The Bridge screen panned back. A vomit of silver spiders burst out of Her midsection crater and hit the rest of the Charles Manson’s spiders, still floating alongside the crater mouth, and the second and larger part of the massacre began.
96, said the screen’s headup display impassively, against 261.
It was like Sakhrans fighting humans—more so, because Sakhrans fought as individuals and the silver spiders fought with perfect co-ordination. On the Charles Manson, they’d chosen to collapse and subdivide when damaged, and even then, any one was a match for at least six opponents. Now, they were outnumbered only three to one.
95, said the headup display, facing 187. 95, facing 163.
Two to one, Foord corrected himself, his horror rising as the odds fell; less than two to one. He had foreseen this, so his horror contained no panic; it was as coldly mathematical as the Bridge screen’s accounting. What was happening was devoid of drama or uncertainty, but still horrifying.
94, said the headup display, facing 123.
The silver spiders were not fighting their opponents, they were merely shredding them and parcelling them into manageable pieces which were handed back down the line into the mouth of the crater where the silver liquid welcomed them into itself.
94, said the headup display, facing 87.
It was an industrial operation. They were loading cargo, not fighting a battle, and seemed genuinely unaware that the cargo was trying to resist them while they loaded it. And now that the operation was into its final stages, it accelerated.
93, said the Bridge screen, facing 45. 93, facing 9.
“Particle beams?” Cyr asked. Her voice betrayed nothing.
“No, not on the crater,” Foord said. Neither did his.
93, facing 0.
“I meant on them, Commander, if they come for us.”
“They won’t. She’s taken enough of us. Now She wants Sakhra.”
•
Nobody spoke on the Bridge. They were thinking the same thing but wouldn’t say it aloud. They all go into the dark, Foord recited to himself, they all go into the dark and become part of Her.
He wasn’t thinking of the ninety-three that had just entered Her. Neither was he thinking of their own spiders, dismembered and parcelled into the crater, or of the spiders and hull-plates taken before from the Charles Manson and swallowed by the crater; that was just hardware and substances.
He was thinking of the original five silver figures; ourselves, blinking at us from out of that hole in Her side, the hole we made. Ourselves. Those five figures carried our souls, and our souls have become part of Her.
Not Have Become: Always Were.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “impossible things. So have you. We can’t leave them unspoken.”
“I thought that’s exactly what we do on your ship,” Smithson said.
Foord ignored that. “Those five figures, we knew when we first saw them that they were us. We saw it behind their eyes. All our memories and motives. Even souls, if we have them. Everything that animates us, animated them.
“And She already knew it. When She made those five, She already knew what we are. She put it into them when She put them in the mouth of the crater. She took it back into Herself when She took them back. I think She’s always known what we are. Since before we existed.”
“Commander,” Thahl said, almost gently, “we’ve turned away from the Commonwealth. We don’t know what we are. Where do we belong now?”
“Perhaps more with Her than the Commonwealth. There’s more of us in Her than we ever gave to the Commonwealth.” What did I just say?
“Commander,” Smithson said, “do you know what you’re saying?”
“Are you saying you haven’t thought the same thing?”
“Are you saying this, Commander?” Cyr asked.
“She means…” Thahl began.
“I know what she means. Is it me speaking, or Her?”
Again, nobody spoke on the Bridge.
“This is me speaking.” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. “I won’t submit to passive submission to a higher power—Her, or the Commonwealth. Nothing outside of me has the right to know my soul. I never really knew what I meant when I said Instrument of Ourselves, but I do now. It means that.”
Foord looked at the Bridge screen where She still floated, apparently immobile. She was further away now, a hundred and fifty thousand feet instead of sixteen hundred, and travelling faster through the Gulf than before, but the screen maintained magnification and their course and speed matched Hers, and the Gulf was empty of reference points. It was as if they were both stationary, and She was only sixteen hundred feet away. She seemed always to be only sixteen hundred feet away.
“The Commonwealth has taken a lot from us, but not as much as She has. The Commonwealth is just a machine, not a god. We must fight the god. We must go on and destroy Her, no matter what things we learn about Her. There can be no time or space except the time and space we take to destroy Her.” He knew he was close to incoherence, but he went on. “No space in front or behind. No time before, after, or during.”
He only understood half of what he said, and had no idea what any of them would say next, himself included. And he would never know, because there was an interruption from somewhere outside.
“Commander,” Thahl said, “we have incoming.”
“I thought I told you not to—”
“The signal isn’t from Sakhra, Commander. Or from Earth. It’s from Her.”
8
She had sent Her signal openly, with no attempt to disguise its origin. She even followed the standard Commonwealth ship-to-ship protocols, prefacing it with a code on the usual hailing frequency; in effect, a formal request for their acceptance of a communication, which with equal formality they refused. She ignored their refusal, and tried to bypass their defences and put Her signal directly onto the Bridge screen.
“Block it, please, Thahl.”
“Commander, it might be….”
Foord looked up at him sharply. “Block it.”
Her image on the Bridge screen became blurred and overlaid with static, a normal and temporary side-effect of the blocking of an incoming signal. When the block was accomplished, the static would clear from the screen; which ought to have been now.
“Thahl?”
“The signal’s growing more powerful, Commander. I’ll try to…”
“Thahl, the screen.”
The Bridge screen had never before gone dark while the ship was operational. The sudden absence of its light was like the sudden absence of air, a visual suffocation. Thahl switched to backup and it relit, showing Her image again, overlaid with static; and again it fell dark. The screen had many backups and failsafes, and Thahl used them all. It stayed dark.
“Smithson,” Foord began, carefully controlling his voice, “do we…”
“Yes, Commander, we still have Her on scanners, and She hasn’t changed course.” His voice tailed away.
The screen relit. It glowed with a soft opalescence, but it was absolutely blank. Worse than dark. And it was changing, in a way it had no business to: changing its texture and surface contours.