Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

captain and I were piped aboard the
Torch. I found myself in a kind of cave, buttressed by struts of some
cartilaginous material. The lighting had been fixed, the on-board
gravity restored.
    We wandered through orifices and along round-walled passageways,
pushing deeper into the body of the Spline. We saw none of Dakk’s
crew, only repair workers from the Base.
    Dakk said to me, ’You haven’t served on a Spline yet, have you?
The ship is alive, remember. It’s hot. At sleep periods you can walk
around the ship, and you find the crew dozing all over the vessel,
many of them naked, some sprawled on food sacks or weapons, or just
on the warm surfaces, wherever they can. You can hear the pulsing of
the Spline’s blood flow - even sometimes the beating of its heart,
like a distant gong. That and the scrambling of the rats.’
    It sounded cosy, but not much like the Navy I knew. ’Rats?’
    She laughed. ’Little bastards get everywhere.’
    On we went. It wasn’t as bad as that hour in the chaotic dark when
the Spline first came limping in, and we had to haul a wounded crew
out of a wounded ship. But even so it was like being in some vast
womb. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get used to this
environment, how I could serve on a ship like this. But Dakk seemed
joyful to be back, so I was evidently wrong.
    We came to a deep place Dakk called the ’belly’. This was a
hangar-like chamber separated into bays by huge diaphanous sheets of
some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. Within the alcoves were
suspended sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.
    I prodded the surface of one of the sacs. It rippled sluggishly. I
could see drifting plants, wriggling fish, snails, a few autonomous
bots swimming among the crowd. ’It’s like an aquarium,’ I said.
    ’So it is. A miniature ocean. The green plants are hornweeds:
rootless, almost entirely edible. And you have sea snails, swordtail
fish and various microbes. There is a complete self-contained
biosphere here. This is how we live; this little farm feeds us. These
creatures are actually from Earth’s oceans. Don’t you think it’s kind
of romantic to fly into battle against Xeelee super-science with a
droplet of primordial waters at our core?’
    ’How do you keep it from getting overgrown?’
    ’The weed itself kills back overgrowth. The snails live off dead
fish. And the fish keep their numbers down by eating their own
young.’
    I guess I pulled a face at that.
    ’You’re squeamish,’ she said sharply. ’I don’t remember that.’
    We walked on through the Spline’s visceral marvels. I didn’t take
in much.
    The truth is I was struggling to function. I’m sure I was going
through some kind of shock. Human beings aren’t designed to be
subject to temporal paradoxes about their future selves and unborn
babies.
    And my head was full of my work on the inquiry into Dakk’s
actions.
    The inquiry procedure was a peculiar mix of ancient Navy
traditions and forensic Commission processes. Commissary Varcin had
been appointed president of the court, and as prosecutor advocate I
was a mix of prosecutor, law officer and court clerk. The rest of the
court - a panel of brass who were a kind of mix of judge and jury
combined - were Commissaries and Navy officers, with a couple of
civilians and even an Academician for balance. It was all a political
compromise between the Commission and the Navy, it seemed to me.
    But the court of inquiry was only the first stage. If the charges
were established Dakk would go on to face a full court martial, and
possibly a trial before members of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave
itself. So the stakes were high.
    And the charges themselves - aimed at my own future self, after
all - had been hurtful: Through Negligence Suffering a Vessel of the
Navy to be Hazarded; Culpable Inefficiency in the Performance of
Duty; Through Disregard of Standing and Specific Orders Endangering
the War Aims of the Navy; Through Self-Regard Encouraging a Navy Crew
to Deviate from Doctrinal Thought…
    There was plenty of evidence. We had Virtual reconstructions based
on the Torch’s logs and the mnemonic fluids extracted from the ship’s
crew. And we had a stream of witnesses, most of them walking wounded
from the Torch. None of them was told how her testimony fitted into
the broader picture, a point which many of them got frustrated about.
But all of them expressed their loyalty and admiration towards
Captain Dakk - even