Faith (39 page)

They could see the
Charles Manson
in front of them, but they didn’t see it. They were not programmed to recognise it and not equipped to communicate with it. They didn’t know it had made them and launched them. They didn’t know about any of its sixty-two (previously sixty-three) living inhabitants. They didn’t know it existed.

They could see the grey flat face of Horus 4, but they didn’t see it. They were not programmed to recognise it and not equipped to feel its gravity. They didn’t know it existed.

They didn’t even know there were two of them. Each was the centre of its own universe, in which only one other thing existed, the shape they hadn’t seen yet. If they didn’t see Her soon, their orbits would decay and they would go down into the grey flat face they didn’t see, and would die before they attained their very limited life. And if they did see Her and did attain life, it would begin and end almost simultaneously.

Instruments of Themselves.

The crude shortrange lenses in their nosecones tracked endlessly back and forth, and still didn’t see Her. Their universe was empty. She had to come closer.

•

The Bridge screen displays showed that Her ion drive, which She had been using in reverse to maintain distance, was gradually reducing. She was closing the distance between them, slowly and apparently with caution. And She was still studying them, with the probes they couldn’t block, or detect, or trace back to Her. They could feel it.

“Everything,” Smithson was saying to Thahl, “comes down to those missiles.” As usual, he was irritating but right. “How are you sure She hasn’t seen them?”

“If She’d seen them,” Thahl said, “She’d know this is all a simulation and She’d destroy them. They’re inert and defenceless.”

Smithson grunted, but said nothing for the moment. Thahl reflected on Smithson’s wording: not Are You Sure but
How
Are You Sure, as if he wanted to avoid giving offence. Unusual for him.

“What if,” Smithson said suddenly, “She’s already launched missiles of Her own, similar to ours, and
they’re
waiting for
us
to come in range?”

“I’d considered that,” Thahl responded.

“And?”

“And I probed the areas around Her. Nothing.”

“They might have evaded you.”

“Then She’ll win.”

Smithson sighed theatrically. Foord said to him
“Listen.
We’re trapped in this orbit, and She’s coming closer, both of which we planned. If She’s seen our missiles, what do we do differently from what we’re doing now?”

“Particle beams?”

“No. We’ve been through that. We both fire our beams, we both use flickerfields, and we both keep our distance. That isn’t what we want. She has to come closer.”

“Is that what She wants?”

“Yes. She wants to finish us closeup, and She will if we’re trapped and vulnerable, and we’ve
made
ourselves trapped and vulnerable. She has to come closer.”

There were gasps from Cyr and Kaang, but when Foord turned quickly from Smithson to look at the screen, She was still there, unchanged.

“What happened?”

“Didn’t you see it, Commander?” Kaang asked.

“No, I wasn’t watching. Replay it, please.”

On the screen She
flicked
, like a visible hand on the end of an invisible arm, whipping sideways and instantly back to its previous position. It was over almost as soon as it began, and everything else was unchanged. The space between them was still closing, but slowly. The Bridge screen returned to real time.

“Has She ever done that before?”

“No, Commander. Not on any of the recordings.”

It was a strange unreadable movement
, thought Foord;
not done for us but for some purpose of Her own
. The way it ended immediately it had begun reminded him of the lifecycles of their two missiles. She has to come closer.

•

Minutes passed. Foord still had his erection; and the bitter taste in his mouth and along the sides of his tongue had returned, gradually stronger as She came gradually closer.

His head throbbed like his penis. His thoughts were slowing down, like an ancient clockwork. Every time one of his thoughts tried to move it tripped a counterweight and generated an equal and opposite thought. No it didn’t. He’d never felt like this before. Yes he had, on the occasions he’d caught himself looking at Cyr, and remembering the orphanage: first an arousal, then something darker, a need to open and penetrate and see underneath. He hadn’t done it with Cyr, but had to with Her. He was afraid not to.

The Bridge screen reduced its local magnification to keep the same image as She came closer. Her ion drive was still reducing. The ports and windows and apertures remained dark. Probes showed no evidence of Her weapons powering up, and no trace of any missiles like theirs, floating inert nearby; although, as Foord knew, their probes were not effective against Her.

“I want Her, Thahl. What do I do to bring Her closer?”

“She’s already closing, Commander.”

“Not fast enough. What do I do to bring Her closer?”

“Commander, don’t gamble. Not now. If She thinks we
want
Her closer…”

“I do want Her, Thahl…So something
opposite.
I don’t want Her.”

The taste along the sides of his tongue. His penis, pumping. Time to lay a card.

“We’ve changed our minds about fighting Her closeup. Haven’t we.”

Phrasing the question as a statement gave his voice a downward cadence at the end of the sentence. So did the deadpan recital of their motives, in the way he intended
She
would interpret them.

“We’ve seen Her and it’s affected us. Hasn’t it. Now all we want is to keep Her away. Don’t we. So we fire our beams.”

“That’s what I told you!” Smithson crowed. “It seems hours ago.”

“Commander,” Thahl whispered, “
don’t gamble.
You don’t need Her to come in faster.”

“Yes, I do
.
” Before I have time to think what it means to destroy Her. “Fire particle beams, please, Cyr.”

The beams lanced out, twice, across the piece of space that had set itself out between them. It was like they’d violated that space and the unwritten sharing of time. Foord didn’t care. Time was up for the sharing of time.

They watched the beams reach Her and watched Her flickerfields hold them easily. Then She reacted.

“She’s increased Her reverse ion drive,” Thahl said. “She’s moved back. I don’t think it’s worked.”

But it had. There was a brief pause while She hung at a fixed distance from them—as though She had drawn back to examine Her conclusion, one last time—and then the Bridge was full of murmuring alarms and headup displays recalibrating to accommodate what She did next. The Bridge screen needed no more shufflings of filters or local magnifications, because She filled it. She had switched Her ion drive to forward, fifty percent, and was coming straight at them.

The screen showed violet flickerings around Her hull as She powered up Her closeup weapons. That was almost reassuring; it was how they must look to Her, as they powered up theirs. Time to lay another card. Foord glanced at Cyr.

“Fire particle beams again, please.”

The beams lanced out. Again, She held them easily. As She did so, She came within visual range of the two missiles. They saw Her, and began and ended their lives.

From the two points where they floated, they erupted towards Her. Amazingly, as though She had the reflexes of a single living thing, She
whirled
in Her own length to face them, a move the
Charles Manson
could never have made; but they were nearly point-blank, and they both slammed into Her, the silent explosions of their impacts following as, nanoseconds too late, Her flickerfields came on.

Both missiles hit Her port side, the first amidships and the second, while She was still rolling from the first, near Her main drives at the stern. She continued to roll, bringing Her port side fully into their view, and they saw it, as if lit by a naked bulb swinging in a cellar: the enormity of what they had done to Her.

Two great craters had been hammered into Her hull, glowing in a colour they couldn’t name. Inside the craters they glimpsed for the first time what lay underneath Her surface, spidery substructures like their own. Bits of Her fountained out of the craters, turning end over end. They came in all shapes and sizes, and some were almost recognisable, like ordinary bits of wreckage from an ordinary ship; but

(Thahl got the Bridge screen to focus on them, and gestured wordlessly at Foord to look)

each piece of wreckage, whether it was a girder or a nut or a bolt—yes, She was made of things like that, as well as other unimaginable things—as soon as it left Her, reproduced in miniature the main damage to Her hull. Each piece, as it was thrown out, developed two craters in its side, and burnt away to nothing in the same unnameable colour as the craters they had hammered into Her.

Each piece, as it burnt away, was replaced by others which did the same, and others after that. The Bridge screen only focussed on the larger ones, but they were all burning away; and they were continuing to pour out of the craters, long after the missiles’ explosions died. Later the Bridge screen would analyse and calibrate every piece of wreckage, individually and exhaustively. It would report its findings upwards to its sentience core, which would report them upwards to the ship’s Codex, which after adding its own comments would report them further upwards to Foord and the others; and they would be no wiser then than they were now, watching it happen.

Thahl switched the Bridge screen back to the main view, where She was still rolling from the two impacts. The edges of the two craters in Her hull were
still
peeling back, pulsing like cell walls, as She completed the roll and Her port side passed out of their view.

She turned and ran. What was left of Her main drives flared, and She swung away, heading into Horus system and towards Sakhra. There was an oddness about how She moved, an asymmetric rolling produced by the way Her drives flared over the jagged wreckage at Her stern; asymmetric but repeated, the limping of something injured. They wouldn’t be able to follow Her until they reached the high point where they could break free of their orbit, but that hardly mattered. She was hurt, intimately and massively; and She was going into the Gulf between Horus system’s inner and outer planets, where She would have no cover.

Her screen image slowly receded, but She had left them something on the Bridge: a silence. It settled among them like another crew member.

It was one of the
Charles Manson
’s old silences, teeming with things unsaid. The reason for it, they all tried to persuade themselves, was Foord’s injunction: Kill your reactions. Kill them all. It fitted well, and each of them—including Foord himself—tried to take refuge in it, in the enormity of what they’d done. But it wasn’t real. There was no enormity. That was, literally, too large a word. What they had done felt smaller and dirtier.

It felt like it should never have happened. As if they were a gang of rapists, standing around after their victim had crawled away.

Later, the silence She left with them began to die.

“What have we done?” Kaang said.

“What we intended,” Cyr said.

“It felt wrong. Like it shouldn’t have happened.”

“Because nobody’s done it before.”

“And it’s trapped us,” Thahl said. “After this, we have to go on and destroy Her.”

“Or kill Her,” Smithson said. “It’s like She really is a living thing.”

“No,” Cyr said. “A ship, like us.”

“You saw those bits of wreckage.”

“Like us.”

“But what they
did—
”

“No!” Cyr snapped. “A ship. Like us.”

“Whatever She is,” Foord said, “I don’t want to know. I never have. I’m afraid of what we’d find.”

“Is that why the Department said don’t communicate with Her? Do they know what She is?”

“I don’t know, Cyr.” Foord glanced at Thahl, who for once would not meet his gaze. “But I’m afraid
not
to destroy Her.”

There was a pause. A piece of the silence broke off, like one of the pieces of Her wreckage, and began to die in the same way as the main silence.

PART EIGHT

1

T
hey reached the high point of their orbit around Horus 4, broke free without difficulty, and entered the Gulf. Later they got the first images of Her on the Bridge screen, crawling brokenly ahead of them. The two great craters on Her port side, midsection and stern, were still pulsing in the same unnameable colour, like chemical fires in a derelict building. Radiating out from them, and spreading over Her hull, were dark lines in swirling watered-silk patterns.

The Bridge screen patched in closeups. Her hull plates, the size of thumbnails, were diamond-shaped and bounded by submicroscopic hairlines which both joined and separated them. The dark swirling lines cut across these boundaries, and (from earlier time-lapse closeups) were spreading like a skin infection. Further from the craters they grew paler, their colour finally merging into the silver of Her hull.

Apart from the craters and the spreading dark lines, She showed nothing. No light or movement behind the windows and ports and apertures which punctuated Her hull, and no emissions other than the damaged main drive.

“A ship, like us,” Cyr said.

“Not like us,” Smithson said.

“Substructures,” Cyr said. “Windows. Ports. Drives. Even hull plates.”

“Not like us,” Smithson repeated.

“Something was in there once,” Kaang said. “I don’t think it’s there any more.”

Foord looked at her curiously.

“Body language, Commander. You can usually tell.”

“Cyr: particle beams, please.”

“I thought you wanted it closeup, Commander.”

“That’s all finished. Just destroy Her.”

The beams stabbed out. Her flickerfields deployed, and held them.