Kapur murmured, ‘You don’t approve of family, gunner?’

‘There is no such thing as family.’

‘You grew up in a Conurbation?’

‘Navy run,’ she growled. ‘Our cadres were broken up and reformed every few years, as per Commission rules. The way it should be. Not like this.’

Kapur nodded. ‘But further from the centre, the rules don’t always hold so well. It is a big Expansion, gunner, and its edges grow diffuse . . . Humanity will assert itself. What’s the harm in family?’

‘What good is “family” doing that rating now? It’s only hurting him. Tsedi is dead.’

‘You despise such weakness.’

‘They lived while good human beings died.’

‘Good human beings? Your comrades in arms. Your family.’

‘No—’

‘Do you miss them, gunner?’

‘I miss my weapon.’ Her starbreaker. It was true. It was what she was trained for, not this sticky paddling in the dark. Without her starbreaker she felt lost, bereft.

In the end Jarn physically dragged Kueht away from the stiffening corpse of his cadre sibling. At last, to Mari’s intense relief, they moved on.

They seemed to travel through the twisting tunnel-tube for hours. As the semi-sentient cloaks sought to concentrate their dwindling energies on keeping their inhabitants alive, their glow began to dim, and the closing darkness made the tunnel seem even more confining.

At last they came to a place where the tunnel opened out. Beyond was a chamber whose mottled walls rose out of sight, into darkness beyond the reach of their cloaks’ dim glow. Jarn connected a line to a hook which she dug into the Spline’s fleshy wall, and she and Mari drifted into the open space.

Huge fleshy shapes ranged around them. Some of them pulsed. Fat veins, or perhaps nerve trunks, ran from one rounded form to another. Even the walls were veined: they were sheets of living tissue and muscle, nourished by the Spline’s analogue of blood.

Mari found herself whispering. ‘Is it the brain?’

Jarn snorted. ‘Spline don’t have brains as we do, tar. Even I know that much. Spline systems are - distributed. It makes them more robust, I guess.’

‘Then what is this place?’

Jarn sighed. ‘There’s a lot about the Spline we don’t understand. ’ She waved a hand. ‘This may be a, a factory. An organic factory.’

‘Making what?’

‘Who knows?’ Kapur murmured. He lingered by the wall, sightless gaze shifting. ‘We are not the only clients of the Spline. They provide services for other species, perhaps from far beyond the Expansion, creatures of whom we may have no knowledge at all. But not everybody uses the Spline as warships. That much is clear.’

‘It is hardly satisfactory,’ Jarn said through clenched teeth, ‘that we have so little control over a key element of the Expansion’s strategy.’