“Listen to yourself, Commander,” Thahl hissed.
There was something like contempt in Thahl’s voice, and Foord suddenly shared it.
“Cyr, I…”
“Leave it, Commander.”
“It was because…”
“Because we have to destroy Her and you’re afraid not to. Leave it.”
He should have left it, but he’d wanted too much to apologise and explain. And now, to counter that, he went into denial and started reassuring himself: at least he and Thahl still understood each other, finishing each other’s sentences. But it wasn’t real. It was whistling in the dark, the same unguessable dark where the Fire Opals had burned and died.
On the Bridge screen, against the emptiness of the Gulf which was both huge and cramped, She did nothing but roll stolidly alongside them with the same crippled gait. On the Bridge, he saw Cyr and Thahl and Smithson—Kaang hadn’t noticed—staring at him across another gulf. As if he was on a path which would take him away from them.
“Is She working on me, like She did with Joser?”
“If She is, Commander,” Thahl said “it won’t be like Joser, not after what we’ve done to Her. We’re going to find out new things about Her.”
“And She isn’t,” Smithson added,” Working On You. That’s self-indulgent, I’ve seen it before on Outsiders, too much imagination. If She’s working on one of us it won’t be you. Off this ship you can be vulnerable, but on it you’re stronger than any of us.”
Foord looked sharply at Smithson, who added, for good measure, “Yes, you heard me correctly, Commander. If She’s working on one of us, maybe it’s me. Why else would you expect me to tell you how strong you are?”
Foord looked at their faces. He couldn’t read them. He didn’t know if She was playing him like Joser. Or playing one of them, or all of them.
We’re going to find out new things about Her. About ourselves. It will get strange.
“Thahl, if I’m right, you may have to…”
“Take command. I know. But you’re not right, Commander…”
“Cyr, what do we do next?”
She exchanged glances with Thahl. “I’m already doing it, Commander. Look at the screen.”
3
Cyr’s combat instincts were more Sakhran than human. She was unmoved by failure. It produced in her neither despair nor defiance, neither desperation nor determination; only an expressionless glance, and then she continued past it. So when the Fire Opals died, she simply switched to what had worked before: the harmonic guns. While Foord indulged himself elsewhere, she powered them up, and now a broadside of golden beams played up and down Faith’s starboard flank.
As before, they took about ten seconds to travel the length of Her hull and back, but this time it was different. Something was happening inside Her.
The windows and ports which lined Her hull had been dark since they first saw Her. One of them, close to Her stern, lit up. The Bridge screen immediately focussed on it, but nothing was visible inside: the light was as depthless as the dark had been. It was the same unnameable colour which burned in the two craters on Her port side, so far removed from any colour they had ever seen that they had difficulty recognising it as light.
The window darkened. The one next to it lit and fell dark, then the one next to that. It was like a lantern floating, or being carried, inside the length of Her hull, stern to nose; then back, nose to stern, the windows lighting and darkening sequentially. When it had passed back through Her hull, it disappeared. The line of windows was dark again.
The dark, like the light, was depthless. It seemed to be only a coating on the inner surface of each window, or to go on for an infinity behind it; either way, it showed nothing of what was inside Her. The process had taken twenty seconds.
Cyr again fired the harmonic guns, directly into the windows. They lit and darkened again, but this time from outside, as the golden light passed over them and released its harmonics. Then, simultaneously, they exploded. Molten silver—a lighter colour than Her hull, the colour of the pyramids– gushed out of them and cascaded down Her flanks. Shards of dark glass, or crystal, or diamond, from the exploded windows fountained and swirled around Her like a swarm of dead Fire Opals, visible only against the cascading silver of Her hull, disappearing against the dark backdrop of the Gulf as they flew further away from Her. A few of them reached as far as the Charles Manson, and bounced off harmlessly.
For the third time, Cyr fired the harmonic guns. More liquid silver poured out of the sockets of Her windows. She was bleeding ten times as copiously as before. There didn’t seem room inside Her for what was pouring out. It was no longer cascading down Her flank, but moving horizontally across it. In ten seconds it covered Her entire starboard side from nose to stern, and built contours which didn’t follow the contours of Her hull underneath it, or the contours of anything they would have recognised as a ship. She altered, and their perspective altered with Her.
Waves of molten silver were moving over Her hull. They moved against or around each other to create peaks and troughs, in long sinuous ripple patterns like wet sand after a retreating sea; then, as the peaks rose and the troughs deepened, they started to look like something else. What was building itself over Her starboard flank made no sense if you saw it as shapes extruding horizontally from a vertical surface, or as shapes covering a ship which was alongside them. You had to be looking down on it, and then it made sense.
Her starboard flank had become a silvered landscape, a relief map of hills and valleys and plains. The sockets of Her windows were lakes of liquid silver. The landscape filled the Bridge screen. A headup display said they were travelling through the Gulf alongside an object whose shape and size were similar to theirs, but it was a lie. They floated miles above it.
As perspective altered, so did magnitude. The lakes became oceans, the hills became mountains, the valleys grew as deep as the Sakhran Great Bowl. Now they were floating above the face of a planet. The Bridge screen couldn’t contain it; the silver landscape filled all 360 degrees of it, and rushed out past sight beyond its top and bottom edges. They’d seen the roaring fiery face of Horus 5 and the blank blurred face of Horus 4, and this was bigger: and all done in silver, height and depth picked out in gradations of silver-white through silver-grey to silver-black. They floated miles above it, and it swam years below them.
As perspective and magnitude altered, so did colour. Shadows welled up inside the liquid silver, never quite reaching its surface, but tinting it like internal bruises: silver green in the valleys, silver blue in the oceans, silver white on the mountain- peaks. Thahl made the Bridge screen magnify one of the oceans. Once it had been a window, then a lake. Now it had bays and inlets, and on its silver-yellow beaches things were crawling out, some to die and some to evolve.
Then the last alteration: time. Alternate bands of light and darkness chased each other across the face of the silver, first slowly, like the turning of pages, then faster. The things which had crawled out of the ocean moved away into the land, from which others returned, altered. They made geometric shapes and grid patterns which grew and reached out lines, some straight and some curved, to cover the landscape and join each other. The pages turned faster and the patterns grew; then stopped growing and stayed the same, page after page; then dwindled and lost their connecting lines; then stayed, diminished, page after page. Was it the face of Her home planet? Or of other planets, after She had visited them? It was too enormous and small, too fast and slow, to have any meaning. Or, like the layers of darkness and light on the inner surfaces of Her windows, when they had been windows, its meaning might go on forever.