When Boussaid did not answer, Foord shouted, over the noise of the escort vehicles, “Is that VSTOL responding to your orders?”
“Yes, Commander. To about the same extent as this escort.”
Grid 19 spread out below them to the left. It was a sunken concrete and metal latticework about a thousand feet long by four hundred wide, crisscrossed with walkways and surrounded by antigrav generators set into the lawned slopes curving down to its surface, and by derricks and cranes bent over it like a mixture of tall and short surgeons over an operating table. It was ringed by a wide tree-lined road along which were more low buildings, mostly engineering facilities. The rest of the Grid’s capacity was underground. It was a minor Grid, so it would be capable of refitting anything up to light cruiser size, perhaps Class 079 or 080, but nothing larger.
It was almost deserted. Not only did it not house a ship, but there were hardly any people—just a few at some windows, Foord noted, speaking into wristcoms as the landchariot and its escort passed by.
Grid 14 contained a Class 047 light cruiser. As Foord looked down from the raised road and saw the Grid swept clear of everything except the ship, whose flat tapered hull shone like the blade of a throwing knife, he knew immediately what was going to happen next, even before the liftoff alarms started blaring and Boussaid started yelling through the wristcom to take cover.
“You mean we should crawl under the landchariot, Colonel?”
“I mean that ship is lifting off now and I have no idea what it’s going to do next!”
“Aren’t you supposed to have an idea?”
Boussaid cut the connection.
Outside, the liftoff alarm had risen a semitone and the escort vehicles were closing in a protective circle around the landchariot, which was lurching with the panicked movements of the chimaera. The two VSTOLs overhead increased their height and moved away to either side of the road.
“Commander,” Thahl began, “perhaps we should….”
“No time. That ship’s only an 047 but if he’s really going to attack, we’re finished. A hundred of those escort vehicles couldn’t stop him.”
But to Foord it was already clear what the ship was going to do. He settled back and watched as it lifted off, with the silence and precision of the magnetic drive used for atmospheric manoeuvres, and moved towards the raised road. The escort vehicles—much less silently but with equal precision—tightened their outward-facing protective circle around the landchariot. Despite their size, they looked like models arranged on the road by a giant invisible hand, a hand which had now returned holding a silver knifeblade towards them. The ship came closer.
It paused only once. Then, as the dust and exhaust fumes churned by the vehicles began to settle, and in a silence which was broken only by one noise which had been mounting all the time, the noise of the chimaera screaming, it passed slowly and deliberately no more than thirty feet above them. It was only an 047, but its long flat hull seemed to go on forever. The chimaera screamed not in fear, but in outrage at the wrongness of its noiseless passage above them. The ship disturbed the air no more than if it had been a long silver trapdoor sliding endlessly open, and it went on and on.
Later, Foord learned that the four injured men were crew members of that ship.
Foord remembered the 047 more vividly even than the final events which were to precede the Charles Manson’s liftoff from Grid Nine, not because it proved him right about its intentions—it was only making a gesture at Foord; an actual attack was impossible—but because it proved something else, something Foord had always understood intellectually but had never seen demonstrated physically.
The ship was only an 047, but Foord had not exaggerated when he said that a hundred escort vehicles could not have stopped it; yet a thousand such ships could not have stopped the Charles Manson. There were different orders of magnitude. He sat in the lurching landchariot, darkened by the never-ending shadow of the 047’s passage, and reflected on them.
The ship finally passed overhead, continued a few hundred feet and then rose into the grey sky; it could have done that directly from Grid 14, but a gesture was a gesture. Foord opened his wristcom and made one of his own; for him, a rare one.
“Colonel Boussaid?”
“Yes, yes, I know, you were right, it didn’t attack.”
“I owe you an apology. We both knew it wouldn’t attack, but you were commanding an escort and I wasn’t. Only one of us could afford to be clever and rely on assumptions. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Commander, that’s gracious. But we haven’t made it yet. The last bit is the biggest gamble.”
Orders of magnitude, thought Foord. The 047’s power dwarfed that of the escort vehicles like a boulder would dwarf a handful of pebbles. Yet there was another scale of power looming beyond that: the power of the Charles Manson, which would dwarf an 047 like a mountain would dwarf a boulder.
And then there was Faith. And Faith—he remembered what the priests at the orphanage had beaten into him—can move mountains.
7
Grid 9 spread out below them and Foord saw his ship again for the first time in two days. And because its shape was the symbol he most recognised, because it stood at every junction in his personal roadmap, because it joined lines which for other people were joined by symbols of home or family or friends, for a moment he saw only his ship and did not see what had happened around it.
Grid 9 was full to bursting. There were dozens of maintenance and service vehicles and cargo vehicles, large and small, called in to Grid 9 from all over Blentport to speed the refit, and simply abandoned where they stood when their work was done. There were thousands—maybe five or six thousand—variously sitting, standing or walking around the Grid and the grassy slopes leading down to it. They had gathered there, slowly at first as the other refits were abandoned to give the Charles Manson priority, then more quickly as news spread of the two incidents of last night and this morning. They were mainly Blentport workers from this Grid and others, and officers and crew from Horus Fleet ships; but there was also a scattering of the slate-grey uniforms of Blentport garrison, at least three hundred. Foord assumed they were the detachment Boussaid sent earlier, who hadn’t quite mutinied, but didn’t return when ordered.
Officers, crew, Blentport workers, garrison members: they each had their own shifting motives, which might turn against each other, or focus on the Charles Manson. Their ambiguity hung murmuring over the whole Grid. It seemed, simultaneously, to stop short of open hostility and to go beyond it.
And in the middle of it was the Charles Manson. It was beautiful, a clean silver shape sixteen hundred feet long, tapering from a width of three hundred feet at its stern, where the main drives bulged, to a pointed snout so sharp a man could actually prick his finger on it. It was as concrete and emphatic as a noun written on a page, with the scattering of people and vehicles around it like prepositions.
“Soon be over now,” Boussaid said in the wristcom. Foord heard tension, or maybe it was tiredness, in his voice.
The convoy reached the turnoff leading down to Grid 9, then halted. One by one the escort vehicles cut their motors to idle. As their engine roar diminished, the murmuring of those crowding the Grid crept up the approach road to replace it. It was an indistinct sound, as indistinct as the motives which produced it.