‘The cloaks will keep us alive for twenty-four hours. We might use the spares to stretch that a little longer. But we need to replenish them. How? Where do we go?’
I wouldn’t have thought so far ahead, Mari considered. Again she was reluctantly impressed by Jarn.
Kapur pressed his fists to his burned-out Eyes. ‘Inwards. The Spline has storage chambers in a layer beneath its hull. I think.’
Tsedi said, ‘If only Lieutenant Mace was conscious. He’s the expert. He would know—’
‘But he isn’t,’ Jarn snapped, irritated. There’s just us.’
They were silent.
‘All right.’ Jarn looked around, and selected an orifice directly opposite the one they had entered through. ‘This way,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll lead. Academician, you follow me, then you two, Tsedi and Kueht. Gunner, bring up the rear. Here.’ She thrust one of the knives into Mari’s hand. ‘Keep together.’
Kapur asked, ‘What about Mace?’
Jarn said carefully, ‘We can’t take him. He’s lost a massive amount of blood, and I think he may be in anaphylactic shock.’
‘We take him.’
‘Sir, you’re our priority.’ That was true, Mari knew. You were always supposed to preserve the Academicians and Commissaries first, for the sake of the knowledge they might bring forward to the next engagement. And if that couldn’t be managed, then you retrieved the mnemonic vials the domeheads kept with themselves at all times. Everything else was expendable. Everything and everyone. Jarn said, ‘We don’t have energy to spare for—’
‘We take him.’ Kapur reached for Mace. Grunting, he pulled the Navy man to him and arranged him on his back, arms around his neck, head lolling, half-legs dangling.
Jarn exchanged a glance with Mari. She shrugged. ‘All right. You others, get ready.’
‘I don’t like this situation, sir,’ Mari said, as she gathered up her kit.
‘Me neither,’ Jarn muttered. ‘The day the Expansion takes full control of these Lethe-spawned Spline the better. In the meantime, just do your job, sailor. Form up. Keep together. Let’s go.’
One by one they filed through the orifice, into the crimson-black tunnel beyond. Mari, as ordered, took the rear of the little column, and she watched the dim yellow glow of the others’ cloaks glistening from the organic walls.
She couldn’t believe this was happening. But she breathed, she moved, she followed orders; and she seemed to feel no fear. You’re in shock, she told herself. It will come.
In the meantime, do your job.
Without gravity there was no up, no down. Their only orientation came from the tunnel around them. Its clammy walls were close enough to touch in every direction, the space so cramped they had to proceed in single file.
The tunnel twisted this way and that, taking them sideways as much as inwards. But with every metre Mari was descending deeper into the carcase of this wounded Spline; she was very aware that she was crawling like some parasitic larva under the skin of a living creature.
What made it worse was the slow going.
Jarn and Mari moved OK, but Kapur blundered blindly, and Tsedi and Kueht seemed unaccustomed to the lack of gravity. The siblings stayed as close to each other as they could get in the confined space, touching and twittering like birds. Mari growled to herself, imagining what the master-at-arms would have said about that.
They couldn’t have gone more than a few hundred metres before Mace’s cloak turned blue. But Kapur, bathed in a cerulean glow he couldn’t see, refused to leave Mace behind. He toiled doggedly on, his inert burden on his back.
Jarn snapped, ‘I don’t have time for this. Gunner, sort it out.’
‘Sir. How?’
‘With the tact and sensitivity you starbreaker grunts are famous for. Just do it. You two, move on.’ She took the lead again, hustling Tsedi and Kueht behind her.
Mari took her place behind Kapur, at a loss. ‘… I guess you knew each other a long time, sir.’
Kapur turned. ‘Mace and I? How old are you, gunner?’
‘Eighteen standard, sir.’
‘Eighteen.’ He shook his head. ‘I first met Mace before you were born, then. I was seconded here by the Commission, on the failed first contact with the Snowflake.’
‘Seconded?’
‘I was a Guardian, a policeman. As the Expansion grows, the rate of Assimilation itself accelerates, and specialists are rare … My own brand of forensic intelligence proved adequate for the role. My job was to understand the Snowflake. Mace’s was to destroy it.’
Mari understood the tension. Resources were always short. The Assimilation, the processing of newly contacted alien species on an industrial scale, followed an accelerating Expansion that now spanned a quarter of the Galaxy’s disc and had reached the great globular clusters beyond.
And, in one of those clusters, they had found the Snowflake. It surrounded a dwarf star, a tetrahedron fourteen million kilometres on a side: a stupendous artefact, a vast setting for an ancient, faded jewel of a star.
So far as anybody knew, the Snowflake had been constructed to observe: simply that, to gather data, as the universe slowly cooled. Since the building of the Snowflake, thirteen billion years had shivered across the swirling face of the Galaxy.
Assimilation was a matter of processing: contact, conquest, absorption - and, if necessary, destruction. If Kapur had been able to determine the goals of the Snowflake and its builders, then perhaps those objectives could be subverted to serve human purposes. If not, then the Snowflake had no value.
Mari guessed, ‘Lieutenant Mace gave you a hard time.’
Kapur shook his head. ‘Mace was a good officer. Hard, intelligent, ambitious, brutal. He knew his job and he carried it out as best he could. I was in his way; that was uncomfortable for me. But I always admired him for what he was. In the end the Snowflake resisted Mace’s crude assaults.’
‘How?’
‘We were - brushed aside.’
He tried to explain what had happened. Their ship had been hit by a beam of lased gravity waves, that had come from outside the Galaxy. It seemed that the Snowmen, the builders of the ’Flake, had been able to manipulate something humans called Mach’s principle. Mach, or Mar-que, it was a name all but lost in the Qax Extirpation.
Kapur said, ‘You are embedded in a universe of matter. That matter tugs at you with gravity fields - but the fields surround you uniformly; they are equal in all directions, isotropic and timeless. The Snowmen had a way of making the field … unequal.’
‘How?’
Kapur laughed uneasily. ‘We still don’t know. I guess you learn a lot in thirteen billion years.
‘It has taken twenty-two years for the Academies to figure out how to deal with the Snowflake. For deal with it we must, of course. Its stubborn, defiant existence is not a direct threat to us, but it is a challenge to the logic of our ideology.’ Now he smiled, remembering. ‘After our failed mission we corresponded, Mace and I. I followed Mace’s career with a certain pride. Do you think it’s getting hot?’
‘Sir—’
‘When I was assigned to this second assault on the Snowflake, Mace was seconded to accompany me. He had risen to lieutenant. It galled him to have to become a wetback.’
‘Sir. Lieutenant Mace is dead.’
Kapur drifted to a halt, and sighed. ‘Ah. Then knowing me did him little good in the end. What a pity it ends like this.’
Gently Mari pulled the broken body from Kapur’s back. Kapur didn’t resist; he drifted to the wall, running his fingers over its moist surface. Mari pulled the cloak off Mace’s inert body, but it had been used up by its efforts to keep Mace alive.
She was surprised to learn of a friendship between a straight-and-true Navy man and a domehead. And then Kapur had attempted to haul his friend along with him, even though it must have been obvious that Mace couldn’t survive - even though Kapur, as their passenger Academician, would have been in his rights to demand that the rest of them carry him along.
People always surprised you. Especially those without military training and the proper orientation. But then, she had never gotten to know any domeheads before, not before this disaster, today.
She shoved the body back the way they had come, up into the darkness. When she was done she was sweating. Maybe it was getting hotter in here, as they penetrated deeper into the core of the Spline. ‘It’s done, sir. Now we have to—’
There was a flash of light from deeper inside the tunnel. And now came a high-pitched, animal scream.
Mari shoved Kapur out of the way and hurled herself down the tunnel.
It was Tsedi, the fat rating. He looked as if he had been shot in the stomach. The cloak over his fat belly was scorched and blackened, flaking away. Kueht bounced around the cramped tunnel, screaming, eyes bugging wide, flapping uselessly.
Jarn was struggling with one of the spare cloaks. ‘Help me.’ Together Jarn and Mari wrapped the cloak around Tsedi’s shivering form.
And when she got closer Mari saw that whatever had burned through the rating’s cloak had gone on, digging a hole right into Tsedi’s body, exposing layers of flesh and fat. Inside the hole something glistened, wet and pulsing.
She retched.
‘Hold it in,’ Jarn said, her own voice tremulous. ‘Your cloak would handle the mess, but you’d smell it for ever.’
Mari swallowed hard, and got herself under control. But her hand went to the knife tucked into her belt. ‘Did someone fire on us?’
Jarn said, ‘Nothing like that. It was the Spline.’
‘The Spline?’
Kapur was hovering above them, anchored to the wall by a fingertip touch. ‘Haven’t you noticed how hot it has become?’
Jarn said evenly, ‘I remember hearing rumours about this. It’s part of their - um, lifecycle. The Spline will dive into the surface layers of a star. Normally, of course, they drop off any human passengers first.’
Mari said, ‘We’re inside a star? Why?’
Jarn shrugged. ‘To gather energy. To feed - to refuel. Whatever. How should I know?’
‘And to cleanse,’ Kapur murmured. ‘They bathe in starstuff. Probably our Spline’s damaged outer layers have already been sloughed away, taking what was left of our emplacements with it.’
‘What about Tsedi?’
‘There was a sunbeam,’ Jarn said. ‘Focused somehow.’
‘An energy trap,’ Kapur said. ‘A way for the Spline to use the star’s heat to rid itself of internal parasites. Like us,’ he added with cold humour.
Jarn said, ‘Whatever it was, it caught this poor kid in the gut. And - oh, Lethe.’
Tsedi convulsed, blood-flecked foam showing at his mouth, limbs flapping, belly pulsing wetly. Jarn and Mari tried to pin him down, but his flailing body was filled with unreasonable strength.
It finished as quickly as it had started. With a final spasm, he went limp.
Kueht began to scream, high-pitched.
Jarn sat back, breathing hard. ‘All right. All right. Take the cloak off him, gunner.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ Kapur said gently. ‘Not while the Spline bathes in its star.’
‘No,’ Jarn said. ‘Deeper, then. Come on.’
But Kueht clung to Tsedi’s corpse. Jarn tried to be patient; in the gathering heat she drifted beside the rating, letting him jabber. ‘We grew up together,’ he was saying. ‘We looked after each other in the Conurbation, in the cadres. I was stronger than he was and I’d help him in fights. But he was clever. He helped me study. He made me laugh. I remember once …’
Mari listened to this distantly.
Kapur murmured, ‘You don’t approve of family, gunner?’
‘There is no such thing as family.’
‘You grew up in a Conurbation?’
‘Navy run,’ she growled. ‘Our cadres were broken up and reformed every few years, as per Commission rules. The way it should be. Not like this.’
Kapur nodded. ‘But further from the centre, the rules don’t always hold so well. It is a big Expansion, gunner, and its edges grow diffuse … Humanity will assert itself. What’s the harm in family?’
‘What good is “family” doing that rating now? It’s only hurting him. Tsedi is dead.’
‘You despise such weakness.’
‘They lived while good human beings died.’
‘Good human beings? Your comrades in arms. Your family.’
‘No—’
‘Do you miss them, gunner?’
‘I miss my weapon.’ Her starbreaker. It was true. It was what she was trained for, not this sticky paddling in the dark. Without her starbreaker she felt lost, bereft.
In the end Jarn physically dragged Kueht away from the stiffening corpse of his cadre sibling. At last, to Mari’s intense relief, they moved on.
They seemed to travel through the twisting tunnel-tube for hours. As the semi-sentient cloaks sought to concentrate their dwindling energies on keeping their inhabitants alive, their glow began to dim, and the closing darkness made the tunnel seem even more confining.