“Permission to speak freely, Commander,” Cyr said.
“Of course.”
“You said we can’t stop what She’s doing. That’s unforgivable. In fact I wonder if it was you speaking at all.”
Foord gazed at her steadily. “Don’t go there.”
She held his gaze. “If you’re saying we can’t stop it, it’s my duty to go there.”
Foord had never heard her use the word Duty before.
“I mean it, Commander.”
“I want to stop it, but we need a weapon that works. We’ve tried most of yours.”
Other conversations on the Bridge had stopped. There were several paths Foord and Cyr could have taken from this point, none of them good; but they were all closed off, unexpectedly, by Smithson.
“You’re both,” he said, “missing the point! Weapons aren’t always called weapons. Anything which produces Cause and Effect can be a weapon.”
“That’s very true,” Foord said drily. “Like Relationships Don’t Stand Still. But do you have anything more specific?”
“Yes, I do. Something very specific, and it makes things stand still. The Prayer Wheels.”
The Prayer Wheels. The stasis generators used to isolate the MT Drive. The Charles Manson’s MT Drive needed three of them for safe containment. The Charles Manson always carried nine. And the MT Drive had been shut down since Horus 5, when She had tried to activate it.
“Go on,” Foord said.
“You know it already,” Smithson said impatiently. “Cannibalise two Prayer Wheels, launch them into those two craters. Gamble. Maybe they’ll freeze those mass-to-energy processes…”
“Why should they?”
“…isolate them, freeze them like an MT Drive, and then the craters will go back to being just holes in Her side, holes which we made, and we can fire whatever we want into them. Get inside Her. Break Her up.”
“Slow down. Why should they freeze the processes like an MT Drive?”
“Look at those craters, Commander.”
Foord looked. They looked back at him across sixteen hundred feet, unblinking and calm. Despite the nameless colour, despite the tricks they played with focus and perspective, they were above all calm. Stable, steady-state.
“Commander, those are not simple mass-to-energy processes. They’ve been slowed down and subdivided, millions of times, until they sidestep the equations. To produce that steady-state energy, to diffuse it through Herself in usable amounts, probably takes only a millionth of what those craters have swallowed. But it also takes a new kind of physics.”
“MT physics.”
“Yes, Commander. We couldn’t do it, we don’t know enough about MT. But we know how to freeze it in stasis fields.”
“So will She. She’ll be able to stop the Prayer Wheels.”
“Of course She will, Commander! But immediately?”
“I don’t know, and neither do you.”
“Then would you rather go on like this? In the time it takes Her to stop the Prayer Wheels, She’ll be vulnerable and those craters will be open to us. Maybe. And Maybe is better than this. Now: my people can get two of them from the stern, weld some guidance systems and motors on them, and have them ready in one of the ventral launch bays in less than an hour. Is that specific enough?”
5
Later, Foord would realise that Smithson had probably saved the ship, simply by having an idea and getting them working on it. It almost didn’t matter whether the idea would work, though it was an extremely clever one; at that moment, if they’d had no goal, they might either have been infected by Foord’s mood, or relieved him of command. Both courses would have been fatal. So Smithson got them working, and Foord stayed in command, though his mood—and its source—remained unreadable and worrying.
Smithson was often impatient with superiors and equals, but less often with subordinates. On this occasion his behaviour was faultless, and a source of some amazement; he was as thoughtful, meticulous and quietly authoritative as Foord himself would normally have been. The two Prayer Wheels were taken from the six reserves not connected to the MT Drive. The work of confirming they were operational, testing and welding in place the guidance and propulsion units, and manhandling them down to a conveyor tube which shot them through to one of the ventral launch bays, took Smithson’s people forty-seven minutes. Once in the launch bay, final testing and routing of the controls through to Cyr took another seven. During that time, Cyr—at Smithson’s suggestion—briefed Foord on what she would be firing into the craters, and in what order. Foord was more responsive than previously, but not much. He sat quietly with Cyr amid the rubbish and debris on the Bridge—which he still insisted should not be cleared—listening to her briefing, and watching Faith.
Faith made no more moves towards them. She increased Her speed to forty-eight percent, and they matched it to stay alongside Her. She did not appear to notice.
Foord was concerned about his behaviour. He tried to determine why he was concerned, but the reason kept sliding past him, as though his concern belonged with the rules of the normal universe, and his behaviour now held an MT-like ability to sidestep it. He was feeling better now, closer to what he remembered as normal, thanks (not for the first time) to Smithson’s cleverness. But he’d come close to accepting what She had done to them. Cyr was right, he should never have behaved like that. He never had before. He resolved never to again, and immediately set about reciting rules for ensuring he never would; and again it sidestepped him, and left him trying to remember why he needed to recite rules. But he felt better now, closer (he told himself) to what he remembered as normal.
After Cyr briefed him, and after he reacted with apparent enthusiasm, she stayed with him (another suggestion of Smithson) and let him talk. Her dark pleated skirt had ridden up behind her as she whirled lithely to sit next to him, so she was not actually sitting on its fabric. The pleats were rucked up around her bottom, but he knew they would fall back gracefully into place when she stood up; they always did.
“A millionth, Cyr.”
“Commander?”
“Smithson said She needs only a millionth of what She swallowed in that crater, to convert into a steady stream of usable energy. I thought She’d turn us into a farm animal and carve off bits of us to eat when She needs to, but She doesn’t need to.”
“Apparently not.”
“But She’ll probably do it anyway, just for the symbolism…Cyr, you see those dark patterns over Her hull?”
“Yes, Commander. They’ve spread.”
“They haven’t moved.”
Originally, Cyr had just wanted to let him talk. Now she looked at him sharply.
“How could they be spreading over Her and not have moved?”
Because, he told her, they were always there; they’d just grown darker. And they weren’t just on Her surface. If they really did diffuse the processes through Her body then they’d have to go all the way through Her in three dimensions, like a tangle of veins and capillaries. So what we see is just the surface of something bigger; the story of this whole mission, he added wryly.
“When they weren’t needed,” he finished, “they were invisible; the same colour as Her hull. But when She needed them, when She was damaged and had to use them, they grew darker as they…”
“Diffused energy through Her,” Cyr said. “So if Smithson’s idea works…”