the evening he’d slipped away from Y’sul’s house in Hauskip city. The other Dweller looked very old indeed, dark and small — barely five metres in diameter — and dressed in high-coverage clothes that probably concealed only a few remaining natural limbs and perhaps some prosthetics.
“Seer Fassin Taak,” Setstyin said, roll-nodding towards him. Then he greeted Y’sul and lastly Valseir — as the most senior of the three Valseir came last and got an even more respectful bow. “Y’sul, Valseir: allow me to introduce the Sage-cuspian-chospe Drunisine, Executive Commander of this craft, the Planetary Protector (Deniable) Isaut.”
“A pleasure,” said the dark Dweller in a crisp, dry-sounding voice.
“And for us an honour,” Y’sul said, brushing Fassin out of the way to present himself to the fore and execute an extravagantly complete bow. “If I may say so.”
“Our pleasure, pre-child,” Valseir half-agreed, also roll-bowing, less completely but with more dignity.
“Good to see you, Setstyin,” Fassin said. “And pleased to meet you, sir,” he told the older Dweller.
Drunisine was by far the oldest and most senior Dweller Fassin had ever encountered. As a Dweller — surviving the perils of childhood first, obviously — rose through Adolescence, Youth and Adulthood to attain the life stages called Prime and then Cuspian and then Sage, what they were eventually aiming for — destined for, if they lived that long — was to reach Childhood, the state of utter done-everythingness that was the absolute zenith of all Dweller existence. The stage immediately before this culmination was the one which Drunisine had reached: chospe - pre-child. There was every chance that Drunisine was over two billion years old.