Faith (16 page)

A few shots were fired in the air and the crowds fell back. Immediately, the escort vehicles broke their circle and moved forwards toward the midpoint of the
Charles Manson
’s hull, noticeably not threatening any collisions with people or things as they had done before. They moved for the exact point on the hull, about midway, where Foord had told them the main airlock was located, though there was no interruption of the hull’s surface and no external marking to indicate this.

The ship, which dwarfed everything else on the Grid, was the least noticeable thing there; it made no movement or noise.

The soldiers funnelled back to plug the gaps between the escort vehicles, apparently without any order being given. The clatter of their weapons and shuffling of their boots as they made final positional adjustments died out only seconds after the brief roar of the escort vehicles’ engines, and the first warning shots, also died.

They weren’t funny anymore. In less than half a minute, and without overturning anything or setting anything on fire, they consolidated their final position—a gauntlet between the landchariot and the
Charles Manson
, a fifty-metre avenue lined so deeply on either side with vehicles and armed men that the crowd beyond it was largely obscured. And whether by accident, or as a final gesture in the last wavering moments of their protection, almost as many guns seemed to be pointing inwards as outwards.

Conventionally, the inactivity of the
Charles Manson
should have seemed menacing, but the ship’s silence and immobility was so profound it seemed to come from inside, as though its interior had been swept by an instantly fatal disease. It had done nothing while a near-riot boiled around it. It had done nothing while the gauntlet was formed and the escort vehicles had charged directly at it, the two vehicles leading each of the gauntlet’s parallel lines slewing to a halt only moments before collision. It had done nothing while Boussaid, who was the first out of one of the two lead vehicles, ordered a few of his men to assemble where the main airlock was located and to guard it. Foord noticed there were as many guns pointing at the airlock as there were pointing at the crowd. He snapped open his wristcom.

“You never told me the bit about covering our airlock. I assume that’s for appearance.”

“Look at them, Commander. Appearance is double-edged.”

Foord closed his wristcom, frowning at whatever it was Boussaid had meant, and glimpsed through the forward window a flicker of muscles in the driver’s neck and shoulders—this time he did not use the whip, merely jerked the reins—and they moved forward. Right to the end, Foord thought, the driver timed the landchariot’s moves with absolute precision.

The landchariot eased forward between the lines of the gauntlet, creaking and rattling in the sudden silence and dropping bits of dirt behind it. Fitful movements rippled along the lines in its wake as people craned and dodged to see inside it. The chimaera breathed heavily and rhythmically as they walked, like masturbating dinosaurs; for them, it was the last stage of a long journey.

Still the
Charles Manson
’s airlock did not open.

The overhang of the
Charles Manson
’s hull was a sheer silver cliff-face. It dwarfed everything else on the Grid, but its silence and stillness was profound; there were times when Foord almost doubted it was there. The landchariot reached it and halted. Foord took a final look at the web in the corner of the side window—he had no way of telling whether it looked back at him—and glanced across at Thahl, who nodded.

Thahl was careful to step out first. He helped Foord down and followed an unwavering three paces behind, a quiet slight figure, as Foord walked round to the front of the landchariot.

Boussaid had already detached himself from the group at the airlock and had taken a couple of steps forward, but paused at a gesture from Foord, who turned and looked up at the Sakhran driver.

“Don’t, Commander, it
isn’t necessary
,” Thahl hissed, but Foord ignored him.

“I understand you don’t speak Commonwealth,” he said to the driver.

The driver gazed down at him, closely but without expression, and apparently confirmed this by not replying.

Thahl stayed where he was, watching Boussaid (who had stepped back to rejoin the group covering the airlock) and Foord; he had become absorbed in the calculation of relative angles and distances between himself, Foord, Boussaid, the airlock and the two lines of the gauntlet. He knew that Foord was still talking to the driver, but had stopped listening; the words didn’t interest him.

“I speak enough Sakhran,” Foord was saying, “to say Thank You, but somehow that would seem patronising. So…”

The driver did not open his mouth, even to spit, but his gaze, dark and expressionless, never left Foord. His secondary eyelids flickered horizontally. The Grid was silent for the moment and the chimaera started to shuffle restlessly, as if in embarrassment. One of them farted.

Three paces behind Foord, Thahl completed his calculations.

“So…”

Foord floundered; the words wouldn’t come. He was still floundering as the driver died. A sliver of barbed stainless steel from somebody’s needlegun—it was impossible to say whose because needleguns discharged silently, but they were standard issue for Horus Fleet crew, and for Blentport garrison—nuzzled greedily into his throat, sweeping him from the landchariot to fall in a crabbed heap at the feet of Thahl, who leaped the corpse without looking at it and made straight for Boussaid.

The difference between Thahl and everybody else was less than a second. While the first long second after the shot was still beginning, and while the reactions of everybody else were still beginning with it, Thahl whipped between their not-yet-moving bodies like a cat between dustbins and reached Boussaid. Normal time returned. In the middle of the group covering the airlock were Boussaid and Thahl. Boussaid had fallen to his knees and Thahl stood behind him, his left hand pulling Boussaid’s head back by the hair while the unsheathed claws of his right hand were touching, but not yet piercing, his throat. Had the two soldiers who were closest to Boussaid and quickest to spring to his aid been able to stop themselves when the poison claws were unsheathed, they would have done so; but they were built on the same scale as Foord, and their momentum was irreversible. They came at Thahl from behind. He dropped them both, one with the heel of his right foot and the other with the elbow of his left arm, without turning to face them and without breaking his grip on Boussaid, to whom he returned his full attention before either of them hit the ground. He had understood that they would have pulled back if possible, and had taken care not to kill them.

Thahl knew, because he had calculated, that he probably had no more than twenty seconds to live. The guns of Boussaid’s troops were trained on him from all sides—those around him and Boussaid swung away from the airlock and towards him, and those along the twin lines of the gauntlet followed soon after. He settled down to wait for the shock of what he had done, and the mixed motives of those with the guns, to corrode their hesitation.

It was impossible, and had never been his intention, to shelter behind Boussaid. He was an open target. Nobody had yet fired because his claws remained at Boussaid’s throat, as precise as micromanipulators; but not all of them regarded the safe return of Foord, or the survival of Boussaid, as a priority. Once they had thought that through, somebody—perhaps whoever had shot the driver—would turn his gun on Thahl, or on Foord, standing alone and all but forgotten near the landchariot, or even on Boussaid himself. It would take, Thahl estimated, about twenty seconds. (Foord made it ten to fifteen, because from where he was standing he could see something Thahl could not see: a look almost of acceptance on Boussaid’s face, as though he had known all along that he would have to die to get them across the last few metres to the ship. Foord remembered the photograph in his office, and his heart almost burst.)

Then, at last, the
Charles Manson
came to life.

There was something alien about the ship’s instant shift from extreme silence to extreme action. It was unrelated in scale to any external event; it was not caused or provoked; it did not build up in any stages of lesser action, which might at least have been understood as a response or warning. It was abrupt and jagged, like the darting of a tarantula.

The
Charles Manson
’s hull was no longer featureless or quiet. Blaring with lights and alarms, throbbing as if with disease, it sprouted blisters which swelled and split open to reveal the mouths and lips and orifices of its closeup weapons array. Nobody had even bothered to preset them on particular targets. Some of them tracked backwards and forwards or up and down, others were aimed directly into the Grid, others vaguely into thin air. It did not matter. There were proximity lasers, coilguns, tanglers, friendship guns, disruptors, breathtakers, harmonic guns, motive beams, and others whose use in a confined area on a planetary surface would have been excessive even if the
Charles Manson
were under direct attack from the whole of Horus Fleet; and they sprouted from a ship crewed by people who had lost, or never had, the motives of people. Thahl had designed his move on Boussaid to win a specific period of time, a period he had calculated to within seconds; now, it seemed, there was all the time in the world.

The main airlock irised open. A ramp tongued out of it to the ground. Many of the
Charles Manson
’s crew of sixty-three had, like Foord, received Special Forces training, and now ten of them moved quickly, but carefully, down the ramp to surround and cover the group around the airlock, the group in whose midst were Thahl and Boussaid. Behind them at the top of the ramp stood Cyr, darkly beautiful, carrying a single handgun with which she motioned Foord to come aboard, and behind her was the
Charles Manson
, massive and motiveless, threatening everything and explaining nothing.

One by one, the men surrounding Thahl laid down their weapons. Some of those along the lines of the gauntlet did the same, but others kept their guns trained on Thahl, or swung them round to cover Foord as he started walking. Thahl read their postures carefully, remembering that postures were not, as with Sakhrans, an auxiliary language, and tried to anticipate which of them would fire first and at who. His grip on Boussaid neither tightened nor relaxed.

As he walked towards his ship—now such a short distance, the last few metres of a long and unpleasant journey—Foord was trying to anticipate the same event as Thahl. If anyone did shoot, he thought it would be one of those in the lines of the gauntlet. It might be a shot in the back—in which case he could do nothing, short of walking to his ship backwards, which he did not intend to do—but that would be relatively deliberate, and on balance less likely. No, if it happened it would be someone’s judgement snapping, the act of someone who had endured all this but could not endure seeing him walk past unharmed; perhaps a shot from ahead, but more likely from either side, where he felt faces and gun-barrels swivel as he passed, as if each one was connected to him by gossamer wires, anchored in his flesh with little pins.

His calculations were less exact than Thahl’s, but nevertheless he got it right. When it happened it came as he expected from the side, from someone in the line on his right, someone he was just about to walk past. Everything went smoothly: he sensed a figure in the line tensing, saw the gun-barrel start to move towards him, and long before he was in any danger Foord turned and drew his own handgun and was looking down its barrel at the face of a young soldier, so young he had acne, looking suddenly terrified at the thought of what he had tried to do. Foord’s finger relaxed on the trigger. So far so good: his reflexes had been up to it, he wouldn’t need to shoot, and he knew Thahl would have reached the same conclusion. Then, to his extreme surprise, he found himself looking down the barrel of his gun at only half a face, trying to decide whether half a face could still wear a frightened expression when the other half was gone.

The shot had come from the
Charles Manson
. From Cyr, standing at the top of the ramp in the open airlock.

Foord was so surprised that for a moment he was unable to move. Unaware that he was still looking down the barrel of his gun, he watched the young soldier’s body rise in the air and commence a long back-somersault, limbs flailing with momentum but not with life; and as it landed, as the men kneeling around it saw its face and started to turn their gaze on him, he decided he had nothing to say to them. He turned away and started walking back to his ship—such a short distance, now—unsure if he would ever reach it, but certain there was nothing else he could do.
Unnecessary
, he kept repeating to himself under his breath, the second syllable keeping unconscious time with his long strides,
Unnecessary
. It was an arid word, as arid as his anger.

He tried to project the manner of someone neither frightened nor guilty, but merely bent on an important errand elsewhere. He walked briskly (but did not break into a run; that would have been fatal) while around him everything, every single thing, which Boussaid had kept at bay for so long now started to happen. There were shouts from the crowd for revenge, only half as bitter as his own impulse to give up and let them take it. The VSTOLs settled lower over the
Charles Manson
and turned their guns towards the open airlock. Soldiers who had laid down their guns were snatching them up and starting to level them. Foord continued to walk.

When the first sounds of gunfire came from behind him he did not tense or turn around; when it continued for some time he assumed, correctly, that they were killing the six chimaera and probably raking the landchariot and the driver’s body. With some difficulty he put it out of his mind, even the web in the window, and continued to walk. He neither slackened nor increased his pace. The two lines of the gauntlet moved in his wake as he passed between them, as though they were trying to fill a vacuum generated by his passage. He was now only a few paces from his ship but he knew that the lines would break before he reached it, and that then he would die in a way quite unlike any he had ever imagined.