That had been exactly Foord’s intention; he liked its irony. However, he caught sight of Joser listening attentively. “Yes, all right, I see what you mean.”
“…Isis Destroyed, Aquila Destroyed, Vega Destroyed…”
“Yes, all right. We’ll just number them, Cyr.”
“One to twenty-nine, Commander?”
“One to twenty-eight. Keep one back.” He glanced at Joser. “The Commonwealth always keeps something back.”
Not yet under power, the Breathtaker dropped down through miles of Horus 5’s thickening atmospheric soup, through reds and purples and ochres. It had onboard motors, but it looked nothing like a missile. Its motors would take it towards Her, but it would never make impact. What it did would not be aimed directly at Her; only the result of what it did.
Smithson had devised and built it in a hurry, and could not, of course, test it. As far as anyone knew, nothing like it had been used before. It might fail to work, or it might work and still be destroyed by Her. If She destroyed it, it might, like the missiles, provide some insights into Her abilities. If it failed to work, it might still leave Her wondering: was its failure genuine or double-bluff?
On the Bridge screen the Breathtaker started to glow. Foord watched it fall further and further until the swirling atmosphere of Horus 5 swallowed it.
A few minutes later, Cyr said “Commander, we’ve received the first confirmation.”
“Thank you, Cyr.”
The Breathtaker was preset to descend to the middle levels of Horus 5’s atmosphere, to send its first confirmation to the Charles Manson, and then to fire its motors and commence a low-level orbit of the planet which, in about ten hours, would take it to a point directly below Her.
It was a large matt black sphere, made of heavy overlapping plates and designed to withstand the pressures found in the middle atmospheric levels of a gas giant. It contained hundreds of small Breathtakers, and a crude but large thermonuclear device. When it completed its low-level orbit and was directly underneath Her, it would send its second confirmation; the thermonuclear device would detonate and the Breathtakers, augmented and amplified by the blast, would smash a temporary vacuum in part of Horus 5’s atmosphere, a shaped vacuum, long and thin, pointing up at Faith. Into it would rush some of the liquid metal hydrogen which existed at Horus 5’s lower levels. The vacuum would very quickly be closed as Horus 5’s atmosphere rushed in to fill it, but by then, if the theory worked, a large slug of liquid metal hydrogen would be accelerated through the vacuum, directly at Her. The vacuum would act like a giant coil gun, miles long.
Maybe it wouldn’t work; maybe it would work but miss; maybe it would work but Her defensive fields—flickerfields—would hold it. Whatever happened, it would be singular: worthy of Her, and of Smithson. If She survived, which Foord fully expected, it would still leave Her wondering. That is, if whatever lived inside Her thought that way.
Joser filtered down the light from the Bridge screen a little more, and time passed quietly; the missiles and Breathtaker would need ten hours to reach Her. One by one each of the Bridge officers wound down his or her routine tasks, and communications with crew members on other parts of the ship gradually tailed off. The ship hung at rest relative to Horus 5; it was closed to communications from outside, and its parts were closed off from each other, as were those who inhabited it.
It waited, serene and invincible. As long as the parts which made up its whole continued to believe they didn’t need or care for each other, the whole could never be destroyed.
8
An hour passed uneventfully.
“Kaang,” Foord said, “if you want some rest, it would be better if you took it now. We’ll need you later, when the missiles start reaching Her.”
“Thank you, Commander, but I’d rather stay. She may not wait until later.”
“It could be hours,” Foord said, with a trace of irritation. “And do you intend to keep the ship on manual?”
“Yes, Commander. You know I prefer manual. I’m faster than the computers.”
She spoke as if explaining housekeeping arrangements; on any other subject, if she had an opinion at all, she would have been more hesitant and probably wrong. Foord let it pass. Whatever else She has, he thought, She doesn’t have a pilot like Kaang. Nobody does, not even the other eight Outsiders.
Across the Bridge, he and Cyr made brief and unexpected eye contact, and realised they were both remembering the same thing: the day Kaang first joined them.
•
Although it could fly in planetary atmospheres, the Charles Manson—like all nine Outsiders—had been built and fitted out in Earth orbit, to preserve secrecy. After its first proving flight, it was kept in orbit to receive its pilot for the second, and definitive, proving flight. When Kaang was brought up by orbital shuttle to join them, they knew of her by reputation; but they were disappointed at the pleasant, but unremarkable, young woman who entered the Bridge and reported for duty.
After the usual formalities, she smiled hesitantly at Foord as she took her place and reminded him—inconsequentially, it seemed at the time—that this was to be the definitive proving flight. Thahl, who was interim pilot, offered to take her through the controls, but she politely declined; if, she said, it was satisfactory to Foord, she would prefer to begin immediately. He agreed, and what followed was almost beyond his belief. She took the ship out of orbit and flew it, not like a sixteen-hundred-foot heavy cruiser, but like a single-seat interceptor. She made it pitch and somersault, roll and yaw, turn in its own length, and almost turn itself inside out. She switched through the array of drives from ion to magnetic to photon to nuclear to ion, from ninety percent to rest and back to ninety percent in each of them, until it seemed ready to collide with itself. She played it like a virtuoso would play a perfect instrument, to the highest level of its performance; the closest to both its perfection and its destruction. For two hours she kept it exactly balanced between the two, on the edge of fulfilling or losing the new life she had shown it. It was sublime, and terrifying. And when it was over, she resumed the hesitant smiles and awkward commonplaces.
That was seven years ago, when he had first taken command of his ship. Since then, he had learnt only three things about Kaang. First, where computers made millions of low-level calculations every second, she could jump them intuitively to see patterns; so could all good military pilots, but she was always faster, and always right. Second, the Department wanted her as pilot on the Albert Camus, the leadship of the Outsider Class, but she had declined politely; she had always, she said, wanted to serve on Foord’s ship. (He’d once asked her why. Embarrassed, she said it was because he understood she was only a pilot, and nothing more).
And that was the third thing he knew about her. Apart from her abilities as pilot, she gave him nothing of any use. She was almost worthless to him.
•
Two more hours passed uneventfully. Cyr broke the silence every few minutes with status reports on the missiles: they were all launched accurately and did not, so far, require any additional guidance or in-flight correction. A long way below them, the Breathtaker continued to plough through the heaving middle levels of Horus 5’s atmosphere. The life-forms around it, who tinted the air and who might be sentient, watched it quizzically as it thundered past them. It would kill some of them when it started functioning, a fact which concerned Foord, but not enough to decide against using it.