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.