The screen covered the curved wall of the Bridge, as thinly and closely as a coat of paint; but now its surface rippled like silk, and something was trying to form on it, behind it, which was impossible. On the segment of the screen facing Foord, two shapes were trying to push through it, a rectangle and an oval. Their meaning was clear to Foord, because the oval sat above the rectangle and suggested a head and shoulders, pushing through a silk shroud.
“Her face,” Thahl said. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“No!” Foord shouted. “Not on my screen, not on my Bridge, it belongs out there. Thahl, we don’t want to see this. Please, block it.”
“It might be Her face, Commander.”
“I said block it!”
Thahl pressed some panels. Nothing happened. He pressed some more. The silken texture, and the shapes forming behind it, slowly drained from the Bridge screen. The screen sank back to its normal contours, went dark and relit, this time with Her image, magnified as before so She seemed only sixteen hundred feet away. Her drives were flickering through the wreckage at the stern in a way they had not done before, and the screen’s headups said that Her course was unchanged but Her speed had dropped to thirty-five percent; Kaang matched it. The midsection crater remained dark.
Foord slowly let out his breath. Something had told him that they should not, absolutely not, see whatever had tried to form on the screen. He knew that no signal from another ship, however powerful, could force itself on the Charles Manson if they decided to block it; finally they had, but he was still uneasy. He knew Her abilities with communications. Or rather, he didn’t know them, not all of them.
“Blocked, Commander.” Thahl’s voice was carefully neutral.
Foord nodded briefly, and looked again at Her image on the screen. Something about Her wasn’t right. She had slowed to thirty percent, said the headups, and Her stern drives were flickering fitfully. He thought again of naked bulbs in cellars. We’re fighting Her through a solar system, and She compresses it down to cellars and dripping alleys.
The alarms murmured.
“What—”
“Another signal, Commander,” Thahl said.
Nothing reached the screen. Her image was still there. She was now down to twenty-five percent, and Her stern drives were cutting out, refiring, and cutting out again.
“Where? Where is Her signal?”
Thahl’s hands flew over his console. His claws started to unsheath and retract, almost but not quite in time with the on-off stuttering of Her stern drives. For a moment he seemed close to panic, something Foord had never seen in him before; then he subsided, and resumed his normal demeanour. He looked round at Foord.
“This signal isn’t aimed at the screen, Commander. It’s aimed directly in here, into the Bridge….”
“What?”
“….and so far, we can’t block it.”
A white light filled the Bridge, like the light they had seen in the midsection crater. They blinked in it. It made them feel cold. It had no source and cast no shadows. It went everywhere; even the air glowed with it. It washed over them, turning their faces to pocked landscapes and their figures to dishevelled statuary.
Foord held his hand in front of his face and studied it, as he had seen himself do in the mouth of the crater. The ripe sweat under his clothes turned fish-cold and clammy. His breath actually frosted in front of his face, stinging his lips and nostrils; and through its vapour he saw, strewn over the floor, the rubbish and debris which he’d refused to move.
Now it started to move itself.
It swirled across the floor in miniature vortexes which sprang up and died at random, like the life-forms on Horus 5. A figure forming in the middle of the Bridge was making it swirl. The figure was solidifying out of the light. It was still indistinct and shifting, a hollow latticework of vapour, like the vapour of Foord’s breath; but it had a head and shoulders, arms and legs, in approximately human proportions.
Foord drew his sidearm. Cyr had already drawn hers and was aiming, and Thahl had started towards it.
“Don’t!” Smithson bellowed. “Don’t touch it! Don’t go near it.”
The headups on the Bridge screen kept assessing and reassessing it: it was a hologram, it was a solid object, it was neither, it was both, it was unreadable. It was also unexpectedly beautiful, a roiling hollow vapour-shape lit from within. It flicked on-off as it tried to form. On the Bridge screen, Her stern drives flicked off-on in the same rhythm.
Her speed dropped to nineteen percent and She started to pitch and yaw. The energy required to project something into the Bridge against all their inbuilt defences was unthinkable, just as the act itself was unthinkable; not even another Outsider could have done it.
“Commander,” Smithson said , “She’s draining Herself. Just to communicate with us, She’s draining Herself!”
“And your point is?”
“My point is, She might be vulnerable to our particle beams, so why haven’t you thought of using our particle beams? And,” to Cyr, “why haven’t you?”
“You’re right,” Foord muttered. You’re always right, you smug slug. “Fire them, Cyr. Not into the craters, but everywhere else.”
The beams lanced out. Her flickerfields met them and held them, but—said the Bridge screen headups—only just. Her stern drives went dark, stuttered and refired, and the still-unformed figure standing in the middle of the Bridge actually doubled over, as if in pain.
“You see? You see?” Smithson shouted, adding unnecessarily “That’s what you should have done!”
“Again, Cyr. Keep firing them.”
Cyr did so, again and again, imagining her finger was not pressing a firing-button but digging into one of Smithson’s eyes. Always, always, he was right, and always, always, she could never forgive him for it.
Her flickerfields still held the beams, but each time Cyr fired, the figure on the Bridge weakened in definition. It threw its arms up around its head. If they had been able to see its face properly, it might have been screaming. The vapour which made up its outline started to disperse, as if blown by a wind. It was fading, and finally faded to nothing, but the white light which had brought it, and out of which it had formed, still filled the Bridge. The debris still swirled fitfully across the floor. Their breath still frosted in front of their faces. They still felt cold.
Her stern drives fell dark and did not refire, and She came to a halt. The Charles Manson halted with Her, and Cyr continued stabbing out the particle beams. Her flickerfields—coloured a distinctive neon purple, unlike those of any other ship—were getting paler and thinner. When they deployed you could still see through them to the silver of Her hull underneath, and the screen headups showed that their power was dropping, and that She was deploying them nanoseconds later. With every firing, the beams were getting closer to penetrating the fields; to actually hitting Her.
“She’s weakening,” Cyr said.
“No She isn’t,” Smithson snapped. “Her fields are weakening, because She’s diverting their power.” He looked across the Bridge. “Into that.”
The figure had returned to the Bridge, but it was fainter than before. It faded almost to nothing, reappeared, then faded again.
“Soon She’ll be defenceless,” Cyr hissed, “and the beams will reach Her.”
All through the engagement their particle beams had been the only weapon which consistently outmatched Her. They pushed and probed through Her fields, a little closer to Her with each firing.