“That’s all seen to, Commander. She won’t….”
“Disturb us again?”
“Yes, Commander.”
Everybody else on this ship, thought Foord—himself, even Joser, even the three doctors he summoned—had at some time either given or received violence. But never Kaang. She was the purest specialist, the least violent and least interesting of all the Charles Manson’s inhabitants. When the violence of the engagement touched her, it touched the ship’s most private part. By not dying, she made it impossible for them to deny it.
And the result was monumentally disgusting: the smell, the stains on the lower areas of her light grey uniform, the facepack of dried blood and yellow moustache of mucus. Her breath had smelt, too. Foord did not even stop to think that at least she was still breathing, only that her breath smelt.
•
For the twenty-sixth 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 AC-1954, another small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. Cyr reached Her with nine shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before realising that Her target simulation, the white blip on the screen indicating Her position, had not moved.
At AC-1954, She had stopped running.
Cyr was surprised enough to glance up at Foord, but not enough to stop firing. Fourteen shots, fifteen. What, she wondered as she continued to fire, is She about to do that’s worth this drain on Her?
The same thought had occurred to Foord. “Joser, I expect this is another missile. Check it, please, will you?”
“Already done, Commander. It is a missile. Closing at twenty percent. Details and a visual will be on the screen shortly.”
“And the other missiles?”
“Other missiles, Commander?”
“Other missiles, Joser. Remember? She tries this every third or fourth time. The first one is a diversion for the others, coming in on parabolic courses while the first is on a straight course.”
That speech had taken Cyr up to twenty-three shots.
“I remember, Commander. I’ll find them.”
“Yes, I think you will. She used to run you ragged, but not any more. Perhaps when we have more time”—Foord was dangerously unaware, then, how little they had—“you’ll tell me how you did it.”
Thirty shots. She remained still, Her flickerfields holding the beams.
“Here are the details, Commander. Visual will follow.”
The Bridge screen displayed headups confirming the missile was under remote guidance from Faith, and showed its position and speed: 26-14-19 and closing, at ninety percent.
“Ninety percent!”
“It was twenty—”
“It’s now ninety, Joser. Impact in seventy-nine seconds, it says. Cyr, get it, please.”
(Smithson scowled at the headup display. “Something wrong about that missile,” he hissed at Joser. “It doesn’t need remote guidance. Too fast to manoeuvre, and on a straight course. So why guidance?” Joser shrugged, oddly and mechanically, as though remotely operated. Smithson turned to repeat the question to Foord, then decided not to. Oddly, he never knew why. It was one of his very few bad decisions.)
The long-range gas and semiconductor lasers lanced out at the missile, almost but not quite parallel to the particle beams which Cyr was still stabbing at Faith. The particle beams were malignant dull blue, the lasers brilliant white. The particle beams reached their target, the lasers didn’t. The approaching missile simply avoided them. It flicked to one side, let them pass by, and returned to its course. All at ninety percent.
Smithson swore. “That’s why remote guidance,” he muttered.
Joser’s expression was unreadable, almost shrouded. “Impact in sixty-four seconds.”
The missile was now visible on the Bridge screen—though Joser had omitted to supply local magnification—and the screen generated the usual side, ventral and dorsal images, and, unasked, added magnification: a grey ovoid, about twenty feet long, with no markings or external features. Considering what it had just done, it should not have looked so ordinary.
“Cyr,” Foord inquired, carefully—but his voice fooled nobody— “how can it do that?”
“Do you want it explained, Commander, or destroyed?”
Again the lasers lanced out. Again they missed.
“How can it do that?”
“Impact in forty-four seconds.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Cyr whispered, probably to herself. The missile’s performance was extraordinary, and whoever on Faith was guiding it was reacting so quickly that Cyr was actually firing lasers and missing—almost unheard-of, and she took it very personally.
The lasers lanced out again and again, and missed both times.
“Something wrong,” repeated Smithson. Joser did not reply; as the missile got closer, he seemed to get further away.
“Impact in thirty-seven seconds.”
“Behind it!” Smithson bellowed. “Look behind it.”
“Thahl,” Foord began, “can we—”
“Yes, Commander, we can outrun it. But if we run, we put Her out of beam range.”
“No!” Joser shouted, but only at Thahl’s grammar. “It’s not it, it’s them.” He paused, oddly, as though afraid of being overheard. “There’s a second one, Commander. Directly behind the first. Duplicating its movements. Hidden in its drive shadow. And when the first one’s destroyed, the second one will…”
Explosions flickered on-off in front of them, knotting space like a muscle cramp.
“Got you, you bastard,” hissed Cyr, who after her setbacks had switched to shortrange crystal lasers and had simply kept firing.
“…the second one will come straight for us. Impact in nineteen seconds. I’m sorry, Commander.”
And as the second grey ovoid hurtled towards them through the wreckage of the first, something else flickered on-off: a glance between Smithson and Foord, concerning Joser. They left it unspoken. Other things mattered more, like the need to get out of Cyr’s way so she could defend them against a rapidly approaching, largely unexpected and wholly ridiculous death.
But now, perversely, Cyr was enjoying herself. The weapons array was her language, and she used it fluently. She composed in it. She hunted the second missile with every closeup weapon in her vocabulary. To the crystal lasers she added motive beams, harmonic guns, tanglers, disruptors and others; she put them together like words in a haiku, each one amplifying each other’s meaning until her composition grew dense and ferocious. She continued also to tap out an unwavering barrage of beam-firings directly at Faith, but that was only punctuation to the main composition. Cyr’s attack on the second missile was an almost perfect statement of her abilities. It lasted exactly nineteen seconds, and then the missile hit the Charles Manson; but it hit as a hundred pieces of wreckage.
And in its wake something else, equally alien, engulfed them. From his console in one of the weapons bays, Cyr’s deputy, Nemec, started cheering. Others on other parts of the ship heard and joined him. The sound was distant and tinny, at first difficult to recognise because even the comm channels which carried it to the Bridge were designed only for muted individual voices; but then, when Thahl formally confirmed only minimal impact damage, the congratulations redoubled and even spread, at first tentatively, to the Bridge.