Slyne’s quadruplets — it would have been impolite to inquire whether they were actually his own — looked like little bloated manta rays, pale and trailing almost useless tentacles, forever bumping into their master or each other and getting themselves tangled in their tethers. The effect, for a human, was inevitably slightly grisly, though Fassin had the added, depressing feeling that the foetuses were the equivalent of a parrot in ancient Earth terms.
“There’s something this time!” Slyne shouted, pointing down to starboard. A small, black object was rising from the deep red depths of gas a couple of hundred metres away.
“Ihave it!” Y’sul yelled, bump-kicking the gun platform on its counterweights. It swung up above the deck to an elevation that let him depress the harpoon gun sufficiently.
“A tchoufer seed!” Sholish exclaimed. “It’s a tchoufer tree seed, sir!”
“Wait a moment, Y’sul,” Fassin said, rising from the deck. “Just let me go and check.” He gunned the little gascraft away from the Poaflias, curving out and down towards the still slowly rising black sphere.
“Keep out of the way!” Y’sul bellowed to the human. Fassin had taken a curved course deliberately, having witnessed Y’sul’s marksmanship before.
“Just hold, will you?” he shouted back.
Y’sul gave a shake and sighted the gun on the black sphere, maniples grasping the trigger.
Slyne craned forward in the rigging. Two of the foetuses wrapped themselves round a stay, entangling him. He looked up, tutted, and brought his spyglass up to a receptor-dense portion of his sensory frill, scanning the rising black orb. “Ah, actually—” he began.
Hatherence bobbed up suddenly. “Y’sul! Stop!”
“Ha-ha!” Y’sul said, twisting the trigger and firing the harpoon. The mounting shook, the gun leapt and banged, the harpoon’s own twin rocket motors sprang out and erupted as soon as it was a safe distance away and the thin black line attached to the main body came whipping and whistling out of a locker just beneath the gun mounting. The harpoon rasped through the gas towards where the black object would be in a few seconds’ time. “Hmm,” Y’sul said, sounding slightly surprised. “One of my better—”
“It’s a mine!” Slyne screamed.
Sholish just screamed.
— Fassin, get away from that thing! Hatherence sent.
The little gascraft instantly started to turn and speed up, rotors blurring in the air.
“Eh? What?” Y’sul said.
Slyne drew his holster-cannon and aimed at the harpoon. He got one shot off before the gun jammed.
“Could that be nuclear?” the colonel shouted. A high, keening noise sounded from the colonel’s esuit.
“Definitely!” Slyne spluttered. He shook his gun and cursed, then slapped at his radio. “Engines! Full astern!” He shook the gun again, desperately. “Fucking scrits!”
Hatherence moved quickly to one side.
Y’sul looked out at the harpoon, dropping smoothly right on course for the black ball, then at the gun mounting. “Sholish!” he barked. “Grab that line!”
Sholish leapt for the thrumming dark curtain of cord being jerked from the locker under the gun, caught hold of it and was instantly whipped towards the gunwales, smashing through stanchions and snapping to a stop, tangled in the hawser, before the slipstream brought him thudding back into the deck behind them. Free of the encumbering line, the harpoon just picked up speed, still heading for the mine. Hatherence got clear of the Poaflias. Fassin’s arrowcraft was still turning, still picking up speed, still even closer to the mine than the ship was.
“Oh, fu—” Y’sul said.
A crimson flash seemed to wash out the gas all around them.
Dead, Fassin had time to think.
For an instant, a tight fan of searing pink-white lines joined Colonel Hatherence’s esuit and the full length of the harpoon, which vanished in a blast of heat and light. A visible shock-sphere pulsed out from the detonation, rocking the mine…
… Which seemed to stop and think for a moment, before continuing to ascend smoothly on its way. The shock wave shook them and the ship. Fassin felt it too. He slowed and turned back.
The Poaflias was scrubbing off speed following Slyne’s last order. The slipstream was lessening but still sufficiently strong to clunk Sholish’s battered carapace off the deck as he floated tangled in the dark mass of wire.
Y’sul looked. “Sholish?” he said in a small voice.
“The species of the Faring are more divided by their sense of time than anything else. We Dwellers, being who and what we are, naturally encompass as much of the spectrum of chronosense as we are able, covering most of it. I exclude the machine-Quick.” A hesitation. “You still abhor those, I take it?”
“Yes, we most certainly do!” the colonel exclaimed.
“Positively persecuted,” Fassin said.
“Hmm. They are different again, of course. But even within the limits of the naturally evolved, the manifold rates at which time is appreciated are, some would argue, collectively the single most telling distinction that might be made between species and species-types.”
The speaker was an ancient Sage called Jundriance. Dweller seniority nomenclature stretched to twenty-nine separate categories, starting with child and ending, no less than two billion years later (usually much more) at Child. In between came the short-lived Adolescent and Youth stages, the rather longer Adult stage with its three sub-divisions, then Prime, with four subdivisions, Cuspian with three and then, if the Dweller had survived to that age (one and a quarter million years, minimum) and was judged fit by his peers, Sagehood, which then repeated all the subdivisions of the Adulthood, Prime and Cuspian stages. So, technically, Jundriance was a Sage-prime-chice. He was forty-three million years old, had shrunk to only six metres in diameter — while his carapace had darkened and taken on the hazy patina of Dweller middle age — had already lost most of his limbs and he was in charge of what was left of the house and associated libraries of the presumed deceased Cuspian-choal Valseir.
The view from the house was motionless and unchanging at normal time, a hazy vista of deep brown and purple veils of gas within a great placid vertical cylinder of darkness that was the final echo of the great storm that the house had once swung about like a tiny planet around a great, cold sun. In appearance the house-library complex itself was a collection of thirty-two spheres, each seventy metres or so in diameter, many girdled by equatorial balconies, so that the construction looked like some improbably bunched gathering of ringed planets. The bubble house hung, very slowly sinking, in that great calm of thick gas, deep down in the dark, hot depths only a few tens of kilometres above the region where the atmosphere began to behave more like a liquid than a gas.
“This is his house, then, yes?” the colonel had asked when they’d first seen it from the foredeck of the Poaflias.
Fassin had looked around, using sonosense and magnetic to search for the section of the derelict CloudTunnel that the house had once been anchored to, but couldn’t find it anywhere nearby. He’d already checked the Poaflias’s charts. The stretch of CloudTunnel no longer showed up on the local holo maps, implying that it had either drifted much further away — which was unlikely — or had fallen into the depths.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, looks like it.”
They’d had to turn the Poaflias around and return to Munueyn. Sholish, badly injured, had been taken to hospital. The surgeons had given him an even chance of surviving. He’d heal best left in a drug coma for the next few hundred days. There was nothing more they could do.
Y’sul could have taken on any number of Youths and Adolescents eager to take his crippled servant’s place, but he’d turned them all down — a decision he’d regretted just a day or so later once they’d set out again, when he’d realised he had nobody to shout at.