‘They’ve just evolved to fit the environment,’ Eden said.
Ezard turned to look at them. ‘I cannot express how glad we are to see you. We have been trapped in this realm too long. We want to meet the rest of humanity. Can you take us out of the red sky?’
Eldon sent the command from his neunonics and his suit visor opened. He breathed in the air. He, like the rest of the crew, had immunised themselves against the particular flavour of viral they were using. If you used virals you hadn’t protected yourself against, then you were a fool who deserved to die, in his opinion.
‘We’ll be glad to help.’ He ignored the demands to know what the fuck he was doing over the interface. He knew with his long life he must have picked up all sorts of nano-infections that his cheap nano-screens could barely control. Time to spread them around, he thought. A plea of ignorance might help if they got caught.
Nulty was still picking up the sensor glitch. Eldon had been right: there had to be something there. Nulty did not like that and was running the signal through every filter he could think of, but the interference of Red Space was preventing him from gathering any more information. It seemed like another strange field reading, not dissimilar but not the same as the weird readings he was getting off the thing they were docked to. A thing he was more and more sure was some kind of S-tech ship.
He had expected to lose contact with the boarding crew but that did not mean that Nulty liked it. He wondered if they were being torn apart by feral Seeder servitors. He could pilot the Swan if he had to, though he was not sure about the bridge drive. The issue was the docking tube. It wasn’t a known tech interface. It seemed attached to the Swan like a leech.
Eventually they all followed Eldon’s lead and opened their visors, making the suits recede from their faces. Melia was the last.
‘It smells of fish,’ she observed. ‘I’m hungry.’
The bio-sculpted inhabitants of the ship/thing Ezard referred to as Mother were all staring at them, their expressions unreadable. Eden could not shake the feeling that they were communicating in some way. She had watched one of them crawl to a swollen nipple-like growth on the wall of the chamber and suck on it. Moments later she had sunk to the ground in what looked like a narcotic stupor.
Ezard had said little. He had just let them wander, as they wanted.
‘When you feel safe, when you are happy, we should discuss if you would be prepared to help us leave this place.’
Eldon had just nodded.
‘Call me when you need me.’ Ezard had then dived off the smooth bone/flesh island into one of the deeper pools. He glided though the water, propelled by a rippling movement in his cloak. Eden was not sure if it was technology, biology or some symbiosis of both.
Brett was looking despondent. Their attempted genocide was weighing heavily on him. He was wandering towards the subjective front of the craft, approaching the biomechanical machinery/organs. In front of the wall of machinery/organs there was what looked to be some kind of web made of a fine, delicate version of the same material as Ezard’s staff. In the centre of the web was a cocoon of the same material. It glowed with an inner light and something about it suggested a feminine quality.
Brett stood looking at it for a while. The others were some way back sitting on one of the islands, not sure what to do while they waited for genocide to take place.
‘We should be heading back,’ Melia said over the interface.
‘If it happens it’ll happen quick,’ Eldon replied, still angry at what he saw as betrayal by the licensed concubine.
‘We’ve no idea what effect it will have on their altered physiology,’ Eden pointed out. ‘If Nulty’s right and this is S-tech, then who knows how they could have augmented themselves.’
‘So what? We just make our excuses and leave?’ Eldon asked.
‘They don’t seem armed,’ Eden said. ‘But I don’t fancying holding off a small civilisation with four disc guns, yeah?’
Brett looked down. He was surprised to see a dolphin looking at him, similar to those that worked with the Church. Except it was not quite a dolphin. Where the Church dolphins had waldos, this one had tentacles. Where the Church dolphins used interface to communicate, this one appeared to have a human mouth growing out of its neck. The creature looked old, its skin cracked and covered in growths.
It was staring straight at Brett from about eight feet down in the clear water. A shadow passed over it and with a flick of its tail it dived down into a tunnel that led into the machinery/organs.
Ezard all but leaped out of the water to land on the island next to Brett. The black pools of his eyes made him difficult to read, but Brett was pretty sure that he was staring at the cocoon with an expression of reverence.
‘What is it?’ Brett asked. He now spoke the same anachronistic version of Known Space common that Ezard did, the translation subroutine having learned it fully and meshed it with his neunonics. Effectively the language had been downloaded into his brain. Though Brett was pretty sure he had heard the others here speak a different language, one that sounded a little like sea life communicating. He had heard sounds like that in immersion programmes. Brett reckoned it would require modifications to their voice boxes to allow them to make the sounds he had heard.
‘She,’ Ezard corrected. He seemed to be struggling to explain concepts with the linguistic tools he had. ‘She is a conduit, a translator. The Mother speaks through her because she is of the Mother’s line. When we are in the real, maybe she will hatch, become like a god. She is the link between them in the past and us now.’
Brett did not understand but found something beautiful in what Ezard was saying. More and more he was sure that he did not want to kill these people.
‘Look, Ezard, there’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. His handsome face was in turmoil as he struggled with his betrayal. He liked and trusted his companions but his loyalty to them was outweighed by the magnitude of the crime they were about to commit. Ezard regarded him with an expression that managed to be both expectant and inscrutable.
Tentacles shot out of the water and wrapped around Brett. He was ripped off his feet and dragged into the water before the others had a chance to respond. Ezard dived into the water after him.
The panic that came from submersion was just an ancient race memory. Brett had more than enough oxygen in his system to survive for a reasonable amount of time underwater. The grip of the dolphin’s tentacles was strong but not crushing. Still, as he struggled to get free, the tentacles might as well have been steel cables.
The dolphin moved with incredible rapidity through the water towards the tunnel that Brett had seen him disappear into earlier. Except now it looked less like a tunnel and more like a sphincter.
His neunonics sounded an alarm as the sensors on his skin, which he used to understand pheromones when dealing with insects, picked up an unknown secretion. The sphincter closed behind them.
Brett found himself being dragged through massive and very alien internal organs that seemed to pulse with their own life. There was the sensation of going deeper and deeper, though whether that was real or just fear, Brett couldn’t be sure.
He tried the interface and was more than a little disturbed that he could not contact the others. Whatever prevented them from contacting the Swan obviously had the same effect between different sections of the ship/thing, whatever it was. Brett did not like the totality of the signal block either.
The dolphin breached onto a small bone-like alcove that looked different to the other areas – dark, lacking in life. The organs around the alcove looking diseased to Brett. The tentacles dragged him out of the water and laid him next to the prone dolphin.