They would never encounter any opponent who wasn’t already part of them. The motives and memories, hopes and fears, history and future of every opponent they had met or would ever meet, were contained in them at an unplumbable depth: in the curved and recurved space between the unique particles which made them, in interstices where no other physical laws reached. All of it was there to be drawn on when they met their next opponent and the next and the next, into eternity or for as long as the universe lasted. They didn’t know why they did it, or who made them, but how they did it was a function of how they were made.
For an almost geological time they had faced opponents, singly and in multitudes. No opponent’s abilities could ever be unknown to them. No opponent’s ship could ever outfight or outperform theirs. And no opponent had ever done to them what this one had done.
•
“Everything.”
“I don’t—”
“Remember when you demanded we send the other Outsiders to the Gulf? We even thought of doing it, but now it’s impossible. You’re on your own. So are we. Everyone’s going to be on his own.”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t listen. Listen. Keep Horus Fleet in a defensive cordon, like we told you. Those two ships are still far away, but they’re coming. They’ll cross the Gulf and arrive at Sakhra, locked in combat, or in whatever else they’re doing to each other. Pray that neither of them wins. Pray that they keep fighting for another year, or ten years, or a thousand.”
•
No opponent had ever done to them what this one had done. They still had superiority, because of their unique ship and their own uniqueness, but now for the first time they felt a stir of unease. Not for themselves—they had never had, or needed, the capacity to feel personal danger—but for the balance, the clockwork, they served. If that was wrong, everything was wrong.
They still had superiority. Foord had done something unexpected, but they could still do other things, beyond even Foord’s abilities. They reflected.
10
“Something went from their lives,” said Thahl’s replica, “and they never got it back.”
Cyr fired the particle beams on full power. They tore through Faith’s underpowered fields and hit Her, twice. She killed Her main drives, killed the signal She was putting into the Bridge, killed all the other things She had primed for later, and threw everything into Her fields, but by then Cyr—who was firing manually and continuously—had hit Her again, and again, and again: five times before Her fields, too late, reached full power.
Smithson’s idea had worked; his ideas always worked. But this one would go on working, long past the point where it gave them what they wanted.
On the Bridge screen they saw Cyr’s five shots raking along Her flank between the midsection and stern craters, vaporising Her hull plates and leaving five parallel clawmarks; then Her fields reached full power, turning opaque and almost solid when Cyr’s beams touched them, and not even the Bridge screen could see through them. No further shots penetrated.
When She killed the signal She was putting into the Bridge, She killed Thahl’s replica with it. It was swept to one side as if by a wind, dividing into particles which further divided into light, and then into nothing. The replica died abruptly and without ceremony, like a real Sakhran, and left nothing behind it.
The white light of Her signal disappeared, plunging the Bridge into the darkness of normal light. The cold went away, and their breath no longer frosted in front of their faces. Foord motioned Cyr to stop firing; Her fields cleared, and the Bridge screen showed what had happened beneath them.
There should have been at least one new crater, or even five new craters, gushing liquid silver and glowing with a nameless colour and throwing out pieces of wreckage which grew five miniature clawmarks and burnt away to nothing. Instead there were only five dark parallel lines, which the beams had scored along Her flank between the two craters; they looked like lines ruled on a very long sheet of writing paper. The Bridge screen did measurements and patched in a closeup: each line was nearly nine hundred feet long and less than a foot wide, the width of a few of Her thumbnail hull plates. The beams had scored out the plates as they raked along Her flank, uncovering the dark pewter of Her second hull layer, gleaming and undamaged.
“Surface only,” Foord hissed at Smithson. “The beams were supposed to be the only thing, apart from her”—he gestured at Kaang, but continued to glare at Smithson—“which gave us an edge!”
“She said that, Commander,” Kaang said. “Or rather, my replica did.”
Foord ignored her, and turned to Cyr. “Craters. Where are the craters?”
“Commander,” Thahl said, “our probes are detecting something inside Her.”
“Our probes have never detected anything inside Her!”
“This is the first time.”
•
It was a movement, slow and vast like something oceanic.The Bridge screen patched in some data, but it was gibberish; it said the movement had occurred nine thousand miles inside Her. The probes lost it and found it again, nearer the surface. Now it was only three thousand miles inside.
“What is it, Thahl?”
“You can see the readouts, Commander. I don’t know.”
“What have we started?” Foord whispered to Smithson, and to Thahl “Why isn’t it showing?”
“I don’t know.”
The midsection and stern craters flared like before with the nameless colour. But this time they flared only fitfully, and when the Bridge screen went to patch in closeups of them, Foord for once overruled it—“Leave it. That’s nothing. Go there”—and ordered it back to the five clawmarks on Her flank. Immediately the light from the craters died, as if She had heard or anticipated him.
The Bridge screen tracked along the clawmarks.
“There.”
At a spot three hundred feet from the edge of the midsection crater, something was rippling Her flank; pushing up from underneath and moving Her hull plates, like Foord had sometimes seen the smaller muscles in Thahl’s forearms moving the diamond-shaped scales of his skin. The screen patched in a closeup.
The movement covered an area no larger than the page of a book, fitting easily between two of the clawmarks; it made a slight bulge in the hull plates. The microscopic distance between the edge of each plate and its neighbours increased fractionally, showing a thin line of pewter underneath—Her second hull layer, uncovered like the clawmarks had uncovered it, but on a much smaller scale. Without being ordered, the screen panned out.
There was another one, a hundred feet away; then a third, then dozens, always between the parallel clawmarks, and only deep enough to uncover, beneath the edges of the plates as they moved apart, the dark pewter of the second hull layer. Now there were hundreds. Because they appeared only between the parallel lines along Her flank, they started to look like writing—an effect heightened by their regularity, because they always followed the outlines of the hull plates. The screen went to closeup again.
The lines made by the gentle parting of the hull plates, which from a distance had looked like lines of cursive writing, were almost granular when seen closeup; like ink under a magnifying glass, sinking into the weave of parchment. The screen went closer still, becoming almost a microscope. It concentrated on just two plates. Their edges, where they had gently eased apart to reveal the dark layer underneath, were like torn paper, with trailing filaments waving microscopic goodbyes to each other as they moved fractionally apart. The screen held the magnification for a few seconds, then panned out again.