Mari grabbed Kapur’s bent form and threw her body across his, sheltering him from the flood of bodily fluids.
Kapur was weeping, inside his cloak. ‘I heard it. I heard what happened to her.’
‘What?’
‘This is the hyperdrive chamber. Don’t you see? Inside a Spline, even a star drive grows organically. Oh, you are seeing miracles today, gunner. Miracles of the possibilities of life.’
‘We have to get you out of here.’
He straightened, seeming to get himself under control. ‘No. The lieutenant—’
Mari shrieked into his face, ‘She’s dead!’ He recoiled as if struck. She forced herself to speak calmly. ‘She’s dead, and we have to leave her, as we left the rest. I’m in charge now. Sir.’
‘The Squeem,’ he said evenly.
‘What?’
‘Jarn’s implant. If we’re to have any chance of rescue, we need it … Once the Squeem conquered the Earth itself. Did you know that? Now they survive only as unwilling symbiotes of mankind.’
Mari glanced back at Jarn’s body, which was drifting away from the pillar. She seemed to have been compressed around a point somewhere above her stomach. Her centre of gravity, perhaps. ‘I can’t.’
‘You have to. I’ll help.’ Kapur’s voice was hard. ‘Take your knife.’
They travelled on for perhaps a day.
Mari’s cloak began to fail, growing cloudy, stiff, confining. Kapur moved increasingly slowly and feebly, and, though he didn’t complain or even ask, he needed a lot of help. It seemed he had been wounded somehow, maybe internally, by the shock that had killed Jarn. But there wasn’t anything Mari could do about that.
Once the tunnel they were using suddenly flooded with a thick gloopy liquid, crimson flecked with black. Blood maybe. Mari had to anchor them both to the wall; she wrapped her arms around Kapur and just held him there, immersed in a roaring, blood-dark river, until it passed. Then they kept on.
At last they found an eye.
It turned out to be just that: an eye, a fleshy sphere some metres across. It swivelled this way and that, rolling massively. At the back was a kind of curtain of narrow, overlapping sheets - perhaps components of a retina - from which narrower vine-like fibres led to the nerve bundle they had followed.
Mari parted the fibres easily. A clear fluid leaked out into the general murk.
She pulled Kapur into the interior of the eye. It was a neat spherical chamber. Unlike the tunnels and chambers they had passed through there were no shadows here, no lurking organic shapes; it was almost cosy.
She lodged Kapur against the wall. She found places to anchor their bundles of water, and the scrap of cloak within which swam the Squeem, the tiny alien not-fish which had inhabited Jarn’s stomach.
She pushed at the forward wall. Her hand sank into a soft, giving, translucent surface. A lens, maybe. But beyond there was only veined flesh. ‘If this is an eye, why can’t I see out?’
‘Perhaps the Spline has closed its eyelids.’
The floor under Mari seemed to shudder; the clear fluid pulsed, slow waves crossing the chamber, as the eye swivelled. ‘But the eye is moving.’
Kapur grinned weakly. ‘Surely Spline dream.’
Then the Spline eyelid opened, like a curtain raising. And, through a dense, distorting lens, Mari saw comet light.
They were deep within a solar system, she saw. She could tell because the comet had been made bright by sunlight. Its dark head was obscured by a glowing cloud, and two shining tails streaked across the black sky, tails of gas and dust.
To Mari it was a strange, beautiful sight. In most Expansion systems such a comet wouldn’t be allowed to come sailing so close to a sun, because of the danger to the inhabitants of the system, and of the comet itself - all that outgassing would make the nucleus a dangerous place to live.
But she saw no signs of habitation. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any lights. Where are the people? … Oh.’
Kapur turned when he heard her gasp.
Spline came sailing out of the glare of the comet’s diffuse coma: great fleshy bodies, a dozen of them, more. She peered, seeking the green sigil of humanity, the telltale glitter of emplacements of weapons and sensors; but she saw nothing but walls of hardened flesh, the watery glint of eyes. This flotilla was moving like none she had seen before - coordinated, yes, but with an eerie, fluid grace, like a vast dance. Some of the Spline were smaller than the rest, darting little moons that orbited the great planets of the others.
And now they were gathering around the comet core.
‘They are grazing,’ she said. ‘The Spline are grazing on the comet.’
Kapur smiled, but his face was grey. ‘This is not a flotilla. It is a - what is the word? - it is a school.’
‘They are wild Spline.’
‘No. They are simply Spline.’
The school broke and came clustering around Mari’s ship. Huge forms sailed across her vision like clouds. She saw that the smaller ones - infants? - were nudging almost playfully against her Spline’s battered epidermis. It was a collision of giants - even the smallest of these immature creatures must have been a hundred metres across.
And now the Spline rolled. Mart’s view was swivelled away from the comet, across a sky littered with stars, and towards a planet.
It was blue: the blue of ocean, of water, the colour of Earth. But this was not a human world. It was swathed in ocean, a sea broken only by a scattered litter of gleaming ice floes at the poles, and a few worn, rusty islands. She could see features on the shallow ocean floor: great craters, even one glowing pit, the marks of volcanism. An out-of-view sun cast glittering highlights from that ocean’s silvery, wrinkled hide, and a set of vast waves, huge to be visible from this altitude, marched endlessly around the water-world.
And now she saw a fleet of grey-white forms that cut through the ocean’s towering waves, leaving wakes like an armada of mighty ships, visible even from space.
‘Of course,’ Kapur said, his voice a dry rustle as she described this to him. ‘It must be like this.’
‘What?’
‘The home world of the Spline. The breeding ground. We knew they came from an ocean. Now they swim through the lethal currents of space. But biology must not be denied; they must return here, to their original birthing place, to spawn, to continue the species. Like sea turtles who crawl back to the land to lay their eggs.’ Kapur folded on himself, tucking his arms into his chest. ‘If only I had my Eyes! … I often wondered how the Spline made that transition from ocean to vacuum. As giant ocean-going swimmers, they surely lacked limbs, tools; there would be no need for the sort of manipulative intelligence that would enable them to redesign themselves. There must have been others involved - don’t you think? Hunters, or farmers. For their own reasons they rebuilt the Spline - and gave them the opportunity to rebel, to take control of their destiny.’
‘Academician,’ Mari said hesitantly. ‘I don’t recognise the stars. I don’t see any sign of people. I never heard of a world like this. What part of the Expansion are we in?’
He sighed. ‘Nobody has seen the home world of the Spline before. Therefore we can’t be in the Expansion. I’m afraid I have no idea where we are.’ He coughed, feebly, and she saw he was sweating.
It was getting hot.
She glanced out of the window-lens. That blue world had expanded so that it filled up her window, a wall of ocean. But the image was becoming misty, blurred by a pinkish glow. Plasma.
‘I think we’re entering the atmosphere.’
‘The Spline is coming home.’
Now the glow became a glaring white, flooding the chamber. The temperature was rising savagely, and the chamber walls began to shudder. She found herself pulled to the floor and pressed deep into yielding tissue.
I’m not going to live through this, she thought. They were simply too far from home, too far from rescue, the situation too far out of control. It was the first time she had understood that, deep in her gut. And yet she felt no fear: only concern for Kapur. She cradled him in her arms, trying to shield him from the deceleration. His body felt stick-thin. He gasped, his face working from pain from which she couldn’t save him. Nevertheless she tried to support his head. ‘There, there,’ she murmured.
‘Do you have any more of that Poole blood?’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘Pity …’ He whimpered, and tried to raise his hands to his ruined Eyes. He had never once complained of that injury, she realised now, even though the agony must have been continual and intense.
She had always thought of herself as strong, but there were different sorts of strength, she thought now. She felt as if her head was full of boulders: huge thoughts, vast impressions that rattled within her skull, refusing her peace. ‘Lieutenant Jarn turned out to be a good officer. Didn’t she, sir?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘I never liked her, before. But she sacrificed her life for you.’
‘That was her duty. You would have done the same.’
‘Yes,’ said Mari doggedly, ‘but you tried to save her. Even though you didn’t have to. Even though you would have been killed yourself in the process.’
He tried to turn his head. ‘Gunner, I sense you believe you have failed, because you aren’t dead yet. Listen to me now. You haven’t failed. In the end, what brought us so far was not your specialist training but deeper human qualities of courage, initiative, endurance. Empathy. In the end it will be those qualities that will win this war, not a better class of weapon. You should be proud of yourself.’
She wasn’t sure about that. ‘If I ever did get out of this I’d have to submit myself for reorientation.’
‘The Commission would have its work cut out, I think - Ah.’ His face worked. ‘Child.’ She had to bend to hear him. He whispered, ‘Even now my wretched mind won’t stop throwing out unwelcome ideas. You still have a duty to perform. Remember.’
‘Remember?’
‘You saw the stars. Given that, one could reconstruct the position of this world, this Spline home. And how valuable that piece of information would be. It is the end of the free Spline,’ he said. ‘What a pity. But I am afraid we have a duty. You must remember. Tell the Commissaries what you saw.’
‘Sir—’
He tried to grasp her arm, his ruined face swivelling. ‘Tell them.’ His back arched, and he gasped. ‘Oh.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking him. ‘No!’
‘I am sorry, gunner Mari. So sorry.’ And he exhaled a great gurgling belch, and went limp.
She continued to cradle Academician Kapur, rocking him like a child, as the homecoming Spline plunged deeper into its world’s thick atmosphere.
But as she held him she took the vials of mnemonic fluid from his waist, and drank them one by one. And she took the Squeem from its cloak bag - it wriggled in her fingers, cold and very alien - and, overcoming her disgust, swallowed it down.
In the last moments, the Spline’s great eyelid closed.
Accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Erdac, Commissary Drith stepped gingerly through the transfer tunnel and into the damaged Spline eye.
Drith’s brow furrowed, sending a wave of delicate creases over her shaved scalp. It was bad enough to be immersed inside the body of a living creature like this, without being confronted by the gruesome sight the salvage teams had found here. Still, it had been a prize worth retrieving.
Erdac said, ‘You can see how the Squeem fish consumed this young gunner, from inside out. It kept alive that way, long enough anyhow for it to serve as a beacon to alert us when this Spline returned to service in human space. And there was enough of the mnemonic fluid left in the gunner’s body to—’
‘A drop is sufficient,’ Drith murmured. ‘I do understand the principle, Commander.’
Erdac nodded stiffly, his face impassive.
‘Quite a victory, Commander,’ Drith said. ‘If the breeding ground of the Spline can be blockaded, then the Spline can effectively be controlled.’
‘These two fulfilled their duty in the end.’
‘Yes, but we will profit personally from this discovery.’ The Commander didn’t respond to that; maybe he thought the remark was a personal test, a trap.
Drith looked down at the twisted bodies and poked at them with a polished toecap. ‘Look how they’re wrapped around each other. Strange. You wouldn’t expect a dry-as-a-stick Academician and a boneheaded Navy grunt to get so close.’
‘The human heart contains mysteries we have yet to fathom, Commander.’
‘Yes. Even with the mnemonic, I guess we’ll never really know what happened here.’
‘But we know enough. What else matters?’ Drith turned. ‘Come, Commander. We both have reports to file, and then a mission to plan, far beyond the Expansion’s current limits … quite an adventure!’
They left, talking, planning. The forensic teams moved in to remove the bodies. It wasn’t easy. Even in death they were closely intertwined, as if one had been cradling the other.