—Shit. Look on the bed.
Judy did so, and saw humanity’s last nightmare lying there.
Three little black cubes, each the size of the first joint of her finger, sat in the middle of the twisted sheets. Dark Seeds.
Something close to panic poured through the corridors; it drained from the rooms into the social areas, a hysterical babble of voices mixed with the half-comprehending cries of children. Many of the passengers had come from Earth, but that would have been before the dark tide had risen to its current extent. The vast majority of people would have boarded the Deborah without ever coming face-to-face with the fascinating emptiness that could grow from the Dark Seeds. Judy took a deep breath. Dark Seeds. Don’t look at them. No matter how much they call to you, don’t observe them in any way: touch, sound, taste. Don’t observe them, or they will begin to grow. And then come the Black Velvet Bands…
Judy pushed open the door of her cabin and stepped into the corridor beyond. Somebody called out to her.
Judy…
“We’re too late,” said Judy tonelessly. “I can hear them calling me already.”
—I can’t hear anything, said Jesse after a pause. —Odd, that. Are you going to kill the other passengers?
“In the end, yes. What else can I do?”
She felt that Jesse had tempted fate with his question, because just at that moment the ugly little girl came running down the corridor, shaking with terror over something that hadn’t been explained to her properly. She saw Judy and ran towards her, snot streaming from her nose.
“Help me!” she called. Judy took her hand weakly.
“I’ll help you,” she whispered.
“You were going to kill her?” said Saskia.
“I did kill her,” said Judy.
The Deborah had been an evolving thing, the fabric of the hull and engines and furnishings constantly changing as the vessel made its journey, always seeking out the optimum form for a spaceship. Now it was dead. As the first Dark Seeds had flickered across its senses, the ship’s AIs would have begun to look away, desperate to avoid gazing into the endlessly fascinating spaces that lay inside them.
Nonsentient nullification routines would have cut in, in an attempt to neutralize the threat, but if the flux of Dark Seeds through this area of space had been too great, then the AIs would have not been able to avoid seeing them. They would have no choice but to shut themselves down. There could be no better indication of the cessation of AI activity than the unchanging nature of the floor and walls of the corridor along which Judy now ran, jerking the ugly child along by the hand. The patterns in the carpets no longer moved to soothe her passage or indicate where to go. The walls were frozen in unsightly lumps, caught halfway in changing from one form to another. Judy turned a corner and a frozen rain of black cubes confronted her. For a moment they appeared to hang in the air, fixed in position as their quantum paths through the universe were interrupted by observation; now they began to fall, pitter-pattering to the floor and vanishing as they left her awareness. The little girl froze, gazing at one of the little black cubes that lay on the floor, a thread of dark light already emerging from its base. Judy clapped a hand over the child’s eyes and dragged her backwards.
“Don’t look at them!” she called. “Never look at them.”
They began to run back the way they had come, Jesse in the lead. He suddenly hesitated.
—Group of people coming this way. Fifteen or twenty. I think we’re trapped.
“Of course we’re trapped,” snapped Judy. “We’re on a dead spaceship drifting in Warp. Where can we go?”
The little girl looked up at her.
“Who are you speaking to?” she said, wiping at her pale face with a shaking hand.
