At last they came to a place where the tunnel opened out. Beyond was a chamber whose mottled walls rose out of sight, into darkness beyond the reach of their cloaks’ dim glow. Jarn connected a line to a hook which she dug into the Spline’s fleshy wall, and she and Mari drifted into the open space.
Huge fleshy shapes ranged around them. Some of them pulsed. Fat veins, or perhaps nerve trunks, ran from one rounded form to another. Even the walls were veined: they were sheets of living tissue and muscle, nourished by the Spline’s analogue of blood.
Mari found herself whispering. ‘Is it the brain?’
Jarn snorted. ‘Spline don’t have brains as we do, tar. Even I know that much. Spline systems are - distributed. It makes them more robust, I guess.’
‘Then what is this place?’
Jarn sighed. ‘There’s a lot about the Spline we don’t understand. ’ She waved a hand. ‘This may be a, a factory. An organic factory.’
‘Making what?’
‘Who knows?’ Kapur murmured. He lingered by the wall, sightless gaze shifting. ‘We are not the only clients of the Spline. They provide services for other species, perhaps from far beyond the Expansion, creatures of whom we may have no knowledge at all. But not everybody uses the Spline as warships. That much is clear.’
‘It is hardly satisfactory,’ Jarn said through clenched teeth, ‘that we have so little control over a key element of the Expansion’s strategy.’
‘You’re right, lieutenant,’ Kapur said. ‘The logic of the Third Expansion is based on the ultimate supremacy of mankind. How then can we share our key resources, like these Spline? But how could we control them - any more than we can control this rogue in whose chest cavity we ride helplessly?’
Mari said, ‘Lieutenant.’
Jarn turned to her.
Mari glanced back at Kueht. The rating huddled alone at the mouth of the tunnel from which they had emerged. She made herself say it. ‘We could make faster progress.’
Before Jarn could respond, Kapur nodded. ‘If we dump the weak. But we are not strangers any more; we have already been through a great deal together. Mari, will you be the one to abandon Kueht? And where will you do it? Here? A little further along?’
Mari, confused, couldn’t meet Kapur’s sightless glare.
Jarn clutched her wounded arm. ‘You’re being unfair, Academician. She’s trained to think this way. She’s doing her job. Trying to save your life.’
‘Oh, I understand that, lieutenant. She is the product of millennia of methodical warmaking, an art at which we humans have become rather good. She is polished precision machinery, an adjunct to the weapon she wielded so well. But in this situation, we are all stranded outside our normal parameters. Aren’t we, gunner?’
‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ Jarn snapped. She picked out a patch of deeper darkness on the far side of the chamber. ‘That way. The way we were heading. There must be an exit. We’ll have to work our way around the walls. Mari, you help Kapur. Kueht, you’re with me …’
More long hours.
As its energy faded, Mari’s cloak grew still more uncomfortable - tighter on her muscular body, chafing at armpits and groin and neck. It was tiring for her to struggle against its elasticity. And, though she had been able to resist throwing up, the cloak was eventually full of her own sour stink.
Meanwhile, her back ached where she had been rammed against the emplacement bulkhead. That gash on her head, half-treated by the cloak, was a permanent, nagging pain. Mysterious aches spread through her limbs and neck. Not only that, she was hungry, and as thirsty as she had ever been; she hadn’t had so much as a mouthful of water since the assault itself. She tried not to think about how much Kueht was slowing them down, what had transpired in the ‘factory’. But there wasn’t much else to think about.
She knew the syndrome. She was being given too much time in her own head. And thinking was always a bad thing.
They came at last to another chamber.
As far as they could see in their cloaks’ failing light, this was a hangar-like place of alcoves and nooks. The bays were separated by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. And within the alcoves were suspended great pregnant sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.
Jarn made straight for one of the sacs, pulled out her knife and slit it open. The liquid pulsed out in a zero-G straight-line jet, bubbling slightly. Jarn thrust a finger into the flow, and read a sensor embedded in her cloaked wrist. She grinned. ‘Sea water. Earth-like, salty sea water. And this green glop is blue-green algae, I think. We found what we came for.’ She lengthened the slit. ‘Each of you pick a sac. Just climb in and immerse yourself; the cloaks will take what they need.’ She showed them how to work nipples in their cloaks that would provide them with desalinated water, even a mushy food based on the algae.
Mari helped Kapur, then clambered inside a sac of her own. She didn’t lose much water when she slit the sac; surface tension kept it contained in big floating globules that she was able to gather up in her hands. She folded the sac like a blanket, holding it closed over her chest. The water was warm, and her cloak, drinking in nutrients, began to glow more brightly.
‘Blue-green algae,’ she murmured. ‘From a human world.’
‘Obviously,’ Kapur said.
‘Maybe this is one of the ways you pay a Spline,’ Jarn said. ‘I always wondered about that.’ She moved around the chamber, handing out vials of an amber fluid that she passed through the sac walls. ‘I think we deserve this. Pass it through your cloak.’
Kapur asked, ‘What is it?’
Mari grinned. ‘Poole’s Blood.’ For Michael Poole, the legendary pre-Extirpation explorer of Earth.
‘Call it a stimulant,’ Jarn said dryly. ‘An old Navy tradition, Academician.’
Mari sucked down her tot. ‘How long should we stay here?’
‘As long as the cloaks need,’ Jarn said. ‘Try to sleep.’
That seemed impossible. But the rocking motion of the water and its swaddling warmth seemed to soothe the tension out of her sore muscles. She thought about her starbreaker station: the smooth feel of the machinery as she disassembled it for servicing, the sense of its clean power when she worked it.
Mari closed her eyes, just for a moment.
When she opened her eyes, three hours had passed. And Kueht had gone.
‘He must have gone back,’ Jarn said. ‘Back to where we left his sibling.’
‘That was hours ago,’ Mari said. She looked from one to the other. ‘We can’t leave him.’ Without waiting for Jarn’s reaction she plunged back into the tunnel they had come from.
Jarn hurried after Mari, calling her back. But Mari wasn’t about to listen. After a time, Jarn seemed to give up trying to stop her, and just followed.
Through the factory-like chamber they went, then back along the twisting length of muscle-walled tunnel.
… Why am I doing this?
Kueht was fat, useless and weak; before the disaster Mari wouldn’t have made room for him in the corridor. All her training and drill, and the Expansion’s Druz Doctrines that underpinned them, taught that people were not of equal worth. It was an individual’s value to the species as a whole that counted: nothing more, nothing less. And it was the duty of the weak to lay down their lives for the strong, the worthless for the valuable.
But it wasn’t working out like that. When it came down to it Mari just couldn’t abandon even a helpless, useless creature like Kueht; she couldn’t be the one to leave him behind, just as Kapur had said. Humanity will assert itself.
She was thinking too much again.
At last they reached the place where Mari had jammed Tsedi’s burned body. Kueht was here, sprawled over his sibling. They pulled at Kueht’s shoulders, turning him on his back. His cloak flapped open. His face was swollen, his tongue protruding and blackened.
Mari said, ‘Kapur talked about opening our cloaks. Maybe that gave him the idea.’
‘It must have been hard,’ Jarn said. ‘The cloak would have resisted being opened; it is smart enough to know that it would kill its occupant if it did. And asphyxiation is a bad way to die.’ She shrugged. ‘He told us he didn’t want to go on without Tsedi. I guess we just didn’t believe it.’
Mari shook her head, unfamiliar emotions churning inside her. Here were two comical little fat men, products of some flawed cadre somewhere, helpless and friendless save for each other. And yet Kueht had been prepared to die rather than live without the other.
‘Why?
’
Jarn put her hand on Mari’s arm; it was small over Mari’s bunched bicep. ‘Don’t think about it.’
They paused to strip Kueht of his cloak. Even now, Mari realised, Jarn was thinking ahead, planning the onward journey.
They made good speed back the way they had come, to where Kapur was waiting. That was because they had after all lost the weak and slow, Mari reflected. It wasn’t a thought that gave her any pleasure.
‘We could just stay here,’ Jarn said. ‘There is food. We could last a long while.’
Jarn seemed to have withdrawn into herself since the loss of Kueht. Maybe exhaustion was weakening her resolve. She was, after all, just a screen-tapper.
‘You’ve done well,’ Mari said impulsively.
Jarn looked at her, startled.
Kapur said, ‘There’s no point staying here. We have to assume we will be rescued, plan for it. Anything else is futile, simply waiting to die.’
Jarn said, ‘We’re stuck inside a Spline warship, remember. Epidermis like armour.’
Kapur nodded. ‘Then we must go to a place where the epidermis can be penetrated.’
‘Where?’
‘The eyes,’ Kapur said. ‘That’s the only possibility I can think of.’
Jarn frowned. ‘How will we find our way to an eye?’
‘A nerve trunk,’ said Mari. Jarn looked at her. Mari said defensively, ‘Why not? Sir. Every eye must have an optic nerve connecting it to the rest of the nervous system. Or something like it.’
Jarn shook her head. ‘You keep springing surprises on me, Mari.’
Kapur laughed out loud. ‘That’s human beings for you.’
They filled up the spare cloaks with sea water. Then, each of them trailing a massive, sluggish balloon by a length of rope, they formed up, Jarn leading, Kapur central, Mari bringing up the rear.
As they left the chamber, mouth-like nozzles puckered from the walls and began to spew sprays of colourless liquid. Mari’s cloak flashed a warning. Stomach acid, she thought. She turned away.
Once they were in motion the inertia of her water bag gave Mari a little trouble, and when the tunnel curved she had some work to do hauling the bag around corners and giving it fresh momentum. But she worked with a will. Physical activity: better than thinking.
In some places the tunnels were scarred: once damaged, now healed. Mari remembered more scuttlebutt. Some of the great Spline vessels were very old, perhaps more than a million years, according to the domeheads. And they were veterans of ancient wars, fought, won and lost long before humans had even existed.
They had been moving barely half an hour when they came to another chamber.
This one was something like the organic ‘factory’. A broad open chamber criss-crossed by struts of cartilage was dominated by a single pillar, maybe a metre wide, that spanned the room. It was made of something like translucent red-purple skin, and Mari made out fluid moving within it: blood, perhaps, or water. And there were sparks, sparks that flew like birds.
Kapur sniffed loudly. ‘Can you smell that?’ Their cloaks transmitted selective scents. ‘Ozone. An electric smell.’
Jarn’s water bag, clumsily sealed, was leaking; Mari had been running into droplets all the way up the tunnel. But now she saw that the droplets were falling - drifting away from Jarn, following slowly curving orbits, falling in towards the pillar that dominated the centre of the room.
Jarn, fascinated, followed the droplets towards the pillar.
Something passed through Mari’s body, a kind of clench. She grunted and folded over.
‘0h,’ said Kapur. ‘That was a tide. Lethe—’
Without warning he hurled himself forward. He collided clumsily with Jarn, scrabbled to grab her, and spun her around. His momentum was carrying the two of them towards the pillar. But he tried to shove her away.
‘No, you don’t, sir,’ Jarn grunted. With a simple one-armed throw she flipped him back towards Mari. But that left her drifting still faster towards the pillar.
Kapur scrabbled in the air. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Hold him, gunner.’ Behind Jarn, Mari saw, those water droplets had entered tight, whirling orbits, miniature planets around a cylindrical sun. Jarn said, ‘We haven’t brought him all this way to—’
And then she folded.
As simple as that, as if crumpled by an invisible fist. Her limbs were thrust forward, her spine and neck bent over until they cracked. Blood and other fluids, deep purple, flooded her cloak, until that broke in turn, and a gout of blood and shit sprayed out.