“The screen, Commander,” Thahl said loudly. His voice sounded strange too. “Look at the screen.”
Apart from the object, which was still dead ahead, the Bridge screen was empty. Horus 5 was gone. The stars were gone. The distance between the stars, and the ability to measure it, was gone.
Some of the Bridge instruments sounded failure or overload alarms. Others stopped registering altogether, and fell silent. Elsewhere around the Bridge, needlemikes and navigation computers and scanners and sensors were jabbering impossibilities at each other; ordered to disprove what had happened, they were pouring out proof in stream-of-consciousness torrents. The stars and planets were gone, not merely as electronic images on the main screen or as phosphor-dot smears on computer displays but as solid objects, as sources of gravity and energy and positional reference. They were gone.
The size of the universe was the distance between the Charles Manson and the now-stationary object facing it.
From outside, a single concussion shook the ship. It was repeated, repeated again, and became a continuous vibration. It was soft and low-register, as discreet as one of the ship’s own alarms, and pitched well below the threshold of actual discomfort; but to the ship, it was more profoundly wrong than the stars’ apparent absence. Very little of what went on outside the Charles Manson should ever have been felt inside. The ship tried to define the new situation—it couldn’t fight what it couldn’t define—by telling its sentience cores to analyse what had happened, and they variously shouted, warbled, beeped and murmured back at it their inability to do so. For a moment the Bridge, unthinkably, became deafening, then the ship told them to stop. It was at least able to do that, but not much more. If it had been more sentient it would have defined what it felt as human panic, while the humans and humanoids who inhabited it remained inhumanly calm.
“Presumably,” Foord said, “that object has put something like a force-field around us.”
“Around us and itself, Commander,” Joser said. “It’s about ten times more powerful than our flickerfields, and…”
“Ten times?”
“…and it’s continuous. It’s blocking everything from outside—light, gravity, radio waves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet… For all I know, the universe could have ended the other side of it.”
On the screen, what had been space was now a confined space, a compartment they shared with Her missile, and with nothing else; depthless black and infinitely close. Joser’s voice still sounded strange. So did Foord’s. So did everybody’s. The reason was—
“That vibration, Joser. What is it?”
“Similar to a tractor beam or motive beam, but not powerful enough to damage the hull, or to activate our flickerfields. Very low register. And very localised.”
“I see,” Foord said slowly, covering for the fact that he didn’t, yet. There was something, but it was still unclear.
“What do you mean, localised?” Smithson spoke across Foord, completely ignoring him. “Answer carefully. Localised where?”
“At the stern, I think.”
“Fuck what you think. Localised where?”
“At the stern.”
“Smithson?…” Foord began.
But Smithson was already roaring orders down several needlemikes at once. He looked round briefly at Foord, snarled “No time. Work it out yourself.”
The vibration ceased. There was another concussion from outside. Then it resumed, louder, and this time there was a second noise accompanying it, a noise from inside the ship. A noise like the scraping of fingernails down a blackboard. Unless someone actually was scraping their fingernails down a blackboard, there was only one explanation for such a noise.
It came from the stern.
“Of course,” Foord said. “The MT Drive. That beam is trying to activate our MT Drive.” His stomach was knotting and clenching, but he spoke calmly.
Across the Bridge, Smithson started clapping two temporarily unoccupied hands together in a heavily sarcastic, and moist, parody of applause.
Foord was irritated. “It’s your MT Drive,” he told Smithson. “She’s got Her hand in your clothes. Do something.”
The noise from the stern got steadily louder.
“I already am,” Smithson muttered. He was now no longer merely operating his controls but fighting them.
The MT Drive struggled to obey Her tractor beam and activate itself, and those on the Bridge struggled not to think about what would happen if it succeeded. The noise from the stern was still increasing. It penetrated even the needlemike circuitry, distorting voices to rasping bass and overlaying them with static; communication would soon be impossible. It activated the Prayer Wheels (the stasis generators used to contain the MT Drive, so called because they were wheel-shaped, and made things around them stand still) which were essential to the Drive’s activation.
A convulsion rolled the length of the ship, as though the burrows and corridors had become a pinball machine with giant ballbearings. Round the Bridge six glasses of inhibitor fluid fell simultaneously to the floor and smashed, were replaced by the chairarm dispensers with six more which also fell to the floor and smashed, and were replaced with six more. Smithson fought back and gradually regained control. The convulsion died away, but it would be the first of many. And from the stern, the noise of the MT Drive’s awakening continued unabated.
“Cyr,” Foord shouted, in the last few seconds during which he could be sure of being heard, “whatever happens, keep all weapons powered. I think She may fly past us, into the system.”
“Commander?”
“I said, Keep all weapons powered. I think She may—”
The second convulsion began. And the the third, and the fourth, rolling up and down the length of the ship until they met and became continuous.
When ships activated their MT Drives inside solar systems—there were only five known cases, all of them years ago—they disappeared without survivors or wreckage; they were never heard of again, even as rumours. The consensus view, which was necessarily tentative since MT had been invented almost by accident, was that they had contracted instantly to mathematically dimensionless points. Every MT Drive was now loaded with inbuilt failsafes to ensure it could never activate if any one of an array of sensors registered planetary or other large bodies anywhere near. Ships’ processes and sentience cores deferred to the failsafes because they were infallible, and an equivalent of instinct; but not this time. This time an attack had come disguised perfectly, as a legitimate command, and they were going to obey it.
And when they did, and the MT Drive was activated, She would kill Her forcefield and let the universe and its gravity and radiation come flooding back in, and the Charles Manson would go wherever the other five went. A good weapon to start the engagement, thought Smithson sourly, as he fought for control. Like my Breathtaker, imaginative and singular. But better, because it fucking works.
To the MT Drive, which had no motive other than to function legitimately, everything was at first routine and normal. It awakened in the stern, found itself the recipient of what could only be a legitimate order to activate, and checked and rechecked each of its failsafes to ensure there were no planetary or other large bodies within the stipulated radius; then checked them again. Once these preliminaries were completed, it sent a stream of neural impulses to the ship’s other sentience cores (weapons, drives, life support, scanners, communications, damage control, flickerfields) giving them formal notice of its activation and requesting them to prepare appropriately; and then it paused, expecting the usual acknowledgements but receiving none. Smithson had blocked each impulse, negating and countermanding and, where necessary, burning out synapses altogether.