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.
The Assimilated ‘Snowflake’ technology would turn out to be very valuable, much later, when I, Luru Parz, rediscovered it in decaying archives.
In the meantime Kapur’s intuition was right. This was a turning point. With the Spline harnessed the Third Expansion accelerated. Mankind burned across the Galaxy.
The vanguard soldiers and Assimilators were reckless.
Destructive.
Magnificent.
THE DREAMING MOULD
AD 12,478
Tomm found a new patch of dreaming mould. Snuggled into the shade of a damp tree root, it had settled down into a grey circle the size of a dinner plate. Where it had crossed the crimson soil it had left a slimy trail. You often found moulds in shady places like this. They didn’t like the brightness of the growth lights. The muddled starlight cast diffuse colours over the mould, but it was always going to look ugly.
Tomm pressed his hands into the mould. It felt cold, slimy, not bad when you got used to it.
And the mould started to talk to him.
As always, it was like waking up. Suddenly he could smell the ozone tang of the growth lights, and hear the bleating of the goat at the Gavil place over the horizon, and he seemed to be able to see every one of the one hundred and twenty thousand stars in the crowded sky.
And then he spread out sideways, that was the way he thought of it, he reached out, left and right. The crowded stars froze over his head – or maybe they wheeled around and around, blurring into invisibility. He was with the mould now. And he could see its long, simple, featureless life all of a piece, from beginning to end, pulled out of time like a great grey slab of rock hauled out of the ground.
Even his heart stopped its relentless pumping.
But there was a flitter, a spark against the orange stars.
He dropped back into time. He stood and wiped his slimy hands on his trousers, watching the spaceship approach.
He was eight years old.
Kard’s metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. ‘Lethe, I love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light shining through the rubble of a planet?’