The two men stood on a balcony, looking out over the caldera. The surging waters beneath formed a great frothed slope spreading all around from underneath the house, a shallow cone of billows and hummocks of foam all furiously bunching and collapsing and rushing ever outwards to where the fractious turmoil settled slightly and became merely wildly charging waves. The balcony was just above the equatorial rim of the house so the column of water actually supporting the place was hidden from them, but the crater walls, a couple of kilometres distant, echoed with the tumult.

They had climbed up here after a modest reception and light lunch with a few of Sal and his wife’s friends — notables all — who were here for the afternoon. Fassin had secured an invitation to stay for a couple of days, until the Shrievalty needed him back in Borquille. He had changed out of his dark grey Shrievalty uniform into casual clothes.

Sal leaned back against the barrier. “Well, thank you for coming to visit.”

Fassin nodded. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“My pleasure. Just mildly surprised you asked.”

“They trust you, Sal.” Fassin gave a small shrug. “Ineeded to get away from all that military shit and they wouldn’t let me just skip out the door of the palace and into Boogeytown.” He looked out at the tumbling waters. “Anyway’ — a glance at Sal—”been too long.” He wanted to give the impression that this had been a good excuse to effect some sort of reconciliation he’d long wanted to make. He and Sal had met up only very occasionally over the two centuries since the wormhole’s destruction, usually at the sort of gigantic social events it was hard to get out of but easy to remain alone within. They hadn’t really talked.

Even now, meeting up, there were whole aspects of their lives that somehow didn’t need to be gone into. How and what they had each been doing was a matter of public record and it would almost be an insult to inquire. Fassin had recognised Sal’s wife from news and social images, hadn’t really needed introducing. There hadn’t been a single person at the reception below, alien or otherwise — servants apart, obviously — about whom Fassin, who was no great social observer, couldn’t have written a short biography. Saluus probably didn’t know as much about Fassin as vice versa, but he’d already congratulated him on his engagement to Jaal Tonderon, so he knew that much (or, more likely perhaps, he just had an efficient social secretary with a good database).

“So, what can you tell me, Fass?” Sal asked casually. He wrinkled his nose. “Can you say anything?”

“About the Emergency?”

“Well, about whatever’s causing all the fuss.”

There was more than a fuss; there was low-level war. Starting the day after martial law was declared there had been a sequence of attacks, mostly on isolated and system-edge craft and settlements, though with some worrying assaults further in-system, including one on a Navarchy dock-habitat in Sepekte’s own trailing Lagrange that had killed over a thousand. Nobody knew whether it was Beyonders behind this resurgence of violence, or the E-5 Discon advanced forces, or a mixture of both.

More oddly, but for Fassin far more disturbingly, somebody had nuked the High Summer house of Sept Litibiti, back on ’glantine, just the day before; missiled it from space like it was a military facility. Bizarre and unprecedented. The place had been empty save for a handful of unlucky gardeners and cleaners, keeping the place ticking over until the appropriate season, but it made Seers throughout the system worried that they’d suddenly, for some reason, become targets. Fassin had sent a message to Slovius saying that maybe they should consider shifting the whole Sept elsewhere on ’glantine. Head for an out-of-season hotel, perhaps. He’d yet to receive a reply, which might be Slovius ignoring his advice, or just the authorities’ new message-traffic checking and censoring software struggling to cope. Neither would surprise.

“Tell me what you know,” Fassin suggested. “I’ll fill in what I can.”

“They want lots of warships, Fass.” Sal gave a sad-looking smile. “Lots and lots of warships. We’re to turn out as many as we can for as long as we can, though they want them sooner rather than later, and any advanced projects that might take longer than a year, even existing ones, are being deprioritised. We’re to gas-line a whole bunch of stuff for—” Sal paused, cleared his throat and waved one hand. “Hell, idiot stuff; we’re to rough-cut a whole load of civilian conversions: armed merchantmen, one-shot cloud-miners, tooled-up cruise liners and so on. We didn’t even do that in the last Emergency. So whatever it is, it’s serious, it’s presumably what our military friends would call credible, and it’s not very far away. Over to you.”

“Lot I can’t tell you,” Fassin said carefully. “Most of which I guess wouldn’t interest you anyway.” He wondered how much he could say, how much he needed to say. “Supposedly to do with something called the Epiphany-Five Disconnect.”

Sal raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. Bit away. Wonder why they’d bother? Richer pickings inward of where they are.”

“But a significant part of the Summed Fleet is on the way. We’re told.” Fassin grinned.

“Mm-hmm. I see. And what about you?” Sal asked, dipping closer to Fassin, voice dropping. “What’s your part in all this?”

Fassin wondered how much the continual rush of noise produced by the waves below would mask their words, if anybody was listening from far away. Since he’d arrived he’d showered and put on a change of clothes he’d requested from the house — caught without the necessary means of attire due to an extended stay away from home, he’d explained, needlessly. He got the impression the servants were perfectly used to providing clothes of varying sizes and for whatever sex to house guests. Still, even without the proscribed horror of nanotech, it was possible to make bugs very small indeed these days. Had the Shrievalty or the Hierchon’s people put some sort of trace or mike on him? Had Sal? Did Sal put surveillance on his guests as a matter of course? His host was waiting for an answer.

Fassin looked into the drink. A few small bubbles of gas rose to the surface and broke, giving some tiny proportion of the substance of Earth to the atmosphere of a planet twenty thousand light years away. “I just did my job, Sal. Delved, talked, took away what the Dwellers would let me take away. Most of which was not momentous, not important, not going to change anything much at all, not something everybody would want or risk everything for.” He looked Saluus Kehar in the eye. “Just stumbled my way through life, you know? Over whatever turned up. Never knowing what would lead to what.”

“Whoever does?” Sal asked, then nodded. “But I see.”

“Sorry I can’t really tell you too much more.”

Sal smiled and looked out at the slope of artificial surf, the pandemonium of waves beyond and the sheer cliffs further away still, brown-black beneath a hazy azure sky.

“Ah, your minder,” he said. The esuit of Colonel Hatherence of the Shrievalty appeared to one side, low over the foam, floating out over the mad froth of waters like a great fat grey and gold wheel. Whirling vane-sets on either side of her esuit kept the Colonel from sinking into the maelstrom. For all its massive size when you were standing next to it, the esuit looked very small from up here.

“She giving you any problems?”

“No. She’s okay. Doesn’t insist I salute her or call her Ma’am all the time. Happy to keep things informal.” All the same, he was hoping to get the Colonel out of the way somehow, either before or once he got down into Nasqueron.

Fassin watched the Colonel as she picked her way across the scape of waves. “But can you imagine trying to sneak into Boogeytown with that dogging your every move?” he asked. “Even just for one last night?”