Tarco quickly took his hand off my back.
‘Permission will be granted,’ said Varcin. ‘I’ll see to that.’
I didn’t believe it. Then I got angry. I felt like I was in a trap. ‘How do you know I’ll want a kid by Tarco? No offence, butthead.’
‘None taken,’ said Tarco, sounding bemused.
Now the Commissary looked irritated. ‘How do you think I know? Haven’t you noticed the situation we’re in? Because it’s in the Torch’s record. Because the child you will bear—’
‘Will be on the Torch, with me,’ said Dakk. ‘His name was Hama.’
I swear Tarco blushed.
‘Was? The kid was called Hama?’ I felt a kind of panic. Perhaps it was the tug of a maternal bond that couldn’t yet exist, fear for the well-being of a child I’d only just learned about. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? He died, out there in the Fog.’
Varcin murmured, ‘One step at a time, remember, ensign.’
Dakk leaned forward. ‘Yes, he died. He rode the Sunrise. He was the one who took a monopole bomb into the Xeelee Sugar Lump. You see? Your child, Dakk. Our child. He was a hero.’
One step at a time. I kept repeating that to myself. But it was as if the wardroom was spinning around.
II
In Dakk’s yacht, I sailed around the huge flank of the Assimilator’s Torch. Medical tenders drifted alongside, hosing some kind of sealant into the living ship’s mighty wounds.
The injured Spline had been allowed to join a flotilla of its kind, regular ships of the line. Living starships the size of cities are never going to be graceful, but I saw that their movements were coordinated, a vast dance. They even snuggled against each other, like great fish jostling.
Dakk murmured, ‘Some of these battered beasts have been in human employ for a thousand years or more. We rip out their brains and their nervous systems – we amputate their minds – and yet something of the self still lingers, a need for others of their kind, for comfort. So we let the distressed swim together for a while.’
I listened absently.
The yacht docked, and the captain and I were piped aboard the Torch. I found myself in a kind of cave, buttressed by struts of some cartilaginous material. The lighting had been fixed, the on-board gravity restored.
We wandered through orifices and along round-walled passageways, pushing deeper into the body of the Spline. We saw none of Dakk’s crew, only repair workers from the Base.
Dakk said to me, ‘You haven’t served on a Spline yet, have you? The ship is alive, remember. It’s hot. At sleep periods you can walk around the ship, and you find the crew dozing all over the vessel, many of them naked, some sprawled on food sacks or weapons, or just on the warm surfaces, wherever they can. You can hear the pulsing of the Spline’s blood flow – even sometimes the beating of its heart, like a distant gong. That and the scrambling of the rats.’
It sounded cosy, but not much like the Navy I knew. ‘Rats?’
She laughed. ‘Little bastards get everywhere.’
On we went. It wasn’t as bad as that hour in the chaotic dark when the Spline first came limping in, and we had to haul a wounded crew out of a wounded ship. But even so it was like being in some vast womb. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get used to this environment, how I could serve on a ship like this. But Dakk seemed joyful to be back, so I was evidently wrong.
We came to a deep place Dakk called the ‘belly’. This was a hangar-like chamber separated into bays by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. Within the alcoves were suspended sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.
I prodded the surface of one of the sacs. It rippled sluggishly. I could see drifting plants, wriggling fish, snails, a few autonomous bots swimming among the crowd. ‘It’s like an aquarium,’ I said.
‘So it is. A miniature ocean. The green plants are hornweeds: rootless, almost entirely edible. And you have sea snails, swordtail fish and various microbes. There is a complete self-contained biosphere here. This is how we live; this little farm feeds us. These creatures are actually from Earth’s oceans. Don’t you think it’s kind of romantic to fly into battle against Xeelee super-science with a droplet of primordial waters at our core?’
‘How do you keep it from getting overgrown?’
‘The weed itself kills back overgrowth. The snails live off dead fish. And the fish keep their numbers down by eating their own young.’
I guess I pulled a face at that.
‘You’re squeamish,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t remember that.’
We walked on through the Spline’s visceral marvels. I didn’t take in much.
The truth is I was struggling to function. I’m sure I was going through some kind of shock. Human beings aren’t designed to be subject to temporal paradoxes about their future selves and unborn babies.
And my head was full of my work on the inquiry into Dakk’s actions.
The inquiry procedure was a peculiar mix of ancient Navy traditions and forensic Commission processes. Commissary Varcin had been appointed president of the court, and as prosecutor advocate I was a mix of prosecutor, law officer and court clerk. The rest of the court – a panel of brass who were a kind of mix of judge and jury combined – were Commissaries and Navy officers, with a couple of civilians and even an Academician for balance. It was all a political compromise between the Commission and the Navy, it seemed to me.
But the court of inquiry was only the first stage. If the charges were established Dakk would go on to face a full court martial, and possibly a trial before members of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave itself. So the stakes were high.
And the charges themselves – aimed at my own future self, after all – had been hurtfuclass="underline" Through Negligence Suffering a Vessel of the Navy to be Hazarded; Culpable Inefficiency in the Performance of Duty; Through Disregard of Standing and Specific Orders Endangering the War Aims of the Navy; Through Self-Regard Encouraging a Navy Crew to Deviate from Doctrinal Thought…
There was plenty of evidence. We had Virtual reconstructions based on the Torch’s logs and the mnemonic fluids extracted from the ship’s crew. And we had a stream of witnesses, most of them walking wounded from the Torch. None of them was told how her testimony fitted into the broader picture, a point which many of them got frustrated about. But all of them expressed their loyalty and admiration towards Captain Dakk – even though, in the eyes of Commissaries, such idolising would only get their captain deeper into trouble.
All this could only help so far. What I felt I was missing was motive. I didn’t understand why Dakk had done what she had done.
I felt I couldn’t get her into focus. I oscillated between despising her and longing to defend her – and all the time I felt oppressed by the paradoxical bond that locked us together. I sensed she felt the same. Sometimes she was as impatient with me as with the greenest recruit, and other times she seemed to try to take me under her wing. It can’t have been easy for her either, to be reminded that she had once been as insignificant as me. But if we were two slices of the same person, our situations weren’t symmetrical. She had been me, long ago; I was doomed to become her; it was as if she had paid dues that still faced me.