Faith (32 page)

And Thahl, the most shocking of all, because Foord had never heard him shout before.
Too early
,
it’s exploding too early, we haven’t reached the core yet and I’m not ready—

“Thahl?”

“Commander. I’m glad you’re back. I thought you’d gone away.”

“I thought so too.”

“Look out there, Commander. Look at what we’ve done.”

They were talking quietly together, as if nothing else existed; as if the ship wasn’t trying to collapse around them, as if the asteroid wasn’t trying to pull open the walls of Thahl’s Alley and make itself burst.

“So the beams—”

“Were too strong for it, Commander.”

Still, thought Foord, finishing each other’s sentences. “I didn’t think it would go quite so quickly, though.”

“Didn’t you? It was only an asteroid.”

They both shrugged, a gesture equally fitting as an end to their conversation, or to their years together; then they turned back to the Bridge screen, and considered what they had done.

The air changed. Thickness and slowness drained out of it. It turned sharp and crystalline. Light and events, having almost stopped, began to move again;
but away from each other
, parallelling the movement of each atom in the asteroid. They were all moving away from each other, like Sakhrans after reading the Book of Srahr.

Time restarted. Light shook itself free of the brown rotting gloom, crawled back through familiar pastels and burst into solar white, breeding new events like life-forms.

Thahl’s Alley opened out into light. Fault-lines radiated from it, reaching through the asteroid’s body like the fingers of a hand, and when they reached the surface the asteroid exploded, blowing through the fingers like sand.

6

Grains of sand.

Time restarted, multiplied, became abundant. Even events couldn’t breed fast enough to fill it, and as the asteroid exploded and the ship fought to outrun the explosion, Foord had time to reflect on those events: on their scale of magnitude. Scales of magnitude had occupied him a lot, ever since he saw a perfectly ordinary Class 037 cruiser pass endlessly overhead at Blentport.

When they approached the asteroid, it was breathing in long geological cycles, heaving its flanks in response to the Belt’s gravity. On a scale of magnitude, they and their ship were microbes in a phial, approaching a mountain.

Sometimes you could trust scales of magnitude. They were simple and linear. For example, two scorpions fighting. They would clack their claws and wave their stings, faces moving like gearboxes, while lesser things around them scurried away aghast. Then an elephant would step on them as it wandered by.

But sometimes, scales of magnitude were ambiguous, hinting that small events were the tip of something larger. For example, two animals glancing at each other, but they were the last dinosaur and the first mammal. Or a small pallid corpse on a beach, but the corpse of the first creature to crawl from the sea.

And sometimes, scales of magnitude were treacherous. They could turn full circle, letting the smallest overpower the largest. The microbes in the phial approaching the mountain were not themselves a threat, but they had
made
the phial which carried them, and it had the power to explode the mountain; and did so.

She remained at the outer edges of the Belt, still shrouded, and watched them. She had seen them execute a photon burst through the Belt, then burrow through an asteroid to explode it from within, and then try to outrun the resulting explosion. She still held all the advantages; they might not escape the explosion, and Her missile had come out of the asteroid with them and was still dogging them, and She knew they couldn’t shake it off. But still, they had done such things that She was beginning to take notice.

7

“This is the one,” Joser was saying “She intended for us this is the one.” He was trying to say something and didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t
that.
Every time he tried to speak to them it came out as those words, but it didn’t matter because nobody heard him or, at that time, even remembered him.

They ran, just ahead of the asteroid’s explosion. The Bridge was chaotic and unrecognisable. Part of the minor core which ran the Bridge’s gravity compensators had been damaged, and now was not the time to repair it. Things which had no business but to be fixed pieces of furniture and equipment had taken to an aerial existence, ricochetting off walls and ceilings like shoals of fish frightened one way and another. They went everywhere. Foord and the others were shouting, not in fear but in outrage that mere external events could dishevel them so.

After what they’d done it would have been fitting to have burst clear and to have seen the asteroid explode from a safe distance. It would even have been fitting, though less satisfactory, to have perished instantly in the centre of the explosion. The fact that their situation was neither of these, but something less than either, was an outrage.

They had burst clear of the explosion, but it had not stopped. It was gathering a wavefront behind them which was now racing and radiating through the Belt, so huge it would be visible to instruments on Sakhra. And their own instruments told them that if they ran as they were now—desperately, at ninety-five percent ion drive, because Thahl wasn’t Kaang and couldn’t use photon drive—then the wavefront would catch them before it dwindled to nothing.

It would hit them in about five minutes. They’d probably survive, the screen added insolently, but whether the damage would be serious or minor couldn’t be predicted.

So they ran, just ahead of the wavefront. How could one asteroid, however massive, go on and on exploding like that? It was throwing out more matter than it was made of. As though someone at the other end of the galaxy had found an MT wormhole where the asteroid exploded, and was throwing fresh debris down it. As though the people in the apartment next door had knocked a hole in the wall and were shovelling things through it: cans, and cornflake cartons, and cat litter, and condoms.

“And the third missile?”

“I already told you, Commander,” Smithson snapped. “We didn’t lose it. It’s still there, a ship’s-length away.”

“And damage reports? I want damage reports.”

“No
time
, Commander, it came out with us and it’s still there and it’s like none of this ever happened.”

“I said, damage reports. Cyr, closeup weapons; Thahl, try to lose it.”

“I’m already trying to lose it, Commander.”

“Like none of this happened,” Smithson muttered.

“And I’m already using closeup weapons,” Cyr said.
Just like before, and they didn’t work then either,
she thought, but didn’t say.

“The one She…”

Foord turned again to Smithson. “I said, Damage reports.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Look behind us.”

Her missile was still there, so close it filled half the rear screen. But behind it, filling the entire rear screen, was the wavefront which, like Foord’s elephant, threatened to squash them all without noticing. In about three minutes, added Smithson.

The wavefront rolled on and on. It seemed like it would reach back to Sakhra. They had already rewritten part of the map of the Belt, in the form of the asteroids they had vaporised; now, a bigger part was being rewritten right behind them, and seeking to include them.

That extraordinary missile, Foord mused, and that wavefront. Two ticking bombs.

“This is. The one She.”

Three, with Joser. Three was too many, so again he forgot Joser.

“Intended for us.”

“Thahl, use the last five percent ion drive, please.”

He did, and so did the missile.

Still stationary, relative to them. Filling half the rear screen. Neither gaining nor falling back. Like before, it had started deploying its flickerfields against Cyr’s attacks, and like before it stopped. No need. No time, either to drain it or destroy it. It had perhaps two or three percent ion drive left, and they had nothing. And two minutes from now the wavefront would catch them, and they had nothing for that either.

There was an impact, but not the missile; not yet. They had ploughed into some asteroid debris, and momentarily went reeling until Thahl righted them. The missile reeled and righted itself with them. More impacts. Thahl’s control of the ship was collapsing; he was fighting the collapse carefully and intelligently, but losing.

The Belt closed in on them. Asteroids and asteroid fragments came at them from ahead and above and below, looming and roaring and whipping past and leaving afterimages through which new ones loomed and roared. The Bridge screen listed them coldly and without comment as they passed, some of them the remains of those destroyed earlier. AN-4044, AL-4091, AD-2025. A series of minor impacts, and then something more serious, a sickening impact to port as they hit and glanced off a fragment from a smallish asteroid, AC-1954. Foord remembered that one. The alarms sounded:
real
damage.

“Port manoeuvre drives impaired, at least twenty percent,” Smithson said.

Foord shrugged. They didn’t, at that time, have any pressing need for manoeuvre drives. “And the wavefront?”

“Fifty seconds, Commander. But it’s dwindling.”

Joser tried again. He had something to tell Foord but not the words he’d been repeating. His mouth
his mouth
wouldn’t make any other words.

“This is the one She intended for us.”

He screamed, and it came out as those words. Shouted, and it came out as those words. Then he drew a last breath, dredged up all his willpower, dragged himself back to sanity, and spoke in clear ringing tones; but it came out as those words.

“This is the one She in
tend
ed for us. This is the one She in
tend
ed for us. This is the one She in
tend
ed for us.”

This the way the world ends, thought Foord, picking up the rhythm with a line of old poetry, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a

BANG.

It was, amazingly, the report of a pistol. A big, blue-black, old-fashioned pistol which Joser was holding. He had just shot himself in the temple, and seemed to be staring down at the pistol through his nostrils, since the half of his face which still remained began from the nostrils downwards. He slumped, and the seat took him.

His blood and brains, like Kaang’s faeces, went everywhere. As with Kaang, they turned away.

“She’s actually killed one of us,” Cyr said.

“She did that long ago,” Foord said, as the wavefront caught and hit them.

“And,” he added, “none of us is One Of Us.”

•

The wavefront was already dying. The further it reached the more insubstantial it became, until finally when it caught them it passed over them like sand. Their desperate flight from it had been just enough. The ship still spasmed as it hit, but the flickerfields held; and then it was gone, roaring past them and dwindling, in the forward screen, to nothing.

But the missile was still there.

“Smithson: damage reports, please.”

“Hull, rear dorsal section, and manoeuvre drives, port and rear dorsal. Nothing we couldn’t repair, if we had time.”

The Bridge was suddenly quieter. Foord watched the asteroids looming and whipping past. Despite what had happened, they seemed almost peaceful.

“Missile’s gaining. She’s decided it should hit now, I think.”

“Commander…” began Thahl.

“It’s OK. There’s no need.”

The grey ovoid swelled slowly in the rear screen, since its speed exceeded theirs by only one or two percent. Naturally they deployed their flickerfields, but were past surprise when it somehow slipped inside them; this was a missile like none they had ever encountered. They watched it grow larger, then blur prior to impact as it passed inside the screen’s final focus. But there was no explosion, just a soft
thump
; and something obscuring the rear screen.

“No. I don’t believe it.”

“What?” Foord said. “Who’s that speaking?”

“Slesar, Commander. Officer Joser’s deputy. I’m sorry, my call should have gone through to him.”

“Never mind that, what’s happened?”

“It’s on the screen, Commander.”

The rear Bridge screen refocussed, and became a stained-glass window of dark red and terracotta, of burnt umber and sienna streaked with ochre. Headup displays provided a spectrographic analysis, but it wasn’t necessary. As soon as Smithson started laughing, they knew.

The third missile had been packed full of shit, probably the last of Her stock from Isis. It was as though Kaang had returned to them, on a grand scale.

8

Two hours later, Kaang did return to the Bridge. She found that it and its occupants had changed; perhaps for better or worse, but certainly for good.

“Welcome back, Kaang.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

She stood in the main doorway, swaying slightly, and blinking at what she saw.

“Yes, I know,” Foord said, waving an arm around, “A mess.” His voice was still quiet, but he spoke more quickly, and with more emphasis, than she was used to. “One small repair, to one small gravity compensator, and all this debris would disappear. But I wanted it left like this. I
ordered
it left like this. I had my reasons. You’ll see.”

Joser’s body was gone—she knew about Joser—and the Bridge consoles were impeccably tidy as usual, but everything else seemed chaotic. Kaang was bewildered. She had never seen it like this.

“Thahl has rerouted the pilot’s functions back to your console, Kaang.”

She nodded and began to pick her way, slightly unsteadily, through the mess and wreckage. Foord took her arm—he had never touched her before—and walked alongside her. His movements were different, somehow more abrupt and jagged; she was used to him moving about his ship silently and carefully. He kicked pieces of debris out of the way, and led her (not directly, but following the walls) to her console.

The others nodded as she passed—she mouthed Thank You to Thahl—but said nothing. Their expressions were hard to read.