“Smithson, we need that position.”
“Later. There are too many echoes.”
“The one…” Joser began.
“I’d really like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said, and this time he did stop, because they hit another swarm of asteroid debris, more heavily this time, and went reeling.
“The one…”
For entire seconds they were out of control, and then the manoeuvre drives fountained and Thahl started to right them, but Foord didn’t notice any of this. He had heard someone speak, just before the Impact alarms murmured.
“Kill the alarms, I can’t hear!” Foord yelled.
“…She intended for us.”
“What? What was that?”
“I said, The one She intended for us.”
Foord froze, horrified: it was Smithson, not Joser, who had spoken.
“Why,” he said carefully “did you say that?”
“Position of Her third missile,” Smithson said, “is 05-03-06 and closing. And,” he added, killing the alarms and what was left of Foord’s composure, “this time She means it. It’s sixty feet long.”
The Bridge screen was shot through with light. The shroud fell away, and the third missile appeared, another featureless ovoid but bigger. They watched it push through its shroud into sudden existence, as if something invisible had just given it birth.
“It’s just a ship’s length away,” Smithson breathed. “Impact imminent.”
It filled half the rear screen: grey, featureless and huge. Foord stared at it, for too long.
“Impact imminent!” Smithson bellowed at him.
“No,” he whispered. “Check its speed.”
It was keeping an exact distance. It was plunging with them through the Belt, more a companion than a pursuer, its grey elliptical dot behind their slender silver delta making a deformed exclamation mark; and because it could hit them at any time, it wouldn’t yet.
Smithson swore. “It’s cut speed to match ours! It’s…”
“Playing with us,” Foord agreed.
“I have ten percent ion speed left, Commander,” Thahl said.
“Use it, please.”
He did, and so did the missile. On the screen, since it maintained distance exactly, nothing happened.
“That’s enough. Cut back to ninety percent, please. We have to leave ourselves something.”
“For what?” Thahl kept his voice carefully neutral, but he cut back, and so did the missile. On the screen its position and distance were unchanged. Thanks to Thahl’s evasive manoeuvres, which it parallelled exactly even in their growing raggedness, it was the only other object in the Belt which wasn’t trying to fling itself at them or away from them.
Cyr was already attacking it with closeup weapons. It carried flickerfields, and even used them for a few seconds, but then ceased: perhaps there was no need. Either She would make it hit, or Thahl would get exhausted, or both, long before Cyr could damage it.
There was a huge explosion, but not the missile; not yet. They had clipped the rim of an asteroid fragment, and went reeling again until Thahl righted them. The missile reeled and righted itself with them, and maintained exact distance.
Another asteroid loomed ahead, and Thahl wrenched them over its horizon, with the missile following, and plunged into a swarm of asteroid debris. Somehow he got through it, and somehow so did the missile. They ran before it through the Belt, sidewinding and somersaulting. They ran like a dog through dustbins, hitting some and missing others; a dog trying to escape its own tail, and turning rabid because it couldn’t.
“The one…”
“Please keep him quiet, Commander.”
They entered another swarm of debris. The minor impacts mounted, and Thahl ignored them. Cyr kept firing at the missile, and it ignored her. Joser was trying to speak to Foord, and Foord ignored him.
The next major asteroid marked the change. It wasn’t a sudden looming obstacle to be avoided: Thahl was actually making for it. It was large, potato-shaped and lumpy. Its face grew until it filled the forward section of the Bridge screen—and continued to grow, until Forward became Down and they were diving into it. Diving, Foord thought, into a giant face of W. C. Fields…there was where the hat should be, and there the cigar. It even had the complexion, veined and pocked and wrinkled, the details hurtling into and inside focus as it rushed up at them.
To their credit, none of them shouted at Thahl to pull out of the dive until they were sure he’d left it too late; and then he ignored them. He held the dive until they were inside final landing height, then turned the ship in its own length, heading up and back into the Belt. The ion drive, where he turned, hit the asteroid’s face like a broken bottle.
And the missile followed them. It did not, as Thahl hoped, dash itself to pieces on the asteroid. It turned as quickly as they did, and was where it had always been: on the rear Bridge screen, a ship’s-length away. It was as though Kaang was piloting it.
Smithson began a long vomit of foul language, which seemed to splatter over the walls of the Bridge and hang dripping like Kaang’s faeces; though it made no difference to the missile. Nothing did. Joser couldn’t detect it, Thahl couldn’t lose it, Cyr couldn’t destroy it, and Foord—
Foord couldn’t take his eyes off it. Whatever it did to them finally, right now She was using it to speak to them, mocking them for surrendering in seconds of retreat what they’d gained after hours of pursuit. Foord even thought he recognised the tone of voice She used to mock them: understated and ironic, like voices used to be on the Charles Manson.
Joser was trying to speak to Foord, but the wrong words kept coming out. He kept saying “This is the one She intended for us,” and Foord heard but ignored him.
They reached a rare pocket of open space in the Belt. Thahl paused, then wrenched them to port, heading for the next asteroid, and Smithson snorted in derision. So, almost, did Foord, and for the same reason: they were running ragged, a frothing dog diving for the dark of the nearest alley.
But literally an alley this time.
The asteroid for which Thahl was running was BZ-1014. It was huge, the size of a small planet. He flung them into orbit around it—after nodding briefly to himself, as if he actually knew what he was doing—and it spread out below them, like a giant unmade bed. It was humped and folded from horizon to horizon, a landscape of craters and mountains. Pulled this way and that by the Belt’s shifting gravity, it breathed in slow geological violence. One of its breaths was ten of their lifetimes.
Thahl tightened orbit; the effect, of dropping closer to the surface while maintaining speed, was like a surge of acceleration. As BZ-1014’s landscape rushed below, vomited out by one horizon and swallowed by the other, he turned and looked directly at Foord.
“Particle beams,” he managed to say; and “Alley.”
And then Foord understood, and had to fight an impulse to laugh out loud—in relief that Thahl had found something they could still do, and in disbelief at what it was.
“You heard him, Cyr. Fire particle beams.”
“And destroy the asteroid? When we’re on top of it?”
“No,” Foord said, “when we’re inside it.”
Cyr was too amazed, and frightened, to reply. She glanced up at Foord; then at Smithson, who also understood; then at Thahl, who was going to do it anyway; and nodded.
They ran for their alley.
At ninety percent ion speed, Thahl tightened and lowered orbit; then dived
vertically
for the largest of the craters.
The particle beams—even stronger than Hers, the one weapon She couldn’t match—stabbed ahead, perfect and recoilless, and ate.