“Iwas coming to get you, Sal. If you’re watching this then I didn’t make it, not personally, but even from beyond the grave, I’m still fucking coming to get you.”

The image froze, then faded. A hand, shaking only slightly, reached out and turned the viewer off.

FOUR:

EVENTS DURING WARTIME

It was a truism that there was not just one galaxy, there were many. Every variety of widely spread sentient life — plus a few creat categories which were arguably non-sentient though still capable of interstellar travel — and sometimes even every individual species-type tended to have one galaxy to itself. The Faring — a trans-category that covered all such beings able and willing to venture beyond their own immediate first-habitats -were like the citizens of a vast, fully three-dimensional but mostly empty city with multitudinous and varied travel systems. The majority of people were content to walk, and made their slow progress by way of an infinitude of quiet, effectively separate deserted streets, quiet parks, vacant lots, remains of wasteland and an entire unmapped network of paths, pavements, alleys, steps, ladders, wynds and snickets. They almost never encountered anybody en route, and when they got to where they were going, it would be somewhere very similar to the place they had departed from, whether that place had been a star’s photosphere, a brown dwarf’s surface, a gas-giant’s atmosphere, a comet cloud or a region of interstellar space. Such species were generally called the Slow.

The Quick were different. Mostly originating from rocky planets of one sort or another, they lived at a higher speed and could never be content forever plodding from place to place. That they had been forced to do so until a viable wormhole network had been established was regarded as quite bad enough. Wormhole access portals were the pinch-points of the worm-hole system — the city’s underground stations — where people of varying species-types were forced to meet and to some extent mingle, though given the tiny amount of time one spent near a portal or within a wormhole, even this seemingly profound tying-together made very little difference to the ultimate unconnectedness of the many different life-strands, and both before they gathered and after they dispersed, the users of the system still tended to congregate at places specific to their own comfort criteria, usually quite different from those of all the others.

Many people regarded the Cincturia as the equivalent of animals: birds, dogs, cats, rats and bacteria. They too lived in the city, but were not responsible for it or entirely answerable to it, and were often to a greater or lesser degree inimical to its smooth running.

Accounting for the Rest — the non-baryonic Penumbrae, the 13-D Dimensionates and the flux-dwelling Quantarchs — was a little like discovering that the ground, the fabric of the city’s buildings and their foundations plus the air itself were each home to another sort of life altogether.

The Mercatoria — largely but not entirely made up the galaxy’s current crop of oxygen breathers — inhabited its own galaxy, then, as did all the other categories of life, and all these different galaxies existed alongside every other one, each interpenetrating the rest, surrounded by and surrounding the others, yet hardly affecting or being affected by them, except, sometimes, through the inestimably precious and all too easily destroyed wormhole network.

Us? Oh, we were like ghosts in the cabling.

* * *

Slave-children were crawling along the giant blades of one of the Dreadnought’s main propellers, packing welding gear, back-sacks of carbon weave and heavy glue-throwers. The pulsing drone of the vessel’s engines and main propulsion thrummed through the wrap-cloak of brown, billowing mist, filling the slipstreamed gas and the structure of the huge ship with buzzing, building, rising and fading harmonics like a vast unending symphony of industrial sound.

Fassin and the colonel watched from an open gantry overlooking the ring of giant engines as the two teams of Dweller infants crawled along the massive blades to the warped and flapping blade ends.

The starboard-most propeller had been hit by a section of DewCloud root. The root had fallen out of the clouds above, probably from a dying DewCloud floating and decomposing tens of kilometres above. DewClouds were enormous, foamy plants anything up to ten kilometres across and five or six times that in height. Like all gas-giant flora, they were mostly gas -a Dweller in a hurry could probably rip right through the canopy of one, hardly noticing they were in the midst of a plant, not an ordinary cloud. To a human they looked like some monstrous cross between an elongated mushroom and a jellyfish the size of a thunder cloud. Part of an Ubiquitous clade, found wherever Dwellers were, they harvested water condensation out of Dwellerine gas-giant atmospheres, using their dangling, thick and relatively solid roots to exploit the temperature difference between the various atmospheric layers.

When they approached the ends of their lives they floated up to the cold cloud tops and the higher haze layers, and bits broke off. The Dreadnought had prop guards to stop floating\falling\ rising stuff interfering with its main propulsion units, but the section of root had slipped in between the guard and the propeller itself, wreaking brief havoc with the thirty-metre-long vanes before being chewed up and thrown out. Now the child-slaves had to climb out along the blades, from the hubs to the tips, to make repairs. Shaped like slim deltas with thin, delicate-looking tentacles which had to both clamp them on to the still-revolving blades and hold the various repair materials, the infants were making heavy weather of it. Dweller officers in motor skiffs rode nearby, bellowing orders, threats and imprecations at the young.

“They could just stop the fucking propeller,” the colonel shouted to Fassin. The open gantry they were holding on to was four-fifths, of the way back from the bulbous nose of the giant ship, an ellipsoid a little over two kilometres in length and four hundred across the beam. The Dreadnought’s twenty-four giant engine-sets protruded from near its rear in a monumental collar of pylons, wires, tubular prop guards and near-spherical engine pods. The wind howled round Hatherence’s esuit and Fassin’s little arrowcraft.

“Slow them down too much, apparently!” Fassin yelled back.

The Dreadnought’s captain had cut the starboard-most engine-set to quarter-power to give the slave-children a better chance of completing their repairs without too many casualties. The ship’s giant rudders, mounted on the octiform tailplane assembly just aft of the engines, were appropriately deployed to compensate for the resulting skewed distribution of thrust.

Fassin glimpsed an escort cruiser through a short-lived break in the clouds a few kilometres away. Other Dreadnoughts and their escorting screens of minor craft were spread out around them in a front a hundred kilometres across and thirty deep. A slave-child near one of the vane tips lost its grip and whirled off the end with a distant shriek, crashing into the inner edge of the outer prop guard. Its scream cut off and the limp body was caught in the combined prop wash and sent whirling back, narrowly avoiding a further collision with the tail assembly. It disappeared behind a giant vertical fin. When it came back into sight it was already starting to spiral slowly down into the enveloping cloud haze. None of the skiff-riding Dwellers spared it a second glance. The dozens of remaining slave-children continued to inch their way along the giant blades.

Fassin looked at the colonel. “Woops,” he said.