Fassin woke up. Still spinning, but the rate was slackening off again. His nose itched and it felt like he needed to pee, even though he knew he didn’t. This never happened when the shock-gel and gillfluid were doing their jobs. He fell asleep.
* * *
Taince Yarabokin woke up. One of her first thoughts as she surfaced slowly to full consciousness was that Saluus Kehar would not have received the message she’d prepared for him, that there was still time for more reviewings and re-recordings and revisions, that she would be able to spend more time watching and listening to herself on the recording, and reduce herself to tears every time. Still time and a chance to confront him, maybe kill him, if that was both possible and something she felt driven to do at the time (she had no idea — sometimes she wanted to kill him, sometimes she wanted him alive to suffer the shame of knowing that she had released the story to the newsnets, and sometimes she just wanted him to know that she knew what had really happened that long-ago night in the ruined ship on the high desert).
She checked the time, feeling woozily around in virtual space for information. Still half a year out from Ulubis. She would be awake now until the attack itself, one of the first to be wakened for the final run-in, because she represented the closest thing they had to local knowledge. Privately she doubted she’d be able to offer much practical help, given that she’d last seen Ulubis over two centuries earlier and it might, to put it mildly, have changed somewhat after having been invaded, but she was the best they had. She thought of herself in that respect more as a talisman than anything else, a small symbol of the system that they would be fighting for. If that had been one consideration in her getting a place in the fleet, it didn’t bother her. She was confident that she was a good, competent and brave officer and deserved her post on merit alone. The fact that it was her own home system she was riding to the rescue of was just a bonus.
The fleet had spread out a little since the battle with the Beyonders in mid-voyage, sacrificing the immediate weight of arms it could bring to bear for a net of forward picket craft which would flag any trouble long before the main body of the fleet got to it. Taince had spent most of the intervening years slow-asleep in her pod, but — thanks to that relative security provided by the advance ships — she’d had some recreational and morale-time out of the shock-gel as well, walking around almost like a normal human being in the spun-gravity of the battleship, feeling odd and strange confronted with such normality, like an alien inhabiting a human’s body; clumsy, astonished at tiny things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm, awkward, especially at first, with meeting other off-duty humans, and missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual existence — with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data and meaning — like an amputated limb.
It would be like that again now, once she had finally come round. Taince wasn’t really looking forward to it. When she was stumbling about on two legs she wanted to be back in the pod, synched in, but when she was there she was forever nostalgic for a normal, physical one-speed, one-reality life. Blue skies and sunlight, a fresh breeze blowing through her hair and green grass and flowers under her bare feet.
Long time ago. And maybe never again, who knew?
Another of Taince’s first thoughts, even when she realised that she was being woken up slowly, without alarms going off, as part of the programmed, pre-agreed duty-shift system rather than some fateful emergency that might end in her death at any moment, was that she had not yet escaped into death, that it was not yet all over, and any terrors and agonies that might be hers to encounter before the peace of oblivion were still ahead of her.
* * *
“Hoestruem,” Quercer Janath said.
“Where?” Fassin asked.
“What do you mean, ‘Where?’?”
“You’re in it.”
Fassin had recovered from his blackout once they’d turned his little gascraft’s systems back on. He still felt disorientated and oddly dirty, a sensation that was only gradually disappearing as the shock-gel enveloped him fully again. Y’sul had seemed a bit groggy too, wobbly in the air when released from his webbing.
Now they were looking at the passenger-compartment screen, which Quercer Janath, still dressed in their shiny overalls, had hit with one rim-arm and got to work. Fassin looked carefully at the image on the screen but all he could see was a star field. He could not, for now, work out in which direction he was looking. Certainly not a direction he was used to looking in. He didn’t recognise anything.
“In it?” he asked, feeling fuzzy, and foolish.
“Yes, in it.”
Fassin looked at Y’sul, who still looked a little grey about the mantle.
The Dweller just shrugged. “Well,” he said, “I certainly give in. Who, what or where the fuck is Hoestruem?”
“A Clouder.”
“A Clouder?” Fassin said. This had to be a translation thing, or a simple misunderstanding. Clouders were part of the Cincturia: the beings, devices, semi-civs and tech dross that were beyond the Beyonders, way on the outside of everything.
Y’sul shook himself. “You mean a WingClouder or TreeClouder or StickyClouder or—”
“No.”
“None of the above.”
“Just a Clouder.”
“But—” Fassin said.
“Aopoleyin, then!” Y’sul shouted. “Let’s start with that! Is that where we are?”
“Yes.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, sort of.”
“Depends.”
“It’s the nearest place.”
“The nearest system.”
“Eh?” Y’sul said.
“The nearest what?” Fassin asked, simply not understanding. He peered at the star field. This didn’t look right. This didn’t look right at all. Not in any way whatsoever, not upside down or mirrored or backside-holo’d or anything.
“I think I’m still confused,” Y’sul said, rippling his sense mantles to wake himself up.
Fassin felt as though he was at the bottom of that gun barrel again, about to be blasted out of it, or already being blown out of it, up the biggest, longest most unspeakably enormous and forever unending gun barrel in all the whole damn universe.
“How far are we from Nasqueron?” he heard himself say.
“Wait a moment,” Y’sul said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘system’?”
“About thirty-four kiloyears.”
“Stellar, not gas-giant. Apologies for any confusion.”
“Thirty-four kiloyears?” Fassin said. It felt like he was going to black out again. “You mean…’ His voice just trailed off.
“Thirty-four thousand light years, standard. Roughly. Apologies for any confusion.”
“I already said that.”
“Know. Different person, different confusion.”
They were in another system, another solar system, another part of the galaxy altogether; they had, if they were being told the truth, left Ulubis — system and star — thirty-four thousand light years behind. There was a working portal in Ulubis system linked via a wormhole to this distant stellar system neither Fassin nor Y’sul had ever heard of.
The Clouder being Hoestruem was a light year across. Clouders were — depending who you talked to — sentient, semi-sentient, proto-sentient, a-sentient or just plain not remotely sentient -though that last extreme point of view tended to be held only by those for whom it would be convenient if it were true, such as those who could do useful, profitable things with a big cloud of gas. Providing it wasn’t alive. Arguably closer to vast, distributedly-smart plants than any sort of animal, they had a composition very similar to the clouds of interstellar gas which they inhabited\were (the distinction was moot).