Faith (46 page)

Cyr pressed a panel. The motors round the rims fired once and went dark. The Prayer Wheels glided slowly, and on diverging paths, towards the midsection and stern craters. Faith seemed not to have noticed them. They passed three hundred feet, then six hundred and nine hundred. Twelve hundred. The light in the craters glowed. As the Prayer Wheels got closer, the light formed a backdrop against which they became diminishing silhouettes.

At fourteen hundred feet Cyr fired the final course adjustment; the motors flared and died. She glanced at Foord, on an impulse mouthed Varicose Veins, and pressed another panel. The Prayer Wheels started to turn. The dark metal of their rims became transluscent and glowed pearl-white as they began generating stasis fields. The motors and guidance systems exploded silently off the rims. The Prayer Wheels entered the craters and were swallowed.

That was not what they’d expected. They’d expected Her to realise what they were doing, and to try flight, evasion, counterattack, anything, to prevent it. If She didn’t it meant either that they’d genuinely surprised Her (for the third time—first the photon burst, then the two missiles) or that it wouldn’t work. But it
is
working, thought Foord exultantly, as he saw things on the Bridge screen he’d never expected to see.

The dark swirling patterns on Her flank grew faint, then darkened and grew faint again. The nameless colour which both lit and obscured the two craters died, then flared and died again. She started to do the things She should have done before. She fired Her manoeuvre drives in sequence and tried to roll so the
Charles Manson
wouldn’t be facing the craters, but Kaang rolled with Her, maintaining relative position and distance—still exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet—and the light in the craters flared and died again. She pushed Her speed to fifty percent and Kaang matched Her. She stopped dead and resumed at forty-five percent, and Kaang stopped dead and resumed with Her. She fired Her manoeuvre drives at random—two of them exploded, bursting their diamond caps—trying to roll or pitch or yaw in any direction which would take the
Charles Manson
away from the craters, but Kaang mirrored everything She did; sometimes, it seemed, before She did it, as if Kaang was taking the lead and making Her follow. The two craters flared one more time, and went dark. The patterns over Her flank darkened one more time and went pale. Another of Her manoeuvre drives exploded, this one near the stern crater, and pieces of wreckage fountained out from Her. The Bridge screen tracked them. Each piece grew two replica craters of its own, but this time they flared once and went dark, like eyes closing.

She seemed to give up, as She had done once before against Kaang, and let them fly alongside Her. Cyr pressed a series of panels, and two of the
Charles Manson
’s main ventral launch bays opened. Objects dropped out of them, fired once and made their way towards Her.

In the few seconds before Cyr’s attack hit Her, they had time to look into the craters. Both of them were lit, not by the unnameable colour but by the weak pearlescent flicker of the Prayer Wheels deep inside them (
another naked bulb in a cellar
, thought Foord) and they saw, despite all the ways in which She was utterly unlike them, a piece of their own likeness. She too was packed solid, almost to dwarf-star density. The stern crater was packed with the cathedral slabs of Her main drive housings, the midsection crater with a melted chaos of cables and conduits, like a bucket of dead eels; and both craters with broken latticeworks of structural girders, even with the same H cross-section as their counterparts on the
Charles Manson
. Angles were random and contradictory. Everything had flowed into everything else and frozen at the instant of melting. Escher and Dalí.

The furthest recesses of each crater were still out of focus, obscured and sealed by the darkness whose surface swirled with watered-silk patterns. If She had a crew, some of them would have moved through these areas; but nothing had kept enough shape to be corridors or doors or anything else recognisable. Or to be their bodies.
We
did that, thought Foord, and then he froze as another thought came, a very unwelcome one.

Maybe we only damaged Her outside, not Her inside. Maybe this is how Her inside
really
is. Maybe She always carries this chaos inside Her.

•

Cyr watched the two ninety-foot Diamond Clusters she had just launched, the last two the
Charles Manson
carried. Like the Prayer Wheels they had fired once and were now gliding on diverging paths towards the two craters. Like the Prayer Wheels, She must have seen them coming and should have responded but did not. Cyr had told Foord they were the best weapon to follow the Prayer Wheels into the craters. Foord still wanted beams, but Cyr persuaded him. She
knew
that energy weapons in the craters would be wrong.

Cyr watched the two of them, and watched her instruments; she calculated that if Faith continued to do nothing, no final course correction would be needed. As with the Prayer Wheels, there was a moment when She could have tried rolling away, and everything would then have depended on Cyr’s preparations and Kaang’s reactions; but the moment passed. The two ninety-foot missiles reached Her and slowly entered the craters and continued and continued to enter until their entire lengths were swallowed.
And this time,
Cyr thought as she watched them explode,
You can swallow but you can’t digest.

They were simple explosions, massive but conventional, not linked to MT physics in any way and not affected by the stasis fields. They flashed On-Off in a nanosecond, On to light the two craters with fire—almost a mundane colour after the colour which had previously lit them—and Off to leave them lit again only by the flicker of the Prayer Wheels, which generated their own space-time and were untouched by non-MT events around them.

This time the explosions went
into
Her, the way they should have done before, and She had no means of reversing them or slowing them, but the explosions themselves would not have damaged Her. It was what they released into Her, a million fractal diamond razors the size of Sakhran claws, flying through Her at a million times the speed She had slowed them to last time. They were a simple physical weapon, carried to massive extremes. Their eruption and flight inside Her had already happened. It would have lasted only another nanosecond after the two explosions, On-Off in their afterimage. If She had been a Commonwealth ship, even a battleship—or even an Outsider—She would have broken in half. Because She was not, Cyr had the next attack already prepared for the craters; and, if necessary, the one after that and the one after that.

She came to a halt, and the
Charles Manson
halted with Her. Alarms murmured on the Bridge. Whatever had happened inside Her, found no other expression outside.

Alarms murmured again. She started to move forward slowly, at twenty percent. The
Charles Manson
parallelled Her. She showed nothing they could read, either as life or death. Maybe the diamond razors had shredded Her interior and crew, and She was moving only on automatic, or maybe they had failed. As usual, She gave them nothing. Her interior, like SchrÖdinger’s cat, was neither dead nor alive, but something else which might become either.

Cyr and Foord exchanged glances.

“Commander, do we still…”

“Yes. What else is there?”

Cyr pressed some more panels, and the next attack began. Blisters rose and opened along the topsurface of the
Charles Manson
’s hull. Their three hundred remaining spiders swarmed out, fired their onboard motors, and made for the midsection crater. It was something Cyr and Foord had both wanted: to do to Her what She had done to them, to assault Her internally and intimately. Always attack the wound, Cyr said.

“Cyr,” said Foord, “if this doesn’t work…”

“I know. I have the next attacks ready.”

The dark gunmetal spiders fanned out as they crossed the sixteen hundred feet. They were silhouetted against the silver of Her hull as they floated slowly towards Her. Many of them were missing limbs. As they neared the midsection crater they fired their motors and funnelled into a narrower formation—almost a coiled rope, like the one She had taken into Herself. Their silhouettes became less distinct as they came within the compass of the crater’s backdrop, where only the flicker of the Prayer Wheels illuminated them. The mouth of the crater was almost the same colour they were.

The slowness and uncertainty of what they were doing made Foord suddenly tired. He looked across the sixteen hundred feet and almost prayed to Her, Respond.

The alarms had earlier murmured on the Bridge, like polite punctuations to the other conversations, but now they shouted. Both craters, stern and midsection, were black. At last, She had neutralised the stasis fields, and the weak illumination from the Prayer Wheels had died.

Cyr glanced at Foord. He shook his head, No.

“Hold them back, Cyr. Don’t let them enter the crater. Not until…”

He had expected to see both craters re-ignite with the unnameable colour, and to see the dark swirling patterns reappear over Her hull, indicating the resumption of Her mass-to-energy processes. So had the Bridge screen, which patched in local magnifications of both craters and of Her hull around them, but nothing showed. At least, nothing they expected.

The midsection crater filled with shivering white light. It was so bright it hit them like a wind, crossing the space between them with almost physical force so they expected the
Charles Manson
to rock. It was like a billion arc lights. It silhouetted the floating bodies of the spiders, reaching itself and their shadows back at the
Charles Manson
like alternate dark and light fingers, projecting their silhouettes onto the
Charles Manson
’s flank in a broken rewriting of the earlier dark patterns on Hers.

And it was only the midsection crater, not the stern. That remained dark. Foord had glanced back at the stern crater to check, and so missed what happened next at the midsection, and found himself wondering what the alarms and shouting were about until he looked back to the midsection crater and saw the figure which walked out of it—
walked,
not crawled—and which was now standing in the crater’s mouth, looking at them across the sixteen hundred feet.

It was human-sized, and human-shaped.

It was human, and they recognised it.

6

“It’s a good analysis,” said the voice, “of the events at Horus 5 and the Belt and Horus 4. The last bit, in the Gulf, is harder to read. Our analysts see it differently to yours.”

“
Our
analysts,” Swann said, “had to work from limited information. From long-range monitoring of drive emissions, from radio and optical telescopes on Sakhra, and a few remote probes that happened to be in the system. We had no ships in the area, because
you
”—he tried to keep his voice even—“because you told us to recall them and deploy them around Sakhra. If you have a different view of what’s happening in the Gulf, it’s because you know more about it than we do. For once, just say yes or no.”

Swann’s Command Centre at Blent was full of screens, most of them showing live feeds of events around Sakhra which he didn’t want to see, but Swann was speaking not into a screen but into a—superficially, at least—old-fashioned microphone. The Department of Administrative Affairs didn’t do faces on screens. It only did voices on mikes.

“Yes, of course we do. We’d hardly build things like the Outsiders and not build in ways of monitoring them. Just because Foord has killed all communications—by the way, with us as well as you—”

“We have only your word for that,” Swann said, then wished he hadn’t. His voice wasn’t shrill, but the remark was.

“Just because Foord has killed all communications,” the voice went on evenly, “doesn’t mean we can’t track him. He knows that, of course. He’s neutralised some of our devices, but not all of them. And Joser wasn’t the only observer we had on the
Charles Manson
. Foord knows that, too.”

“So you have information which we don’t about what those two ships are doing in the Gulf. I insist you share it.”

“Insist?”

The days Swann had spent in the Command Centre, since Boussaid’s death and since the
Charles Manson
had left to engage Her alone, seemed longer than the rest of his life. They stretched back behind him, worrying and unfathomable, noisy and fetid. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes. Neither, by his orders, had any of his staff—the military and security people he’d charged with monitoring events on Sakhra, the communications people he’d charged with tracking the
Charles Manson
’s engagement of Faith, and the mission analysts he’d charged with interpreting it. Their cups and meal trays and half-used toiletries were strewn over the floor, left where they fell. The atmosphere was as thick and furry as the inside of his mouth.

Without any possibility of realising it, Swann had done to the Command Centre what Foord had done to the Bridge of the
Charles Manson
.

“We have an apparently invincible opponent,” Swann said. “She’s entered the outer reaches of Horus system, almost certainly to attack Sakhra. The only ship with any chance of defeating Her has, on your orders, engaged Her alone. According to our analyses She’s made the
Charles Manson
shut down its MT Drive, execute a photon burst through the Belt, and burrow through a large asteroid. Then, apparently, Foord succeeded in damaging Her at Horus 4.” Swann became aware that he’d been counting the points on his fingers, the nails of which were stained and bitten; Foord’s hands, he remembered, were always immaculate. “And now there’s a series of strange closeup exchanges between them in the Gulf, and those two ships are travelling alongside each other. Through the Gulf. Towards
us.
And Foord won’t communicate. Maybe it’s not just one invincible opponent coming for us, but two.
Yes,
I said Insist!”