He felt her shiver. She was dressed in light clothes. He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. He’d seen that in screen stories and it still made him feel good to do it. He didn’t mind the cold, though it was worse than it had been, and a breeze was starting to blow from above. It was a part-katabatic wind, he’d been told by somebody: a current of cold air flowing down from the ice-locked wastes above, displacing warmer, less dense air below and driving gently but firmly downwards, spilling over the lip of the waterfall like a ghost of the frozen, plunging waters.
They stood in silence for a while, then Liss reminded Saluus that he was supposed to meet with Peregal Emoerte for a private talk before dinner that evening. There was still time, though. He felt cold now, close to shivering. He would wait until he did shiver before he went in. He stared up into the near-complete darkness directly overhead, watching the spark of a close-orbit satellite pass above them. He felt Liss stiffen at his side, and pulled her closer.
“What’s that?” she said after a few more moments.
He looked where she was pointing, to the low west, where only the vaguest, dimmest hint of purple near the horizon showed where Ulubis had set.
A little above that horizon, in the sky below, beyond and above the thickest strands of reflected orbital light, new lights were flickering to life. They were a sprinkle of bright blue, scattered across a rough circle of sky the size of a large coin held at arm’s length, and increasing in number with every passing second. The blue points wavered, gradually strengthening. More and more were lighting up, filling the little window of sky with a blue blaze of cold fire, barely twinkling in the chill, still air out over the frozen plains.
Saluus felt himself shiver, though not from the cold. He opened his mouth to speak but Liss looked up at him and said,
“That’s them, isn’t it? That’s the Starveling Cult guys, the E-5 Discon. That’s the invasion fleet, braking.”
“Fraid so,” Sal agreed. His ear stud was pinging and the comms in the suite was warbling plaintively. “We’d better go in.”
* * *
Groggy again. Still in the passenger\freight compartment of the Velpin. He brought the little gascraft’s systems back up. The wall-screen crazed, came clear, showed stars fixed, then swinging, and finally settled on a greeny-blue and white planet. Fassin’s first reaction on seeing it was that the place looked alien, unsuitable for life without an esuit. Then he realised that it looked like ’glantine or Sepekte; like images of Earth, in fact. Going gas-giant native, he told himself. Thinking like a Dweller. It didn’t usually happen so quickly.
“Oh, fuck!” Y’sul said angrily, staring at the image on the screen. “It’s not even a proper fucking planet!”
The waves came booming in like blindness, like stubbornness bundled and given liquid form, an unending slow launching against the ragged fringe of massively sprawled rocks, each long, low rough ridge of water heaving skywards to tumble like some ponderously incompetent somersaulter, rolling up and falling forward, hopeful and hopeless at once, disintegrating, exploding in spray and foam, coming to pieces amongst the fractured bone-yard of rock.
The waters drained after each assault, rattling boulders, stones and pebbles between the massive jabs and points of granite, sloughing like a watery skin and falling away again, that stony chattering speaking of a slowly aggregated success, the waves -the ocean — rubbing away at the land, breaking up and breaking away, using rock against rock, tumbling it and crashing it and cracking it, abrading over centuries and millennia to a kind of stubborn accomplishment.
He watched the waves for some time, admiring their vast mad pounding, reluctantly impressed by such sheer clamorous inces-sancy. The salt spray filled his hair and eyes and nose and lungs. He breathed in deeply, feeling joined, feeling linked to and part of this wild, unceasing elemental battle.
A low, golden light struck out across the ruffled nap of sea, sunlight swinging slow beneath a great piled series of cloud escarpments to the west, layers of vapour draped over distant peaks and spires of rock disappearing into the long misted curve of north-facing shore.
Seabirds wheeled across the wind and waves, diving, flapping away, clutching slim fish like wet slices of rainbow.
It had felt strange, at first, coming out of the little gascraft. It always did, it always had, but this time seemed different, more intense somehow. This was an alien homeland, a familiar yet utterly different place; closer to what ought to be home, further from what was. Eleven thousand light years away from Ulubis this time, though they had travelled further than the last time to get here. And just twelve days’ travel.
When he’d opened the gascraft’s hatch and stood, he’d staggered and swayed, needed holding up by Y’sul. He’d coughed and nearly retched, feeling scrawny and weak and thin and hollowed-out, shivering in the strange ultra-nakedness of returning to the basic human condition, as slimed and wet and naked as a newborn, and even the retreating tendrils of the gill-fluid and shock-gel tubes there too, umbilical links to image birth. He felt lighter and heavier at once, blood draining, bones complaining.
Then, after a while, being naked — even naked in ordinary clothes — started to feel normal again. Every now and again, though, he shivered. The Velpin’s pattern-follower had done its best to make human wearable clothes, but still the results felt strange and slick and cold.
They were on Mavirouelo, a ninety per cent Earthlike not far from the galactic outskirts, though less isolated than Ulubis. A Waterworlder-colonised planet, a Sceuri world.
Waterworlds were the single most common type of rocky planet in the galaxy, even though you never saw the rock, which was, on average, a metal-rock core about the size of Earth buried under five thousand kilometres of pressure-ice, finally topped by a hundred klicks of ocean. Such planets provided the next most common planetary environments after the near-ubiquitous gas-giants themselves, and had given the Mercatoria three of its eight principal species: the Sceuri, the Ifrahile and the Kuskunde.
Mavirouelo was not a classic waterworld — it wasn’t even as water-covered as Earth itself — but it had been colonised by the Sceuri before any native animal — of air, land or sea — had developed sufficiently to claim it as their own, and so had become one of the Sceuri far-worlds, an outpost of their own semimperia within the greater commonwealth of the Mercatoria.
The Sceuri weren’t conventional waterworlders, either. They were Cetasails, resembling sea mammals but with backs ridged by spinnaker spines which they could hoist to the wind and so sail as well as swim across their worlds.
Y’sul, in his esuit, rose out of the sea like a submarine conning tower, frightening the seabirds. He floated up and out and made his way across the turmoil of waves to the low cliff where Fassin stood. The human was suddenly reminded of the time he had stood with Saluus Kehar, watching Hatherence, in her esuit, float out across the chaos of artificial surf surrounding the waterspout house.
“Fassin!” Y’sul boomed, floating, dripping and humming, in the air ten metres above him. “No sign yet?”
“No sign yet.”
Y’sul held up a mesh basket of glistening, flapping, wriggling stuff. “Look what I caught!” He brought the basket in front of his forward mantle to look at it. “Think I’ll take it back to the ship.”
Y’sul flew over Fassin, dropping water and small shells on top of him, then headed inland a couple of hundred metres to the ship-section resting on the scrubby ledge of vegetation fringing the jagged ranks of cliffs, pinnacles and mountains beyond. The fifty-metre-long lander made up the nose section of the Velpin, the rest of which, with Quercer Janath aboard, was still in orbit.