· System, Y’sul said. — Home of the planet Nasqueron. In Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs.

· Ah, yes. Rather far away from here.

· Lots of humans there and another lot on their way, Y’sul said. — Probably going to be a war. Lot of deaths, I’d imagine. You collect humans?

· We have difficulties only with certain Cincturian species, the bird-creature told them. — Humans we have heard of and accommodated in the past, though not on this craft. I shall pass on your information at the earliest opportunity to our most proximate Sepulcraft. They may well be aware already, of course,

and possibly on their way even as we speak. However, we are grateful for your thoughtfulness.

— My pleasure, Y’sul said, sounding pleased with himself. He glanced at Fassin. — What?

Fassin looked away. They were passing bodies spread against the tunnel’s surface like small solidified explosions of rock. -Palonne, their guide informed them. — Ossile, obviously. Victims of war. Subject to a parasitic stone-rot virus of some sort.

— Fascinating, Y’sul said. — Are we nearly at this Leisicrofe fellow yet?

Duty looked at a small display clipped to one of his cinched-in wings. — Another few hundred metres.

· What’s he up to here, anyway? Y’sul asked.

· Up to? The Ythyn sounded uncertain.

· Just… studying you people, is he?

· Why, no. No, of course not. The Ythyn officer was silent for a moment. — Oh dear.

Fassin and Y’sul exchanged looks.

Fassin said, — You’re not saying he’s dead, are you?

— Well, yes. Of course. This is a Sepulcraft, gentlemen. I was under the impression that you simply wanted to see the body.

* * *

The news came while she was asleep. Taince watched an hours-old recording of the faint, sideways-seen, blue-shifted glimmers approaching from the direction of the E-5 Discon as the Starveling invasion fleet started braking for its arrival in Ulubis system. The invaders would take nearly three months to reach Ulubis. The Summed Fleet was still four months’ travel away, including its own, more dramatic deceleration regime, due to start in a little more than eighty days. The Fleet tacticians had learned quite a lot just from the braking profile of E-5 Discon’s fleet.

First, it was big: a thousand ships or more, unless there was something outlandishly clever going on with dummy drive signatures. Second, it was staying ninety-five per cent together, with only a few dozen smaller ships venturing ahead of the main fleet. This might imply a significant straight-through, braking-beyond force still hidden, though from the rest of the profile this didn’t look so likely. The size, definition and shifted-frequency signatures of the drives themselves revealed a relatively slow, old-tech vessel-capability envelope. Basically all but the lightest craft in the Summed Fleet force would be able to take on all but the heaviest of the invaders’ ships with a better than average chance of prevailing, and anything that couldn’t be outfought could be outrun (for whatever that was worth when there was nowhere to run to).

And there was one behemoth in there, a giant ship, probably a command-and-control lander- and troop-carrier plus facili-ties-and-repair vessel. At least a billion tonnes, klicks across, doubtless very heavily armoured and armed and escorted, but a classic grade-A high-value target, a possible king-piece, a back-breaker, if it could be successfully engaged and destroyed or taken out of action or even captured. Just posting a powerful-enough guard-ship screen to try and keep it safe in the event of a serious attack threat would significantly sap the invading\ occupying force’s abilities, cut down their dispositional options and drastically curtail their split-regroup capacity.

The Fleet tacticians had been positively cruel about this dinosaur of a ship. A vanity piece, they called it, an Idiot Aboard! sign hung round the neck of the enemy fleet. Every space-faring species that built warcraft quickly found out one way or another — often the hard way — that big ships just didn’t work except as a hideously expensive way of impressing the more credulous type of native. Flexibility, manoeuvrability, low unit risk-cost, distributed inherent damage resistance, fully parsed battle-space side-blind denotation control grammar… these and other even more arcane concepts were what really mattered in modern space warfare, apparently, and a Really Big Ship just didn’t sit too comfortably with any of them.

The tacticians pretty much spoke their own language, were mostly very intense, and blinked a lot.

“So a strong point that’s really a weak point,” Taince had suggested at one of their briefings.

“That would be a viable alternative definition,” one of them said, after a moment or two’s thought.

Since just a week ago, though, relatively little evidence of further activity.

Well, the Discon invaders had arrived later than anticipated, and the Summed Fleet forces were arriving earlier. Deliberate, on their part, of course. The invaders would have quickly found out when Ulubis had been told to expect the Summed Fleet’s arrival, and it was always prudent to keep the enemy off balance, to upset their assumptions. Let them think they had so much time and then arrive early before they’d got everything prepared.

Smiting. It was all about smiting. That was one of Admiral Kisipt’s favourite words. The Voehn Fleet Commander knew it in several hundred different languages, including Earth Anglish. Be ready at all times to smite the enemy. Strike with speed, decisiveness and weight.

Taince found herself lightly smitten with one of the junior male officers, discovered it was mutual and took part in some invasive tussling of her own.

The time displays ticked down steadily towards the point where they’d have to get back into their lonely little individual pods again for the deceleration burn that would bring them down from near-light speed to something close to Ulubis-zero, for the start of the attack.

* * *

The Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz spun very slowly beneath the Velpin, still gently accelerating for its distant target system and its unburied cargo of the long-dead. The Velpin was tracking round the outer rim of the giant craft, senses primed. Fassin and Y’sul were back aboard. They had been shown to the lifeless body of Leisicrofe, ice-welded to the side of the great dark corridor in the company of a half-dozen other dead Dwellers.

· Very well preserved, as you see, Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian had pointed out. — I hope you feel this setting is appropriate. The Ythyn officer had still been upset at the earlier misunderstanding.

· So he just died, then? Y’sul had asked.

· Very suddenly, apparently. We found him drifting — rolling along in his esuit, actually — a few days after he arrived. He had expressed an interest in mapping the distribution of bodies of different species and species-types while he was here. We saw no reason not to allow him to do so.

They weren’t permitted to use reaction motors inside the Sepulcraft. Y’sul had used his esuited spine-arms to push himself over to the side of the tunnel. He’d landed awkwardly by the Dweller’s body, which was naked save for a small hub-cloth.

— I have no idea whether this is this Leisicrofe guy or not, frankly, Y’sul had said. — But it is a Dweller, probably from Nasqueron and he is most certainly dead.

— Any sign of… anything? Fassin asked.

Y’sul had inspected the body, using lights and radar-sense, finding nothing. He’d unclipped the corpse’s hub-cloth and shaken it. Fassin had sensed their Ythyn host preparing to object, but a moment later Y’sul had replaced the hub-cloth and was looking round the back of the body where ice attached it to the tunnel wall.