Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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