Factions, thought Fassin.

Valseir went on, “Not all of us are quite so studiedly indifferent to events taking place within the greater galaxy as we generally contrive to appear. There are those of us who, without ever wanting to know the full details of your mission, in fact knowing that they’d be unable to square knowledge of its substance with their species loyalty, would help you nevertheless. Others… others would kill you instantly if they even began to guess what it was you’re looking for.” The old Dweller floated over, came close to a kiss-whisper as he said, — And believe it or not, Fassin Taak, Drunisine is of the former camp, while your friend Setstyin is of the latter.

Fassin pulled away to look at the old Dweller, who added, -Truly.

After a few more moments, Fassin asked, “When will I be able to follow your friend Leisicrofe?”

“I think you’ll know one way or the other before the night is out. And if we both don’t at least begin to follow Leisicrofe, we may both follow your Colonel Hatherence.”

Fassin thought this sounded a little melodramatic. “Truly?” he asked, signalling amusement.

“Oh, truly, Fassin,” Valseir said, signalling nothing. “Let me repeat: none of this is about kindness.”

* * *

Saluus Kehar was not happy. He had his own people in certain places, his own ways of finding things out, his own secure and reliable channels of intelligence quite independent of the media and the official agencies — you didn’t become and stay a major military supplier unless you did — and he knew about as well as anybody did what had happened during the disastrous Nasqueron raid, and it was simply unjust to blame him or his firm.

For one thing, they’d been betrayed, or their intelligence or signals had been compromised, or at the very least they’d been out-thought (by Dwellers!). And because of that failing — which was unquestionably nothing to do with him — they’d been ambushed and out-outnumbered. Dozens of those heretofore un-fucking-heard-of super-Dreadnought ships had turned up when the incursionary force had been expecting no more than a handful — at most — of the standard ones, the models without the reactive mirror armour, the plasma engines and the wideband lasers. Plus the Dwellers had simply done a very good job of lying over the years — years? Aeons — presenting themselves as hopeless bumblers and technological incompetents when in fact — even if they couldn’t build anything very impressive from scratch any more — they still had access to weaponry of serious lethality.

The military had fucked up. It didn’t matter how good the tool was, how clever the craftsman had been, how well-made the weapon was; if the user dropped it, didn’t switch it on or just didn’t know how to use it properly, all that good work went for nothing.

They’d lost all the ships. All of them. Every single damn one, either on the raid or supporting it from space immediately above. Even a few of the ships not involved at all — those standing guard round Third Fury while the recovery and construction teams worked — had been targeted and annihilated by some sort of charged-particle-beam weapon, with two craft on the far side of the moon each chased by some type of hyper-velocity missile and blown to smithereens as well.

Unwilling to accept that they’d made a complete mess of the operation, the military had decided it mustn’t be their fault. Kehar Heavy Industries must be to blame. There must, to quote an ancient saying, be something wrong with our bloody ships. The sheer completeness of the catastrophe, and the frustrating lack of detail regarding exactly what had gone wrong, actually made it easier to blame the tool rather than the workman. All the ships had been made gas-capable by Saluus’s shipyards, all had been lost on their first mission using their new abilities, so — according to that special logic only the military mind seemed to appreciate — it must be a problem with the process of making them capable of working in an atmosphere that was responsible.

Never mind that the battlecruiser acting as Command and Control for the whole operation and both the Heavy-Armour Battery Monitors had been blasted to atoms just as effortlessly as the ships working in the planet’s clouds, even though they’d never been gas-capabled and were still in space at the time; that little detail somehow got rolled up into greater disaster and conveniently forgotten about in the hysteria.

So now they’d lost Fassin and they’d lost their lead to this Dweller List thing. Worse, they had a serious intelligence problem, because, basically, they’d been duped. The old Dweller Valseir must have suspected something or been tipped off. They knew this for the simple reason that the information he’d provided — almost the last data that had got relayed back to the top brass on Sepekte before everything went haywire — had proved, when checked later, to be a lie. The Dweller he’d told Fassin to look for in Deilte city didn’t exist. For the sake of this they’d lost over seventy first-rate warships for no gain whatsoever — ships they would seriously miss when the Beyonder-Starveling invasion hit home for real — and they’d thoroughly antagonised the Dwellers, who’d never been people it was advisable to get on the wrong side of even before they’d suddenly shown they still packed the kind of punch that could humiliate a Mercatorial fleet. As military fuck-ups went it was a many-faceted gem, a work of genius, a grapeshot, multi-stage, cluster-warhead, fractal-munition regenerative-weapon-system of a fuck-up.

In fact it was only that last item on the long list of calamitous consequences — dealing with the Dwellers’ subsequent actions and signals — that had worked out less badly than it might have. Finally, something positive.

Saluus was in a meeting. He hated meetings. They were an entirely vital part of being an industrialist, indeed of being a businessman in any sort of organisation, but he still hated them. He’d learned, partly at his father’s side, to get good at meetings, working people and information before, during and after them, but even when they were short and decided important stuff they felt like a waste of time.

And they were rarely short and rarely decided important stuff.

This one wasn’t even his meeting. Unusually, he wasn’t in control. He’d been summoned. Summoned? He’d been brought before them. That caught the mood better.

He far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter (though not always — if you had one where everybody was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on for ever too) and they were easier to control — easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings — often, Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem important that meetings could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time problems and often far away. But then — this was the slightly weird bit — as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.

Maybe because it was a sign of how much you’d been able to delegate, maybe because it was a way of imposing your authority on those in the middle and upper-middle ranks beneath you, maybe because the things being discussed at high-level meetings were so important that you needed the very last nuance of physicality they provided over a holo conference to be sure that you were working with all the relevant information, including whether somebody was sweating or had a nervous tic.