Beyond the forward bulkhead the Snowflake, the target, was beginning to glow internally, pink-white, and subtle structures crumbled. Fleshy Spline hulls drifted across the artefact’s immense, complex expanse, purposeful, determined.

But the bulkhead was blistering, about to give way.

She dived through the hatch. Jarn slammed it closed. Mari felt a soundless explosion as the bulkhead failed. The alarm was cut off at last.

She was in a kind of cave, roughly spherical, criss-crossed by struts of some cartilaginous material. It was dark here, a crimson obscurity relieved only by the glow of the cloaks. She could see portals in the walls of the cave - not hatchways like decent human engineering, but orifices, like nostrils or throats, leading to a network of darker chambers beyond. There was some kind of air here, surely unbreathable. Little motes moved in it, like dust.

When she touched a wall, it was warm, soft, moist. She recoiled.

She was stuck inside the body of a Spline.

Mari had never forgotten her first view of a Spline ship.

Its kilometres-wide bulk had dwarfed her flitter. It was a rough sphere, adorned by the tetrahedral sigil of free humanity. The hull, actually a wrinkled, leathery hide, was punctured by vast navels within which sensors and weapons glittered. In one pit an eye had rolled, fixing Mari disconcertingly; Mari had found herself turning away from its huge stare.

The Spline - so went below-decks scuttlebutt - had once scoured the depths of some world-girdling ocean. Then, unknown years ago, they rebuilt themselves. They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs - and rose from their ocean like vast, studded balloons.

What it boiled down to was that Spline ships were alive: living starships.

On the whole, it was best not to think about it. Cocooned in the metal and ceramic of a gun or sensor emplacement, you mostly didn’t have to. Now, however, Mari found herself immersed in deep red biological wetness, and her flesh crawled.

Jarn, strapping her own damaged arm tightly to her side, watched her with disgust. ‘You’re going to have to get used to it.’

‘I never wanted to be a wetback. Sir.’ The wetbacks were the officers and ratings who interfaced between the Spline vessel and its human cargo. Mace, the Navy officer who had been assigned to escort Academician Kapur during the action, was a wetback.

‘We’re all wetbacks now, gunner.’ Jarn glanced around. ‘I’m senior here,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m in charge. Gunner, help me with these people.’

Mari saw that Jarn was trying to organise the survivors into a rough line. She moved to help. But there was just a handful here, she saw - eight of them, including Mari and Jarn, just eight left out of the thirty who had been working in the emplacement at the time of the assault.