Then, at last, the Charles Manson came to life.
There was something alien about the ship’s instant shift from extreme silence to extreme action. It was unrelated in scale to any external event; it was not caused or provoked; it did not build up in any stages of lesser action, which might at least have been understood as a response or warning. It was abrupt and jagged, like the darting of a tarantula.
The Charles Manson’s hull was no longer featureless or quiet. Blaring with lights and alarms, throbbing as if with disease, it sprouted blisters which swelled and split open to reveal the mouths and lips and orifices of its closeup weapons array. Nobody had even bothered to preset them on particular targets. Some of them tracked backwards and forwards or up and down, others were aimed directly into the Grid, others vaguely into thin air. It did not matter. There were proximity lasers, coilguns, tanglers, friendship guns, disruptors, breathtakers, harmonic guns, motive beams, and others whose use in a confined area on a planetary surface would have been excessive even if the Charles Manson were under direct attack from the whole of Horus Fleet; and they sprouted from a ship crewed by people who had lost, or never had, the motives of people. Thahl had designed his move on Boussaid to win a specific period of time, a period he had calculated to within seconds; now, it seemed, there was all the time in the world.
The main airlock irised open. A ramp tongued out of it to the ground. Many of the Charles Manson’s crew of sixty-three had, like Foord, received Special Forces training, and now ten of them moved quickly, but carefully, down the ramp to surround and cover the group around the airlock, the group in whose midst were Thahl and Boussaid. Behind them at the top of the ramp stood Cyr, darkly beautiful, carrying a single handgun with which she motioned Foord to come aboard, and behind her was the Charles Manson, massive and motiveless, threatening everything and explaining nothing.
One by one, the men surrounding Thahl laid down their weapons. Some of those along the lines of the gauntlet did the same, but others kept their guns trained on Thahl, or swung them round to cover Foord as he started walking. Thahl read their postures carefully, remembering that postures were not, as with Sakhrans, an auxiliary language, and tried to anticipate which of them would fire first and at who. His grip on Boussaid neither tightened nor relaxed.
As he walked towards his ship—now such a short distance, the last few metres of a long and unpleasant journey—Foord was trying to anticipate the same event as Thahl. If anyone did shoot, he thought it would be one of those in the lines of the gauntlet. It might be a shot in the back—in which case he could do nothing, short of walking to his ship backwards, which he did not intend to do—but that would be relatively deliberate, and on balance less likely. No, if it happened it would be someone’s judgement snapping, the act of someone who had endured all this but could not endure seeing him walk past unharmed; perhaps a shot from ahead, but more likely from either side, where he felt faces and gun-barrels swivel as he passed, as if each one was connected to him by gossamer wires, anchored in his flesh with little pins.
His calculations were less exact than Thahl’s, but nevertheless he got it right. When it happened it came as he expected from the side, from someone in the line on his right, someone he was just about to walk past. Everything went smoothly: he sensed a figure in the line tensing, saw the gun-barrel start to move towards him, and long before he was in any danger Foord turned and drew his own handgun and was looking down its barrel at the face of a young soldier, so young he had acne, looking suddenly terrified at the thought of what he had tried to do. Foord’s finger relaxed on the trigger. So far so good: his reflexes had been up to it, he wouldn’t need to shoot, and he knew Thahl would have reached the same conclusion. Then, to his extreme surprise, he found himself looking down the barrel of his gun at only half a face, trying to decide whether half a face could still wear a frightened expression when the other half was gone.
The shot had come from the Charles Manson. From Cyr, standing at the top of the ramp in the open airlock.
Foord was so surprised that for a moment he was unable to move. Unaware that he was still looking down the barrel of his gun, he watched the young soldier’s body rise in the air and commence a long back-somersault, limbs flailing with momentum but not with life; and as it landed, as the men kneeling around it saw its face and started to turn their gaze on him, he decided he had nothing to say to them. He turned away and started walking back to his ship—such a short distance, now—unsure if he would ever reach it, but certain there was nothing else he could do. Unnecessary, he kept repeating to himself under his breath, the second syllable keeping unconscious time with his long strides, Unnecessary. It was an arid word, as arid as his anger.
He tried to project the manner of someone neither frightened nor guilty, but merely bent on an important errand elsewhere. He walked briskly (but did not break into a run; that would have been fatal) while around him everything, every single thing, which Boussaid had kept at bay for so long now started to happen. There were shouts from the crowd for revenge, only half as bitter as his own impulse to give up and let them take it. The VSTOLs settled lower over the Charles Manson and turned their guns towards the open airlock. Soldiers who had laid down their guns were snatching them up and starting to level them. Foord continued to walk.
When the first sounds of gunfire came from behind him he did not tense or turn around; when it continued for some time he assumed, correctly, that they were killing the six chimaera and probably raking the landchariot and the driver’s body. With some difficulty he put it out of his mind, even the web in the window, and continued to walk. He neither slackened nor increased his pace. The two lines of the gauntlet moved in his wake as he passed between them, as though they were trying to fill a vacuum generated by his passage. He was now only a few paces from his ship but he knew that the lines would break before he reached it, and that then he would die in a way quite unlike any he had ever imagined.
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.