Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

ahead, planning the onward journey.
    They made good speed back the way they had come, to where Kapur
was waiting. That was because they had after all lost the weak and
slow, Mari reflected. It wasn’t a thought that gave her any
pleasure.
     
    ’We could just stay here,’ Jarn said. ’There is food. We could
last a long while.’
    Jarn seemed to have withdrawn into herself since the loss of
Kueht. Maybe exhaustion was weakening her resolve. She was, after
all, just a screen-tapper.
    ’You’ve done well,’ Mari said impulsively.
    Jarn looked at her, startled.
    Kapur said, ’There’s no point staying here. We have to assume we
will be rescued, plan for it. Anything else is futile, simply waiting
to die.’
    Jarn said, ’We’re stuck inside a Spline warship, remember.
Epidermis like armour.’
    Kapur nodded. ’Then we must go to a place where the epidermis can
be penetrated.’
    ’Where?’
    ’The eyes,’ Kapur said. ’That’s the only possibility I can think
of.’
    Jarn frowned. ’How will we find our way to an eye?’
    ’A nerve trunk,’ said Mari. Jarn looked at her. Mari said
defensively, ’Why not? Sir. Every eye must have an optic nerve
connecting it to the rest of the nervous system. Or something like
it.’
    Jarn shook her head. ’You keep springing surprises on me,
Mari.’
    Kapur laughed out loud. ’That’s human beings for you.’
    They filled up the spare cloaks with sea water. Then, each of them
trailing a massive, sluggish balloon by a length of rope, they formed
up, Jarn leading, Kapur central, Mari bringing up the rear.
    As they left the chamber, mouth-like nozzles puckered from the
walls and began to spew sprays of colourless liquid. Mari’s cloak
flashed a warning. Stomach acid, she thought. She turned away.
    Once they were in motion the inertia of her water bag gave Mari a
little trouble, and when the tunnel curved she had some work to do
hauling the bag around corners and giving it fresh momentum. But she
worked with a will. Physical activity: better than thinking.
    In some places the tunnels were scarred: once damaged, now healed.
Mari remembered more scuttlebutt. Some of the great Spline vessels
were very old, perhaps more than a million years, according to the
domeheads. And they were veterans of ancient wars, fought, won and
lost long before humans had even existed.
    They had been moving barely half an hour when they came to another
chamber.
    This one was something like the organic ’factory’. A broad open
chamber criss-crossed by struts of cartilage was dominated by a
single pillar, maybe a metre wide, that spanned the room. It was made
of something like translucent red-purple skin, and Mari made out
fluid moving within it: blood, perhaps, or water. And there were
sparks, sparks that flew like birds.
    Kapur sniffed loudly. ’Can you smell that?’ Their cloaks
transmitted selective scents. ’Ozone. An electric smell.’
    Jarn’s water bag, clumsily sealed, was leaking; Mari had been
running into droplets all the way up the tunnel. But now she saw that
the droplets were falling - drifting away from Jarn, following slowly
curving orbits, falling in towards the pillar that dominated the
centre of the room.
    Jarn, fascinated, followed the droplets towards the pillar.
    Something passed through Mari’s body, a kind of clench. She
grunted and folded over.
    ’0h,’ said Kapur. ’That was a tide. Lethe - ’
    Without warning he hurled himself forward. He collided clumsily
with Jarn, scrabbled to grab her, and spun her around. His momentum
was carrying the two of them towards the pillar. But he tried to
shove her away.
    ’No, you don’t, sir,’ Jarn grunted. With a simple one-armed throw
she flipped him back towards Mari. But that left her drifting still
faster towards the pillar.
    Kapur scrabbled in the air. ’You don’t understand.’
    ’Hold him, gunner.’ Behind Jarn, Mari saw, those water droplets
had entered tight, whirling orbits, miniature planets around a
cylindrical sun. Jarn said, ’We haven’t brought him all this way to -
’
    And then she folded.
    As simple as that, as if crumpled by an invisible fist. Her limbs
were thrust forward, her spine and neck bent over until they cracked.
Blood and other fluids, deep purple, flooded her cloak, until that
broke in turn, and a gout of blood and shit sprayed out.
    Mari grabbed Kapur’s bent form and threw her body across his,
sheltering him from the flood of bodily fluids.
    Kapur was weeping, inside his