5
Two hours had passed since the photon burst. They had won back their advantage, putting Faith within their beam range and themselves out of Hers, and they were driving Her before them through the Belt; but they still remembered Kaang. Not as a colleague (they liked to think there were no such things on Foord’s ship) or as an individual (she had never been interesting enough) or even as their pilot (Thahl substituted adequately). It was much more specific than that. They remembered her because the whole Bridge stank of her shit.
Only pack hunters tended their injured: solitary predators, like cats and Sakhrans and the Charles Manson’s crew, preferred to ignore them. For that unspoken reason, and for other reasons, they had left Kaang where she fell after the photon burst. It was nearly an hour before Foord summoned attention, and as the doctors carried her out she had defecated, massively. It had gone everywhere.
For the twenty-fourth time in the two hours since the photon burst, 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. Her cover this time was AD-2049, a small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran. Cyr reached Her with eight shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes. Somehow the time didn’t seem to pass as slowly as when Kaang had been pilot. Thahl’s competence was monotonous, but Kaang’s near-perfection was even more so.
They had counted out the last two hours in careful five-minute pieces like this one; but the first five minutes, following their emergence from the photon burst, really counted, because they had done something remarkable. They had become the first of Her opponents ever to surprise Her. When She had seen the only other ship in Horus system which might be able to threaten Her, emerging from the insanity of a photon burst through asteroids and coming at Her firing, She had—not exactly panicked, but hurried. And in the first few minutes, the engagement had been reshaped.
She fled from them so hurriedly that by the time She found fresh cover (Cyr reached Her with seven shots that time, all of which Her flickerfields held), She was two-thirds of the way through the Belt. Now, two hours later, She was three-quarters through and still running. Occasionally She tried other tactics—missiles on parabolic courses, decoys, even a shrouded mineswarm—but each time Joser spotted them and Cyr destroyed them.
The five minutes were eventually counted. For the twenty-fifth time, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic; headup displays; target simulations. Her cover this time was AD-2025, a miserably small asteroid (they all were, now that the Belt was starting to peter out) whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran, trying to double back on them—She tried this every third or fourth time—but was easily headed off by the particle beams. Cyr reached Her with eleven shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes.
“You’re getting better at this,” Cyr remarked to Joser.
Joser gave her a slight nod of acknowledgement. “It’s the repetition. I like the repetition,” he said, and meant it.
The Bridge was pleasantly quiet, and Foord, quietly pleased. The Belt was dwindling, the asteroids She was using for cover were getting smaller, the spaces between them larger, and each time She broke and ran She had to take more of Cyr’s unwaveringly accurate beam-firings. She was being drained; not only, it seemed, of energy through Her flickerfields, but of will. Even Her occasional counterattacks carried no real conviction. And most important, they had locked Her back in beam range and She seemed unable to break out of it.
Foord’s wristcom buzzed.
“Commander, may I talk to you?” Kaang sounded as bad as she had looked the last time Foord saw her.
“Kaang. It’s good to hear your voice again.” (It wasn’t.) “How are you?” (“How is she?” Foord had asked, an hour ago, of one of the doctors he had finally called to the Bridge. “She was half-dead, Commander, when the ship discarded her. She’s still half-dead.”)
Kaang didn’t reply. He tried again.
“How are you, Kaang?”
“I’m in Medical, Commander.”
“Ah,” Foord said. He had never been able to sustain a conversation with Kaang about anything, except her duties as pilot. He tried again; this time, the last resort of any visitor to any sickbed. “Is there anything you need?”
“That’s what I want to talk about, Commander. The doctors say there’s no permanent damage.”
“That’s good…Kaang, I don’t know how to tell you what we owe you.” This was literally true: he genuinely didn’t know how to say such things. He had blurted the words out, as though admitting to some personal disease.
“Commander, I think I should return to duty.”
“No.” Foord was relieved; this at least was familiar territory. “When you’re fit, yes, but not before. Until then we have adequate cover.”
“Who’s acting as pilot, Commander?”
“Thahl. Both he and I hold current Pilot’s Certificates.”
“Commander, excuse me.” The one area where she would show resistance. “What did you and Thahl score on your last annual tests? Seventy-five percent?”
“Thahl scored seventy-five. I scored seventy-four.”
“The best military pilots score about eighty. I’ve never scored below ninety-five. She won’t let you stalk Her forever, Commander. You need me back on the Bridge.”
“And you need rest, according to my medical advice.” (“She’s gone unattended for an hour longer than necessary, Commander,” the doctor had snapped, his forearms covered in shit and blood, “and she needs rest. More particularly, a rest from you.”) “I most need you back, Kaang, when we’ve finally driven Her out of the Belt and this engagement really begins. If it is one. Until then we have adequate cover.”
He snapped his wristcom shut, too abruptly.
Joser sniffed the air. “It’s like she’s never been away,” he murmured to Cyr.
“Her absence,” Cyr agreed, “has been deeply smelt.”
Foord glanced at them curiously. The rapport between them had started to grow after the photon burst, and coincided with Joser becoming more effective. It was not something he would have expected.
He gazed round the Bridge. “I believe I asked for status reports.” He hadn’t. “Do I have to ask for them again?”
While the reports were being given—they were short, satisfactory and required only half his attention—he was thinking about Kaang.
“Thahl.”
“Commander?”
“Block off communications from Kaang, please. I don’t want any more calls like that.”
In the first few minutes after the photon burst, when they erupted upon Her, they’d had no choice but to leave Kaang where she fell. But later, when the engagement resettled into the dual monotony of asteroid-hopping and beam-firing, they continued to ignore her. Their agreement to do so, like much on Foord’s ship, was unspoken. Each of them found tasks to attend to, rather than attend to her—tasks which often required them to speak to each other over, and around, and through, where she was slumped at her console. It was only much later, and almost too late, when Foord summoned help. Outsiders always went self-contained during missions; it was their nature to turn inwards.