“There is no need to talk of surrender,” sub-master Sorofieve said quickly, and, to Sal’s amusement, actually looked round, glancing left and right to make sure nobody else had heard the “S’ word in the old cruise ship’s lounge, which was deserted apart from a few bar staff, the three men and a half-dozen or so of their closest staff. (Liss was there, looking darkly beautiful, mostly silent, occasionally talking quietly with one or other of the other assistants, secretaries and ADCs. When the Propylaea sub-master did his glancing-around act, her gaze met Sal’s; she smiled and flexed her eyebrows.)
If there were any spies here, Sal thought, they weren’t lurking behind the furniture in the shadows, they were sitting right here, around them. The indispensable aides and helpers they all relied on to run their so-important lives were the obvious candidates for the post of spy. If anything ever got back to the Hierchon — or any other more lowly but still important branch of the Ulubine Mercatoria — regarding talk of surrender or anything else deemed Unspeakable it would probably be one of these people they’d have to thank.
Saluus knew one could never be one hundred per cent certain, but he was pretty sure that the lovely Liss wasn’t working for anybody else. He’d seemingly let slip a couple of things early on in their relationship which he’d have expected to come back to him if she’d been in the pay of somebody else. It had been a sort of recommendation that she’d come via Fassin and he’d obviously known her from decades earlier. That was far too long a game just to get to an industrialist, even Saluus Kehar.
“No need?” Thovin said, turning to his secretary, holding up his glass and winking theatrically. “It’s what we’d be talking about if the Summed Fleet wasn’t on its way. Be the rational thing to do.” He snorted. “I’m not saying we should surrender. Been ordered not to, been ordered to fight to the last, but if the Fleet wasn’t coming and we weren’t looking for this… this thing, supposedly somewhere on Nasq.” (The fabled Transform, of course, Saluus thought. The mythical magic bullet which Fassin, if he was still alive, might be chasing yet.) “What else would we be doing but thinking how to not all get ourselves killed?”
“We are prepared, we are forewarned,” sub-master Sorofieve said, smiling desperately. “We shall give a good account of ourselves, I am sure. We are fighting for our homes, for our honour, for -’ the man looked round again “- for our very humanity!” Ah, Sal realised, Sorofieve had been checking there were no aliens present whom he might be offending. “We have millennia of Mercatorial, ah, wisdom and martial ability behind us. What are these Starveling renegades in comparison?”
Eleven hundred ships, that’s what they were, Saluus thought. Eleven hundred to our three hundred, and a balance of forces the strategists say is way up the force-yield spectrum compared to ours, too: medium-heavy to our light. Plus one mega-ship, to our one antique battlecruiser.
They had had another meeting with some of the Dweller representatives just that afternoon. They went down these days in person, reclined in human-form spacesuits held in small circular gascraft of two or three seats, congregating in a great hall in one of a whole fleet of giant Dreadnought-sized craft the Dwellers had dedicated to the purpose. With the gascraft canopies hinged open it was possible to sit\lie there in some comfort and talk directly to the Dwellers, face-to-hub or whatever it was.
Saluus wouldn’t want to spend more than a day like that in multiple gees, but it was worth doing. The Dwellers seemed to appreciate it and — thanks to some cram-coaching by the senior Seers who also came down with them to the meetings and stayed with them for all but the most delicate and high-security-clearance matters — Saluus was even starting to get the hang of Dweller expressions and nuances of meaning and demeanour, both as put across in speech and as displayed on their signal skin. Probably all too late, and — so far — to no avail whatsoever. But at least it felt like he was doing something — the shipyards of KHI were basically on autopilot, working flat out and so synched-in to what the military wanted that they’d effectively become part of a command economy. He’d just been getting in the way.
“This is a threat to the whole of Ulubis system,” Sorofieve said. Sal suppressed a sigh. This was only Sorofieve’s third day in this latest round — he’d replaced First Secretary Heuypzlagger, who’d found the high gravity too wearing — and he was talking to a Dweller called Yawiyuen who was also new to the process, but even so. They’d been circling over this same ground for weeks now.
“These Starveling Cult people will show no respect for Nasqueron’s neutrality,” the sub-master concluded.
“How do you know?” Gruonoshe, another of the Dwellers, asked. They were nine in all: the two human negotiators and a couple of assistants each — Liss was there in a seat behind Sal, having declared herself quite happy in the high gravity — Chief Seer Meretiy of Sept Krine, and just the two Dwellers, both in ceremonial half-clothes, ribboned and jewelled.
“Know what?” Sorofieve asked.
“Know that these Starveling Cult people will show no respect for Nasqueron’s neutrality,” Gruonoshe said, innocently.
“Well,” Sorofieve said, “they are invaders, warmongers. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, they are barbarians. They respect nothing.”
“Still, it does not follow that they’d quarrel with us,” Yawiyuen said, signal skin showing reasonableness.
“They want to take over the whole system,” Sorofieve said, looking to Saluus for help. “To them that would include Nasqueron.”
“We have heard of the Starveling Cult,” Yawiyuen told them. (- Wonder from where? Liss sent to Saluus via his ear stud.) “It appears to be an unremarkable Quick hegemonist diffusion, concerned with conquering its own kind and species-type-suitable environments, uninterested in attacking gas-giants.”
“The point here,” Saluus said smoothly, his amplified voice sounding rich and powerful, “is that they are only attacking Ulubis system to get to Nasqueron.”
“Why?” Gruonoshe asked.
“We’re not entirely sure,” Saluus said. “We are sure they want something from Nasqueron, something they can’t get from any other gas-giant, but exactly what that may be, we can’t say. But we are quite positive that that is why they are mounting this attack in the first place.”
“Why are you sure?” Gruonoshe again.
“We intercepted intelligence to that effect,” Sorofieve replied.
“What intelligence?” Yawiyuen asked.
“The intelligence,” Sorofieve said, “came from the personal diary of the Supreme Commander of the Starveling Cult invasion fleet sent to the Ruanthril system nearly eighteen years ago. The fleet was intercepted by a Mercatorial force. The captured records show that the enemy commander complained specifically about the need to divert so many of the E-5 Discon’s forces to somewhere as out of the way and strategically unimportant as Ulubis, just for some item or piece of information in Nasqueron.”
“Nasqueron was mentioned by name?” Gruonoshe asked.
“It was,” Sal said.
He half-expected a little voice in his ear to say something like “Good lie’ but then remembered that even Liss hadn’t been told the full truth about the Dweller List and the mythical Transform. She would have an idea, as a lot of people close to the epicentres of power did, that Fassin had been sent on a secret mission to look for something valuable in Nasqueron, and that the object of this search might have some bearing on the war, but that was about all. She hadn’t been present at the briefing by the AI projection of Admiral Quile, hadn’t been let in on the secret subsequently by some of those who had been there — as Sal had — and so didn’t know the details of the intelligence they’d been given.