The two VSTOLs which had shadowed them since they entered the inner gate moved off to join five others—not four, Foord noted, but five now—hovering directly over the Charles Manson, for what purpose and on whose orders Foord could not begin to imagine.
“Neither can I,” Boussaid replied when Foord called him, “so forget them. They can’t matter now.”
Most of the people on the Grid and on the grassy slopes around it were now standing and looking up at the convoy, then back at the ship. The murmur of their voices increased, maybe a semitone. Their mood was as unreadable as the ship. The Charles Manson remained still and silent, with every port and orifice closed and opaqued.
The engines of the escort vehicles thundered anew, and they and the landchariot moved down the approach road.
The Charles Manson carried many missiles, of all shapes and sizes and designs. The last fifty, including the two strange ones made to Foord’s specification, had only been loaded that morning. The special lowloader which had transported them now stood abandoned at the point where the approach road joined the Grid. So, instead of sweeping dramatically out into the choked arena, the convoy halted. The escort vehicles disgorged troops who set about lining the approach road to hold the crowd back, a job which they did amid much heel-clattering, saluting and mutual barking of orders. A corporal strode briskly towards the lowloader, presumably to drive it out of the way. He climbed the access ladder up its mountainous flank and disappeared into the cab. For a while nothing happened.
“What’s keeping you?” yelled one of Boussaid’s sergeants.
“It won’t tell me its start code.”
From the modest crowd clustered around the entrance to the Grid came a modest ripple of laughter. It increased when another sergeant grabbed a loudhailer and demanded that The Driver Of This Vehicle should Make Himself Known. It subsided slightly when, after a hurried conference, a man was found who knew how to circumvent the start codes of cargo lowloaders. He too climbed the access ladder up its side and disappeared into the cab. A moment later its multiple engines coughed mightily into life, and the lowloader lurched forward. The laughter redoubled, and began to spread to those crowding the main arena of the Grid, when the lowloader ploughed into the side of a small robot welding vehicle which, after being bulldozed for several feet, sprang into brief reflex life, extended a telescopic arm and caressed the lowloader’s flanks in a search for hull-plates. Clever, thought Foord, and genuinely unexpected. But it’s very high risk, and it won’t last.
For now, though, the fiasco continued. Eight of the ten escort vehicles roared forward and formed a large semicircle where the approach road joined the Grid, a semicircle into which nothing was allowed except the landchariot and the two remaining escort vehicles flanking it. Thus the landchariot finally clattered out onto Grid 9; and the moment it did so the semicircle became a circle, the escort vehicles joining behind it to package it in the same manoeuvre they had executed at the inner gate.
There was only a modest crowd gathered at the approach road; most people had stayed in the main arena of the Grid. Those nearby, having seen the landchariot’s entrance onto the Grid and perhaps having caught a glimpse of Foord or Thahl inside, now moved away. As they did so, soldiers poured out of the escort vehicles to move them further away; more soldiers than there were people. The convoy, still maintaining a circle around the landchariot, moved towards the Charles Manson at the centre of the Grid. The troops had to march after the convoy. By stages their march became a trot, then a run, then a ragged dash. Don’t overdo it, Foord prayed silently to Boussaid. Genuine cock-up, not slapstick. Be careful.
The ragged dash was, in any case, unnecessary. The convoy only moved fifty metres or so before it encountered another knot of abandoned vehicles, among and around which a few groups of sightseers stood or sat, waiting to be moved away. The convoy halted. Usefully, this allowed the troops to catch up with it, and since their original orders had been to move people away, they moved these people away. Less usefully, they did not ask whether any of those moved were in charge of any of the abandoned vehicles. After a hurried conference, it was decided to bulldoze them clear.
Almost inevitably, the main obstruction was a cargo lowloader. This one, however, was smaller than the previous one. Its brakes were not powerful enough to withstand the two escort vehicles bulldozing it; they gave way suddenly and it was pushed clear, skidding into the side of a second, smaller, vehicle. The smaller vehicle tottered, then crashed onto its side and burst into flames. It was a fire truck.
Foord watched as alarms sounded and a column of black oily smoke climbed skywards, as slowly and deliberately as if it was made of bricks being laid one on top of the other. He started to think that Boussaid had overdone it. But the escort vehicles carried full firefighting equipment and were around the fire truck in seconds. The fire was smothered in foam. The column of black smoke, its source cut off abruptly, hovered vertically like an exclamation mark without a dot, then slowly dissipated. There were some ironic cheers from those crowding the Grid, but not from all of them; some noticed the speed and precision with which the convoy had dealt with the fire, so at odds with how it had entered the Grid.
The convoy moved on, trailing a line of straggling troops like a freshly-whipped court jester dragging a pig’s-bladder, lurching from fiasco to fiasco, leaving in its wake a swathe of damaged, dented, charred and overturned vehicles. It picked its way through the congestion and around the crowds in a mazy series of diagonals and curlicues, and with an elephantine solemnity which deepened as the mocking laughter around it increased; but always coming a little closer to the Charles Manson. Foord went many times to call Boussaid and congratulate him, but didn’t; the effectiveness of the plan would soon wear off, and Boussaid must be desperately trying to assess how much further it would take them. And what to do when it failed.
•
When they saw the convoy edging closer to the Charles Manson, people started moving away from the outer edges of the Grid and towards the centre, where the ship stood. By the time the convoy had got within fifty metres of the ship, several hundred of them were waiting. Their mood was not yet openly hostile; a few of them were still laughing.
The convoy halted. During the brief pause, the six VSTOLs hovering directly above dropped lower until their grapples and undercarriages hung only a few metres above the ship’s dorsal ridge. The impression was not one of people converging on the ship, but of the ship having pulled them in, on invisible lines, almost like fishing for them. This impression remained even when the fragile mood Boussaid had created started to waver, and the first brittle noises of violence began.
As Boussaid’s last troops poured out of the escort vehicles for the last time to clear the crowds for the last fifty metres, Foord hardly gave his ship a glance. He was aware, as he watched heavily-armed figures striding past the landchariot’s windows, that this time the mood was different because the tension was mutual. The first angry clashes with the crowds were isolated, but they spread and got to within seconds of a full-scale riot. With fifty metres to go, Boussaid’s plan was exhausted.
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.