The Algebraist

They were hitching a ride to the war zone.

A Tu

“You claim to have been around in your present form for ten billion years and you still haven’t developed a decent hangover cure?” Hatherence had asked, incredulous.

They’d been floating in a restaurant car, waiting for the galley to figure out the exact chemical composition of oerileithe food.

Y’sul, his voice muffled, issuing from within a translucent coverall that was the Dweller equivalent of dark glasses, had replied, “Suffering is regarded as part of the process, as is the mentioning of it. As is, one might add, the sympathy one receives from one’s companions.”

The colonel had looked sceptical. “I thought you felt no pain?”

“Mere physical pain, no. Ours is the psychic pain of realising that the world is not really as splendid as it seemed the evening before, and that one may have made something of a fool of oneself. And so on. I wouldn’t expect a little dweller to understand.”

They’d detrained at Nuersotse, a sphere city riding mid-altitude in the boiling ragged fringes of the equatorial Belt’s northern limits. Nuersotse was barely thirty kilometres in diameter, relatively dense by Dweller city standards and built for strength and manoeuvrability. High-speed transport craft left in convoys every hour or so, as one of the Band Border Wheels swung near.

They’d crossed on the Nuersotsian-Guephuthen Band Border Wheel One, a colossal, articulated structure two thousand kilometres across held rotating on the border of two atmospheric gas-giant bands, protruding a kilo-klick into each, its whole enormous mass spun by the contra-rotating gas-streams on either side. Band Border Wheels were the largest moving structures most gas-giant planets possessed, if one discounted the globe-girdling CloudTu

Band Border Wheels really spun, transferring transport and materials from one band to another with minimal turbulence and in relative safety, with the added bonus that they produced prodigious amounts of electricity from their spindle drive-shafts. These protruded from the upper and lower hubs, vast hemispheres whose lower rims were pocked with microwave dishes hundreds of metres across, geared up to tear round at blurring, mind-numbing speeds and beaming their power to an outer collecting ring of equally enormous stationary dishes which then pumped the energy into docked bulk accumulator carriers.

The Wheel and the city had been caught in the outer edges of a small boundary-riding storm when they’d arrived, though both were being moved out of the way as quickly as they could be. Everything, from the planet itself to Fassin’s teeth, had seemed to vibrate around them as the turbulence-hardened transfer ship hurried them empodded from the CloudTu

Hurled round in the giant centrifuge of the Wheel, stuck against its i

The storm had been affecting Guephuthe more severely than Nuersotse. The outer equatorial ring of the city was spi

Another multi-kiloklick CloudTu

At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition — nay, a quest! — he was undertaking with these -yes, these, two — famous, well-co

They’d floated in the Tu

Fassin and Hatherence had looked, glowering, at Y’sul.

He’d finished dusting himself down and straightening his clothing, then done a double take at their aggregated gaze and a

The cousin was an engineering officer on the Dreadnought Stormshear, a thirty-turreter with the BeltRotationeers’ 487th “Rolling Thunder’ Fleet. Bindiche, the cousin, bore a longstanding familial grudge against Y’sul and so naturally had been only too happy to accept a great deal of kudos from an inwardly mortified, outwardly brave-facing, hail-cuz-bygones-now Y’sul by doing him the enormous, surely never-to-be-forgotten favour of vouching for him and his alien companions to his captain and so securing passage into the war zone, though even that only happened after a quick suborb flight in a nominally freight-only moonshell pulsed from High Tolimundarni to Lopscotte (again covered by cousin Bindiche and his endlessly handy military co

The slipstream howled and screamed around the Seer and the colonel. They watched the slave-children attempt their repairs. Clustered around the ends of the giant propeller blades, Fassin thought the Dweller young looked like a group of especially dogged flies clinging to a ceiling-mounted cooling fan.

Dweller children had a generally feral and entirely unloved existence. It was very hard for humans not to feel that adult Dwellers were little better than serial, congenital abusers,- and that Dweller children ought to be rescued from the relative brutality of their existence.