‘Academician,’ Mari said hesitantly. ‘I don’t recognise the stars. I don’t see any sign of people. I never heard of a world like this. What part of the Expansion are we in?’
He sighed. ‘Nobody has seen the home world of the Spline before. Therefore we can’t be in the Expansion. I’m afraid I have no idea where we are.’ He coughed, feebly, and she saw he was sweating.
It was getting hot.
She glanced out of the window-lens. That blue world had expanded so that it filled up her window, a wall of ocean. But the image was becoming misty, blurred by a pinkish glow. Plasma.
‘I think we’re entering the atmosphere.’
‘The Spline is coming home.’
Now the glow became a glaring white, flooding the chamber. The temperature was rising savagely, and the chamber walls began to shudder. She found herself pulled to the floor and pressed deep into yielding tissue.
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 h
is 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?’
This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy’s main disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.
The flitter’s hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.
Xera said carefully, ‘I compliment you on the efficiency of your process.’
He waved that aside. ‘Forget efficiency. Forget process. Commissary, this cluster contains a million stars, crowded into a ball a hundred light years across. It’s only four decades since we first arrived here. And we will have processed them all, all those pretty lights in the sky, within another fifty to sixty years. What do you think of that?’
‘Admiral—’
‘This is the reality of Assimilation,’ he snapped. ‘Ten thousand ships, ten million human beings, in this fleet alone. And it’s the same all over the Expansion, across a great spherical front forty thousand light years across. I doubt you even dream of sights like this, back in the centre. Commissary, watch and learn ...’
Without warning, planets cannonballed out of the sky. She cowered.
Kard laughed at her shock. ‘Oh. And here is our destination.’ Stub, the rodent-faced young pilot, turned to face them, grinning. ‘Sir, wake me up when it gets interesting.’
Stub called Xera a domehead when he thought she wasn’t listening. She tried not to despise them both for the way they bullied her.
There were three worlds in this sunless system, locked into a complex gravitational dance. Xera could see them all, sweeping in vertiginously, pale starlit discs against a crowded sky. Only one of them was inhabited: she saw the blue of water and the grey-green of living things splashed against its rust-red hide. It was called, inevitably, ‘Home’, in the language of the first human colonists to have reached this place, millennia before.
Xera was a xenoculturalist. She was here because the inhabitants of Home had reported an indigenous sentient species on their world. If this was true the planet might be spared from the wrecking crews, spared from demolition for the sake of its inner iron, its natives put to a more subtle use: mind was valuable. The fate of whole cultures, alien and human, the fate of a world, could depend on her assessment of the inhabitants’ claim.
But her time was cruelly brief. Rear Admiral Kard’s own impatient presence here - he hadn’t wanted to spare any of his line officers to check out what he called ‘earthworm grunting’ - told her all she needed to know about the Navy’s attitude to her mission.
Belatedly she remembered to deploy her data desk; she needed to record the triple worlds’ orbital dynamics. Here in this crowded cluster, stellar close approaches were frequent, and worlds were commonly ripped free of the stars that had borne them. Most planets floated alone, but this world, Home, was unusual in having its two gravitationally locked companion worlds. The nature of their mutual orbit was apparently puzzling to the Academicians, and they had asked her to check it out. Orbital dynamics were hardly her priority, but nobody else was going to get a chance to study this unique jewel-box of worlds. She held up her desk, letting it record.
But already the flitter had begun its brisk closing descent, and the opportunity was over.
She flew through a spectacular orbital picket of Snowflakes, the giant tetrahedral artefacts the Navy employed as surveillance and communications stations. Then Home opened out into a landscape that fled beneath her, a land of lakes and forests and farms and scattered townships, of green growing things illuminated by floodlights mounted on unlikely stalks.
It was all so complex, so fascinating, but she had so little time. This was the reality of Assimilation: the processing of alien worlds and species on an industrial scale. Out here, you just did what you could before the starbreaker teams moved in. It was rescue work, really. The only consolation was that you would never know what you had missed—
She was plunged into blackness. Impact foam encased her.
Xera had no idea what had happened. But she felt a guilty stab of satisfaction that Kard and his magnificent Navy had screwed up after all.
To Tomm the flitter had been an all but invisible bubble, sweeping down through the air, with its three passengers suspended inside. But then it stopped dead, as if it had run into a wall, and its hull appeared out of nowhere. Opaqued, the flitter was an ugly, lumpy thing. It hung for a heartbeat. Then the flitter tipped up until it pointed at the ground, and fell without ceremony.
On impact the hull broke up into compartments that dropped into the dirt. Hatches popped open, and a gooey white liquid ran into the rust-red ground.
Two people tumbled out. They were wearing bright orange skin-tight suits, to which the sticky liquid clung. They staggered a few paces from the wreck and collapsed to their knees. They were a woman and a man, Tomm saw.
The man had silvery fake eyes. He didn’t see Tomm, or if he did he didn’t care. He immediately got up and stalked back into the wreckage of the flitter, ripping debris out of the way.
The woman was younger. Her head was shaved. She got to her feet more slowly. She looked around, as if she had never seen stars, dirt, growth lights before. She looked right at Tomm.
Then, coming to herself, she ran to the flitter’s wrecked forward section. Tomm made out splashes of blood in there. The woman stepped back, a look of horror on her face. She glanced around, but there was nobody in sight, nobody but Tomm.
She walked back and spoke to him. He waited as she tapped at a panel on her chest, and a box floated up into the air by her shoulder. ‘Can you understand me?’ the box asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I need help.’
Together they prised open the ripped hull. There wasn’t much to see. Opaqued, the hull looked like scuffed metal, and all the pod’s control surfaces were blank, dead. But there was a man - Tomm guessed he was the pilot - crumpled up into the nose of the pod, the way you’d wad a tissue into your pocket.
The woman bent over the pilot, feeling at his neck. ‘He’s still alive. Fluttery pulse . . . Lethe, I’m not trained for this. What’s your name?’
‘Tomm.’
‘All right, Tomm. I’m Xera. I need you to pass me a med cloak. In the compartment behind you.’
The door was stiff, but Tomm was strong. The cloak was brilliant orange, so bright it seemed to dazzle. Xera just threw the cloak at the pilot. It immediately began to work its way around the body, then it filled up with more white goo.
When the cloak had set hard Xera took the pilot’s shoulders, Tomm his legs. The pilot felt lighter than he looked. They got him out through the ripped hull, and set him on the ground. He lay there in the dirt, wrapped up like a bug in a cocoon, only his bruised face showing.
‘He looks young,’ Tomm said.
‘He’s only fifteen.’ She glanced at him. ‘How old are you?’
‘Eight. How old are you?’
She forced a smile. ‘Twenty-five standard. I think you’re very brave.’ She waved a trembling hand. ‘To cope with all this. A crashing spaceship. An injured man.’
Tomm shrugged. He had grown up on a farm. He knew about life, injury, death.
He waited to see what happened next.
The air was warm, and smelled of rust. The land was like a tabletop, worn flat.
Kard had dumped heaps of equipment out of the fl
itter onto the ground, and was pawing through it.
Xera said, ‘Admiral - what happened?’
‘The Squeem,’ Kard said bluntly. ‘Dead, every last one of them. All the systems are down. We didn’t even get a mayday out.’ He glanced at the complex sky. ‘The controllers don’t know we are here. It’s happened before. Nobody knows how the little bastards manage it.’
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