Now there were thousands of them. The localised ripplings in Her flank were starting to join and become a concerted outward bulge along nine hundred feet. The fine cursive lines were visible again from a distance; that, and the fact that they all continued to stay within the lines of the clawmarks, made the suggestion of writing irresistible. They almost formed the shapes of recognisable letters: letters arranged in words, words in sentences, with an underlying grammar. Foord had to fight a temptation to try and read it.
Here and there, as the bulging increased, hull plates were gently popping off Her surface, uncovering a small solid blob of the dark pewter layer underneath. The screen patched in closeups of some of the plates: they didn’t develop five miniature clawmarks of their own and burn away to nothing, they just lifted gently off and floated alongside Her. It was gradual, and did not seem threatening. The screen panned out again.
More hull plates were lifting off; dozens, then hundreds, leaving dark solid blobs behind them. Hundreds became thousands. The impression of unreadable writing along Her flank changed; now it looked more like a musical notation, and Foord fought the temptation to read a tune into it. Smithson even started trying to hum it.
Foord glared at him. “Stop that. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Smithson was unabashed. “What do you mean, Wrong?”
“What is She doing?”
“She isn’t, Commander, it’s being done to Her. She can’t stop it because She’s diverted Her power to the fields. To keep us off Her.”
“Then we should be pleased, and you should be saying I Told You So. We’re not, and you aren’t. So what’s wrong?”
Smithson did not reply.
“What have we started?”
Nine hundred feet of Her flank, between midsection and stern, blew open. There was no explosion. It blew open slowly, layer by layer, as if She was undressing for them.
•
Perhaps She really couldn’t stop it, and could only slow it down; if so, She had slowed it thousands of times. It had the shape of an explosion, but not the speed. Every surface feature on the nine-hundred-foot section of Her flank detached itself and floated gently outwards: silver thumbnail hull plates in hundreds of thousands; lines of windows plugged with darkness; manoevre drive nozzles, scanner outlets, weapons apertures. Most of them floated away complete and undamaged, turning end over end, and when the Bridge screen showed closeups of them there were no miniature echoes of larger damage and no burning away to nothing. They lifted off and came to rest floating alongside Her.
There was no gushing of liquid silver and no nameless colour. Where the outer hull layer had lifted away, the second layer remained underneath: unbroken dark pewter, featureless except for echoes of the windows and apertures of the outer layer. Then it too blew slowly open.
The second layer was an unbroken whole, not miniature plates like the outer layer. All nine hundred feet of it blew out in five pieces, so large they retained fractions of the original curvature. The screen showed them in closeup as they lifted away. When they were clear of Her they broke into smaller pieces, always with clean sharp edges, and floated alongside Her where they bumped and nuzzled into the remains of Her outer layer.
Below the second layer was a cavity filled with a latticework of structural members and subassemblies which had linked it to the third layer, also dark pewter. After the second layer blew out, so did the latticework. They had glimpsed it once before when their missiles hit Her and opened the two craters, but now they saw it in detail as the screen went to closeup. Then, the explosions of their missiles had torn into it, breaking and twisting it; now it was exerting its own force, a thousand times slower but irresistible, to pull itself gently free from its fastenings to the third layer and float away from Her. Like before, some of it was recognisable and had counterparts in the Charles Manson: girders with an H cross-section, ducting, conduits, circular pipes squashed to ovals where they were sheared, platings with screw-fastenings and giant bolts (the screen even showed their threads in closeup, gleaming as they unscrewed themselves from their anchorage points). Other parts were unrecognisable, discs and triangles and polyhedrons made of something which hovered between gas and solid and liquid. It all lifted gently out of the nine-hundred-foot gash in Her flank, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, and floated alongside Her.
For once, Foord thought, Smithson’s wrong. This isn’t being done to Her, She’s doing it to Herself.
The third layer of Her hull, like the second, was dark pewter. All along the nine-hundred-foot gash, it was scarred and dented where the structural members had pulled free and floated outwards. The Bridge screen, anticipating that the third layer would also go, patched in closeups of sections along its length. When it blew out, the screen calculated, the gash would reach deeper into Her than the craters and they would see Her interior. But it didn’t blow out. The gash in Her side became dark, either depthless or infinite, and nothing else came out of it. The screen’s headups said the gash was a molecule deep, then nine thousand miles deep, then infinite, and then the headups cancelled themselves and said Unable. It belonged to another universe where physical laws unravelled and time went, not forwards or backwards, but sideways and inside out. Unable.
“Kaang,” Foord managed to say, “you see that?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Fly us into it.”
Around the Bridge, they turned on him in disbelief.
The alarms started murmuring.
“Commander,” Kaang stammered, “do you really…”
“Alright, no. Cyr, fire the beams into it.”
“We don’t know what it is, Commander!”
“That’s why.”
Cyr went to press the firing-panel, then looked round at the others.
“I gave you an order.”
The alarms were murmuring, louder because they were unanswered.
“Look at the screen headups, Commander!”
The alarms were murmuring because, for only the second time, their probes had detected something moving inside Her. The screen headups, like before, were unreadable. They said it was nine thousand miles inside Her, and ten times bigger than the previous movement; then three thousand miles inside, and a hundred times bigger.
“I’ve seen the readouts. Fire on it.”
The beams stabbed out, but Her fields met them on full power, opaque and almost solid, and held them. Cyr stopped firing and the fields cleared. The movement had not yet reached the surface of Her hull. The screen said it was only a molecule’s thickness inside Her and a million times larger than before, then cancelled. Unable.
Nothing further happened.
“She’s waiting for us to go back to Her,” Foord said, mostly to himself. New things about Her. “Kaang, take us to fifty thousand feet and hold us there.”
Kaang did so.
•
When Kaang brought them to rest, She continued.
Something started to emerge from the darkness of the gash in Her flank. It was not a hundred times or ten times or a million times bigger than before, but it would become bigger than She was and it was impossible. Earlier, She had survived by eating Herself. Now, She defecated.
What came out of the gash looked like the fingers of a giant hand: five separate fingers, thicker than Sakhran trees, at intervals of about two hundred feet along the entire length of the gash. They were separate, but moving in a way which suggested that back inside Her, behind the darkness, they were linked together in a hand. They were dark blue, at first almost invisible against the darkness in the gash; then, as they emerged, they became visible against the silver of Her hull.