Creatures

Recorded on three tapes, no more. On all three, a fraction of a second before the cameras died. The theory is a creature of the fifth dimension brushing our world with its edge. Champions of Abilit who have met it cannot describe what they saw — the speech goes.

A small creature, about the size of a cat, its fur giving off a soft green light. An ancient race made at the same time as the Cube, as its counterweight. It feels the currents of Abilit, warns of danger, and can hold the Cube's dark side back for a while with its singing.

It lives only in the hulls of dead warships. It can lie still for years until it feels the warmth of a living engine. Then one lunge, and all that is left of a boarding party is the armour. The only way to kill it is to burn the hull through with plasma.

A single alien is not intelligent. But a swarm of two hundred or more begins, quite suddenly, to solve multidimensional equations. The Swarm Mind is thought to have no centre: each body holds a piece of the memory, the way a neuron does.

The elder of the Treed twins. He never lets feeling take hold of him, and his mind runs a step ahead. He is the bearer of the Cube, and the infection shows as black veins under his skin. His bond with the Cube is the strongest of anyone's, which is exactly what makes him vulnerable. At the end he gives the Cube up, and loses part of his memory with it.

The younger twin. Faster than anyone in the group, with reactions like an accelerator. She jokes and needles, and behind it she is afraid for Axel. A superb pilot: she destroyed three pirates without the Cube's help. At the end she finishes Li'Xar, feeding the general too much of the Cube's living force.

Once a defender of the Hydrolites. Over time his mind was bent out of shape. A giant water serpent several hundred metres long, his body flickering with the energy of Abilit; every sweep of him raises heavy waves. The Cube severed Tydrax's link to Abilit, and Luna finished him with a shot to the heart.

Up to forty metres long. It breathes radiation. It swims the vacuum between planets and feeds on the solar wind. On instruments it looks drawn — flat, two-dimensional. Every attempt to take a specimen has ended with the pilots missing.