The Night Council, as it transpired, was right to be cautious. Skade’s team began removing the final layer of cubes, beginning at Galiana’s feet; they were pleased when they found that the underlying tissue was largely undamaged, and continued to work upwards until they reached her neck. They were confident that she could be warmed back to body temperature, even if it would be a more difficult exercise than a normal reefersleep revival. But when they began to expose her face, they learned that their work was far from over. The cubes moved, slithering without warning. Sliding and tumbling over each other, contracting in nauseating waves, the final part of the cocoon oozed into Galiana like a living oil slick. The black tide sucked itself into her mouth, her nose, her ears and her eye-sockets, flowing around her eyeballs. She looked the way Skade had hoped she would: a radiant homecoming queen. Even her long black hair was intact, frozen and fragile now, but exactly as it had been when she had left them. But the black machinery had reestablished itself inside her head, augmenting the formations that were already present. Scans showed that there was still little displacement of her own brain tissue, but more of her implant loom had been dismantled to make way for the invader. The black parasite had a crablike aspect, extending clawed filaments into different parts of her brain. Slowly, over many days, they brought Galiana back to just below normal body temperature. All the while Skade’s team monitored the invader, but it never changed, not even as Galiana’s remaining implants began to warm and re-interface with her thawing brain tissue. Perhaps, Skade dared to wonder, they might still win? She was, it turned out, almost right. She heard a voice. It was a human voice, feminine, lacking the timbre — or the strange Godlike absence of timbre — that ordinarily meant that the voice was originating inside her skull. This was a voice that had been shaped in a human larynx and propagated through metres of air before being decoded by a human auditory system, accumulating all manner of subtle imperfections along the way. It was the sort of voice that she had not heard in a very long time. The voice said, ‘Hello, Galiana.’ Where am I? There was no answer. After a few moments the voice added kindly, ‘You’ll have to speak as well, if you can. It’s not necessary to do more than attempt to make the sound shapes; the trawl will do the rest, picking up the intention to send electrical signals to your larynx. But simply thinking your response won’t work, I’m afraid — there are no direct links between your mind and mine.’ The words seemed to take an eternity to arrive. Spoken language was horridly slow and linear after centuries of neural linkage, even if the syntax and grammar were familiar. She made the intention to speak, and heard her own amplified voice ring out. ‘Why?’ ‘We’ll come to that.’ ‘Where am I? Who are you?’ ‘You’re safe and sound. You’re home; back in the Mother Nest. We recovered your ship and revived you. My name’s Skade.’ Galiana had been aware only of dim shapes looming around her, but now the room brightened. She was lying on her back, canted at an angle to the horizontal. She was inside a casket very much like a reefersleep casket but with no lid, so that she was exposed to the air. She saw things in her peripheral vision, but she could not move any part of her body, not even her eyes. A blurred figure came into focus before her, leaning over the open maw of the casket. ‘Skade? I don’t remember you.’ ‘You wouldn’t,’ the stranger replied. ‘I didn’t become one of the Conjoined until after your departure.’ There were questions — thousands of questions — that needed to be asked. But she could not ask all of them at once, most especially not via this clumsy old way of communicating. So she had to begin somewhere. ‘How long have I been away?’ ‘One hundred and ninety years, almost to the month. You left in…’ ‘2415,’ Galiana said promptly. ‘… Yes. And the present date is 2605.’ There was much that Galiana did not properly remember, and much that she did not think she wanted to remember. But the essentials were clear enough. She had led a trio of ships away from the Mother Nest, into deep space. The intention was to probe beyond the well- mapped frontier of human space, exploring previously unvisited worlds, looking for complex alien life. When rumours of war reached the three vessels, one ship had turned back home. But the other two had carried on, looping through many more solar systems. As much as she wanted to, she could not quite recall what had happened to the other ship that had continued the search. She felt only a shocking sense of loss, a screaming vacuum inside her head that should have been filled with voices. ‘My crew?’ ‘We’ll come to that,’ Skade said again. ‘And Clavain and Felka? Did they make it back, after all? We said goodbye to them in deep space; they were supposed to return to the Mother Nest.’ There was a terrible, terrible pause before Skade answered. ‘They made it back.’ Galiana would have sighed if sighing were possible. The feeling of relief was startling; she had not realised how tense she had been until she learned that her loved ones were safe. In the calm, blissful moments that followed, Galiana looked more closely at Skade. In certain respects she looked exactly like a Conjoiner from Galiana’s era. She wore a plain outfit of pyjamalike black trousers and loosely cinched black jacket, fashioned from something like silk and devoid of either ornamentation or any indication of allegiance. She was ascetically thin and pale, to the point where she looked on the ravenous edge of starvation. Her facial tone was waxy and smooth — not unattractive, but lacking the lines and creases of habitual expression. And she had no hair on either her scalp or her face, lending her the look of an unfinished doll. So far, at least, she was indistinguishable from thousands of other Conjoiners: without mind-to-mind linkage, and devoid of the usual cloud of projected phantasms that lent them individuality, they could be difficult to tell apart. But Galiana had never seen a Conjoiner who looked anything like Skade. Skade had a crest — a stiff, narrow structure that began to emerge from her brow an inch above her nose, before curving back along the midline of her scalp. The narrow upper surface of the crest was hard and bony, but the sides were rilled with beautifully fine vertical striations. They shimmered with diffraction patterns: electric blues and sparkling oranges, a cascade of rainbow shades that shifted with the tiniest movement of Skade’s head. There was more to it than that, however: Galiana saw fluidlike waves of different colours pump along the crest even when there was no change in its angle. She asked, ‘Were you always like that, Skade?’ Skade touched her crest gently. ‘No. This is a Conjoiner augmentation, Galiana. Things have changed since you left us. The best of us think faster than you imagined possible.’ ‘The best of you?’ I didn’t mean to put it quite that way. It’s just that
