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 A thin, intense, withdrawn man, he wore his head shaven after the ancient fashion of the Commission for Historical Truth, and he had a clutch of bright red vials strapped to his waist: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 It has withdrawn from us, from human contact.’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.’
‘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.