Faith (17 page)

Ahead of him he saw his crew retreating. Slowly and carefully, and with guns still levelled, they were backing up the ramp to the main airlock. For the first time he looked at their faces, pleased he could recognise each of them. He also noted, with a satisfaction which was ridiculous in the circumstances, that they hadn’t made the obvious mistake; they hadn’t tried to come forward and cover him back to the ship, which would have merely hastened the inevitable. Thahl had not joined the retreat and remained standing over Boussaid, and Cyr was still standing in the open airlock. Foord avoided looking at either of them. It must have become quiet again, because Foord was suddenly aware of a small but inappropriate sound, the buzzing of his wristcom. He ignored it—though a part of him tried to imagine how it would look if he answered it—and continued walking. Such a short distance now.

Having calculated that the lines would break when he was still a few paces away from his ship, he half-hoped that they would not. It was part of the nature of irony, whose ability to turn back on itself he was beginning to understand like a Sakhran, that the lines of the gauntlet would take longer to break; long enough for him to begin to think he might have a chance of reaching his ship after all. So he was only half-surprised to find himself no more than two or three paces from the foot of the ramp, and almost level with Thahl, when the lines finally broke and the roar he had been expecting went up behind him. Only then did he take a last look at Thahl. And the irony turned back on itself again.

Thahl leaned forward and said to Boussaid, “I’m sorry, Colonel.” As Foord walked past him and started to ascend the ramp, Thahl moved the talons of his right hand until they pierced Boussaid’s throat, once, then lifted the body and threw it writhing into the path of the soldiers who were rushing after Foord. The deliberate obscenity of the gesture made them stop just long enough for Thahl to follow Foord up the ramp and through the airlock, which immediately irised shut behind them. Just before it closed, Foord took a last look back. Medical staff from the escort vehicles had already surrounded Boussaid, and there was the approaching siren of a VSTOL ambulance, which Foord knew would be too late; the antidote to Sakhran venom needed to be administered within seconds.

“It was unnecessary,” Foord said quietly to Cyr as he strode along the cramped main corridor of his ship towards the Bridge. “I know how accurate you can be with a handgun, or any weapon. You could have wounded him. There was no need.”

“But Thahl…” began Cyr.

“What Thahl did,” Foord said, still speaking quietly and without turning around, “was unavoidable. What you did was gratuitous.”

A few moments later, though this was not yet known on the
Charles Manson,
the irony turned back on itself a third time.

Thahl had had no intention of killing Boussaid; he had not used poison but had just given the appearance of having done so, to cause enough distraction for them to reach the ship. It had been his last throw of the dice; his claws pierced flesh without injecting venom. But Thahl was not aware that Boussaid had a heart condition. The shock and speed of Thahl’s attack triggered a massive heart seizure, from which he died.

•

The
Charles Manson
rested for a few more minutes on Grid 9, alien and impregnable; a single, self-contained denial of everything around it. Then, quietly and without requesting clearance from Blentport, it engaged magnetic drive and lifted off unopposed. At the requisite altitude it switched from magnetic to ion drive, left Sakhra’s atmosphere, and passed without ceremony or recognition through the silver ranks of Horus Fleet. At about the time that Boussaid’s doctors realised they were dealing not with Sakhran venom but with a heart attack, Horus Fleet was closing the ranks of its cordon behind the
Charles Manson
; like a woman folding back her disarranged clothes as a customer passes out of her apartment.

PART FIVE

1

F
oord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.

“After this,” he waved a hand at the food set out in front of them, “it’s just pills and hyperconcentrates. This is our last proper meal, until the mission is over.”

“And before the mission is over,” Smithson said, tasteless as always, “one of us will betray you.”

Smithson was a mixture of reptile and mollusc, and other unclassifiable things, in a humanoid shape. For a nonbelieving nonhuman who had only travelled infrequently in the Commonwealth, he had a disconcertingly thorough grasp of human cultures and religions.
And he just uses it for pisstaking,
thought Foord, gazing at him speculatively. Smithson gazed back as if he knew exactly what Foord was thinking, which might well have been the case. Smithson was tall and grey and moist, and his eyes seemed to see everything; they were large intelligent eyes, as warm and golden as urine.

After a few moments, Smithson shrugged. For him, shrugging meant the brief extrusion and retraction of a secondary limb from his lower torso. Foord chose to regard the gesture as conciliatory.

Their last meal together started without ceremony, and proceeded quietly. There was some conversation, but it was muted and commonplace, scarcely louder than the sound of cutlery on plates. Thahl was still eating when the others had finished, but they had seen him eat before and registered no reaction; it was not really living meat, just a preparation from the ship’s culture vats served at body temperature and grown with a nervous system incorporating motor responses. Thahl was always careful to eat it more tidily and slowly than he would have eaten real prey.

Smithson, who had finished eating before any of them, was an extreme herbivore. He ate concentrated vegetable slime: it went everywhere. He absorbed it subatomically, as efficiently as carnivores extracted sustenance from meat. He even ate like a carnivore, quickly and violently, always looking around him as he chewed.

Foord had insisted that their infrequent meals on the Bridge should be taken together, and defied any of the humans to object. Rather to his annoyance none of them had, although his liberal gesture did irritate Thahl and Smithson: they both found humans’ eating conventions unsettling, though for different reasons, and would have preferred to eat alone.

The Bridge was a circular compartment set deep in the ship’s midsection. Bridge officers sat at consoles arranged in a circle which followed the shape of the curved walls. All of the walls were screen, a screen so thin it had almost been painted there. It showed a linked projection of what the external viewers saw from their thousands of positions over the ship’s hull; normally it showed what was humanly visible, but it could be locally magnified or filtered or altered in wavelength to make visible displays along any electromagnetic band. Merely integrating the thousands of viewers to provide a continuous and infinitely-variable 360-degree projection inside the Bridge was an exceptionally complex task, requiring a computer almost the size of Foord’s thumb.

The Bridge screen was where the
Charles Manson
’s nine-percent sentience most frequently communicated with the crew. Often—like a very good butler—it would anticipate their requirements before they were spoken, and patch in a local magnification or headup. Or, with its own equivalent of a polite cough, it might display something unasked which it considered important. Usually it anticipated correctly. Very occasionally Foord would overrule it.

The meal finished as quietly as it had begun. Gradually their conversation returned to matters connected with the mission. Relays clicked and mumbled and voices whispered from comms, an unnoticed background noise. The Bridge was twilit and muted, its occupants murmuring over consoles like surgeons at an operation. Foord himself, after the events preceding liftoff from Sakhra, felt immediately more comfortable here. The ship was his world, far more than any of the places where he made planetfall. On real planets, among real people, he could be surprisingly vulnerable, and often had to be saved from his ill-judged liberal impulses by others like Thahl or Cyr or Smithson. But on his ship he was supreme. It was his
home
, far more than the arid apartment he kept on Earth, and far more even than his home planet, where he was no longer welcome.

They were fifty minutes out of Sakhra, headed for Horus 5, the outer planet of the system, where She was expected to make an emergence.

•

Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.

“Status reports, please,” he murmured.

“Sakhra says they’ve detected no emergence, Commander,” Thahl said, on Foord’s immediate left.

“And your view?”

“They’re probably right. If She had entered the system undetected, our instruments should by now have picked up some residual ripples, and all they’re showing is normal background interference.”

“And Director Swann, has he called again?” Foord asked, implying a continuation of the subject of background interference.

“Not so far, Commander.”

Foord passed to Joser, on Thahl’s left. Joser was of average build, with suspiciously pleasant and open features. He reminded Foord of the priests at the orphanage.

“Could there have been an emergence?”

“She has emerged undetected in other systems, Commander, but our scanners are more sensitive. On balance, I think not.”

“Thank you.”

“Also, the amount of energy released by a ship emerging from MT Drive at the periphery of a solar system is so large that…”

“Yes, thank you.” Foord’s gaze continued round the circle of consoles to the next one, opposite him.

“The weapons array,” Cyr said, “will work satisfactorily. If,” she shot a glance at Joser, “we can locate Her. We may already have failed to do that.”

“The signature of a ship emerging from MT Drive into the solar system would be so large that…”

“That you would have detected Her. But you aren’t sure,” Cyr said, quite unreasonably.

Foord raised an eyebrow.

“Status reports,” he quietly informed the air just above their heads, “should be confined to facts unless I ask for opinions, and should be addressed to me.”

Tension subsided abruptly. The ship’s environment was cramped and potentially explosive and Foord kept everything, especially personal interaction, low-key. Conversation was by undercurrents, nuances and inflexions, by things left unsaid. A raised eyebrow on the
Charles Manson
was equivalent to a raised fist anywhere else.

Cyr tossed her dark hair and smiled, formally. “You’re right, Commander. For my part I apologise.” She thrust up three manicured fingers, waited just long enough to make it a gesture, and counted off. “One, long-range weapons array. Two, medium-range. Three, closeup weapons, including the two missiles built to your specification. I listed them all together because the report is the same: they all tested perfect after the refit.”

Foord thanked her elegant fist, still raised, and added “Take special care of those two missiles.”

•

“It was unnecessary,” Foord had said quietly to Cyr, fifty minutes earlier as he strode along the cramped main corridor of his ship towards the Bridge. “I know how accurate you can be with a handgun, or any weapon. You could have wounded him.
There was no need.”

Ten minutes later, she reported to his study.

“You wanted to see me, Commander.”

“Come in. Close the door, please.” She did so, and remained standing.

Outsider crew members were allowed individual leeway over uniform. Cyr’s was a dark blue tunic with a box-pleated skirt, over a white long-sleeved shirt. She had several others like it, all personally and expensively tailored for her. She wore it because she knew it aroused Foord. It made him remember the uniforms of the girls at the orphanage, one of whom he had raped.

“You know why you’re here.” Foord did not make it a question, and she did not give it an answer. She merely stared back at him.

Foord often wondered how much of her was human. Certainly the outside—that was almost more than human—but inside she could seem full of poison. She was disturbingly beautiful. Her face, like that of a classical statue depicting something like Justice or Liberty, was too perfect to be alive. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders; it was black, with hints of violet iridescence like birds’ plumage or (which Foord thought more appropriate) beetles’ wing-cases. Her lipstick and manicured nails were also, today, dark blue; other days they might be maroon or dark grey or purple or black, to match her other tailored tunics.

Despite her intelligence and beauty, Foord found her cold and predatory and often disgusting.

“Why did you kill him?”

“He was about to kill you.”

“You could have wounded him.”

“I couldn’t be sure he’d drop his gun.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“
Because I wanted to.
”

Foord locked eyes with her, then looked down at his desk, where he had placed a heavy hardwood ruler, nearly three feet long. It was a souvenir; the priests at the orphanage had used it on him, often, and he was minded to use it on Cyr. She saw him eyeing it and knew what he intended. It would be totally against regulations, even the deliberately ambiguous Department regulations written for Outsiders, but Foord’s authority was such that Cyr would have accepted it.

He wanted to do it, more than anything except destroy Faith, and he infuriated himself by finally deciding not to. He knew she would have accepted it, but not to atone for the life she had taken so unnecessarily. She did not perform acts of atonement.

“Why did you kill him?” he repeated.

“
Because I wanted to
,” she repeated; and added, as a thought she did not speak,
To make sure you lived
.

“I thought this would be pointless. Just go.”

She held his gaze for a moment; then turned to leave, the pleats of her skirt fanning out.

•

Foord thanked Cyr’s elegant fist, still raised, added “Take special care of those two missiles,” and passed to the console on her left.