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.’
Tarco asked maliciously, ‘How do you feel about Captain Dakk?’
‘She is a true leader. I’d follow her anywhere.’
All I felt was unease. No heroes: that’s one lesson of the Druz Doctrines, the creed that has held mankind together across fifteen thousand years, and drilled into every one of us by the Commissaries at their orientation sessions every day. If my future self had forgotten about that, something had gone wrong.
But now the gunner was looking at me intently. I became aware I was rubbing my thumb down my cheek. I dropped my hand and turned my face away.
Captain Dakk was standing before me. ‘Recognition. You’d better get used to that.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I groused. I was starting to resent the whole situation.
‘I don’t think what you, or I, want has much to do with it, ensign.’
I muttered to Tarco
, ‘Lethe. Am I that pompous?’
‘Oh, yes.’
Dakk said, ‘I think we’re organised here for now. I’ll come back later when I can start thinking about damage control. In the meantime we’ve been ordered to your captain’s wardroom. Both of us.’
Tarco said hesitantly, ‘Sir - what’s a Sunrise?’
She looked surprised. ‘Right. You don’t have them yet. A Sunrise is a human-driven torpedo. A suicide weapon.’ She eyed me. ‘So you heard what happened in the Fog.’
‘A little of it.’
She cupped my cheek. It was the first time she had touched me. It was an oddly neutral sensation, like touching your own skin. ‘You’ll find out, in good time. It was glorious.’
Dakk led us back through Kard’s officer country. Commissary Varcin met us there.
Here, the partitions had hastily been taken down to open up a wide area of deck that was serving as a hospital and convalescent unit. There were crew in there in all stages of recovery. Some of them were lying on beds, weak and hollow-eyed. Many of them seemed to be pleading with the orderlies to be put back on the Torch despite their injuries - once you lose contact with your ship in a war zone it can be impossible to find it again. And many of them asked, touchingly, after the Torch itself. They really cared about their living ship, I saw; that battered old hulk was one of the crew.
An awful lot of them sported ponytails, men and women alike, apparently in imitation of their captain. Very non-Doctrinal.
When they saw Dakk they all shouted and cheered and whistled. The walking wounded crowded around Dakk and thumped her on the back. A couple just turned their heads on their pillows and cried softly. Dakk’s eyes were brimming, I saw; though she had a grin as wide as the room, she was on the point of breaking down.
I glanced at Tarco. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Among the medics I saw a figure with the shaven head and long robes of the Commission. She was moving from patient to patient, and using a needle on them. But she wasn’t treating them. She was actually extracting blood, small samples that she stored away in a satchel at her side.
This wasn’t the time or place to be collecting samples like that. I stepped forward to stop her. Well, it was a natural reaction. Luckily for me Tarco held me back.
Commissary Varcin said dryly, ‘I can see you have your future self’s impetuosity, ensign. The orderly is just doing her duty. It’s no doubt as uncomfortable for her as it is for you. Commissaries are human beings too, you know.’
‘Then what—’
‘Before they went into battle every one of these crew will have been injected with mnemonic fluid. That’s what we’re trying to retrieve. The more viewpoints we get of this action, the better we can anticipate it. We’re ransacking the ship’s databases and logs too.’
Call me unimaginative. I still didn’t know what unlikely chain of circumstances had delivered my older self into my life. But that was the first time it had occurred to me what a potent weapon had been placed in our hands. ‘Lethe,’ I said. ‘This is how we’ll win the war. If you know the course of future battles—’
‘You have a lot to absorb, ensign,’ Varcin said, not unkindly. ‘Take it one step at a time.’
Which, of course, had been my own advice to myself.
At last, somewhat to my relief, we got Dakk away from her crew. Varcin led us down more corridors to Captain Iana’s plush wardroom.
Tarco and I stood in the middle of the carpet, aware of how dinged-up we were, scared of spreading Spline snot all over Iana’s furniture. But Varcin waved us to chairs anyhow, and we sat down stiffly.
I watched Dakk. She sprawled in a huge chair, shaking a little, letting her exhaustion show now she was away from her crew. She was me. My face - reversed from the mirror image I’d grown up with. I was very confused. I hated the idea of growing so old, arrogant, unorthodox. But I’d seen plenty to admire in Dakk: strength, an ability to command, to win loyalty. Part of me wanted to help her. Another part wanted to push her away.
But mostly I was just aware of the bond that connected us. It didn’t matter whether I liked her or loathed her; whichever way, she was always going to be there, for the rest of my life. It wasn’t a comfortable notion.
Varcin was watching me. I got the idea he knew what I was feeling. But he turned to business, steepling his fingers.
‘Here’s how it is. We’re scrambling to download data, to put together some kind of coherent picture of what happened downstream.’ Downstream - not the last bit of time-hopping jargon I was going to have to get used to. ‘You have surprises ahead of you, Ensign Dakk.’
I laughed a bit shrilly, and waved a hand at the captain. ‘Surprising after this? Bring it on.’
Dakk looked disgusted. Tarco placed a calming hand on my back.
Varcin said, ‘First, you - rather, Captain Dakk - will be charged. There will be a court of inquiry.’
‘Charged? What with?’
Varcin shrugged. ‘Negligence, in recklessly endangering the ship.’ He eyed Dakk. ‘I imagine there will be other counts, relating to various violations of the Druz Doctrines.’
Dakk just smiled, a chilling expression. I wondered how I ever got so cynical.
Varcin went on, ‘Ensign, you’ll be involved.’
I nodded. ‘Of course. It’s my future.’
‘You don’t understand. Directly involved. We want you to serve as the prosecuting advocate.’
‘Me? Sir.’ I took a breath. ‘You want me to prosecute myself. For a crime, an alleged crime anyhow, I won’t commit for twenty-four years. Is there any part of that I misunderstood?’
‘No. You have the appropriate training, don’t you?’
Dakk laughed. ‘This is their way, kid. After all who knows me better?’
I stood up. ‘Commissary, I won’t do it.’
‘Sit down, ensign.’
‘I’ll go to Captain Iana.’
‘Sit. Down.’
I’d never heard such a tone of command. I sat, frightened.
‘Ensign, you are immature, and inexperienced, and impetuous. You will have much to learn to fulfil this assignment. But you are the necessary choice.
‘And there’s more.’ Again, I glimpsed humanity in that frosted-over Commissary. ‘In four months’ time you will report to the birthing complex on Base 592. There you will request impregnation by Ensign Hama Tarco, here.’
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 b
e 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.’
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