‘The last time I checked the showers were out of order.’ ‘The last time you checked?’ Volyova paused and made a clucking sound with her tongue. ‘Buckle up. I’m taking us in.’ They swooped in close to the dark misshapen mass of the lighthugger. Khouri remembered her first approach to this same ship, back when she had been tricked aboard it in the Epsilon Eridani system. It had looked just about normal then, about what one would expect of a large, moderately old trade lighthugger. There had been a distinct absence of odd excrescences and protuberances, a marked lack of daggerlike jutting appendages or elbowed turretlike growths. The hull had been more or less smooth — worn and weathered here and there, interrupted by machines, sensor-pods and entry bays in other places — but there had been nothing about it that would have invited particular comment or disquiet. There had been no acres of lizardskin texturing or dried-mudplain expanses of interlocked platelets; no suggestion that buried biological imperatives had finally erupted to the surface in an orgy of biomechanical transformation. But now the ship did not look much like a ship at all. What it did resemble, if Khouri had to associate it with anything, was a fairytale palace gone sick, a once-glittering assemblage of towers and oubliettes and spires that had been perverted by the vilest of magics. The basic shape of the starship was still evident: she could pick out the main hull and its two jutting engine nacelles, each larger than a freight-dirigible hangar; but that functional core was almost lost under the baroque growth layers that had lately stormed the ship. Various organising principles had been at work, ensuring that the growths, which had been mediated by the ship’s repair and redesign subsystems, had a mad artistry about them, a foul flamboyance which both awed and revolted. There were spirals like the growth patterns in ammonites. There were whorls and knots like vastly magnified wood grain. There were spars and filaments and netlike meshes, bristling hairlike spines and blocky chancrous masses of interlocked crystals. There were places where some major structure had been echoed and re-echoed in a fractal diminuendo, vanishing down to the limit of vision. The crawling intricacies of the transformations operated on all scales. If one looked for too long, one started seeing faces or parts of faces in the juxtapositions of warped armour. Look longer and one started seeing one’s own horrified reflection. But under all that, Khouri thought, it was still a ship. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I see it hasn’t got a fuck of a lot better since I was away.’ Volyova smiled beneath the brim of her cap. ‘I’m encouraged. That sounds a lot less like the Inquisitor and a lot more like the old Ana Khouri.’ ‘Yeah? Pity it took a fucking nightmare like that to bring me back.’ ‘Oh, this is nothing,’ Volyova said cheerfully. ‘Wait until we’re inside.’ The shuttle had to swerve through a wrinkled eyelike gap in the hull growth to reach the docking bay. But the interior of the bay was still more or less rectangular, and the major servicing systems, which had never much depended on nanotechnology, were still in place and recognisable. An assortment of other in-system craft was packed into the chamber, ranging from blunt- nosed vacuum tugs to major shuttles. They docked. This part of the ship was not spun for gravity, so they disembarked under weightless conditions, pulling themselves along via grab rails. Khouri was more than willing to let Volyova go ahead of her. Both of them carried torches and emergency oxygen masks, and Khouri was very tempted to start using her supply. The air in the ship was horribly warm and humid, with a rotten taste to it. It was like breathing someone else’s stomach gas. Khouri covered her mouth with her sleeve, fighting the urge to retch. Ilia…‘ ‘You’ll get used to it. It isn’t harmful.’ She extracted something from her pocket. ‘Cigarette?’ ‘Have you ever known me to say yes to one of those damned things before?’ ‘There’s always a first time.’ Khouri waited while Volyova lit the cigarette for her and then drew on it experimentally. It was bad, but still a marked improvement on unfiltered ship air. ‘Filthy habit, really,’ Volyova said, with a smile. ‘But then filthy times call for filthy habits. Feeling better now?’ Khouri nodded, but without any great conviction. They moved through gulletlike tunnels whose walls glistened with damp secretions or beguilingly regular crystal patterns. Khouri brushed herself along with gloved hands. Now and then she recognised some old aspect of the ship — a conduit, bulkhead or inspection box — but typically it would be half-melted into its surroundings or surreally distorted. Hard surfaces had become fuzzily fractal, extending blurred grey boundaries into thin air. Varicoloured slimes and unguents threw back their torchlights in queasy diffraction patterns. Amoebalike blobs drifted through the air, following — or at times swimming against, it seemed — the prevailing shipboard air-currents. Via grinding locks and wheels they transferred to the part of the ship that was still rotating. Khouri was grateful for the gravity, but with it came an unanticipated unpleasantness. Now there was somewhere for the fluids and secretions to run to. They dripped and dribbled from the walls in miniature cataracts, congealing on the floor before finding their way to a drainage aperture or hole. Certain secretions had formed stalagmites and stalactites, amber and snot-green prongs fingering between floor and ceiling. Khouri did her best not to brush against them, but it was not the easiest of tasks. She noticed that Volyova had no such inhibitions. Within minutes her jacket was smeared and swabbed with several varieties of shipboard effluent. ‘Relax,’ Volyova said, noticing her discomfort. ‘It’s perfectly safe. There’s nothing on the ship that can harm either of us. You — um — have had those gunnery implants taken out, haven’t you?’ ‘You should remember. You did it.’ ‘Just checking.’ ‘Ha. You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?’ ‘I’ve learned to take my pleasures where I can find them, Ana. Especially in times of deep existential crisis…’ Ilya Volyova flicked a cigarette butt into the shadows and lit herself another. They continued in silence. Eventually they reached one of the elevator shafts that threaded the ship lengthwise, like the main elevator shaft in a skyscraper. With the ship rotating rather than being under thrust it was much easier to move along its lateral axis. But it was still four kilometres from the tip of the ship to its tail, so it made sense to use the shafts wherever possible. To Khouri’s surprise, a car was waiting for them in the shaft. She followed Volyova into it with moderate trepidation, but the car looked normal inside and accelerated smoothly enough. ‘The elevators are still working?’ Khouri asked. ‘They’re a key shipboard system,’ Volyova said. ‘Remember, I’ve got tools for containing the plague. They don’t work perfectly, but I can at least steer the disease clear of anything I don’t want to become too corrupted. And the Captain himself is occasionally willing to assist. The transformations aren’t totally out of his control, it seems.’ Volyova had finally raised the matter of the Captain. Until that moment Khouri had been clinging to the hope that it might all turn out to be a bad dream she had confused with reality. But there it was. The Captain was very much alive.
