“Couldn’t you just tell us?” Y’sul asked plaintively.

“Just point us in the right direction.”

“And we’ll be on our way”

The Sceuri wriggled in the great pool, sending water sloshing. It laughed. A soft, tinkling sound from the hovering speaker. “Oh, I could, but I always had the feeling my friend Leisicrofe had travelled even more widely than I have, especially into the gases of Nhouaste. I think you may be heading there, as you did not come through the wormhole portal, and he did not depart through it. You see? I have my sources. I know what goes on. You can’t fool me. I am not so stupid. You and your little Squanderer friend will be heading back to Nhouaste.”

“Doubt it,” the Dweller travelcaptain said, snorting.

Fassin was the little Squanderer friend. The Sceuri took great pride in having become a technological, space-faring species, given the obstacles they’d had to overcome. A classic water-world environment had almost no easily available metals. Any metal-bearing ores that a waterworld possessed tended to be locked away under all that ice, deep in the planet’s inaccessible rocky core. Waterworlders had to do what they could with what fell from the sky in the shape of meteorites, and in this shared a developmental background with gas-giant Dwellers.

To get into space in the face of such a paucity of readily available raw materials was not easy, and the Sceuri regarded themselves as deserving considerable recognition and respect for such a triumph of intellect over scarcity. Accomplishing the same feat when you came from a rock-surface planet was a relatively trivial, expectable, even dismissible trick. The Sceuri called people from such planets Squanderers as a result, though not usually to their face or other appropriate feature.

“Please make clear, oh great A of A,” the other half of Quercer Janath said.

Fassin suspected that he already knew what the Sceuri was thinking. The local gas-giant, Nhouaste — inhabited by Dwellers, of course — was, like the vast majority of Dweller gas-giants, not a world that welcomed Seers or anybody else apart from other Dwellers. Aumapile of Aumapile had probably been told where Leisicrofe was heading next and assumed that as the Dweller had not gone through the Mercatorial wormhole — and assuming he hadn’t headed into deep space at STL speeds — he must have gone to look for whatever it was he was looking for in the one place that even being fabulously rich and corruptly well-connected couldn’t gain you access to, in this system or any other: a Dweller-inhabited gas-giant.

“I think the Toilers our mutual friend sought have found a new niche, no longer in space, but in gas, you see?” the Sceuri said. Even through the speaker sphere, the creature’s voice sounded pleased with itself.

“Toilers?” Y’sul said.

“Known.”

“Benign semi-swarm devices,” the other half of Quercer Janath announced. “Infra-sentient. Known for randomly building inscrutable space structures, best guess for purpose of which being as preparatory infrastructure for an invasion that never took place on behalf of a race long gone and thoroughly forgotten. Distribution very wide but very sparse. Numbers fluctuate. Rarely dangerous, sometimes hunted, no bounty.”

“So there.”

Y’sul looked surprised. “Really?” he asked,

“Oh, stop being so coy!” their host chided, creating sinuous splashing patterns in the water, as though tickled. “Of course! As though you didn’t know.” The Aumapile of Aumapile blew jets of water from each end. A scent of something vaguely rotten filled Fassin’s nose. “But I know where our friend was going to next, and you don’t. However, I shall be willing to tell you if you take me along, once I am aboard your ship. Such large places, gas-giants! And of course we have four. One thinks, Oh, who can say, where would one’s quarry be?” The Sceuri flicked its tail. Fassin got splashed. “And what do you say, sirs?”

Y’sul looked at Fassin and quietly rippled his mantle, the Dweller equivalent of a head-shake.

The travelcaptain was silent for a moment or two, then said,

“If we do take you with us…”

“Ah! But I have my own ship! Indeed, you are in it!”

“Won’t work.”

“Have to come with us in ours.”

“I have smaller ships! Many of them! A choice!”

“Makes no difference. Has to be ours.”

“Conditions of Passage.”

“Well…’ the Sceuri said.

“Passengers travel unconditionally.”

“Unconditionally.”

“What does that mean?”

“Trust us.”

“Yes. No matter what.”

“Means you get zapped unconscious every time we travel, is what it means,” Y’sul told their host. Quercer Janath made a hissing noise. “Plus,” Y’sul added, oblivious, “you may not end up where you thought you were going to.”

“How primitive! Why, of course!”

* * *

Eleven hundred ships. They were facing eleven hundred ships. All of them had to be beyond a certain size, capable of crossing the great gulf of space between the E-5 Discon and here in reasonable time, and they would probably all be armed. Ulubis could muster less than three hundred true space-capable war-craft, even after their frenzy of building. The Summed Fleet on its way to their rescue was of similar size, but its ships would be of another order of magnitude in hitting power: a full mix of destroyers, light, medium and heavy cruisers, plus the real big guys, the battlecruisers and battleships.

Ulubis had frigates, destroyers and light cruisers, and one old battlecruiser, the Carronade. They’d built a significant fleet in the centuries following the destruction of the portal, and a few more ships in the half year since the news of the coming invasion, but nothing like enough to offer the invaders serious opposition.

They’d lost about a sixth of their total fighting force in the few minutes of action in the storm on Nasqueron, months earlier, including their only other battlecruiser. Those had mostly been light units, but it had been a grievous loss.

The latest bit of bad news was that the consortium working on the rail gun had fallen so far behind schedule that it was highly doubtful they’d even get to the trials stage before the invasion took place. The giant gun was being dismantled so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Starveling Cultists. There was something almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had been.

Kehar Heavy Industries and the other manufacturers had worked as hard as they could to construct, repair, upgrade and modify as many warships as they could, and had militarised dozens of civilian craft. But there was only so much they could do and it was never going to be enough. They were outnumbered. They could go down fighting, but they were going down.

“It couldn’t be any worse!” Guard-General Thovin spluttered, practically spraying his drink. They were on a requisitioned ex-cruise liner, one of the Embassy support ships, rolling in orbit around Nasqueron. Saluus and the Propylaea sub-master Sorofieve had been sent by the rest of the War Cabinet to add, if it were possible, an extra note of urgency to the talks with the Dwellers. Thovin, seconded from his Guard duties to be Commander-in-Chief, Ulubis Orbital Forces, was there in charge of the very lightly armed escort detachment because he was out of the way and couldn’t do too much harm. The grandeur of his new title seemed to almost entirely make up for the lack of viable military hardware at his disposal.

“We can’t even surrender to the Starvelings because if we do the Summed Fleet will clobber us when they arrive,” he said. “We’re going to get fucked-over twice!” He threw back his drink.

Saluus didn’t like Thovin — he was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel.