Thahl leaned forward and said to Boussaid, “I’m sorry, Colonel.” As Foord walked past him and started to ascend the ramp, Thahl moved the talons of his right hand until they pierced Boussaid’s throat, once, then lifted the body and threw it writhing into the path of the soldiers who were rushing after Foord. The deliberate obscenity of the gesture made them stop just long enough for Thahl to follow Foord up the ramp and through the airlock, which immediately irised shut behind them. Just before it closed, Foord took a last look back. Medical staff from the escort vehicles had already surrounded Boussaid, and there was the approaching siren of a VSTOL ambulance, which Foord knew would be too late; the antidote to Sakhran venom needed to be administered within seconds.
“It was unnecessary,” Foord said quietly to Cyr as he strode along the cramped main corridor of his ship towards the Bridge. “I know how accurate you can be with a handgun, or any weapon. You could have wounded him. There was no need.”
“But Thahl…” began Cyr.
“What Thahl did,” Foord said, still speaking quietly and without turning around, “was unavoidable. What you did was gratuitous.”
A few moments later, though this was not yet known on the Charles Manson, the irony turned back on itself a third time.
Thahl had had no intention of killing Boussaid; he had not used poison but had just given the appearance of having done so, to cause enough distraction for them to reach the ship. It had been his last throw of the dice; his claws pierced flesh without injecting venom. But Thahl was not aware that Boussaid had a heart condition. The shock and speed of Thahl’s attack triggered a massive heart seizure, from which he died.
•
The Charles Manson rested for a few more minutes on Grid 9, alien and impregnable; a single, self-contained denial of everything around it. Then, quietly and without requesting clearance from Blentport, it engaged magnetic drive and lifted off unopposed. At the requisite altitude it switched from magnetic to ion drive, left Sakhra’s atmosphere, and passed without ceremony or recognition through the silver ranks of Horus Fleet. At about the time that Boussaid’s doctors realised they were dealing not with Sakhran venom but with a heart attack, Horus Fleet was closing the ranks of its cordon behind the Charles Manson; like a woman folding back her disarranged clothes as a customer passes out of her apartment.
PART FIVE
1
Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.
“After this,” he waved a hand at the food set out in front of them, “it’s just pills and hyperconcentrates. This is our last proper meal, until the mission is over.”
“And before the mission is over,” Smithson said, tasteless as always, “one of us will betray you.”
Smithson was a mixture of reptile and mollusc, and other unclassifiable things, in a humanoid shape. For a nonbelieving nonhuman who had only travelled infrequently in the Commonwealth, he had a disconcertingly thorough grasp of human cultures and religions. And he just uses it for pisstaking, thought Foord, gazing at him speculatively. Smithson gazed back as if he knew exactly what Foord was thinking, which might well have been the case. Smithson was tall and grey and moist, and his eyes seemed to see everything; they were large intelligent eyes, as warm and golden as urine.
After a few moments, Smithson shrugged. For him, shrugging meant the brief extrusion and retraction of a secondary limb from his lower torso. Foord chose to regard the gesture as conciliatory.
Their last meal together started without ceremony, and proceeded quietly. There was some conversation, but it was muted and commonplace, scarcely louder than the sound of cutlery on plates. Thahl was still eating when the others had finished, but they had seen him eat before and registered no reaction; it was not really living meat, just a preparation from the ship’s culture vats served at body temperature and grown with a nervous system incorporating motor responses. Thahl was always careful to eat it more tidily and slowly than he would have eaten real prey.
Smithson, who had finished eating before any of them, was an extreme herbivore. He ate concentrated vegetable slime: it went everywhere. He absorbed it subatomically, as efficiently as carnivores extracted sustenance from meat. He even ate like a carnivore, quickly and violently, always looking around him as he chewed.
Foord had insisted that their infrequent meals on the Bridge should be taken together, and defied any of the humans to object. Rather to his annoyance none of them had, although his liberal gesture did irritate Thahl and Smithson: they both found humans’ eating conventions unsettling, though for different reasons, and would have preferred to eat alone.
The Bridge was a circular compartment set deep in the ship’s midsection. Bridge officers sat at consoles arranged in a circle which followed the shape of the curved walls. All of the walls were screen, a screen so thin it had almost been painted there. It showed a linked projection of what the external viewers saw from their thousands of positions over the ship’s hull; normally it showed what was humanly visible, but it could be locally magnified or filtered or altered in wavelength to make visible displays along any electromagnetic band. Merely integrating the thousands of viewers to provide a continuous and infinitely-variable 360-degree projection inside the Bridge was an exceptionally complex task, requiring a computer almost the size of Foord’s thumb.
The Bridge screen was where the Charles Manson’s nine-percent sentience most frequently communicated with the crew. Often—like a very good butler—it would anticipate their requirements before they were spoken, and patch in a local magnification or headup. Or, with its own equivalent of a polite cough, it might display something unasked which it considered important. Usually it anticipated correctly. Very occasionally Foord would overrule it.
The meal finished as quietly as it had begun. Gradually their conversation returned to matters connected with the mission. Relays clicked and mumbled and voices whispered from comms, an unnoticed background noise. The Bridge was twilit and muted, its occupants murmuring over consoles like surgeons at an operation. Foord himself, after the events preceding liftoff from Sakhra, felt immediately more comfortable here. The ship was his world, far more than any of the places where he made planetfall. On real planets, among real people, he could be surprisingly vulnerable, and often had to be saved from his ill-judged liberal impulses by others like Thahl or Cyr or Smithson. But on his ship he was supreme. It was his home, far more than the arid apartment he kept on Earth, and far more even than his home planet, where he was no longer welcome.
They were fifty minutes out of Sakhra, headed for Horus 5, the outer planet of the system, where She was expected to make an emergence.
•
Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.
“Status reports, please,” he murmured.
“Sakhra says they’ve detected no emergence, Commander,” Thahl said, on Foord’s immediate left.
“And your view?”
“They’re probably right. If She had entered the system undetected, our instruments should by now have picked up some residual ripples, and all they’re showing is normal background interference.”
“And Director Swann, has he called again?” Foord asked, implying a continuation of the subject of background interference.