‘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.
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.’