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.)