— Nothing, he’d sent back.

“There,” one half of Quercer Janath said.

On one of the Velpin’s screens, a flickering outline appeared around one of the abandoned ships littering the carbuncularly irregular outer hull of the Sepulcraft.

Fassin looked at the craft. It was a simple black ellipsoid, maybe sixty metres long. Deep-space cold, lifeless.

“That it?” Y’sul asked. “You sure?”

“It’s a Dweller Ail-Purpose, Single-Occupancy Standard Pattern SoloShip,” the truetwin told them. “And it pings recent.”

“Can you wake its systems?” Fassin asked. “Find out where it was last, where it came from?”

The travelcaptain looked at him. “Doesn’t work like that.”

“Pay attention.”

They got permission from the Ythyn to lift the SoloShip and join it to the Velpin. They warmed it up and introduced a standard gas-giant atmosphere. There was just about enough room for Y’sul and Fassin to board together. Quercer Janath had already laser-synched the little ship’s closed-down computer matrix to that of the Velpin. The screens, tanks, surfaces and other displays flickered, steadied and shone. The craft beeped and clicked around them. It still felt cold.

Y’sul knocked and tapped a few of the more obviously delicate-looking bits of machinery with his hub-arms.

“You getting anything?” he asked. The truetwin was staying on board the larger craft.

“There’s stuff in the log,” one half told them. “That’s sailor-talk for diary.”

“No saying!” Y’sul said.

“Truly. But it’s not accessible from here. You’ll have to input from there.”

“How, exactly?” Fassin asked.

“How should we know?”

“Not our ship.”

“Experiment.”

They experimented. The correct technique involved Y’sul pressing in to a Dweller-shaped double-alcove sensory nook and pressing four glyphboard icons on four different glyph-boards at once. The main screen stopped showing stars and the darkly glittering hull of the Sepulcraft and started showing what looked like the interior of a small library instead. Y’sul reached out into the virtual space and pulled down a book whose spine said Log. He opened it.

A motionless Dweller hub faced them in close-up.

“Well,” Y’sul said, “that certainly looks like the stiff in the big space hearse.”

“We can see him. Should be a Play button.”

“Try hitting it.”

“Gee,” Y’sul said. “Thank fuck you guys are there.” He hit Play.

* * *

Taince Yarabokin woke from a light sleep to a low-level alarm, telling her not even to think about instigating a pod-quit regime. She swung to the exterior fore-view display and looked out. Ulubis glowed sharp and blue ahead, a tiny sun amongst the surrounding scrape of stars, at last. The blueness was a function of the ship and the fleet’s colossal speed, hammering into the light waves, compressing wavelength. Taince switched from LR Sensors to ship-state. A fierce and terrible force pulled at everything. They’d started their final deceleration burn. The majority of the fleet was losing speed hard, piling up a hundred or more gravities as it braked for the approach to and arrival at Ulubis system, still over a month away.

Another group of ships — one full squadron of sixty vessels -was not decelerating so rapidly. A dozen were not slowing at all and would maintain full speed all the way to and most of the way through the system, their crews and systems trained over hundreds of simulations for an ultra-high-speed pass across Ulubis planetary system which would last for less than four hours. In that time, less than twenty days from now, they would have to collect and evaluate all the data they could on the then-current state of the system and then both signal their intelligence back to the ships behind and choose a suite of attack profiles from a vast menu of possibilities they carried in their data banks before loosing all the munitions they could against whatever hostiles they had identified. They hoped the pickings would be rich for them. They’d be arriving with little warning only a month after the Starveling fleet had struck. With luck the situation would be fluid and the E-5 Discon forces wouldn’t have had time to organise their defences properly.

Then, even before those advance ships were all the way through the system, they would begin their own still more violent deceleration, to come to a stop a light month beyond, and get back to Ulubis weeks after the main fleet had arrived: at best to help with the mopping up, at worst to deliver a retaliatory hammer-blow.

The remainder of the Advance-attack Squadron would pass through the system in small groups of ships, their arrival staggered, unpredictable, distributed, their tactics in part defined by whatever the high-speed craft had discovered. With luck, with what they hoped and trusted was a good battle-plan, the waves of war craft, each able to spend more fighting time in the system than its immediate predecessor, would deliver a succession of softening-up blows against the enemy: rocking it, unbalancing it, confusing and bloodying it. The main body of the fleet, arriving like a bunched fist, would just provide one final massive knockout punch.

Their drive light would precede them, of course. There would be no complete surprise.

The Starveling invasion had given the defenders of Ulubis even more warning, not that there was much they could have done with it. The E-5 Discon fleet had slowed right down, shut its drives off almost as one while still a few days out, well within the system’s Oort shell, then slowed further as its lead ships crossed the boundary into the planetary system.

For the next few weeks after the drive signatures meshed with the Ulubis system and shut off, when the invasion must have been at its height, there had been a lot of weapon-blink. Much of it had been around the planets Sepekte and Nasqueron.

* * *

“My name is Leisicrofe of Hepieu, Nasqueron equatorial. This is my last testament. I will presume that whoever you are you have followed me for the data which I carried on behalf of my fellow Dweller, the scholar Valseir of Schenehen. If you have not, and this recording has fallen to you in what one might term a casual manner, it may be of little interest. If, however, you do seek the data I held, then I must tell you now that you are going to be disappointed.”

Something in Fassin seemed to break and fall away.

“Uh-oh,” Y’sul said.

“This may seem unfortunate and may make you angry. However, I have most likely done you a considerable favour, as it is my sincere and firm belief that what I was asked to carry was something I should not have been, and something that nobody should have been or should be asked to take responsibility for. It was not something I was supposed to know about, of course, and it was not really Valseir’s fault that I came into possession of the knowledge of what it represented.”

“Talks a lot, doesn’t he?” Y’sul said.

“To my shame, I think I must be more shallow than my friend Valseir gave me credit for. He gave me the data sealed in a safe-keep box and asked me not to open it. I said I would not. He did not even ask me for my word, thinking, I am sure, that simply asking a friend and fellow scholar such a thing, and receiving such an assurance, was guarantee enough. However, I am not like Valseir. I am inquisitive by nature, not as the result of an intellectual fascination with any particular subject. I resisted the urge to open the safekeep box for many years while I was on my travels, but eventually I surrendered to temptation. I opened the safekeep, I began to read what was inside, and realised its importance. Even then I might have stopped reading, closed the box and put it away again, and had I done that I would still be alive. Instead, I carried on reading — and this has resulted in my death. I can only claim that perhaps I was in a sort of trance of disbelief at the time.”