“How do you navigate this thing?”

“Point.”

“Point?”

“Get to the general volume and then point in the right direction.”

“Secret is plenty of power.”

“Delicate finessing of delta-V is sign you haven’t really got enough power.”

“Power is all.”

“You can do a lot by just pointing.”

“If you’ve got enough power.”

“Though sometimes you have to sort of allow a bit for deflection.”

“That’s a technical term.”

Fassin couldn’t work out how to take the ship over. Dwellers could, if they were determined, go years without experiencing anything a human would recognise as sleep, and Quercer Janath claimed that they could get by without any at all, not even little slow-down style snoozes. His gascraft had no weapons apart from the manipulators, he had never trained to use the arrowhead as a close-combat device and anyway an Adult Dweller was bigger and probably more powerful -except in top speed — than the little gascraft. Dwellers were, anyway, generally regarded as being very hard to disable and\or kill.

He remembered Taince Yarabokin talking about her close-combat briefings. The basic advice when confronting a Dweller who meant you harm — if you, as a human, were in a conventional spacesuit, say — was to make sure you had a big gun. There was no known way an unarmed human, even in an armoured suit, could take on a fit young Dweller. If you didn’t have a big gun, then Run Away Very Quickly was the best advice. Of all the Mercatorial species, only the Voehn were known to be able to tackle a Dweller unarmed, and even then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Fassin supposed he could just ram Quercer Janath. Crashing the little gascraft into them nose first might knock them out or disable them, but he wasn’t sure there was sufficient room to work up enough speed for such a manoeuvre in any single part of the ship. He’d need to start a few compartments back and come slamming into the command space, hoping for a lucky hit, and that they wouldn’t hear him coming and just rote out of the way to leave him to smash into the instruments. He wondered what Hatherence would have done. He wondered if she’d have been allowed to come in the first place. Almost certainly not with any weapons. On the other hand there was that standard Dweller casualness about such things. On the other hand, this ship didn’t seem that casual.

Even if he could get Quercer Janath out of the way, what about Y’sul? He didn’t think the older Dweller would conspire or even cooperate. Y’sul had made it very clear that he was an entirely loyal Dweller who was simply being a good guide and mentor, not some treacherous human-lover in league with or harbouring any sympathy for the Mercatoria, an entire power structure and civilisation he professed neither to understand nor care about.

And even if Fassin could somehow get control of the ship by himself, tricking both Dwellers — or all three, depending how you looked at it — what then? He still hadn’t been able to find any sign of a hidden navigational matrix on the ship. Where was he supposed to go? How did he find the wormhole portal that had brought them here? When he found it, how did he get through, assuming it was in any way guarded or just administered? Mercatorial portals were some of the most intensely monitored and heavily guarded locations in the galaxy. Even allowing for the semi-chaotic indifference that Dwellers tended to display regarding such matters, could he really expect to fly unchallenged through one of their portals as though it was just another patch of space?

He’d tried to find out more about the whole process of finding and traversing a Dweller wormhole portal — an Adjutage — from Quercer Janath, but they had, to even his surprise, given their conspicuous gift for the technique, comprehensively out-vagued themselves on the matter, surpassing their most studiedly unhelpful earlier replies by some margin.

Fassin had been allowed out of the ship. He’d floated free of it as it cruised gently through the tenuous, near-vacuum body of the Clouder Hoestruem. He wanted to check as best he could that this was not all faked somehow. How, after all, did he really know that he was where Quercer Janath said he was? They’d told him. He’d seen information displayed on some screen and in or out of some holo displays. It could all be a joke, or a way of setting him up for something. So he had to check.

Outside the Velpin, keeping pace with the ship as it slid through the allegedly self-aware interstellar cloud, he used the little gascraft’s senses to gauge whether he was in some vast artificial environment.

As far as Fassin could tell, he wasn’t. He genuinely was in a chemical\dust cloud on the edge of a planetary system a quarter of the way round the galaxy from his home and halfway in towards the galactic core. The stars looked completely different. Only the distant galaxies still aligned. If it wasn’t really the edge of deep space, it was a brilliant simulation of it. He used up a little of his reaction mass — water, basically — to fly a few kilometres away from the Velpin, and still encountered no wall, no giant screen. So either he was in a truly prodigious VR space, or it was all being done directly, through his brain, or through the gascraft’s own collar, somehow uprated to one hundred per cent immersion, beyond check.

He thought back to something Valseir had said once: Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

Valseir had been talking about the Truth and other religions, but Fassin felt he was in a similar situation here. He had no real choice but to act as though all this was genuine. Even so, he had to keep the idea that it wasn’t at the back of his head, just in case. Because if all this was real then he was, maybe, on the brink of the most astounding discovery in all human history, a revelation that could do untold harm or bring inestimable benefits to any combination of the Mercatoria, its adversaries and just about every other space-faring species in the galaxy. He remembered confronting the emissarial projection, what seemed like an age ago, back in the Autumn House. Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a setup, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.

He ran every check he could while he was outside the hull of the Velpin. He was in space. Everything checked out. Or he was in a sim so complete that there was no disgrace in being taken in by it. Back to the Truth again. Hatherence would have appreciated the dilemma.

He could, if he really wanted, he supposed, just try and run away. The gascraft would support him indefinitely, it was capable of independent entry into a planetary atmosphere, and if he used almost all his reaction mass he could be in the inner system of this star Aopoleyin in a few years. He could even sleep most of the way and hardly notice the journey. But then what? He’d never heard of the place. It was somewhere in the Khredeil Tops (whatever those were) according to the gascraft’s rudimentary star atlas, but it wasn’t listed as a human or Mercatorial inhabited system and there was no mention of it having any inhabitants at all. That didn’t mean there was nobody there — everywhere seemed to support somebody who called it home — but it meant that he’d probably be no further forward trying to get back home.

He came back to the ship when Quercer Janath signalled excitedly that they’d found something. It wasn’t Leisicrofe’s ship; it was the delicate ball of gas and chemicals — a lacework ball of cold and dirty string open to the vacuum, held together by just a trace of gravity — that was the Clouder’s mind.

… Looking for… ?

— A Dweller. A gas-giant Dweller, called Leisicrofe.

… Image…