“Remaking the internal architecture isn’t a complex function?” Matchell asked.

Stig shot her a look as if to say “why does everyone think I have the answers?”

The corridor widened out and opened onto a chamber that looked for all the world like the inside of a gourd: a lobed, symmetrical room. Its walls sported ridges which ran up towards the chamber’s apex from all sides, joining to form a central rosette. It was devoid of anything resembling either crew or controls.

Stig was saying nothing, so Lee prompted, “Are they…on their way?”

“It is a living ship,” Stig stated. His expression was willing her to understand without him having to haul all the words out himself.

“Yes…?” Lee prompted.

“So it doesn’t need crew,” Mal finished. “It just…is?”

Stig nodded.

“Well, what are we—?” Sabreur started, and then flinched back. “Christ, what is it doing?”

The rosette at the centre of the ceiling was opening out, and through it were coming…

Worms, Lee thought at first, and her stomach lurched. She was wrong, though. They were more like centipedes, articulated and leggy, hundreds of the damned things of all sizes—from as thick as a thigh bone to slender as a hair.

But the cascade of things wasn’t just pouring out onto the floor. The largest appendages formed a kind of superstructure that the rest twined about and clung to. The more she watched, the more Lee saw an emergent shape within the crawling chaos, a thing that had two legs, two arms, torso, head…The head was the worst, because where a face would be, there was a frenetic business of whiskery feelers and writhing bodies all twining and seething about one another.

She remembered a nature documentary where the grave, mannered commentator had explained how the legs of insects had evolved to perform countless different tasks. That narrator hadn’t known the half of it. The limbs twisted together in twitching cables that were nothing much like lips and locked their chitinous joints into the lines of jaw and cheekbone. They dug sockets in which metal-sheened beads flowered like something breaking from a cocoon. Little comb-edged arms clicked over them and back up, and Lee realized it was feigning blinking.

The face that finally formed was androgynous, puppet-like, constantly on the verge of fraying apart into its component pieces. It regarded them blankly, and then animation came to its various parts. They started out of sync, movements staggered, but at last every limb was moving with purpose. It cocked its terrible head slightly and smiled, showing teeth like the pale backs of burrowing beetles.

For a long time nobody spoke. The facsimile’s glittering regard played over them as its features settled and resettled, waves of change flurrying across its visage. Alien and hideous precisely because it was trying so hard to look human.