Ganscerel lay with his eyes closed, breathing deeply and letting the technicians detach him from the machinery.

Paggs glanced over. “Are we convincing you at all, Fass?”

“You’re convincing me it’s even easier to remote delve these days than it used to be.” Fassin levered himself from the couch with the steady application of force from one small finger and let himself float very gently towards the floor. “I would have taken your word for it.”

“So, you only got one-third of the volumes concerned, young Taak,” Ganscerel said.

Fassin was giving a very private briefing in an engineering store off the secondary ship hangar. Ganscerel had wanted it conducted in his quarters but there wasn’t a way of squeezing the colonel in there. Present were Fassin, Ganscerel, Paggs and Colonel Hatherence. Fassin wanted them each to know as much as he did — or at least as much as he thought they ought to know — about what he had found on his long-ago delve and what they would be looking for on the one they were hoping to begin the following day.

“Yes,” he said. “I traded some high-definition images of Earth Twentieth-Century European Expressionist paintings for -amongst a lot of other stuff — what was catalogued as a tri-trans-lated text of a pre-Third Chaos Lutankleydar epic poem, a private, unpublished work by — or perhaps commissioned by -a Doge of the Enigmatics. It was all double-encrypted and compressed but it was known to be in three volumes. I got three volumes from Valseir, only — as it turned out years later, when it was finally de-mangled by the Jeltick — what I’d been given wasn’t Volumes One, Two and Three. It was Volume One, three times over, in three separate languages. And it wasn’t by an Enigmatic Doge either.

“One of the volumes was in a previously known but untranslatable Penumbral language from the time of the Summation. When the translation was made it acted as a Rosetta; gave the key to a lot of other stuff, and that sidetracked everybody for a while. Then some pin-eyed Jeltick scholar spotted a note at the end, buried in the appendices in a crude but related slang-language, obviously added later, but not much later, that basically said the whole thing had been written during the Long Crossing of the Second Ship, by an Outcast Dweller skilled in the Penumbral language, and that, yes, of course there was a Dweller List, they — the ship, or its crew — had the key to it, and it would be included in Volume Two or Three of this epic poem. It was also, of course, in the ship, and the ship was heading for the Zateki system. That’s why the Jeltick sent an expedition straight there as soon as they had the translation.”

“Why not come here, to Nasqueron, where they might have found the Third Volume?” Paggs asked, smiling.

“Because the Shrievalty hadn’t told them where the data had come from. Whether this was oversight or deliberate we haven’t been told. The Jeltick may have guessed it was from a Dweller Studies centre but they couldn’t be sure whether it was or not and, if so, which one. They probably did start making inquiries, but they didn’t want to alert anybody else to the importance of what they had. Don’t forget, the information had been copied and re-copied — it was lying about in data reservoirs all over the civilised galaxy. Quite possibly people had even already translated and read the main text but just hadn’t got round to the appendices, where the all-important note was. The slightest hint that there was anything of strategic interest in that tranche and everybody else would have dusted it off, read it and — bang — the Jeltick would have lost their edge. So they fuelled and tooled and set sail for Zateki instead.”

“This could all be a hoax, you know,” Ganscerel said, snorting. He adjusted his robes, frowning deeply. “Ido believe I detect the laboured and tortuous signature of Dweller humour here. This could just be a joke at the expense of anyone foolish enough to fall for it.”

“It could indeed, sir,” Fassin agreed. “But we have our orders and we have to make the effort, just in case it is all true.”

“So we are looking for the remaining two volumes of this… what is it called, exactly?” Colonel Hatherence asked.

“Best translation,” Fassin said, “is, The Algebraist. It’s all about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, love, longing, honour, long voyages home… all that stuff.”

“And what is or was this Long Crossing?” Ganscerel asked irascibly. “I haven’t heard of it.”

“The voyage back home from what humans used to call the Triangulum Nebula,” Fassin said, with a small smile.

“Well,” Ganscerel said, frowning once more. “We are not really much further forward, are we? And what, pray, do we call the Triangulum Nebula now, Seer Taak?”

“We call it the Lost Souls II Galaxy, Chief Seer. The crossing was called the Long Crossing because it took thirty million years. The outward journey allegedly took almost no time, because it was conducted through an intergalactic wormhole, the portal location of which is amongst those included in the Dweller List.”

Hervil Apsile, Master Technician of the Third Fury Shared Facility, ran the ultrasonic hand-held over the gascraft’s starboard nacelle one more time, smiling with some satisfaction at the smooth line on the screen. Above his head, one of the Shared Facility’s drop ships stood on extended legs, a squat lifting-body shape, hold doors open. To one side, the main hangar’s transparent dome showed a vast darkness, fitfully illuminated by long lighting flashes like sheets of tipped diamond catching the light of a dim blue sun.

“Checking for scrits, Hervil?” Fassin asked, approaching by bounce along the fused-rock floor.

Apsile grinned at the sound of Fassin’s voice but watched the hand-held’s screen until he’d got to the end of the seam he was inspecting. He switched the machine off and turned to Fassin. “Just the standard varieties detected so far, Seer Taak.”

Scrits were the almost certainly mythical creatures which Dwellers blamed when anything went badly wrong anywhere in their vicinity. The humans who had lately taken up the baton of Dweller Studies had adopted early on the idea of scrits to account for the high degree of malfunctions any interaction with — or indeed near — the Dwellers seemed to involve. It was either that or accept that the Dwellers’ endemic technological carelessness and congenital lack of enthusiasm for keeping machinery in reliably working order was somehow contagious.

Fassin patted the dark flank of the fat, arrowhead-shaped gascraft. This was his own machine, designed specifically for and partly by Fassin himself. It was about five metres long, four across the beam if you included the outboard manoeuvring nacelles and a little under two metres in height. Its smooth form was broken only by the shut lines of its various manipulators and manoeuvring impellers, a few sensor bulges, and the rear power assembly, vanes currently stowed. Fassin rubbed his hand over its port tail fin. “All prepped and ready, Herv?”

“Entirely,” Apsile said. He was Nubianly black, slim but muscled, sleekly bald. Only a few lines round his eyes made him look remotely as old as he was, which was very. Every year or so, before his annual depilatory treatment — he thought gene treatment too invasive — a white micro-stubble would start to appear on his scalp, giving his head the appearance of a bristling star field. “And you?” he asked.

“Oh, prepped and ready too,” Fassin told him. He’d just come from the day’s final briefing, with the Dweller Current State people. It was their challenging brief to try and keep abreast of what was going on in the sheer and utter chaos that was Dweller society and, as a sideline, keep track of where the major Dweller structures, institutions and — especially — Individuals Of Interest were at any given moment.

The news was not good: a formal war was brewing between Zone two and Belt C, at least one long-term storm structure between Zone one and Belt D was collapsing while two were building elsewhere, and the movements of IOIs recently had been particularly fluid. One might even say capricious. As for the whereabouts of choal Valseir, well. Nobody had seen anything of the fellow for centuries.