The Starvelings wanted the palace intact, hence the weapon choice. They would have to touch ground, send in the troops, to accomplish their symbolic goal. At last some vulnerability, a chance to inflict some real casualties, restore honour.
When the first gun platforms buzzed through, the lieutenant had ignored them. One drone machine had hummed right past his position, hesitated, then moved on. Spotting the dead, senses not calibrated for jajuejein. When the first landers had arrived, setting down in the rubble- and corpse-strewn plaza, still Inesiji held off. Four, five, six machines landed, disgorging heavily armed and armoured troops, many made huge in exoskeletons.
When a larger, grander-looking machine landed behind the first wave, Inesiji had set the pulse gun to max, disabled the safety buffers and let rip, pouring fire down into the large craft, spreading it to the smaller landers and then setting the gun to movement-automatic and scrambling and rolling away down the long curved gallery with just his hand weapon before the returning fire had sliced into the position seconds later, ripping a twenty-metre hole out of the side of the great spherical building.
He could see the hole from here, down amongst the wreckage of the fallen atmospheric power column. It had not long since stopped smoking. Hours had passed. He’d killed another dozen or so, shot down two landers, firing once from each position in the wreckage and the surrounding buildings, then quickly moving. Their problem was that they thought they were looking for a human. A jajuejein, especially one out of uniform or clothing, spreading himself out across some debris, didn’t look to them like a soldier ought to look; he looked like a bunch of fallen metallic twigs, or a tangle of electrical cabling. One trooper in an exoskeleton had died when he walked right up to Inesiji to take the gun he could see lying in the wreckage, tangled in some sort of netting, not realising that the netting was Inesiji. The gun must have seemed alive, rising up of its own accord to shoot the astonished trooper in the head.
But now Inesiji wasn’t feeling too good. The radiation damage was getting through to him. He was starting to seize up. Night was coming down and he didn’t think he’d see the morning. Smoke drifted from the city, and there were flashes overhead and at ground level. Gunfire, booms, all hollow, rolling and empty-sounding.
He heard the heavy tramp-tramp-tramp of another exoskeleton nearby, over the lip of the little crater-nest. Getting closer.
He looked one last time at the hole in the vast, sunset-tinged face of the spherical palace, raised himself slowly to see where the exoskeleton was, and died in a lancework of laser filaments fired from a gun platform a hundred metres above.
* * *
The great glittering ship, skinned in gold and platinum, was half a kilometre across, a slightly smaller — and mobile — version of the Hierchon’s Palace in Borquille. It sank slowly down through the first high haze layer and the cloud tops beneath like some vast and shining seed. The small, sharp, dartlike shapes of its escort vessels carved courses around it, swinging to and fro, insectile.
A craft like a silvery Dreadnought rose out of the cloud layers beneath, a kilometre off, and held altitude. The descending golden ship drew slowly to a stop level with the smaller vessel.
The silver ship signalled the golden one, asking it to identify itself.
The Dweller craft’s crew heard an obviously synthesised but powerful voice say, “Iam the Hierchon Ormilla, ruler of the Ulubine Mercatoria and leader of the Ulubine Mercatorial Government in Exile. This is my ship, the State Barge Creumel. Myself, my staff and family seek temporary sanctuary and shelter here.”
“Welcome to Nasqueron, Hierchon Ormilla.”
* * *
“How they treating you, Sal?”
Liss had come to visit Saluus in his cell, deep in the bowels of the Luseferous VII. A thin, tough, transparent membrane extended from the door surround like a bubble and preceded her into the cell, where Sal sat at a small wall-moulded desk, reading from a screen.
“They’re treating me well enough,” he told her. The membrane gave their voices, as heard by the other, an oddly distant quality. Sal stood up. “You?”
“Me? I’m a fucking hero, Sal.” She shrugged. “Heroine.” She nodded at the screen. “What you watching?”
“Reading up on the glorious history of the Starveling Cult under its illustrious leader, the Archimandrite Luseferous.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell me it wasn’t all planned out, Liss.”
“It wasn’t all planned out, Saluus.”
“Liss your real name?”
“What’s real?”
“It wasn’t planned out, was it? I mean, kidnapping me.”
“Course not.” Liss dropped into a small seat moulded into the wall by the door. “Spur of the moment.”
Sal waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. She just slumped there, looking at him. “Gave you the idea myself, didn’t I?” Sal said. “I told you Thovin good as accused me of getting ready to run.”
“Been thinking how best to use you for a while,” she told him. “But it was last-minute, in the end. We were there, the ship was ready to go, I’d seen you pilot it, knew it wasn’t hard.” Liss shrugged. “They’d only have requisitioned it and put a warhead in it, used it as a missile.”
“That really the best you could think to do with me?”
“We might have been able to do more, but I didn’t think so. Just unsettle everybody by taking you out of the equation. A morale blow, you seeming to go off and join the invaders. Worked, too. Confusion duly visited.”
“So it was opportunistic”
“I’m a Beyonder. We’re brought up to think for ourselves.”
“So were you always after me? Was I some sort of target?”
“No. Opportunism again. Great thing.”
“And Fassin?”
“Useful guy to know. Never much use for real spy stuff, but worth keeping in touch with. Led me to you, so it was worth it. Probably dead now, but you never know. Still disappeared in Nasq.”
“What’s happening? In the system, I mean. The war has started, hasn’t it? They won’t tell me anything, and the screen only accesses library stuff.”
“Oh, the war’s started all right.”
“And?”
Liss shook her head, whistled. “Woucha. Some of those ships you built? Taking a terrible pasting. All very unequal. All that stuff about fighting to the last ship? Bullshit, in the end. Space war’s almost over. Hierchon’s disappeared.”
“Is it all just military? Any cities or habs being targeted?” Sal held her gaze for a moment, then looked down. “I have a lot of people there, Liss.”
“Yeah, you’re only human, Saluus, I know. No need to act.”
He looked up sharply at her, but met an unforgiving gaze. She was still dressed in her slim esuit, coloured a pastel blue today to match her eyes. The thick helm-collar round her neck formed an odd-looking ruff, making her small head, dark hair gathered tightly back, look as though it was on a plate. “Borquille’s the only bit of ground been taken over so far,” she told him, relenting. “That got messy. No particularly newsworthy atrocities yet though.”
He sighed and sat back in the little seat by the screen. “Why are you — the Beyonders — cooperating with these… these guys?”
“Keeps you people out of our hair.”
“Us people? The Mercatoria?”
“Of course the fucking Mercatoria.”