— The Guard-mentors are a Guild, colonel. They run a closed shop. If you dumped one of them, none of the rest would touch you. You’d certainly then find some clown who’d offer to act as a guide, mentor, guard, whatever — in fact they’d probably have to form a queue — but they’d be very young and stupid, or very old and, ah, eccentric, and they’d assuredly get you into far more trouble than they were ever likely to get you out of. The Guard-mentors Guild would harass them from the start, for one thing, and the vast majority of other Dwellers wouldn’t talk to you at all. Librarians, archive-keepers, antiquarians, exo-specialists — all the people we most need to talk to, in other words — in particular would not even give you the time of day.
They made room for Y’sul’s servant, Sholish, returning from the side chamber with a two-piece, highly polished, mirror-finished cuirass. Sholish was an adolescent, only a few hundred years old, barely three-quarters grown and skinny. Personal servants, always at least two generational stages younger than their masters, were fairly common in Dweller society, especially where the senior Dweller was bothering to pursue a hobby-cum-profession which actually involved a degree of study and\or training, when the servant had a fighting chance of picking up the basics of the given trade. The better masters regarded their servants more as apprentices than servants and the occasional especially aberrant ones treated their underlings almost as equals.
Y’sul had yet to fall prey to such sentimentality.
“And about time, you custard-brained phlegm-wart!” Y’sul yelled, snatching the cuirass from Sholish’s grasp. “Did you have to forge and weave the armour yourself? Or did you start gazing at your own reflection and lose all track?”
Sholish mumbled, retreated.
— I refuse to accept that we are as powerless as you imply, major, the colonel told Fassin.
He turned to look at the oerileithe. — We are here very much on sufferance, colonel. The Dwellers can go off entire species of Seers, for no accountable reason. Nobody’s ever worked out a pattern to this. You just suddenly find that you and your kind aren’t welcome any more. It doesn’t usually happen while they’re still getting to know a new-to-civilisation species, but even that’s no guarantee. They certainly get fed up with individuals — I’ve seen it happen — and that’s equally random. Every time I come down here I have to accept that no matter how friendly and helpful everybody might have been during my last visit — (the colonel gave a sceptical laugh) — they might have nothing more to do with me this time or ever again. In fact, they might tell me I’ve got a day to get out or become the object of a hunt. And a Seer faces that prospect every single time they delve, either remotely or directly. We just have to get used to it. They don’t even need to have met you; there are records of Seers-to-be who’ve spent decades getting trained up, who’ve been part of respected Seer Septs going back millennia who’ve been about to go on their very first delve and been told not to bother and to stay away for ever. It’s a minor miracle they’ve accepted you the way they have. And don’t forget the only reason you’re not constantly being challenged as an interloper is because Y’sul is on record as vouching for you.
· You are saying we are stuck with this buffoon.
· We are. I know it’s hard to believe, but he’s one of the better ones.
· Core help us. Why waste time? I shall apply for my posthu-mous decoration immediately.
The Volunteer Guild of Guard-mentors existed to look after Dwellers visiting from other bands of the same planet, or, very rarely, from another gas-giant, usually one within the same stellar system. Dwellers — almost always alone — did make journeys from one stellar system to another, but it didn’t happen often and it usually meant that the individual concerned had been thrown out of their own home gas-giant for some particularly heinous crime or unforgivable character defect.
The Dwellers had pretty much stopped making deep space trips en masse after the Second Diasporian Age, when the galaxy had been half the age it was now. It was generally held that seven billion years’ lack of practice probably accounted for the sheer awfulness of Dweller spaceship design and building standards, though Fassin wasn’t convinced that cause and effect hadn’t been confused here.
They were due to leave for the war zone the following day. The interval since the frustrating audience with the City Administrator had been spent fending off Dweller journalists and their news remotes and trying to find out what they could about events in the wider system. Eventually they’d had to compromise and trade. One journalist got a very guarded but exclusive interview from Fassin (very guarded indeed — Colonel Hatherence kept coughing loudly whenever they approached any subject remotely to do with their mission) in return for news of the outside.
The Third Fury moon had been devastated and all on or in it had perished. There was no news of a drop ship surviving, though equally there was no news of any wreckage from such a ship being found. However, of course, if it had just dropped into the Depths… Many satellites had been destroyed or damaged. Those belonging to the Quick (this meant the Mercatoria) appeared to be either missing or out of action. Some warships belonging to the current local Quick species had spent an amount of time investigating the rubble of the moon Third Fury. The moon ’glantine appeared much as it always had. Stellar-system ship traffic appeared light, as it had for some days now, but not anomalous. A signal had been sent on the behalf of Oculan Colonel Hatherence, on the authority of Guard-mentor Y’sul of Hauskip, to the moon ’glantine. No reply had yet been received. Nothing untoward had happened to the transmitting station responsible following the transmission.
According to the journalist, this was all stuff they could have found out themselves, eventually. The trick was knowing where to look. The journalist seemed to feel miffed that they’d got the better end of the deal, too, because everything he’d told them was at least ninety per cent true, specifically to avoid upsetting them. He knew aliens could be funny that way.
“What, exactly, did your friend say?”
“He said they wanted him to… ‘to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for…’ I’m pretty certain those were his exact words. Then he seemed to realise he was saying too much, giving too much away, and he changed the subject. The… hesitation, that sudden change of subject made the earlier form of words all the more important. He realised he was speaking to somebody who spent a lot of his life in Nasqueron, who might not feel the same way he would about the implications of what he was talking about.”
“This was spoken in…?”
“Humanised G-Clear, very close to this. Meanings are pretty much identical, just altered pronunciation for the human voice.”
“No Anglish words involved?”
“None.”
“So, he said ‘gas-lined’ not ‘streamlined’ or ‘air-lined’?”
“One wouldn’t say ‘air-lined’ as far as I know. The normal form of words would be ‘streamlined’. He chose ‘gas-lined’ without thinking because it was more technically correct, because it has a narrower meaning. In this context it means altering a vacuum-capable craft so that it can also operate in an atmosphere like Nasqueron’s.”
“Which you take to mean that an invasion or large-scale destructive raid upon us is imminent?”
“I think some sort of raid is a distinct possibility.”
“This seems a thin thread to hang such a weighty fear upon.”
“I know. But please understand, the guy’s company builds and refits three-quarters of the system’s war craft. The phrase ‘gas-lined’ is quite specific and that sudden change of tack when he realised he was talking to somebody who might be sentimentally or emotionally attached to Nasqueron and sympathetic towards Dwellers is significant. I know this man, I’ve known him since I was a child. I know how his mind works.”