'Well?'
'Yeah, well, depends what definition you accept. To some they're post-civilisational, because the individual groups on each gas-giant have so little contact with each other, to others they're a diasporian civilisation, which is the same thing expressed more kindly, to others still they're just a degenerate example of how to almost take over an entire galaxy and then fail, because they just lost interest, or they somehow forgot what the purpose of the operation was in the first place, or they misplaced their ruthlessness and came over all coy and conservational and decided it would only be fair to give everybody else a chance, too, or they were warned off by some higher power. All of which might be true, or nonsense. And that's what Dweller Studies is all about. Maybe one day we'll know for sure . . . What?' There was something about the way Taince was looking at him.
'Nothing. Just wondering. You still sticking to the line you haven't decided what to do after college?'
'I might not become a Seer, Taince, or anything to do with Dweller Studies; it isn't compulsory. We don't get drafted.'
'Mm-hmm. Well,' she said, 'time for another attempt to contact the real world.' She rose smoothly to her feet. 'Coming?'
'Mind if I stay behind?' Fassin rubbed his face, looked around. 'Bit tired. I think we're safe enough here, yeah?'
'Guess so,' Taince told him. 'Back soon.' She turned and tramped off into the darkness, quickly disappearing and leaving Fassin alone with the soft lights of the flier in the vast, unechoing space.
He did and didn't want to fall asleep, and after a few moments alone thought that maybe he didn't feel so secure here by himself after all, and nearly went after Taince, but then thought he might get lost, and so stayed where he was. He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn't going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.
*
He left in the false dawn of an albedo sunrise, Ulubis still well below the horizon but lighting up half the facing hemisphere of Nasqueron, flooding the Northern Tropical Uplands of 'glantine with a soft, golden-brown light. A small yellow auroral display to the north added its own unsteady glow. He'd already said various goodbyes to friends and family in the Sept the night before and left messages for those, like his mother, he couldn't contact immediately. He'd left Jaal asleep.
Slovius, somewhat to Fassin's surprise, came to see him off at the house port, a hundred-metre circle of dead flat granite coldmelt a kilometre downslope from the house, near the river and the gently rising edge of the Upland forest. Light rain fell from high, thin clouds moving in from the west. A sleek, soot-black Navarchy craft, maybe sixty metres long, sat on a tripod of struts at the centre of the circle, radiating heat and bannered by drifting steam.
They stopped and looked at it. 'That's a needle ship, isn't it?' Fassin said.
His uncle nodded. 'I do believe it is. You will be going to Pirrintipiti in some style, nephew.' Slovius's own suborb yacht, a streamlined yet stubbier machine, half the size of the black Navarchy ship, lay on a circular parking pad just off the main circle. They walked on, Fassin in his thin one-piece gee-suit, worn under his light Sept robe, feeling as if he was walking with a sort of warm gel extending from ankle to neck.
Fassin carried the grip holding his formal wear. A pony-tailed servant had his other bag and held a large umbrella over Fassin. Slovius's chair-tub had extended a transparent cover above him. Another servant held the sleeping form of Fassin's niece Zab in her arms; the child - up scandalously late the evening before and somehow hearing of her uncle's summons to Sepekte - had insisted she wanted to say goodbye to Fassin and wheedled her grandfather and parents into granting permission, but then had fallen back asleep almost as soon as they'd left the house in the little funicular which served the port.
'Oh, and my regards to my old friend Seer-Chief Chyne, of the Favrial,' Slovius said as they crossed to the Navarchy craft. 'Should you see him. Oh, and most especially to Braam Ganscerel, of Sept Tonderon, naturally.'
'I'll try to say hello to all who know you, uncle.'
'I should have come with you,' Slovius said absently. 'No, maybe not.'
A grey-uniformed figure appeared from a drop-platform under the black ship and walked towards them. The officer, a fresh-faced, cheery-looking woman, took off her cap, bowed to Slovius, and to Fassin said, 'Major Taak?'
Fassin stood looking at her for a moment, before recalling that officially he was now a major in the Shrievalty Ocula. 'Ah, yes,' he said.
'First Officer Oon Dicogra, NMS 3304,' the young woman said. 'Welcome. Please follow me.'
Slovius held out one flippery hand. 'I shall try to remain alive until your return, Major Nephew.' He made a wheezing noise that was probably a laugh.
Fassin gripped Slovius's finger stubs awkwardly. 'I'm rather hoping this is a false alarm and I'll be back in a few days.'
'In any event, take care. Goodbye, Fassin.'
'I shall. Goodbye.' He kissed the still-sleeping Zab lightly on the cheek, avoiding waking her, then followed the Navarchy officer to the platform, stepped up onto it and waved as the curve-bottomed slab raised them into the ship.
'We'll be pulling about 5.2 Earth gees most of the way,' Dicogra said as Fassin's robe and his luggage were secured in a brace-cabinet. 'Are you happy with that? The physio profile we got on you says yes, but we have to check.'
Fassin looked at her. 'To Pirrintipiti?' he asked. The local shuttles and suborbs accelerated a lot less sharply than that, and they did the trip in less than an hour. How tight was this schedule?
'No, to Borquille city,' Dicogra said. 'Going straight there.'
'Oh,' Fassin said, surprised. 'No, 5.2 is fine.'
The planet-moon 'glantine's gravity was about a tenth of that, but Fassin was used to more. He thought about pointing out that his day job involved spending years at a time in a gravity field of over six Earth gees, but of course that was in a Dwellerine arrowship, pickled in shock-gel, and didn't really count.
First Officer Dicogra smiled, wrinkled her nose and said, 'Good for you. That physio report said you were quite a toughie. Still, we'll spend nearly twenty hours at that acceleration, with only a few minutes weightless right in the middle, so do you need to visit the heads? You know, the toilet?'
'No, I'm fine.'
She gestured at his groin, where a bulge like a sports box was the only place on his body where the grey, centimetre-thick gee-suit didn't hug the contours of his flesh. 'Any attachments required?' she asked, smiling.
'No, thanks.'
'Drugs to let you sleep?'
'Not necessary.'
The ship's captain was a whule, a species that always looked to Fassin like a cross between a giant grey bat and an even more scaled-up praying mantis. She greeted Fassin briefly via a screen from the bridge and he was settled into a steep-sided, semi-reclined couch in a gimballed ball pod near the centre of the ship by First Officer Dicogra and a fragile-seeming but dexterous whule rating who smelled, to the human nose, of almonds. The whule rating levered himself out with a snapping sound of wing membranes and Dicogra settled into the only other couch in the pod. Her preparations for a day of five gees continuous consisted of tossing her cap into a locker and adjusting her uniform underneath her.
The ship lifted slowly at first and Fassin watched on a screen on the curved wall opposite as the port's circular landing ground fell away, the little figures there lifting their heads as the Navarchy craft rose. Zab might have waved one tiny arm, then the haze of clouds intervened, the view tilted and swung and the ship accelerated - the gimballed pod keeping him and Dicogra level in their seats - towards space.
*
Was that screaming? His eyes flicked open. His neck hairs were standing on end, his mouth was dry. Dark. Still inside the ruined alien ship, his back resting against the dimly lit flier. Taince gone, away to the gap to check for comms reception. Oh shit, those were screams, from behind. Maybe shouting, too. He scrambled to his feet, looking
around. Little to see; just the faint traces of the warped landscape of destruction and collapse that was the interior of the wrecked ship, the tilted decks and bulkheads, the huge hanging strips of whatever-the-hell hanging from the invisibly dark and distant ceiling. The screams were coming from forward, from the interior, from the direction that Saluus and Ilen had walked in. He stood staring into that darkness, holding his breath to listen better. Sudden silence, then maybe a voice - Sal's shouting, the words indistinct. Help? Taince? Fass?
What do I do? Run to help? Wait for Taince? Look for another torch, another gun if there is one?
A clattering noise behind him made him spin round.
Taince, bounding down from one gnarled level of the buckled wall. 'You okay?'
'Yes, but—'
'Stay with me. Keep a few steps behind. Say if you can't keep up.' She went past him at a slow run, her gun high in one hand. Later, he would remember that there was a grim sort of smile on her face.
They ran up the shallow slope leading deeper into the ship, over increasingly large ripples in the material beneath their feet until they were leaping from ridge to ridge, then jumped down through a tear in the floor and ran slightly uphill on a half-giving surface like thin rubber over iron, vaulting one-handed over enormous, thigh-high cables strung in an irregular net across the space. Fassin followed Taince as best he could, guided by the glow patches on her fatigues. She ran and leapt more fluidly with one hand filled with pistol than he did pumping both arms. The floor pitched up more steeply, then down.
'Taince! Fassin!' Sal shouted, somewhere ahead.
'Duck!' Taince yelled, suddenly running doubled-up.
Fassin got down just in time; his hair touched the hard fold of ink-black material above. They slowed down, Taince feeling her way one-handed along the dark ceiling, then slipping sideways through a narrow gap.
Fassin followed, the cold press of ungiving material on either side making him shiver.
Light ahead. A dim confusion of tilted floor and a half-open chaos of girders and tubes forming a ceiling, spikes like stalagmites and stalactites, thin hanging cables, a frozen downward explosion of some red substance like an enormous inverted flower. And there, crouching on a narrow ledge by a jagged, vaguely triangular hole in the floor a couple of metres across, staring into it, lit by the glow patches stuck to his jacket, was Sal.
He looked up. 'Len!' he shouted. 'She fell!'
'Sal,' Taince said sharply, 'that floor safe for us?'
He looked confused, frightened. 'Think so.'
Taince tested the way ahead with one foot, then knelt by the triangular hole, right at one apex. She motioned Fassin to stay back, lay on her front and stuck her head into the hole, then, muttering something about the edges being braced, signalled Fassin to the side of the hole opposite Saluus. There was more room on that side. He lay and looked in and down.
The triangle opened out into a darkly cavernous space beneath them, just vague glints of edged surfaces visible below; stepped collections of what looked like huge cooling fins. Fassin's head seemed to swim, recognising how much of the wrecked ship was beneath the level they were on now. He remembered the flier climbing from the desert floor before entering the giant ship. How far had they climbed? A hundred metres? A little less? Plus the journey from the flier to here had been mostly uphill.
Ilen lay about six metres down, caught on a couple of arm-thick projections that stuck curving out from the nearest intact bulkhead beneath like two slim tusks. She lay on her front, her head, one leg and one arm hanging over the drop. Glow patches on her sleeves provided pale, greeny-blue light. The fractured ends of the two tusk-shaped protrusions were only centimetres from the side of her body. Off to one side at eight- or nine-metre intervals, several more sets of the tusklike shapes clawed out from the bulkhead like bony fingers grasping at the gaping space. The drop below Ilen looked fifty or sixty metres deep, down to the bladelike edges of the fins beneath.
The human mindset had had to adapt to places like 'glantine where gravity was weaker and a fall that would break both your legs on Earth was something you could walk away from. But given enough vertical space to accelerate into, a human's body would be just as injured or dead after a sixty-metre drop here as it would after a thirty-metre fall on Earth.
'Any rope?' Taince asked.
Sal shook his head. 'Oh God, oh fuck. No. Well, yes, but we left it back there.' He nodded further into the ship. He seemed to shiver, hugging himself then putting up the collar of his jacket, as though cold. 'C-couldn't undo the knot again.'
'Shit! She's moving,' Taince said, then stuck her head into the hole and shouted, 'Ilen! Ilen, don't move! Can you hear me? Don't move! Just say if you can hear me!'
Ilen moved weakly, her head and the arm dangling over the drop shaking and shifting. She looked to be trying to roll over, but was edging still closer to the drop.
'Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,' Sal said, his voice high and quick and strained. 'She was behind me. I thought she was all right. I didn't see anything, must have stepped over it. A hatch or something or it was just balanced and she must have knocked it and she was shouting, sort of balanced over it, one hand, and screaming, and I couldn't get back in time and she fell. We didn't even find anything, didn't do anything! Just junk! Oh fuck! She was fine! She was just behind me!'
'Be quiet,' Taince said. Sal sat back, rubbing his mouth, shaking. Taince put the gun back into her fatigues, slapped a glow patch onto her forehead, then, with her hands on two sides of the triangular hole, lowered her head into the gap again, further this time. She levered herself out for a second and looked back at Fassin. 'Hold my feet.'
Fassin did as he was told. Taince got her shoulders through the hole, then they heard her say, 'Ilen! You mustn't move!' She hauled herself back out, leaving the glow patch where it was on her forehead like some strange, shining eye. 'Nothing to hold on to underneath here,' she told them. 'She's moving around. Must have hit her head. She's going to fall.' She looked at Sal. 'Sal, how far away is that rope? By time.'
'Oh fuck! I don't know! Ten, fifteen minutes?'
Taince glanced back into the hole. 'Shit,' she said quietly. ‘Ilen' she shouted. 'You must not move!' She shook her head. 'Shit, shouting at her's just making her move,' she said, as though to herself. She took a deep breath, looked at Saluus and Fassin. 'Okay. Here's what we're going to do,' she said. 'Daisy-chain rescue. Practised this, it's doable.'
'Right,' Sal said, sitting forward, his face pale in the dim light. 'What do we have to do?'
'One holds on at the top, somebody climbs down their body, holds on to their feet, last person climbs down both and picks up Ilen. I'll do that bit.'
Sal's eyes widened. 'But the person at the top—' 'Will be you. You're the strongest. Wouldn't work on Earth; does here,' Taince told them. She slid over and grabbed Sal's backpack. 'Seen it done with four links. You two guys look in good enough shape. Fass, you're in the middle. Plus person at the top gets tied on with these straps,' she said, glancing at Sal and then pulling a knife from her fatigues and slicing into one set of shoulder straps.
Sal knelt quaking at the side of the hole. 'Fucking God, Taince,' he said, 'we all want to rescue her, but this could get us all killed. Fuck, oh fuck. I don't know. I don't fucking believe this, I just fucking don't. This isn't happening, this is just not fucking happening!' He sat back again, visibly trembling. He looked at his shaking hands, turning them over and staring at them as though he didn't recognise them. 'I don't know if I have any grip,' he said. 'I really don't.'
'You'll be fine,' Taince told him, busy with the straps.
'Oh fuck, we're all going to fucking die,' Sal said. 'Fucking hell.' He shook his head hard. 'No. Not. Not. No.'
'This will work,' Taince said, quickly tying the cut straps to those still joined to the pack.
I'm calm, thought Fassin. I'm probably in shock or something, but I feel calm. We might all be about to die, or it might be a close shave and a bonding thing we all
remember for the rest of our long lives, but either way I feel calm. What will happen will happen and as long as we do our best and don't let each other down, no matter what happens we'll have been fine. He looked at his own hands. They were shaking, but not uncontrollably. He flexed them. He felt strong. He would do everything he could, and if that wasn't enough, that wasn't his fault.
Sal jumped up, wobbling dangerously close to the hole. 'There's more rope,' he said suddenly. His face was still grey-pale, but now almost expressionless. He moved past Taince.
Fassin looked at him, wondering what he was talking about.
'What?' Taince said, testing a square-section stalagmite extrusion on the floor then flipping the pack straps over it.
'Rope,' Sal said, pointing towards the outside and the flier. He took a backwards step in that direction. 'There's more. In the flier. I'll go. I know where it is.' He backed off further.
'Sal!' Taince shouted at him. 'There isn't time!'
'No, there is, I'll go,' Sal said, still backing off.
'Stay fucking here, Sal,' Taince said, dropping and deepening her voice. Sal seemed to hesitate but shook his head and turned and ran.
Taince leapt and made a grab for him but he'd moved too quickly. He vaulted a stalagmite and ran towards the gap Fassin and Taince had squeezed through earlier. Taince dropped to one knee and pulled the gun. 'Stop, you fucking coward!'
There might, Fassin thought, have been half a second when Taince could have fired, but she dropped the gun and stashed it in her fatigues as Sal sprinted, ducking through the gap and away. Taince looked at Fassin. Now her face had gone blank, he thought. 'Still a possibility,' she said, and quickly stepped out of her fatigues. She wore a one-piece underbody the same colour as her skin, so for just a moment she appeared to be naked. She reattached the top and trousers of the fatigues, snapping them tight to test that they held. 'Right,' she said. 'Now, this ties to your ankle.'
The straps on the backpack held, and Fassin did too, wrists tied to them but taking his own weight and Taince's on his hands and fingers initially because he didn't trust the straps, and the knot tying Taince's trousers to his ankle held as well, and Taince was holding on fine as she shinned down over him and onto the fatigues and down with him twisting his neck and shoulders out and round so he could just about watch her progress and watch Ilen too, as though as long as he kept watching her she'd be all right, but then there was a ground-quake, shaking the ship, not badly, but enough to bring Fassin out in a cold sweat as he hung there, hands, palms, fingers slipping until it really was the straps and the straps alone holding him, and below him, below Taince, still just out of reach, Ilen moved one more time and fell over the edge and away into the darkness.