“This is why we are confined to the single hull?” Hatherence asked the captain. They were on the foredeck, a slightly ramshackle sprouting of fibres and sheet protruding over the craft’s battered-looking nose. Y’sul had spotted a harpoon gun on the foredeck and challenged his companions to a coarse shoot the next time they traversed a promising volume. Apparently where they were now, just two days out of Munueyn, constituted just such a happy hunting ground — however, nobody had seen anything worth harpooning so far.
“That’s right!” Slyne bobbed eagerly over the deck. “Less I use the other hull, less I owe the city!” Captain Slyne was hanging on to some rigging, floating above everybody else to get a good view and act as lookout and target spotter. They were making a decent speed through the dim crimson gases. The slipstream would have blown Slyne aft if he hadn’t been holding on. A decent speed in this case meant less than a quarter of the velocity of the Dreadnought Stormshear on cruise, but the gas down here was thicker and the slipstream’s force was all the greater.
“There’s something!” Slyne yelled, pointing up and to starboard.
They all looked.
“No! Wrong,” Slyne said cheerfully. “Beg pardon.” Slyne was taking his captain’s role seriously, accoutred with lots of mostly useless ancient naval paraphernalia like spyglasses, an altimeter, a museum-piece radio, a scratched-looking hail visor, a shining antique holster-cannon and a radiation compass. His clothing and half-armour looked very new but based on designs that were very old. He had a couple of pet foetuses tethered to each of his Hub girdles.
The foetuses were Dweller young who hadn’t even been allowed to progress to the stage of being children. The usual reason they existed was because a Dweller-turned-female of particular impatience had decided she couldn’t be bothered going to full term, and had aborted. The results made good pets. Dwellers could survive on their own almost from conception, they just didn’t progress intellectually and had nobody to protect them while they were completely helpless.
Slyne’s quadruplets — it would have been impolite to inquire whether they were actually his own — looked like little bloated manta rays, pale and trailing almost useless tentacles, forever bumping into their master or each other and getting themselves tangled in their tethers. The effect, for a human, was inevitably slightly grisly, though Fassin had the added, depressing feeling that the foetuses were the equivalent of a parrot in ancient Earth terms.
“There’s something this time!” Slyne shouted, pointing down to starboard. A small, black object was rising from the deep red depths of gas a couple of hundred metres away.
“Ihave it!” Y’sul yelled, bump-kicking the gun platform on its counterweights. It swung up above the deck to an elevation that let him depress the harpoon gun sufficiently.
“A tchoufer seed!” Sholish exclaimed. “It’s a tchoufer tree seed, sir!”
“Wait a moment, Y’sul,” Fassin said, rising from the deck. “Just let me go and check.” He gunned the little gascraft away from the Poaflias, curving out and down towards the still slowly rising black sphere.
“Keep out of the way!” Y’sul bellowed to the human. Fassin had taken a curved course deliberately, having witnessed Y’sul’s marksmanship before.
“Just hold, will you?” he shouted back.
Y’sul gave a shake and sighted the gun on the black sphere, maniples grasping the trigger.
Slyne craned forward in the rigging. Two of the foetuses wrapped themselves round a stay, entangling him. He looked up, tutted, and brought his spyglass up to a receptor-dense portion of his sensory frill, scanning the rising black orb. “Ah, actually—” he began.
Hatherence bobbed up suddenly. “Y’sul! Stop!”
“Ha-ha!” Y’sul said, twisting the trigger and firing the harpoon. The mounting shook, the gun leapt and banged, the harpoon’s own twin rocket motors sprang out and erupted as soon as it was a safe distance away and the thin black line attached to the main body came whipping and whistling out of a locker just beneath the gun mounting. The harpoon rasped through the gas towards where the black object would be in a few seconds’ time. “Hmm,” Y’sul said, sounding slightly surprised. “One of my better—”
“It’s a mine!” Slyne screamed.
Sholish just screamed.
— Fassin, get away from that thing! Hatherence sent.
The little gascraft instantly started to turn and speed up, rotors blurring in the air.
“Eh? What?” Y’sul said.
Slyne drew his holster-cannon and aimed at the harpoon. He got one shot off before the gun jammed.
“Could that be nuclear?” the colonel shouted. A high, keening noise sounded from the colonel’s esuit.
“Definitely!” Slyne spluttered. He shook his gun and cursed, then slapped at his radio. “Engines! Full astern!” He shook the gun again, desperately. “Fucking scrits!”
Hatherence moved quickly to one side.
Y’sul looked out at the harpoon, dropping smoothly right on course for the black ball, then at the gun mounting. “Sholish!” he barked. “Grab that line!”
Sholish leapt for the thrumming dark curtain of cord being jerked from the locker under the gun, caught hold of it and was instantly whipped towards the gunwales, smashing through stanchions and snapping to a stop, tangled in the hawser, before the slipstream brought him thudding back into the deck behind them. Free of the encumbering line, the harpoon just picked up speed, still heading for the mine. Hatherence got clear of the Poaflias. Fassin’s arrowcraft was still turning, still picking up speed, still even closer to the mine than the ship was.
“Oh, fu—” Y’sul said.
A crimson flash seemed to wash out the gas all around them.
Dead, Fassin had time to think.
For an instant, a tight fan of searing pink-white lines joined Colonel Hatherence’s esuit and the full length of the harpoon, which vanished in a blast of heat and light. A visible shock-sphere pulsed out from the detonation, rocking the mine…
… Which seemed to stop and think for a moment, before continuing to ascend smoothly on its way. The shock wave shook them and the ship. Fassin felt it too. He slowed and turned back.
The Poaflias was scrubbing off speed following Slyne’s last order. The slipstream was lessening but still sufficiently strong to clunk Sholish’s battered carapace off the deck as he floated tangled in the dark mass of wire.
Y’sul looked. “Sholish?” he said in a small voice.
“The species of the Faring are more divided by their sense of time than anything else. We Dwellers, being who and what we are, naturally encompass as much of the spectrum of chronosense as we are able, covering most of it. I exclude the machine-Quick.” A hesitation. “You still abhor those, I take it?”