“Attempting to invade a gas-giant would, nevertheless, be a momentous action. In seven thousand years, the Mercatoria has done no such thing.”

“The situation is desperate for them locally. They are under threat of invasion within the year. A standard year, not one of yours. Help is at least one more standard year away beyond that. In fact, the invasion may already be beginning. The attacks on Third Fury and the Mercatoria’s other assets around Nasq. could be part of it.”

“And attempting to invade us helps them how?”

“They think there may be something here which will make a difference. Some information. That’s why I’m here, to look for it. But if they thought I was dead or not likely to succeed, the Mercatoria might intervene directly. Plus the invaders the Mercatoria is worried about might well think the same way with even less cause to hesitate. I get the impression the future continuance of Dweller Studies is kind of low on their set of priorities.”

“Fassin, what sort of information could possibly make such a course of action seem sensible?”

“Important information.”

“More specifically?”

“Very important information.”

“You are not willing to tell me.”

“Willing or able. Best you don’t know.”

“So you tell me.”

“If I thought the specifics would help convince you, I’d let you know,” Fassin lied.

He was talking to a Dweller called Setstyin. Setstyin liked to call himself an influence pedlar, which was a humble term for somebody with contacts extending as high as his went. Dweller society was remarkably flat in terms of social hierarchy — flat as the surface of a neutron star compared to the sheer verti-cality of the Mercatoria’s baroque monstrosity — but to the extent that there was a top and bottom of society, the suhrl Setstyin was in touch with both.

He was a society host and a part-time social worker, a hospital visitor and a friend to the great and good as far as either could be said to exist in Dweller terms; a sociable, clubbable creature intensely and genuinely interested in other people, more so even than in kudos (this made him very unusual, even strange, almost threatening). He was, in human terms, somewhere between a total geek and very cool. His geekiness was that bizarre failure to care about the one thing that everybody agreed really mattered: kudos, while his coolness came from the same source, because not caring about kudos — not obsessing about it, not chasing it down wherever it might be found, not constantly measuring one’s own coolness against that of one’s peers — was in itself kind of cool. As long as there was not the faintest shadow of a suspicion he was playing some weird back-game, deliberately pursuing kudos by pretending not to, so long as his lack of interest in it was seen as being the unaffected carelessness of a kind of wise naif, he was kudos-rich, though in a curiously unenviable way.

(It had been Slovius who had first explained to Fassin how kudos worked. Fassin had thought it was a bit like money. Slovius had explained that even money wasn’t like money used to be, but anyway kudos was sometimes almost an opposite. The harder you’d worked for your kudos, the less it was worth.) Setstyin was also one of the most sensible, level-minded Dwellers Fassin had ever encountered. And he treated a request by a mere human to wake up, speed up and converse over the phone with a degree of respect and seriousness that few other Dwellers would have.

Fassin had told Hatherence he needed time to let his human brain and body sleep, and his arrowcraft self-repair and recharge itself. He’d retreated to the long spoke room he’d been allocated in Y’sul’s house. This was a dark and dusty gallery littered with piles of discarded clothes, lined with ancient wardrobes and floored with out-of-favour paintings and crumpled wall hangings. There was a double-dent Dweller bed in there too and a treefoam-lined cubby by one wall, so it kind of constituted a bedroom, not that Fassin or his gascraft really needed such a thing.

Fassin had secured the door, used the little arrowcraft’s sonic senses to locate a removable ceiling panel and exited through the double skin roof into a breezy and relatively dark night.

Like all Dweller cities, Hauskip was situated in a historically calm patch within its atmospheric volume, but cities still had weather. They experienced pressure differentials, squalls, fog, rain, snow, crosswinds, upwellings, down draughts, lateral force and spin, all depending on the state of the gas stream around them. Moderately buffeted, half-hidden by the shreds of thicker gas scudding across the lamplit night, Fassin had made his way up and out across the sheen of rooftops.

Sky traffic had been relatively light — most travel would be within the spindles and spokes linking the city’s main components — but there had been a few Dwellers roting about in the distance, and enough small craft — packet-delivery machines, mostly — for Fassin to hope he was going unremarked.

Distant lightning had flickered deep below.

Fassin had come to a dangling wave-guide cable a few centimetres thick, followed it up to a deserted public plaza like a vast, empty bowl circled with dim, attenuated lights, and found a public screen booth.

Setstyin was also in the equatorial band, though on the other side of the planet. Fassin might therefore have hoped to find him awake at such a time, but Setstyin had been sleeping off the effects of an especially good party he’d hosted the night before. Dwellers could go for tens of their days without sleep but when they did sleep they tended to do so on a prodigious scale. Fassin had begged and pleaded with Setstyin’s servant to have him woken and even then it had taken a while. Setstyin looked and sounded groggy, but it appeared that his mind was fully awake inside there somewhere.

“And you would like me to do what?” Setstyin asked. He scratched at his gill fringe with one spindle arm. He was wearing a light sleep collar round his mid-hub, which was regarded as a polite minimum when addressing someone other than a close friend or family member over the phone. Dwellers were hardly self-conscious about showing their inner-hub mouth parts and pleasure organs, but there was a degree of decorum in such matters, especially when confronted with an alien. “What shall I say, Fassin, and to whom?”

A gust of wind made the arrowcraft’s vanes purr to hold it in place as Fassin looked into the camerascreen. “Convince whoever you can, preferably as high as you can reach, preferably discreetly, that there really is a threat. Give them time to decide what they’re going to do if there is a raid. It may be best just to let it happen. What you don’t want to do is have an unthinking hostile reaction that leads to some maniac Quick nuking a city or two to try to teach you a lesson.”

Setstyin looked confused. “How would that benefit anybody?”

“Please, just trust me — it’s the sort of thing Quick species do.”

“You want me to talk to politicians and military people, then, yes?”

“Yes.” Politicians and military people in Dweller society were as much amateurs and dilettantes as gifted tailors or devout party-throwers like Setstyin — possibly a little less dedicated -but you had, Fassin reflected, to work with what you were presented with.

Setstyin looked thoughtful. “They’re not going to go with an invasion.”

This was true, Fassin supposed. In the full sense of the word an invasion was impossible. The Ulubis forces were hopelessly inadequate for the task of occupying a volume as great as Nasqueron or any other gas-giant, even if it had been inhabited by a congenitally peaceful, naturally subservient and easily cowed species rather than, well, Dwellers. Attempting to control the place with Dwellers around would be like peeing into a star. The danger was that, in carrying out a raid to secure a given volume for long enough to hunt down the information they were looking for, the Mercatoria would cause the Dwellers to react as though they were undergoing a full-scale invasion. It seemed to be part of Dweller psychology that if something was worth reacting to, it was even more worth overreacting to, and Fassin dreaded to think what that might imply for all sides.