Faith (3 page)

“I’ll fix it, Sergeant” Stockton said quietly. “I’ll get the
Charles Manson
for him.”

And somehow he did.

•

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I’ve been told I have an urgent personal call. May I take it?”

Foord raised an eyebrow—a gesture missed by most of those on the Bridge because of the soft lighting, though Thahl noted it—and said “Yes, of course. Do you wish to take it privately?”

“No thank you, Commander, I’ll take it here.”

He spoke softly into his comm, nodded, and waited. No call came through. A couple of minutes passed. The soft lighting seemed to darken, as if the Bridge had its own artificial summer evening. It turned almost to twilight. Movements flickered discreetly round its edges, and low nuanced voices murmured.

No call came. Sarabt had died before they could connect him.

PART TWO

“I
t won’t happen again” the convoy leader repeated. “Probably.”

“What caused it?” asked Copeland.

“A malfunction in the remote guidance system.”

“I didn’t ask what it was. I asked what caused it.”

“These malfunctions are quite common in freighters, Captain.”

“I’ll try again. What. Caused. It.”

Pause. “We don’t know.”

“You can’t be certain it wasn’t Her.”

The convoy leader stayed silent.

Come on
, Copeland thought,
it’s only a double negative
. But he didn’t bother to press for an answer.

It was Her.

In a convoy of thirty-one unmanned freighters, number Twenty-Nine had suddenly broken formation and embarked on a peregrination of its own for nearly three minutes, after which it had re-inserted itself in the line-ahead formation of the convoy. It was not uncommon for remotely-piloted freighters to do such things, and since returning it had responded perfectly to signals. There was absolutely no evidence that anything external was involved. And, at Copeland’s repeated insistence, they had checked and rechecked that, most thoroughly.

He knew it was Her.

“You can’t be certain it wasn’t Her! Probably Won’t Happen Again is no good to me!”

The convoy leader’s image, on Copeland’s small chair-side comm screen, showed none of the anxiety this outburst had caused among Copeland’s crew on the Bridge, only a dogged will not to be bullied; he was a civilian.

Copeland knew about civilian pilots, and knew about people who wouldn’t be bullied. He remained silent, and let his silence grow loud and long, never for a moment taking his eyes off the comm screen. Finally, the convoy leader started to fidget under his rancid gaze.

“Captain, I….”

“Until,” Copeland resumed, his voice now soft, “you can tell me exactly what caused the malfunction, I’m assuming it was Her. That means my ship remains on alert, and if any ship in your convoy breaks formation again I may order it destroyed. That includes the manned lead freighter.
Your
manned lead freighter.”

“Captain, I….”

“Stay on, I haven’t finished with you yet.”

Copeland was large and overweight, an unreasonable and fractious burden for his Captain’s chair, even though it was reinforced. He had the complexion of a piece of uncooked pork, and eyes like the heads of embedded maggots. His gaze switched abruptly from the chair-side comm screen to the main screen at the front of the Bridge, where the convoy of freighters, thirty-one idiot unmanned ships led by one idiot manned ship, stretched for miles, identical nose to identical tail. It continued to lumber on undisturbed, and Copeland continued to lumber in his chair, disturbed. He was not reassured. His instincts were usually pessimistic, and usually accurate.

He refocused his glare on the Bridge officers in front of him, silhouetted against the forward main screen, and barked “Status reports.”

“Scanners: there are no sightings. Maintaining alert.”

Copeland referred to his Bridge officers, and had them refer to themselves, by their function and not their name—an archaic military custom of which he was one of the few remaining practitioners.

“Weapons: everything powered up and on immediate readiness.”

“Engineering: immediate readiness on all drives.”

“Signals: maintaining open channels with Anubis 3 and 4. They detect no other ships.” Pause. “Convoy leader is waiting to report, Captain.”

Copeland swivelled to face the comm screen. His chair creaked as he did so.

“Convoy leader,” he intoned, “I’m pleased to tell you that I’m now able to accept your status report.”

The face on the screen started to frown, then thought better of it. Most ship’s captains took status reports at much longer intervals than this. Copeland took them every thirty or forty minutes; he treated them as recitations, to help him focus.

The convoy leader checked his own instruments. “We’re two hours twelve minutes from arrival at Anubis 4. Guidance systems are functioning. No further incidents. But…”

“Acknowledged.”

“But I respectfully request, once again, that you move your ship closer. We want a
proper
escort.”

“Respectfully denied.”

“Commander, Anubis 4 needs this convoy urgently.”

“Be precise. The convoy is going to the moon of Anubis 4. And it needs this convoy no more or less urgently than it needed any of the previous convoys.”

“Previous convoys were delivered before
She
started appearing. Do I have to remind you that you volunteered to handle the escort of this convoy yourself?”

“I volunteered because it was politically impossible to order any smaller ship to handle it.” And, he added to himself, no other ship in Anubis would have a chance, not if She appeared here. I won’t send others to certain death when I can send myself to, well, to perhaps not-quite-certain death.

“Captain, unless you give us closer escort I can only assume that you’re using us as bait! You’re inviting an attack.”

“I can hardly defend you without one.”

He slammed the channel shut before the convoy leader could see past the apparently clever rejoinder and realise that he meant Yes, I am. As the small comm screen went dark he scanned the unmoving silhouettes of his Bridge officers for any reaction. He found none. They knew exactly what he meant, but they felt his gaze on their backs and took care to remain like cardboard cutouts.

“Pilot, he said two hours twelve minutes until Anubis 4. Is that accurate?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“It’s too long.”

“It’s as fast as the convoy will go, Captain.”

Copeland’s disgusted snort was violent enough to jerk his body, which in turn brought a creak from the contour chair on which he was beached untidily and asymmetrically. Over the last hours the creak of the chair had assumed the character of a second voice, prefacing and echoing his shifts of mood (and of posture, which was the same thing) like an extra person, a familiar. The Bridge officers tensed when they heard it, then cancelled their tensing, then grew tenser in case he had spotted their tension before they cancelled it. It was a process which came close to perpetual motion.

Some members of his crew asserted that Copeland’s mind was as small as his body was large, others that it was as agile as his body was ponderous. He knew of the existence of both opinions and took care to ignore them equally.

•

Anubis and Isis were both ex-Sakhran systems: much larger than the almost negligible Bast, but much smaller than Horus, the Sakhrans’ home system.

Bast, where the
Pallas
had been destroyed, was light-years away. The Commonwealth spanned twenty-nine solar systems; but the MT Drive, discovered almost by accident three centuries ago, compressed the spaces between solar systems to nothing, and removed distances from awareness. So, when the other twenty-eight systems got news of what had happened in Bast, it was like hearing muffled sounds in another room of the same darkened house.

The news had reached the
Wulf
, Copeland’s ship, just after it passed the mid-point of its journey from Anubis 3, the system’s major planet, to the moon of Anubis 4. Copeland had promptly gone to full alert, dropped back from the convoy, and waited for the equivalent of footsteps in the hall and the turning of a door-handle.

He knew it was Her.

He knew She was in the system. Even before he heard about the events in Bast, he knew She would be coming, not just to this system but for
this convoy.
That was why he overrode the normal protocols and transferred escort duty from the small Class 072, which would normally have done it, to his own ship. The
Wulf
was a Class 095 cruiser, by far the highest designation in the small Anubis Fleet which, until now, had been more than sufficient for the security of the system. It was a silver needle nearly fifteen hundred feet long, as small and predatory in the wake of the freighters as a Sakhran stalking a herd of herbivores. It had three-percent sentience.

The
Wulf
maintained speed and distance from the freighters, enough of each to be ambiguous: it might be guarding them, stalking them, or playing them out as bait. Copeland wanted Her. It might be a match. Fifteen hundred feet was about the same size as She was; without Her extraordinary abilities, of course, but with
his
unusual instincts.

Copeland had commanded the
Wulf
for years. Now, for what it was worth, he could claim to be the greatest living authority on its construction and performance. It was his ship; he and it, like a long-married couple, had moulded their lives to each other. If it was physically possible, they would have started to look alike.

His brother, fifteen years his junior, had recently accepted command of a Class 097 in the huge Horus Fleet; he was the first of his family to leave Anubis for a century, but Copeland was not envious. Horus Fleet had problems of its own. An alien ship.
Two
alien ships, the first an Outsider sent by Earth to engage the second, sent by nobody knew who. But She hadn’t gone to Horus, not yet; She would come
here
first, or so his instincts told him.

How would She make Herself known? Her firepower and performance were at least equal to an Outsider. And, since nobody knew where She came from or what She was, there were other abilities which were almost unguessable: shrouding, communications, unprecedented tactical shifts. How would She make Herself known, in
this
system, when She moved against
this
convoy?

Anubis 4, the system’s outer planet, was a gas giant. Unusually, it had only one moon: airless and featureless, but with huge deposits of bauxite and associated minerals. This convoy, like the three previous ones, was intended to land on the moon where its cargo, and the freighters themselves, would be used to construct a large extraction plant and mining complex. Construction was already well under way; when it was finished it would probably get a proper city name, but until then it was simply called Khan’s, after the geophysicist who had founded it.

The freighters, like those before them, would be cannibalised for the mining complex; they would never leave the moon.

From time to time, communications had been disrupted by bursts of static. Copeland, suspicious enough already, had become even more so when freighter Twenty-Nine experienced its guidance malfunction. That too, they had told him, like the static bursts, was probably caused by electrical discharges from Anubis 4—normal on gas giants, and likely to increase the closer they got. He had not been reassured; nothing ever fully reassured him. After a particularly strong burst of static, they had even proved to him that there was a correlation with some sudden turbulence in Anubis 4’s atmosphere at exactly the same time. He accepted what they said, but then started watching Anubis 4’s cloud cover in case
She
was manipulating it.

He knew She was there. He knew She would come for them. He didn’t know what She would do, but he suspected it would be almost anything. She was like the bastard child of Moby Dick and Kafka: invincible and strange.

“Further orders, Captain?”

“She’s there somewhere. Worry about Her.”

For the next hour his orders were scrupulously observed. His eyes, from their two open graves in his face, watched the forward screen almost without pause. Occasionally other crew members would enter the Bridge on routine business, but they gave or took their messages in whispers and with glances back at him—an indication of his contagious mood. Even during a formal alert, the Bridge of any warship, except an Outsider, remained accessible for legitimate errands, and was usually bustling. The Bridge of the
Wulf
, without any explicit orders from Copeland, had become like the Bridge of an Outsider: quiet, withdrawn, a place where communication was sparse and nuanced.

The hour started to stretch out. His instincts had produced the mood which infected the rest of them, and made time pass so uncomfortably, but nevertheless most of them trusted his instincts—a trust justified when, just as the hour passed, he activated the alarms and yelled for battle stations, moments
before
the screen showed the convoy breaking up.

•

“Freighters Twenty, Twenty-Four and Twenty-Nine no longer respond to signals,” the convoy leader yelled. “This isn’t like the last time. They aren’t coming back. Their remote guidance systems have been completely burned out.”

“It
is
like the last time,” Copeland said, “because you don’t know what caused it or where it came from. Do you?”

“No, Captain, but I’ve ordered members of my crew to board them and take them in manually.”

“Cancel those orders.”

“But…..”

“I’m taking personal command of those three. Re-form your convoy without them and get under way.”

Copeland cut the connection and watched on the forward screen as the line of freighters moved slowly ahead; automatic filters on the screen compensated for the brief sequential blaze, one by one, of their crude chemical motors. The three which had broken formation stayed where they were, a tight huddled knot of spheres and girders behind the main line of the convoy, like the dot at the bottom of an exclamation mark.