Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

cloak. ’I heard it. I heard what
happened to her.’
    ’What?’
    ’This is the hyperdrive chamber. Don’t you see? Inside a Spline,
even a star drive grows organically. Oh, you are seeing miracles
today, gunner. Miracles of the possibilities of life.’
    ’We have to get you out of here.’
    He straightened, seeming to get himself under control. ’No. The
lieutenant - ’
    Mari shrieked into his face, ’She’s dead!’ He recoiled as if
struck. She forced herself to speak calmly. ’She’s dead, and we have
to leave her, as we left the rest. I’m in charge now. Sir.’
    ’The Squeem,’ he said evenly.
    ’What?’
    ’Jarn’s implant. If we’re to have any chance of rescue, we need
it… Once the Squeem conquered the Earth itself. Did you know that?
Now they survive only as unwilling symbiotes of mankind.’
    Mari glanced back at Jarn’s body, which was drifting away from the
pillar. She seemed to have been compressed around a point somewhere
above her stomach. Her centre of gravity, perhaps. ’I can’t.’
    ’You have to. I’ll help.’ Kapur’s voice was hard. ’Take your
knife.’
     
    They travelled on for perhaps a day.
    Mari’s cloak began to fail, growing cloudy, stiff, confining.
Kapur moved increasingly slowly and feebly, and, though he didn’t
complain or even ask, he needed a lot of help. It seemed he had been
wounded somehow, maybe internally, by the shock that had killed Jarn.
But there wasn’t anything Mari could do about that.
    Once the tunnel they were using suddenly flooded with a thick
gloopy liquid, crimson flecked with black. Blood maybe. Mari had to
anchor them both to the wall; she wrapped her arms around Kapur and
just held him there, immersed in a roaring, blood-dark river, until
it passed. Then they kept on.
    At last they found an eye.
    It turned out to be just that: an eye, a fleshy sphere some metres
across. It swivelled this way and that, rolling massively. At the
back was a kind of curtain of narrow, overlapping sheets - perhaps
components of a retina - from which narrower vine-like fibres led to
the nerve bundle they had followed.
    Mari parted the fibres easily. A clear fluid leaked out into the
general murk.
    She pulled Kapur into the interior of the eye. It was a neat
spherical chamber. Unlike the tunnels and chambers they had passed
through there were no shadows here, no lurking organic shapes; it was
almost cosy.
    She lodged Kapur against the wall. She found places to anchor
their bundles of water, and the scrap of cloak within which swam the
Squeem, the tiny alien not-fish which had inhabited Jarn’s
stomach.
    She pushed at the forward wall. Her hand sank into a soft, giving,
translucent surface. A lens, maybe. But beyond there was only veined
flesh. ’If this is an eye, why can’t I see out?’
    ’Perhaps the Spline has closed its eyelids.’
    The floor under Mari seemed to shudder; the clear fluid pulsed,
slow waves crossing the chamber, as the eye swivelled. ’But the eye
is moving.’
    Kapur grinned weakly. ’Surely Spline dream.’
    Then the Spline eyelid opened, like a curtain raising. And,
through a dense, distorting lens, Mari saw comet light.
     
    They were deep within a solar system, she saw. She could tell
because the comet had been made bright by sunlight. Its dark head was
obscured by a glowing cloud, and two shining tails streaked across
the black sky, tails of gas and dust.
    To Mari it was a strange, beautiful sight. In most Expansion
systems such a comet wouldn’t be allowed to come sailing so close to
a sun, because of the danger to the inhabitants of the system, and of
the comet itself - all that outgassing would make the nucleus a
dangerous place to live.
    But she saw no signs of habitation. ’I don’t get it,’ she said. ’I
don’t see any lights. Where are the people?… Oh.’
    Kapur turned when he heard her gasp.
    Spline came sailing out of the glare of the comet’s diffuse coma:
great fleshy bodies, a dozen of them, more. She peered, seeking the
green sigil of humanity, the telltale glitter of emplacements of
weapons and sensors; but she saw nothing but walls of hardened flesh,
the watery glint of eyes. This flotilla was moving like none she had
seen before - coordinated, yes, but with an eerie, fluid grace, like
a vast dance. Some of the Spline were smaller than the rest, darting
little moons that orbited the great planets of the others.
    And now they were gathering around the comet core.
    ’They are grazing,’ she