A thought occurred to Fassin. — You ever been in a Dweller planet before, colonel?

— Indeed not. A privilege denied until now. Hatherence made a show of looking about. — Not unlike home, really.

Another thought occurred. — You did receive clearance? Didn’t you, colonel?

· Clearance, Seer Taak?

· To come down. To enter Nasq.

— Ah, the colonel sent. — Not as such, I do confess. It was thought that I would be remote delving with you and your colleagues, from the Shared Facility on the Third Fury moon. Braam Ganscerel himself took the time to assure me of this personally. No objection was raised regarding such a presence. I believe that permission was in the process of being sought for me to accompany you physically into the atmosphere if that became necessary — as indeed it now has — however, the last that I heard in that regard indicated that the relevant clearances had yet to materialise. Why? Do you envisage there being a problem?

Oh, shit.

· The Dwellers, Fassin told her, — can be… pernickety about that sort of thing. Pernickety, he thought. They were liable to declare the colonel an honorary child, give her a half-hour start and set off to hunt her. — They take their privacy quite seri-ously. Unauthorised entries are severely discouraged.

· Well, I’m aware of that.

· You are? Good.

· I shall throw myself upon their mercy.

· Right. I see.

You are either quite brave and possessed of a decent sense of humour, Fassin thought, or you really should have done more homework.

· So, Seer Fassin Taak, in which direction ought we to proceed?

· Should be a CloudTunnel about four hundred klicks… that way, Fassin sent, turning the gascraft to point more or less south and slightly down. — Unless it’s moved, obviously.

· Shall we? the colonel said, drifting in that direction.

· Going to ping one of our sats, let them know we’re alive,

Fassin told her.

· This is wise?

Was it wise? Fassin wondered. There had been some sort of attack on the Seer infrastructure around Nasqueron, but that didn’t mean the whole near-planet environment had been taken over. On the other hand…

· How fast can that esuit go? he asked the colonel.

· At this density, about four hundred metres per second.

About half that, on sustained cruise.

Fassin’s arrowcraft could just about keep pace with that. Disappointing. He was still hoping to give the colonel the slip at some point. It looked like he wasn’t going to be able to just outrun her.

— Ping sent, he told Hatherence. — Let’s go.

They went, quickly. They’d got about a hundred metres away when a flash of violet light ripped the cloud apart behind them and a stark, short-lived beam-cluster splayed through the volume of gas they’d been floating within a few seconds earlier. Further beams radiated out from the initial target point, pulsing through the atmosphere in slowly spreading semi-random stabs. One flicked into existence about fifty metres from them, booming and crackling. All the rest were much further away and after a minute or so they ceased altogether.

· Somebody would seem to be ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak, the colonel sent as they flew through the gas.

· So it would appear.

The flash and EMP came a couple of minutes after that. A low, rumbling concussion caught up with them some time later.

· Was that a nuke? Fassin sent. His instruments seemed to leave no other interpretation, but he still found it hard to believe.

· I am unaware of any phenomenon able to mimic one so convincingly.

· Fucking hell.

· I float corrected. Somebody would seem to be extremely ill-disposed towards you, Seer Taak.

· The Dwellers are not going to be happy, he told Hatherence. — Only they’re allowed to let off nukes in the atmosphere, he explained. — And it isn’t even fireworks season.

They found the CloudTunnel about where Fassin had thought it ought to be, only a hundred kilometres out laterally and two kilometres further down: bang on by Nasqueron standards. The CloudTunnel was a bundle of a dozen or so carbon-carbon tubes like some vast, barely braided cable-cluster floating in the midst of an unending cloudscape of gently billowing yellow, orange and ochre. The CloudTunnel’s two main tubes were about sixty metres in diameter, the smallest — basically comms and telemetry wave guides — less than half a metre. The whole cluster had looked thread-thin when they’d first caught sight of it, tens of kilometres away, but up close it looked like a hawser fit to tether a moon. A great, deep rushing sound rumbled from inside the two main pipes.

· What now? the colonel sent.

· We see if my vicarious kudos credit is still good.

Fassin used one of the arrowcraft’s manipulators to prod one of the wave guides, working the filaments through the tube’s protective sheath without breaking it. A hair-thin wire extended into the matrix of light filling the narrow tube. Information streamed from the far end of the wire, into the gascraft’s biomind, its transitional systems and then into Fassin’s head, forming a coded chaos of babbling sound, wildly scintillating visuals and other confused sensory experiences. The interruption in the light streams had already been noticed and allowed for. A pulse of information aimed right at the filament sent an identity request and inquired whether assistance was required, otherwise stop interfering with a public information highway.

— A human, Fassin Taak, privileged to be Slow Seer at the court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, he sent. — I’d like some assis-tance in the shape of transport at the given location, bound for Hauskip City.

He was told to wait.

“Fassin Taak, Out-Bander, Stranger, Alien, Seer, Human! And… what’s this?”

“This is Colonel Hatherence of the Mercatorial Military-Religious Order the Shrievalty Ocula, an oerileithe.”

“Good day, Dweller Y’sul,” Hatherence said. They had switched to using ordinary sound-speech.

“A little dweller! How fascinating! Not a child, then?”

Y’sul, a sizeable mid-adult a good nine metres or so in diameter, rolled through the gas and, extending one long spindle-arm, clunked a fist-bunch (bink-bink-bink!) on the esuit of the Colonel.

“Hellooo in there!” Y’sul said.

Hatherence’s discus of esuit leaned to one side under the rain of not-so-gentle blows. “Pleased to meet you,” she replied tersely.

“Not a child,” Fassin confirmed.

They were in a giant bowl-like room, roofed with slate-diamond micrometres thin, in a Thickeneers’ Club in Hauskip City.

Hauskip lay within the equatorial zone of Nasqueron, one of the hundred thousand or so major conurbations in that particular atmospheric band. Seen from the right angle in a sympa-thetic light, it looked a lot like the internal workings of an ancient mechanical clock, multiplied and magnified several thousand times. From far enough away, or just seen in a schematic, it resembled millions of toothed-looking wheels caught up in amongst each other, with larger sets of wheels interconnecting with them through hubs and spines and spindles, themselves linking up with still greater sets of wheels. The whole mighty, slowly gyrating and spinning assemblage, easily a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, floated within a thick soup of gas a hundred kilometres beneath the cloud tops.

The city was the hub for several CloudTunnel lines. Once an empty car had made its way to the access hatch nearest to where Fassin and Hatherence pitched up alongside the CloudTunnel, it had taken two changes of line, riding in the same car, for Fassin and the colonel to get there through the network of partially evacuated, high-speed transit tubes. The whole journey had taken one of Nasqueron’s short day-night cycles. They had each slept for most of the time, though just before Fassin had dozed off, the colonel had said, “We go on. You agree, major? We continue our mission. Until we are ordered to cease.”