“The process will be temporarily frozen, and the patterns will disappear.”
She looked at him again. He smiled and said “It’s like with a new partner. When you start living together you find out new things. Intimate things, like how her varicose veins work.”
Cyr almost smiled back. She stood up. The pleats fell gracefully back into place.
“It’s nearly time, Commander. Will you be ready?”
He undersood why she had to ask him that. His behaviour had been disturbing; less than was required of him. It would be tempting, and quite reasonable, to think that Faith had been working on him like She’d done with Joser. But now he felt that the truth was worse—that his behaviour came from him. Or maybe that was also Faith working on him, but more obliquely.
“If I’m not ready,” he called after her—the pleats fanned out as she turned to face him—“you know that you must ask Thahl to consider…”
“Yes, I know that. I’ve already come close to it.”
•
“They’re ready,” Smithson said, after fifty-four minutes had elapsed.
“Thanks,” Foord said. “I owe you.”
“For moving your furniture?”
He smiled briefly, then nodded at Cyr. “Launch them.”
The two Prayer Wheels dropped silently out of the ventral bay and floated underneath the Charles Manson. They were rings of dark metal nine feet in diameter, with a hub and four radiating spokes. Smithson’s people had actually rolled them, like oversized cartwheels, from the cramped MT Drive pit near the stern to one of the cargo tubes, where they were shot through to the ventral bay. The motors and guidance systems were simply metal boxes welded to their circumference at irregular intervals; they looked like bits of mud caked on the rims of real cartwheels.
Cyr pressed a panel. The motors round the rims fired once and went dark. The Prayer Wheels glided slowly, and on diverging paths, towards the midsection and stern craters. Faith seemed not to have noticed them. They passed three hundred feet, then six hundred and nine hundred. Twelve hundred. The light in the craters glowed. As the Prayer Wheels got closer, the light formed a backdrop against which they became diminishing silhouettes.
At fourteen hundred feet Cyr fired the final course adjustment; the motors flared and died. She glanced at Foord, on an impulse mouthed Varicose Veins, and pressed another panel. The Prayer Wheels started to turn. The dark metal of their rims became transluscent and glowed pearl-white as they began generating stasis fields. The motors and guidance systems exploded silently off the rims. The Prayer Wheels entered the craters and were swallowed.
That was not what they’d expected. They’d expected Her to realise what they were doing, and to try flight, evasion, counterattack, anything, to prevent it. If She didn’t it meant either that they’d genuinely surprised Her (for the third time—first the photon burst, then the two missiles) or that it wouldn’t work. But it is working, thought Foord exultantly, as he saw things on the Bridge screen he’d never expected to see.
The dark swirling patterns on Her flank grew faint, then darkened and grew faint again. The nameless colour which both lit and obscured the two craters died, then flared and died again. She started to do the things She should have done before. She fired Her manoeuvre drives in sequence and tried to roll so the Charles Manson wouldn’t be facing the craters, but Kaang rolled with Her, maintaining relative position and distance—still exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet—and the light in the craters flared and died again. She pushed Her speed to fifty percent and Kaang matched Her. She stopped dead and resumed at forty-five percent, and Kaang stopped dead and resumed with Her. She fired Her manoeuvre drives at random—two of them exploded, bursting their diamond caps—trying to roll or pitch or yaw in any direction which would take the Charles Manson away from the craters, but Kaang mirrored everything She did; sometimes, it seemed, before She did it, as if Kaang was taking the lead and making Her follow. The two craters flared one more time, and went dark. The patterns over Her flank darkened one more time and went pale. Another of Her manoeuvre drives exploded, this one near the stern crater, and pieces of wreckage fountained out from Her. The Bridge screen tracked them. Each piece grew two replica craters of its own, but this time they flared once and went dark, like eyes closing.
She seemed to give up, as She had done once before against Kaang, and let them fly alongside Her. Cyr pressed a series of panels, and two of the Charles Manson’s main ventral launch bays opened. Objects dropped out of them, fired once and made their way towards Her.
In the few seconds before Cyr’s attack hit Her, they had time to look into the craters. Both of them were lit, not by the unnameable colour but by the weak pearlescent flicker of the Prayer Wheels deep inside them (another naked bulb in a cellar, thought Foord) and they saw, despite all the ways in which She was utterly unlike them, a piece of their own likeness. She too was packed solid, almost to dwarf-star density. The stern crater was packed with the cathedral slabs of Her main drive housings, the midsection crater with a melted chaos of cables and conduits, like a bucket of dead eels; and both craters with broken latticeworks of structural girders, even with the same H cross-section as their counterparts on the Charles Manson. Angles were random and contradictory. Everything had flowed into everything else and frozen at the instant of melting. Escher and Dalí.
The furthest recesses of each crater were still out of focus, obscured and sealed by the darkness whose surface swirled with watered-silk patterns. If She had a crew, some of them would have moved through these areas; but nothing had kept enough shape to be corridors or doors or anything else recognisable. Or to be their bodies. We did that, thought Foord, and then he froze as another thought came, a very unwelcome one.
Maybe we only damaged Her outside, not Her inside. Maybe this is how Her inside really is. Maybe She always carries this chaos inside Her.
•
Cyr watched the two ninety-foot Diamond Clusters she had just launched, the last two the Charles Manson carried. Like the Prayer Wheels they had fired once and were now gliding on diverging paths towards the two craters. Like the Prayer Wheels, She must have seen them coming and should have responded but did not. Cyr had told Foord they were the best weapon to follow the Prayer Wheels into the craters. Foord still wanted beams, but Cyr persuaded him. She knew that energy weapons in the craters would be wrong.
Cyr watched the two of them, and watched her instruments; she calculated that if Faith continued to do nothing, no final course correction would be needed. As with the Prayer Wheels, there was a moment when She could have tried rolling away, and everything would then have depended on Cyr’s preparations and Kaang’s reactions; but the moment passed. The two ninety-foot missiles reached Her and slowly entered the craters and continued and continued to enter until their entire lengths were swallowed. And this time, Cyr thought as she watched them explode, You can swallow but you can’t digest.
They were simple explosions, massive but conventional, not linked to MT physics in any way and not affected by the stasis fields. They flashed On-Off in a nanosecond, On to light the two craters with fire—almost a mundane colour after the colour which had previously lit them—and Off to leave them lit again only by the flicker of the Prayer Wheels, which generated their own space-time and were untouched by non-MT events around them.