Kaang sensed what would happen next, just before it happened. Faith stopped firing Her manoevre drives; She had given up.
Kaang cut the move she had just started and let momentum take them, slowly, in an arc over Faith’s dorsal surfaces, and down, facing Her port side. On the Bridge, and up and down the length of the Charles Manson, seat harnesses burst open with hisses of compressed air. It was like the ship was letting out a breath.
Kaang finally brought them to rest, at a distance of exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet, and they saw.
4
The two great craters on Her port side, one amidships and one near the stern, were still there. She hadn’t miraculously repaired them. Around their edges, and in their interior where twisted latticeworks of substructures could still be glimpsed, the craters pulsed with the same unnameable colour. It shifted between all the colours they knew, without becoming any of them.
The craters went at least fifty feet into Her flank. Nothing poured out of them any more.They were filled with wreckage near Her surface, but the deeper they went the stranger they became. There was a darkness at the back of them which seemed either depthless or infinite: a curtain of something neither gas nor liquid nor solid, with a pattern of whorls like watered silk. It reminded Foord of the patterns on the endpapers of his father’s books.
The craters pulsed into and out of focus, their apparent depth growing and diminishing as the light inside them shifted. Sometimes they seemed only as deep as they really were. Sometimes they seemed deeper than Her hull was wide, making corridors into somewhere else which was also filled with wreckage, like cameras taking pictures of cameras taking pictures into infinity. Then the light would shift again, and the craters would return to what they really were: something that nobody had ever done to Her before.
The damage was not only in the craters. Around their edges the fabric of Her outer hull had been torn back so violently that it produced an effect of inversion, as though the two missiles had burst out of Her, not in. The dark swirling patterns covered Her port side more densely than Her starboard, and around the edges of the craters they were darkest and densest of all.
The damage was massive. But it looked like it had gone beyond damage, and become something else.
Something about the craters had started to worry Foord. Thahl too, because before Foord could ask him he superimposed on the Bridge screen an earlier image of the craters, when the missiles first hit Her. The ship picked up on Thahl’s request, and added text headups before Thahl asked for them.
The two craters had grown in area, by about two percent according to the headups; but they remained exactly the same shape as before, down to the smallest indentation, as though the present image was merely a slight magnification of the earlier one. They still looked like pulsing wounds, but wounds didn’t spread so uniformly. They had the appearance of stability; of balance. Of the achievement of steady state.
Steady State, thought Foord, and froze as he started to understand.
“Commander,” Cyr said loudly, “we need your orders.”
Cold, organised shock hit Foord. It should almost have killed him, but it didn’t; instead it spread through him steadily and uniformly, a replica of what was happening in the craters. He’d just learned, as Thahl promised, something new about Her. Something truly new; and intimate, and obscene.
She’s eating Herself.
“Commander!” Cyr was shouting now. “We need your orders!” She turned to Thahl, and whispered “What’s eating him?”
“No orders,” Foord said quietly. “No questions. Please, listen to me.”
This, he told them, was how She could go on crawling through the Gulf to Sakhra when the damage they’d done should have destroyed Her. She’d reached a conclusion. For the first time someone had made Her fight for Her life, and She’d fought desperately and passionately; and this was how. This was where Her conclusion led.
She’d turned the craters into a controlled process of self-digestion, mass to energy.
He waved away their questions. Maybe where She comes from, he said, this is what every living thing does when it’s wounded: puts its muzzle into the wound and eats, to give the rest of itself, the unwounded part, strength to go crawling on. Maybe whoever built Her put replicas of that reflex into Her, as we put crude analogues of ours into our ships. And No, he said, I don’t have evidence. How could I, when nobody’s ever been able to probe Her? But you’ve seen what’s happened to Her since Horus 4, and I know I’m right.
Their questions died out.
Foord remembered a character in one of his father’s books, a minor Dickens character, who kept saying “If I’m wrong I’ll…I’ll eat my head.” The sheer impossibility of it had entranced him; he had pondered it for days. He thought, If She ever reaches Sakhra at this crawling pace, She’ll have eaten Herself entirely and She won’t exist. Yes She will. What’s eaten will still exist, but it will be something quite different…
This wasn’t a frenzy of self-mutilation. It was steady and careful and measured. She was digesting the damaged parts of Herself at exactly the rate She needed to provide the energy to go on fighting, to go on crawling through the Gulf. Her motives were desperate but Her conclusion was cold and considered, and Her execution unfailingly accurate. Like everything She did.
Both his parents, in the later stages of the illness which finally took them, had fought a losing battle to keep their appearance. He’d pretended not to notice the incontinence-stains on their clothing, or their subterfuges to conceal them. This was similar: something private about Her which he shouldn’t have seen.
“What She’s doing to stay alive, Cyr, is in the craters. Go for the craters.”
•
For ten seconds, the golden light of the Charles Manson’s harmonic guns swept along Her flank, pumping their resonances into Her. She seemed to shudder, but it could have been the effect of the shifting colour from the craters. Lit by that colour, nothing seemed real or measurable.
Cyr fired the harmonic guns again, once, along and back. This time she also fired the Friendship guns (used only when close) at Her flank; they shot Jewel Boxes, self-guiding shells which on impact released jagged slivers of synthetic diamond able to shred almost any known surface. They didn’t shred Faith, but each one succeeded in digging a small shallow gash in Her flank, dislodging three or four of Her thumbnail hull plates, and that was enough for Cyr’s immediate purpose. There were nineteen such gashes in an irregular line along Her flank, between the midsection and stern craters.
Why doesn’t She respond? thought Foord. Cyr was thinking the same thing, and added Perhaps She already has.
Cyr launched a swarm of grapples across the sixteen hundred feet. She called them Hands of Friendship, diamond-tipped claws on the end of black monofilament lines which tumbled out like spider-secretions from ventral orifices on the Charles Manson. The claws were shaped like Sakhran hands, and were self-programmed to find any irregular surface, grip it, and never let go. One, and occasionally two, of them landed on each of the nineteen shallow gashes, and held. Now, Cyr thought, we’re directly touching Her.