Faith (30 page)

At AC-1954, She had stopped running.

Cyr was surprised enough to glance up at Foord, but not enough to stop firing. Fourteen shots, fifteen.
What
, she wondered as she continued to fire, is She about to do that’s worth this drain on Her?

The same thought had occurred to Foord. “Joser, I expect this is another missile. Check it, please, will you?”

“Already done, Commander. It is a missile. Closing at twenty percent. Details and a visual will be on the screen shortly.”

“And the other missiles?”

“Other missiles, Commander?”

“Other missiles, Joser. Remember? She tries this every third or fourth time. The first one is a diversion for the others, coming in on parabolic courses while the first is on a straight course.”

That speech had taken Cyr up to twenty-three shots.

“I remember, Commander. I’ll find them.”

“Yes, I think you will. She used to run you ragged, but not any more. Perhaps when we have more time”—Foord was dangerously unaware, then, how little they had—“you’ll tell me how you did it.”

Thirty shots. She remained still, Her flickerfields holding the beams.

“Here are the details, Commander. Visual will follow.”

The Bridge screen displayed headups confirming the missile was under remote guidance from Faith, and showed its position and speed: 26-14-19 and closing, at ninety percent.

“
Ninety
percent!”

“It was twenty—”

“It’s now ninety, Joser. Impact in seventy-nine seconds, it says. Cyr,
get it
, please.”

(Smithson scowled at the headup display. “Something wrong about that missile,” he hissed at Joser. “It doesn’t
need
remote guidance. Too fast to manoeuvre, and on a straight course. So why guidance?” Joser shrugged, oddly and mechanically, as though remotely operated. Smithson turned to repeat the question to Foord, then decided not to. Oddly, he never knew why. It was one of his very few bad decisions.)

The long-range gas and semiconductor lasers lanced out at the missile, almost but not quite parallel to the particle beams which Cyr was still stabbing at Faith. The particle beams were malignant dull blue, the lasers brilliant white. The particle beams reached their target, the lasers didn’t. The approaching missile simply avoided them. It flicked to one side, let them pass by, and returned to its course. All at ninety percent.

Smithson swore. “
That’s
why remote guidance,” he muttered.

Joser’s expression was unreadable, almost shrouded. “Impact in sixty-four seconds.”

The missile was now visible on the Bridge screen—though Joser had omitted to supply local magnification—and the screen generated the usual side, ventral and dorsal images, and, unasked, added magnification: a grey ovoid, about twenty feet long, with no markings or external features. Considering what it had just done, it should not have looked so ordinary.

“Cyr,” Foord inquired, carefully—but his voice fooled nobody— “how can it do that?”

“Do you want it explained, Commander, or destroyed?”

Again the lasers lanced out. Again they missed.

“How can it do that?”

“Impact in forty-four seconds.”

“Oh,
fuck
you,” Cyr whispered, probably to herself. The missile’s performance was extraordinary, and whoever on Faith was guiding it was reacting so quickly that Cyr was actually firing lasers and missing—almost unheard-of, and she took it very personally.

The lasers lanced out again and again, and missed both times.

“Something
wrong
,” repeated Smithson. Joser did not reply; as the missile got closer, he seemed to get further away.

“Impact in thirty-seven seconds.”

“
Behind it!
” Smithson bellowed. “
Look behind it.
”

“Thahl,” Foord began, “can we—”

“Yes, Commander, we can outrun it. But if we run, we put Her out of beam range.”

“No!” Joser shouted, but only at Thahl’s grammar. “It’s not
it
, it’s
them
.” He paused, oddly, as though afraid of being overheard. “
There’s a second one
, Commander. Directly behind the first. Duplicating its movements. Hidden in its drive shadow. And when the first one’s destroyed, the second one will…”

Explosions flickered on-off
in front of them, knotting space like a muscle cramp.

“
Got you
, you bastard,” hissed Cyr, who after her setbacks had switched to shortrange crystal lasers and had simply kept firing.

“…the second one will come straight for us. Impact in nineteen seconds. I’m sorry, Commander.”

And as the second grey ovoid hurtled towards them through the wreckage of the first, something else flickered on-off: a glance between Smithson and Foord, concerning Joser. They left it unspoken. Other things mattered more, like the need to get out of Cyr’s way so she could defend them against a rapidly approaching, largely unexpected and wholly ridiculous death.

But now, perversely, Cyr was enjoying herself. The weapons array was her language, and she used it fluently. She composed in it. She hunted the second missile with every closeup weapon in her vocabulary. To the crystal lasers she added motive beams, harmonic guns, tanglers, disruptors and others; she put them together like words in a haiku, each one amplifying each other’s meaning until her composition grew dense and ferocious. She continued also to tap out an unwavering barrage of beam-firings directly at Faith, but that was only punctuation to the main composition. Cyr’s attack on the second missile was an almost perfect statement of her abilities. It lasted exactly nineteen seconds, and then the missile hit the
Charles Manson
; but it hit as a hundred pieces of wreckage.

And in its wake something else, equally alien, engulfed them. From his console in one of the weapons bays, Cyr’s deputy, Nemec, started cheering. Others on other parts of the ship heard and joined him. The sound was distant and tinny, at first difficult to recognise because even the comm channels which carried it to the Bridge were designed only for muted individual voices; but then, when Thahl formally confirmed only minimal impact damage, the congratulations redoubled and even spread, at first tentatively, to the Bridge.

It was Cyr’s moment and she basked in it, though not to the extent of forgetting her beam-firing. Seventy-two shots, said the screen headup display. Seventy-three.

Foord’s gaze flicked from the screen to Cyr; then to Joser, where it rested for a moment; then back to the screen. He stayed silent.

“…very fast and manoeuvrable,” Cyr was explaining to the Bridge in an it-was-nothing-really drawl, punctuated with glances at Foord, “but they had no flickerfields. They weren’t a new type of missile, just one of Her known types, but stripped down for speed—probably nothing but drives, warheads and guidance. They had no defences.”

“Like that kid you shot at Blentport.”

Seventy-eight, said the headup display. Cyr’s beam-firings did not waver, even after Foord’s remark. Seventy-nine.

Even Smithson gasped at what Foord had said. The Bridge fell silent, then the silence died down into uproar. Foord stopped it with a glance.

“Thahl, this is an emergency. Get us out of here, now!”

The manoeuvre drives fountained. The
Charles Manson
began to turn away—from Faith, who had seemed at its mercy, and from the nuzzling wreckage of Her missiles—and ran.

“Why?” Cyr demanded. “You ordered Her missiles destroyed and I destroyed them!”

“Two of them.” Foord laid the words down in front of her, like small corpses. “Ask Joser about the third.”

“
Third?
” Cyr screamed at Joser, then “Oh no.” She had seen Joser’s face.

“There’s no third missile,” Joser said with quiet precision.

“No,” Cyr kept saying, not to Joser but to herself. “No.”

“If there’s a third missile,” Joser said with quiet precision “the scanners will detect it.”

Thahl took the ion drive to ninety percent, almost as smoothly as Kaang. An hour seemed to pass.

“The scanners won’t detect it,” Joser said with quiet precision. He had just bitten completely through his lower lip. “Not this. This is the one She intended for us.”

Foord glanced at the headup display—now, at last, Cyr had stopped firing the particle beams; the count was eighty—and turned back to Joser.

“See,” he said. “What’s been done to us.”

He might have been talking to Joser about Faith, or to the rest of the Bridge about Joser. Both, suddenly, made sense.

They ran. At ninety percent ion drive Thahl took the
Charles Manson
back into the Belt, surrendering in seconds the ground they had won in penny pieces over hours, rolling and swerving at random because they might still evade whatever pursued them; they might have entire minutes left.

Foord looked at Joser. “I want you to relinquish scanners. Please hand them to Smithson.”

“The one She intended for us.”

Joser’s console went dark. He hadn’t relinquished —probably hadn’t heard —but Thahl did it for him, routing the scanners through to Smithson. Later, thought Foord, I’ll get him removed. But not now. Definitely not now.

“While Thahl is pilot,” Foord asked Smithson, “can you do scanners as well as drives?”

“Running out of people.”

“Can you do scanners as well as drives?”

“Of course I can, Commander. I can also take in your laundry, if you wish.”

“Two out of three will be enough.”

“Then forget the scanners and I’ll take in your laundry.”

“The one She intended for us.”

“Thahl,” began Foord, “could you…”

“Use photon drive? If you order it, Commander. But…”

“But you’re not Kaang.” At least, thought Foord, we still finish each other’s sentences.

Faith remained at rest, while they digested what She had done to them and tried to run from it. But what She had done was already inside them, ahead of Her missile. It concerned Joser.

•

They ran for ninety seconds, and were still alive. The Bridge screen showed the Belt corkscrewing around them. Thahl showed no obvious signs of stress, but he never did.

“Nothing yet,” Smithson said.

“The one She intended for us.” Joser was repeating the phrase as regularly as Cyr had repeated her beam-firings; and with the same accuracy. As far as they could, they ignored him.

Had She, thought Foord, somehow possessed Joser’s mind? That was the obvious explanation, but Foord knew it was wrong. The truth was more subtle, and much worse: not possessed it,
predicted
it. But so precisely that mere possession was unnecessary.

“Something out there,” Smithson said. “An echo. No, it’s gone. But the signature was unusual. It’s big.”

“The one She intended for us.”

“Stop saying that,” Cyr said.

“Leave him, he can’t hear you,” Smithson said.

“And anyway,” Foord added, “it’s all he’ll ever say.”

This was the first real event of the engagement; all the others had been fakes, fought in different languages. In their language Her attacks had been real, and had only just been beaten off by the abilities of Smithson, then Kaang, then Cyr. In Her language there had only ever been one attack, as gradual and patient as erosion, and She had directed it—all of it—at Joser.

“There, another echo!” Smithson shouted.

“The one…”

“Gone again. But it’s
big
.”

“…She intended for us.”

“I’d like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said.

The ship shuddered as it ploughed through some asteroid debris. Thahl quickly righted it.

Foord glanced at the screen. The speed was impossible. The Belt whipped past them, boiling, and flung bits of itself at them like antibodies. He knew Thahl couldn’t sustain this, but said nothing yet.

Merely being run ragged by an opponent’s superiority would not have done this to Joser. What She had used on him over all those hours was more than just technical superiority. His failure was not the cause of his collapse, only a symptom. He was finished long before then.

“More echoes,” Smithson said. “I think I can pinpoint it, though…”

She might have killed Joser there and then just by telling him what She was, but that wasn’t how She worked. Not by telepathy, and not by possession. The truth was more subtle, and much worse. She arranged the events he experienced; and then, because She knew him and knew all of them, She predicted, to the second, how he would react. She used events to make him believe, gradually, that he wasn’t as bad as the others believed him to be, or as he feared himself to be; She did it piece by piece, letting him see things on his inadequate scanners which She could easily have concealed. Then, when he’d started despite himself to believe, even to the point where he could exchange banter with Cyr, She dashed him by making him miss things he should easily have spotted, even on his inadequate scanners; and She predicted, down to the last second, when this would prove insupportable to him.

By the time Her third missile was launched, he was already finished.

“I need the missile’s position,” Foord said, a minute later. They were still alive.

“You can’t have it,” Smithson said.

“What?”

“It’s shrouded, so I’m only getting random echoes. You’ll get the position when I can trust our scanners.”

“Recall Kaang, Commander,” Cyr whispered.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Kaang’s not fit. There isn’t time.”

“There
already
isn’t time. Look at the screen. How long can Thahl keep doing this?”

“Smithson, we need that position.”

“Later. There are too many echoes.”

“The one…” Joser began.

“I’d really like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said, and this time he did stop, because they hit another swarm of asteroid debris, more heavily this time, and went reeling.

“The one…”

For entire seconds they were out of control, and then the manoeuvre drives fountained and Thahl started to right them, but Foord didn’t notice any of this. He had heard someone speak, just before the Impact alarms murmured.