The ship was a graceful silver delta, slender and elongated. It was just over one thousand six hundred feet long, and three hundred feet wide at its widest point, at the stern where its array of main drives was concentrated.
Radiating from the Bridge were the other inhabited sections where the crew of fifty-seven, excluding the six on the Bridge, were embedded. There was no room for any place where the entire crew, or even part of it, could gather; no crew member was likely to see more than six or seven others during a mission. It was a quiet and nonsocial environment, compartmentalised to the extent that if an inhabited section became irreparably damaged (unlikely, but not impossible) it could be shut off and forgotten and its functionality transferred elsewhere, leaving the ship free to go on without it as if a diseased part had been amputated.
•
“Cyr?”
“Nothing since my last report.”
“Smithson?”
“Nothing since her last report.”
“Commander,” Thahl whispered, “I have Director Swann again. He asks why you haven’t yet ordered maximum speed to Horus 5.”
“Tell him…”
“He insists you speak to him, Commander.”
“Insists.”
“His word.”
“Later. My word.”
And the Outsider Class cruiser Charles Manson, Instrument of the Commonwealth, plunged on at its own chosen speed. It was a silver jewel-box full of functionality: drives and weapons and sentience cores, bionics and electronics and power sources, scanners and signals and life support, all packed to almost dwarf-star density. Externally beautiful, but internally dark and cramped, like a silver evening gown hiding ragged underwear.
The Outsiders took existing technology as far as it could possibly go; as far as it would ever go. They were not the largest of the Commonwealth’s various warships, but they were the closest to perfection, and would not be improved upon until the currently stale physical sciences were shaken by the next major breakthrough. At an unvarying thirty percent photon speed the Charles Manson went on to its appointment, silent and catastrophic.
2
HORUS SOLAR SYSTEM. Your ship’s Codex has all the detail. This summary may, however, suggest some of the system’s more unusual, and usable, features.
Horus is a main sequence star, 1.6 times the size of Earth’s Sun, and at a similar stage in its life. It has three inner planets, then the Gulf, then two outer planets separated by an asteroid belt.
Horus 1 and 2 are respectively 59 million and 90 million miles mean distance from Horus. Both are uninhabited; Horus 1 is molten slag and Horus 2, bare rock. Horus 3 is Sakhra: the third of the inner planets, 118 million miles mean distance from Horus.
After Sakhra comes the system’s first unusual feature: the Gulf between inner and outer planets. From Sakhra to Horus 4, the Gulf extends for 980 million miles, the largest empty space in any known solar system. It ends at the orbit of the system’s second unusual feature, the planet Horus 4.
Horus 4 has a mean distance of 1100 million miles from Horus. It is the most massive planetary body in the known galaxy. Its mass and density and gravity are extraordinary: it has some of the properties of a small neutron star, as well as those of a large planet.
The Asteroid Belt extends 400 million miles, between Horus 4 and Horus 5. It too is unusual, both in its extent and in the number and size of its asteroids; many are the size of small planets. Almost certainly, the Belt is Horus 4’s doing: the remains of two or even three very large planets inside the orbit of Horus 5, torn to pieces by Horus 4’s gravity.
Horus 5 has a mean distance of 1540 million miles from Horus, and is the system’s outermost planet: a gas giant with a thick hydrocarbon atmosphere and a swarm of moons.
If She makes an emergence in Horus system, you will face Her alone and unconstrained, as the Department promised. If that happens, you may find the unusual features of this system helpful, though of course the authors of this briefing would not presume to advise you on how to engage Her.
Foord had no intention of considering any advice on how to engage Her, whether it came from the Department or the Sakhran authorities or even his own crew, unless it suited him. He had been reflecting for some days on the strategy and tactics he would employ if She emerged at Horus, and had found something which seemed genuinely to have escaped everybody’s notice.
For the next few days, just as for the last few days, all the planets of Horus system would be roughly in alignment: like an antique clockwork orrery, with its brass balls quivering on the ends of their brass rods.
Maybe, Foord had thought, when She emerges at Horus 5, at the outer edge of the system, She’ll wait for us to reach Her. Why? Because, he imagined, She’ll want to meet us there, almost formally, so She can fight us all the way through the system, planet by planet, back to Sakhra. And why should She do that? Because, Foord further imagined, She would think it fitting; because She would have found out that in this system alone, She could enter into a single combat with the only other ship in known space able to match Her.
It was a recurrent daydream, or conceit, of Foord to think about Her so. But it also suited his purposes. He had analysed Her known capabilities and previous documented encounters, and the features of Horus system (using the real data on his ship’s Codex, not the Department’s rather patronising and flippant briefing) and had concluded where it would be best to engage Her: in the Gulf, and in the outer parts of the system. So he wanted to fight Her all the way back to Sakhra.
For the same sound operational reason, She would probably have done a similar analysis and reached a similar conclusion—that is, if whatever lived inside Her worked and thought in that way.
•
Things were as quiet and well-ordered as usual on the Bridge. So, after the meal had finished and he had taken status reports, Foord decided to go for a walk; there was something he needed to see.
“Back in twenty minutes,” he told them, as the Bridge door irised shut behind him. “Thahl, you have the ship.” The others glanced up, but said nothing.
He walked through the cramped main corridor. It was more like a burrow, with conduits and cables and wires and circuitry pressing down from above, prodding sideways from the walls, and pushing up from the floor: a burrow through the ship’s densely-packed working parts, which occupied almost every inch of its sixteen hundred feet. The main corridor forked into secondary burrows even more cramped, and he followed them, occasionally having to stoop.
The secondary burrows looked unmade, like a building site. Their walls were unfinished plaster and cement. They were lit by naked light fittings, which worked efficiently (everything worked efficiently, whatever it looked like) but were fixed at random angles and irregular intervals. This was what the Charles Manson really was, inside itself. Its crew, human and nonhuman, moved like germs through its elegant but densely-packed body.