Cyr was gliding elegantly among the guests, for the most part ignoring the men (though this was not reciprocated) and making conversation with the women; she could make them feel ugly and untidy just by standing near them, even though she was still wearing her uniform and they were wearing evening gowns. She was well aware of her effect on them, but behaved as if she wasn’t.
Kaang was the centre of a group of Horus Fleet pilots, apologising for herself as always. Every time they were invited to events like this, her reputation went before her. Pilots would introduce themselves, would ask her how she did it, and would leave baffled or resentful, or worse, when they found she couldn’t tell them. It was a gift she had been born with, and didn’t understand. It made her many times better than they would ever be, but with none of their effort. They hated her for that, and also, perversely, for the fact she was not arrogant about it; for the fact that it embarrassed her.
Smithson was pleased to discover that someone had prepared thoroughly enough to have included, just for him, some concentrated vegetable matter; in deference to the elegance of the occasion, it was presented as small solid cakes rather than bowls of slime, but it was palatable. (Cyr told him later that Swann had called her, personally, to check on his dietary needs.)
Smithson was an Ember. His planet, Emberra, was unusually rich and self-sufficient. Emberra had made it clear to the Commonwealth that it would decline any Invitation To Join, and the Commonwealth, wisely, didn’t press the point. Instead it negotiated a network of trade agreements and political treaties, making Emberra a partner but not a part of the Commonwealth. Embers were thus not often seen on Commonwealth planets. Smithson quickly found himself the centre of an openly curious, but not initially hostile, group.
“So what’s your real name?” someone asked. “Is ‘Smithson’ a human nickname or translation or something?”
“Ember names are long multisyllables, sometimes a paragraph long. They identify us by summarising our lives and accomplishments. ‘Smithson’ is a human approximation of the last two syllables of my name.”
“Doesn’t it cramp your style a bit?”
“How do you mean?”
“When you’re rolling in bed with a female, do you whisper her full name?”
“Yes, but we speak quickly. Especially when we’re fucking each other senseless.”
Eventually, someone else asked “So how do you come to be working for the Commonwealth?”
“Well, I…”
“And how, of all things,” a lady interrupted, “do you come to be working for the Commonwealth on an Outsider?”
“I had to leave Emberra,” he said, straight faced. “I’m not welcome there. I killed my children and ate them.”
She laughed uncertainly. As he walked away from the group, which he did without any formal leave-taking, he heard someone say “Even more gross than Foord,” and someone else answer “Yes. A seven-foot walking column of snot.”
Of the rest, Joser was conversing easily and working the room—in the few months since he joined the Charles Manson, he had shown himself to be more socially adept than any of them—and Thahl was conversing less easily, but tolerably well. He was not the only Sakhran present; Swann had taken care to include several on his guest list, including Thahl’s father Sulhu, who had politely declined.
After some perfunctory and awkward circulating, Foord spotted Smithson alone and called him over. They skulked together in a corner of the elegant ballroom. That was when Foord had asked him.
“Let me be clear, Commander.” Smithson was about to say I Don’t Understand, but caught himself just in time. “You want me to devise something to use when we meet Her at Horus 5, but it’s not vital whether it succeeds?”
“Not absolutely vital.”
“Why do you think She’ll wait at Horus 5?”
“Not your concern. She’ll wait. As to whether it succeeds…I want one of your Ideas. The first time we encounter Her, I want something unusual. Something singular. If it doesn’t succeed, I still get to see how She responds to it, and that’s almost as valuable.”
“And you tell me this now, a few days before we lift off?”
“I’m not asking you to invent a new branch of physics. I’m not asking you to build something never seen before.”
“Stop telling me what you’re not asking, Commander.”
“Just use our existing weapons, but put them together into something unusual. Something singular. I already told you. Have one of your Ideas.”
“When I have an idea,” Smithson muttered, “I usually start from the premise that it will work…” But even while speaking, he began to sort and pick through the possibilities.
A string quartet had been setting up on the main stage for the last few minutes. Just as it struck up, Joser came over to join Foord and Smithson.
“Thank you,” Smithson told him, “but I don’t dance.”
“Commander,” Joser said, “Director Swann will be making a welcome speech very soon. I thought it might be useful if you were to spend a little more time with him and his party.”
“Useful?”
“He’s holding this reception for us, Commander. I do think we might….”
Foord reluctantly complied, and Smithson was left alone, still pondering. That was how he came to devise the thing which dropped out of the Charles Manson’s ventral bay which now sped towards Horus 5.
•
Foord looked round at Cyr and Smithson. “Commence launch procedures, please.”
From a series of small bays near the ship’s nose, a swarm of slender objects slid out horizontally. From a larger ventral bay a single object, of a much different shape and size, dropped vertically towards the planet. The smaller objects were conventional missiles, released in a swarm on randomly-varying orbits round Horus 5. The large single object was a Breathtaker.
Breathtakers were usually miniature closeup weapons, designed to enter an opponent’s hull and burn away atmosphere; they would consume any gas, whatever it was, and leave behind a perfect vacuum. The object Smithson had put together was, in effect, a large and long-range Breathtaker, but it wasn’t designed for Her. At least, not directly.
The missiles were launched amid a surge of noise and light at the same time as the Breathtaker dropped silently out of the ventral bay. Nobody seriously believed this would stop Her detecting the Breathtaker’s launch—Her superiority in all areas of scanners and signals technology was well known—but they tried it anyway. Similarly, nobody believed any of the missiles would actually get through, but the speed and manner of Her response, how She detected and countered them, would be illuminating.
Foord had originally wanted to launch twenty-nine missiles at Her, one for each Commonwealth solar system. Warming to his theme, he had decided to give each one the name of a Commonwealth system.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Commander,” Cyr had said.
“Why not?”
“We know She’ll almost certainly destroy them. So how will it sound if I keep announcing Horus Destroyed, Anubis Destroyed, Alpha Centauri Destroyed, Bast Destroyed, Sirius Destroyed…”