“So the beams—”
“Were too strong for it, Commander.”
Still, thought Foord, finishing each other’s sentences. “I didn’t think it would go quite so quickly, though.”
“Didn’t you? It was only an asteroid.”
They both shrugged, a gesture equally fitting as an end to their conversation, or to their years together; then they turned back to the Bridge screen, and considered what they had done.
The air changed. Thickness and slowness drained out of it. It turned sharp and crystalline. Light and events, having almost stopped, began to move again; but away from each other, parallelling the movement of each atom in the asteroid. They were all moving away from each other, like Sakhrans after reading the Book of Srahr.
Time restarted. Light shook itself free of the brown rotting gloom, crawled back through familiar pastels and burst into solar white, breeding new events like life-forms.
Thahl’s Alley opened out into light. Fault-lines radiated from it, reaching through the asteroid’s body like the fingers of a hand, and when they reached the surface the asteroid exploded, blowing through the fingers like sand.
6
Grains of sand.
Time restarted, multiplied, became abundant. Even events couldn’t breed fast enough to fill it, and as the asteroid exploded and the ship fought to outrun the explosion, Foord had time to reflect on those events: on their scale of magnitude. Scales of magnitude had occupied him a lot, ever since he saw a perfectly ordinary Class 037 cruiser pass endlessly overhead at Blentport.
When they approached the asteroid, it was breathing in long geological cycles, heaving its flanks in response to the Belt’s gravity. On a scale of magnitude, they and their ship were microbes in a phial, approaching a mountain.
Sometimes you could trust scales of magnitude. They were simple and linear. For example, two scorpions fighting. They would clack their claws and wave their stings, faces moving like gearboxes, while lesser things around them scurried away aghast. Then an elephant would step on them as it wandered by.
But sometimes, scales of magnitude were ambiguous, hinting that small events were the tip of something larger. For example, two animals glancing at each other, but they were the last dinosaur and the first mammal. Or a small pallid corpse on a beach, but the corpse of the first creature to crawl from the sea.
And sometimes, scales of magnitude were treacherous. They could turn full circle, letting the smallest overpower the largest. The microbes in the phial approaching the mountain were not themselves a threat, but they had made the phial which carried them, and it had the power to explode the mountain; and did so.
She remained at the outer edges of the Belt, still shrouded, and watched them. She had seen them execute a photon burst through the Belt, then burrow through an asteroid to explode it from within, and then try to outrun the resulting explosion. She still held all the advantages; they might not escape the explosion, and Her missile had come out of the asteroid with them and was still dogging them, and She knew they couldn’t shake it off. But still, they had done such things that She was beginning to take notice.
7
“This is the one,” Joser was saying “She intended for us this is the one.” He was trying to say something and didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t that. Every time he tried to speak to them it came out as those words, but it didn’t matter because nobody heard him or, at that time, even remembered him.
They ran, just ahead of the asteroid’s explosion. The Bridge was chaotic and unrecognisable. Part of the minor core which ran the Bridge’s gravity compensators had been damaged, and now was not the time to repair it. Things which had no business but to be fixed pieces of furniture and equipment had taken to an aerial existence, ricochetting off walls and ceilings like shoals of fish frightened one way and another. They went everywhere. Foord and the others were shouting, not in fear but in outrage that mere external events could dishevel them so.
After what they’d done it would have been fitting to have burst clear and to have seen the asteroid explode from a safe distance. It would even have been fitting, though less satisfactory, to have perished instantly in the centre of the explosion. The fact that their situation was neither of these, but something less than either, was an outrage.
They had burst clear of the explosion, but it had not stopped. It was gathering a wavefront behind them which was now racing and radiating through the Belt, so huge it would be visible to instruments on Sakhra. And their own instruments told them that if they ran as they were now—desperately, at ninety-five percent ion drive, because Thahl wasn’t Kaang and couldn’t use photon drive—then the wavefront would catch them before it dwindled to nothing.
It would hit them in about five minutes. They’d probably survive, the screen added insolently, but whether the damage would be serious or minor couldn’t be predicted.
So they ran, just ahead of the wavefront. How could one asteroid, however massive, go on and on exploding like that? It was throwing out more matter than it was made of. As though someone at the other end of the galaxy had found an MT wormhole where the asteroid exploded, and was throwing fresh debris down it. As though the people in the apartment next door had knocked a hole in the wall and were shovelling things through it: cans, and cornflake cartons, and cat litter, and condoms.
“And the third missile?”
“I already told you, Commander,” Smithson snapped. “We didn’t lose it. It’s still there, a ship’s-length away.”
“And damage reports? I want damage reports.”
“No time, Commander, it came out with us and it’s still there and it’s like none of this ever happened.”
“I said, damage reports. Cyr, closeup weapons; Thahl, try to lose it.”
“I’m already trying to lose it, Commander.”
“Like none of this happened,” Smithson muttered.
“And I’m already using closeup weapons,” Cyr said. Just like before, and they didn’t work then either, she thought, but didn’t say.
“The one She…”
Foord turned again to Smithson. “I said, Damage reports.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Look behind us.”
Her missile was still there, so close it filled half the rear screen. But behind it, filling the entire rear screen, was the wavefront which, like Foord’s elephant, threatened to squash them all without noticing. In about three minutes, added Smithson.
The wavefront rolled on and on. It seemed like it would reach back to Sakhra. They had already rewritten part of the map of the Belt, in the form of the asteroids they had vaporised; now, a bigger part was being rewritten right behind them, and seeking to include them.
That extraordinary missile, Foord mused, and that wavefront. Two ticking bombs.
“This is. The one She.”
Three, with Joser. Three was too many, so again he forgot Joser.
“Intended for us.”
“Thahl, use the last five percent ion drive, please.”
He did, and so did the missile.
Still stationary, relative to them. Filling half the rear screen. Neither gaining nor falling back. Like before, it had started deploying its flickerfields against Cyr’s attacks, and like before it stopped. No need. No time, either to drain it or destroy it. It had perhaps two or three percent ion drive left, and they had nothing. And two minutes from now the wavefront would catch them, and they had nothing for that either.