assemblage, and as the assemblages neared each other they threw out extensions between each other, umbilical lines of flowing black daughter machines. Waves of mass pulsed between the main cores, and now and then one of the primaries fissioned or merged with its neighbour. The purple lightning continued to flicker between the inky shapes, occasionally forming a geometric shell around Khouri’s ship, before collapsing back to something which appeared much more random. Despite herself, despite the certain feeling that she was going to die, the approach was fascinating. It was also sickening: simply looking at the Inhibitor machines inspired a feeling of dreadful nausea, for she was apprehending something that had clearly never been shaped by human intelligence. It was breathtakingly strange, the way the machines moved, and in her heart she knew that Volyova and she had — if such a thing were possible — terribly underestimated their enemy. They had seen nothing yet. The machines were now only a hundred metres from her ship. They formed a closing black shell, oozing tighter around their prey. The sky was being locked out, visible only between the tentacular filaments of the exchanging machines. Limned in violet arcs and sprays of lightning — quivering sheets and dancing baubles of contained plasma energy — Khouri saw thick trunks of shifting machinery probing inwards, obscenely and hungrily. The ship’s exhaust was still thrusting behind them, but the machines were quite oblivious to it, and it seemed to pass right through the shell. ‘Thorn?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘It’s just that I had to know. I’ve always been one to push things.’ I don’t really blame you. I might have done the same thing, if the tables were turned.‘ ‘That means we’d have both been stupid, Ana. It isn’t any excuse.’ The hull clanged, then clanged again. The whooping alarm changed its tone: no longer reporting imminent pressure collapse or a stall warning, but indicating that the hull was being damaged, prodded from outside. There was a vile metallic scraping sound, like nails dragged down tin, and the wide, grasping end of a trunk of Inhibitor machinery splayed itself across the cockpit windows. The circular end of the trunk squirmed with a moving mosaic of tiny thumb-sized black cubes, the swirling motion possessing a weird hypnotic quality. Khouri tried to reach the controls that would shutter the windows, imagining it might make one or two seconds’ difference. The hull creaked. More black tentacles attached themselves. One by one the sensor displays began to blank out or haze with static. ‘They could have killed us by now…’ Thorn said. ‘They could, but I think they want to know what we’re like.’ There was another sound, one she had been dreading. It was the squeal of metal being torn aside. Her ears popped as pressure fell within the ship, and she assumed that she would be dead a second or two later. To die by depressurisation was not the most desirable of deaths, but she imagined that it was preferable to being smothered by Inhibitor machinery. What would the grasping black shapes do when they reached her — dismantle her the same way they were pulling the ship apart? But just as she had formulated that consolatory thought, the sensation of pressure drop ceased and she realised that if there had been a hull rupture it had been brief. ‘Ana,’ Thorn said. ‘Look.’ The bulkhead door that led into the flight deck was a wall of rippling ink, like a suspended tidal wave of pure darkness. Khouri felt the breeze of that constant bustling motion, as if a thousand silent fans were being flicked back and forth. Only now and then did a pulse of pink or purple light strobe within the blackness, hinting at dreadful machine-filled depths. She sensed hesitation. The machines had reached this far into her ship, and they must have been aware that they had arrived at its delicate organic core. Something began to emerge from the wall. It began as a domelike blister as wide across as Khouri’s thigh, and then it extended, taking on the form of a tree trunk as it probed further into the cabin. Its tip was a blunt nub like one extremity of a slime mould, but it waggled to and fro as if sniffing the air. A blurred haze of tiny black machines made the edge difficult to focus on. The process took place in silence, save for the occasional distant snap or crackle. The nub grew out from the wall until it was a metre long, and as many metres again from Khouri and Thorn. For a moment it ceased extending and swung to one side and then the other. Khouri saw a black thing the size of a bluebottle flit past her brow and then settle back into the main mass of the trunk. Then, with dire inevitability, the trunk bifurcated and resumed its extrusion. The split ends forked, one aiming for Khouri, the other for Thorn. It grew via oozing waves of cubes pulsing along the length of it, the cubes swelling or contracting before locking into their final positions. ‘Thorn,’ Khouri said. ‘Listen to me. We can destroy the ship.’ He nodded once. ‘What do I do?’ ‘Free me and I’ll do it. It won’t accept the destruct order from you.’ He made to move, but had shifted barely an inch before the black tentacle had whipped out another appendage to pin him down. It was done with care — the machinery was clearly still unwilling to harm them inadvertently — but Thorn was now immobilised. ‘Nice try,’ Khouri said. The tips were only an inch from her. They had bifurcated and re-bifurcated on their final approach, so that now a many-fingered black hand was poised before her face, fingers — or appendages — ready to be plunged into eyes, mouth, nose, ears, even through skin and bone. The fingers were themselves split into tinier and tinier black spikes, vanishing into a grey- black bronchial haze. The trunk pulled back an inch. Khouri closed her eyes, thinking the machinery was preparing itself to strike. Then she felt a sharp prick of coldness beneath her eyelids, a sting so quick and localised that it was hardly pain at all. A moment later she felt the same thing somewhere within her auditory canal, and an instant after that — though she had no real idea of how rapidly time was actually passing now — the Inhibitor machinery reached her brain. There was a torrent of sensation, confused feelings and images cascading by in rapid, random succession, followed by a sense that she was being unravelled and inspected like a long magnetic tape. She wanted to scream or make some recognisable human response, but she was pinned hard. Even her thoughts had become gelid, impeded by the invasive presence of the black machines. The tarlike mass had crept into every part of her, until there was almost no space left for the entity that had once thought of itself as Khouri. And yet enough remained to sense that even as the machine pushed itself into her there was a two-way flow of data. As it established communicational feeds into her skull, she became dimly cognisant of its smothering black vastness, extending beyond her head, back along the trunk, back through the ship and into the clump of machines that had surrounded the ship. She even sensed Thorn, linked into the same information-gathering network. His own thoughts, such as they were, echoed hers precisely. He was paralysed and compressed, unable to scream or even imagine the release that would come from screaming. She tried to reach out to him, to at least let him know that she was still present and that somone else in the universe was aware of what he was going through. And at the same time she felt Thorn do likewise, so that they linked fingers through neural space, like two lovers drowning in ink. The process of being analysed continued, the blackness seeping into the oldest parts of her mind. It was the worst thing she had ever experienced, worse than any torture or simulation of torture that she had ever known on Sky’s Edge. It was worse than anything the Mademoiselle had done to her, and the only respite lay in the fact that she was only dwindlingly aware of her own identity. When that was gone she would be free. And then something changed. At the limit of what she was feeling through the data-gathering channels, there was a disturbance on the periphery of the cloud that had englobed her ship. Thorn sensed it as well: she felt a pathetic flicker of hope reach her through the bifurcation. But there was nothing to be hopeful about. They were just feeling the machines regroup, ready for the
