Foord thought, Could we have done that? And where’s She getting Her power?
He watched Cyr, who had stayed cool and resourceful throughout, as she launched another swarm, this time of inceptor beams. Inceptors were high-power tractor beams, ten times fatter and stronger. Cyr had had enough of complexity and tangling. She had decided simply to punch the inceptors through the thing between them and get a direct hold on Her.
They never reached Her. She launched inceptor beams of Her own which met theirs one for one and tangled them like She had tangled their tractor beams, so the result was the same.
Stalemate.
On the Bridge screen, the thing which had grown up between the two ships now filled the sixteen hundred feet. It was bigger than either of them, and almost as complex. Red fingers from their hull, and blue fingers from Hers, poured into it and fed it. It was a living thing which they’d created together and were feeding together. It swelled and pulsed. Colours chased each other across its surfaces.
Cyr swore. So did Foord, and gestured at the thing on the screen. “Kill it, Cyr. Cut the beams.”
“But Her beams—”
“Were intended to stop ours, not to reach us. When ours go, Hers will go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. But if you’re not, cut them one at a time. Cut one.”
Cyr cut one tractor beam. On the Bridge screen one red finger disappeared, together with its branches and subdivisions, leaving empty tunnels in the body of the thing between them.
Faith immediately cut one of Her beams; a blue finger disappeared, leaving a mirror-image network of empty tunnels.
“You see? Now cut the rest, one by one.”
Cyr did so, and so did Faith, one of Hers for one of theirs. It was like taking veins and arteries out of a body, one at a time. They’d created and fed it together; now they pulled it apart, together.
It proceeded slowly but methodically. We work well together, thought Foord sourly, watching it on the Bridge screen. We almost belong like this, working with each other. Building up something that doesn’t exist unless you see it on a screen, and then dismembering it.
Eventually it was done, and the space between them on the Bridge screen was as empty as it had been in real space. The two ships were still separated by sixteen hundred feet. They still travelled together through the Gulf, side by side, at a matched thirty percent. They regarded each other. Whether She watched them as they watched Her, through eyes and screens, they didn’t know. But they could feel their gaze returned.
“I need your next orders, Commander.”
“Everything, Cyr. Hit Her with everything.” He looked at Thahl, who looked away.
•
A new set of apertures opened along the port side of the Charles Manson’s hulclass="underline" short-range crystal lasers. They stabbed at Her like horizontal rain. The range was too close for Her flickerfields—or theirs, if She responded—and every one of them hit Her, but spattered off like raindrops. Cyr shrugged, then boosted their strength to maximum. A few of them brought small puffs of surface debris from Her hull, but did not penetrate. Cyr boosted them again, beyond maximum.
For the first time, She attacked. She fired a broadside of low-intensity light beams. Their colour was pale gold.
“Harmonic guns,” Foord muttered. Cyr nodded, apparently unconcerned.
Faith’s harmonic guns were like those of the Charles Manson—multiband harmonic noise generators, running up and down the audible and inaudible scales to disrupt the molecular structure of a ship’s hull. In previous engagements they had torn apart the hulls of at least three Commonwealth cruisers, but the Charles Manson was different: stronger by several magnitudes.
The harmonics were encoded in the light beams, and the light beams, when they hit, released them. They sounded like an organ toccata and fugue overlaid with too much bass, and a choir singing in counterpoint overlaid with too much treble, both sequences of notes deconstructed and put back together at random.
They played—literally—over the Charles Manson’s hull. They set up resonances which rolled through the Bridge and the cramped corridors and living-spaces. They brought noises like those from Horus 4, noises of torsion as the ship’s inner skins were twisted in opposite directions to each other, and to the outer skin. They brought concentric ripples to the surfaces of the drinks in the chairarm dispensers, and stirrings from the rubbish on the floor of the Bridge. They induced nausea and muscle cramps, but nothing more; they were designed to tear ships apart, not their occupants. And they failed, because they weren’t strong enough. They rolled the length of the Charles Manson and back again, then subsided.
Cyr boosted the crystal lasers to danger level, and held them there; they brought more puffs of surface debris from Her hull. Cyr glanced at Foord, smiled briefly, and fired the Charles Manson’s harmonic guns. Their golden beams reached across the sixteen hundred feet and released their encoded notes over Her hull, which was still being hit by the crystal lasers. They couldn’t hear the music of their harmonic guns, but they knew it would resonate inside Her at least as powerfully as Hers had, inside them.
For ten seconds, the time it took to run the sequence of notes up and down Her hull, She didn’t respond. That was enough to suggest She was being damaged; and the crystal lasers were adding to it, persistently and in penny pieces. Cyr powered up the harmonic guns for another broadside.
Her hull blurred and shone, like Her soul was leaking out of it, and at the same time the Charles Manson was hit with a series of small impacts. While they were still trying to understand what had happened, the Bridge screen patched in local magnifications and showed them. At each place where the crystal lasers had been hitting Her, the thumbnail-sized scales of Her hull had silvered over and reshaped themselves into collimating mirrors, raised at angles to reflect back the Charles Manson’s lasers; not just to hit it, but to hit it on the corresponding points of its hull. Again, desperation; again, unfailing accuracy; and again, Foord swore.
Cyr recovered quickly. The reflected lasers were causing only limited surface damage, like they had done to Her, and it was easily remedied; Cyr turned them off. She glanced at Foord and fired a second broadside of harmonic guns. Again they reached Her and played their notes up and down Her hull, and again She didn’t respond. Cyr fired a third broadside.
They knew Her internal damage must be mounting. They knew She’d have to fire Her starboard manoeuvre drives to get out of range of their harmonic guns, and She did so; but what came out of them was not drive emissions. It was heavier and slower, dark and bulbous and glistening, like dozens of separate streams of entrails. About five hundred feet out from Her the streams joined, and became a single cloud of corrosive plasma, the colour of insects’ wing-cases: dark but crawling with iridescence. She flourished it like a cloak, and sent it billowing towards them.
Foord immediately ordered retreat. The Charles Manson’s port manoeuvre drives fountained, and the gap between them increased to three thousand feet. Then the manoeuvre drive apertures widened, and fired a neutraliser cloud.
Foord was right, She’d wanted to widen the gap, but She’d made them do it. And faced with a plasma cloud, they’d had no choice. They couldn’t let it near them. It would corrode their electronics, infect their bionics, eat their outer hull layers, and—worst of all—would carry on doing those things even after an engagement had been won and the enemy who launched it was destroyed. But a plasma cloud could be countered; by retreating, and by launching a neutraliser.