In its haste to obey Kaang’s priority overrides, the ship almost attacked itself. It slammed shut the final bulkheads; slammed down and locked the seat harnesses of its crew; burst open Kaang’s harness as the last one (Foord’s) locked; and made Kaang the focus of all its systems, sending neural implant wires to burrow into her face and head like maggots, pulsing with information. From the rest of its crew it turned away, leaving them isolated from itself and Kaang as though they were infected.
It killed internal communications. It killed its own Damage Control systems, since Damage could not begin to describe what would happen if Kaang failed. It killed the Bridge screen and all other onboard screens except Kaang’s, because although it had nothing to say about whether a photon burst through asteroids was sanity or insanity, it knew that only Kaang was far enough from either to be allowed to see it happening. It almost killed its own crew, reducing them to sixty-two near-corpses, buried in their own harnesses and in darkness. Then, when they were no longer necessary, it killed the alarms.
The photon drive cut straight in at ten percent. What might be the last fourteen seconds of the ship’s life had already begun; nine seconds were left.
Two sets of events were taking place, one inside and one outside the ship. They should have been galaxies apart, not separated only by the thickness of the hull. Outside, the Charles Manson was plunging through the Belt, wrenching itself past, under, above, below and between those asteroids it had not already vaporised, ten times as quick and vicious in missing them as it had been in destroying them. Inside, everything was filtered and compensated out to almost nothing, the Bridge and corridors and burrows as dark as the vacated interior passages of a corpse; the ship might already have been dead and buried, or embedded in crystal like the Book of Srahr.
Nine seconds to go. They dropped like water from a tap.
Plop.
Eight seconds to go.
While his mother was dying his father had found a letter she had written, while she could still write, setting out her will; her last secret. And now Foord was seeing the last secret of his ship; how it had ordered its final affairs so that only Kaang, in the sense the ship would have recognised it, was still alive.
Plop. Seven seconds to go.
He did not actually hear the sound, just as he did not actually see the seconds poke out, one by one, into the stillness of the Bridge and fall to the floor, Plop
Six seconds to go.
but he realised they reminded him not only of water dropping from a tap (that was too obvious) but of human faeces dropping from…. No. He recoiled from that. That was something his own senses, deprived of input, were providing
Plop. Five to go.
from somewhere in his memory, perhaps Her use of faeces in the famous Isis engagement. But in one way it was accurate. Inside the Charles Manson time really was passing that slowly, and the last few seconds of the photon burst really were falling that softly; solemn, dark brown, and blunt.
Plop. Four to go.
The Charles Manson was not alive enough to know that it could die. But it knew all about subdivision downwards into isolated parts, and Kaang was its last moving part.
Plop. Three.
Except that she wasn’t Kaang any more. At Kaang’s place on the Bridge, watching on the last working screen what would have been unwatchable to the others, there was now only an object. It looked like an exploded diagram, its seat harness burst open around its waist, its face and head fountaining with neural implants. Only its eyes and hands moved. They seemed speeded up by a factor of at least ten, but still—as always—unhurried.
Kaang was going to succeed. Foord was so certain of that that he even stopped listening for the last seconds to fall. He would never have heard them anyway. They were obliterated by the noise of a gigantic explosion. It wasn’t the ship’s destruction—that would have been beyond their hearing—but the ion drive, cutting in at full reverse thrust as the photon drive died, to kill their momentum and bring them out of the photon burst at rest.
The ship turned away from Kaang, like it had previously turned away from the rest of its crew, and forgot her. It left her lying in the tatters of her seat harness, her face bleeding where it had pulled out its neural implants; it routed her pilot’s functions through to Thahl, and her console died as the others came back to life. It reopened its main systems along their usual channels; withdrew the bulkheads; unlocked the seat harnesses; reactivated the screens and lights and alarms; and awaited further instructions.
They had reached their moment, but it was already dying on them. It was the one moment when She might be vulnerable; when they had done something that might genuinely surprise Her. But the moment was dying on them even as it began, and the only way to give it meaning was to forget Kaang. Like the ship, they turned away from her, not even pausing to see if she was alive. Without speaking to each other they resumed the engagement, now with Thahl as replacement pilot; and Cyr, before any of them, resumed firing the particle beams.
4
The smaller asteroids in the Belt were mostly irregular, as lumpy and stolid as potatoes emptied from a sack; and two perfect killing machines stalked each other through them, like tarantulas.
At least, one was a perfect killing machine—the one which was visible and which had just executed a photon burst through asteroids, a near-impossible manoeuvre from which it had emerged with weapons firing. The other one stayed shrouded, a dark spot in darkness; it appeared to be surprised by the unheard-of manoeuvre, and appeared to be running.
But the battle between them was complicated and enigmatic. They fought in different languages, and with different weapons, and at times hardly seemed to be fighting each other at all. Their definitions of Battle and Fight and Weapon seemed to correspond only obliquely. And the space between them, by a kind of relativity, was changing as the battle changed. Things were happening to it. In some ways it was no longer space at all.
Space joined the two ships, and separated them. It was empty, but full of the weapons they fired across it at each other. It was shapeless, but given shape by the Charles Manson’s particle beams, whose range exceeded Hers. After emerging from the photon burst, the Charles Manson had reverted to the same monotonous attrition which had worked so well before, draining Her and systematically destroying asteroids as She sought cover behind them, keeping Her always at a range from which She could not return fire, at least not with Her own beams.
The space between them read like a book, its pages visibly crammed with the Charles Manson’s language: it was shot through with the dull blue of the particle beams, always one way, stabbing incessantly at Her. But it also contained something else, travelling back from Her to the Charles Manson; something unreadable. Something like the white areas of pages, wrapping round the Charles Manson’s beams like white spaces round printed words.
The Charles Manson’s language was one of physical attacks on physical targets. And Faith, while occasionally replying in the same language, seemed also to be conducting another kind of battle, on different targets. On people. On a person in particular. They were all known to Her, but She fixed on one.