Locked into a centrally positioned space which doubled as a passenger compartment and hold, restrained by webbing, Fassin and Y’sul felt the ship commit to spirals within spirals within spirals, tiny corkscrew motions threaded into a whole ramped course of greater coils, themselves part of a still wider set of ever quicker, tighter loops.
“Fucking hell,” Y’sul commented.
A faulty screen was set in the far wall, hazed over with static. It made buzzing noises and occasionally flashed with images of ragged, striated clouds whipping past in distorted twists of light and shade. Fassin could see and hear, though both senses were degraded. All the systems in the gascraft had been switched off. Webbed upright, he could see out of the de-opaqued plate over his face — he’d let some of the shock-gel drain away so he could see better. The sound that came through the little arrowhead was at once dulled and high. Y’sul’s voice sounded like squeaks, barely comprehensible.
Fassin and Y’sul were stuck to the inner surface of the compartment, pinned there by the ship’s wild spins.
“Any idea why they have to do all this fractal spiralling?” Fassin had asked when they’d both been secured and Quercer Janath had gone to their command space a single compartment away.
“Could just be pure mischief,” Y’sul had said.
Fassin looked at Y’sul now. Both the Dweller’s sense fringes were turned in.
The ship accelerated hard, executing a broad curve. The screen flashed black pitted with stars, all revolving frantically, then blanked out.
The insane, nested sets of spirals resolved down to a single long-axis spin, as though the Velpin was a shell travelling down the barrel of some vast gun.
The ship resounded with a high, singing note around them and seemed to settle into something like a cruise. The rate of spin slackened off gradually. Fassin watched as Y’sul’s sense fringes gradually opened. The screen showed slowly spinning stars for several minutes. Then it blanked out again. The spinning picked up once more and Y’sul turned his fringes outside-in again. The spin built up until Fassin could feel his whole body being pressed through the shock-gel. It was his own coffin, he realised. Of course it was. He was getting tunnel vision now, starting to see the view down that great gun barrel, the view ahead shrunk to a single point far away; way, way in the distance, nothing but darkness and grey beyond darkness on either side, down that never-ending tube towards the last defined place they were aiming towards, never coming any closer.
Fassin woke up. Still spinning, but the rate was slackening off again. His nose itched and it felt like he needed to pee, even though he knew he didn’t. This never happened when the shock-gel and gillfluid were doing their jobs. He fell asleep.
* * *
Taince Yarabokin woke up. One of her first thoughts as she surfaced slowly to full consciousness was that Saluus Kehar would not have received the message she’d prepared for him, that there was still time for more reviewings and re-recordings and revisions, that she would be able to spend more time watching and listening to herself on the recording, and reduce herself to tears every time. Still time and a chance to confront him, maybe kill him, if that was both possible and something she felt driven to do at the time (she had no idea — sometimes she wanted to kill him, sometimes she wanted him alive to suffer the shame of knowing that she had released the story to the newsnets, and sometimes she just wanted him to know that she knew what had really happened that long-ago night in the ruined ship on the high desert).
She checked the time, feeling woozily around in virtual space for information. Still half a year out from Ulubis. She would be awake now until the attack itself, one of the first to be wakened for the final run-in, because she represented the closest thing they had to local knowledge. Privately she doubted she’d be able to offer much practical help, given that she’d last seen Ulubis over two centuries earlier and it might, to put it mildly, have changed somewhat after having been invaded, but she was the best they had. She thought of herself in that respect more as a talisman than anything else, a small symbol of the system that they would be fighting for. If that had been one consideration in her getting a place in the fleet, it didn’t bother her. She was confident that she was a good, competent and brave officer and deserved her post on merit alone. The fact that it was her own home system she was riding to the rescue of was just a bonus.
The fleet had spread out a little since the battle with the Beyonders in mid-voyage, sacrificing the immediate weight of arms it could bring to bear for a net of forward picket craft which would flag any trouble long before the main body of the fleet got to it. Taince had spent most of the intervening years slow-asleep in her pod, but — thanks to that relative security provided by the advance ships — she’d had some recreational and morale-time out of the shock-gel as well, walking around almost like a normal human being in the spun-gravity of the battleship, feeling odd and strange confronted with such normality, like an alien inhabiting a human’s body; clumsy, astonished at tiny things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm, awkward, especially at first, with meeting other off-duty humans, and missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual existence — with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data and meaning — like an amputated limb.
It would be like that again now, once she had finally come round. Taince wasn’t really looking forward to it. When she was stumbling about on two legs she wanted to be back in the pod, synched in, but when she was there she was forever nostalgic for a normal, physical one-speed, one-reality life. Blue skies and sunlight, a fresh breeze blowing through her hair and green grass and flowers under her bare feet.
Long time ago. And maybe never again, who knew?
Another of Taince’s first thoughts, even when she realised that she was being woken up slowly, without alarms going off, as part of the programmed, pre-agreed duty-shift system rather than some fateful emergency that might end in her death at any moment, was that she had not yet escaped into death, that it was not yet all over, and any terrors and agonies that might be hers to encounter before the peace of oblivion were still ahead of her.
* * *
“Hoestruem,” Quercer Janath said.
“Where?” Fassin asked.
“What do you mean, ‘Where?’?”
“You’re in it.”
Fassin had recovered from his blackout once they’d turned his little gascraft’s systems back on. He still felt disorientated and oddly dirty, a sensation that was only gradually disappearing as the shock-gel enveloped him fully again. Y’sul had seemed a bit groggy too, wobbly in the air when released from his webbing.
Now they were looking at the passenger-compartment screen, which Quercer Janath, still dressed in their shiny overalls, had hit with one rim-arm and got to work. Fassin looked carefully at the image on the screen but all he could see was a star field. He could not, for now, work out in which direction he was looking. Certainly not a direction he was used to looking in. He didn’t recognise anything.
“In it?” he asked, feeling fuzzy, and foolish.
“Yes, in it.”
Fassin looked at Y’sul, who still looked a little grey about the mantle.
The Dweller just shrugged. “Well,” he said, “I certainly give in. Who, what or where the fuck is Hoestruem?”
“A Clouder.”
“A Clouder?” Fassin said. This had to be a translation thing, or a simple misunderstanding. Clouders were part of the Cincturia: the beings, devices, semi-civs and tech dross that were beyond the Beyonders, way on the outside of everything.