Faith (24 page)

“Get us out of here, Kaang! Photon drive, ninety percent, random evasion!” His voice sounded strange. It wouldn’t carry.

“Have you seen the screen, Commander?” Thahl asked.

“Kaang, I said Get us out of here!”

“Out of
where
, Commander? Where are we?”

“The screen, Commander,” Thahl said loudly. His voice sounded strange too. “
Look at the screen.
”

Apart from the object, which was still dead ahead, the Bridge screen was empty. Horus 5 was gone. The stars were gone. The distance between the stars, and the ability to measure it, was gone.

Some of the Bridge instruments sounded failure or overload alarms. Others stopped registering altogether, and fell silent. Elsewhere around the Bridge, needlemikes and navigation computers and scanners and sensors were jabbering impossibilities at each other; ordered to disprove what had happened, they were pouring out proof in stream-of-consciousness torrents. The stars and planets were gone, not merely as electronic images on the main screen or as phosphor-dot smears on computer displays but as solid objects, as sources of gravity and energy and positional reference. They were
gone.

The size of the universe was the distance between the
Charles Manson
and the now-stationary object facing it.

From outside, a single concussion shook the ship. It was repeated, repeated again, and became a continuous vibration. It was soft and low-register, as discreet as one of the ship’s own alarms, and pitched well below the threshold of actual discomfort; but to the ship, it was more profoundly wrong than the stars’ apparent absence. Very little of what went on outside the
Charles Manson
should ever have been felt inside. The ship tried to define the new situation—it couldn’t fight what it couldn’t define—by telling its sentience cores to analyse what had happened, and they variously shouted, warbled, beeped and murmured back at it their inability to do so. For a moment the Bridge, unthinkably, became deafening, then the ship told them to stop. It was at least able to do that, but not much more. If it had been more sentient it would have defined what it felt as human panic, while the humans and humanoids who inhabited it remained inhumanly calm.

“Presumably,” Foord said, “that object has put something like a force-field around us.”

“Around us and itself, Commander,” Joser said. “It’s about ten times more powerful than our flickerfields, and…”

“
Ten
times?”

“…and it’s continuous. It’s blocking everything from outside—light, gravity, radio waves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet… For all I know, the universe could have ended the other side of it.”

On the screen, what had been space was now a confined space, a compartment they shared with Her missile, and with nothing else; depthless black and infinitely close. Joser’s voice still sounded strange. So did Foord’s. So did everybody’s. The reason was—

“That vibration, Joser. What is it?”

“Similar to a tractor beam or motive beam, but not powerful enough to damage the hull, or to activate our flickerfields. Very low register. And very localised.”

“I see,” Foord said slowly, covering for the fact that he didn’t, yet. There was something, but it was still unclear.

“What do you mean,
localised
?” Smithson spoke across Foord, completely ignoring him. “Answer carefully. Localised
where
?”

“At the stern, I think.”

“Fuck what you think. Localised
where
?”

“At the stern.”

“Smithson?…” Foord began.

But Smithson was already roaring orders down several needlemikes at once. He looked round briefly at Foord, snarled “No time. Work it out yourself.”

The vibration ceased. There was another concussion from outside. Then it resumed, louder, and this time there was a second noise accompanying it, a noise from
inside
the ship. A noise like the scraping of fingernails down a blackboard. Unless someone actually
was
scraping their fingernails down a blackboard, there was only one explanation for such a noise.

It came from the stern.

“Of
course
,” Foord said. “The MT Drive. That beam is trying to activate our MT Drive.” His stomach was knotting and clenching, but he spoke calmly.

Across the Bridge, Smithson started clapping two temporarily unoccupied hands together in a heavily sarcastic, and moist, parody of applause.

Foord was irritated. “It’s
your
MT Drive,” he told Smithson. “She’s got Her hand in
your
clothes. Do something.”

The noise from the stern got steadily louder.

“I already am,” Smithson muttered. He was now no longer merely operating his controls but fighting them.

The MT Drive struggled to obey Her tractor beam and activate itself, and those on the Bridge struggled not to think about what would happen if it succeeded. The noise from the stern was still increasing. It penetrated even the needlemike circuitry, distorting voices to rasping bass and overlaying them with static; communication would soon be impossible. It activated the Prayer Wheels (the stasis generators used to contain the MT Drive, so called because they were wheel-shaped, and made things around them stand still) which were essential to the Drive’s activation.

A convulsion rolled the length of the ship, as though the burrows and corridors had become a pinball machine with giant ballbearings. Round the Bridge six glasses of inhibitor fluid fell simultaneously to the floor and smashed, were replaced by the chairarm dispensers with six more which also fell to the floor and smashed, and were replaced with six more. Smithson fought back and gradually regained control. The convulsion died away, but it would be the first of many. And from the stern, the noise of the MT Drive’s awakening continued unabated.

“Cyr,” Foord shouted, in the last few seconds during which he could be sure of being heard, “whatever happens, keep all weapons powered. I think She may fly past us, into the system.”

“Commander?”

“I said, Keep all weapons powered. I think She may—”

The second convulsion began. And the the third, and the fourth, rolling up and down the length of the ship until they met and became continuous.

When ships activated their MT Drives inside solar systems—there were only five known cases, all of them years ago—they disappeared without survivors or wreckage; they were never heard of again, even as rumours. The consensus view, which was necessarily tentative since MT had been invented almost by accident, was that they had contracted instantly to mathematically dimensionless points. Every MT Drive was now loaded with inbuilt failsafes to ensure it could never activate if any one of an array of sensors registered planetary or other large bodies anywhere near. Ships’ processes and sentience cores deferred to the failsafes because they were infallible, and an equivalent of instinct; but not this time. This time an attack had come disguised perfectly, as a legitimate command, and they were going to obey it.

And when they did, and the MT Drive was activated, She would kill Her forcefield and let the universe and its gravity and radiation come flooding back in, and the
Charles Manson
would go wherever the other five went.
A good weapon to start the engagement,
thought Smithson sourly, as he fought for control.
Like my Breathtaker, imaginative and singular. But better, because it fucking works.

To the MT Drive, which had no motive other than to function legitimately, everything was at first routine and normal. It awakened in the stern, found itself the recipient of what could only be a legitimate order to activate, and checked and rechecked each of its failsafes to ensure there were no planetary or other large bodies within the stipulated radius; then checked them again. Once these preliminaries were completed, it sent a stream of neural impulses to the ship’s other sentience cores (weapons, drives, life support, scanners, communications, damage control, flickerfields) giving them formal notice of its activation and requesting them to prepare appropriately; and then it paused, expecting the usual acknowledgements but receiving none. Smithson had blocked each impulse, negating and countermanding and, where necessary, burning out synapses altogether.

The Drive could never be argued into disbelieving its basic imperatives, and Smithson didn’t try to, so at first it was aware of him only as a procedural obstacle; but when he moved from blocking to counterattack, striking through his network of emergency overrides at the core of the Drive itself, it became aware of him as a set of motives. It considered him, and he it. They came together, touching intimately along their interface, and quietly agreed that they shared nothing except the need to obliterate each other. Then they moved apart and began again, but this time without rules. It was no longer a game of procedural chess, and the
Charles Manson
was no longer their chessboard, but their weapon.

While the alien tractor beam continued to play softly over the stern, feeling for the MT Drive like some molester’s fingers fumbling with zips and buttons—and while some parts of the ship, ambiguously, stopped resisting and started opening themselves to it—the
Charles Manson
began to falter. It saw its own physical and mental processes in turmoil, and since those processes were its idea of itself, it became the turmoil. It listened to the Drive telling it to cut life support from the Bridge and destroy Smithson, and to Smithson telling it to isolate and burn out the Drive, and found itself speaking those orders with its own voice while it listened to them.

The interface between Smithson and the Drive was longer than the ship, as bloodvessels when unravelled are longer than a body, and the ship knew that the interface was the scene of a terminal conflict. What remained of its lower-level systems tried to sound damage control and life support alarms, but with no more force than the reflex not to die of something dying. Smithson and the MT Drive swept through it like two infections, destroying it only as a by-product of their attempts to destroy each other, and that was the last thing the ship realised before they swamped it and its consciousness ended; that, and the fact that if it ever existed again, it would only be as
one
of them and not as both.

The object She had sent became suddenly inert on all wavelengths. The tractor beam fell away. The convulsions faded. The MT Drive shut down. Horus 5 and the starfield returned to the Bridge screen. Smithson had succeeded, and Foord opened his mouth to breathe again, but

“Commander,” Joser said. “She’s coming for us. Position 08-07-08 and closing rapidly.”

Time started moving again, rushing back into the ship like thoughts after a coma. Foord could actually
hear
the seconds rushing back: they blew through the corridors and burrows, at first slowly then faster. The next phase of the engagement was already growing out of the body of the last.

“I’m handing back what’s left of your ship, Commander,” Smithson said. Foord had never heard him sound tired before. “Most of the damage will be within the capacity of the self-repair systems, but not the MT Drive. That, you can forget. You’ll never be able to use it again.”

“Position 07-04-08, and closing rapidly.”

“Smithson…”

“I know, I know. Time. I’d finished, anyway.”

Time. Blowing cold through the corridors. Smithson had saved the ship, but it had also partly died. It had lost one of its sentience cores and one of its drives; it was now a ship for which time could run out, like it ran out for other, ordinary, ships.

“Commander! She’s 06-03-06 and closing.”

“Yes. How much time?”

“Ninety seconds, if…”

“Thahl, Cyr, feed the closeup weapons and ignore everything else—scanners, life support , drives, everything.”

He turned to face the forward section of the Bridge screen. Nothing was visible, yet. But it wouldn’t be. She was shrouded.

“Fifty seconds, Commander.”

“No, Joser. No more countdowns. Hit the alarms when there’s twenty seconds to go. That’s all.”

She continued to approach at high speed, but was still below the horizon of Horus 5. The screen continued to show Horus 5, but no simulation of Her approach; the scanners were operating at less than twenty percent capacity, and by the time they generated any simulations, She would be on top of them. The
Charles Manson
continued to bleed off what remained of its resources to feed its closeup weapons. It had done well. It had already grown them carefully back to near-optimum, like a crippled animal growing a perfect set of claws for its final defence.

The alarms started murmuring.

Foord heard himself thinking
No
.
This isn’t what She wants. We must do what She wants.

“Cyr, cancel my orders! Stand down all closeup weapons.”

“Commander?”

“Thahl, stand down everything except the Bridge screen. Leave us inert. No drives, life support, scanners…” When Thahl looked up inquiringly, Foord snapped “Binary Gate. Work it out yourself. Cyr, cancel closeup weapons, now! I mean it!”

A roaring swamped the Bridge and something rose over the horizon of Horus 5.

It was a patch of empty space. Just like the empty space around it, but something was wrong. This was like a patch of empty space from another day, or seen from another angle, and it came towards them

paused, and
glanced
at them

and rushed past. Foord swore as the forward screen erupted with light and a deep violet afterimage settled across his eyes like a piece of hot iron, and when his sight returned the screen was still shuffling filters and the
Charles Manson
was left bobbing in the wake of whatever had passed.

The inert missile had been allowed to lay close by the
Charles Manson
ever since Smithson disabled the MT Drive; there was neither the time nor the resources to destroy it. As She came over the horizon, it quietly disappeared, collapsing itself down to nothing.