The Algebraist (56 page)

He ran every check he could while he was outside the hull of the
Velpin.
He was in space. Everything checked out. Or he was in a sim so complete that there was no disgrace in being taken in by it. Back to the Truth again. Hatherence would have appreciated the dilemma.

He could, if he really wanted, he supposed, just try and run away. The gascraft would support him indefinitely, it was capable of independent entry into a planetary atmosphere, and if he used almost all his reaction mass he could be in the inner system of this star Aopoleyin in a few years. He could even sleep most of the way and hardly notice the journey. But then what? He’d never heard of the place. It was somewhere in the Khredeil Tops (whatever those were) according to the gascraft’s rudimentary star atlas, but it wasn’t listed as a human or Mercatorial inhabited system and there was no mention of it having any inhabitants at all. That didn’t mean there was nobody there - everywhere seemed to support somebody who called it home - but it meant that he’d probably be no further forward trying to get back home.

He came back to the ship when Quercer & Janath signalled excitedly that they’d found something. It wasn’t Leisicrofe’s ship; it was the delicate ball of gas and chemicals - a lacework ball of cold and dirty string open to the vacuum, held together by just a trace of gravity - that was the Clouder’s mind.

… Looking for… ?

- A Dweller. A gas-giant Dweller, called Leisicrofe.

… Image…

- Image?

… Told image expect… specific image…

- Ah. I have an image with me. How… ? Where, I mean what do I show it to, so you can see it?

… No… describe…

- Okay. It’s an image of white clouds in a blue sky.

… Accords…

- So you can tell me? Where Leisicrofe is?

… Went…

- When did he go?

… Measure time how you… ?

- Standard system?

… Known… being Leisicrofe went 7.35 x 10° seconds ago…

Fassin did the calculation. About twenty years earlier.

He was nestled into the outer regions of the Clouder’s mind, the little gascraft resting gently between two broad strands of gas a fraction less cold than the surrounding chill of deep space. He was, in effect, delving, stopped right down to talk to something that made a deep, slow-timing Dweller look like a speed-freak. Clouders thought surpassingly slowly.

A signal from outside, from the
Velpin.
To the Clouder he sent,

- Where did Leisicrofe go?

Then he clicked up to normal speed.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’ Y’sul asked, sounding irritable. ‘I am rapidly running out of patience with this bilateral monomaniac. It’s been ten days, Fassin. What’s happened? Fallen asleep?’

‘I’m going as fast as I can. Only been a few tens of seconds for me.’

‘You could just stay and think at normal speed, you know. Give us all time to mull over whatever this gas-brain’s saying. No need to go doing this show-off delving stuff.’

‘Less of a conversation that way. This shows respect. You get more out of people if you--’

‘Yes yes yes. Well, you just carry on. I’ll try and find more games to keep this split-personality cretin occupied. You rote off and commune with this space-vegetable. I’ll do the real hard work. Sorry I came along now. If I’ve missed any more good battles while I’ve been away…’ His voice faded into the distance.

Fassin descended into extreme slow-time again. The Clouder still hadn’t replied.

At least this time there was no insane spiralling. There was the same fuzzy, low-reliability screen to distract them as they wafted away from the Clouder and made for the hidden wormhole mouth, and the doors out of the passenger compartment were just as locked, but there was no fierce spinning. Fassin let Quercer & Janath take over the gascraft remotely and turn off its systems. He didn’t bother to clear any of the shock-gel or turn the faceplate clear this time, he just put himself into a trance. It was easy, a lot like preparing to go down into slow-time. And it meant he couldn’t see or hear Y’sul complaining about the ignominy of being zapped unconscious just because they were going on a space journey.

They were making for somewhere called Mavirouelo - yet another place Fassin had never heard of. This was where Hoestruem had said that Leisicrofe was going next. The Clouder hadn’t known if this was a system, a planet, another Clouder or what. Quercer & Janath had gone silent for a moment when they heard the name, and Fassin had sensed them consulting the ship’s crude galactic atlas. They declared that they knew the place. A planet, in the Ashum system. (Fassin, or at least the gascraft’s memory, did know of this place. It was even connected, with its own Mercatorial-controlled wormhole, though Fassin suspected they wouldn’t be using it.) Total travel time to be expected was ‘a few days’.

As he slid into unconsciousness, Fassin’s thoughts were of how beautiful the Clouder had looked. The vast being was like a million great long gauzy scarves of light, a whisper of matter and gravity close to nothingness that massed more than many solar systems, drifting yet purposeful, intent by ancient decision, along a course charted out over millions of years, propelled, dirigible by minute flexings of cold plasmas, by the force of near-not-there-at-all magnetic fields, by sigh-strength expulsions and drawings-in of interstellar material. Cold and dead-seeming yet alive and thinking. And beautiful, in the right light. Seen in a fitting wash of wavelengths, there was something endlessly, perfectly sublime about…

*

Saluus stood on a balcony of ice and metal, looking out at the view, his breath misting in the air before him.

The Shrievalty retreat was embedded in and partially sculpted from the frozen waterfall Hoisennir, a four-hundred-metre-high, klick-wide cliff of ice marking where the river Doaroe began its long fall from the high semi-arctic plateau towards the tundra and plains beyond. A low winter sun provided a grand display of Sepektian clouds and a fuzzy purple-red sunset, but nowhere near enough heat to start melting the ice.

Sepekte wobbled slowly and not especially significantly. Its arctic and antarctic circles, where the sun alternately never set or never rose during the heights of summer and depths of winter, were less than a thousand kilometres in diameter. Officially classed as a hot\temperate planet by human standards, its winters were longer but less severe than those of Earth and their worst effects were confined to smaller areas than on humanity’s original home. But the Hoisennir waterfall was far north and high up in the arctic-shield mountains, and the Doaroe spent standard years at a time entirely frozen.

The place was called a retreat because it was owned by the Shrievalty, but as far as Saluus was concerned it was just a hotel and conference centre. The view was impressive, though, when there was sufficient daylight actually to see it properly. It had a certain severe appeal, Saluus was prepared to grant.

Saluus didn’t like being here, all the same. He wasn’t keen on places that he couldn’t get away from easily - preferably, if the worst came to the worst, by just walking. To get away from here meant an air-car or a lift up or down the interior of the frozen fall to the landing ground on the ice of the solidified river above, or down to the vac-rail station on the shore of the frozen lake at the foot of the cliff. When he’d found out where the conference on the Dweller Embassy was to be held - at fairly short notice, for security reasons - he’d made sure to have a parasail packed with his luggage, just so that he had an emergency way out, if it came to it.

He knew that almost certainly there wouldn’t be any emergency - or if there was it would be something so big and-or quick that there would be no getting away from it - but he felt better, safer having the parasail by the balcony window of his bedroom. Most of the other important attendees had suites far inside the fall, to be further away from anything that might come at them from outside, but Saluus had insisted on an outside suite, one with a view, a way out. He hadn’t parasailed for decades but he’d rather risk his neck that way than cowering at the back of a suite, whimpering, just waiting for death.

He sometimes wondered where this obsession with being able to get away came from. It wasn’t something he’d been born with or picked up as the result of some traumatic experience in childhood, it was just something that had sort of crept slowly up on him all the way through his adult life. One of those things, he supposed. He hadn’t bothered wasting any time thinking really deeply about it.

All that mattered, Saluus supposed, was that the retreat\hotel was as safe a place to be as anywhere was, these days. The attacks on Ulubis system had gone on, never slackening off for very long, never really reaching any sort of peak. Many of the targets were obvious military ones, often attacked with bombs, missiles and relatively short-range weapons. These were usually blamed on the Beyonders. Other targets had cultural or morale value or were just big. These were the kind that were hit from deep space, with high-velocity, sometimes near-light-speed boosted rocks. The number of such attacks had increased even as the weight of assaults by drone craft carrying beam weapons and missiles had decreased.

Some of the strategists claimed that all this represented a failure by their enemies to attack when they’d expected to, though it seemed to Saluus that what they called the proof of this relied too much on simulations and shared assumptions.

It had all certainly gone on for a long time now. People had worked their way through the various stages of shock, denial, defiance, solidarity, grim determination and who-knew-what else; nowadays they were just tired of it. They wanted it all to end. They feared how that end might come about, but they were half broken by the erratic bombardment and the ever-present uncertainty.

Worse - in a way, because news had somehow leaked out of when the invasion by the Starveling Cult had been expected, and it had not yet materialised - people were starting to think that it might not now ever happen. The real conspiracy theorists believed that it had all been a huge military-industrial paranoid death-fantasy right from the start, that no real threat had ever existed, that most of the attacks were being carried out by the security forces themselves, either as part of an inter-service conflict or in a carefully planned series of cynical, deliberately self-sacrificial moves that would gain sympathy for the armed forces even as the mass of people lost the few remaining civil liberties they still had; that it was all just an excuse to turn the whole Ulubis system into a semi-fascist society, securing power in the hands of the privileged few.

Even those of a more moderate turn of mind chafed at the freedoms lost and the restrictions imposed, and had begun asking where exactly was this terrible threat they had been preparing for for the best part of a year? Shouldn’t the sky have lit up by now with the invading fleet’s drives as they decelerated into Ulubis near-space? People were starting to question the need for all the sacrifice and hardship and to wonder if too much was being done to counter a threat that so far hadn’t materialised and not enough to deal with the ongoing attrition of small-scale but still intermittently devastating attacks.

The strategists were wondering where the E-5 Discon forces were, too. There had been wild arguments over what the best strategy was: go out to meet the invading fleet or fleets, hoping to gain a slight edge by a degree of surprise - and keeping at least some of the fighting out of the populated reaches of Ulubis system - or sit tight and wait, building up maximum forces where they were in the end most needed? Drone scout ships had already been dispatched in the general direction the invasion was coming from but so far none of them had found anything. A very literal long shot.

A giant magnetic rail gun was being constructed in orbit round G’iri, the smaller gas-giant beyond Nasqueron, built to scatter space in front of the oncoming fleet with debris: a huge blunderbuss supposed to throw a sleet of surveillance machines and a cloud of tiny guided explosive or just kinetic mines before the invading ships, but it was only now getting up to speed, months late, wildly over budget and plagued by problems. At least this latest failure couldn’t be laid at the door of Kehar Heavy Industries. Saluus’s firm had never been involved in the contract. They’d been the obvious people to build it but it had been handed over to a consortium of other companies partly just to show that KHI didn’t have a monopoly and to give some of the others a shot at a big project.

The interim report on the Nasqueron debacle had pretty much cleared KHI, finding nothing worse than occasionally imprecise accounting, the sort of rush-resulted corner-cutting that was only to be expected in anything like the current emergency. The whole storm-battle farce had been a home-grown military fuck-up in other words, just as Saluus had maintained from the start. Partly as a result, he had become more integrated into the whole planning and strategic superstructure of the Ulubine Mercatoria and even, fairly regularly, the Emergency War Cabinet.

This made sense. It also appealed to Saluus’s sense of importance, and he was self-aware enough to know and accept this. And, of course, it had the additional effect of tying him in tighter to the political hierarchy of the system, identifying him even more strongly with the ruling structures and individuals, giving him more of an incentive to fight to preserve Mercatorial rule. If the bad guys did sweep in and take things over it would be harder now for Saluus to wave his hands and claim to be just a modest shipbuilder, now humbly at the service of the new masters.