The Mistake Not … had seriously considered saying no to both, but then decided this was unlikely to be a drill or some sort of bizarre test of loyalty. That said, the Kakistocrat was eccentric, even if it wasn’t officially Eccentric, and so it still might be some sort of weird drill of the Kak’s own devising. In the end it agreed to go but vetoed the other vessel passing on its specifications beyond being allowed to say that they would likely prove sufficient.

“No idea if it’s bad news, good news or even no news, Xan,” the ship sent back to the Liseiden admiral. “Just orders.”

“That’s too bad; it was good having you around,” Ny-Xandabo said. He meant to sound sincere, and, to some degree, did. “You take care. We hope we see you again.”

“Same here. Mind how you go. We’ll talk again. Out.”

Seven

(S -20)

Fzan-Juym was a sub-summit-orbit satellite of the Sculpt planet Eshri, making it one of a very small sub-category of moons; only its military nature and natural/artificial status – it was, arguably, a ship – stopped it being regarded as a genuine wonder.

The Werpesh, the people who had constructed the Girdlecity on Xown, had turned their attentions to Eshri at about the same time they’d begun building on Xown, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. By then Eshri had been dead for well over a billion years. It was small, dry, frozen and stony, with a thin atmosphere and a solidified core that registered as barely warm; most of the heat from its formation had been convected and then radiated away, and what little radioactivity the core had possessed had since decayed almost to nothing.

Thanks to little tectonic activity of its own but a lot of early asteroid-battering that had produced lava outflows covering large parts of the world, it had been a fairly smooth little globe to start with. The Werpesh had decided to improve – as they saw it – upon this promising start, and used planiforming techniques to turn Eshri into one of their Sculpt worlds; a flat-surfaced planet of polished rock with a network of encircling trenches – steep sided, kilometres deep and tens of kilometres wide – incised into and right around it. From space the planet looked like a colossal ball-bearing etched with ball-races for thousands of smaller spheres.

Scholars of the Werpesh and their works reckoned Eshri was the most extreme of all the Sculpt worlds; on no other had the ground been so thoroughly levelled, the remaining atmosphere so assiduously removed, the canyon-trenches etched so deep or so wide or attained such a bewildering complexity.