Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

cannibalism - or rather,
whatever did this wasn’t her kind.’
    Rusel elevated the viewpoint and cast around. He saw a trail of
blood leading away from the woman, smeared along the walls and floor,
quite unmistakable, as if something had been dragged away.
    Andres said, ’I think our transients suddenly have a
predator.’
    ’Not so suddenly,’ Rusel said. A part of his scattered
consciousness was checking over the Ship’s logs, long ignored. This
kind of incident had been going on for a couple of centuries. ’It’s
been rare before, once or twice a generation. Mostly it was the old
who were taken, or the very young - vulnerable, dispensable, or
replaceable. But now they seem to be upping the rate.’
    ’And making a dent in the transients’ numbers.’
    ’Yes. You were right to bring me here.’ This had to be resolved.
But to do it, he thought with a deepening dread, he was going to have
to confront a horror he had shut out of his awareness for
millennia.
    ’I’m here with you,’ Andres said gently.
    ’No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ’But I have to deal with this
anyhow.’
    ’Yes, you do.’
    His viewpoint followed the bloody trail as it wound through the
corridor-villages of the transients. Broken in places, the trail
slinked through shadows or through holes worn in the walls. It was
the furtive trail of a hunter, he thought.
    At last Rusel came to the bulkhead that cut the Ship in two,
marking the limit of his transients’ domain. He had long put out of
his mind what lay beyond this wall: in fact, if he could have cut
away the Ship’s aft compartment and let the whole mess float off into
space he would long ago have done so.
    But there was a hole in the bulkhead, just wide enough to admit a
slim body.
    The bulkhead was a composite of metal and polymer, extremely
tough, and a metre thick; the hole was a neat tunnel, not regular but
smooth-walled, drilled right through. ’I can’t believe they have
tools,’ he said. ’So how did they get through?’
    ’Teeth,’ Andres said. ’Teeth and nails - and time, of which they
have plenty. Remember what you’re dealing with. Even if the bulkhead
was made of diamond they’d have got through eventually.’
    ’I hoped they were dead.’
    ’Hope! Wishful thinking! That always was your weakness, Rusel. I
always said you should have killed them off in the first place.
They’re just a drain on the Ship’s resources.’
    ’I’m no killer.’
    ’Yes, you are - ’
    ’And they are human, no less than the transients.’
    ’No, they’re not. And now, it seems, they are eating our
transients.’
    His viewpoint drifted before the hole in the wall. Andres seemed
to sense his dread; she didn’t say anything.
    He passed through the barrier.
    He emerged in the upended chamber he still thought of as the
amphitheatre, right at the base of the Ship. This was a big, bare
volume, a cylinder set on its side. After the spin-up it had been
used to pursue larger-scale reconstruction projects necessary to
prepare the Ship for its long intergalactic voyage, and mounted on
its floor and walls were the relics of heavy engineering, long
abandoned: gantries, platforms of metal, immense low-gravity cranes
like vast skeletons. Globe lights hovered everywhere, casting a
yellow-white light complex with shadows. It was an oddly magnificent
sight, Rusel thought, and it stirred memories of brighter, more
purposeful days. On the wall of the chamber, which had been its
floor, he could even make out the brackets which had held the
acceleration couches on launch day.
    Now, every exposed surface was corroded. Nothing moved. And that
upturned floor, which Andres had turned transparent a mere year after
the launch, was caked by what looked like rock. It was a hardened
pack of faeces and cloth scraps and dirt, a wall of shit to block out
the Galaxy.
    At first, in this jungle of engineering, he couldn’t make out
anything living. Then, as he allowed the worn-out ambience of the
place to wash over him, he learned to see.
    They were like shadows, he thought, slim, upright shadows that
flitted through the gantries, furtive, cautious. At times they looked
human - clearly upright, bipedal, purposeful - though their limbs
were spindly, their bellies distended. But then they would collapse
to all fours and lope away with a bent gait, and that impression of
humanity vanished. They didn’t seem to be wearing clothes, any more
than the transients did. But unlike the transients their bodies