“Provisionally given, of course,” Y’sul said. “Though the precise meaning of ‘unprovoked’ might be challenged in a wider context, and the exact definition of ‘shipwreckee’, equally, could well be open to dispute if one wished to be picky. That aside, though, do I understand there is some sort of dispute in progress, out amongst you people?”

“You understand correctly,” Fassin told the Dweller.

“Oh, not another one of your wars, please!” Y’sul protested, with a rolling-back of his whole body which was actually relatively easy for a human to interpret, correctly, as an equivalent of rolling one’s eyes. (Though, to be fair, there was quite a lot of Dweller gestures with this translation.)

“Well, pretty much, yes,” Fassin told him.

“Your passion for doing each other harm never ceases to amaze, delight and horrify!”

“I’m told there is to be a Formal War between Zone 2 and Belt C,” Fassin said.

“I too am told that!” Y’sul said brightly. “Do you really think it will happen? I’m not optimistic, frankly. Some appallingly good negotiators have been drafted in, I understand… Ah. Your hull carapace, doing the job of standing in, feebly, for the body you so sadly lack, bears marks upon it which I take to mean you were being sarcastic earlier.”

“Never mind, Y’sul.”

“Right then, shan’t. Now then: Valseir. There is a point of congruency”

“There is?”

“Yes!”

“With what? Between what and what?”

“His demise and this war we’ve been promised!”

“Really?”

“Yes! His old study — it is in the current zone of disputation, I believe.”

“But if it’s already been broken up—” Fassin began.

“Oh, there are bound to be back-ups, and I’m not even sure the old fellow has been finally put to rest.”

“After two hundred years?”

“Come now, Fassin, there were matters of probate.”

“And it’s in the war zone?”

“Very likely, yes! Isn’t it exciting? I think we ought to go there immediately!” Y’sul waved all his limbs at once. “Let’s form an expedition! We shall go together.” He looked at Hatherence. “You can even bring your little friend.”

— I have been considering whether to attempt to communicate with your Shared Facility, via your satellites or directly, the colonel told him.

· I wouldn’t, Fassin sent. — But if you decide you must, tell me before you try. I want to be well out of the volume.

· You think the same sort of attack directed against us following your “ping’ might be directed against us here?

· Probably not here, in a Dweller city. But then, why risk it? We don’t know that whoever’s been shooting at us quite understands what they’d be letting themselves in for, so they might just waste us and have to deal with the consequences later.

We won’t be around to jeer.

— We need to find out what is going on, Major Taak, Hatherence informed him.

— I know, and I’m going to send a request for information up to a sat from a remote site as soon as I’ve checked out what’s been going on via the local nets.

The colonel floated over to look at the enormous though ancient and highly directional flat screen which Fassin was using in his attempt to find out what had been happening. They were in Y’sul’s home, a ramshackle wheel-house in a whole vast district of equally shabby-looking wheel-houses hanging on skinny spindles underneath the city’s median level like a frozen image of an entire junkyard’s worth of exploded gearboxes.

Y’sul had escorted them back from his club in a state of some excitement. Then he’d left them alone, taken his servant Sholish and gone off in search of a decent tailor — his usual tailor had most inconveniently taken it into his mind to change trades and become a Dreadnought rating; probably trying to get in on the ground floor of this upcoming war.

— What have you found? the colonel asked, watching the flat screen fill with an image of the Third Fury moon. — Hmm. The moon appears almost undamaged.

— This is an old recording, Fassin explained. — I’m trying to find an updated one.

— Any mention of the hostilities?

— Not very much, Fassin told her, using a manipulator to work the massive, stiff controls of the old screen. — There’s been a mention on a minority radio news service, but that’s it.

— It is regarded as news, though? This is encouraging, I think?

— Well, don’t get too excited, Fassin sent. — We are talking about a station some amateurs run for the few people like themselves who are actually interested in things happening in the rest of the system; maybe a few thousand Dwellers out of a planetary population of five or ten billion.

· The number of Dwellers in Nasqueron is really that uncer-tain?

· Oh, I’ve seen estimates as low as two billion, as high as two hundred, even three.

· I encountered this degree of uncertainty in my research, Hatherence said as Fassin switched manually between channels, data sets and image-trails. — I recall thinking it must be a mistake. How can one be two base-ten orders of magnitude out? Can’t one just ask the Dwellers? Don’t they know themselves how many they are?

· You can certainly ask, Fassin agreed. He put some humour into his signal. — An old tutor of mine used to say of questions like this that the answers will prove far more illuminating regarding Dweller psychology than they will concerning their actual subject.

· They lie to you or they don’t know themselves?

· That is a good question too.

· They must have an idea, the Colonel protested. — A society has to know how many people it contains, otherwise how would it plan infrastructure and so on?

Fassin felt himself smiling. — That’s how it would work in pretty much any other society, he agreed.

· There are those who would assert that Dwellers are not in fact civilised, the colonel said thoughtfully, — that they could scarcely be said to possess a society in any single planet, and on a galactic scale cannot be said to constitute a civilisation at all. They exist rather in a state of highly developed barbarism.

· I’m familiar with the arguments, Fassin told her.

· Would you agree?

· No. This is a society. We are in a city. And even just in the one planet, this is a civilisation. I know the definitions will have changed over the years and you might take a different view from me, but in the history of my planet we’d refer to a civilisation based around a single river system or on a small island.

· I forget how small-scale one has to think when dealing with planets with solid-surface living-environments, the colonel said, apparently without meaning to insult. — But even so, the defi-nition of a civilisation has to move on when one ascends to the galactic stage, and the Dwellers, taken as a whole, might seem deficient.

· I think it comes down to one’s own definition of the terms, Fassin said. — Hold on; this looks promising.

He swung back from a mosaic of sub-screens to a single moving image. Third Fury again, though this time looking hazier, less defined, and shot from some distance away. The shallow domes of the Shared Facility were obvious if not clear, down near one tipped edge of the little moonlet. A flash on the surface away to one side, and a semi-spherical cloud of debris, spreading. A glowing crater left where the flash had come from.

· This looks like yesterday, Hatherence said.

· Does, doesn’t it? Fassin agreed. — Looks like it was taken from high up on Belt A or the south of Zone 2. Just some amateur pointing a camera. Fassin found how to spin the stored recording back and then forward, then discovered how to zoom in. — And that’s us.

They watched a cerise spot appear on a glittering blister near the edge of the Shared Facility, and could just make out the grainily defined debris of the hangar dome blowing outward in front of a sudden haze of quickly dissipating mist. A tiny dark grey dot rose from the shattered dome and crawled away: the drop ship, making its desperate dive for the planet.