Upon hearing that I realised I still did not know enough about Brumallian society. I realised the Consensus could not decide everything, and that there had to be levels of decision-making below that to tighten the essential nuts and bolts of their civilisation. Yes, the Consensus might decree that non-Brumallians should be imprisoned, but I doubted it had specified where or how. Did individuals make such lesser decisions, or perhaps subgroups of the overall Consensus?

"Do you yet have any idea of what happened?" I asked.

She glanced at me, expression bland, and nodded to one side. "I can't pick up very much out here, but my sense of direction is fine and I know that is not the sunrise." An orange glow etched out the dark horizon. It told me nothing—Tigger could still have diverted the attack. She added, "That's where Vertical Vienna is…or was."

The cold finally drove Rhodane to put her helmet and gloves back on. Beside us on the canal path grew plant life resembling blue cycads. Where guards brushed against the overhanging leaves, pieces snapped off and tinkled to the ground. As we trudged over frozen mud, I studied these quofarl and picked out one of the two I had met before. "You, quofarl." He glanced towards me and I signed a question, asking his name. It was short and pithy with a nuance of meaning conveying hard relentless striving. In my mind I translated it as 'Slog'.

"Slog, can you tell me what has happened?" I signed as he stepped up beside me.

"Fleet destroyed Vertical Vienna," he replied.

"We heard two explosions," I suggested in the interrogative.

"One missile detonated before reaching the ground."

"Was the city fully evacuated before the second missile hit?"

"No."

"Damn them," muttered Rhodane. "Damn all Fleet to the hells they create."

Finally we cut away from the canal, heading along a path through the vegetation. Fluted mollusc shells like old porcelain crunched underneath our feet. Upon reaching another canal where a small barge was moored, much debate ensued between the quofarl escorts. I guessed this sort of thing might be a problem without someone appointed to give orders. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the ice lay too thick for them to commandeer a barge from there to the city and down, so on we trudged. Dawn lit the sky by the time we reached the underground city's head. In its light I saw the large catfish forms of wormfish writhing under the ice and peering up at us with bemused eyes. The temperature above the city grew noticeably warmer and the ice thinner, and in places broken. We clambered aboard another barge, motored into the top of one of those watery lift shafts with living pumps labouring ceaselessly all around us, then plummeted down the descent tube. I was getting very hungry now and starting to feel a bit strange, but we did not come upon any grobbleworm stalls this time. We were quickly whisked from the barge and guided through corridors and hallways until I thought I vaguely recognised our surroundings. Having removed her helmet and tested the air, Rhodane told me, "Eighteen hundred dead, and the entire city of Vertical Vienna gutted."

Eventually they brought us to a room, into which Slog and his companion accompanied us while the rest of the quofarl departed. Glancing around I saw this place was furnished, but with oddly grating discords in the layout and the furnishings themselves. A cylindrical shelving unit occupied the central space, loaded with a seemingly random collection of screens, pherophones, mollusc shells and curiously shaped glass tanks containing squirming life forms. Plants, which were all dark green leaf interspersed with bright orange tendrils, were arrayed around the walls, growing from polished woody spheroids I recognised as the husks of things I had seen on some of the trees up on the surface. There were paintings too, displaying bizarre Brumallian landscapes or crowded city scenes. Triangular wooden tiles covered the floor, upon which was scattered various geometrically shaped mattresses, and similarly shaped low tables of verdigrised metal sealed under a glistening skin. Putting aside some device which apparently fitted over her face—I suspected it to be their version of a VR mask—a Brumallian woman rose from one mattress and turned to face us. It took me a moment to recognise one of the Speakers who along with Rhodane had questioned me.

Without much ado she informed me, "Fleet is not listening. It is in fact jamming all communications. You must present our case to the Sudorian Parliament, but let me first present our case to you." She gestured to a large chest standing open nearby.

Feeling somewhat tetchy, I replied, "You had better feed me first."

In their terms, the evidence was incontrovertible, though it took me some time to understand this since much of it could be easily falsified back in the Polity, yet not here. The Brumallian Speaker, whose name referred to some flower found in this acidic environment and who I called Lily, showed me a picture of the missile launcher in question, then gestured to a nearby table on which lay a piece of metal with something like a barcode etched into it.

"There are some launchers stored 8,000 miles from here, but they are the only ones we have left. This was one of the last seized by Fleet and taken into the ground base nearest to Vertical Vienna, where it was supposed to be destroyed," she told me.

This proved Fleet was last in possession of the missile launcher and, before using it, neglected to file off the serial number. There was more evidence: footage, obviously taken from concealment, of a Fleet Special Operations team transporting a bulky cargo out towards the launch site; Brumallian remains found at the site DNA matched, perfectly, with Brumallians who had disappeared during the War; and a chemical analysis showing that the propellant used in the missile was of Fleet manufacture. But it was not just that: there was lots of linking evidence, lots of detail, carbon-crystal storage filled with information. As I ate roasted molluscs off a gold-plated spike I assessed it all throughout the many ensuing hours.

"You understand that this proves the remnant of the launcher definitely came from that launch site," Rhodane pointed out while I studied a particular recording. Without her I would have missed a lot of stuff like that.

Finally satisfied and somewhat weary, I realised that here lay proof of the innocence in this business of the Brumallians, and that here also was a weapon the Sudorian Parliament could use to politically castrate Fleet. Of course the evidence lay here while those who needed to see this lay some millions of miles away, with Fleet sitting directly in the way. And political castration was not quite the same as the physical kind; Fleet might be put firmly in the wrong and voted down in Parliament, but votes, and being in the wrong, did not necessarily take fingers off triggers.

"And how am I supposed to present this evidence to the Sudorian Parliament?"

"We have ships," replied Lily.

"So do Fleet—large powerful ships sitting in orbit above us."

"They are withdrawing towards Sudoria. It has become apparent that we were not the real target."

"Real target?" Rhodane queried.

"Orbital Combine," Lily replied.