Alastiar Reynolds

and dents pulsed in an out of the membrane’s surface, Skade swore she saw a gargoyle face leer at her. She knew that it was the fault of her subconscious, imprinting a pattern where none existed, but the impression of inchoate evil was inescapable.
Then the bubble expanded again, swelling up to the size of a small spacecraft. Some of the whisking arms did not swing out of the way in time, and their sharp extremities punched through the undulating membrane. The sensors flipped into overload, unable to process the howling torrent of gravitational and particle flux. Inexorably, matters were shifting out of control. Vital control systems in the rear of Nightshade were shutting down. The arms began to move spasmodically, lashing against each other like the limbs of ill-orchestrated dancers. Nodules and flanges sheered off. Scarves of glowing plasma ripped between the boundary and its encasing machinery. The boundary bloated again; its membrane swallowed cubic hectares of support machinery. The failing machinery could no longer hold it stable. Dim explosions pulsed within the bubble. A major control arm severed itself and swung back into the side of Nightshade’s hull. Skade sensed a chain of explosions surging along the side of her ship, pink blossoms cascading towards the bridge. Her beautiful machinery was ripping itself to pieces. The bubble squirmed larger, oozing through the failing constraints of the sheered and buckled arms. Emergency alarms sounded, internal barricades clanging down throughout the ship. Whiteness glared from the heart of the bubble as matter within it underwent a partial transition to the pure photonic state. A catastrophic reversion to the state- three quantum vacuum, in which all matter was massless…
The photo-leptonic flash surged through the membrane. The few arms that were still functioning were snapped backwards like broken fingers. There was a brief, furious sizzle of plasma discharge and then the bubble swept larger, engulfing Nightshade and dissipating at the same time. Skade felt it slam through her, like a sudden cold front on a warm day. At the same time a shock wave shook the ship, throwing Skade against a wall. Ordinarily the wall would have deformed to absorb the energy of the collision, but this time the impact was hard and metallic.
Yet the ship remained around her. She was able to think. She could still hear klaxons and emergency messages, and the barricades were still closing. But the excursion event had passed. The bubble had shattered, but while it had damaged her ship — perhaps profoundly, perhaps beyond the point of repair — it had not destroyed it.
Skade willed her consciousness rate back down to her normal processing speed. Her crest throbbed with the excess blood heat it had to dissipate — she felt light- headed — but that would soon pass. She appeared to have suffered no injuries, even in the violent crash against the wall. Her armour moved at her will, undamaged by the impact. She took hold of a wall restraint and tugged herself into the middle of the corridor. She had no weight, for Nightshade was drifting and had never been equipped for spin-generated gravity.
Molenka?
There was no response. The entire shipboard network was down, preventing neural communication unless the subjects were extremely close to each other. But she knew where Molenka had been before the bubble had swelled out of control. She called aloud, but there was still no answer, and then set off in the direction of the machinery. The critical volume was still pressurised, though she had to persuade the internal doors to let her through.
The glossy, curved surfaces of the alien machinery, like black glass, had shifted since she was last within this part of the ship. She wondered how much of the change had happened during the failed attempt to expand the bubble. The air prickled with ozone and a dozen less familiar smells, and against the continuous background of klaxons and spoken alarms she heard sparking and shearing sounds.
‘Molenka?’ she called again.
note 354 The neural response was incredibly weak, but it was recognisably Molenka. She was close now, certainly.
Skade pushed forwards, hand over hand, the movements of her armour stiff. The machinery surrounded her on all sides, smooth black ledges and protrusions, like the water-carved rock in some ancient underground cavern. It widened out, admitting her to an occlusion five or six metres from side to side. The scalloped walls were studded with data-input sockets. A window set into the far side of the chamber offered a view of the smashed and buckled containment machinery jutting from the rear of her ship. Even now some of the arms were still moving, ticking lazily back and forth like the last twitching limbs of a dying creature. Seen with her eyes, the damage appeared much worse than she had been led to believe. Her ship had been gutted, its viscera ripped out for inspection.
But that was not what drew Skade’s attention. In the approximate centre of the occlusion floated an undulating sac, its skin a milky translucence behind which something shifted in and out of visibility. The sac was five-pointed, throwing out blunt pseudopodia that corresponded in proportion and arrangement to the head and limbs of a human. Indeed, Skade saw, the thing within it was human, a shape she glimpsed in shattered parts rather than any unified whole. There was a ripple of dark clothing and a ripple of paler flesh.
Molenka?
Though she was only metres away, the reply felt astonishingly distant.
note 355
Skade shivered, impressed by the woman’s calm. She was clearly going to die, and yet her reporting of her predicament had an admirable detachment. It was the attitude of a true Conjoiner, convinced that her essence would live on in the wider consciousness of the Mother Nest, and that physical death amounted only to the removal of an inessential peripheral element from a much more significant whole. But, Skade reminded herself, they were a long way from the Mother Nest now. The bubble, Molenka ?
note 356 The five-pointed thing wobbled revoltingly, hinting at some awful instability that was on the point of collapsing.
What state are you in, Molenka?
note 357 The bubble fragment began to contract, exactly as Molenka had said it was likely to do. The body-shaped membrane shrunk down until its surface conformed closely with Molenka’s body. For a dreadful moment she looked quite normal, except that she was covered in a shifting glaze of pearly light. Skade dared to hope that the bubble would choose that instant to collapse, freeing Molenka. But at the same time she knew it was not about to happen.
The bubble quivered again, hiccoughed and twitched. Molenka’s expression — it was quite visible — became obviously frightened. Even through the faint neural channel that connected them, Skade felt the woman’s fear and apprehension. It was as if the glaze was tightening around her.
note 358
I can’t. I don’t know what to do.
Molenka’s skin was tight against the membrane. She was starting to suffocate. Normal speech would have been impossible by now, but the automatic routines in her head would have already started shutting down non-essential parts of her brain, conserving vital resources to squeeze three or four extra minutes of consciousness from her last breath. note 359