I could see figures moving in the tunnel – Torch crew, presumably. Here came two of them labouring to support a third between them. Kard crew rushed forward to take the injured tar. I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she. That was how bad the burns were. Loops of flesh hung off limbs that were like twigs, and in places you could see down to bone, which itself had been blackened.
Tarco and I reacted somewhat badly to this sight. But already med cloaks were snuggling around the wounded tar, gentle as a lover’s caress.
I looked up at the Commissary, who was standing patiently. ‘Sir? Can you tell us why we are here?’
‘We received ident signals from the Torch when it downfolded. There’s somebody here who will want to meet you.’
‘Sir, who—’
‘It’s better if you see for yourself.’
One of the Torch crew approached us. She was a woman, I saw, about my height. There was no hiding the bloodstains and scorches and rips, or the way she limped; there was a wound in her upper thigh that actually smoked. But she had captain’s pips on her collar.
I felt I knew her face – that straight nose, the small chin – despite the dirt that covered her cheeks and neck, and the crust of blood that coated her forehead. She had her hair grown out long, with a ponytail at the back, quite unlike my regulation crew-cut. But – this was my first impression – her face seemed oddly reversed, as if she was a mirror image of what I was used to.
I immediately felt a deep, queasy unease.
I don’t know many captains, but she immediately recognised me. ‘Oh. It’s you.’
Tarco had become very tense. It turned out he had thought the situation through a little further than I had. ‘Commissary, what engagement has the Torch come from?’
‘The Fog.’
My mouth dropped. Every tar on Base 592 knew that the Fog is an interstellar cloud – and a major Xeelee concentration – situated inside 3-Kilo, a good hundred light years deeper towards the centre of the Galaxy. I said, ‘I didn’t know we were hitting the enemy so deep.’
‘We aren’t. Not yet.’
‘And,’ Tarco said tightly, ‘here we are greeting a battle-damaged ship that hasn’t even left Earth yet.’
‘Quite right,’ Varcin said approvingly. ‘Ensigns, you are privileged to witness this. This ship is a survivor of a battle that won’t happen for another twenty-four years.’
Tarco kind of spluttered.
As for me, I couldn’t take my eye off the Torch’s captain. Tense, she was running her thumb down the side of her cheek.
‘I do that,’ I said stupidly.
‘Oh, Lethe,’ she said, disgusted. ‘Yes, tar, I’m your older self. Get over it. I’ve got work to do.’ And with a glance at the Commissary she turned and stalked back towards her ship.
Varcin said gently, ‘Go with her.’
‘Sir—’
‘Do it, ensign.’
Tarco followed me. ‘So in twenty-four years you’re still going to be a buttface.’
I realised miserably he was right.
The three of us pushed through the narrow passageway into the Torch. The gravity was lumpy, and I suspected that it was being fed in from the Kard’s inertial generators.
I had had no previous exposure to the organic ‘technology’ of a Spline. We truly were inside a vast body. Every time I touched a surface my hands came away sticky, and I could feel salty liquids oozing over my uniform. The passage’s walls were raw flesh, much of it burned, twisted and broken, even far beneath the ship’s epidermis.
But that was just background to my churning thoughts. Captain Dakk, for Lethe’s sake.
The captain saw me staring again. ‘Ensign, back off. We can’t get away from each other, but over the next few days life is going to get complicated for the both of us. It always does in these situations. Just take it one step at a time.’
‘Sir—’
She glared at me. ‘Don’t question me. What interest have I got in giving you bad advice? I don’t like this situation any more than you do. Remember that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
We found lines of wounded, wrapped in cloaks. Crew were labouring to bring them out to the Kard. But the passageway was too narrow. It was a traffic jam, a real mess. It might have been comical if not for the groans and cries, the stink of fear and desperation in the air.
Dakk found an officer. He wore the uniform of a damage control worker. ‘Cady, what in Lethe is going on here?’
‘It’s the passageways, sir. They’re too ripped up to get the wounded out with the grapplers. So we’re having to do it by hand.’ He looked desperate, miserable. ‘Sir, I’m responsible.’
‘You did right,’ she said grimly. ‘But let’s see if we can’t tidy this up a little. You two,’ she snapped at Tarco and me. ‘Take a place in line.’
And that was the last we saw of her for a while, as she went stomping into the interior of her ship. She quickly organised the crew, from Torch and Kard alike, into a human chain. Soon we were passing cloaked wounded from hand to hand, along the corridor and out into the Kard’s loading bay in an orderly fashion.
‘I’m impressed,’ Tarco said. ‘Sometime in the next quarter-century you’ll be grafted a brain.’
‘Shove it.’
The line before us snarled up. Tarco and I found ourselves staring down at one of the wounded – conscious, looking around, waiting to be moved out. He was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen.
If this was all true, in my segment of time he hadn’t even been born yet.
He spoke to us. ‘You from the Kard?’
‘Yeah.’
He started to thank us, but I brushed that aside. ‘Tell me what happened to you.’
Tarco whispered to me, ‘Hey. Don’t ask him about the future. You never heard of time paradoxes? I bet the Commission has a few regulations about that.’
I shrugged. ‘I already met myself. How much worse can it get?’
Either the wounded man didn’t know we were from his past, or he didn’t care. He told us in terse sentences how the Torch had been involved in a major engagement deep in the Fog. He had been a gunner, with a good view of the action from his starbreaker pod.
‘We came at a Sugar Lump. You ever seen one of those? A big old Xeelee emplacement. But the nightfighters were everywhere. We were taking a beating. The order came to fall back. We could see that damn Sugar Lump, close enough to touch. Well, the captain disregarded the fallback order.’
Tarco said sceptically, ‘She disregarded an order?’
‘We crossed the chop line.’ A chop line is actually a surface, a military planner’s boundary between sectors in space – in this case, between the disputed territory inside the Fog and Xeelee-controlled space. The Xeelee had been suckered by the fallback, and the Torch broke through their lines. ‘We only lasted minutes. But we fired off a Sunrise.’
Tarco said, ‘A what?’ I kicked him, and he shut up.
Unexpectedly, the kid grabbed my arm. ‘We barely got home. But, Lethe, when that Sunrise hit, we nearly shook this old fish apart with our hollering, despite the pasting we were taking.’