Pala was right that the Xeelee star-cloak was a weapon. One day this strange apparition would return, to haunt human history.
What a pity Bicansa’s people never did find an off-switch.
This was an age when every resource in the Galaxy had to be harnessed to feed the Expansion. So the Missionaries and Assimilators drove on.
But, at the very edge of the human front, they were never very safe vocations.
BREEDING GROUND
AD 10,537
The starbreaker pod exploded in her face.
Mari was hurled backwards, landing with a jarring impact against the weapons emplacement’s rear bulkhead. Something gushed over her eyes - something sticky - blood? With sudden terror she scraped at her face.
The emplacement’s calm order had been destroyed in an instant. Alarms howled, insistent. There was screaming all around her, people flailing. The transparent forward bulkhead had buckled inwards, and the row of starbreaker pods behind it, including her own, had been crushed and broken open. Charred shadows still clung to some of the stations, and there was a stink of smoke, of burned meat. She had been lucky to have been thrown back, she realised dully.
But beyond the forward bulkhead the battle was continuing. She saw black extragalactic space laced by cherry-red starbreaker beams, a calm enfilade caging in the bogey, the Snowflake, the misty alien artefact at the centre of this assault. The rest of the flotilla hovered like clouds around the action: Spline ships, fleshy scarred spheres, sisters of the living ship in which she rode, each wielding a huge shield of perfectly reflective Ghost hide.
Then the gravity failed. She drifted away from the wall, stomach lurching. In the misty dark, something collided with her, soft and wet; she flinched.
There was a face in front of her, a bloody mouth screaming through the clamour of the alarm. ‘Gunner!’
That snapped her back into focus. ‘Yes, sir.’
This was Jarn, a sub-lieutenant. She was bloodied, scorched, one arm dangling; she was struggling to pull herself into a pressure cloak. ‘Get yourself a cloak, then help the others. We have to get out of here.’
Mari felt fear coil beneath her shock. She had spent the entire trip inside this emplacement, a station stuck to the outer flesh of a Spline ship; here she had bunked, messed, lived; here was her primary function, the operation of a starbreaker beam. Get out? Where to?
‘… Academician Kapur first, then Officer Mace. Then anybody else who’s still moving …’
‘Sir, the action—’
‘Is over.’ For a heartbeat Jarn’s shrill voice softened. ‘Over for us, gunner. Now our duty is to keep ourselves alive. Ourselves, and the Academician, and the wetback. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Move it.’ Jarn spun away, hauling pressure cloaks out of lockers.
Mari grabbed a cloak out of the smoke-filled air. Jarn was right; the first thing you had to do in a situation like this was to make sure you could keep functioning yourself. The semi-sentient material closed up around her, adjusting itself as best it could. There was a sharp tingle at her forehead as the cloak started to work on her wound. The cloak was too small; it hurt as it tried to enfold her stocky shoulders, her muscular legs. Too late to change it now.
Jarn had already opened a hatch at the back of the emplacement. She was pushing bodies through as fast as she could cram them in. Seeing Mari, she jabbed a finger, directing Mari towards Kapur.
The Academician - here because he was the nearest thing to an expert on the action’s target - was drifting, limbs stiff, hands clutched in front of his face. Mari had to pull his hands away. His eye sockets were pits of ruin; the implanted Eyes there had burned out.
No time for that. She forced herself to close the cloak over his face. Then she pushed him by main force towards Jarn’s open hatchway.
Next she came to Mace, the wetback, the Navy officer. He was bent forward over a sensor post. When she pulled him back she saw that both legs had been crudely severed, somewhere below the knee. Blood pumped out of broken vessels in sticky zero-G globules. His mouth gaped, strands of bloody drool floating around his face.
Her cloak had a medical kit. She ripped this open now and dug out a handful of gel. Shuddering at the touch of splintered bone and ragged flesh, she plastered the gel hastily over the raw wounds. The gel settled into place, turning pale blue as it sealed vessels, sterilised, dissolved its substance into a blood replacement, and started the process of promoting whatever healing was possible. Then she dragged a cloak around Mace and hurled him bodily towards Jarn and the hatch.
Under the alarm, she realised now, the noise had subsided. No more screaming. Nobody left in the emplacement was moving, nobody but her.
Beyond the forward bulkhead the Snowflake, the target, was beginning to glow internally, pink-white, and subtle structures crumbled. Fleshy Spline hulls drifted across the artefact’s immense, complex expanse, purposeful, determined.
But the bulkhead was blistering, about to give way.
She dived through the hatch. Jarn slammed it closed. Mari felt a soundless explosion as the bulkhead failed. The alarm was cut off at last.
She was in a kind of cave, roughly spherical, criss-crossed by struts of some cartilaginous material. It was dark here, a crimson obscurity relieved only by the glow of the cloaks. She could see portals in the walls of the cave - not hatchways like decent human engineering, but orifices, like nostrils or throats, leading to a network of darker chambers beyond. There was some kind of air here, surely unbreathable. Little motes moved in it, like dust.
When she touched a wall, it was warm, soft, moist. She recoiled.
She was stuck inside the body of a Spline.
Mari had never forgotten her first view of a Spline ship.
Its kilometres-wide bulk had dwarfed her flitter. It was a rough sphere, adorned by the tetrahedral sigil of free humanity. The hull, actually a wrinkled, leathery hide, was punctured by vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered. In one pit an eye had rolled, fixing Mari disconcertingly; Mari had found herself turning away from its huge stare.
The Spline - so went below-decks scuttlebutt - had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. Then, unknown years ago, they rebuilt themselves. They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs - and rose from their ocean like vast, studded balloons.
What it boiled down to was that Spline ships were alive: living starships.
On the whole, it was best not to think about it. Cocooned in the metal and ceramic of a gun or sensor emplacement, you mostly didn’t have to. Now, however, Mari found herself immersed in deep red biological wetness, and her flesh crawled.
Jarn, strapping her own damaged arm tightly to her side, watched her with disgust. ‘You’re going to have to get used to it.’
‘I never wanted to be a wetback. Sir.’ The wetbacks were the officers and ratings who interfaced between the Spline vessel and its human cargo. Mace, the Navy officer who had been assigned to escort Academician Kapur during the action, was a wetback.
‘We’re all wetbacks now, gunner.’ Jarn glanced around. ‘I’m senior here,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m in charge. Gunner, help me with these people.’
Mari saw that Jarn was trying to organise the survivors into a rough line. She moved to help. But there was just a handful here, she saw - eight of them, including Mari and Jarn, just eight left out of the thirty who had been working in the emplacement at the time of the assault.
Here was Kapur, the spindly Academician with the ruined Eyes, sunk in sullen misery. Beside him Mace drifted in the air, his cloak almost comically truncated over those missing legs. Next to Mace were two squat forms, wrapped in misted cloaks, clutching at each other. Round faces peered up at Mari fearfully.
She reached for their names. ‘Tsedi. Kueht. Right?’
They nodded. They were supply ratings, both male, plump, soft-skinned. They spoke together. ‘Sir, what happened?’ ‘When will we get out of here?’
Academician Kapur turned his sightless face. ‘We made a bonfire. A bonfire of wisdom almost as old as the universe. And we got our fingers burned.’
The ratings quailed, clutching tighter.
Useless, Mari thought analytically. Dead weight. Rumour had it they were cadre siblings, hatched in some vast inner-Expansion Conurbation; further rumour had it they were also lovers.
She moved on down the line of cloaked bodies. Two more survivors, roughly wrapped in their cloaks. She recognised Vael, a gunner ranked below herself, and Retto, a sub-lieutenant who had been officer of the watch at the time of the attack. Good sailors both. Even the officer.
Except they weren’t survivors at all. She could see that even through the layers of their imperfectly fitting cloaks, which had turned a subtle blue colour, the colour of death. Mari’s heart sank; it would have been good to have these two at her side.
Jarn had extracted a kit of what looked like hypodermic needles from a pack at Mace’s waist. ‘Take their cloaks. Retto’s and Vael’s.’
Jarn was one rank below the CO and his First Officer, with nominal responsibilities for communications. Mari knew her as a prissy idiot who routinely dumped any responsibility downwards. And now, in this grim situation, she had issued a stupid order like that. ‘Sir, they’re dead.’
Kapur turned blindly. A thin, intense, withdrawn man, he wore his head shaven after the ancient fashion of the Commission for Historical Truth, and he had a clutch of bright red vials strapped to his waist: mnemonic fluid, every droplet a backup record of everything that had happened during the action. He said, ‘I can read your tone of voice, gunner. I can tell what you’re thinking. Why did such good comrades have to die, when such a rabble as this has survived?’
‘Academician, shut up,’ Jarn snapped. ‘Sir. Just do it, gunner. There’s nothing to be done for them now. And we’re going to need those cloaks.’ Fumbling one-handed, she began to jab needles into the fleshy wall of the little cavern, squirting in thick blue gunk.
Of course Kapur was right. Mari surveyed her surviving companions with disgust: Jarn the pompous ass-muncher of a junior officer, Mace the half-dead wetback, Kapur the dried-up domehead, the two soft-bodied store-stackers. But there was nothing to be done about it.
Keeping her face stony, Mari peeled the cloaks off the inert bodies of Vael and Retto. Vael’s chest had been laid open, as if by an immense punch; blood and bits of burned meat floated out of the cavity.
Jarn abandoned her needle-jabbing. ‘The Spline isn’t responding.’ She held up the emptied hypodermics. ‘This is the way you communicate with a Spline - in an emergency, anyhow. Chemicals injected into its bloodstream. Lieutenant Mace could tell you better than I can, if he were conscious. I think this Spline must be too badly wounded. It has withdrawn from us, from human contact.’
Mari gaped. ‘We can’t control the ship?’
Kapur sighed. ‘The Spline do not belong to us, to humanity. They are living ships, independent, sentient creatures, with whom we negotiate.’
The siblings huddled fearfully. The fatter one - Tsedi - stared with wide eyes at Jarn. ‘They’ll come to get us. Won’t they, sir?’
Jarn’s face flickered; Mari saw she was out of her depth herself, but she was working to keep control, to keep functioning. Maybe this screen-tapper was stronger than Mari had suspected. ‘I’m a communications officer, remember.’ That meant she had a Squeem implant, an alien fish swimming in her belly, her link to the rest of the crew. She closed her eyes, as if tapping into the Squeem’s crude group mind. ‘There is no they, rating.’
Tsedi’s eyes were wide. ‘They’re dead? The crew? All of them?’
‘We’re on our own. Just focus on that.’
Alone. Kapur laughed softly. Mari tried to hide her own inner chill.
As if on cue, they all felt a subtle, gut-wrenching displacement.
‘Hyperdrive,’ Mari said.
The siblings clutched each other. ‘Hyperdrive? The Spline is moving? Where is it taking us?’
Kapur said, ‘Wherever it wants. We have no influence. Probably the Spline doesn’t even know we are here. This is what you get when your warship has a mind of its own.’
Impatiently, Jarn snapped, ‘Nothing we can do about that. All right, we have work to do. We should pool what we have. Med kit, supplies, weapons, tools, anything.’
There was precious little. They had the cloaks, plus the two spares scavenged from the bodies of Vael and Retto. The cloaks came with med-kits, half depleted already. There was some basic planet-fall survival gear, carried routinely by the crew: knives, water purification tablets.
Jarn rubbed her wounded arm, gazing at the kit. ‘No food. No water.’ She glared at Kapur. ‘You. Academician. You know anything about Spline?’
‘More than the rest of you, I suspect,’ Kapur said dryly. ‘For all you use them to fly around the Expansion from one battle to another. But little enough.’