Y’sul shook himself. “You mean a WingClouder or TreeClouder or StickyClouder or—”

“No.”

“None of the above.”

“Just a Clouder.”

“But—” Fassin said.

“Aopoleyin, then!” Y’sul shouted. “Let’s start with that! Is that where we are?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, sort of.”

“Depends.”

“It’s the nearest place.”

“The nearest system.”

“Eh?” Y’sul said.

“The nearest what?” Fassin asked, simply not understanding. He peered at the star field. This didn’t look right. This didn’t look right at all. Not in any way whatsoever, not upside down or mirrored or backside-holo’d or anything.

“I think I’m still confused,” Y’sul said, rippling his sense mantles to wake himself up.

Fassin felt as though he was at the bottom of that gun barrel again, about to be blasted out of it, or already being blown out of it, up the biggest, longest most unspeakably enormous and forever unending gun barrel in all the whole damn universe.

“How far are we from Nasqueron?” he heard himself say.

“Wait a moment,” Y’sul said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘system’?”

“About thirty-four kiloyears.”

“Stellar, not gas-giant. Apologies for any confusion.”

“Thirty-four kiloyears?” Fassin said. It felt like he was going to black out again. “You mean…’ His voice just trailed off.

“Thirty-four thousand light years, standard. Roughly. Apologies for any confusion.”

“I already said that.”

“Know. Different person, different confusion.”

They were in another system, another solar system, another part of the galaxy altogether; they had, if they were being told the truth, left Ulubis — system and star — thirty-four thousand light years behind. There was a working portal in Ulubis system linked via a wormhole to this distant stellar system neither Fassin nor Y’sul had ever heard of.

The Clouder being Hoestruem was a light year across. Clouders were — depending who you talked to — sentient, semi-sentient, proto-sentient, a-sentient or just plain not remotely sentient -though that last extreme point of view tended to be held only by those for whom it would be convenient if it were true, such as those who could do useful, profitable things with a big cloud of gas. Providing it wasn’t alive. Arguably closer to vast, distributedly-smart plants than any sort of animal, they had a composition very similar to the clouds of interstellar gas which they inhabited\were (the distinction was moot).

Clouders were part of the Cincturia, the collection of beings, species, machine strains and intelligent detritus that existed -generally — between stellar systems and didn’t fit into any other neat category (so they weren’t the deep-space cometarians called the Eclipta, they weren’t drifting examples of the Brown Dwarf Communitals known as the Plena, and they weren’t the real exotics, the Non-Baryonic Penumbrae, the thirteen-way-folded Dimensionates or the Flux-dwelling Quantarchs).

Valseir’s friend Leisicrofe was a scholar of the Cincturia. The research trip he was making was a field trip, visiting actual examples of Cincturia — Clouders, Sailpods, Smatter, Toilers and the rest — throughout the galaxy. He had come to visit Hoestruem because it was one of the few Clouders anywhere near a worm-hole portal. Only it wasn’t a wormhole or a portal that anybody in the Mercatoria or the rest of what called itself the Civilised Galaxy knew anything about.

The star Aopoleyin was only a dozen light days away. The Clouder Hoestruem — much larger than the stellar system as measured to its outermost planet — was passing partly through the outer reaches of the system, intent (if that was not too loaded a word) on its slow migration to some far-distant part of the great lens. The Dweller Leisicrofe was somewhere here, in his own small craft, or at least had been. The Velpin set out to look for him.

“How long were we really under?” Fassin asked Quercer Janath. They were floating in the Velpin’s control space, watching the scanners chatter through their sweeps, searching for anything that might be a ship. The progress was slow. The Dwellers had long had an agreement with the Clouders that meant their ships made very slow speed when moving through one. Clouders were resilient, but their individual filaments, the wispy bands and channels of tenuous gas that formed their sensory apparatus and nervous systems, were surpassing delicate, and a ship the size of the Velpin had to move slowly and carefully amongst the strands of Clouder substance to avoid causing damage. The Velpin was broadcasting a signal hail looping a request for Leisicrofe to get in touch, though Quercer Janath was not optimistic this would raise their quarry; these academics were notorious for turning off their comms.

The truetwin looked genuinely puzzled. The double-creature shook itself, rustling the shiny crinkles of the mirror-finish coveralls. “How long were you under what?”

“How long were we really unconscious?” Fassin asked.

“Some days.”

“And then some more days.”

“Seriously,” Fassin said.

“And what’s this ‘we’?” Y’sul protested. “I wasn’t unconscious!”

“There.”

“You see?”

“Your friend disagrees.”

“Some days, you said,” Fassin quoted.

“Some days?” Y’sul said. “Some days? We weren’t unconscious for some days, any days, a single day!” He paused. “Were we?”

“The process takes some time, requires forbearance,” the truetwin Dweller said. “Sleep is best. No distractions.”

“How could we possibly keep you amused?”

“And then there’s the security aspect.”

“Of course.”

“I was only briefly drowsy!” Y’sul exclaimed. “I shut my eyes for a moment, in contemplation, no more!”

“About twenty-six days.”

“We were unconscious for twenty-six days?” Fassin asked. “Standard.”

“Roughly.”

“What?” Y’sul bellowed. “You mean we were kept unconscious?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“In a manner of speaking!” a plainly furious Y’sul roared. “What we said.”

“And what manner of speaking would that be, you kidnapping piratical wretches?”

“The manner of speaking complete truth.”

“You mean you drugged or zapped us unconscious?” Y’sul fairly howled.

“Yes. Very boring otherwise.”

“How dare you?” Y’sul shrieked.

“Plus it’s part of the terms for using the tube.”

“Conditions of Passage,” the left side of Quercer Janath intoned.

The other side of the truetwin made a whistling noise.

“Oh, yes! Those Conditions of Passage; they’ll get you every time.”

“Can’t be helpful with them.”

“Can’t use the tube without “em.”

“Don’t — What? — You — Condi — !” Y’sul spluttered.

“Ah,” Fassin said, signalling to Y’sul to let him speak. “Yes. I’d like to ask you some questions about, ah, tube travel, if you don’t mind.”

“Absolutely.”

“Ask away.”

“Make the questions good, though; the answers may well be baloney.”

“…Never heard anything so disgraceful in all my…’ Y’sul was muttering, drifting over to a set of medium-range scanner holo tanks and tapping them as though this would aid the locating of Leisicrofe’s ship.

Fassin had known they’d been under for more than an hour or two. His own physiology, and the amount of cleaning-up and housekeeping the shock-gel and gillfluid had had to do had told him that. Finding out that it had been twenty-six days left him more relieved than anything else. Certainly losing that amount of time when you hadn’t been expecting to and hadn’t been warned about it was disconcerting and left one feeling sort of retrospectively vulnerable (and would it be the same on any way back?) but at least they hadn’t said a year, or twenty-six years. Fate alone knew what had happened in Ulubis during that time — and of course, with all his gascraft’s systems switched off, Fassin had no way of checking whether this really was the amount of time they had spent unconscious — but it looked like at least one small part of the Dweller List legend was true. There were secret wormholes. There was one, for sure, and Fassin thought it unlikely in the extreme that the one between Ulubis and Aopoleyin was the only one. It was well worth losing a couple of dozen days to find that out.