He gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.
“She isn’t going to Sakhra, not yet. She knows we can’t follow until we’ve made repairs. She knows this will be fought all the way back to Sakhra, so She’ll wait for us. When we’re ready we’ll find Her there, in the Belt, waiting. Now…. Thahl, please cancel battle stations, and go back to secondary alert. Smithson, how long will a full damage repair operation take?”
“Four hours if we hurry, Commander.”
“Take five, and don’t hurry.”
“You realise the MT Drive is permanently down until we make port again?” He hesitated on Until; Foord knew he had been about to say Unless.
“Yes, I realise that.”
“And you’re serious about not hurrying?”
“Yes. Five hours, six hours, She’ll wait.”
“Commander,” Joser said, “She’s just switched down from photon to ion drive. Still decelerating, and heading into the Belt.”
“Good…. Smithson, we owe you.” He left a short pause, so Smithson could play out his usual game.
“You should have seen it earlier, Commander, what She was doing. I can’t always be the first to see things.”
“I did see it, eventually.”
“Eventually.”
“Tell me, do you think that inside Her there was someone like me who asked someone like you to think up something like your Breathtaker? Something unusual, to mark the start of the engagement?”
“You’d better hope not, Commander. Because if there was, Her version worked.”
“It didn’t, because you saw it in time and disabled it. Perhaps it was like ours. Not made to succeed, just to make us wonder.”
“You’re wrong, Commander, and you’re self-indulgent. Ours got snuffed out, and we don’t even know how. Hers started working, and we only just stopped it. Don’t have any illusions about what happened here. It was a near disaster.”
The alarms stopped murmuring. Red telltales disappeared one by one from the consoles, impact harnesses retracted, and the Bridge lighting increased from near-darkness to its more customary twilight. Thahl, Smithson and the others began implementing damage repair operations. Muted conversations between the Bridge and other parts of the ship restarted, like conversations at a restaurant after an altercation.
“Commander,” Smithson said, “how did you know She wouldn’t attack ?”
This time, when Foord laughed, it came out precisely as he intended.
“Because we were defenceless.”
“You gambled that She wouldn’t attack if we made ourselves defenceless.”
“Yes. She even glanced at us, to make sure. Did you see?”
“You gambled the ship that She wouldn’t…”
“Undefended civilian targets, She doesn’t attack. Undefended warships, who make themselves undefended? Yes, I gambled. Work out the odds for yourself. But only for the next five hours or so. Then we go after Her.”
•
Four hours fifty-one minutes later, Thahl announced completion of damage repairs. Foord immediately insisted on a further series of external working parties to check the hull’s integrity, even though the original repairs included external working parties, and even though the hull’s sensors confirmed no breach of integrity. He also requested a further systems overhaul to ensure the MT Drive was irrevocably dead and could never, as Smithson said, be reactivated. These operations took a further eighty minutes before they were completed to Foord’s satisfaction. Almost completely restored, he told himself; except, of course, that one of its nine sentience cores, the one controlling the MT Drive, was dead. Along with the Drive itself.
He spoke to the ship’s Codex, the agregation of its sentience cores, to verify that it understood. It told him it did, that nine were now eight, that one was amputated, and the eight would go on without it.
Status reports were taken, battle stations resumed, and the Charles Manson moved off for the Belt at an unhurried thirty percent ion speed. It arrived without incident and found Her waiting—waiting almost politely, just as Foord had expected—and the second phase of the engagement began.
PART SIX
1
The weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen.
Cyr sighed; she had been grooming her nails. She rested her right hand palm down on a panel, and pressed. The Charles Manson’s particle beams lanced out. Target Destroyed, said the headup display redly; it was referring to AN-4044, a minor asteroid near the outer rim of the Belt, scarcely larger than a small city and only just large enough to merit a classification number. Faith had been using it as cover for the last five minutes, which was all the weapons core had instructions to allow. Now it was vaporised, neatly and hygienically, by the beams; reduced to almost nothing. She was running again, and the Bridge screen simulation depicted Her movements. She was too distant for a visual, and in any case was still shrouded. It did not matter. Shrouding could not hide Her drive emissions, despite Her occasional half-hearted attempts to disguise them.
Kaang now joined in. Her instructions, like Cyr’s, had been pared down by repetition to an unfailing routine. The manoeuvre jets fountained and the ion drive played up and down the register as she made the Charles Manson parallel exactly Faith’s ducking and weaving. The Charles Manson’s particle beams had superior range, and Kaang kept Her always at an exact distance.
For six hours they had bombarded Her monotonously through the Belt. It seemed like six days. She had not succeeded in hitting back, though the constant use of Her flickerfields would be draining Her more than the constant beam-firings were draining the Charles Manson. Her counterattacks had been irregular, and were dwindling.
Cyr fired the beams again. Target Reached, said the screen headup. The weapons core predicted where She would go for cover, ignoring the evasive manoeuvres, and aimed the beams accordingly. As usual, the prediction was correct, and as usual Her flickerfields held; just. She made cover again, a small unclassified asteroid this time, and the weapons core started counting off another five minutes. The headup display dimmed. Kaang brought the ship to rest, still exactly at maximum beam range, and Cyr resumed grooming her nails. It was not a theatrical gesture; there was little else to do. Their tactics had been successful, but grindingly repetitive.
Most asteroid belts were sparse and meagre, but this one was huge, and it teemed. Horus 4 had created it by destroying two, maybe three, giant planets, leaving the Belt crowded with surrealist shapes and quivering with gravity. Its outer rim areas, where they were stalking Her, consisted mainly of smaller and more irregular asteroids, hanging in space at contradictory angles, like rock formations growing out of nothing. Parallax made some of them look so close they were about to collide. Gravity in the Belt was a latticework of forces, near and distant, small and large. The asteroids exerted it on each other, and had it exerted on them by Horus 4 and Horus 5 and the sun Horus. They moved in whole or partial orbits, balancing and counterbalancing each other like one of Foord’s brass clockwork mechanisms.