Nova War

The larger fields surrounding both Trader and Swimmer snapped off suddenly. The priest moved forward quickly, intersecting his own field-bubble with Swimmer's and shooting him with a dart from his weapon before Swimmer could react.

A freezing numbness began to envelop Swimmer's thoughts.

'After all, it's true there are worse things than death,' Trader continued, twisting his manipulators together with sick glee. Swimmer barely heard his following words before consciousness finally abandoned him: 'Being human, for instance.' Hugh Moss stepped out from the tug and onto an airless plain on the surface of Blackflower. This plain was ringed by jagged mountains that delineated the outline of an ancient impact crater.

He was protected from the harsh vacuum of space by a shaped field-bubble that had a minute but perceptible effect on the local gravitational field. Tiny energy spikes at different points in the sphere could impel it in a particular direction; so he now caused it to float towards the low foothills fringing the nearest peak, quickly picking up speed. They operated on Swimmer in Turbulent Currents for several weeks continuously. First, they placed him in an artificially induced coma, then suspended his piscine form within a nutrient-rich soup of highly engineered bacteria that ate away first at his outer epithelial layers before attacking specific types of differentiated tissue.

Arrays of closely packed femtosecond-pulse lasers cut away at his fins, manipulators, and then much of the fleshy bulk of his body, before narrowing their focus to the cellular level, carefully removing minute fragments and pieces of flesh and muscle from around Swimmer's skeletal structure and nerve cells.

Before long, his body had been reduced to little more than a naked bundle of ganglia and neuroglia, his nerves and cerebral tissue meanwhile suspended within a dense bundle of supportive meshes. The nutrient soup was then flushed, and replaced with a liquid suspension of nanocytes that had been specially tailored to his genetic material. These entered every cell, re-engineering him at the smallest possible level, while teams of Shoal surgeons relearned the techniques necessary to reshape his body into something entirely different.

By necessity, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents slept through much of this in a dreamless coma.

They rebuilt his skeleton into a humanoid scaffold of tissue, plastic and metal, meanwhile operating on his cerebrum until it could be squeezed into a tiny braincase without compromising the thoughts and memories it retained. New flesh was grown in layers over the top of the skeleton, while the framework supporting the naked nervous tissues shifted into a new alignment, micro-surgical instruments still cutting and pruning and reshaping what was then left into something that would fit inside re-engineered muscles and skin.

Artificial organs were grown in situ – lungs, heart, kidneys and more, tweaked to at least superficially resemble those of a human being. The rebuilt nervous system was gradually hidden under a tide of growing flesh.

And somewhere inside all of this, the Shoal-member known as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents died a very real death indeed. He awoke, insane and naked, light slanting through tall windows that touched a bare concrete floor. He gagged on dry air, his mind telling him he was drowning even while his newly constructed lungs drew air down into them in great heaving gasps. He twisted and screamed, unable to coordinate unfamiliar limbs, the chafing of dry dust against his skin almost more than he could take.

He lay panting as sunlight crawled across the floor towards him, and tried desperately to comprehend the new sensations and feelings coming to him through unfamiliar sense organs.

That he had died was a conclusion he would come to only in retrospect. There was so little left of Swimmer in Turbulent Currents in the travesty Trader had now made of him; and yet his memories of who and what he had been remained intact.

Later – much, much later – he recalled the paradox of the ship that was repaired, piece by tiny piece, so many times that nothing of the original remained. It was the kind of endless circular argument best left to the young as to whether it was in fact still the same ship once every part of it had been replaced.

And therein lay the greatest cruelty of all, that this dazzling expertise had been deployed to make sure that he would always remember what he had been – and the reason for his punishment.

Somehow, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents staggered upright on two strange-feeling feet, only to collapse a moment later, writhing and screeching out his madness at the bare metal walls that echoed his own cries back at him.

He was alone, utterly alone, bar the cameras he knew must be watching him, recording every appalling moment, documenting the tragic outcome for anyone suicidal enough to betray Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.

The creature that had once been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents managed to crawl towards a half-open door, stumbling through it and into the burning light of a midday sun. It didn't take much guesswork to realize he was now a long, long way away from the Te'So system.

Far overhead, contrails cut a bluish-red sky in half, while a large orange sun burned its way down slowly towards a distant horizon. A nearby road cut across a desert expanse in the direction of low hills beyond, while in the other direction a distant glimmer suggested the shores of an ocean or lake.

He crouched in the dirt, and saw that he had emerged from what appeared to be a warehouse – one of human design.

He looked upwards and saw a vast planet overhead, entirely visible even in the daytime and far larger than the sun. He could actually see it moving, as if barely skirting the world on which he stood, and he wondered if he was about to be witness to some cataclysmic collision.

And, in that moment, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents knew where he was: Corkscrew.

Corkscrew was a Consortium world close to the outer limits of the sphere of influence permitted to humanity by the Shoal. The planet apparently bearing down on him was therefore Corkscrew's co-orbital companion, Fullstop.

Stable co-orbital worlds were extremely rare, and the only other example Swimmer had ever heard of was a pair of moons in humanity's home system. Fullstop and Corkscrew effectively shared the exact same orbit around their parent star; and Fullstop, a smaller world with a faster orbit, caught up with Corkscrew every 287 days.

As it now rushed towards the larger world, the combination of mutual gravitational attraction and momentum sent Fullstop swinging past the larger world, appearing from the point of view of any observer on Corkscrew's surface to first approach dangerously close, before quickly receding as Fullstop then moved into a wider orbit before continuing on its way.

The human culture on Corkscrew called this phenomenon 'playing chicken'. They had a regular festival at the time of every close approach, making jokey fake sacrifices and generally acting the fool in the way only humans really could, like frightened monkeys hoping their screeching and dancing could mask the very real fear induced by the awesome sight of an entire planet bearing down on you at enormous speed.

Swimmer could even make out certain man-made details on Fullstop's surface, both worlds being habitable, and he could see clearly the glistening silvery blue of rivers, lakes and oceans, as the planet proceeded across the sky.

He knelt in the sand and watched its passing until night fell and Fullstop finally began to recede into the distance. Then he crawled back inside the warehouse to sleep, collapsing in a heap on the bare dusty floor to spend his first night as a human – or at least as an approximation of one.

His features twisted into a combination that he did not yet know was called a 'smile'.