Dwellers had always been hard to follow. In the past people had tried setting drone remotes on individuals to keep tabs on them. However, Dwellers regarded this as a gross intrusion on their privacy and had an uncanny ability to spot and destroy any such platforms, micro-gascraft or bugs, no matter how small or clever they were. Dwellers also sulked. When people had the temerity to try anything so underhand, cooperation was withdrawn. Sometimes over an entire population. Sometimes for years.

The Slow Seers of Nasqueron had a pretty good relationship with the local Dwellers. By Dweller Studies standards it was almost close, but only because the Seers tried to interfere as little as possible with Dweller life. In return the Dwellers were relatively cooperative, and broadcast a daily update on the location of their most important cities, structures and institutions. This eight-and-a-bit-hourly bulletin was a byword for trustworthiness — almost a legend — in Dweller Studies, on occasion approaching accuracy rates of very nearly ninety per cent. “Things fine with Sept Bantrabal?” Apsile asked. “All well. Slovius sends his regards.” Fassin had talked to his uncle a few hours earlier, still trying to persuade him to leave the Autumn House. The time delay between Third Fury and ’glantine made a normal conversation just about possible. He’d caught up with Jaal too, on the other side of ’glantine, at her Sept’s Spring House. Life appeared relatively normal back on ’glantine, the new Emergency affecting people there less than it seemed to on Sepekte.

Apsile flicked a roll-screen from his sleeve and tapped a few patches. He looked casually up at the lifter ship poised above the little gascraft, ready to accept the smaller vessel inside its open hold and take it down to the gas-giant’s atmosphere. Fassin followed the Master Technician’s gaze. He looked at a dark shape already hanging inside the cargo space, protruding downwards from it like a thick wheel. He frowned. “That looks a lot like Colonel Hatherence,” he said.

“Not many places she’ll fit,” muttered Apsile. “Eh?” A voice bellowed. Then, quieter: “My name? Oh. Yes, that’s me. Seer Taak. Major Taak, I should say. Hello. Sorry; asleep. Well, you know, one does. Thought I’d try out this space here for size. Fits very well, must say. I shall be able to be transported to the atmosphere of Nasqueron most ably by this vessel, if needs be. Well, so I think. Think you so too, Master Technician?”

Apsile smiled broadly, revealing teeth as jet as his skin. “I think so too, ma’am.”

“There we are agreed, then.” The giant hanging discus dropped fractionally from its mountings inside the delta-shaped transporter, so that it could turn and twist towards them. “And so. Major Taak. How goes your attempt to persuade Chief Seer Braam Ganscerel that you ought to be allowed to delve directly?”

Fassin smiled. “It goes like a long-term delve, colonel; exceeding slow.”

“A pity!”

Apsile thumbed a patch on his roll-screen, clicked the screen back into his sleeve and nodded at the little gascraft. “Well, she’s ready. Want to put her up?” he asked.

“Why not?” It had become something of a tradition that Apsile and Fassin lifted the craft into the carrier. They stooped, took an end each and — very slowly at first — hoisted the arrowhead into the space above, letting their feet lift off the floor at the end to slow it down. The gascraft weighed next to nothing in Third Fury’s minuscule gravity, but it massed over two tonnes and the laws regarding inertia and momentum still applied. They were carried three metres up inside the drop ship’s hold, towards the opened arms of the waiting gascraft cradle. The Colonel’s esuit took up the space of two of the little gascraft, but that still left room for another five in the drop ship’s hold. The arrowhead snicked into place alongside the tall discus that held Colonel Hatherence. Satisfied that the arrowhead was correctly fastened in, the two men let themselves fall back to the floor. The colonel drifted down alongside them.

Fassin looked up at the sleek lines of the gascraft. How small it looks, he thought. Tiny space to spend years in… decades in… even centuries… They landed. Apsile, more experienced, got his knee-flex just right; Fassin bounced.

The giant esuit had to tilt to clear the carrier ship’s opened hold doors, toppling then coming upright again with a burr of vanes and a whoosh of air. “Imust say I myself would prefer to enter the atmosphere directly, that is to say, in fact. Indeed, in reality,” the colonel shouted.

“Yes,” Fassin said. “I would too, colonel.”

“Good luck in that!” the oerileithe boomed.

“Thank you,” Fassin said. “I suspect good luck will be necessary, if not sufficient.”

A few hours later he had just about enough time to reflect that it was bad luck which produced the opportunity they had both been looking for, before he had to flee for his life.

* * *

The others persuaded him eventually. Thay, Sonj and Mome were all going. Why not him? Not nervous, surely? Maybe just too lazy?

He wasn’t nervous or — quite — that lazy. He just wanted to stay back at the nest and bland with K, who was coming to the end of a tream, socked into a traumalyser and a linked-up subsal. She floated, lightly tethered, in the gentle stream blowing out of the air chair, slim graceful body semi-foetal, arms waving, her long, end-tied chestnut hair blossoming above her like a cobra hood, wrapping over her head then wafting back again. The NMR net was like a hand with twenty-plus slim silver fingers grasping her head from the back. The subsal’s transparent tube disappeared into a tiny neuro-taplet just behind her left earlobe. K’s eyes moved languidly behind their lids and her face seemed set in a smile.

At this stage, coming out of a long tream, it was as though she had been diving in some abyssal depths and was now swimming slowly back in through a few kilometres of sunlit shallows. You could wade out to meet the person coming in without surrendering yourself to the whole para-lucid chemical-NMR-holo-induced dream state, you could sort of snorkel with them while they still gilled, heading for the beach that was mundane reality.

· Hey, Fass! she’d sent when he first dipped in to join her, slipping on a small NMR collar and becoming part of the slowly evaporating tream. She’d been away for a day and a half; a long one. — You came to meet me? Thanks, part!

· Have fun? he asked.

— More than fun. Guess where I’ve been?

He sent a shrug. — Faintest.

— I did a delve! I treamed a delve like Seers do, into Nasqueron! Well, it wasn’t really Nasq, it was another gas-giant called Furenasyle. That’s where the chip must have been templated. You heard of Furenasyle?

· Yeah, it’s another place they do Dweller Studies. So you treamed you were there? Delving, yeah?

· Surely did. You make it sound so amazing. And, Fass, it was great! Best tream… well, second-best tream I’ve ever had! K sent a kind of complicit, sexy smirk in his direction. He guessed the tream she was referring to. They’d experienced it together. A love-tream, a joint immersion in what they felt for each other. Well, supposedly. Love treams were tacky in some ways — you could still lie about your feelings in them, and if you selected the right template from the traumalyser device and suitable accompanying chemicals from the subsal, you could pretty much guarantee a tream of surpassing, wide-eyed heart-throbbing bliss even between two people who basically hated each other. But it had been good, between the two of them. Good, but not something that he’d wanted to do again. He supposed he was suspicious of the whole Virtual Reality experience, and treaming, especially with a synched-in subsal providing appropriate synthesised chemicals for delivery to the brain, was the most immersive VR you could find. Legally or semi-legally, anyway.