Dakk said to me, ‘You haven’t served on a Spline yet, have you? The ship is alive, remember. It’s hot. At sleep periods you can walk around the ship, and you find the crew dozing all over the vessel, many of them naked, some sprawled on food sacks or weapons, or just on the warm surfaces, wherever they can. You can hear the pulsing of the Spline’s blood flow - even sometimes the beating of its heart, like a distant gong. That and the scrambling of the rats.’

It sounded cosy, but not much like the Navy I knew. ‘Rats?’

She laughed. ‘Little bastards get everywhere.’

On we went. It wasn’t as bad as that hour in the chaotic dark when the Spline first came limping in, and we had to haul a wounded crew out of a wounded ship. But even so it was like being in some vast womb. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get used to this environment, how I could serve on a ship like this. But Dakk seemed joyful to be back, so I was evidently wrong.

We came to a deep place Dakk called the ‘belly’. This was a hangar-like chamber separated into bays by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. Within the alcoves were suspended sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.

I prodded the surface of one of the sacs. It rippled sluggishly. I could see drifting plants, wriggling fish, snails, a few autonomous bots swimming among the crowd. ‘It’s like an aquarium,’ I said.

‘So it is. A miniature ocean. The green plants are hornweeds: rootless, almost entirely edible. And you have sea snails, swordtail fish and various microbes. There is a complete self-contained biosphere here. This is how we live; this little farm feeds us. These creatures are actually from Earth’s oceans. Don’t you think it’s kind of romantic to fly into battle against Xeelee super-science with a droplet of primordial waters at our core?’

‘How do you keep it from getting overgrown?’

‘The weed itself kills back overgrowth. The snails live off dead fish. And the fish keep their numbers down by eating their own young.’

I guess I pulled a face at that.

‘You’re squeamish,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t remember that.’

We walked on through the Spline’s visceral marvels. I didn’t take in much.

The truth is I was struggling to function. I’m sure I was going through some kind of shock. Human beings aren’t designed to be subject to temporal paradoxes about their future selves and unborn babies.

And my head was full of my work on the inquiry into Dakk’s actions.