Faith (43 page)

She fired the starboard manoeuvre drives, more gently this time. They fountained, and the
Charles Manson
moved—very slowly—to port. Kaang made some minor balancing adjustments to the ion drive, so the
Charles Manson
maintained distance at exactly eighty thousand feet, and began circling Her. On the Bridge screen they saw Her starboard manoeuvre drives fountain briefly, then cut; fountain again, then cut; and repeat the sequence, so that She turned minutely as the
Charles Manson
circled Her massively, always presenting Her starboard side. It linked them together, as if they were at opposite ends of the minute-hand of a giant clock face, they at the outer rim and She at the centre: a fixed relationship, defined by clockwork. They both knew it was a lie, and when she was ready, Kaang ended it.

She went straight to a hundred and ten percent ion drive and shot the
Charles Manson
down the invisible line of the minute hand. At sixteen hundred feet, when everyone expected Kaang to decelerate, she didn’t; she held the impossible speed but poured it into a series of rolls and slides and feints and somersaults which plunged them back seven years, to when she had first piloted the ship. She vectored the main drives to augment the manoeuvre drives, pushed the manoeuvre drives to thirty percent above danger level—two of the outlets burst after ten minutes, a third after fifteen minutes, and she ignored the alarms—and executed all her previous moves over and under and around Faith, but this time within the compass of only sixteen hundred feet, so She had less time to roll with the moves. But She did roll; although Her main drives were impaired Her manoeuvre drives were still operational, and they fountained in changing combinations up and down Her flank as She played them, just as Kaang did. The two ships tempted and toyed with each other as if they were knifeblades in the hands of two invisible but closely-matched opponents.
Her pilot,
thought Kaang after twenty minutes,
is good but he isn’t a freak like me. Why can’t I find another freak like me?

After twenty-three minutes alarms were sounding throughout the
Charles Manson
, the minor-damage alarms now joined by the deeper notes of hull-integrity warnings, and Kaang ignored them.
This will be difficult,
Foord had said,
She doesn’t want us there.
Kaang neither knew nor cared why. She had no idea what they’d see when she finally got them there, or what they’d do about it; that wasn’t her territory. She blocked out everything except the imperative to pile move upon move until they emerged on Her unseen port side, and as time went on—it was now over thirty minutes—each move was getting them closer, and each of Her rolls was getting a little later. A little closer to too late.

Kaang poured more and more moves into the compass of sixteen hundred feet. If she’d left a visible trail, it would have looked like the tangle of tractor beams. She knew the balance was shifting but her face remained expressionless. Her hands blurred over the panels of her console, bringing convulsions to the
Charles Manson
with every touch, but she still seemed unhurried. The alarms and hull-integrity notes and warning headups on the screen were multiplying, and Kaang continued to ignore them. With each move she built her advantage and edged closer to a final outflanking, but with each move something burst or broke or failed. She knew exactly what she was doing to the ship, without needing alarms or headups, and she knew she was getting close to its real limits. She knew, even better than Foord, that the
Charles Manson
was almost alive and she was almost killing it.

Kaang sensed what would happen next, just before it happened. Faith stopped firing Her manoevre drives; She had given up.

Kaang cut the move she had just started and let momentum take them, slowly, in an arc over Faith’s dorsal surfaces, and down, facing Her port side. On the Bridge, and up and down the length of the
Charles Manson
, seat harnesses burst open with hisses of compressed air. It was like the ship was letting out a breath.

Kaang finally brought them to rest, at a distance of exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet, and they saw.

4

The two great craters on Her port side, one amidships and one near the stern, were still there. She hadn’t miraculously repaired them. Around their edges, and in their interior where twisted latticeworks of substructures could still be glimpsed, the craters pulsed with the same unnameable colour. It shifted between all the colours they knew, without becoming any of them.

The craters went at least fifty feet into Her flank. Nothing poured out of them any more.They were filled with wreckage near Her surface, but the deeper they went the stranger they became. There was a darkness at the back of them which seemed either depthless or infinite: a curtain of something neither gas nor liquid nor solid, with a pattern of whorls like watered silk. It reminded Foord of the patterns on the endpapers of his father’s books.

The craters pulsed into and out of focus, their apparent depth growing and diminishing as the light inside them shifted. Sometimes they seemed only as deep as they really were. Sometimes they seemed deeper than Her hull was wide, making corridors into somewhere else which was also filled with wreckage, like cameras taking pictures of cameras taking pictures into infinity. Then the light would shift again, and the craters would return to what they really were: something that nobody had ever done to Her before.

The damage was not only in the craters. Around their edges the fabric of Her outer hull had been torn back so violently that it produced an effect of inversion, as though the two missiles had burst out of Her, not in. The dark swirling patterns covered Her port side more densely than Her starboard, and around the edges of the craters they were darkest and densest of all.

The damage was massive. But it looked like it had gone beyond damage, and become something else.

Something about the craters had started to worry Foord. Thahl too, because before Foord could ask him he superimposed on the Bridge screen an earlier image of the craters, when the missiles first hit Her. The ship picked up on Thahl’s request, and added text headups before Thahl asked for them.

The two craters had grown in area, by about two percent according to the headups; but they remained exactly the same shape as before, down to the smallest indentation, as though the present image was merely a slight magnification of the earlier one. They still looked like pulsing wounds, but wounds didn’t spread so uniformly. They had the appearance of stability; of balance. Of the achievement of steady state.

Steady State,
thought Foord, and froze as he started to understand.

“Commander,” Cyr said loudly, “we need your orders.”

Cold, organised shock hit Foord. It should almost have killed him, but it didn’t; instead it spread through him steadily and uniformly, a replica of what was happening in the craters. He’d just learned, as Thahl promised, something new about Her. Something truly new; and intimate, and obscene.

She’s eating Herself.

“Commander!” Cyr was shouting now. “We need your orders!” She turned to Thahl, and whispered “What’s eating him?”

“No orders,” Foord said quietly. “No questions. Please, listen to me.”

This, he told them, was how She could go on crawling through the Gulf to Sakhra when the damage they’d done should have destroyed Her. She’d reached a conclusion. For the first time someone had made Her fight for Her life, and She’d fought desperately and passionately; and this was how. This was where Her conclusion led.

She’d turned the craters into a controlled process of self-digestion, mass to energy.

He waved away their questions. Maybe where She comes from, he said, this is what every living thing does when it’s wounded: puts its muzzle into the wound and eats, to give the rest of itself, the unwounded part, strength to go crawling on. Maybe whoever built Her put replicas of that reflex into Her, as we put crude analogues of ours into our ships. And No, he said, I don’t have evidence. How could I, when nobody’s ever been able to probe Her? But you’ve seen what’s happened to Her since Horus 4, and I know I’m right.

Their questions died out.

Foord remembered a character in one of his father’s books, a minor Dickens character, who kept saying “If I’m wrong I’ll…I’ll
eat my head.”
The sheer impossibility of it had entranced him; he had pondered it for days. He thought,
If She ever reaches Sakhra at this crawling pace, She’ll have eaten Herself entirely and She won’t exist. Yes She will. What’s eaten will still exist, but it will be something quite different…

This wasn’t a frenzy of self-mutilation. It was steady and careful and measured. She was digesting the damaged parts of Herself at exactly the rate She needed to provide the energy to go on fighting, to go on crawling through the Gulf. Her motives were desperate but Her conclusion was cold and considered, and Her execution unfailingly accurate. Like everything She did.

Both his parents, in the later stages of the illness which finally took them, had fought a losing battle to keep their appearance. He’d pretended not to notice the incontinence-stains on their clothing, or their subterfuges to conceal them. This was similar: something private about Her which he shouldn’t have seen.

“What She’s doing to stay alive, Cyr, is in the craters. Go for the craters.”

•

For ten seconds, the golden light of the
Charles Manson
’s harmonic guns swept along Her flank, pumping their resonances into Her. She seemed to shudder, but it could have been the effect of the shifting colour from the craters. Lit by that colour, nothing seemed real or measurable.

Cyr fired the harmonic guns again, once, along and back. This time she also fired the Friendship guns (used only when close) at Her flank; they shot Jewel Boxes, self-guiding shells which on impact released jagged slivers of synthetic diamond able to shred almost any known surface. They didn’t shred Faith, but each one succeeded in digging a small shallow gash in Her flank, dislodging three or four of Her thumbnail hull plates, and that was enough for Cyr’s immediate purpose. There were nineteen such gashes in an irregular line along Her flank, between the midsection and stern craters.

Why doesn’t She respond?
thought Foord. Cyr was thinking the same thing, and added
Perhaps She already has.

Cyr launched a swarm of grapples across the sixteen hundred feet. She called them Hands of Friendship, diamond-tipped claws on the end of black monofilament lines which tumbled out like spider-secretions from ventral orifices on the
Charles Manson
. The claws were shaped like Sakhran hands, and were self-programmed to find any irregular surface, grip it, and never let go. One, and occasionally two, of them landed on each of the nineteen shallow gashes, and held. Now, Cyr thought, we’re directly touching Her.

Cyr’s long jewelled fingers played another combination of panels, opening another pattern of apertures on the
Charles Manson
, this time along the starboard midsection. The objects which emerged were globular and milky and quivering. They made their way towards Her like a slow-motion ejaculation, each one targeted at one of Her port manoeuvre drive outlets. Cyr called them Diamond Clasps, because they were plasmas of altered carbon which turned on impact into plugs of liquid, then solid, synthetic diamond. They landed on Her and dressed Her, covering each outlet with a brilliant sparkling scab. Two missed, but the other fifty-three landed accurately.

She responded. She must have known what was coming next—that Cyr would hold Her in position and attack the craters—yet it was strangely half-hearted. She fired just three of Her port manoeuvre drives, presumably to test whether She could dislodge the diamond scabs. She couldn’t; thin streams of drive emissions squirted from underneath them, but most of their force was contained. Then, using Her starboard manoeuvre drives only, She tried to roll away, but the claws and monofilament lines of the grapples held Her. She didn’t try again.

“Now the craters,” Foord whispered.

“This is too easy. Something’s wrong.”

“The craters!”

“Commander, it’s too easy. She wants us to go for the craters.”

“She wants you to think that, so you won’t go for them. You wanted my orders. Carry out my orders.”

Cyr hesitated. Something, perhaps Faith, was still telling her not to attack the craters directly. As her hand hovered over a panel she hadn’t pressed before, she thought
This may be wrong, it may keep Her alive.
She pressed the panel.

A long ventral aperture slid open, releasing an object like an ancient battering-ram, ninety feet long: a Diamond Cluster, a missile whose bulging warhead was a cluster of five hundred Jewel Boxes, which would explode their fractal diamond slivers simultaneously. It could shred any known Commonwealth ship. If it hit Her where She was already damaged, it should break Her in half.

It dropped out of the
Charles Manson
’s underside, made one calculated burst of its motors and went dark, crossing the sixteen hundred feet to Her. On the Bridge screen they watched it entering the midsection crater. It went deep inside until, like everything else in there, it passed beyond focus. The latticeworks of wreckage and shifting colour swirled and swallowed it, like it was entering a forest of seaweed.

It exploded, but not in a way which made any sense. First, the explosion blew
out
of the crater, not in. And second, it was hundreds of times slower than it should have been, so slow that it was drained of force. And third—

The pattern of force and fragments, of blast and flying diamond-slivers, which should have erupted
into
Her and should have been unstoppable, came blossoming
out
of the crater in a slow and syrupy and ever-widening funnel, almost a gesture, reaching out to the
Charles Manson
; then reversed itself. The huge burst-open body of the Diamond Cluster and its multiple warhead came back together, unexploded itself, and sank back into the midsection crater like treacle down a throat. They never saw it again. But the dark watered-silk patterns around the crater’s edges turned darker.