This time the explosions went into Her, the way they should have done before, and She had no means of reversing them or slowing them, but the explosions themselves would not have damaged Her. It was what they released into Her, a million fractal diamond razors the size of Sakhran claws, flying through Her at a million times the speed She had slowed them to last time. They were a simple physical weapon, carried to massive extremes. Their eruption and flight inside Her had already happened. It would have lasted only another nanosecond after the two explosions, On-Off in their afterimage. If She had been a Commonwealth ship, even a battleship—or even an Outsider—She would have broken in half. Because She was not, Cyr had the next attack already prepared for the craters; and, if necessary, the one after that and the one after that.
She came to a halt, and the Charles Manson halted with Her. Alarms murmured on the Bridge. Whatever had happened inside Her, found no other expression outside.
Alarms murmured again. She started to move forward slowly, at twenty percent. The Charles Manson parallelled Her. She showed nothing they could read, either as life or death. Maybe the diamond razors had shredded Her interior and crew, and She was moving only on automatic, or maybe they had failed. As usual, She gave them nothing. Her interior, like SchrÖdinger’s cat, was neither dead nor alive, but something else which might become either.
Cyr and Foord exchanged glances.
“Commander, do we still…”
“Yes. What else is there?”
Cyr pressed some more panels, and the next attack began. Blisters rose and opened along the topsurface of the Charles Manson’s hull. Their three hundred remaining spiders swarmed out, fired their onboard motors, and made for the midsection crater. It was something Cyr and Foord had both wanted: to do to Her what She had done to them, to assault Her internally and intimately. Always attack the wound, Cyr said.
“Cyr,” said Foord, “if this doesn’t work…”
“I know. I have the next attacks ready.”
The dark gunmetal spiders fanned out as they crossed the sixteen hundred feet. They were silhouetted against the silver of Her hull as they floated slowly towards Her. Many of them were missing limbs. As they neared the midsection crater they fired their motors and funnelled into a narrower formation—almost a coiled rope, like the one She had taken into Herself. Their silhouettes became less distinct as they came within the compass of the crater’s backdrop, where only the flicker of the Prayer Wheels illuminated them. The mouth of the crater was almost the same colour they were.
The slowness and uncertainty of what they were doing made Foord suddenly tired. He looked across the sixteen hundred feet and almost prayed to Her, Respond.
The alarms had earlier murmured on the Bridge, like polite punctuations to the other conversations, but now they shouted. Both craters, stern and midsection, were black. At last, She had neutralised the stasis fields, and the weak illumination from the Prayer Wheels had died.
Cyr glanced at Foord. He shook his head, No.
“Hold them back, Cyr. Don’t let them enter the crater. Not until…”
He had expected to see both craters re-ignite with the unnameable colour, and to see the dark swirling patterns reappear over Her hull, indicating the resumption of Her mass-to-energy processes. So had the Bridge screen, which patched in local magnifications of both craters and of Her hull around them, but nothing showed. At least, nothing they expected.
The midsection crater filled with shivering white light. It was so bright it hit them like a wind, crossing the space between them with almost physical force so they expected the Charles Manson to rock. It was like a billion arc lights. It silhouetted the floating bodies of the spiders, reaching itself and their shadows back at the Charles Manson like alternate dark and light fingers, projecting their silhouettes onto the Charles Manson’s flank in a broken rewriting of the earlier dark patterns on Hers.
And it was only the midsection crater, not the stern. That remained dark. Foord had glanced back at the stern crater to check, and so missed what happened next at the midsection, and found himself wondering what the alarms and shouting were about until he looked back to the midsection crater and saw the figure which walked out of it—walked, not crawled—and which was now standing in the crater’s mouth, looking at them across the sixteen hundred feet.
It was human-sized, and human-shaped.
It was human, and they recognised it.
6
“It’s a good analysis,” said the voice, “of the events at Horus 5 and the Belt and Horus 4. The last bit, in the Gulf, is harder to read. Our analysts see it differently to yours.”
“Our analysts,” Swann said, “had to work from limited information. From long-range monitoring of drive emissions, from radio and optical telescopes on Sakhra, and a few remote probes that happened to be in the system. We had no ships in the area, because you”—he tried to keep his voice even—“because you told us to recall them and deploy them around Sakhra. If you have a different view of what’s happening in the Gulf, it’s because you know more about it than we do. For once, just say yes or no.”
Swann’s Command Centre at Blent was full of screens, most of them showing live feeds of events around Sakhra which he didn’t want to see, but Swann was speaking not into a screen but into a—superficially, at least—old-fashioned microphone. The Department of Administrative Affairs didn’t do faces on screens. It only did voices on mikes.
“Yes, of course we do. We’d hardly build things like the Outsiders and not build in ways of monitoring them. Just because Foord has killed all communications—by the way, with us as well as you—”
“We have only your word for that,” Swann said, then wished he hadn’t. His voice wasn’t shrill, but the remark was.
“Just because Foord has killed all communications,” the voice went on evenly, “doesn’t mean we can’t track him. He knows that, of course. He’s neutralised some of our devices, but not all of them. And Joser wasn’t the only observer we had on the Charles Manson. Foord knows that, too.”
“So you have information which we don’t about what those two ships are doing in the Gulf. I insist you share it.”
“Insist?”
The days Swann had spent in the Command Centre, since Boussaid’s death and since the Charles Manson had left to engage Her alone, seemed longer than the rest of his life. They stretched back behind him, worrying and unfathomable, noisy and fetid. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes. Neither, by his orders, had any of his staff—the military and security people he’d charged with monitoring events on Sakhra, the communications people he’d charged with tracking the Charles Manson’s engagement of Faith, and the mission analysts he’d charged with interpreting it. Their cups and meal trays and half-used toiletries were strewn over the floor, left where they fell. The atmosphere was as thick and furry as the inside of his mouth.
Without any possibility of realising it, Swann had done to the Command Centre what Foord had done to the Bridge of the Charles Manson.
“We have an apparently invincible opponent,” Swann said. “She’s entered the outer reaches of Horus system, almost certainly to attack Sakhra. The only ship with any chance of defeating Her has, on your orders, engaged Her alone. According to our analyses She’s made the Charles Manson shut down its MT Drive, execute a photon burst through the Belt, and burrow through a large asteroid. Then, apparently, Foord succeeded in damaging Her at Horus 4.” Swann became aware that he’d been counting the points on his fingers, the nails of which were stained and bitten; Foord’s hands, he remembered, were always immaculate. “And now there’s a series of strange closeup exchanges between them in the Gulf, and those two ships are travelling alongside each other. Through the Gulf. Towards us. And Foord won’t communicate. Maybe it’s not just one invincible opponent coming for us, but two. Yes, I said Insist!”