Keeping her face stony, Mari peeled the cloaks off the inert bodies of Vael and Retto. Vael’s chest had been laid open, as if by an immense punch; blood and bits of burned meat floated out of the cavity.

Jarn abandoned her needle-jabbing. ‘The Spline isn’t responding.’ She held up the emptied hypodermics. ‘This is the way you communicate with a Spline - in an emergency, anyhow. Chemicals injected into its bloodstream. Lieutenant Mace could tell you better than I can, if he were conscious. I think this Spline must be too badly wounded. It has withdrawn from us, from human contact.’

Mari gaped. ‘We can’t control the ship?’

Kapur sighed. ‘The Spline do not belong to us, to humanity. They are living ships, independent, sentient creatures, with whom we negotiate.’

The siblings huddled fearfully. The fatter one - Tsedi - stared with wide eyes at Jarn. ‘They’ll come to get us. Won’t they, sir?’

Jarn’s face flickered; Mari saw she was out of her depth herself, but she was working to keep control, to keep functioning. Maybe this screen-tapper was stronger than Mari had suspected. ‘I’m a communications officer, remember.’ That meant she had a Squeem implant, an alien fish swimming in her belly, her link to the rest of the crew. She closed her eyes, as if tapping into the Squeem’s crude group mind. ‘There is no they, rating.’

Tsedi’s eyes were wide. ‘They’re dead? The crew? All of them?’

‘We’re on our own. Just focus on that.’

Alone. Kapur laughed softly. Mari tried to hide her own inner chill.

As if on cue, they all felt a subtle, gut-wrenching displacement.

‘Hyperdrive,’ Mari said.

The siblings clutched each other. ‘Hyperdrive? The Spline is moving? Where is it taking us?’

Kapur said, ‘Wherever it wants. We have no influence. Probably the Spline doesn’t even know we are here. This is what you get when your warship has a mind of its own.’

Impatiently, Jarn snapped, ‘Nothing we can do about that. All right, we have work to do. We should pool what we have. Med kit, supplies, weapons, tools, anything.’

There was precious little. They had the cloaks, plus the two spares scavenged from the bodies of Vael and Retto. The cloaks came with med-kits, half depleted already. There was some basic planet-fall survival gear, carried routinely by the crew: knives, water purification tablets.

Jarn rubbed her wounded arm, gazing at the kit. ‘No food. No water.’ She glared at Kapur. ‘You. Academician. You know anything about Spline?’

‘More than the rest of you, I suspect,’ Kapur said dryly. ‘For all you use them to fly around the Expansion from one battle to another. But little enough.’

‘The cloaks will keep us alive for twenty-four hours. We might use the spares to stretch that a little longer. But we need to replenish them. How? Where do we go?’