He tried to grasp her arm, his ruined face swivelling. ‘Tell them.’ His back arched, and he gasped. ‘Oh.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking him. ‘No!’

‘I am sorry, gunner Mari. So sorry.’ And he exhaled a great gurgling belch, and went limp.

She continued to cradle Academician Kapur, rocking him like a child, as the homecoming Spline plunged deeper into its world’s thick atmosphere.

But as she held him she took the vials of mnemonic fluid from his waist, and drank them one by one. And she took the Squeem from its cloak bag - it wriggled in her fingers, cold and very alien - and, overcoming her disgust, swallowed it down.

In the last moments, the Spline’s great eyelid closed.

Accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Erdac, Commissary Drith stepped gingerly through the transfer tunnel and into the damaged Spline eye.

Drith’s brow furrowed, sending a wave of delicate creases over her shaved scalp. It was bad enough to be immersed inside the body of a living creature like this, without being confronted by the gruesome sight the salvage teams had found here. Still, it had been a prize worth retrieving.

Erdac said, ‘You can see how the Squeem fish consumed this young gunner, from inside out. It kept alive that way, long enough anyhow for it to serve as a beacon to alert us when this Spline returned to service in human space. And there was enough of the mnemonic fluid left in the gunner’s body to—’

‘A drop is sufficient,’ Drith murmured. ‘I do understand the principle, Commander.’

Erdac nodded stiffly, his face impassive.

‘Quite a victory, Commander,’ Drith said. ‘If the breeding ground of the Spline can be blockaded, then the Spline can effectively be controlled.’

‘These two fulfilled their duty in the end.’

‘Yes, but we will profit personally from this discovery.’ The Commander didn’t respond to that; maybe he thought the remark was a personal test, a trap.

Drith looked down at the twisted bodies and poked at them with a polished toecap. ‘Look how they’re wrapped around each other. Strange. You wouldn’t expect a dry-as-a-stick Academician and a boneheaded Navy grunt to get so close.’

‘The human heart contains mysteries we have yet to fathom, Commander.’

‘Yes. Even with the mnemonic, I guess we’ll never really know what happened here.’

‘But we know enough. What else matters?’ Drith turned. ‘Come, Commander. We both have reports to file, and then a mission to plan, far beyond the Expansion’s current limits . . . quite an adventure!’

They left, talking, planning. The forensic teams moved in to remove the bodies. It wasn’t easy. Even in death they were closely intertwined, as if one had been cradling the other.

The Assimilated ‘Snowflake’ technology would turn out to be very valuable, much later, when I, Luru Parz, rediscovered it in decaying archives.