Later the same day, Sulhu stood in front of Hrissihr, wrapping his cloak against the wind and looking up at the huge frontage of the hillcastle just as Foord had done when he first arrived. The srahr, symbol of zero and infinity and symbol of Faith, was still there where someone had daubed it. The black paint was beginning to peel and shred.
She was coming again, and events were taking place on Sakhra. They were not mass events, because both the Sakhrans and the humans who had settled on Sakhra (the Sakhran humans, Sulhu called them privately) were too enigmatic, too apolitical and fragmented, for mass movements. It was ironic that they had those features in common. Sulhu sometimes amused himself with the thought that one day, Sakhran humans might become human Sakhrans. The simple reversal of adjective and noun would mean a world of difference.
So they were not mass events, just individual episodes. Still, they were troubling. Like the strange gathering on Grid 9 at Blentport, and the manner of the Charles Manson’s departure. With his son on board. Sulhu wondered whether he would see his son return to Sakhra, but on other days he also wondered if he’d see Her return to Sakhra. There was something about Foord and his ship that made him fear for any opponent they engaged; even this one.
•
Swann felt tired. Not so much physically—he had been on sleep inhibitors for the last few days—but spiritually. There were too many things to deal with, all of them troubling. And the burns on his hands and face, although they’d been treated and would heal, were throbbing persistently.
Blentport was now relatively quiet. All the Grids were empty, all the Horus Fleet ships were refitted and had joined the defensive cordon, and most of the port’s military personnel were evacuated to the highlands. Swann had personally directed this from his Command Centre in the basement of one of the Blentport buildings. When it was complete he had stayed there to observe the long-range scans of the events in the outer regions of Horus system, where the Charles Manson was engaging Faith, and to direct responses to the mostly isolated, but disturbing, incidents in the lowlands. He had been there, almost continuously, for days.
“The Charles Manson. Still dead?” He meant its communications.
“Yes, Director.”
“Alright. Keep hailing it.”
Like Foord, he was large and black-bearded and came from a heavy-gravity planet; but his bulk was not conditioned muscle, as was Foord’s, and he lacked Foord’s tidiness and grooming—a lack which had been apparent during the events preceding Foord’s liftoff, and again during the incident with Copeland’s ship. Nothing had happened since to improve either his appearance or his demeanour. The outbreaks of violence were mostly in the lowlands, and were neither large-scale nor orchestrated. But, like all lowlands politics, they were difficult to read; and troubling. Swann and Sulhu unknowingly shared the same private expression—Sakhran humans—to describe the Commonwealth settlers who colonised the lowlands.
Grid 9 was now empty. Swann had walked through it a couple of times, as listlessly as Sulhu walked the empty wings of Hrissihr. A few days ago, those who had gathered there (civilian and military) milled around for some time after the Charles Manson’s departure. Some of them slaughtered the six chimaera. Later, when they heard Boussaid had died, they set fire to the landchariot and threw the Sakhran driver’s body into it. In the side window, unseen, the web curled and died.
Swann had tried personally to drag the Sakhran’s body clear of the burning landchariot, sustaining burns to his hands and face. That was the first of only three times that he had left the Command Centre in the last few days. The second was to receive Rikkard Blent’s descendant (was it great-great-great-grandson? Swann couldn’t remember and didn’t care) from the Sakhrans who returned him, unharmed but still bellicose, from Hrissihr. His name was actually Blent-Gundarssen: the Blent family name had sunk and resurfaced, through generations of bedsheets.
Swann asked them to convey to Sulhu his thanks, his promise that the man would be prosecuted, and his regret at the death of the Sakhran driver. All this had been acknowledged with polite inclinations of Sakhran heads, while above them the last few ships of Horus Fleet rose to join the cordon. Swann had to shout to be heard.
The third time he left the Command Centre was to tell Boussaid’s family, personally, what had happened. There could have been a fourth time, when Copeland was shuttled down to Blentport to face arrest and trial, but Swann had sent others.
“Charles Manson still dead?”
“Yes, Director…Director, we’ll tell you if anything comes in.”
“I know you will. But you don’t think anything will come, do you?”
“No, Director. Foord cut communications deliberately.”
Swann looked at the cordon on one of the many screens in the Command Centre. It was a classic formation. Battleships and cruisers formed the outer ring. Destroyers and interceptors inside, ready to engage Her closeup if She got through the larger ships. Everything was deployed logically and sensibly, facing out towards the Belt and the Gulf and outer planets from where She would come if Foord didn’t stop Her. All of them, of course, had been ordered to stay in formation, no matter what happened with Foord.
It was the largest fleet in any of the Commonwealth’s twenty-nine systems, except for the Earth fleet. Swann wondered if it would be enough. If it wasn’t, and if She ignored the evacuation and launched a catastrophic attack on Sakhra’s now almost undefended Bowl areas then a handful of people on Sakhra, Swann among them, would be personally responsible. He accepted that. He was fiercely, but intelligently, loyal to the Commonwealth.
Swann’s planet, like Foord’s, had been authoritarian and corporatist, but unlike Foord he had come to the Commonwealth in the ordinary way, through the regular armed forces and not the Department. Like Foord, however, he had found that planets like his were only a minority. Most of the Commonwealth was a lot better. On balance, he told himself with his usual clumsiness, far more about it was right than was wrong. Even when it did something wrong, such as the law about removal of poison glands from Sakhrans in the lowlands, plenty of its citizens—himself included—were ready to stand up and campaign.
There were other banks of screens in the Command Centre, to which Swann had been increasingly drawn over the last few days. They depicted events at Horus 5, the Belt, and—now—Horus 4. They were not actual views but simulations, because of the distances involved and the cessation of transmissions from Foord. Some would be accurate, others based on the best guesses of Swann’s mission analysts.
At Horus 5 She had outthought Foord, as Swann expected; but something had happened in the Belt, coinciding with Foord’s cutting of communications. There had been a burst on photon drive through asteroids, an apparent collision with one large asteroid, an apparent hit by one of Her missiles, but the Charles Manson was still there. Then, it had left the Belt and headed for Horus 4, and after a pause She had followed. But was She chasing Foord, or making for Sakhra?