The nearest screen showed the camera swinging across the sky, searching for an intact Mercatoria ship, only to find further drifts of smoke, new clouds of ash, already drifting on the wind.
The other screen’s view pivoted to the sky, where something glowing yellow was fading and disappearing as it cooled, at first still keeping station with the scene directly beneath, then starting to drift away to the east.
The huge sphere was still rising, though slowing now, coming gradually level with the remains of the spectating fleet. The remaining two dozen or so mirror-finish Dreadnoughts were decelerating, heaving-to on one side of the clumped and scattered ships.
A bellowing roar of utter — and unexpected — victory built quickly in every Dweller throat along the length of the concourse, swelling to a clanging, thunderous cacophony of mind-splitting, thought-warping sound.
Then a series of crashing, titanic shock waves pummelled the Dzunda like a gale whipping a flag. A barrage of noise like a troop of titans clapping entirely drowned out the hollering Dwellers.
All the screens went dark. The Blimper Dzunda lurched for one last time, then started to fall out of the sky. Those Dwellers not already heading swiftly for the exits immediately began to do so, the ones near Fassin sweeping him along with them, up the access tube he’d been trying to head for originally, out via a wide funnel port into a viewing gallery, through its massively shattered diamond roof and out into the bruised and battered skies of Nasqueron.
“You mean some of your ridiculous fucking fairy stories about secret ships and hyper-weapons are actually true?” Fassin said.
“Well,” Y’sul said, looking round. “So it would appear.”
They were somewhere inside the Isaut, the enormous spherical ship which had destroyed almost the entire Mercatorial fleet — space-based command-and-control plus heavy-weaponry bombardment back-up included — in the space of about half a second. The Isaut was something called a Planetary Protector (Deniable), not that Fassin or, apparently, anybody else rescued from the destroyed and damaged ships of the spectating fleet had ever heard of such a thing. That, as Y’sul had pointed out, was a pretty unarguably convincing brand of deniability.
There had, of course, been rumours and myths concerning secret Dweller martial capability and the general lack of wisdom of getting into a fight with such an ancient and widespread species for as long as people could remember, but — as most of these myths and rumours seemed to be spread by the Dwellers themselves — as a rule nobody ever really took them seriously. The Dwellers spent so much time huffing and puffing and telling people how completely wonderful and brilliant they were — and yet seemed so self-obsessed, so inward-looking and so careless of their distant fellows, so unconnected not just with the rest of the civilised galaxy but with their own vastly scattered diaspora — they were inevitably dismissed as vainglorious fantasists and their vaunted ships and weapons, at best, a sort of folk memory of earlier magnificence, long lost, entirely eclipsed.
Even now, having just seen the results of the Isaut’s intervention with his own eyes — or at least through the little gascraft’s sensors — Fassin could not entirely believe what he’d witnessed.
“Well, this is a strange place to be,” Valseir said, looking about the spherical space he, Y’sul and Fassin had been shown to.
They had rendezvoused quite quickly in the general gas-borne confusion of survivors from the Dzunda. Fassin’s arrrowhead-shaped craft, though smaller than all the surrounding Dwellers, was a sufficiently different shape for Valseir and Y’sul to spot him quite without difficulty and head in his direction.
“Why is everybody else giving me such a wide berth?” Fassin had asked when they’d each drifted up to him in the after-battle calmness. It was true; all the other Dweller survivors were keeping a good fifty metres or so away from him.
“Worried you’re going to be a target,” Y’sul had said, checking his various pockets and pouches to see what he might have lost in the excitement. Around them, various long smoky columns were drifting in the breeze like anaemic stalks rooted in the dark storm base far below, and great dumb-bell-shaped clouds — all that was left of the nuclear explosions — were twisting and slowly tearing apart, their round, barely rolling heads still climbing into higher and higher levels of atmosphere, being caught in differential wind streams and casting vast hazy shadows across the again-quiet skies of the storm’s eye. Hovering to one side, the vast banded sphere which had risen from the Depths floated like a miniature planet caught in the eye of the great storm.
To one side, in the Storm Wall, the GasClipper fleet seemed to be trying to regroup. Tumbling out of the sinking Dzunda with the rest of the survivors, only a lifelong exposure to Dweller insouciance — both congenital and feigned — had prevented Fassin gasping in disbelief at the sound of various people around him quite seriously discussing whether the GasClipper race would just continue, be restarted or declared void, and passing opinions regarding the status of already existing bets in the light of this suite of likely choices.
The less damaged spectating and other craft were picking up the various free-floating Dwellers. Ambulance skiffs from the surviving craft in the silver Dreadnought fleet and hospital vessels from the nearest port facilities were rescuing the more seriously injured and burned individuals.
Fassin had indeed been targeted, but not by weaponry. A trio of skiffs had emerged from the giant sphere and made straight for the little group formed by Fassin and his two Dweller friends. They’d been taken aboard and the skiffs returned immediately to the enormous globe, ignoring the outraged yells of the Dwellers who until moments before had been studiously avoiding Fassin.
The lead skiff, crewed by a jolly pair of remarkably old-looking Dwellers — they didn’t volunteer their names, ranks or ages, but they each looked at least as old as Jundriance — had deposited them somewhere deep inside the giant spherical craft, way down a dark tunnel into a broad sphere of reception space, complete with washing facilities and what Y’sul had taken one look at and sniffily dismissed as a snackateria. Before they’d left again in their skiff, it had been one of these unnamed Dwellers who, in response to a question of Fassin’s, had told them the name and category of the great craft they’d been brought inside. Fassin had warned him that his gascraft had been in contact with Mercatoria nanotech and he might be contaminated, which did not surprise or alarm anybody aboard as much as he’d been expecting. The skiff’s crew scanned the little gascraft and told him, well, he wasn’t contaminated any more.
“Where is your little friend the Very Reverend Colonel?” Y’sul asked Fassin, making a show of looking around the reception space. “She jumped out of her seat and raced off just before all the fun started.”
“She’s dead,” Fassin told him.
“Dead?” Y’sul rolled back. “But she seemed so well armed!”
“She shot what turned out to be a Mercatorial… device,” Fassin said. “One of the first of their craft on the scene seemed to assume this meant she was a hostile and wasted her.”
“Oh,” Y’sul said, sounding downcast. “That was the Mercatoria, was it? Not these Disconnected people. You sure?”
“I’m fairly sure,” Fassin said.
“Damn,” Y’sul said, sounding annoyed. “Might sort of look like I’ve lost a bet, in that case. Wonder how I can get out of it?” He floated off, looking deep in thought.
Fassin turned to Valseir. “You sure you’re all right?” he asked. The old Dweller had looked a little shaken when they’d rendezvoused in the gas above the sinking Blimper, though apart from a few carapace abrasions picked up in the welter of people rushing to escape the sinking ship, he was uninjured.