“Excuse me. Thahl?”
“No call yet, Commander.”
“Thank you. Please keep us at battle stations. Joser?”
“Position of second intruder is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”
The ship on the screen continued to turn away. Now it was almost sideways on, repeating the view the screen had patched in earlier. Like before, SABLE 097 CX 141 bulged over the long contours of its flanks. Class 097s were heavy cruisers. The Sable was bigger than the Charles Manson, but much less powerful; like Foord against Thahl, it wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds.
“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have a call from Director Swann.”
“Thank you. Put him through, please.”
“Well, Commander Foord.”
“Well, Director Swann.”
“As you can see, the Sable is leaving the Gulf. When can I expect you to do the same, in the opposite direction?”
“As soon as we’ve tracked him for a reasonable distance.”
“Of course,” Swann said, magnanimously. He was visibly more relaxed; his face had the equivalent of a spring in its step. Foord’s manner, on the other hand, was precisely the same as before. “But when you’ve tracked him I want you to go, Commander! Do you hear?”
“What will happen to him, Director?”
“You know perfectly well what will happen to him.”
“And his crew?”
“That’s another matter. But for Captain Copeland, it’s all over.”
“Copeland?”
“Yes. It was his brother at Anubis.”
•
“If you can’t stop Her,” Swann had said to Foord, as the Charles Manson was making ready to re-engage photon drive and head through the Gulf towards Horus 5, “then She’ll have to get past Horus Fleet to reach Sakhra. If the Fleet can’t stop Her, neither will Sakhra’s normal defences, but by then the evacuation will have progressed and if She ever reaches here She’ll find military areas full of civilians and most of the movable defences gone to the highlands. If everything else fails I’ll gamble on Her not attacking civilian targets.”
Foord had not answered.
“And don’t give me any of your silences, Foord, not after what your people did here! My family have been evacuated too. They’re taking the same risk as everyone else. I was born here, and so were my parents and my children, and I’ll defend it any way I see fit.”
Foord had not meant his silence to imply disapproval. Insofar as the evacuation interested him at all, which was not very much now that he’d left Sakhra, he could see it made some sense; Thahl had persuaded him of that. His silence was merely a suggestion that they both had other things they should be doing.
“We’re just about to move off, Director. Was there anything else?”
“We need you to stop Her, Foord; but…”
“But you think the cure is worse than the disease?”
“Your ship isn’t a cure. It’s another disease.”
Foord had blinked a couple of times at the empty patch on the screen, where Swann had cut the connection, and then returned his attention to the Bridge.
“Joser, please keep a continuous check on Her position and confirm every ten minutes. Kaang, please take us out of here, heading 99-98-96, on photon drive at thirty percent rising to ninety percent.”
The conversation with Swann had taken place forty minutes earlier. The Charles Manson was now about one-quarter of the way through the Gulf, holding at ninety percent photon speed. The Bridge screen had cut in with filters and compensators at twenty percent to adjust for relativistic distortion of the starfield, and at seventy percent had blanked out entirely and substituted a simulation which showed Horus 5 in outline, and beyond it, at 99-98-96 and unmoving, a white dot which represented Her. It seemed very faint on the screen, like the last living thing in a wasteland; or the first, of millions.
At regular intervals Joser would murmur “Position of Faith is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband,” and Foord would acknowledge politely. That, and the muted voices of the others as they made regular status reports or conducted routine conversations with other parts of the ship, was the only human noise on the Bridge. When the Charles Manson went to battle stations, there were changes of degree which were barely perceptible; relationships were a little more carefully delineated, Foord was a little more courteous and attentive to detail, and noise and light were a little more subdued.
Foord was starting to feel distaste at what he’d done, as if he’d been pulling wings off flies; Swann was only trying to protect his people. He took a sip from the tumbler of inhibitor fluid put out by his chairarm dispenser. It was half-full, exactly as he left it since the encounter with the Sable, and when he replaced it it slid down into the chairarm, was replenished, and slid up again. It was a tall tumbler, filled almost to the brim, but no vibration disturbed the surface of the liquid. Had it done so Foord would have been quite disoriented. For generations, it had been an established convention that space travel was dulclass="underline" empty of events, and almost devoid of distance.
It was empty of events because events could be anticipated by the ship, and either avoided, evaded, compensated or filtered, before or while they happened; so that at ninety percent photon speed the ship enabled gravity, light, elapsed time and sensory perception to function inside it exactly as if it was at rest.
It was almost devoid of distance because distances between stars could be sidestepped by the MT Drive, and distances within solar systems could be eaten up by the ship’s array of lesser drives. Since the development of Matter Transfer, distances between stars had ceased to have much meaning. Most interstellar cultures, like the Commonwealth and the old Sakhran Empire, had developed MT Drive almost by accident. It was still only partially understood. One of its features was that it could not be used within solar systems; to engage it anywhere near bodies of planetary mass would be catastrophic. Distances within solar systems, however, were no more than a minor irritation for ships with photon and ion drive.
All that, plus the existence of instantaneous communication using principles derived from MT physics, made it possible for a Commonwealth of twenty-nine solar systems to function as if each system was an apartment in the same block, divided only by thin walls and a darkened hall and staircase—darkened, because nobody needed to go out there anymore. The Gulf in Horus system was the nearest anyone would get to the old pre-MT days of space travel, when people travelled physically through the nothingness between stars, instead of sidestepping it as they did now; an MT Jump, and an emergence from it, took the same time whether the distance was one light-year or a hundred.
“Position of Faith,” Joser said, “is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”
“Thank you,” Foord replied, giving Joser a sidelong glance. Maybe, he thought, Joser would say that Foord had been unreasonable over the Sable; or that Foord had compromised on the Department’s orders. Either way, it’d sound good when whispered back to the Department.
“You have the ship,” he told Thahl. As he left the Bridge, he turned to Cyr. “I’d like to see you in my study, please. In five minutes.”
•
Foord’s study was almost adjacent to the Bridge, a very short walk down an adjoining corridor. When four minutes fifty seconds had elapsed, Cyr walked the short distance, knocked on the door, and waited. When Foord called Enter, she did so, and like last time she closed the door behind her and remained standing.