He looked across at Thahl and mouthed, Nothing is simple.
Foord and Thahl were perhaps the only two people on the Charles Manson who shared anything like trust, but just then they were both unsure.
Thahl looked back across the Bridge at Foord and mouthed, Nothing is real.
The manoeuvre drives fountained. Kaang turned the ship in its own length and commenced a slow, elegant departure towards the rim of the Belt, back in the direction of Horus 5.
A few minutes passed.
“She’s still moving into the Belt, Commander,” Joser said. “Position 14-17-15. But She’s slowing. Like you said,” he added, hopefully.
“Not quite like I said. I’d have expected Her to stop by now. I wonder if we should increase speed? No, let’s not over-embellish...”
Another few minutes passed. The asteroids grew perceptibly smaller and sparser, but the Charles Manson still picked its way through them with the same unhurried delicacy. At only five percent, it would be a long time before they left the Belt; not that they expected to.
“She’s cut Her drives at last, Commander,” Joser said eventually. “But She’s at rest, not following.”
“Joser, watch Her position,” Foord said. “I think She’s going to…”
Foord studied the white dot on the screen showing Her current position. Still just out of range, of course. It wasn’t that She’d stopped—She didn’t need to stop in order to launch weapons—but he had a feeling this would be something unusual.
“Commander, She’s launched something. It’s not shrouded. I’ll have a visual soon.”
•
It was a cone-shaped object, tumbling towards them end over end; about thirty feet long by twenty feet wide at its base, said the Bridge screen. It offered no resistance to probes, and the probes showed it to be quite empty. It was not travelling under power (though outlets at its base indicated pulse motors) and there were no guidance or homing signals, so the screen concluded it must be on a preset course. As if to confirm this, it fired its motors briefly on-off to avoid a cloud of asteroid debris, then resumed its course towards them.
And, although the screen did not add any comment about this feature, its colour was pink; bright, nursery pink.
Comical and conical, Foord thought; still pisstaking.
“Stay at rest for now, please,” he said. “Joser, the screen says there are no guidance signals.”
“That’s right, Commander: no guidance or homing signals. And ETA is ninety-nine seconds.”
“So no guidance, and apparently—if we believe the probes—nothing inside it. So what’s it there for? What’s it mean?”
A section of the Bridge screen became locally magnified. The usual series of schematics was generated, unasked, by the screen: ventral, dorsal, side, front and rear. They added nothing not already visible.
“Cyr: lasers, please. I want to see inside it.”
A single laser stabbed out, one of the ship’s shortrange crystal lasers. It hit, and a section of the cone sheared off. Inside was as pink as outside; it really did seem empty. It still came on, tumbling end over end, but now more erratically.
“ETA fifty-nine seconds, Commander.”
“Again, please, Cyr.”
Two more shots, two more bits sliced off the cone, two more views of an apparently empty and featureless interior.
Still plenty of time, Foord thought, to destroy it. So what’s it going to do to confound us at the last moment? He told Kaang to move them to port a few hundred feet and bring them to rest, which she did. The cone fired its motors, on-off, as it had done to avoid the cloud of debris, changing course so it still came at them, still tumbling end over end.
“ETA forty-five seconds, Commander.”
“Cyr, finish it, please. Lasers.”
If anything’s going to happen it will be now, thought Foord. But it didn’t. The cone exploded, not very spectacularly, and was reduced to pink dust which drifted away to add itself to the map of the Belt which Foord had been so assiduously rewriting.
Foord took a sip of inhibitor fluid—the tumbler had remained undisturbed on his chairarm during the recent flurry of activity—and settled back in his chair. He let out a long breath.
“Joser, what’s Her position, please?”
“Unchanged and stationary, Commander.”
“Good… So what did She mean with that missile?”
“Mean?”
“Yes. It was slow, empty, had no shrouding and no flickerfields, was coloured pink, and looked silly. Right?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“And apart from the two occasions it fired its motors it wasn’t travelling under active power. Right?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Yet it changed course when we did. Which means, doesn’t it, that it either had an active homing system or was receiving guidance signals from Her.”
“There were no homing or guidance signals, Commander!”
“You mean you failed to detect them.” Foord did not say it unkindly, or accusingly. “Come on, this is the area She has most advantage over us. I just need to know how much advantage. I need to see how we failed to detect them.”
“Detecting no homing or guidance signals is not the same as failing to detect them, Commander. I didn’t fail to detect them. There were no signals.”
“That’s a clever answer,” Foord replied, “but not a helpful one.”
“Commander,” Thahl said quietly, “you asked what She meant by that missile.”
“Well?”
“It seems to have been empty. So, suppose it really didn’t have an onboard homing system, and suppose it really wasn’t able to receive guidance signals.”
“Well?”
“Then its movements must have been preset by Her when She launched it. Including the move to follow our last-minute turn to port. She preset that move when She launched it. Before you gave the order to turn.”
3
The Charles Manson was partly alive, but not alive enough to know that it could die. Its partial life made it serene and invincible; it knew that as long as the parts which made up its whole continued not to need each other, the whole could not be destroyed. It understood that when Foord, of all people, broke down it would probably not be noisy or sudden; with Foord it was more likely to be a careful, phased collapse. So it waited for the expected confirmation. It would then simply continue, minus the discarded part.
The ship had noted his increasingly unusual behaviour, the speech patterns and vocal nuances and repeated unanswered questions. It had prepared for his replacement by Thahl, or (if there were further contingencies) by Cyr or Smithson; Joser and Kaang were not on its list. It had noted that Thahl would normally be next, but had detected minor aberrations in him, too. It made no judgements—it wasn’t able to—but only calculated contingencies. The contingencies were programmed into the computers which served its sentience cores which, when they came together, were its Codex.
But Foord did not break down. His reaction, when it came, was perhaps worse.
“What is She, Thahl?” he kept asking; the one question he always said he wouldn’t ask. “What is She? How can She reach into our MT Drive and our communications and our thoughts before we think them? How is it She already knows us?” Eventually he stopped asking and fell silent, and then his reaction became clear: not breakdown, but withdrawal. He turned inwards, back to the time when the darkness came.