The Dreadnought took them as far as Munueyn, a Ruined City fallen amongst the dark, thick gases of the lower atmosphere where slow coils of turbulence roiled past like the heavy, lascivious licks of an almighty planetary tongue, a place all spires and spindles, near-deserted, long unfashionable, a one-time Storm-Centre now too far from anything to be of much interest to anybody, a place that might have garnered kudos for itself had it been near a war zone, but could hope for almost none at all because it was within one. A wing-frigate took them from the Dreadnought and deposited them in the gigantic echoing hall of what had once been the city’s bustling StationPort, where they were greeted like returning heroes, like gods, by the local hirers and fliers. They found a guest house for negative kudos. They were, in effect, being paid to stay there.

“Sir!” Sholish said, rising from the mass of petitioners in the small courtyard below. “A hostelier of impeccable repute with excellent familial connections in the matter of wartime travel warrants beseeches you to consider his proposal to put at your disposal a veritable fleet of a half-half-dozen finely arrayed craft, all in the very best of condition and working order and ready to depart within less than an hour of their arrival.”

“Which will be when, precisely, banelet of my already too-long life?”

“A day, sire. Two, at the most. He assures.”

“Unacceptable! Utterly and profoundly so!” Y’sul proclaimed, frilling the very idea away with a shudder. He was nestled within a dent on a flower-decked terrace outside and above the Taverna Bucolica, close enough to the city’s central plaza to smell the mayor’s desperation. He dragged deep of a proffered pharma cylinder and with the exhalation breathed, “Next!”

Fassin and the colonel, floating nearby, exchanged looks. Hatherence floated closer.

· We could just take off, you and I.

· All by ourselves?

· We are both self-sufficient, we are both capable of making good time.

· You reckon?

The colonel made it obvious that she was looking his arrow-craft over. — I think so.

I think you called up the specs on this thing before we left Third Fury and know damn well so, he thought.

He sent, — So we go haring off into the clouds together, just we two.

— Yes.

· There is a problem.

· Indeed.

· In fact, there are two problems. The first one is that there’s a war on, and we’ll look like a pair of warheads.

· Warheads? But we shan’t even be transonic!

· There are rules in Formal War regarding the speed that warheads can travel at. We’ll look like warheads.

· Hmm. If we went a little slower?

· Slow warheads.

· Slower still?

· Cruise mines. And before you ask, any slower than that and we’ll look like ordinary monolayer float mines.

Hatherence bobbed up and down, a sigh. — You mentioned a second problem.

· Without Y’sul it’s unlikely that anybody will talk to us.

· With him it is unlikely that anybody else will get a word in.

· Nevertheless.

They needed their own transport. More to the point, they needed transport that would be allowed to pass unchallenged in the war zone. Whatever remained of Valseir’s old dwelling lay far enough off the CloudTunnel network to make roting or floating their way there too long-winded. Y’sul had agreed to fix things — with his equatorial, big-city connections, escorting exotic aliens, he was bound to positively exude kudos towards all those who might help him — but then had got caught up in the whole process just due to the numbers of people who wanted to be the ones who helped him, and so became unable, seemingly, to make up his mind. Just as it seemed likely he was about to settle on one outrageously generous offer, another would appear over the horizon, even more enticing, necessitating a further reappraisal.

Finally, after two days, Hatherence could take no more and hired her own ship, on terms slightly better than the ones just rejected by Y’sul.

In their suite at the Taverna, Y’sul protested. “Iam doing the negotiating!” he bellowed.

“Yes,” the colonel agreed. “Rather too much of it.”

A compromise was arrived at. The colonel confessed to their hirer that she was legally unable to commit to a firm contract and Y’sul then remade it on the exact same terms while the appalled shipmaster was still drawing breath to protest. That day, the day the war officially got under way, ceremonially beginning with an opening gala and Formal Duel in Pihirumime, half the world away. A day later they sailed — taking the next downward eddy that also swirled in the right horizontal direction — aboard the Poaflias, a hundred-metre twin-hull screw-burster of unknown but probably enormous age. It boasted a crew of just five apart from its captain and was rotund and slow, but was — for some reason lost in the mists of Dweller military logic — still registered as an uncommitted privateer scout ship and so cleared to make her way within the war zone and, one might hope, liable to pass any consequent challenge save one conducted by opening fire prior to negotiations.

Their captain was Slyne, an enthusiastic youngster barely arrived at Adulthood, still very much a Recent and behaving more like a Youth. He’d inherited the Poaflias on the death of his father. The Dwellers clove to the idea of Collective Inheritance, so that, when one of them died, any private property they could fairly claim to have accumulated went fifty per cent to whoever they wanted it to go to and fifty per cent to whatever jurisdiction they lived within. This was why only one hull of the twin-hulled Poaflias was fully owned by Slyne. The city of Munueyn owned the other half and was renting it to him, accumulating kudos. The less Slyne could actually do with the ship, the more control he would lose, until ultimately the city could reasonably claim it was all theirs; then, if he wanted to stay aboard, he’d more or less have to do whatever the city asked him to do with the ship. This expedition, however, conducted under his own auspices, ought to go a long way towards securing his ownership rights over the whole vessel.

“This is why we are confined to the single hull?” Hatherence asked the captain. They were on the foredeck, a slightly ramshackle sprouting of fibres and sheet protruding over the craft’s battered-looking nose. Y’sul had spotted a harpoon gun on the foredeck and challenged his companions to a coarse shoot the next time they traversed a promising volume. Apparently where they were now, just two days out of Munueyn, constituted just such a happy hunting ground — however, nobody had seen anything worth harpooning so far.

“That’s right!” Slyne bobbed eagerly over the deck. “Less I use the other hull, less I owe the city!” Captain Slyne was hanging on to some rigging, floating above everybody else to get a good view and act as lookout and target spotter. They were making a decent speed through the dim crimson gases. The slipstream would have blown Slyne aft if he hadn’t been holding on. A decent speed in this case meant less than a quarter of the velocity of the Dreadnought Stormshear on cruise, but the gas down here was thicker and the slipstream’s force was all the greater.

“There’s something!” Slyne yelled, pointing up and to starboard.

They all looked.

“No! Wrong,” Slyne said cheerfully. “Beg pardon.” Slyne was taking his captain’s role seriously, accoutred with lots of mostly useless ancient naval paraphernalia like spyglasses, an altimeter, a museum-piece radio, a scratched-looking hail visor, a shining antique holster-cannon and a radiation compass. His clothing and half-armour looked very new but based on designs that were very old. He had a couple of pet foetuses tethered to each of his Hub girdles.

The foetuses were Dweller young who hadn’t even been allowed to progress to the stage of being children. The usual reason they existed was because a Dweller-turned-female of particular impatience had decided she couldn’t be bothered going to full term, and had aborted. The results made good pets. Dwellers could survive on their own almost from conception, they just didn’t progress intellectually and had nobody to protect them while they were completely helpless.