Thahl glanced up, but did not hesitate. Foord watched his hands, slender talons with two opposed thumbs, moving over his illuminated console, leaving darkness wherever they landed.
“Done, Commander. We’re alone.”
The microphone was only symbolic. Thahl knew the Department would have put several other probes on the ship; he knew about most of them, but not all. Later, Foord would order him to disable them, which he would do, but he wouldn’t get them all. So, the microphone was only symbolic, but the symbolism was powerful.
The Department would want to retaliate. If they destroyed Her, they would put themselves beyond the Department’s retaliation, and if they didn’t destroy Her then She’d destroy them; and they’d be beyond the Department’s retaliation. Either way, Foord had now locked them outside. They were genuinely outside the Department’s reach.
The symbolism was very powerful, but Thahl knew Foord had also calculated it carefully, as he always did. And it wasn’t only, or at least wasn’t entirely, a mere cynical calculation—Thahl, too, had felt The Shudder. They all had. Exactly as Foord had calculated.
•
There was a silence on the Bridge. Even when they started speaking the silence remained in their speech, jumping from the end of one sentence to the beginning of another.
“They’ll want to know why,” Kaang said.
“When this is over,” Cyr said, “and when we rejoin, we can tell them.”
“Perhaps we won’t rejoin,” Smithson said.
“Of course we will,” Cyr said. “Instrument Of Ourselves is right for what we need now, but we’ll have to rejoin. When She’s gone, there will be…”
“Nowhere else to go,” finished Kaang. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Smithson said, “but for now I prefer it like this. It feels right.”
The silence was quite unlike the Charles Manson’s usual repertoire of silences: reflective, rather than pregnant. Some of them gazed out across the plane of the Belt, in the direction of the inner edge where She waited. The stars twinkled. Some of them were dead.
“Some of us will die,” Smithson said.
“Yes,” Foord said. “But now we really can defeat Her. And She doesn’t know it, yet.”
“She’ll know,” Kaang said, unexpectedly, “when we engage Her. Ships have a body language.”
“What will She…” Cyr began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Kaang. “What will She do when She finds out?”
“It isn’t important,” Thahl said suddenly. “We all know, She isn’t concerned either way.”
The others looked at him.
“Anything sent up to stop Her is irrelevant. She may destroy it, play with it, or let it go. She isn’t concerned either way.”
“For once…” Foord began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Thahl. “For once, I think you’re wrong. Where we’re concerned, She is concerned. She won’t run ahead of us to Sakhra, and She won’t stay put in the Belt. She wants to fight us all the way through the system. All the way back to Sakhra. I know it.”
And then something else occurred to Foord. These pieces of knowledge about Her which he’d been gathering so carefully, based on his observation and research and on what he thought was his growing instinct about Her, perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were planted by Her, as She had done with Joser. Not by telepathy, but events. She does things, and predicts their effect on us, which means that somehow She already knows us.
He was so struck with this idea that he scarcely noticed when Cyr excused herself from the Bridge. Something I need to check in the weapons bays, she had said. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. He nodded abstractedly.
•
Unnecessary, Cyr told herself, as she picked her way through the cramped corridor leading to the weapons bays, Unnecessary. Like the kid you shot at Blentport. It was a vicious thing to say, more like something I’d say, and it made him sound ugly. I should have spoken to him. She imagined the conversation, in his study. —You wanted to see me? —Yes, what you said. How could you say that, after I’d just destroyed Her missiles? —Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Was there anything else? Foord had a habit of receiving an attack, draining it, and tossing it back to the attacker like a dead empty thing; it was a habit Cyr knew he could apply to his personal dealings as well as his military ones.
The main corridor branched into several narrower corridors, with naked lights and unfinished plaster, and she took the one leading to the bay she wanted. On the way she had to squeeze past one of her junior officers, a young woman called Hollith, so tightly that at least one of them enjoyed it, and then she was in the particular bay she had come to visit, staring up at Foord’s two missiles.
She had come here to try and figure them out: not what they did, but how he’d use them. Everyone knew he delivered every time, against every opponent, but how would he deliver this time? And against this opponent? Even Smithson, arguably the cleverest of them, had not been able to see how Foord would use these things. Smithson, in fact, had been quite disparaging about them, perhaps irritated by their simple design and by Foord’s cryptic answers to his questions.
Smithson, arguably the cleverest of us? She did a double-take on that, just as Foord might have done. First, as he would have said, there is no Us. And second, she knew Foord operated on the principle that they were all at least his intellectual equals. Still, if even Smithson can’t figure them out and I can…Then she looked up at them again, at their ugly flanks with overlapping blue-black metal plates, their strange nosecones and obscenely swelling drive bulges. They seemed to stare back at her insolently, giving her nothing. How could Foord devise weapons whose use even Smithson couldn’t figure out, though Foord had got Smithson to build them? Two reasons, she told herself. One, because he’d put the answer in plain sight where it would be most hidden, and Two, because he was clever; at least as clever as Smithson, which meant very clever indeed.
Cyr was from a wealthy Old Earth family which provided the Commonwealth with a monotonous stream of diplomats and bankers and senior civil servants. She had opted instead for a military career, and her family had disowned her, not because of her career choice but because of another choice she made.
Her family was as large as it was wealthy. Her childhood and adolescence was full of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins; full of mahogany and velvet, lawns and landscaped gardens, parties and functions and friends; and full of the particular ease which came from wealth worn lightly. Even by their standards she was unusually clever and attractive and they adored her and surrounded her, sensing she would distinguish herself but not, then, knowing how.
For her, the darkness came later than it did for Foord, and came differently. Her fifteenth birthday was marked with a party in the grounds of her home. It lasted through most of the day and she slipped indoors to go to the bathroom. A friend of her father’s, also a diplomat, followed her inside. He had always been attentive and kind, a regular guest at the house. This is our secret, he said as he started touching her, A special birthday present. Her instincts took over; she fought back with her hands and then, when he still wouldn’t go away, with her father’s cutthroat razor. The stroke which actually stopped him was a lucky one, but he collapsed abruptly and bled copiously. It went everywhere.