Cyr’s long jewelled fingers played another combination of panels, opening another pattern of apertures on the Charles Manson, this time along the starboard midsection. The objects which emerged were globular and milky and quivering. They made their way towards Her like a slow-motion ejaculation, each one targeted at one of Her port manoeuvre drive outlets. Cyr called them Diamond Clasps, because they were plasmas of altered carbon which turned on impact into plugs of liquid, then solid, synthetic diamond. They landed on Her and dressed Her, covering each outlet with a brilliant sparkling scab. Two missed, but the other fifty-three landed accurately.
She responded. She must have known what was coming next—that Cyr would hold Her in position and attack the craters—yet it was strangely half-hearted. She fired just three of Her port manoeuvre drives, presumably to test whether She could dislodge the diamond scabs. She couldn’t; thin streams of drive emissions squirted from underneath them, but most of their force was contained. Then, using Her starboard manoeuvre drives only, She tried to roll away, but the claws and monofilament lines of the grapples held Her. She didn’t try again.
“Now the craters,” Foord whispered.
“This is too easy. Something’s wrong.”
“The craters!”
“Commander, it’s too easy. She wants us to go for the craters.”
“She wants you to think that, so you won’t go for them. You wanted my orders. Carry out my orders.”
Cyr hesitated. Something, perhaps Faith, was still telling her not to attack the craters directly. As her hand hovered over a panel she hadn’t pressed before, she thought This may be wrong, it may keep Her alive. She pressed the panel.
A long ventral aperture slid open, releasing an object like an ancient battering-ram, ninety feet long: a Diamond Cluster, a missile whose bulging warhead was a cluster of five hundred Jewel Boxes, which would explode their fractal diamond slivers simultaneously. It could shred any known Commonwealth ship. If it hit Her where She was already damaged, it should break Her in half.
It dropped out of the Charles Manson’s underside, made one calculated burst of its motors and went dark, crossing the sixteen hundred feet to Her. On the Bridge screen they watched it entering the midsection crater. It went deep inside until, like everything else in there, it passed beyond focus. The latticeworks of wreckage and shifting colour swirled and swallowed it, like it was entering a forest of seaweed.
It exploded, but not in a way which made any sense. First, the explosion blew out of the crater, not in. And second, it was hundreds of times slower than it should have been, so slow that it was drained of force. And third—
The pattern of force and fragments, of blast and flying diamond-slivers, which should have erupted into Her and should have been unstoppable, came blossoming out of the crater in a slow and syrupy and ever-widening funnel, almost a gesture, reaching out to the Charles Manson; then reversed itself. The huge burst-open body of the Diamond Cluster and its multiple warhead came back together, unexploded itself, and sank back into the midsection crater like treacle down a throat. They never saw it again. But the dark watered-silk patterns around the crater’s edges turned darker.
She’s digesting it, thought Cyr, aghast. Converting its mass to Her energy. She never cared about it exploding, She just wanted it inside Her. And we gave it to Her. Part of us is now part of Her. What have we started?
The dark swirls continued to darken, for about fifty feet around the midsection crater. There was a shuddering at Her stern as She started to repower Her crippled main drives, and alarms were sounding on the Bridge. Cyr tried to think it out for a few seconds more. If there’s a mass-to-energy process in the crater, the dark patterns must diffuse it through Her. And if you diffused that process, if you subdivided it hundreds or thousands of times as She had done, you could change it and change the laws it obeyed. You could write the laws it obeyed.
And we gave it to Her. “Commander…”
Alarms sounded again on the Bridge. She had fired Her main drives and was starting to move away, and Kaang immediately matched Her course and speed: like before, She moved through the Gulf at thirty percent, in the direction of Sakhra. The two ships were travelling alongside each other, still linked by Cyr’s diamond grapples and monofilament lines; and still separated by one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet.
Cyr felt a mounting horror. “Commander…” she repeated.
Foord shook his head, and pointed at the screen. Something was coming out of the midsection crater.
•
The Bridge screen had spotted it at the same time as Foord, and patched in local magnification. It came into focus as it came out of the shifting colour. It became definite only when it left the crater, and started crawling over the surface of Her hull.
It was about the size of a man, and shaped like a spider. Its body was triangular, with three jointed and clawed legs extending up and out from each corner. It was the same metallic-ceramic silver as Her hull, and its body was featureless, with no recognisable sensory devices, so there was no focus of its identity; no face.
Another one emerged behind it, and another, and another.
“Thahl?”
“No, Commander. These are new.”
Even so, they weren’t surprising. The Charles Manson carried its own self-programming EV synthetics, used for hull repairs and occasionally for close combat. They were not unlike these, both in shape and size.
“Hold our position,” Foord said. “No matter what happens.”
More came out of the crater, one by one. The Bridge screen counted them: nineteen. They darted across Her flank towards the shallow gashes where Cyr’s grapples were anchored, the diamond Hands of Friendship which were designed never to let go. The spiders dug them out of Her hull, busily and precisely, then fired onboard motors and rode them, and their monofilament lines, back across the sixteen hundred feet to the Charles Manson. The lines had come out of the Charles Manson’s underside, and now they curved back on themselves as the spiders flew them back towards the Charles Manson’s dorsal surfaces. It was like they were folding a giant bedsheet.
Hundreds more of them poured out of the midsection crater, not in the same tidy order as the first nineteen. They were climbing over each other to get out, as if they were running from something in the crater rather than running to attack the Charles Manson; but that impression lasted only a moment. Each one, as it emerged, fired its onboard motor and jumped the sixteen hundred feet, following the original nineteen. Some were blown to pieces by Cyr’s Friendship guns as they jumped, and others were vaporised by the motors of those immediately in front of them; but nearly two hundred landed on the dorsal surface of the Charles Manson’s hull, where, like prospectors in a gold rush, they ignored each other and started digging where they landed.
Nobody ever made you fight like this before, thought Cyr, talking both to herself and to Her, as she activated the Charles Manson’s own synthetics to meet them.
On the Bridge, the usual murmuring of alarms was again supplemented by the deeper notes of hull-integrity warnings. Faith’s synthetics dug busily; the claws which dealt so easily with Cyr’s Hands of Friendship were shredding the hull’s topsurface. Some had already penetrated to the first inner layer. They worked quickly and precisely, with an air of self-absorption, as though competing. Rising vertically above each of them, like smoke from factory chimneys, were floating columns of shredded hull-fragments.