· Dweller Formal Wars are like duels fought on a huge scale, Fassin told her. The colonel turned fractionally towards him. — Normally about some aesthetic dispute. They’re often the final stage of a planet-planning dispute.

· Planet-planning?

· A common one is where there’s some dispute concerning the number of belts and zones a planet ought to have. Then, the Odds and the Evens are the two sides, usually.

· Planet-planning? the colonel repeated, as though she hadn’t picked up right the first time. — I did not think gas-giants were, well, planned.

· The Dwellers claim they can alter the number of bands a planet has, over a sufficiently great amount of time. They’ve never been reliably observed doing this but that doesn’t stop them claiming to be able to do it. Anyway, it’s not the doing of the thing that matters, it’s the principle. What sort of world do we want to live in? That’s the question.

· Even or Odd?

— Exactly. A Formal War is just the working-out.

Another salvo. The ship really shook this time, and a number of the slave-children yelped at the ragged boom resulting. Combs of gas trails leapt from all sides, a cone defining a tunnel of braided sky in front of them.

· Wars are also fought over disagreements such as which GasClipper ought to be allowed to fly a certain pennant colour during a race.

· A war for this? Hatherence sounded genuinely horrified. — Have these people never heard of committees?

— Oh, they have committees and meetings and dispute proce-dures. They have lots of those. But getting Dwellers to stick with a decision that’s gone against them, even after they’ve sworn on their life beforehand that they’ll abide by it, is not the easiest thing to do, in this or any other world. So disagree-ments tend to rumble on. Formal Wars are just the Dweller equivalent of a Supreme Court, a tribunal of last resort. Also, you have to understand that they don’t really have standing armed forces as such. Between wars, the Dreadnoughts and other military bits and pieces are cared for by enthusiasts, by clubs. Even when a Formal War is declared, all that happens is that the clubs get bigger as ordinary people sign up. The clubs sound and feel like what you or I might understand as proper military authorities but they’ve no legal standing.

The colonel shook as though just confronted with something of ultimate grisliness. — How perverse.

· For them, it seems to work.

· The verb “work’, Hatherence sent, — like so many other common terms, seems to be required to take on additional mean-ings when one talks of Dwellers. How do they decide who’s won one of these bizarre conflicts?

· Occasionally a straight dead-count, or the number of Dreadnoughts destroyed or crippled. More usually there’ll be an elegance threshold pre-agreed.

· An elegance threshold?

· Hatherence, Fassin said, turning to her, — did you do any research into Dweller life? All that time in -

· I believe I encountered a mention of this concept but dismissed it at the time as fanciful. It genuinely counts in such matters?

· It genuinely counts.

· And they can’t agree a workable disputes procedure for what ship flies which colourings without resorting to war, but they can happily agree on that resulting war being decided on a concept as fuzzy as elegance?

— Oh, that’s never disputed. They have an algorithm for it.

Another terrific judder rang the Stormshear like a dull bell. The thin, uncoiling tracks combed the sky ahead of them.

· An algorithm? the colonel said.

· Elegance is an algorithm.

The screens showed the blue target quaking under the impact of a handful of shells. Hatherence glanced at Y’sul, who was trying to blow purple smoke rings and pierce them with a rim arm.

· And it’s all run by clubs, she said. — Of enthusiasts.

— Yes.

· Clubs?

· Big clubs, Hatherence.

· So is all this why their war technology is so awful? She asked.

· Is it?

· Fassin, Hatherence said, sounding amused now. — These people claim to have been around since the week after reionisation and building these Dreadnought things for most of that time, yet that target is less than a dozen klicks ahead, each salvo is thirty-six shells—

· Thirty-three. One of the turrets is out of action.

· Regardless. They are only hitting that effectively unmoving target with every second or third round. That is simply pathetic.

· There are rules, formulae.

· Insisting on ludicrously inefficient gunnery?

· In a sense. No guided shells, all guns and aiming systems to be based on ancient patterns, no jet engines for the Dreadnoughts, no rocket engines for the missiles, no particle or beam weapons at all.

· Like duels fought with ancient pistols.

· You’re getting the idea.

· And this is meant to keep them all in martial trim in case they are invaded by outside hostiles?

· Well, yes, Fassin agreed. — That does begin to look like a slightly hollow claim when you actually see the technology, doesn’t it? Of course, they claim they’ve got star-busting hyper-weapons hidden about the place somewhere, just in case, and the skills are somehow transferable, but…

· Nobody’s ever seen them.

· Something like that.

The Stormshear unleashed its mighty anti-ship missiles, loosing what was probably meant to be a twelve-strong broadside. The eleven tiny, slim projectiles came screaming from all sides of the great vessel — the slave-children yelped again and some dropped their trays — and hurtled out towards the distant blue target drone on smoky, twisting plumes of jet exhaust like deranged darts. Two of the missiles drifted too close to one another; each appeared to identify the other as its intended target and so both swung wildly at their opposite number, missed, twisted round in a sweeping double braid, flew straight at each other and this time met and exploded in a modest double fireball. Some Dwellers in the observation lounge — distracted, perhaps sarcastic — cheered.

A third missile seemed to take the nearby explosion as a sign that it ought to perform an upward loop and head straight back at the Stormshear. “Oh-oh,” Y’sul said.

The oncoming missile settled into a flat, steady course, becoming a small but rapidly enlarging dot, aimed straight at the nose of the Dreadnought.

“They do have destructs, don’t they?” Hatherence said, glancing at Fassin.

Some Dwellers started looking at each other, then made a dash for the access tube to the Stormshear’s armoured nose, creating a jam around the door. Slave-children, also trying to escape, either got through ahead of the rush or were thrown roughly out of the way, yelping.

The dot in the sky was getting bigger.

“They can just order it to blow up, can’t they?” the colonel said, roting backwards. A high, whining noise seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the colonel’s esuit. The yelling, cursing knot of Dwellers round the exit didn’t seem to be shifting. The Stormshear was starting to turn, hopelessly slowly.

“In theory they can destruct it,” Fassin said uneasily, watching the still unshifting melee around the exit. “And they do have close-range intercept guns.” Another frantic slave-child was ejected upwards from the scrum by the door, screaming until it slapped into the ceiling and dropped lifeless to the slowly tilting deck.

The missile had real shape now, no longer a large dot. Stubby wings and a tailplane were visible. The Stormshear continued to turn with excruciating slowness. The missile plunged in towards them on a trail of sooty exhaust. Hatherence rose from her dent-seat but moved closer to the diamond-sheath nose of the observation blister, not further away.

— Stay back, major, she sent. Then a terrific tearing, ripping noise sounded from above and behind them, a net of finger-fine trails filled the gas ahead of the ship’s nose and the missile first started to disintegrate and then blew up. The interceptor machine gun somewhere behind continued firing, scoring multiple hits on the larger pieces of smoking, glowing missile wreckage as they tumbled on towards the Stormshear, so that when the resulting shrapnel hit and punctured the observation blister it caused relatively little damage, and only minor wounds.