Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

closing darkness made the tunnel seem even more
confining.
    At last they came to a place where the tunnel opened out. Beyond
was a chamber whose mottled walls rose out of sight, into darkness
beyond the reach of their cloaks’ dim glow. Jarn connected a line to
a hook which she dug into the Spline’s fleshy wall, and she and Mari
drifted into the open space.
    Huge fleshy shapes ranged around them. Some of them pulsed. Fat
veins, or perhaps nerve trunks, ran from one rounded form to another.
Even the walls were veined: they were sheets of living tissue and
muscle, nourished by the Spline’s analogue of blood.
    Mari found herself whispering. ’Is it the brain?’
    Jarn snorted. ’Spline don’t have brains as we do, tar. Even I know
that much. Spline systems are - distributed. It makes them more
robust, I guess.’
    ’Then what is this place?’
    Jarn sighed. ’There’s a lot about the Spline we don’t understand.
’ She waved a hand. ’This may be a, a factory. An organic
factory.’
    ’Making what?’
    ’Who knows?’ Kapur murmured. He lingered by the wall, sightless
gaze shifting. ’We are not the only clients of the Spline. They
provide services for other species, perhaps from far beyond the
Expansion, creatures of whom we may have no knowledge at all. But not
everybody uses the Spline as warships. That much is clear.’
    ’It is hardly satisfactory,’ Jarn said through clenched teeth,
’that we have so little control over a key element of the Expansion’s
strategy.’
    ’You’re right, lieutenant,’ Kapur said. ’The logic of the Third
Expansion is based on the ultimate supremacy of mankind. How then can
we share our key resources, like these Spline? But how could we
control them - any more than we can control this rogue in whose chest
cavity we ride helplessly?’
    Mari said, ’Lieutenant.’
    Jarn turned to her.
    Mari glanced back at Kueht. The rating huddled alone at the mouth
of the tunnel from which they had emerged. She made herself say it.
’We could make faster progress.’
    Before Jarn could respond, Kapur nodded. ’If we dump the weak. But
we are not strangers any more; we have already been through a great
deal together. Mari, will you be the one to abandon Kueht? And where
will you do it? Here? A little further along?’
    Mari, confused, couldn’t meet Kapur’s sightless glare.
    Jarn clutched her wounded arm. ’You’re being unfair, Academician.
She’s trained to think this way. She’s doing her job. Trying to save
your life.’
    ’Oh, I understand that, lieutenant. She is the product of
millennia of methodical warmaking, an art at which we humans have
become rather good. She is polished precision machinery, an adjunct
to the weapon she wielded so well. But in this situation, we are all
stranded outside our normal parameters. Aren’t we, gunner?’
    ’This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ Jarn snapped. She picked out a
patch of deeper darkness on the far side of the chamber. ’That way.
The way we were heading. There must be an exit. We’ll have to work
our way around the walls. Mari, you help Kapur. Kueht, you’re with
me…’
     
    More long hours.
    As its energy faded, Mari’s cloak grew still more uncomfortable -
tighter on her muscular body, chafing at armpits and groin and neck.
It was tiring for her to struggle against its elasticity. And, though
she had been able to resist throwing up, the cloak was eventually
full of her own sour stink.
    Meanwhile, her back ached where she had been rammed against the
emplacement bulkhead. That gash on her head, half-treated by the
cloak, was a permanent, nagging pain. Mysterious aches spread through
her limbs and neck. Not only that, she was hungry, and as thirsty as
she had ever been; she hadn’t had so much as a mouthful of water
since the assault itself. She tried not to think about how much Kueht
was slowing them down, what had transpired in the ’factory’. But
there wasn’t much else to think about.
    She knew the syndrome. She was being given too much time in her
own head. And thinking was always a bad thing.
    They came at last to another chamber.
    As far as they could see in their cloaks’ failing light, this was
a hangar-like place of alcoves and nooks. The bays were separated by
huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with
fat. And within the alcoves were suspended great pregnant sacs of
what looked like water: green, cloudy water.
    Jarn made straight for one of the sacs, pulled out her