The Bridge was silent except for a few exhaled breaths. Faith continued to fly alongside them. The craters continued to pulsate. The Gulf just continued, before and behind them; and so did whatever had just taken place over the topsurface of the Charles Manson. There was no sense that something had just ended successfully.
When Smithson said “What next?” he was the first to speak. Nobody answered, because he wasn’t asking what they would do next, but what She would do next. And She had already begun.
The columns of debris floating vertically over the abandoned excavations grew taller and thinner. They waved backwards and forwards in unison as they grew. Their waving was repetitive and hypnotic, like hair on a drowned corpse. Each backwards-and-forwards cycle left them a little more off the vertical, inclining a little more in the direction of Faith; and a little taller and thinner, as if they were not just accretions of debris but something ductile, being teased out longer and thinner by their own waving motion. As they extended and thinned they looked even more like strands of hair: diseased hair, piebald with the colours of the Charles Manson, the silver of its shredded hull-plates and the dark gunmetal of its dismembered spiders. And always getting thinner, easing gradually further in Her direction.
Cyr shook off the near-hypnosis of their waving motion long enough to ask herself why she wasn’t firing on them, or why none of the others had asked her; then became aware that something else was happening, back on the topsurface of the Charles Manson.
At first it seemed like a minor optical fault on the Bridge screen, a faint double image of the landscape of the hull’s surface. There was a barely visible mirror-image of the surface of the hull, floating inches above the real surface; as though part of the hull had shed a molecule-thick layer of its skin which, as it floated upwards, retained the shape of the original. The Charles Manson’s surviving spiders, moving slowly to and fro repairing the damage done by the excavations—their movements were also repetitive and hypnotic, as if they were shadows cast by the waving columns above them—passed through the apparent double image without noticing it. Those on the Bridge saw why when the Bridge screen spotted it and attempted to magnify it locally: up close, it was almost nothing. You had to be at a distance even to glimpse it, and then you weren’t sure. But it existed. The Bridge screen didn’t deal in optical faults, even minor ones.
It rose higher, and grew more distinct as it rose. Now it was six feet above the surface, still mirroring the shape of the hull beneath it, and had thickened and turned silver grey. And now, when the Bridge screen again magnified it locally, it had acquired substance and texture: it was granular, made up internally of swirling and eddying particles. Cyr cried out, and Foord again tasted bile along the sides of his tongue, as they both realised what they were watching.
It was the collective ghost of the silver spiders.
Nothing which keeps halving itself ever becomes nothing. They had divided down beyond visibility into atoms and their subatomic components, and were now recombining into something else.
Cyr fired on it with the Friendship guns and shortrange lasers. They passed through it, leaving useless rents which closed as the particles inside it swirled back. It rose into a conical shape, as though it was a bedsheet and a figure underneath it had stood up. The conical point rose higher, pulling the rest after it until it too became a column, thicker and taller than the others. It waved backwards and forwards in time with the other columns of silver and gunmetal. Together, they took their leave of the Charles Manson.
A soft concussion rolled up and down the hull as they moved off it in unison and started to cross the sixteen hundred feet back to Her, a slow slanting elongated armada. Cyr fired on all of them with no more effect than before.
They converged, coiling and twining round each other, two hundred strands into a single rope which carried Her colours and theirs, and Her substance and theirs. Cyr fired tanglers and disruptors after it, and more lasers and Friendship guns, but they passed through it and spent themselves. Like a coil of matter spiralling from a captive sun into its black hole companion, the giant rope of their substance and Hers reached out towards the midsection crater on Her port side.
Foord stared. We can’t let Her take it inside Her. But we’re too close for particle beams, there’s no time for plasma clouds, and nothing else works.
“Kaang.”
“Commander?”
“Ram Her, please. Aim us at the crater.”
The Bridge froze. Cyr glanced at Thahl.
“Commander,” Thahl said carefully, “She’d assimilate us. All of us. And then She’d go on to Sakhra.”
Foord nodded impatiently, gestured with a raised hand: You didn’t think I was serious, did you? “Thahl, you said we’d find out new things about Her. Look at the screen. That wasn’t a battle. She wasn’t fighting us, She was farming us.”
The great coiled rope, light silver and dark silver, grey and gunmetal, reached closer to the midsection crater. It floated between the two ships, away from one and towards the other, touching neither of them. It had never physically linked them, had never simultaneously touched both of them, but it held them together by what it was, their substance and Hers.
Perhaps this was all the silver spiders had wanted: to subdivide into molecular ghosts and offer themselves back inside Her for assimilation, together with the shredded pieces of the Charles Manson’s hull and spiders which they’d collected for Her and coiled together into this giant rope which would feed Her so She could go on to Sakhra. Perhaps She wanted the Charles Manson by Her side all the way back through the Gulf, to feed off it as required. Partly companion, partly farm animal.
On the Bridge screen they watched as the midsection crater seemed to open itself to the reaching rope. It entered, and continued and continued to enter, until all its length was enfolded and swallowed into the nameless colour. As She took it into Herself a shockwave radiated out from the crater across Her flank. It was a darkening of the watered-silk lines, diffusing through Her the energy She created from the mass She had received, dividing and subdividing it down thousands of branching paths. She moved forward relative to the Charles Manson. Her ion speed increased to forty-five percent. Kaang matched it, and they stayed alongside Her; for now, they had nowhere else to go. Where do farm animals escape to?
By one more increment, one more order of magnitude, they had become part of Her. As they flew together through the Gulf to Sakhra, there might be further increments. She would take and use what She wanted of them, and they couldn’t stop Her. That, now, was their relationship.
•
“Relationship? Relationship? Commander, this is a military engagement!”
“Call it what you like, Cyr.”
“Relationships don’t stand still, Commander. They grow. They die. And they can be changed.”
It seemed like hours ago when Foord said that. In fact it was only minutes, and they still flew alongside Her through the featureless dark of the Gulf. She still moved with the same crippled gait—Her image lurched vertically up and down on the Bridge screen—but now She was travelling at forty-five percent, and so were they. The swirling patterns over Her hull were darker. Once they’d stalked each other through the Belt like a pair of tarantulas. Now it was different.