But nothing.

And with the darkness, silence, as the last of the air went, both from the control space and the esuit.

Brimiaice felt something give way inside him. He heard his insides bubbling out into the cavity between his body and the interior surface of the suit. He’d thought it would hurt, and it did.

He caught a glimpse of light off to one side, and looked up, realising, as the light flared all over one flank of the control space, that he was seeing the framework of the battlecruiser’s hull structure, silhouetted from outside by some astoundingly bright -

* * *

Lieutenant Inesiji of the Borquille palace guard lay outstretched in a little crater-like nest within the wreckage of one of the fallen atmospheric power columns, its fawn and red debris lying tubed, slabbed and powdered across the plaza leading to the Hierchon’s Palace. The klicks-high column had taken a direct hit at the plinth from something in the first attack earlier that morning, and tumbled base-first, collapsing with an astounding slowness along a course about half its height, finally creating from its circular summit — as it lowered mightily, thunderously, shaking the plaza, the palace, every nearby part of the city — a sudden great torus of dust and vapour, a huge coiling “O’ a hundred metres wide that floated up into the sky, rolling round and round under and over itself as the massive tower hammered into the lower-rise buildings surrounding the plaza.

Inesiji had watched it happen from near the top of the palace itself, crammed in behind the controls of a pulse gun hidden behind camo net hundreds of metres above where the great cloud of wreckage fell. His human and whule comrades lay around him, fallen around the three long, tensioned legs of the gun. The invaders had used neutron weapons, bombs and beams, killing almost all the other biologicals in the vicinity. Jajuejein were not so easy to kill. Not that quickly, anyway. Inesiji was suffering and seizing up, and would die within a few days no matter what, but he could still function.

The Starvelings wanted the palace intact, hence the weapon choice. They would have to touch ground, send in the troops, to accomplish their symbolic goal. At last some vulnerability, a chance to inflict some real casualties, restore honour.

When the first gun platforms buzzed through, the lieutenant had ignored them. One drone machine had hummed right past his position, hesitated, then moved on. Spotting the dead, senses not calibrated for jajuejein. When the first landers had arrived, setting down in the rubble- and corpse-strewn plaza, still Inesiji held off. Four, five, six machines landed, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troops, many made huge in exoskeletons.

When a larger, grander-looking machine landed behind the first wave, Inesiji had set the pulse gun to max, disabled the safety buffers and let rip, pouring fire down into the large craft, spreading it to the smaller landers and then setting the gun to movement-automatic and scrambling and rolling away down the long curved gallery with just his hand weapon before the returning fire had sliced into the position seconds later, ripping a twenty-metre hole out of the side of the great spherical building.

He could see the hole from here, down amongst the wreckage of the fallen atmospheric power column. It had not long since stopped smoking. Hours had passed. He’d killed another dozen or so, shot down two landers, firing once from each position in the wreckage and the surrounding buildings, then quickly moving. Their problem was that they thought they were looking for a human. A jajuejein, especially one out of uniform or clothing, spreading himself out across some debris, didn’t look to them like a soldier ought to look; he looked like a bunch of fallen metallic twigs, or a tangle of electrical cabling. One trooper in an exoskeleton had died when he walked right up to Inesiji to take the gun he could see lying in the wreckage, tangled in some sort of netting, not realising that the netting was Inesiji. The gun must have seemed alive, rising up of its own accord to shoot the astonished trooper in the head.

But now Inesiji wasn’t feeling too good. The radiation damage was getting through to him. He was starting to seize up. Night was coming down and he didn’t think he’d see the morning. Smoke drifted from the city, and there were flashes overhead and at ground level. Gunfire, booms, all hollow, rolling and empty-sounding.

He heard the heavy tramp-tramp-tramp of another exoskeleton nearby, over the lip of the little crater-nest. Getting closer.

He looked one last time at the hole in the vast, sunset-tinged face of the spherical palace, raised himself slowly to see where the exoskeleton was, and died in a lancework of laser filaments fired from a gun platform a hundred metres above.

* * *

The great glittering ship, skinned in gold and platinum, was half a kilometre across, a slightly smaller — and mobile — version of the Hierchon’s Palace in Borquille. It sank slowly down through the first high haze layer and the cloud tops beneath like some vast and shining seed. The small, sharp, dartlike shapes of its escort vessels carved courses around it, swinging to and fro, insectile.

A craft like a silvery Dreadnought rose out of the cloud layers beneath, a kilometre off, and held altitude. The descending golden ship drew slowly to a stop level with the smaller vessel.

The silver ship signalled the golden one, asking it to identify itself.

The Dweller craft’s crew heard an obviously synthesised but powerful voice say, “Iam the Hierchon Ormilla, ruler of the Ulubine Mercatoria and leader of the Ulubine Mercatorial Government in Exile. This is my ship, the State Barge Creumel. Myself, my staff and family seek temporary sanctuary and shelter here.”

“Welcome to Nasqueron, Hierchon Ormilla.”

* * *

“How they treating you, Sal?”

Liss had come to visit Saluus in his cell, deep in the bowels of the Luseferous VII. A thin, tough, transparent membrane extended from the door surround like a bubble and preceded her into the cell, where Sal sat at a small wall-moulded desk, reading from a screen.

“They’re treating me well enough,” he told her. The membrane gave their voices, as heard by the other, an oddly distant quality. Sal stood up. “You?”

“Me? I’m a fucking hero, Sal.” She shrugged. “Heroine.” She nodded at the screen. “What you watching?”

“Reading up on the glorious history of the Starveling Cult under its illustrious leader, the Archimandrite Luseferous.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell me it wasn’t all planned out, Liss.”

“It wasn’t all planned out, Saluus.”

“Liss your real name?”

“What’s real?”

“It wasn’t planned out, was it? I mean, kidnapping me.”

“Course not.” Liss dropped into a small seat moulded into the wall by the door. “Spur of the moment.”

Sal waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. She just slumped there, looking at him. “Gave you the idea myself, didn’t I?” Sal said. “I told you Thovin good as accused me of getting ready to run.”

“Been thinking how best to use you for a while,” she told him. “But it was last-minute, in the end. We were there, the ship was ready to go, I’d seen you pilot it, knew it wasn’t hard.” Liss shrugged. “They’d only have requisitioned it and put a warhead in it, used it as a missile.”

“That really the best you could think to do with me?”

“We might have been able to do more, but I didn’t think so. Just unsettle everybody by taking you out of the equation. A morale blow, you seeming to go off and join the invaders. Worked, too. Confusion duly visited.”

“So it was opportunistic”

“I’m a Beyonder. We’re brought up to think for ourselves.”