Third Fury had no appreciable atmosphere and only the vaguest suggestion of gravity. The heavy cruiser could almost have docked directly with the Seer base complex on the side of the little moon which always faced Nasqueron. However, a troop landing craft took them from one to the other. The Pyralis lay a few kilometres off, effectively another temporary satellite of the gas-giant. Its escort of two light cruisers and four destroyers took up station a few tens of kilometres further out in a complicated cat’s cradle of nested orbits around the moon, slim slow shadow shapes only glimpsed when they passed in front of the planet’s banded face.
Third Fury had been constructed, or converted, from an already existing moonlet, billions of years earlier, by one of the first species to pay homage at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. Given that Dwellers were the most widespread of the planet-based species of the galaxy, with a presence in almost all gas-giants — themselves the most common type of planets — the fact that out of those ninety million-plus Dweller-inhabited super-globes there were exactly eight with populations willing to play host to those wishing to carry on more than the most fleeting conversation with their inhabitants spoke volumes — indeed, appropriately, libraries — about their almost utter lack of interest in the day-to-day life of the rest of the galactic community.
It was, though, only almost utter; the Dwellers were not perfectly anything, including reclusive. They sought, gathered and stored vast quantities of information, albeit with no discernible logical system involved in the acquisition or the storage, and when quizzed on the matter seemed not only completely unable to present any obvious or even obscure rationale for this effectively mindless accumulation of data, but even genuinely puzzled that the question should be asked at all.
There had also, throughout recorded time — even discounting the notoriously unreliable records kept on such matters by the Dwellers themselves — always been a few of their populations available for discourse and informational trading, though this was invariably only granted on the eccentric and capricious terms of the Dwellers. Since the end of the First Diasporian Age, when the galaxy and the universe were both around two and a half billion years old, there had never been no working centres of Dwellers Studies, but in the following ten and a half billion years there had never been more than ten such centres operating at any one time either.
Acceptable companions came and went.
The Dwellers were of the Slow, the category of species that stuck around in a civilised form for at least millions of years. The people they let come and visit them and talk to them, and with whom they were prepared to trade information, were usually numbered amongst the Quick, the kind of species that often counted its time as a civilised entity in tens of thousands of years, and sometimes not even that long. The Dwellers would tolerate and talk to other Slow species as well, though normally on a less regular and frequent basis. The suspicion was that the Dwellers, for all their fabled patience — no species colonised the galaxy at speeds averaging less than one per cent of the speed of light (not counting stopovers) unless it was supremely patient — could get bored with the species that came to talk to them, and by selecting only those numbered amongst the Quick they ensured that they would never have to endure for too long a time the attentions of people they only looked forward to seeing the back of. Just wait a bit and — in a twinkling of an eye by Dweller standards — their troublesome guests would evolve out of nuisancehood.
For the last sixteen hundred years or so — barely half a Dweller eye-twinkling — humans had been adjudged as acceptable confidants for the Dwellers of Nasqueron in the system of Ulubis, their presence mostly tolerated, their company usually accepted, their safety almost always guaranteed and their attempts to talk to the Dwellers and mine their vast but defiantly imaginatively organised and indexed data shales met with only the most formal of obstructiveness, the lighter forms of derision and the least determinedly obfuscatory strategies.
That such playful coynesses, such nearly-too-small-to-measure diffidences and such gentle, barely-meriting-the-name hindrances appeared to the humans concerned to be obstacles of monumental scale, hideous complexity and inexhaustibly fiendish invention just went to show who’d been doing this for most of the lifetime of the universe and who for less than two thousand years.
Other approaches had, of course, been tried.
Bribing creatures who found the concept of money merely amusing tended to tax even the most enterprising and talented arbitrageur. The Dwellers clove to a system in which power was distributed, well, more or less randomly, it sometimes seemed, and authority and influence depended almost entirely on one’s age; little leverage there.
Alternatively, every now and again a species would attempt to take by force of arms what those involved in Dweller Studies attempted to wrest from the Dwellers by polite but dogged inquiry. Force, it had been discovered — independently, amazingly often — did not really work with Dwellers. They felt no pain, held their own continued survival (and that of others, given the slightest provocation) to be of relatively little consequence and seemed to embody, apparently at the cellular level, the belief that all that really mattered, ever, was a value unique to themselves which they defined as a particular kind of kudos, one of whose guiding principles appeared to be that if any outside influence attempted to mess with them they had to resist it to the last breath in the bodies of all concerned, regardless.
Dwellers were almost everywhere and had been there practically for ever. They had learned a few things about making war over that time, and while their war machines were believed to be as customarily unreliable — and eccentrically designed, built and maintained — as every other piece of technology they deigned to involve themselves with, that didn’t mean they weren’t deadly; usually for all concerned, and within a disconcertingly large volume.
Other species had prevailed against Dwellers on occasion. Entire planetary populations of them had been wiped out and whole gas-giants dismantled to provide the raw material for one of those monstrous megastructure projects that Quick species in particular seemed so keen on building, apparently just because they could. But the long-term results were, to date, inevitably unhappy.
Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and — when it suited them — single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when — or even geological ages after when — you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them travelling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection travelling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of “What the fu—?” before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation.
Retaliation, where it was still possible, and on the few occasions it had been tried, led without fail towards a horribly messy war of attrition, whereupon the realisation of the sheer scale of the Dweller civilisation (if one could even call it that) and its past — and therefore probably future — longevity more often than not had a sobering effect on whatever species had been unwise enough to set themselves against the Dwellers in the first place.