The Protreptic, the ex-Voehn craft en route for Nasqueron, Ulubis via the Direaliete system, under the command of the self-confessed twin AI Quercer Janath, pirates and close-combat Voehn-wasting specialists.

They were back under moderate deceleration, on their way into the system and the hidden wormhole.

The details of the dream were starting to slip away from him, fish sine-waving goodbye through the water. And yet he felt he’d understood something. What had it been?

Confusing.

Something about Saluus, and had Hatherence been in there too? Sal’s house, only it had been a volcano, then the virtual environment where he met the ship, and it had looked at -

In the shock-gel, pickled in it, surrounded by it, Fassin felt his eyes go wide and his skin prickle and crawl. His heart spasmed, thudding erratically in his chest.

He could do it himself. He could wait until they got back, back to Nasq. and Ulubis, and take it to somebody — if he found Valseir he could just ask him, though he didn’t think he’d be able to find Valseir — but that wasn’t good enough. He had to know.

He’d committed the image-leaf to the gascraft’s memory. Lying there in the shock-gel, inside the little arrowhead, he called the photograph up and saw it floating before him. The picture of blue sky and white clouds looked odd to him, half-alien and wrong, and yet half-familiar at the same time, invoking a feeling of something between nostalgia and homesickness.

He blew the image up to the point where it became a blocky abstract of colour. He scanned the whole image for smaller images, found nothing, then started running various routines that the gascraft’s biomind held for finding patterns in random data. Had he recorded the image in fine enough detail to find anything hidden in it? Would the hidden data, if it was there, be findable without some other code?

He wished he could access the original, stowed in a tiny locker on the outside of the gascraft, but he couldn’t, not while he was pinned under this sort of force. Anyway, it might look suspicious to Quercer Janath if he started peering too intently at the image-leaf. Because that was where the answer might lie, where it might — just, perhaps, maybe — have been lying all the time.

“…I took the original of the folder to a friend and fellow collector in Deilte, a city in the south polar region, within a safekeep box…’ That, or something very like it, was what Valseir had said.

Fassin had recorded the conversation verbatim in the gascraft’s memory, but it had been wiped aboard the Isaut. Didn’t matter; he had a pretty good memory for detail himself. He hadn’t realised at the time what the implication of Valseir’s remark was — the Mercatorial ships had tried to mount their raid on the ships in the storm fleet shortly afterwards and things had all gone a bit exciting — but it meant there was probably a copy. Valseir was a scholar, and punctilious about word use and the terminology of editions and precedence. He wouldn’t have talked about the original of something unless there was a need to distinguish it from a copy. So there was a copy. There was a back-up, and it had amused the old Dweller to have Fassin carry it with him all the time.

Well, it was a plausible-enough theory.

Fassin thought it would be a Valseir-like thing to have done, but he’d been wrong about the old Dweller before. Dwellers did become set in their ways and predictable, sometimes, given the ages they could live to, but sometimes they just became more devious, too.

He fell asleep, the routines running on in front of him, and dreamed of streams of numbers, liquid algebra full of equations and meanings that started to make sense and then — just as he tried to study them and understand them — broke up and wriggled away, flickering to chaos.

A soft chime woke him up.

He was in the gascraft, in the stolen Voehn ship. The deceleration felt gentler, as though they might be approaching their goal. He clicked to an outside view and saw an orange-red sun, dead ahead. The Dweller-shaped bulk in the seat ahead twisted fractionally.

“Fassin?” Quercer Janath said.

If he hadn’t been in the shock-gel inside the gascraft, he’d have jumped.

“Mmm?” he said.

“Going to have to put you in your own little cell for the next bit, all right?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Soon as we’re at one gee standard.”

“I hear and obey,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned.

Back in the gascraft’s math-space, Fassin had a result.

There was indeed data hidden in the image-leaf’s depiction of a partially clouded blue sky. It had been there all the time. He’d had the answer, if that was really what it was, with him from the start.

It looked like alien algebra.

He tried to understand it.

It meant nothing.

It might mean everything.

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous had a tight, unpleasant feeling in his guts. He recognised it. It was the feeling that he got when he might have left something too late, or just got something wrong somehow. It was the feeling of being in a game and realising you might have made a terrible mistake a couple of turns or moves ago, of wanting to go back and undo what had been done, right the wrong, fix the error.

When he’d been a child playing a game against another child and had made a mistake, he’d sometimes just say, “Oh, look, I didn’t mean to do that earlier, I meant to do this…” and had discovered that even though such behaviour might be forbidden by the rules of the game, you could get away with it amazingly often. At first he’d thought this was because he was just a more powerful character than whoever he was playing against, until he’d realised that the people this sort of tactic worked against tended to be those whose fathers weren’t nearly as powerful as his. Later he’d become powerful himself, and found that cheating was still a workable tactic. Later still, he’d found that he didn’t need to cheat. He could make the most awful blunder and never suffer for it because his opponent, guessing what was good for them in the greater context of life beyond the game, would never dare take advantage of that mistake. It was a kind of invincibility.

Machines were different; they usually wouldn’t let you make illegal moves or take back earlier errors. So you just reset them, or went back to the saved position or a time when the mistake could be unmade.

Only this was not a game, or — if it was — it was one in which Luseferous didn’t know how you changed the rules or swept your arm across the board or hit the Delete All sequence. Maybe the end of the game was death, and he’d wake to find himself in the greater reality that the Truth had always maintained existed. That was a sort of comfort, though even then he didn’t want to wake up after a failure.

Time was the problem. Time and the fucking Dwellers.

The Luseferous VII swung ponderously into orbit around the planet Nasqueron. He watched it from his new flagship, the Main Fleet Combat Craft Rapacious (a super-battleship in all but name, he’d be prepared to concede).

Insufficient time. How had it come to this? If he hadn’t delayed so long before starting, if he hadn’t stopped off along the way, if he hadn’t, perhaps, insisted on full fleet dispositional discipline… and yet he’d swung into action much more quickly than some democratic or committee-based organisation could have, and he would have been mad to leave strongholds intact along his line of advance and… and return. And discipline was important, keeping everything together was important. It symbolised loyalty, it betokened military and personal discipline.

So there had been no choice, really. They’d got here as quickly as they could. The fucking Beyonders should have warned him the Summed Fleet squadrons were coming quicker than they’d anticipated. It was all their doing. It might even be a conspiracy against him. Oh, they’d taken part in the attacks on Ulubis when it had suited them, though they’d never been as decisive as they could and should have been. Fucking whining lily-livered moralists. Military targets! So they preserved their precious fucking scruples and left him to do the dirty work. If they’d been as emphatic and ruthless as he’d been, things might have turned out differently. Instead they’d supported him just enough to bring him here but now that he was where they’d wanted him all along, they were deserting him.