The military had fucked up. It didn’t matter how good the tool was, how clever the craftsman had been, how well-made the weapon was; if the user dropped it, didn’t switch it on or just didn’t know how to use it properly, all that good work went for nothing.
They’d lost all the ships. All of them. Every single damn one, either on the raid or supporting it from space immediately above. Even a few of the ships not involved at all — those standing guard round Third Fury while the recovery and construction teams worked — had been targeted and annihilated by some sort of charged-particle-beam weapon, with two craft on the far side of the moon each chased by some type of hyper-velocity missile and blown to smithereens as well.
Unwilling to accept that they’d made a complete mess of the operation, the military had decided it mustn’t be their fault. Kehar Heavy Industries must be to blame. There must, to quote an ancient saying, be something wrong with our bloody ships. The sheer completeness of the catastrophe, and the frustrating lack of detail regarding exactly what had gone wrong, actually made it easier to blame the tool rather than the workman. All the ships had been made gas-capable by Saluus’s shipyards, all had been lost on their first mission using their new abilities, so — according to that special logic only the military mind seemed to appreciate — it must be a problem with the process of making them capable of working in an atmosphere that was responsible.
Never mind that the battlecruiser acting as Command and Control for the whole operation and both the Heavy-Armour Battery Monitors had been blasted to atoms just as effortlessly as the ships working in the planet’s clouds, even though they’d never been gas-capabled and were still in space at the time; that little detail somehow got rolled up into greater disaster and conveniently forgotten about in the hysteria.
So now they’d lost Fassin and they’d lost their lead to this Dweller List thing. Worse, they had a serious intelligence problem, because, basically, they’d been duped. The old Dweller Valseir must have suspected something or been tipped off. They knew this for the simple reason that the information he’d provided — almost the last data that had got relayed back to the top brass on Sepekte before everything went haywire — had proved, when checked later, to be a lie. The Dweller he’d told Fassin to look for in Deilte city didn’t exist. For the sake of this they’d lost over seventy first-rate warships for no gain whatsoever — ships they would seriously miss when the Beyonder-Starveling invasion hit home for real — and they’d thoroughly antagonised the Dwellers, who’d never been people it was advisable to get on the wrong side of even before they’d suddenly shown they still packed the kind of punch that could humiliate a Mercatorial fleet. As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.
In fact it was only that last item on the long list of calamitous consequences — dealing with the Dwellers’ subsequent actions and signals — that had worked out less badly than it might have. Finally, something positive.
Saluus was in a meeting. He hated meetings. They were an entirely vital part of being an industrialist, indeed of being a businessman in any sort of organisation, but he still hated them. He’d learned, partly at his father’s side, to get good at meetings, working people and information before, during and after them, but even when they were short and decided important stuff they felt like a waste of time.
And they were rarely short and rarely decided important stuff.
This one wasn’t even his meeting. Unusually, he wasn’t in control. He’d been summoned. Summoned? He’d been brought before them. That caught the mood better.
He far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter (though not always — if you had one where everybody was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on for ever too) and they were easier to control — easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings — often, Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem important that meetings could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time problems and often far away. But then — this was the slightly weird bit — as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.
Maybe because it was a sign of how much you’d been able to delegate, maybe because it was a way of imposing your authority on those in the middle and upper-middle ranks beneath you, maybe because the things being discussed at high-level meetings were so important that you needed the very last nuance of physicality they provided over a holo conference to be sure that you were working with all the relevant information, including whether somebody was sweating or had a nervous tic.
This was the sort of stuff a good holo would show up, of course, though equally the sort of stuff a good pre-transmission image-editing camera would smooth away. In theory somebody in a conference call could be sitting there sweating a river and jumping like they’d been electrocuted, but if they had decent real-time image-editing facilities they could look the perfect epitome of unruffled cucumber-chill.
Though there was stuff you could do in reality, too, of course. For his thirteenth birthday, Saluus’s father had given his son a surprise party and, later, a surprise present in the shape of a visit to a Finishing Clinic, where, over the course of a long and not entirely pain-free month, they fixed his teeth, widened his eyes and altered their colour (Saluus had been womb-sculpted for the appearance he’d had, but, hey, a father could change his mind). More to the point, they made him much less fidgety, upped his capacity to concentrate and gave him control over his sweat glands, pheromone output and galvanic skin response (the last three not strictly legal, but then the clinic was owned by a subsidiary of Kehar Heavy Industries). All good for giving one an edge in meetings, discussions and even informal get-togethers. And usefully applicable to the art of seduction, too, where one’s blatant proximity to and control over astounding quantities of cash had somehow failed to have the desired effect.
This was a meeting of the Emergency War Cabinet, a high-level top-brass get-together in a klicks-deep command-bunker complex beneath one of a handful of discreetly well-guarded mansions dotted round the outskirts of greater Borquille State.
A high-level top-brass get-together minus the Hierchon Ormilla himself, however. He was patently too grand to attend a mere meeting, even of something as important as the Emergency War Cabinet, even when the fate of the System was in even greater jeopardy than it had been before the disastrous decision to go mob-handed into the atmosphere of Nasqueron the instant they thought they had a firm lead to the — anyway probably mythical — Dweller List.
And why did meetings always make his mind wander, and, specifically, make it wander towards — wander towards? Head straight for — sex?
He looked at women he was attending meetings with and found it very hard not to imagine them naked. This happened when they weren’t especially attractive, but was inevitable and often vivid if they were even slightly good-looking. Something about being able to look at them for long periods when they were talking, he suspected. Or just the urge to shuck off the whole civilised thing of being good little officers of the company and get back to being cave people again, humping in the dirt.