Groups of hull-plates on the Charles Manson’s rear dorsal areas rose up into blisters and burst open, disgorging the Charles Manson’s own synthetics. They too were like spiders, but spiders from the planet where they were designed and built, with globular bodies and eight multiclawed legs. They were the dark bluish grey of gunmetal. They were slightly bigger than their opponents, and there were more of them, five hundred against two hundred. They swarmed over the top of the Charles Manson’s hull as though they were a shadow cast by a third ship. Faith’s spiders ignored them and continued digging into the hull until the last possible moment, then turned one by one as the swarm reached them.
One of the Charles Manson’s many external viewers picked up the moment of first contact, and patched in to the Bridge screen. One of Faith’s spiders was digging deep into the hull when three of the Charles Manson’s reached it. It stopped its work and turned to face them, though it had no face and neither did they. The three closed on it from different angles. It impaled the first, extending a leg to strike down through the dark globular body and into the hull, then rose and pivoted on that leg to grasp the second, holding it aloft while it snipped off its eight legs one by one, and rolled its body away. It completed its pivot and landed, then flicked the leg by which it held its first opponent impaled; in a torrent of cogs and gears and catarrh-coloured machine oil, the first opponent was cut in half and the two halves left painlessly but uselessly twitching. Faith’s spider seemed to consider for a moment; then carefully nudged the two sets of dismembered remains to send them floating up to join the column of hull-fragments rising above its excavation, to which it returned. The third of its opponents, which it had either forgotten or decided to ignore, leapt after it and struck downward, severing a corner of its triangular body complete with three jointed legs. Faith’s spider died, or became nonfunctional, so strangely that on the Bridge they could only stare at what happened; but the Bridge screen magnified it, and recorded it in detail.
The two pieces of Her spider did not bleed oil or spurt mechanical innards. The surfaces where they had been severed were smooth and solid, like a stone sheared in two, with no inner cavities or workings. The two pieces grew still; then broke in half, again with a solid shear, and broke in half again and again, beyond vision, until they became nothing. Except that nothing which continually halves itself ever becomes nothing.
The Bridge screen patched in two more viewers. They showed similar individual battles, dark against silver.
A silver spider cut two opponents to pieces, and turned back to continue its excavation. But one of the two, its dark globular body split almost in half, and dragging the empty half of its body and the strings of its insides behind it, crawled after the silver spider on its three remaining legs. It looked like bravery, but was not; the dark spider, like Foord’s two missiles, recognised nothing in the universe except its programming. It struck down at the third joint of one of the silver spider’s legs, and severed it. The silver spider fell into halves, and subdivided down to nothing; almost as if it wanted to.
Five dark spiders encircled a silver spider. It let them close in; then whirled balletically, pivoting on first one and then another corner of its triangular body, striking with its claws at different parts of the circle around it. Every time it struck, an opponent was mutilated. They fell back. Finally one of the five caught a claw and severed it at the joint. They stayed back and waited for it to start subdividing—which it did almost eagerly, as if that was even more important than digging into the hull—and then they moved off to the next battle.
The Bridge screen patched in more viewers, shuffled them one after another, then subdivided them into a mosaic. Then it started to pan out. Only one side fought collectively; the other fought in intervals between attacking the hull, and then only as isolated individuals against two or three or more opponents. They never went to help—or even seemed aware of—each other.
The Bridge screen panned out further. Along the top of the Charles Manson’s hull were nearly two hundred excavations, some of them now dangerously deep. Each was the scene of a battle, and each was marked by a floating vertical column of pieces of hull, to which were being added the dark dismembered bodies of the Charles Manson’s spiders. They were smokestacks in a diseased industrial landscape; and, like giant lice running over it, things with no faces or voices or identities fought with unrelenting vacancy.
The Charles Manson had never before had to repel a boarding by an opponent’s synthetics, and Faith had never before had to reveal or use Her own. Both were somehow violated, but together they had made this. We work very well together, Foord thought sourly, watching it. Thahl sheathed and unsheathed his claws, Cyr unconsciously licked her lips. Smithson was expressionless. Kaang, until Foord told her to stop, had actually put her hands over her face.
The Bridge screen again subdivided into a mosaic of individual battles. It had seen a pattern, which it judged worthy of attention. The Charles Manson’s spiders were no match individually for their opponents. In direct combat, even three or more against one, they were being annihilated. But their self-programming told them something else. They only had to sever one body-part, even the last joint of one leg, and the silver spiders would cease to operate and start subdividing down to nothing, almost as if they wanted to.
What made you? thought Foord, staring across the sixteen hundred feet. What are you? She looked and behaved like a ship, sustained damage, showed internal substructures—they were still visible now in the craters, lit by the unnameable colour, as the two ships flew alongside each other through the dark of the Gulf. And the wreckage that had poured out of those craters, each fragment repeating the main damage and burning away to nothing. And the silver landscape. And the self-digestion, mass to energy, diffused through Her damaged body by dark swirling watered-silk traceries.
And now the silver spiders, easily able to shred the Charles Manson’s hull and dismember its spiders but subdividing down to nothing when any part of them was severed, so they could only be whole or be nothing. And when not whole, they seemed to want to be nothing, and that was what the Bridge screen had seen. That was what had started to turn the battles.
The Bridge screen displayed the numbers. Five hundred against two hundred became four hundred against a hundred and fifty, and then the change set in: three hundred and fifty against eighty, three hundred against twenty. The Bridge screen patched in the end of the last silver spider. It had shredded six opponents and, moments before it was overrun, snipped off one of its own legs and subdivided down to nothing.
The top of the Charles Manson’s hull was a leprous landscape: excavations like open sores, sprouting vertical columns of debris, and everywhere dismembered spiders. Nearly three hundred of the Charles Manson’s dark spiders remained, though few of them had all their body-parts. Without ceremony, they set about repairing the excavations. They used plugs of synthetic diamond like those Cyr had launched at Faith, carrying them to and fro across the hull in their original form, like quivering opalescent eggs. They picked their way through the debris with the slow injured gait of soldiers after a battle, except that the bodies they stepped over were only those of their own kind. Their opponents had gone, subdivided to nothing.