Faith

1

It was a late autumn afternoon, and the sun Horus bled through a bandage of clouds. He arrived alone, cramped and tired after the journey. Foord was disappointed, but not surprised, when they didn’t come out to meet him.

Almost before he stepped out, the Sakhran landchariot which brought him clattered back towards the lowlands, its driver hissing and flaying the team. He looked up at Hrissihr and saw the great black disc daubed over one of its buttresses. A srahr: he remembered reading about it in his mission briefing from the Department.

The srahr (unlike the name of the historical figure, it is not written with a capital S) is recurrent in Sakhran culture. It is the silent letter in their alphabet, and the symbol of zero and infinity in their mathematics. In their past legends it is the mark of apocalypse, and in their present legends the mark of the unidentified ship, which for reasons of their own they call Faith. This ship came once before, over three hundred years ago, and they know it will soon return. You are not the only visitor they are expecting.

He gave the black disc a cursory glance, aware that they would be watching for his reaction. Then he turned his attention elsewhere around the massive hillcastle, noting details with the habitual precision of a warship commander. The wind swore down at him and he tasted two distinct liquids, one from his watering eyes and the other from his running nose.

Hrissihr rose before him like the fist of a subterranean arm. He counted off one minute, concluded the Sakhrans would not be coming out, and walked into the main courtyard. Several doors led off it, each one—he knew from his briefings—the entrance to a separate Sakhran apartment. Hrissihr looked like the castle of some single absolute ruler, but it wasn’t; it was the home of many Sakhran families, although, being Sakhrans, they stayed behind their own doors and rarely met socially. Tonight was to be an exception, with a dinner in the little-used Main Hall to mark his arrival.

The walls of the courtyard were hung with iron braziers, some containing fires which spat as he passed them, others empty beneath old soot-smears, recording the departure of Sakhran families to the Commonwealth lowlands, or to other hillcastles higher and further away. In the wind from the Irsirrha Hills, dead leaves rushed across the flagstones and clamoured against the shut doors. He picked up one; it was dark grey-green, its veins dry and spatulate. He tossed it away and the wind snatched it.

Sulhu chose that moment to appear.

“Commander Foord! You’re very welcome.”

Together they walked across the courtyard, Foord treading the dead leaves noisily and the Sakhran avoiding them gracefully. A few doors opened, and other Sakhrans peered warily from their apartments at Foord; either he was carrying some disease, or was the disease. Sulhu, though, treated him warmly, as if they’d known each other for years and this wasn’t the first time they had ever met. He took Foord’s arm and looked up at him as they walked, smiling a dark red mouthful of pointed teeth and chattering in perfect if rather sibilant Commonwealth.

“Your journey here wasn’t too tiring, I hope? I’ve been looking forward to this meeting. My son Thahl has told me all about you. I’m delighted that you could come up here and visit us while your ship is on Sakhra. Come in, come in….”

•

“You haven’t seemed completely at ease tonight, Commander Foord. I hope the food wasn’t to blame.”

“The food was fine, thank you. The fact is, I rarely get invited anywhere twice. I don’t make a very good guest.”

“Yes, my son Thahl says you call it Social Awkwardness. Then there’s also the long journey, and Director Swann’s opposition to your visit here. My invitation was well-meant, but perhaps not well-judged.”

“It was both, and very much appreciated. Also, my visit here is a useful reminder to the Director that I don’t take orders from him.” Swann was Director of Horus Fleet—regular military—and found having an Outsider at Blentport deeply insulting.

The silence lengthened. Sulhu’s eyes were unwavering behind the occasional horizontal flicker of their secondary lids. His ophidian face, usually rather immobile, seemed to crawl under the play of firelight.

“Alright, Commander. You’ve had an evening of small talk over dinner with my neighbours. Let’s not continue it. Can we talk freely? You’re off the record here, you know.”

Most Sakhrans were natural linguists, but Foord found Sulhu’s near-fluency disconcerting; it made him sound like he understood humans as well as he understood their language.

“You mean, Talk Freely about what I’m doing here?”

“Everyone knows what you’re doing here, Commander. Me especially. My son Thahl gave me an outline of your orders.”

His son Thahl sat deferentially silent and to one side, partly hidden in shadow. The dinner to welcome Foord had finished and the rest of those who attended—only a minority of those living at Hrissihr—had gone back to their apartments across the courtyard, or across other courtyards, and closed their doors behind them. Their empty chairs remained in a crescent round the dwindling fire. There had been much about the dinner—soft low light, murmured conversations, carefully judged understatement—which reminded Foord of the Charles Manson.

Foord turned and glared pointedly at Thahl, who showed no obvious embarrassment. The slender Sakhran darkwood chair on which Foord sat, although much stronger than it looked, still creaked under his weight.

“As well as being your son, Thahl is an officer on my ship. Those orders are confidential. Or were.”

“I said Outline, Commander, not details. Everyone knows them in outline. And in any case, Commonwealth law recognises no secrets within a Sakhran family.”

Since Sakhrans reproduced asexually once or twice in a lifetime, the father-son bond was strong; it was the only bond which was, since all the others had weakened over the last three hundred years. Hillcastles like Hrissihr provided the minimum for life, housing families of two, or sometimes three, who ate together only rarely. Fathers died, sons grew into almost the same identity, and reproduced; then died, and their sons grew into almost the same identity, and reproduced; then died. Sakhran society was conservative and minimal.

Foord knew all that from his long association with Thahl, but the detailed point about Commonwealth law had been covered in his briefing, and he should have remembered it.

“Of course,” he said hastily, and to both of them. “My apologies.”

Sulhu nodded, deadpan. “You’re not a very good guest. I won’t be inviting any more Socially Awkward people here.”

The evening wore on, and still Foord stayed talking. Despite his misgivings, and with all the issues looming in the background, he found himself enjoying it: Thahl’s father was good company. Thahl himself hardly said a word, having clearly decided to leave them to each other.

“I was watching you, of course, when you saw the srahr,” Sulhu said. “Later I watched you examine a dead leaf. Both are getting numerous. We’re well provisioned here for our winter, but are your people provisioned for theirs?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“I listen to Commonwealth broadcasts, Commander. I read Commonwealth journals. They all refer to Faith as a distant thunder. They hint that whole systems, including this one, may be battened down if She comes. I’m old and diseased and will soon die, so few things worry me; but that does.”

Tall narrow windows were scored down one wall of the Hall, like clawmarks. Foord stood up, stretched, and strode over to gaze out of one of them, his heels clacking on the flagstones. He was tall and powerfully built, dark-haired and bearded, a fourth-generation native of one of the Commonwealth’s heavy-gravity planets. He exuded a musky odour, like a lion. People meeting him for the first time found his quietness and reticence so at odds with his appearance as to be unnatural, almost threatening.

“Why does it worry you?”

The Sakhran laughed drily. “Because they’ve sent you here. The prospect of being anywhere nearby when you find Her is not appealing.”

“But you’re old and diseased and will soon die.”

Sulhu inclined his head, in the way of acknowledging a hit. Foord thought, It must be all this time around Thahl. I’m beginning to learn irony.

“Well,” Sulhu said, “there’s also the fact that my son will be on your ship.”

“No. There’s something else that worries you. Something you haven’t told me.” It amounted to calling his host a liar, so Foord spoke carefully. “But I think you will, when you’ve worked out how to say it.”

He continued to gaze through the leaded glass where the cold blaze of Blentport and its surrounding cities was spread out far below, prominences flaring now and then as ships landed for refit or lifted off to join the cordon around Sakhra. Under the huge Sakhran night, the spaceport seemed both mighty and vulnerable; like a beached whale, its size made it weak.

“An impressive spaceport,” Sulhu observed. “Much more impressive than anything we had. And yet, do you know how it got its name? When Sakhra became absorbed by, or rather was Invited To Join, the Commonwealth two hundred years ago”—Sulhu’s vocal irony, like all other forms of Sakhran irony, was light and subtle—“we pointed out Srahr’s tomb and asked that no human should ever go there uninvited to read his Book. For no better reason than that, a man named Rikkard Blent did. We caught him before he entered and later returned his still living body to the lowlands. The Commonwealth never actually retaliated, except—rather injudiciously if you ask me—to name Blentport after him.”

Sulhu paused for a moment. When he resumed, the irony had drained from his voice.

“To name its biggest spaceport after a silly man who thought he could come up here and just read the Book of Srahr. Srahr was the greatest of us, Commander. Poet, philosopher, soldier, scientist; and, unfortunately, author. We never recovered from his literary career… Must you go back tomorrow morning, Commander?”

“I think so. The refit has to be completed.”

“If you could stay until the afternoon, I had in mind a hunting trip.”

Foord smiled. “Cyr would have liked that.”

“He’s your Weapons Officer, isn’t he?”

“She.”

“Ah. Tell me about the people on your ship.”

Foord told him.

“But if they’ve done those things, why aren’t they dead? Or in prison?”

“Because they’re too valuable. And I’ve Done Those Things, too.”

“You see, Commander,” Sulhu went on, “There’s something wrong about this mission of yours.” His hands raised themselves from his lap, just enough to silence Foord, and returned to rest. “Let me think about how best to put it to you.”

Not for the first time that evening there was a loud roar as some military transports dipped low over the Irsirrha on their way down to Blentport. Suddenly aware that he was shivering, Foord walked back to stand by the fire.

“Yes,” Sulhu said as the noise from the ships died away, “that’s a good cue. It’s common knowledge—I didn’t get this from my son, it’s in all the broadcasts—that Horus Fleet has been ordered to maintain a defensive cordon around Sakhra, and that if She appears in the system, you’re to go out and engage Her singly, and they’re to stay put.”

“Yes, the Department made a terrible mistake at Isis. They insisted the Sirhan should join the regular forces, and not fight Her alone. They don’t want to repeat that mistake here. If anything, they’ve gone to the other extreme.”

“But Horus Fleet is the biggest in the Commonwealth, outside of Earth. Do the people who give you your orders really think the whole Fleet isn’t equal to Her?”

“Maybe they think She isn’t equal to me.”

“I was in Blentport a few days ago and I watched your ship land.” A carnivore’s lightning-bright smile. “I can’t imagine much that would equal it. But here’s my point: what will happen after you destroy Her?”

Foord had some difficulty hiding his surprise. “I can’t say. My orders aren’t specific.”

“No, not what you will do afterwards; what will happen. This is a matter which has interested me for a long time.” Thahl, who had been almost silent all evening, shifted uneasily, but Sulhu went on. “Why is the Commonwealth expanding?”

Again, Foord had some difficulty hiding his surprise. “Is that all you were thinking how to say?”

“All?”

“Well. There are obvious reasons: economic, political, military, probably in that order.”

“I hardly think so. Economically the Commonwealth already has an abundance of unused resources, politically its systems are if anything more divided than they were before it acquired them, and militarily it has never encountered an enemy strong enough to justify making itself bigger; though that may change now.”

Foord was beginning to feel tired, and remembered the journey which would be waiting for him the following day.

“Then maybe none of those. Maybe cultural: just sheer curiosity.”

“Better, but it still only explains the process in terms of itself. New systems are acquired because they’re there.” Sulhu’s tone was almost bantering.

“Then,” Foord’s was almost irritated, “since you’ve obviously thought about it, what’s your answer?”

“It’s very strange, Commander. I’ve studied cultures like the Commonwealth. They seem to expand for no good reason, at least none they’re conscious of. Almost as if something external was making them.”

“What made the Sakhran Empire stop expanding three hundred years ago?”

“Two things, Commander: Faith, and Srahr’s Book. And it didn’t just stop expanding, it declined. When you see this,” he gestured around him, “you must find it difficult to imagine that we once built ships….though nothing like yours, of course, or like Her….”

Sulhu turned and gazed deliberately past Foord towards the windows. His hands tightened slightly round the obsidian goblet he was holding.

Foord read the gesture accurately. The subject was important, but they’d only touched on it; it needed a whole new conversation, and it was too late. He stood.

“It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for your hospitality.”

Sulhu smiled and inclined his head. His eyes were dark, simultaneously deep and depthless. “For me, too. I expect to invite you back one day, Commander.”

Outside, the wind from the Irsirrha howled through the empty wings of Hrissihr. The last fires in the wall-braziers crackled in the courtyard, and their distant cousin in the hearth hissed and stirred in response.

2

The interior of the Sakhran landchariot was dark and dirty, cramped even for Sakhrans. The seat barely extended halfway up Foord’s back, and was inadequate for even one of his buttocks. Because he was reluctant to put his feet on the opposite seat (though he could not have made it much dirtier) he spent most of the journey back from Hrissihr peering between his knees at Thahl, who peered back impassively.

Thahl’s face was thin and ophidian, flesh stretched taut over muscle. In fact his whole body was flesh stretched taut over muscle. His skin was purplish grey and made up of tiny diamond-shaped scales, which undulated from the movement of the strange musculature beneath them. The undulation pushed the scales into minutely different angles so they reflected light at different moments and intensities, like the play of light on water. There was nothing much, either in appearance or demeanour, to distinguish a younger Sakhran like Thahl from an older one like Sulhu.

Foord was already uncomfortable and cold, and the journey had barely started; and yet, when he recalled Swann’s annoyance, not just at Foord’s going to Hrissihr but going there in a landchariot, he thought it was worth it.

“How long will the journey back take, Thahl?”

“About as long as your journey here, Commander, since that was also by landchariot and covered exactly the same route.”

“Ah.”

“Of course, most of the return journey will be downhill, so it’s likely to be quicker. While on the other hand,” Thahl continued, relentlessly deadpan, “traffic towards Blentport will be much heavier than traffic towards Hrissihr….”

Foord sighed. They could be irritating, sometimes.

There was nothing much to see, yet. The road from Hrissihr was cut into rock, so one side showed only a sheer face hurtling past, and what might have been an impressive view on the other side was obscured by grey, clinging mist (they had made a very early start) and grimy windows.

Foord turned his attention to a web in the bottom corner of one of the windows. In it hung the dry hollow carcase of something like a fly, jerking with the movement of the landchariot. Foord scraped the window-pane so particles of paint and wood fell on to the web, to tempt its maker to emerge, and watched bemused as the web itself folded over at the points where the particles landed, a silver glistening of digestive juices dribbling down its strands.

The road wound backwards and forwards across the face of the Irsirrha. The landchariot clattered on, leather creaking and wood and metal rattling, the driver occasionally swearing at the chimaera, they occasionally swearing back. Foord yawned; he had not had a good night. They’d given him an apartment in one of the empty wings of Hrissihr, but their beds, like all their furniture, did not accommodate his bulk easily. He started to doze.

A spider perched on his shoulder. He jerked awake and tried to brush it off. It was Thahl’s hand, gently tugging.

“My apologies, Commander, but it’s time for you to check in.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” He snapped open his wristcom.

“Yes, what do you want?” Smithson’s voice answered.

“This is Foord.”

“This is me, on the Bridge. What do you want?”

“Checking in. We’re on our way back from Hrissihr.”

“Yes, we know that. Your wristcom tracker says where you are.”

Foord sighed. “We should be with you in,” he glanced at Thahl, thought better of it, sighed again and went on, “in about three hours.”

“No. There are delays. All the roads into Blentport and the cities are clogged. It seems everyone’s coming to the lowlands. Is it some local thing we don’t know?”

Foord shot an inquiring glance at Thahl, who shrugged; not the Sakhran gesture but the human one, with his shoulders. “What about the refit, Smithson? Is it proceeding well?”

“It is now. Swann agreed that we come before everything, and he’s told his people they have to work round the clock.”

“How did that happen? When I saw Swann, he said he’d never let our refit take priority over the defensive cordon. Outsiders can take their turn, he said. He practically prodded me in the chest.”

“Yes, well, he did all that with me too. But I encouraged him to see it differently.” Smithson deliberately paused; he was leaving a space for Foord to congratulate him, so he could receive the congratulation ungraciously and imply it was patronising, and that listening to it kept him from valuable sharp-end work. It was part of his ritual. Foord saw it coming and simply went on.

“What’s been completed?”

“All drives and weapons have been overhauled and tested. Scanners and minor systems have been overhauled and are due for testing presently. And right now I’m watching them load on board those two missiles you told them to build.”

“Did you make sure they were built exactly to my specification?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly?”

“Yes….Commander, what were you thinking of? Why take on a couple of primitive things like that?”

“Just a hunch. I have an idea they might be important.”

“I have an idea they might be a waste of space.”

Foord let that pass. “How are relations at Blentport?”

“How are relations at any port we put into?”

“I asked you about Blentport.”

“They started out badly, and got worse because of the refit. Swann’s people have been told to give me priority, and they are, but they really don’t like me.” Occasionally, as now, Smithson would lapse into theatrical self-pity. Foord had never known anyone for whom self-pity was less appropriate. “What about my feelings? What happened to common courtesy? I mean…..”

•

Like a piece of gently mocking Sakhran conversation, the road wound backwards and forwards across the face of the Irsirrha. It was a track of loose stones and mud, devoid of signs or distance markers.

One side of the landchariot still showed only a rock face rushing past, but on the other side, now the mist had cleared, there was a sheer drop filled with heavy forest: huge trees with green-grey foliage as dense as fur, casting green-black shadows. Because Foord was looking down on them, and because they grew so close together, it was difficult to see properly just how tall they were, or how far into the distance they reached, but both figures were big: about six hundred feet and hundreds of miles respectively.

Occasionally there would be a break in the forest and Foord would catch glimpses of dark torrential rivers and granite palisades; and other hillcastles, all smaller than Hrissihr and showing only one or two sullen plumes of smoke. Hrissihr was the only large hillcastle so close to Blentport and the lowlands; the others were much further away, high in the distant mountain ranges which dwarfed even the Irsirrha. Humans hardly ever went up there. There was a rumour in the lowland cities that somewhere, high in the heavily-forested mountains, was a thousand-foot tree.

There was no other traffic yet; there wouldn’t be until they got closer to the lowlands and started hitting Commonwealth towns. The driver—Foord knew him only as a surly expanse of diamond-scaled back and shoulders visible through the grimy front window—hissed and swore and whipped the team.

“Thahl,” Foord said, “you omitted to calculate that this landchariot has six chimaera pulling it, not four like the one which brought me.”

“You mean, Commander, that that will affect any estimate of our travel time? But this is not a fresh team, unlike the one which brought you. The driver will have to rest and water them in an hour or two.”

“Oh.” Foord subsided.

Rituals. At least Thahl only did it privately, this gentle pisstaking; never in front of others, or when it genuinely mattered. Smithson did it publicly, privately, whenever and wherever he liked.

Foord commanded one of the nine deadliest warships in the Commonwealth, crewed by uniquely talented and dangerous individuals, yet they all had these rituals they enacted with him. Often they would change the rules at random, on the possibly anarchic basis that random rule changes were part of the rules. And Foord usually went along with it; anything to get the most from them. In any case, as well as being their Commander he was also one of them. He had done things as terrible as any of them. Except, of course, for Thahl. As far as Foord knew, Thahl had done nothing more terrible than any other Sakhran; he was not, by Sakhran standards, psychotic or maladjusted. He had simply completed all the necessary officer courses, usually with grades well into the top five percent, and had specifically asked to serve on an Outsider. He’d never wanted anything else.

The Department appreciates that you have a Sakhran First Officer; you know a lot about him, but maybe less about them. Your ship’s Codex, as usual, has more detail, but you may prefer this modest summary.

Sakhrans contain elements of mammal and reptile; and other elements, still unclassifiable. They reproduce asexually, but our cultural preconceptions still lead us to refer to them as males.

They have a slight build, but extraordinary physical abilities; the deadliest intelligent humanoids known to us. They evolved to compete with their planet’s other spectacular carnivores: Angels, Coils, Diamondfaces, and even the dreadful Walking Air. Sakhrans can outkill them all.

Their neural synapses and metabolism, their musculature and reflexes, are quite unique. Their bones and claws and teeth are like titanium. Thahl is smaller than you, but much faster and stronger. You have often been heard to say that you wouldn’t last ten seconds against him. Ten seconds is optimistic.

But they work best as individuals, not in teams. This could be connected with the next point.

You have had a long working relationship with one Sakhran, which may have obscured an important fact about Sakhrans generally. They were not always like they are now. Their society, their institutions, their Empire, even their everyday technology, declined rapidly—it was not a collapse, but a rapid decline—three hundred years ago, after the first visit of the unidentified ship and the writing of the Book of Srahr. We know no other culture which has declined in quite the same way. This may not impinge on your professional relationship with Thahl, which appears to have worked well; but with other Sakhrans, it may be significant.

The landchariot lurched on.

“Thahl,” Foord began, “I was sorry not to see your father before we set off this morning. Was he unwell?”

“Not unusually so, Commander. He’s old and diseased and will soon die, of course, but that wasn’t why he didn’t appear. I think he was concerned that if he saw you again he might delay you by restarting last night’s conversation.”

“I enjoyed last night’s conversation. He asks very good questions.”

“He’s very ignorant.”

A few miles later, as if there had not been a gap of distance and silence in their conversation, Thahl added: “My father asked me to give you a message, Commander. First, to thank you for coming up to visit him. Second, that whatever happens, he expects to invite you a second time.”

They were still in the Irsirrha, but they had left the higher slopes and the road didn’t double back on itself so much; it was straighter, plunging down between walls of dripping forest on either side. The view was smaller-scale, but didn’t seem so. Higher up, what would have been a much more impressive view had been obscured, by the mist and the sheer density of the trees. Here, the forest had thinned out enough to see how massive the trees really were; although the trees of the higher Irsirrha were even taller, these ones still towered four hundred feet over the road, often standing in groups of three or four as if talking privately together. Somehow, they made the air around them seem like the air in a cathedral.

They were set far enough apart to see the green-black shadows they cast on the ground, and the armoured secondary foliage bursting in frozen waves around their lower trunks, and the dark mouths of openings in the coils of their massive roots. Sakhra had many species of trees, but Sakhrans had a particular name for tall trees generally; they called them Shadanth, or Vertical Rivers.

The gradient softened. The road widened but was still mainly loose stones and mud, and still showed no signs or markers. The trees on either side were no less tall than before, but were set back further from the road, leaving a verge of mud and grass, dotted with tall clumps of silver-green bladeweed. As they turned a bend they encountered the first traffic they had seen all morning, another landchariot coming directly towards them at a speed almost matching theirs. They swerved to a halt and the two drivers had a brief and spiteful conversation—at least, to Foord it sounded spiteful—before the other driver lashed his team and clattered away towards the highlands.

They remained stationary.

The driver, without turning round, said something. Thahl leaned out of the window and a long, sibilant conversation ensued. When it finished they both sat silently, long enough for Foord to start hearing the noises of the forest; then the driver’s whip exploded over the six huge backs of his team, and they shot forward.

“What was that about?”

“It may be nothing, Commander. The driver has heard something…Can I suggest you check in again?”

“Thahl, what is this? Does it have any bearing on the ship?”

“Nothing like that, Commander. A rumour of a local evacuation. But it may affect our journey time and it would be prudent to check in more frequently from now on.”

Foord snapped open his wristcom.

“Yes?” Smithson said. “What do you want?”

“An update on the refit, please.”

“Scanners are done and tested. Minor systems await testing.”

“We may be delayed getting back.”

“You will be, Commander. Traffic’s got worse, it’s so tight you can’t…”

“No,” Foord said, not eager to hear Smithson complete the phrase, “it’s up here. There may be further delays in the highlands.”

“Why don’t we send one of the ship’s fliers for you? Or even better, get Swann to send a Blentport flier?”

“No. We’ve been through this before. I told you I wanted to make this journey by landchariot.”

The answering noise from Foord’s wristcom was moist and disgusting. In a gesture characteristic of his species Smithson had plunged his hand, and by symbolic extension Foord’s, into one of his lower abdominal orifices.

“Well, Commander, whenever and however you get here, we’ll have completed the refit, done the testing, got their people off and ours on, in four hours.”

“Four hours?” Foord and Thahl exchanged glances. Even Thahl looked surprised.

“Yes? Why not four hours? What’s wrong?”

“I expected eight at least.”

“Well. It’s four.”

Again, the ritual; Smithson left a gap into which Foord was supposed to put praise which Smithson could accept ungraciously. All the same, Foord couldn’t let it go unacknowledged.

“Last night at Hrissihr, I was thinking you’d need most of today to complete. I didn’t expect we might leave so soon. Thank you.”

“With the trouble we’ve had here, they might not let us leave.”

“Trouble?” Foord asked, carefully. “What trouble?”

“An incident in a bar with two of our crew. Cyr’s dealing with it. It’s always an incident in a bar, isn’t it?”

“Where is Cyr now?”

“She’s at Swann’s offices.”

“Tell me what you know, now.”

“Two of our crew got called names in a bar. There was a fight, the others got hurt, Cyr took our two aboard and isn’t releasing them. It does happen every time, doesn’t it, Commander?”

“Get Cyr to call the moment she returns from Swann. If I haven’t heard in thirty minutes I’ll check in again.”

A clattering and hissing and squealing as two more landchariots passed them going the other way. A sickening jolt as they crashed through a pothole. The driver swore, the whip flew and crackled electrically, and they hurtled on.

•

“Why have we stopped?”

It was an hour later. The road was wider, the gradient shallower, and Sakhran landchariots heading up into the Irsirrha were more frequent. The forest still towered over the road on both sides, however, and they had seen nobody except Sakhrans.

“Why have we…”

“The team have to be rested and watered, Commander.”

“Fine, then let’s get out.”

“We’ll only be here a few minutes.”

“Half an hour, you said earlier.”

“No, we’ll be going sooner than that.”

“Nevertheless, I’m getting out.”

“I wouldn’t advise it, Commander.”

“Why?”

“There may be trouble here.”

“Tell me about it outside.”

They stepped out into a large forest clearing where the road from the Irsirrha crossed two others. It was full of landchariots, of Sakhrans hissing and chimaera squealing; of wheels foundering in mud, smoke from damp wood fires, the sodden flapping of canvas and hammering of tent-pegs.

With a sudden vicious blow at the leader’s chest their driver smashed the harness from his team, whereupon they lumbered over to a pothole full of muddy water, drank, and settled; this, apparently, amounted to resting and watering. The driver had already turned his back, pointedly, and stalked off to sit alone on a dead tree-trunk some distance away. He unsheathed his claws at another Sakhran who was doing no more than amble past.

“What is this place, anyway?” Foord demanded.

“It’s the last gathering-place before the lowlands, Commander.”

“Gathering-place? Sakhrans, gathering?” Foord was surprised to hear himself speak so sourly. He put it down to discomfort from the journey: cramp, and a throbbing headache.

“These are hunting-parties, Commander, from Hrissihr and from some of those smaller places you saw on the way down. They come here to exchange news and trade carcases.”

“They appear to be doing little of either. They look like they hate each other. Their chimaera look like they hate each other.”

“Then perhaps they’ve just come together to reaffirm it, Commander.”

They walked across the sullen clearing, between groups of Sakhrans whose expressions were unreadable, past tents and fires, and around landchariots festooned with carcases, mostly of giant wild relatives of chimaera. Other carcases hung from poles, heads lolling, or sat in heaps in the mud ready for flensing. Many had throats cut. Some were partly eaten.

“Anything here remind you of the Charles Manson, Thahl?”

“I’m not sure I understand, Commander.”

“Oh, you know, this comradeship”—again, Foord was surprised at his own sourness—“this golden glow of social intercourse.”

Thahl glanced at him but did not reply.

They sat down on a tree-trunk, the wood of which was damp and rotten and teeming with white grubs. Foord’s throbbing headache was getting worse.

“So what’s about to happen here, Thahl? And why didn’t you warn me earlier?”

“I only suspected it as we drew in, Commander.”

The throbbing had become louder and more pronounced, almost loud enough to be an external noise.

Thahl stood up. So did most of the other Sakhrans. They looked like they were smelling the air, but Foord recognised it as their posture for listening.

He suddenly realised there was an external noise.

“Thahl, what’s going on? What’s that…”

Thahl had relaxed slightly; he turned an expressionless gaze on Foord.

“I know what it is now, Commander. But it’s too late to leave, and it could still be dangerous. Please stay close by me.”

Three military groundcars entered the clearing. They settled with a low whine and disgorged twenty soldiers who set about moving Sakhrans away from the centre of the glade. They carried only light sidearms and behaved with impeccable courtesy. Their demeanour was carefully low key, and although well drilled, they seemed to have been chosen for their non-threatening appearance; they were of average build with regular features, definitely not Special Forces like those Foord had seen in Blentport.

At the edge of the clearing, coming up the road from the lowlands, loomed the source of the throbbing background noise: three tracked military lowloaders carrying enough equipment to erect a large scanner emplacement and several particle beam and missile units. The throbbing was due to the heavy muffling of their engines, which were now idling as they waited—Foord gasped when he realised this—to move into the centre of the clearing.

“Thahl! I thought you said the military never came into the highlands. There’s going to be murder here.”

“I don’t think so, Commander. But please stay close.”

Slowly, carefully, the soldiers made a space for themselves in the centre of the clearing. Their patience and diplomacy were remarkable; they persuaded the Sakhrans back, easing their way with smiles and thanks, requesting space with gestures carefully drained of sudden movement, speaking softly and politely, treading as if on broken glass. There were only twenty of them; any one Sakhran, armed or unarmed, could easily have killed five or six, and there were nearly seventy Sakhrans. But Sakhrans together were less than Sakhrans individually. Foord had often read about it, but this was the first time he had ever seen it demonstrated, and he was astonished. He glanced at Thahl and thought, Is this is what you lost? Did a book make you like this?

It was over in a few minutes. Twenty men, chosen by someone very cleverly, had persuaded seventy Sakhrans to move aside and allow the Commonwealth to make its first military entry into the Sakhran highlands in two hundred years.

The Sakhrans stood singly, or in twos and threes, and watched the lowloaders lurch into the clearing. Foord let out a breath and walked back to the landchariot with Thahl, who gestured to the driver. By the time they were inside, the main scanner emplacement had been mostly erected and the particle beam and missile units were being unloaded. Smithson could not have done it much better.

“They were very good,” Foord said.

“Yes, Commander. I was afraid you might be endangered, but they handled it well.”

Foord looked askance at Thahl, a gesture he had learnt from Thahl himself.

“You’re more Worrier than Warrior.”

“It keeps you alive, Commander…and I think we’ll see more of this as we get closer to the lowlands. I think I know what these rumours of evacuations are about.”

“Well?”

“We’ll see more military incursions into the highlands. Later, we’ll see some of the outlying civilian populations being moved into the lowlands.”

“I don’t understand.”

Thahl waited politely until he did.

“You mean they’re gambling that if She defeats us, and comes for Sakhra, She won’t attack the cities if they’ve been turned into civilian targets?”

“Yes, Commander.”

Foord swore to himself.

“I think,” Thahl added, unnecessarily, “this may not be a pleasant journey.”

The driver’s whip exploded and the landchariot clattered out of the clearing and down towards the lowlands.

3

The landchariot hurtled on, now a dark wheeled box full of so many varieties of brooding that even the chimaera fell silent and ran faster as if merely to get away from it.

They passed their first roadsign. It was crooked and untended and read, in blue letters on a rustpocked white background, BOWL BLENTPORT (Pindar, Framsden, Cromer, Meddon). As it flashed past the landchariot, Foord leaned out of the window to look back at it. The reverse side was blank.

The road was wider now and verged with grey-green tussocky grass, the terrain more level and less heavily wooded; they were in the vaguely-defined border between the end of the lower Irsirrha and the start of the foothills, which would eventually slope down and level out at the rim of the Great Lowland Bowl. They were making good time; but all around them, the details which it was Foord’s lifelong habit to note and store were mounting.

It began when they left the clearing. As the road sloped gently downhill and they got closer to the foothills, the forest gradually thinned out, becoming the exception rather than the rule. Fields predominated, with trees—usually smaller varieties, like cloudclaw and armourfern—making borders between them. The fields, of course, were not Sakhran; Sakhrans didn’t farm, though a few did work on the human-owned farms which characterised the foothills and the edges of the Bowl. But Foord had noticed these fields on the way up to Hrissihr, along with occasional farmhouses; there were people and vehicles around them, smoke from chimneys, the sound of engines running. Now they were deserted; the farmhouses showed streams of furniture and possessions vomited out of open windows and doors, and churned tracks in the mud.

There were other figures, however. Every quarter-mile or so there would be a military vehicle, usually a small groundcar, with a couple of soldiers. This seemed to be the message: evacuate to the lowlands now, leave your possessions, go now, this is an emergency, and if you go now, we’ll post guards against looting; an easy task, since no humans would be left to do any looting, and the remaining Sakhrans would be in the highlands.

Sakhra’s diameter is about 1.5 times that of Earth, large for an Earth-type planet. Its atmosphere and gravity, and the length of its day, are all close to Earth normal. Its topography is unusual. The largest continent, Shaloom, covers most of one hemisphere; its main feature, taking up sixty percent of its land area, is the Great Lowland Bowl.

The Bowl was thought to be an ancient impact crater, but that theory is discounted now; anything making a crater that size would have destroyed the planet.

The Bowl’s cross-section is irregular, sometimes deep and sometimes shallow. Most of the Commonwealth settlers on Sakhra live there. Some Sakhrans also work and live there, but most remain in the traditional hillcastles in the mountains and highlands.

Sakhra’s other hemisphere consists of oceans and archipelagos, and has huge natural resources: mineral deposits offshore, and precious metals and precious stones in the mountains of the larger islands. (There may be similar finds in the mountains of Shaloom, but for obvious political reasons these are not prospected.) The Commonwealth’s main economic activity is the extraction and processing of these commodities, and their transport to, and distribution from, Blentport.

Landchariots hurtled past them every few minutes, in the direction of the highlands. And, also heading for the highlands and also every few minutes, they encountered more military traffic: low-slung groundcars with opaque windows, light armoured vehicles, and, so far, five more convoys of tracked lowloaders taking scanner and missile and beam installations up into the Irsirrha.

Then, when they started to pass the farms, they saw the other half of the evacuation: the civilian traffic from outlying farms and villages, mostly pickups and trucks and offroaders, laden with people and packing cases. The traffic had not yet reached crisis proportions because the human population in the foothill areas was quite sparse, but further down, when it met the normal lowland traffic, it would be unimaginable. And then there was the roadblock. Or rather, there wasn’t.

“Are you a local resident, sir?”

“No. Do you want to see my papers?”

“Are you going to the lowlands, sir?”

“Yes. My papers?”

“Not necessary, sir, if you’re going to the lowlands.”

The soldier paused as a couple of freighters roared overhead, on their way down to Blentport. The sky—a grey inverted bowl shot with high trailing clouds, like the roof of a giant mouth streaked with mucus—had again started to be full of them, like it was last night.

“Are you sure you don’t need to see my papers?”

“Yes, sir, as long as you’re going to the lowlands.” He was already losing what little interest he had in Foord. “Safe journey.”

Across the road, on the side leading up into the highlands, where they had seen a stream of landchariots and military vehicles, but no civilian traffic, there was not merely one soldier but nine or ten, all heavily armed, and a large armoured sixwheel. Both its gun turrets were pointing down the road in the direction of traffic from the lowlands, but that may have been coincidence.

Foord’s wristcom buzzed. He snapped it open.

“This is me,” Smithson said. “Is that you?”

“Smithson, where is Cyr? Why hasn’t she called?”

“She’s still with Swann. And it’s forty minutes since you said you’d call in thirty minutes.”

“I know, we were delayed… The traffic is getting heavier, but we’re still aiming to be back in about two hours.”

On Foord’s wristcom, either a toilet flushed or Smithson laughed. “I don’t think so, Commander. It’ll get worse as you get closer. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like now, down here.”

“Is the refit still on target?”

“Yes, be done in three hours. I’ve got total priority. At least nine ships, including three Class 097s, are stuck down here and can’t join the cordon, because of me,” he said proudly. “It’s going well. But whether we leave in three hours, or wait twelve for a post-mortem on that alehouse brawl, is Cyr’s problem. And yours.”

“Post-mortem?”

“Nobody’s dead, Commander, it was just an expression.”

An expression, thought Foord, which he had used deliberately. “Smithson, if we’re ready to leave in three hours we’ll leave! Do you understand?”

Smithson hated being asked Do You Understand; he took it as a personal insult, a fact of which Foord was aware. “Call Cyr, please,” he went on quickly, “and tell her I want the details of that incident. And she’s not to hand our people over to Swann. And even if Horus doesn’t set tonight, two things are certain: we leave when the refit is done, and we leave with all our crew.”

Foord felt like adding another Do You Understand, but decided it would be ill-judged. He snapped the wristcom shut.

•

At Pindar the evacuation really started to show itself. Foord looked out of the landchariot as it turned a bend into the main street, and swore.

Coming here from the highlands was like jumping from air into treacle. Pindar was the last Commonwealth settlement he had passed on his way up to Hrissihr yesterday, and the first on their way down today: a small market town with a longish narrow main street lined with houses and shops and civic buildings, all slightly uncared-for and all built on the same modest scale. It would have taken a direct bombing better than it was taking the evacuation.

They were embedded in traffic. Most of it was town vehicles, with a few trucks and offroaders from neighbouring farms, some of which had passed them on the way down, sounding their horns. They were not sounding their horns now. Pindar was gridlocked but eerily quiet.

Military groundcars were positioned at intervals along the main street, turning it into a one-way through road to the lowlands. The traffic was like a stream of food passing down a long mouth, with the groundcars as inward-pointing teeth.

It looked like much of Pindar was already evacuated. The main street resembled a table-top onto which the contents of buildings had been emptied like the contents of pockets. For collection later, Foord thought, as though the urgency dwindled once people were put on the road, and pointed in the unvarying direction of the lowlands.

Thahl was right. And this, thought Foord, must be happening all the way around the rim of the Bowl. Here, though the crowding was heavy, it was still rather small-scale, just one modest town in the foothills; the entire population of the foothills wasn’t that large, but if this was happening here, it was the tip of something far larger. And something quite desperate.

They can never do it, Foord kept thinking. There isn’t time. They can’t turn the lowlands into an undefended civilian area!

They could, and they were; not completely, but perhaps just enough.

Foord opened his wristcom, told it to seek the local broadcasts, and listened.

The broadcasts talked of hotels and commercial buildings in the Bowl being requisitioned. Of camps erected on unused land between lowland cities. Of the mobilisation of hospitals and social services and charities to take the sudden—but, as they described it, temporary—influx of people. Of special comm links to enable those who had relatives in the lowlands to contact them and arrange accommodation (the preferred option). Of detailed arrangements for farms to leave one or two people behind to tend crops and animals.

The broadcasts used as much of the truth as humanly possible, but no more than necessary. They said—it was common knowledge anyway—that She may be coming to Horus, and that people in outlying areas were being moved temporarily to the lowland cities where they could be better protected. It was, they repeated, only temporary, until the Charles Manson lifted off from Blentport to engage Her.

They didn’t simply have one official broadcast repeating this message. They got existing presenters to insert it in existing programmes, not merely reading a prepared text but speaking around a summary they’d been given, so they could preserve some spontaneity. Even so, Foord heard similar phrases being repeated by different voices. The most common was We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You. Once or twice, though, he actually heard the phrase Drawing The Wagons Into A Circle. He suspected the authorities hadn’t fed them that; their plan might be desperate, but they weren’t stupid.

They mentioned that large military detachments were being deployed to the highlands to prevent looting of evacuated properties. They did not mention that they were also moving defence emplacements to the highlands, or creating the impression (hasty and partial, but maybe just enough) that the lowland cities were undefended. Such an impression could not be other than hasty and partial. They could never move all the military out of the lowlands, even if they wanted to. What they wanted was to move the most visible garrisons. The fixed defence emplacements around the Bowl and especially around Blentport would remain, but would be visibly undermanned.

Foord left the wristcom on speaker. It scrolled up and down all the lowland frequencies, repeating substantially the same material. Foord and Thahl listened in the landchariot as it moved, at walking pace, through Pindar. The web in the window continued to salivate.

“This is their endgame, Thahl. We haven’t even left to engage Her. She hasn’t even appeared in Horus yet. And they’re gambling that if She defeats us and comes to Sakhra, this—this, will keep Her from attacking the lowlands!”

The broadcasts continued to murmur out of Foord’s wristcom. We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You.

“It may not work, Commander, but it’s all they’ve got. Their ships can’t fight Her because they’ve been told to stay in the defensive cordon, while we fight Her. If She comes here, it means She’s destroyed us and destroyed their cordon. They have to have an endgame, even one like this.”

Foord did not answer for a while. Then, “You of all people. I thought you’d be outraged at the military going into the highlands.”

“Commander, the way they see it, they’re decoying Her away from the cities. If She comes, those in the highlands know they won’t have a chance against Her.”

We Have To GET You, To Where We Can PROTECT You. Nothing is simple, Foord thought but did not say. He snapped his wristcom shut. Immediately it started buzzing.

“Foord.”

“Cyr, Commander. I’ve just left Director Swann’s offices.”

“And is he still demanding we hand over our people?”

“No, Commander.” She laughed, rather unpleasantly. “He almost disappointed me. Before I could invoke our priority he invoked it for me. Keep them, he said, and just go. He’s desperate to get us off Sakhra.”

“Good. Should I know who did what to who or will it keep?”

“You can guess most of it, Commander. It does happen every time, doesn’t it?”

It was a voice-only channel, but Foord nodded; he knew that Cyr would read the quality of his silence. Outsiders were always treated, especially by regular military forces, like the carriers of a disease. Everyone knew the Department recruited most Outsider crew members from prisons, and psychiatric hospitals, and orphanages; sociopaths and psychopaths who could never work with regular forces. And when one or two of them walked into a bar, or were seen anywhere in public, the results were almost inevitable. Most were not openly aggressive, which made them even more of a provocation; they were loners or depressives who tended to sit in corners, in ones or twos or small groups. On this occasion, two were set upon by four from a Horus Fleet cruiser, also on Blentport for refit.

“Was anybody killed?”

“No, Commander. Our two went immediately back to the ship. I refused to hand them over to Swann, and now he’s given up. The other four were all injured, one of them seriously, but he won’t be permanently scarred or disabled: I checked with the hospital.”

“Alright, Cyr, thank you…No, wait, something’s happening here.”

The traffic jamming the main street of Pindar had been strangely quiet. Now, Foord could hear klaxons and sirens, and soldiers shouting at vehicles to move to one side of the road, further and further to one side until they mounted the pavement. Something huge was coming.

Foord should have realised what it was from the low throb of its engine, or the shape of the shadow it cast, but he didn’t until it was upon them: a tracked lowloader, like those in the clearing earlier, but much larger. There were others behind it. They carried more beam and scanner units, and missiles so tall they towered precariously over Pindar’s buildings, and they moved through the main street in the opposite direction to everything else: in the direction, of course, of the highlands. The lowloader was so long that as it passed the landchariot, and continued and continued to pass, it seemed that its bulk was standing still and they were moving past it. Then it passed by and the illusion ended, but as those behind it followed, each of them equally tall, there was another illusion: that of a city moving through a town.

“What’s that noise, Commander? Are you all right?”

“It’s OK, Cyr, a military convoy is passing through. Stay on, I want to speak again when it’s quieter.”

The lowloaders continued: there were seven of them, followed by groundcars, sixwheels and other vehicles. When they had gone, and their engine-noise had receded, the traffic was ushered back into the centre of the road and continued at walking pace. The sirens stopped. The abnormal quiet returned.

“Cyr.”

“Commander?”

“That convoy gave me an idea. Cyr, I intend to return to the lowlands, and to the ship, in this landchariot. Contact Swann, please. Tell him where we are, and tell him to get a military escort to clear the way for us. Invoke our priority, it seems to work.”

Cyr did not reply immediately.

“Cyr? Do you think that’s pushing him too far?”

“No, Commander.” Foord realised, from the inflexion of her voice, that she had been laughing quietly. “I think he’ll do anything….I’ll call him now. We are heaping insults on him, aren’t we?”

Foord snapped his wristcom shut, and thought, This is like the running joke in ancient movies, where one person gets repeatedly clobbered. He thought also, She never asked why I have to go by landchariot, though she probably thinks it’s self-indulgent. The fact was, he didn’t really know himself. Instinctively, it just felt fitting. He could have rationalised it by saying it was done out of respect for Thahl, but that wasn’t true. Thahl had already told him, firmly but in private, that he thought the idea was unnecessarily risky as well as a provocation to Swann.

Between Foord’s knees, and across the landchariot’s dim interior, Thahl stayed expressionless and silent, though Foord had known him long enough to know he was amused at the indignities being piled on Swann. Sakhrans’ quiet humour was strangely at odds with their capacity for violence.

Foord looked above Thahl’s head at their driver. He had never seen anyone’s mere neck and shoulders radiate so much repressed anger. The driver had said nothing to Thahl since leaving the clearing, and nothing at all to Foord; his turned back carried far more expression than Thahl’s face.

•

When they finally got out of Pindar the road widened; traffic was heavy but faster. In both directions—toward the lowlands and highlands, the latter now entirely military vehicles—it was an unbroken stream. Cyr called back to report that Swann, although outraged that Foord should enter Blentport by landchariot, had agreed almost gratefully to the suggestion that a military escort would hasten his return and, hence, departure. They would be met, Cyr said, by a specially picked detachment who would escort them at high speed the rest of the way down.

The foothill country opened up and the landchariot clattered on, between fields of dark gold corn stubble where suddenly-empty houses stood alone as if daubed there in anger; fields of waving barley where cloud shadows raced each other across the ground; between fields of naked brown ploughed earth where flocks of white birds, or things like birds, wheeled screaming. And everywhere in the fields were swarms of giant Sakhran butterflies, iridescent violet and purple, looking for the farm animals on whose excrement they fed; they preferred it warm, so they would cluster around anal orifices. The farmers called them Buggerflies.

The sky was still full of freighters going to and from Blentport. As two passed overhead, much too low and much too fast—they were huge ships, and their passing seemed to go on and on, like that of the lowloaders—they encountered their escort. Swann had wasted no time.

Two sleek, low-slung military groundcars, with sirens blaring and lights flashing, came up behind them from the direction of the highlands, overtook them and waved them down. The landchariot juddered to a halt, the chimaeras’ hooves scuttering and kicking up stones and mud. Three soldiers got out of each car. They were from heavy-gravity planets, each one of them bigger than Foord, and they wore dark blue Special Forces uniforms.

“Commander Foord and Officer Thahl?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Kudrow. Major Miles Kudrow.” He was not unlike Foord, even down to the thick dark hair and beard; but younger and larger. The five standing behind him were equally large, and looked impressive even to Foord. “I’ve been ordered by Director Swann to escort you back to your ship.”

“Thank you, Major. We didn’t expect you quite so soon.”

Kudrow nodded, politely. “Commander, my orders were to escort you in this landchariot.”

“That’s correct.”

“Can I suggest you transfer to the cars? We’d make better time.”

“Thank you, Major, but I particularly want to complete the journey by landchariot.”

“Of course, Commander. We’ll get you there as quickly as we can. One car in front, one behind, sirens and lights. We’ve already called ahead so a lane will be cleared when we hit the main highway.”

“Thank you, Major.”

Kudrow opened his wristcom and spoke into it. His wristcom, and Foord’s, buzzed in unison. “Our numbers are stored, Commander. Please call me if we’re going too fast, or too slow. See you in Blentport.”

They moved out into the road, one car in front and one behind, the sirens and flashing lights clearing the way. Generally the traffic moved aside in good time, leaving them free to rush past in the left-hand lane; vehicles which didn’t move quickly enough were made to, diplomatically but efficiently. Kudrow seemed to have got the landchariot’s speed exactly right, and kept it thoughtfully constant. They were making good time, having neither to slow down or to rush beyond the chimaeras’ capacity.

The road was wide, still partly stones and mud, but starting to show patches of proper surfacing. The area was still predominantly agricultural, although crops and livestock had given way to commercial-scale market gardening: huge fields growing the prized Sakhran black tulips and blue roses. It was a more prosperous area: they passed through a couple of market towns and saw several farmhouses, all notably larger and better-kept than Pindar. The towns had fatter names, too: Framsden, Cromer, Meddon.

After twenty minutes, Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

“Kudrow, Commander. We’ll be taking a left turn in half a mile.”

“Trouble?”

“No, Commander. I’ve called ahead and there’s a detour we can take to reach the main highway: a farm road which cuts off a few miles. My people are keeping it open for us.”

It came up in a couple of minutes, a small turnoff guarded by a sixwheel. Kudrow’s car, in front of them, signalled and turned smoothly, flashing its lights at the sixwheel as it did so. The landchariot, and the second car behind, followed.

But it wasn’t a road, or even a track. It was just a clearing. Kudrow’s car skidded round, throwing up stones and mud and turning in almost its own length to face them; and with impressive speed and precision, and before the car stopped moving, Kudrow and his two passengers jumped out and were at Foord’s side of the landchariot, guns levelled. Foord could even read the name-tags of the other two: Lyle and Astin. The guns were pointed unwaveringly in his face—directly at him, with such geometric precision that their muzzles appeared to him as perfect black circles. Not even ovals, but circles.

“Get out, please. Both of you.”

For most of the morning Foord had seen Thahl gazing impassively from the seat opposite, but now the seat was empty, the landchariot’s other door hanging open—when did that happen? Foord had neither seen nor heard him move—and as Foord stepped out he saw the second car, which had stopped behind them, and waved desperately to the three inside it, who wouldn’t meet his gaze.

Time fractured. Foord glimpsed the results of what Thahl did before he saw him do it. Events should have been sequential, but Thahl’s speed broke them into pieces and when Foord tried to put them back together, they no longer followed each other properly. He seemed to remember them before they happened.

The guns were pointed unwaveringly in his face. Kudrow was explaining that they could not allow an Outsider to compromise Sakhra’s defences, and would not rely on an Outsider to defend them against Her, that was unthinkable, and the only way to stop it was this.

Foord looked at the three in the second car, and concluded they’d washed their hands of it. He couldn’t remember if he concluded that before or after Kudrow spoke.

The guns pointed unwaveringly in his face were now on the ground, because Thahl had broken the forearms of Lyle and Astin. Thahl had not used his poison, because they were still alive where they fell, and were screaming. Their screams drowned the sound of Kudrow’s voice, explaining why they had to kill Foord. No, that came earlier. The voice drowned by the screams was Thahl’s. He was saying to Kudrow, Please don’t, You know you don’t have a chance, Don’t make me do this, Just walk away. Just leave the gun.

Kudrow reached for his sidearm. No, Thahl said, Please don’t, his pleading tone ridiculously at odds with what he had done. Thahl snatched Kudrow’s pistol, infinitely quicker than its owner, and tossed it away. Foord noticed that Kudrow’s severed hand was still clutching the grip, and Kudrow was screaming, so maybe it was his screaming now which was drowning out his voice then.

It should all have been sequential—blurringly fast, but still sequential —except that Thahl’s speed splintered it. Foord had seen Thahl in combat before, but not like this. This was a single glimpse, on-off, of things that were impossible; as if Thahl had opened his private jewel-box of impossibilities, flourished it in front of Foord’s face, and snapped it shut.

Time slowed, and the pieces rearranged themselves. Thahl had kicked the guns away from the three on the ground. Kudrow was still screaming. The others were unconscious. Then Kudrow fell silent. Foord tasted brine along the sides of his tongue, the taste that comes before vomiting: a reaction not to the violence, but to its strangeness.

And one last detail: their driver had said and done nothing while it happened. He was sitting where he had been all along, flicking the chimaera with his reins and waiting for the journey to resume.

Finally, when he had recovered, Foord strode over to the second car. Thahl followed him at a distance. The three inside hadn’t had time, from when it started to when it finished, even to open the door.

Somehow, Foord correctly picked out the senior one.

“Did Director Swann know anything of this?”

“No, Commander.”

“And you, you all washed your hands of it.”

“Yes. We told Major Kudrow we wanted no part of it. He said, Look the other way.”

“Your name?”

“Lieutenant Traore, Commander.”

Foord turned to Thahl, and their eyes met. Foord shook his head slightly, then turned back to face those in the car. He could see them all let out a breath; they saw what passed between him and Thahl, and were praying they’d read it correctly.

“Alright. Lieutenant, please call Director Swann, now, and tell him what happened here. And tell him we’re going into Blentport in this landchariot, and he’s to give authority for the roads to be cleared for us. We want to see his fliers and VSTOLs and groundcars ahead of us all the way to Blentport, clearing a path. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“As soon as you’ve arranged that, we’ll leave here. You and your colleagues are to stay put. And please arrange medical help.”

He stood for a while listening to them make the call, then turned to Thahl.

“How did you know they…”

“More Worrier than Warrior.”

Foord nodded, wryly. Thahl’s quiet friendship and gentle mockery had been like a soothing antiseptic balm after the orphanage; yet still he could do things like this.

4

The journey was turning feverish. The road was now a six-lane carriageway, the middle and outer lanes jammed with a thrombosis of traffic and the inner lane cleared for them, cars and trucks shunted to one side by the military. The oncoming three lanes were an unbroken procession of military vehicles: more lowloaders and groundcars, tankers and multiwheels and personnel carriers, each one with its own battery of sirens and lights. Ahead there were VSTOLs hovering low over the road, low enough to force traffic into the outer lanes. Their road was being made for them as they travelled it.

They were in the flat country leading to the rim of the Bowl: immense and drab, partly fields and partly industrial wasteland, littered with low-grade and failing development: warehouses, factories, workshops, silos, apartment blocks. Some of them were soiled with brown stains from their partly-exposed steel skeletons.

Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

“Commander, it’s Cyr. We’ve got a situation.”

“Situation?”

“It’s the crews of the Horus Fleet ships. They’re stuck here until our refit’s completed and they’re gathering round our Grid—not doing anything yet, just watching. And when I refused to hand over our people to Swann, civilians and military started gathering too. They don’t seem to know what they want yet, but Swann won’t order them away because he says their mood is unreadable and he can’t predict the consequences. And now the news of what Thahl did …How long until you arrive, Commander?”

“About ninety minutes.”

“It may get worse. And when you do arrive, it’ll take something exceptional to get you through this crowd and on board. You won’t reconsider the landchariot?”

“Not now.”

“A moment please, Commander…Smithson says he has an idea about what to do when you arrive. I’ll call back.”

“Thank you, Cyr.”

The landchariot sped on. The landscape stretched either side of the highway, reflecting the sky’s greyness as if it was a stretch of ocean.

Now that they were approaching the edge of the Great Lowland Bowl, there was a strangeness about what they saw. The country was too unrelievedly flat to see the actual rim yet—it wouldn’t be visible until they were almost on top of it—but the strangeness had to do with how its presence was felt and almost seen. Freighters and warships, going to or from Blentport, appeared to fly into and out of the ground at a distant point on the horizon where the rim was located but not yet visible; at the same location and for miles beyond, the air was coloured with rainbows from the rivers which fell in torrents over the edge; and occasionally, there was the sense that beyond every rise in the horizon there was not simply more land, but emptiness—a difference in the quality of the landscape, like the difference felt near a coast before the sea was visible. And it did things to the air. Above the rim, so high above it they couldn’t be seen properly, were flocks of white things floating on the roiling air-currents. They weren’t birds, but they had wings over thirty feet across. Angels.

Blentport is situated in the Great Lowland Bowl. It is the headquarters of Horus Fleet, and the Commonwealth’s biggest port outside of Earth. It has landing and takeoff capacity for warships, freighters and liners: nine large and ten minor Grids, each able to repair, rebuild or refit a ship.

Commonwealth cities grew rapidly in the Bowl. Blentport grew rapidly too, because Horus Fleet was needed to protect the natural riches of Horus system; but the cities grew faster, making one huge conurbation surrounding the port.

You will have consulted your ship’s Codex about Blentport. Remember, however, the following:

First, how it got its name.

Second, its unique “City Centre” location. Population pressure in the Bowl conurbation is high, and Blentport is inevitably affected by (or even the cause of) the political and social pressures around it.

Third, its capacity. It can only refit, at any one time, less than half of Horus Fleet—adequate for most situations, but not for what you will find when you arrive there. The enforced deployment of the entire Fleet to a defensive cordon around Sakhra will precipitate a serious emergency, with more ships than it can handle putting in for refit.

Your ship has total priority, but the situation is volatile. The effect of anything ill-considered on your part is something you may be able to imagine better than the authors of this briefing.

They hung poised over the rim, and Foord froze. The traffic lurched forward and their road, along with all the others, commenced its long spiral descent round the sides of the Bowl. As it did so the Bowl effectively vanished; its curvature was so vast and shallow that it was no more discernible, from its own surface, than the curvature of a planet.

They were in a huge but ordinary landscape, occasionally hilly and occasionally flat. Their road was cantilevered out from the Bowl’s sides where the gradient was steep, almost flat where it was shallow. There were junctions with other major roads which forked off into the interior of the Bowl, and these roads too followed the ordinary demands of the landscape: sometimes raised on columns and sometimes at ground level, sometimes on embankments and sometimes in cuttings.

Overlaying the landscape was the Bowl’s metropolis. There was no single name for it: people tended to cling to the names of the original cities and districts, perhaps because the Bowl conurbation was too big for any single name. The cities and suburbs did not fill the Bowl levelly or evenly, like water, but crept up its sides, like brandy. As soon as the landchariot entered the multilane road spiralling down, outlying buildings rose and crowded alongside it. Some were quite mundane, like the suburbs of any city: schools, apartment blocks, shopping malls, leisure centres, vehicle workshops (including, as they passed through one of the seedier districts, workshops for landchariots).

The traffic was as heavy and slow as it had been on the rim, except for their lane, which the military still cleared ahead of them. But now they had entered the Bowl, there were more junctions and more delays. They came to a major junction and slowed, waiting to take the turnoff to the interior.

Foord said “Thahl, about the driver…”

“What of him, Commander?”

“Why is he so angry? I can feel it coming off him in waves.”

Thahl paused. “Commander, when you decided to return to Blentport by landchariot, was it something you considered important?”

“Yes. Also to make a point to Swann, but it was important to me. Why do you ask?”

“The driver believed it was important to you. That’s why he agreed to take you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Thahl waited politely until he did.

“You mean, because of the evacuation he won’t be allowed to leave...and if he has to stay he’ll have his poison glands removed?”

“Yes, Commander, that’s possible.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes, Commander. I discussed it with him back at the clearing. He said he agreed to take you in and he’ll take you.”

“Thahl, we must stop this. I had no idea. I’ll call Swann and get a flier…”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, Commander. Don’t try to stop him. He’d sooner kill you than be persuaded not to take you in.”

•

Foord snapped open his wristcom.

“Yes, Commander?”

“Cyr, we’ve entered the Bowl. We should be at the ship in an hour. How is the situation there?”

“The refit is almost finished, but we’re now fully surrounded. Our Grid is full of crews from the other ships, stranded here because of us. And Port personnel. And troops from the Port, who are supposed to keep the others away from us but aren’t. They’ve been coming since we last spoke.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Swann came to the ship. Asked to come aboard.”

“What the fuck”—Foord rarely swore audibly; this was his quota for the day—“What the fuck made him think he could come aboard my ship?”

“That was almost exactly, word for word, what Smithson said to him.”

“What did he want?”

“He said the mood of the people around us was difficult to read, and said he wasn’t going to force them off our Grid without first trying a better way.”

“Better Way? I thought you said Smithson had an idea.”

“That’s what he meant. Smithson had asked Swann to get the commander of the garrison at Blentport, Colonel Boussaid, to help. Smithson met Boussaid at one of Swann’s receptions when we first landed—”

“One of those I didn’t go to?”

“Yes, Commander. Smithson was impressed by him.”

“Smithson was impressed?”

“Yes, he said Boussaid’s one of the few real people at Blentport. Anyway, Swann only wanted to say that he’d get Boussaid to help you when you reach Blentport. That was all.”

“So Smithson asks Swann for Boussaid’s help, Swann turns up personally to say yes, and Smithson...”

“Yes, Commander. Tells him to fuck off.” She laughed. Her voice was dark and beautiful, but she could also make it ugly. “We’re still piling indignities on him, aren’t we?”

Foord knew that Thahl was smiling; not by any upward turn of the corners of his mouth or change of expression in his eyes, but Foord knew. He snapped his wristcom shut.

The landchariot hurtled on.

“Thahl, it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

“Late, Commander?”

“For the driver. Now we’ve entered the Bowl.”

“Yes, Commander.”

After a while, Foord said “Are you sure? I could put pressure on Swann, maybe invoke our priority, and….”

“And what? Refuse to lift off?” Privately, Thahl regarded Are You Sure much as Smithson regarded Do You Understand.

“Alright, but this law about removal of poison glands…..you of all people….”

“Commander, that law will almost certainly be repealed soon. Most humans here think it’s wrong. ”

They hurtled on. Cyr did not call back. The driver said nothing. Thahl said almost nothing, and Foord did not reply to it. In the window the web still quivered and salivated over the particles of wood and dry paint Foord had dropped into it—perhaps the most apocalyptic event of its recent life.

The journey was beginning to tighten around them.

They kept to the fast multilane roads, which meant they drove through the suburbs between cities more than the cities themselves. Often their road would rear itself up on columns and rise over sunken or congested areas, covering them like a smear of cosmetic. It passed through districts which were once open grassland separating the original cities but now, with economic ebb and flow, were variously rich and poor.

They drove through wasteland scabbed with empty buildings where businesses had grown and died. Through a vast and deafening open market where carcases hung dripping from hooks with signs like Wild Chimaera’s Handkilled By Sakhran’s, or Angel’s Freshly AirSnared (someone had added And Freshly Fallen). Through political and financial districts, where people occurred rather than worked, lounged in pavement bars, or dined luxuriously in unnamed restaurants where menus carried Angel and chimaera dishes, but had the good taste not to show prices. They drove through civic districts with huge public buildings, flowing and organic, some of them honeycombed so that they softened sunlight into granular latticeworks, and some of them designed to appear not designed but on the brink of metamorphosis into some higher form. They drove through, or around, or over, districts so different they didn’t seem to belong on the same planet, yet were linked to each other as inextricably as nerve-ends; a universe apart but a postcode away.

And sometimes, after feverish speed, there was feverish slowness; where gridlocked junctions were like archipelagos, and even their military escort couldn’t clear a path immediately. At these times the atmosphere grew as thick and heavy as standing water, as though the vehicles cramming the road were shadows cast on an ocean floor by objects floating above in still salty froth.

Even when they were travelling at speed, it seemed that the landchariot stood still while the cities and suburbs moved and unfolded around it, trying on different sets of clothes, changing and rechanging obsessively and restlessly, unable to decide what they were. The road and its traffic wound on, and around, and in, and out, like a stream of antibodies seeking a source of infection.

5

They were directed by the military, who obeyed Swann’s orders to the letter, through the gridlocked junctions and on to a major six-lane highway leading directly to Blentport. After thirty minutes, they found themselves rushing alongside a thirty-foot high chainlink fence, with vast grasslands rippling beyond it: the outer perimeter fence of Blentport. The road to their right was choked with traffic, and the air above them was full of VSTOLs. They hurtled on.

Later, his wristcom buzzed.

“Commander Foord?”

“Who is this?”

“Khalil Boussaid. Colonel Khalil Boussaid, commander of what remains of the garrison at Blentport. Most of it has headed for the hills. Literally.”

“Thank you for calling, Colonel. Smithson says you’re the only real person he’s met at Blentport.”

“I think,” Boussaid laughed, “he meant only that most of the others have gone… Commander, we have a very troubling situation here, and I want to get you back on board your ship without anyone getting hurt. I’m waiting for you at Gate 14. You need to continue round the perimeter fence for twelve miles…”

“Twelve miles?”

“Blentport is a very large place, Commander. And please hurry. Things are worsening here.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

The fence rushed past on their left. It loomed thirty feet high, jewelled with electronic monitors, bristling with swivelguns, and crackling with high voltage, and this was only the outer fence; the two inner fences got progressively stronger. To the lowland cities, Blentport was an old and central presence, a slow heart surrounded by rapidly growing organs; it limited their growth and fuelled it, linking them as they strained to grow away from it. Maybe that was how the Commonwealth viewed Earth.

From the few glimpses Foord had got of Blentport from his ship as it landed, he remembered it as a vast yellow plain as big as the cities around it, with its three concentric fences looking like cell walls to prevent it and the cities from infecting each other. From ground level it looked like the only large area of living land they had encountered in the Bowl, a windswept expanse of yellow-green grass. From above, the great gates were spaced at regular intervals in the fences to allow the approach roads to spiral symmetrically inwards, but from ground level the sheer scale reasserted itself and the distance between gates, which had looked negligible, became interminable.

The landchariot sped on. They started to encounter roadblocks, but each time they were waved through by soldiers who knew very well who they were. The traffic was thinner and moved faster, as more of it was bled off at the roadblocks. The vehicles still sharing the road with them were mainly articulated trucks on their regular runs, with their cabled flanks and multiple wheels towering above the roof of the landchariot and more than filling the window on Foord’s right, where the web ignored them and continued to have wet dreams of small cataclysms.

In the distance, sirens wailed, both the high unbroken harmonic of military groundcars and the two-tone of VSTOLs, the latter both military and ambulances, but they were less frequent now; either the evacuation of the military had reached and passed its peak or the landchariot had left it behind. The evacuation, thought Foord sourly. Sakhra had the Commonwealth’s second-largest fleet, and almost all of it was deployed in a defensive cordon against just one ship. Her. The evacuation was their way of saying that they expected Her to defeat Foord’s ship and penetrate the cordon.

Foord was watching a truck thunder past on the right in apparent silence, and realised its noise was drowned in the roar from the left as a Horus Fleet ship, probably an 078, lifted off from the distant centre of Blentport. It looked overladen and undermaintained, and rose as heavily as a methane bubble through mud, barely clearing the tops of the distant control buildings as it made its belated, and bloated, way to join the cordon. Apparently, the Charles Manson’s refit was nearing completion and Blentport was returning to other work.

There was a gap in the perimeter fence up ahead, an approach road leading to a gate.

“Take it!” Boussaid yelled in Foord’s wristcom. “Take it, it’s Gate 14!”

They took it. So, immediately, did some of the smaller and slower groundcars which were bunched behind them on the inside lane. Sirens blared and four military sixwheels, which in the noise and chaos Foord had not noticed waiting in the verges, lurched forward to block the approach road. The landchariot slewed to a halt within a few feet of their slabsided flanks. The groundcars immediately behind halted, and vehicles behind them, on the inner lane of the main road, but unable to see what was causing the holdup, skidded and sounded their horns.

The military sirens died out. The horns from behind did not. Voices were raised behind them as soldiers set about moving back the vehicles which had followed them into the approach road. The arguments reached a crescendo and died abruptly when someone, Foord hoped a soldier, fired a shot, Foord hoped into the air. A moment of silence was followed by a gunning of engines and churning of wheels as the vehicles behind backed off. Then the landchariot was alone, faced by sixwheels and ringed by soldiers whose positions, faces and weapons were unwavering. The wind rolled hugely over the Blentport grassland. The traffic roar from the main road seemed a long way away.

The soldiers lowered their guns, and one of them spoke into his wristcom. Immediately Foord’s buzzed.

“Boussaid, Commander. They know who you are. Follow them to the middle gate, they’re expecting you.”

The Sakhran driver, who had given no sign of being able to speak Commonwealth, but was fluent in the language of levelled and lowered guns, did not wait for instructions. He lashed the team forward just as the sixwheel directly in front gunned its engine—it squealed, like a metallic chimaera—moved aside, let them pass through the outer gate, and followed close behind.

A half-mile in silence, with the swivelguns on the outer fence tracking them all the way, and with the tall waving grasses of Blentport looking as though any minute they would crash down in torrents to engulf the road which so tentatively parted them, and then came the middle fence, as high as the first; then a gatehouse, bigger than the first; and another assembly of military vehicles and soldiers, also bigger than the first. They were passed through quickly and politely, and escorted another half mile to the third fence and gate. The third fence was thirty feet high, partly chainlink and partly stone. From the amount of visible and conventional defences covering it (swivelguns, heat and motion sensors, lasers, arclights) Foord could imagine what else was hidden inside it, or, because it was camouflaged or microminiaturised, simply invisible on its surface.

Everything about the third fence area was bigger: the gate and gatehouse (both large, solid, real stone constructions, unlike their more makeshift equivalents on the two inner fences), the military vehicles, and even the soldiers themselves.

Boussaid, however, was not big; he was about Thahl’s height, balding, and plumpish. He was standing alone in front of the gate in the third fence.

“Commander Foord! You’re very welcome.”

All around him were lights and sirens, troops running to and fro, military vehicles gunning their engines, crews barking out orders; yet somehow, without shouting, Boussaid’s voice carried to the landchariot.

Foord got out, followed by Thahl, and went over to Boussaid, who shook hands. His face seemed open and amiable and generous, which normally would have made Foord instantly suspicious.

“The only real person on Blentport. Did Smithson really say that?”

“I’m told he did. He also said you can get us back to my ship. Can you?”

“Of course, Commander.”

“And the landchariot?”

“You can ride it right up to your ship, if you wish…But first,” he motioned casually towards the gatehouse, “let’s go in and talk. I need to brief you on this situation. I keep a small room or two in some of these gatehouses, and I have one just here. Come in, come in…”

The gatehouse was a two-storey stone building, blocky and squat, not unlike some Sakhran buildings. Foord noticed as they approached it that its outlines were softened by creepers trained along its walls and even—he did a doubletake at this—some hanging flowerbaskets and windowboxes. Three plates and three water-dishes were placed in an orderly line outside the main door, where a large tortoiseshell cat, orbited by two silently fighting kittens, surveyed them impassively. They walked through a couple of anterooms and into a small inner office.

“The kittens are Dollop and Globule. I haven’t thought of a name for their mother yet.”

“Fundamental Particle?” suggested Thahl.

“A nice idea, but not a name for a cat. I could give you a whole dissertation on the naming of cats…perhaps when you get back.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Thahl.

“Do all your gatehouses have hanging baskets and cats and windowboxes?”

“Most have cats, Commander. Members of the garrison make pets of them, or vice-versa. Flowerbaskets and windowboxes, no—only the gatehouses where I keep a small room, as here.”

There was a desk but no other obvious office furniture, only a couple of armchairs and a sofa. Standing in front of the desk, Foord saw several documents arranged neatly—nobody would ever completely eliminate paper—which were annotated in red, green and blue, in a hand which, even upside-down, Foord could see was regular and careful. Boussaid’s writing implements were set out on the desk; they were old-fashioned, functional, devoid of personal insignia, but well maintained. Foord’s own personal possessions were similar. He began to like Boussaid.

Apart from the documents and several comms, the only other object on the desk was a still photograph, in a plain wooden frame, of a woman and two children, all three slightly plump, amiable and open-faced. Boussaid let Foord look at it for a while before he spoke.

“Ever see people after a really bad brawl, Commander?”

“Oh no, Colonel, never. When we put into a port, nobody is ever less than totally welcoming.”

“Usually,” Boussaid continued imperturbably, “the aftermath of a brawl here on the Port is messy. Cracked heads and broken bones; blood; missing teeth; people battered from head to foot, usually in an area equidistant from each.”

Foord’s smile began just as Boussaid’s vanished.

“But not this time, Commander. I’ve just visited some Horus crew members who were involved in this incident with your people. They’re all badly injured, one of them very badly. Probably you know this. I certainly expected it. What I didn’t expect was the way they’d been injured. It was neat and clean and deliberate, and very vicious; and totally disproportionate.” He shifted his gaze, from Foord to Thahl. “It’s as if you attacked them, apart from the bit about Vicious and Disproportionate.”

Unusually, Thahl was taken unawares. He became suddenly and diplomatically absorbed in the indicator board on the wall: nineteen lights, one per grid.

“Or as if,” Boussaid went on, “Faith was already here, disguised as two of your crew. That’s how clean.”

Sixteen of the lights, Thahl noted, flashed red, indicating a ship present. This included the light for Grid Nine, which housed the Charles Manson.

“I’m sorry it happened, Colonel. But it does happen every time.”

Thahl saw Foord and Boussaid lock eyes and remain so for some time without either speaking. Finally Boussaid broke contact. He flipped open his wristcom, said “Confirmed. Start now,” snapped it shut and said to Foord “I’ve just activated certain plans, Commander.”

Before Foord could reply, he noticed a red light go out on the indicator board; a small ship lifting off from one of the minor grids. Through a window he watched it ascend, noiselessly and vertically.

His wristcom buzzed.

“You’d better answer it, Commander. It’s connected with my call.”

Foord did so. “Commander, it’s Cyr. I’ve just received a call from the garrison commander’s staff, with orders which they say have your authority.”

“What are the orders?”

“To be ready for your arrival here in about thirty minutes, and to be ready, at any time from now until you arrive, to go to Armed Shutdown. Are those orders confirmed?”

Even Thahl could no longer maintain the polite pretence of interest in the screens. Armed Shutdown was the last resort of a grounded ship under heavy attack; it made it impregnable and immovable. To Foord’s knowledge it had never been used before by a Commonwealth ship in a Commonwealth port; not even by an Outsider.

Foord glanced briefly at Boussaid.

“Yes,” he said. “Confirmed.”

“I hope Boussaid knows what he’s doing, Commander.”

“I’m with him now,” Foord said drily, “and I believe he does.”

He closed his wristcom, slowly and thoughtfully. From a distance, another ship lifted off and another of the red monitor lights went out. This one was a very large ship, a Class 097. For the first few hundred feet of its ascent it rode on its noiseless magnetic drive; then its atmosphere boosters cut in, their multiple trails looking—and sounding—like a set of giant fingernails screeking across the grey slate of the sky. Foord waited until the noise receded.

“Armed Shutdown, Colonel?”

“It may come to that. Or it may not, it’s hard to read…Excuse me.” He opened one of the comms on the table and spoke into it without activating the screen. “He’s here now, start sending, I want him to see for himself…. Thank you.” He activated the comm screen, and spun it round to face Foord, whose expression did not change.

“This is presumably from one of your VSTOLs?”

“Yes. I have four hovering over Grid Nine at the moment.”

Thahl’s expression didn’t change either, but only because his face was made that way. Inside, there was a surge of feelings he couldn’t precisely identify when he saw his ship—a slender silver delta, sixteen hundred feet long—on Grid 9. At times he’d felt he might not see it again. The sound of Foord’s voice jerked him back.

“And the people crowding the Grid, who are they?”

“A large part of Blentport’s civilian population. Plus the crews of Horus Fleet ships waiting to join the cordon, plus a large detachment of my troops.”

As if on cue, the comm screen went blank. Boussaid had not deactivated it.

“And that’s it. Nothing has happened yet but anything might. And I may be one of the last people on the Port prepared to do anything about it.”

“You said you could get me back to my ship. How?”

“A couple of hours ago, Commander, I sent a large detachment from what’s left of my garrison to clear Grid Nine.”

“And?”

“As I said, they’re still there, among that crowd. They reported initially that the mood was too tense to attempt any dispersal. Then they said that unless I actually ordered them back they’d stay, to maintain a discreet presence and contain any disorder. I understood.” He paused, then laughed softly. “They’ve become like the people they were sent to disperse. With most of my garrison in the highlands, and the problem of how to get you through that, particularly when you insist on doing it in a landchariot, the last thing I want to do is even hint at mutiny.” Again he laughed. “You may already have protected us from Faith, Commander, because every minute your ship remains here, Blentport becomes less and less worthy of Her attention as a target.”

Out of Foord’s sight, Thahl smiled privately and thought I like him, how he looks askance at the world. Smithson was right. He usually is.

Another ship roared overhead. Another light went out.

“I’ve tried to defuse the situation by hurrying the liftoff of the Horus Fleet ships grounded here, some of them before their refits have been completed, but too many of them are still grounded. The call I made just now activated plans to take you—yes, and your landchariot—under heavy escort to your ship on Grid Nine, and to get you and Thahl safely aboard. I’ll be going along in the lead escort vehicle, with what remains of my garrison.”

“How do you intend to get us aboard?”

“You’d think it ridiculous if I told you, and there isn’t time to argue. Call it a last throw of the dice. Just go along with whatever happens.”

Foord thought about what Smithson had said, added his own impression so far of Boussaid, and said “All right, Colonel. And thank you.”

“One more thing before we move off, Commander. When we reach Grid Nine, and when you see what happens there, you may start to question my judgement, so remember this. I believe it’s inevitable that someone, almost certainly a member or members of my garrison, is going to die before we get you back on your ship today.”

6

Nobody hated Foord except Other People. Nobody would ever refuse him cooperation (indeed, left to themselves they would heap it upon him) except that there were Other People. Other People had to be considered. Other People still clung to preconceptions, still harboured gangrenous prejudices—in short, hated him—and clicked their tongues at the vast majority who would otherwise have flocked to welcome the Commander of an Outsider. These Other People even hated the shape of an Outsider, because it was unlike ordinary ships: elemental and simple, a slender delta without corrugations or excrescences or power-bulges.

Always it was Other People. And Other People when asked would cite others, who when asked would cite others, so that wherever the Charles Manson made planetfall and Foord had to leave his ship to have dealings with what Other People would call the real world, he would find himself shunted through a series of shadowy anterooms where conversations died as he entered and restarted as he left and where always those Other People, the ones who really did hate him, had gone just moments before, leaving a chair still warm or a drink half-drunk or something daubed on a wall. He understood this and recognised that many of them genuinely believed it. In his absence, he knew they would turn to each other and remark on how much some Other People hated him.

When he and Thahl left the gatehouse and walked back to the landchariot they found it surrounded by heavy armour, with guns peering down at it from all angles. The six medium-calibre rapidfire guns trained on the landchariot’s rear belonged to the two triple-turreted sixwheels which had followed them through the outer and middle gates; the slender swivelguns ahead, along the top of the inner fence, would coldly track anything which moved; and the heavy-calibre guns massed further ahead were mounted on ten huge armoured twelvetracks waiting to escort Foord safely across the last few miles to Grid Nine, where, it seemed, most of Blentport waited to watch him rejoin the Charles Manson. Or watch him try to rejoin it.

Outside, a loudspeaker emitted a single harmonic and some three or four hundred troops apparently sprang from the ground and started milling silently around the ten huge twelvetracks. A second harmonic and they disappeared inside them, as if soaked up. A third, lower harmonic and the inner gate began to open: it was a large section of the fence, a chain-link and girder latticework over thirty feet wide, and it took its time. The ENTER NOW sign flashed, the driver’s whip uncoiled and spat in the heavy air, and the chimaera, heaving their great grey buttocks from side to side and forced forwards only after some abortive plunges to the left and right, reluctantly took the landchariot through the gate. The ten twelvetracks immediately clotted around it, two in front, three on either side and two behind, as though parcelling the infection entering a wound; and then the whole cavalcade—in scale, a mongrel dog escorted by ten elephants—started down the long wide road leading to the Grids at the heart of Blentport. The same slow mechanisms which had prised the gate open now closed it deafeningly behind them, causing a great voiceless flock of white birds to rise from the grass and resettle, like shaken powder.

The swivelguns on the long curve of the inner fence, either side of the gate for hundreds of feet, tracked them through in finely graduated arcs and continued to track them into the distance; and then, ten minutes later when Boussaid signalled the gatehouse from the lead vehicle that they were ENTERING GRID AREA NOW, swung away and forgot them.

•

“Grid 19,” Boussaid announced over Foord’s wristcom, unnecessarily, as they passed a junction in the road where a large sign said GRID 19. “One of the outlying minor grids. About fifteen minutes to your ship, unless we encounter anything on the way.”

“Looks like we already have,” Foord replied, referring to a VSTOL which was now following them, hovering silently a hundred feet directly above with full grappling tackle hanging underneath it like entrails.

When Boussaid did not answer, Foord shouted, over the noise of the escort vehicles, “Is that VSTOL responding to your orders?”

“Yes, Commander. To about the same extent as this escort.”

Grid 19 spread out below them to the left. It was a sunken concrete and metal latticework about a thousand feet long by four hundred wide, crisscrossed with walkways and surrounded by antigrav generators set into the lawned slopes curving down to its surface, and by derricks and cranes bent over it like a mixture of tall and short surgeons over an operating table. It was ringed by a wide tree-lined road along which were more low buildings, mostly engineering facilities. The rest of the Grid’s capacity was underground. It was a minor Grid, so it would be capable of refitting anything up to light cruiser size, perhaps Class 079 or 080, but nothing larger.

It was almost deserted. Not only did it not house a ship, but there were hardly any people—just a few at some windows, Foord noted, speaking into wristcoms as the landchariot and its escort passed by.

Grid 14 contained a Class 047 light cruiser. As Foord looked down from the raised road and saw the Grid swept clear of everything except the ship, whose flat tapered hull shone like the blade of a throwing knife, he knew immediately what was going to happen next, even before the liftoff alarms started blaring and Boussaid started yelling through the wristcom to take cover.

“You mean we should crawl under the landchariot, Colonel?”

“I mean that ship is lifting off now and I have no idea what it’s going to do next!”

“Aren’t you supposed to have an idea?”

Boussaid cut the connection.

Outside, the liftoff alarm had risen a semitone and the escort vehicles were closing in a protective circle around the landchariot, which was lurching with the panicked movements of the chimaera. The two VSTOLs overhead increased their height and moved away to either side of the road.

“Commander,” Thahl began, “perhaps we should….”

“No time. That ship’s only an 047 but if he’s really going to attack, we’re finished. A hundred of those escort vehicles couldn’t stop him.”

But to Foord it was already clear what the ship was going to do. He settled back and watched as it lifted off, with the silence and precision of the magnetic drive used for atmospheric manoeuvres, and moved towards the raised road. The escort vehicles—much less silently but with equal precision—tightened their outward-facing protective circle around the landchariot. Despite their size, they looked like models arranged on the road by a giant invisible hand, a hand which had now returned holding a silver knifeblade towards them. The ship came closer.

It paused only once. Then, as the dust and exhaust fumes churned by the vehicles began to settle, and in a silence which was broken only by one noise which had been mounting all the time, the noise of the chimaera screaming, it passed slowly and deliberately no more than thirty feet above them. It was only an 047, but its long flat hull seemed to go on forever. The chimaera screamed not in fear, but in outrage at the wrongness of its noiseless passage above them. The ship disturbed the air no more than if it had been a long silver trapdoor sliding endlessly open, and it went on and on.

Later, Foord learned that the four injured men were crew members of that ship.

Foord remembered the 047 more vividly even than the final events which were to precede the Charles Manson’s liftoff from Grid Nine, not because it proved him right about its intentions—it was only making a gesture at Foord; an actual attack was impossible—but because it proved something else, something Foord had always understood intellectually but had never seen demonstrated physically.

The ship was only an 047, but Foord had not exaggerated when he said that a hundred escort vehicles could not have stopped it; yet a thousand such ships could not have stopped the Charles Manson. There were different orders of magnitude. He sat in the lurching landchariot, darkened by the never-ending shadow of the 047’s passage, and reflected on them.

The ship finally passed overhead, continued a few hundred feet and then rose into the grey sky; it could have done that directly from Grid 14, but a gesture was a gesture. Foord opened his wristcom and made one of his own; for him, a rare one.

“Colonel Boussaid?”

“Yes, yes, I know, you were right, it didn’t attack.”

“I owe you an apology. We both knew it wouldn’t attack, but you were commanding an escort and I wasn’t. Only one of us could afford to be clever and rely on assumptions. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Commander, that’s gracious. But we haven’t made it yet. The last bit is the biggest gamble.”

Orders of magnitude, thought Foord. The 047’s power dwarfed that of the escort vehicles like a boulder would dwarf a handful of pebbles. Yet there was another scale of power looming beyond that: the power of the Charles Manson, which would dwarf an 047 like a mountain would dwarf a boulder.

And then there was Faith. And Faith—he remembered what the priests at the orphanage had beaten into him—can move mountains.

7

Grid 9 spread out below them and Foord saw his ship again for the first time in two days. And because its shape was the symbol he most recognised, because it stood at every junction in his personal roadmap, because it joined lines which for other people were joined by symbols of home or family or friends, for a moment he saw only his ship and did not see what had happened around it.

Grid 9 was full to bursting. There were dozens of maintenance and service vehicles and cargo vehicles, large and small, called in to Grid 9 from all over Blentport to speed the refit, and simply abandoned where they stood when their work was done. There were thousands—maybe five or six thousand—variously sitting, standing or walking around the Grid and the grassy slopes leading down to it. They had gathered there, slowly at first as the other refits were abandoned to give the Charles Manson priority, then more quickly as news spread of the two incidents of last night and this morning. They were mainly Blentport workers from this Grid and others, and officers and crew from Horus Fleet ships; but there was also a scattering of the slate-grey uniforms of Blentport garrison, at least three hundred. Foord assumed they were the detachment Boussaid sent earlier, who hadn’t quite mutinied, but didn’t return when ordered.

Officers, crew, Blentport workers, garrison members: they each had their own shifting motives, which might turn against each other, or focus on the Charles Manson. Their ambiguity hung murmuring over the whole Grid. It seemed, simultaneously, to stop short of open hostility and to go beyond it.

And in the middle of it was the Charles Manson. It was beautiful, a clean silver shape sixteen hundred feet long, tapering from a width of three hundred feet at its stern, where the main drives bulged, to a pointed snout so sharp a man could actually prick his finger on it. It was as concrete and emphatic as a noun written on a page, with the scattering of people and vehicles around it like prepositions.

“Soon be over now,” Boussaid said in the wristcom. Foord heard tension, or maybe it was tiredness, in his voice.

The convoy reached the turnoff leading down to Grid 9, then halted. One by one the escort vehicles cut their motors to idle. As their engine roar diminished, the murmuring of those crowding the Grid crept up the approach road to replace it. It was an indistinct sound, as indistinct as the motives which produced it.

The two VSTOLs which had shadowed them since they entered the inner gate moved off to join five others—not four, Foord noted, but five now—hovering directly over the Charles Manson, for what purpose and on whose orders Foord could not begin to imagine.

“Neither can I,” Boussaid replied when Foord called him, “so forget them. They can’t matter now.”

Most of the people on the Grid and on the grassy slopes around it were now standing and looking up at the convoy, then back at the ship. The murmur of their voices increased, maybe a semitone. Their mood was as unreadable as the ship. The Charles Manson remained still and silent, with every port and orifice closed and opaqued.

The engines of the escort vehicles thundered anew, and they and the landchariot moved down the approach road.

The Charles Manson carried many missiles, of all shapes and sizes and designs. The last fifty, including the two strange ones made to Foord’s specification, had only been loaded that morning. The special lowloader which had transported them now stood abandoned at the point where the approach road joined the Grid. So, instead of sweeping dramatically out into the choked arena, the convoy halted. The escort vehicles disgorged troops who set about lining the approach road to hold the crowd back, a job which they did amid much heel-clattering, saluting and mutual barking of orders. A corporal strode briskly towards the lowloader, presumably to drive it out of the way. He climbed the access ladder up its mountainous flank and disappeared into the cab. For a while nothing happened.

“What’s keeping you?” yelled one of Boussaid’s sergeants.

“It won’t tell me its start code.”

From the modest crowd clustered around the entrance to the Grid came a modest ripple of laughter. It increased when another sergeant grabbed a loudhailer and demanded that The Driver Of This Vehicle should Make Himself Known. It subsided slightly when, after a hurried conference, a man was found who knew how to circumvent the start codes of cargo lowloaders. He too climbed the access ladder up its side and disappeared into the cab. A moment later its multiple engines coughed mightily into life, and the lowloader lurched forward. The laughter redoubled, and began to spread to those crowding the main arena of the Grid, when the lowloader ploughed into the side of a small robot welding vehicle which, after being bulldozed for several feet, sprang into brief reflex life, extended a telescopic arm and caressed the lowloader’s flanks in a search for hull-plates. Clever, thought Foord, and genuinely unexpected. But it’s very high risk, and it won’t last.

For now, though, the fiasco continued. Eight of the ten escort vehicles roared forward and formed a large semicircle where the approach road joined the Grid, a semicircle into which nothing was allowed except the landchariot and the two remaining escort vehicles flanking it. Thus the landchariot finally clattered out onto Grid 9; and the moment it did so the semicircle became a circle, the escort vehicles joining behind it to package it in the same manoeuvre they had executed at the inner gate.

There was only a modest crowd gathered at the approach road; most people had stayed in the main arena of the Grid. Those nearby, having seen the landchariot’s entrance onto the Grid and perhaps having caught a glimpse of Foord or Thahl inside, now moved away. As they did so, soldiers poured out of the escort vehicles to move them further away; more soldiers than there were people. The convoy, still maintaining a circle around the landchariot, moved towards the Charles Manson at the centre of the Grid. The troops had to march after the convoy. By stages their march became a trot, then a run, then a ragged dash. Don’t overdo it, Foord prayed silently to Boussaid. Genuine cock-up, not slapstick. Be careful.

The ragged dash was, in any case, unnecessary. The convoy only moved fifty metres or so before it encountered another knot of abandoned vehicles, among and around which a few groups of sightseers stood or sat, waiting to be moved away. The convoy halted. Usefully, this allowed the troops to catch up with it, and since their original orders had been to move people away, they moved these people away. Less usefully, they did not ask whether any of those moved were in charge of any of the abandoned vehicles. After a hurried conference, it was decided to bulldoze them clear.

Almost inevitably, the main obstruction was a cargo lowloader. This one, however, was smaller than the previous one. Its brakes were not powerful enough to withstand the two escort vehicles bulldozing it; they gave way suddenly and it was pushed clear, skidding into the side of a second, smaller, vehicle. The smaller vehicle tottered, then crashed onto its side and burst into flames. It was a fire truck.

Foord watched as alarms sounded and a column of black oily smoke climbed skywards, as slowly and deliberately as if it was made of bricks being laid one on top of the other. He started to think that Boussaid had overdone it. But the escort vehicles carried full firefighting equipment and were around the fire truck in seconds. The fire was smothered in foam. The column of black smoke, its source cut off abruptly, hovered vertically like an exclamation mark without a dot, then slowly dissipated. There were some ironic cheers from those crowding the Grid, but not from all of them; some noticed the speed and precision with which the convoy had dealt with the fire, so at odds with how it had entered the Grid.

The convoy moved on, trailing a line of straggling troops like a freshly-whipped court jester dragging a pig’s-bladder, lurching from fiasco to fiasco, leaving in its wake a swathe of damaged, dented, charred and overturned vehicles. It picked its way through the congestion and around the crowds in a mazy series of diagonals and curlicues, and with an elephantine solemnity which deepened as the mocking laughter around it increased; but always coming a little closer to the Charles Manson. Foord went many times to call Boussaid and congratulate him, but didn’t; the effectiveness of the plan would soon wear off, and Boussaid must be desperately trying to assess how much further it would take them. And what to do when it failed.

•

When they saw the convoy edging closer to the Charles Manson, people started moving away from the outer edges of the Grid and towards the centre, where the ship stood. By the time the convoy had got within fifty metres of the ship, several hundred of them were waiting. Their mood was not yet openly hostile; a few of them were still laughing.

The convoy halted. During the brief pause, the six VSTOLs hovering directly above dropped lower until their grapples and undercarriages hung only a few metres above the ship’s dorsal ridge. The impression was not one of people converging on the ship, but of the ship having pulled them in, on invisible lines, almost like fishing for them. This impression remained even when the fragile mood Boussaid had created started to waver, and the first brittle noises of violence began.

As Boussaid’s last troops poured out of the escort vehicles for the last time to clear the crowds for the last fifty metres, Foord hardly gave his ship a glance. He was aware, as he watched heavily-armed figures striding past the landchariot’s windows, that this time the mood was different because the tension was mutual. The first angry clashes with the crowds were isolated, but they spread and got to within seconds of a full-scale riot. With fifty metres to go, Boussaid’s plan was exhausted.

A few shots were fired in the air and the crowds fell back. Immediately, the escort vehicles broke their circle and moved forwards toward the midpoint of the Charles Manson’s hull, noticeably not threatening any collisions with people or things as they had done before. They moved for the exact point on the hull, about midway, where Foord had told them the main airlock was located, though there was no interruption of the hull’s surface and no external marking to indicate this.

The ship, which dwarfed everything else on the Grid, was the least noticeable thing there; it made no movement or noise.

The soldiers funnelled back to plug the gaps between the escort vehicles, apparently without any order being given. The clatter of their weapons and shuffling of their boots as they made final positional adjustments died out only seconds after the brief roar of the escort vehicles’ engines, and the first warning shots, also died.

They weren’t funny anymore. In less than half a minute, and without overturning anything or setting anything on fire, they consolidated their final position—a gauntlet between the landchariot and the Charles Manson, a fifty-metre avenue lined so deeply on either side with vehicles and armed men that the crowd beyond it was largely obscured. And whether by accident, or as a final gesture in the last wavering moments of their protection, almost as many guns seemed to be pointing inwards as outwards.

Conventionally, the inactivity of the Charles Manson should have seemed menacing, but the ship’s silence and immobility was so profound it seemed to come from inside, as though its interior had been swept by an instantly fatal disease. It had done nothing while a near-riot boiled around it. It had done nothing while the gauntlet was formed and the escort vehicles had charged directly at it, the two vehicles leading each of the gauntlet’s parallel lines slewing to a halt only moments before collision. It had done nothing while Boussaid, who was the first out of one of the two lead vehicles, ordered a few of his men to assemble where the main airlock was located and to guard it. Foord noticed there were as many guns pointing at the airlock as there were pointing at the crowd. He snapped open his wristcom.

“You never told me the bit about covering our airlock. I assume that’s for appearance.”

“Look at them, Commander. Appearance is double-edged.”

Foord closed his wristcom, frowning at whatever it was Boussaid had meant, and glimpsed through the forward window a flicker of muscles in the driver’s neck and shoulders—this time he did not use the whip, merely jerked the reins—and they moved forward. Right to the end, Foord thought, the driver timed the landchariot’s moves with absolute precision.

The landchariot eased forward between the lines of the gauntlet, creaking and rattling in the sudden silence and dropping bits of dirt behind it. Fitful movements rippled along the lines in its wake as people craned and dodged to see inside it. The chimaera breathed heavily and rhythmically as they walked, like masturbating dinosaurs; for them, it was the last stage of a long journey.

Still the Charles Manson’s airlock did not open.

The overhang of the Charles Manson’s hull was a sheer silver cliff-face. It dwarfed everything else on the Grid, but its silence and stillness was profound; there were times when Foord almost doubted it was there. The landchariot reached it and halted. Foord took a final look at the web in the corner of the side window—he had no way of telling whether it looked back at him—and glanced across at Thahl, who nodded.

Thahl was careful to step out first. He helped Foord down and followed an unwavering three paces behind, a quiet slight figure, as Foord walked round to the front of the landchariot.

Boussaid had already detached himself from the group at the airlock and had taken a couple of steps forward, but paused at a gesture from Foord, who turned and looked up at the Sakhran driver.

“Don’t, Commander, it isn’t necessary,” Thahl hissed, but Foord ignored him.

“I understand you don’t speak Commonwealth,” he said to the driver.

The driver gazed down at him, closely but without expression, and apparently confirmed this by not replying.

Thahl stayed where he was, watching Boussaid (who had stepped back to rejoin the group covering the airlock) and Foord; he had become absorbed in the calculation of relative angles and distances between himself, Foord, Boussaid, the airlock and the two lines of the gauntlet. He knew that Foord was still talking to the driver, but had stopped listening; the words didn’t interest him.

“I speak enough Sakhran,” Foord was saying, “to say Thank You, but somehow that would seem patronising. So…”

The driver did not open his mouth, even to spit, but his gaze, dark and expressionless, never left Foord. His secondary eyelids flickered horizontally. The Grid was silent for the moment and the chimaera started to shuffle restlessly, as if in embarrassment. One of them farted.

Three paces behind Foord, Thahl completed his calculations.

“So…”

Foord floundered; the words wouldn’t come. He was still floundering as the driver died. A sliver of barbed stainless steel from somebody’s needlegun—it was impossible to say whose because needleguns discharged silently, but they were standard issue for Horus Fleet crew, and for Blentport garrison—nuzzled greedily into his throat, sweeping him from the landchariot to fall in a crabbed heap at the feet of Thahl, who leaped the corpse without looking at it and made straight for Boussaid.

The difference between Thahl and everybody else was less than a second. While the first long second after the shot was still beginning, and while the reactions of everybody else were still beginning with it, Thahl whipped between their not-yet-moving bodies like a cat between dustbins and reached Boussaid. Normal time returned. In the middle of the group covering the airlock were Boussaid and Thahl. Boussaid had fallen to his knees and Thahl stood behind him, his left hand pulling Boussaid’s head back by the hair while the unsheathed claws of his right hand were touching, but not yet piercing, his throat. Had the two soldiers who were closest to Boussaid and quickest to spring to his aid been able to stop themselves when the poison claws were unsheathed, they would have done so; but they were built on the same scale as Foord, and their momentum was irreversible. They came at Thahl from behind. He dropped them both, one with the heel of his right foot and the other with the elbow of his left arm, without turning to face them and without breaking his grip on Boussaid, to whom he returned his full attention before either of them hit the ground. He had understood that they would have pulled back if possible, and had taken care not to kill them.

Thahl knew, because he had calculated, that he probably had no more than twenty seconds to live. The guns of Boussaid’s troops were trained on him from all sides—those around him and Boussaid swung away from the airlock and towards him, and those along the twin lines of the gauntlet followed soon after. He settled down to wait for the shock of what he had done, and the mixed motives of those with the guns, to corrode their hesitation.

It was impossible, and had never been his intention, to shelter behind Boussaid. He was an open target. Nobody had yet fired because his claws remained at Boussaid’s throat, as precise as micromanipulators; but not all of them regarded the safe return of Foord, or the survival of Boussaid, as a priority. Once they had thought that through, somebody—perhaps whoever had shot the driver—would turn his gun on Thahl, or on Foord, standing alone and all but forgotten near the landchariot, or even on Boussaid himself. It would take, Thahl estimated, about twenty seconds. (Foord made it ten to fifteen, because from where he was standing he could see something Thahl could not see: a look almost of acceptance on Boussaid’s face, as though he had known all along that he would have to die to get them across the last few metres to the ship. Foord remembered the photograph in his office, and his heart almost burst.)

Then, at last, the Charles Manson came to life.

There was something alien about the ship’s instant shift from extreme silence to extreme action. It was unrelated in scale to any external event; it was not caused or provoked; it did not build up in any stages of lesser action, which might at least have been understood as a response or warning. It was abrupt and jagged, like the darting of a tarantula.

The Charles Manson’s hull was no longer featureless or quiet. Blaring with lights and alarms, throbbing as if with disease, it sprouted blisters which swelled and split open to reveal the mouths and lips and orifices of its closeup weapons array. Nobody had even bothered to preset them on particular targets. Some of them tracked backwards and forwards or up and down, others were aimed directly into the Grid, others vaguely into thin air. It did not matter. There were proximity lasers, coilguns, tanglers, friendship guns, disruptors, breathtakers, harmonic guns, motive beams, and others whose use in a confined area on a planetary surface would have been excessive even if the Charles Manson were under direct attack from the whole of Horus Fleet; and they sprouted from a ship crewed by people who had lost, or never had, the motives of people. Thahl had designed his move on Boussaid to win a specific period of time, a period he had calculated to within seconds; now, it seemed, there was all the time in the world.

The main airlock irised open. A ramp tongued out of it to the ground. Many of the Charles Manson’s crew of sixty-three had, like Foord, received Special Forces training, and now ten of them moved quickly, but carefully, down the ramp to surround and cover the group around the airlock, the group in whose midst were Thahl and Boussaid. Behind them at the top of the ramp stood Cyr, darkly beautiful, carrying a single handgun with which she motioned Foord to come aboard, and behind her was the Charles Manson, massive and motiveless, threatening everything and explaining nothing.

One by one, the men surrounding Thahl laid down their weapons. Some of those along the lines of the gauntlet did the same, but others kept their guns trained on Thahl, or swung them round to cover Foord as he started walking. Thahl read their postures carefully, remembering that postures were not, as with Sakhrans, an auxiliary language, and tried to anticipate which of them would fire first and at who. His grip on Boussaid neither tightened nor relaxed.

As he walked towards his ship—now such a short distance, the last few metres of a long and unpleasant journey—Foord was trying to anticipate the same event as Thahl. If anyone did shoot, he thought it would be one of those in the lines of the gauntlet. It might be a shot in the back—in which case he could do nothing, short of walking to his ship backwards, which he did not intend to do—but that would be relatively deliberate, and on balance less likely. No, if it happened it would be someone’s judgement snapping, the act of someone who had endured all this but could not endure seeing him walk past unharmed; perhaps a shot from ahead, but more likely from either side, where he felt faces and gun-barrels swivel as he passed, as if each one was connected to him by gossamer wires, anchored in his flesh with little pins.

His calculations were less exact than Thahl’s, but nevertheless he got it right. When it happened it came as he expected from the side, from someone in the line on his right, someone he was just about to walk past. Everything went smoothly: he sensed a figure in the line tensing, saw the gun-barrel start to move towards him, and long before he was in any danger Foord turned and drew his own handgun and was looking down its barrel at the face of a young soldier, so young he had acne, looking suddenly terrified at the thought of what he had tried to do. Foord’s finger relaxed on the trigger. So far so good: his reflexes had been up to it, he wouldn’t need to shoot, and he knew Thahl would have reached the same conclusion. Then, to his extreme surprise, he found himself looking down the barrel of his gun at only half a face, trying to decide whether half a face could still wear a frightened expression when the other half was gone.

The shot had come from the Charles Manson. From Cyr, standing at the top of the ramp in the open airlock.

Foord was so surprised that for a moment he was unable to move. Unaware that he was still looking down the barrel of his gun, he watched the young soldier’s body rise in the air and commence a long back-somersault, limbs flailing with momentum but not with life; and as it landed, as the men kneeling around it saw its face and started to turn their gaze on him, he decided he had nothing to say to them. He turned away and started walking back to his ship—such a short distance, now—unsure if he would ever reach it, but certain there was nothing else he could do. Unnecessary, he kept repeating to himself under his breath, the second syllable keeping unconscious time with his long strides, Unnecessary. It was an arid word, as arid as his anger.

He tried to project the manner of someone neither frightened nor guilty, but merely bent on an important errand elsewhere. He walked briskly (but did not break into a run; that would have been fatal) while around him everything, every single thing, which Boussaid had kept at bay for so long now started to happen. There were shouts from the crowd for revenge, only half as bitter as his own impulse to give up and let them take it. The VSTOLs settled lower over the Charles Manson and turned their guns towards the open airlock. Soldiers who had laid down their guns were snatching them up and starting to level them. Foord continued to walk.

When the first sounds of gunfire came from behind him he did not tense or turn around; when it continued for some time he assumed, correctly, that they were killing the six chimaera and probably raking the landchariot and the driver’s body. With some difficulty he put it out of his mind, even the web in the window, and continued to walk. He neither slackened nor increased his pace. The two lines of the gauntlet moved in his wake as he passed between them, as though they were trying to fill a vacuum generated by his passage. He was now only a few paces from his ship but he knew that the lines would break before he reached it, and that then he would die in a way quite unlike any he had ever imagined.

Ahead of him he saw his crew retreating. Slowly and carefully, and with guns still levelled, they were backing up the ramp to the main airlock. For the first time he looked at their faces, pleased he could recognise each of them. He also noted, with a satisfaction which was ridiculous in the circumstances, that they hadn’t made the obvious mistake; they hadn’t tried to come forward and cover him back to the ship, which would have merely hastened the inevitable. Thahl had not joined the retreat and remained standing over Boussaid, and Cyr was still standing in the open airlock. Foord avoided looking at either of them. It must have become quiet again, because Foord was suddenly aware of a small but inappropriate sound, the buzzing of his wristcom. He ignored it—though a part of him tried to imagine how it would look if he answered it—and continued walking. Such a short distance now.

Having calculated that the lines would break when he was still a few paces away from his ship, he half-hoped that they would not. It was part of the nature of irony, whose ability to turn back on itself he was beginning to understand like a Sakhran, that the lines of the gauntlet would take longer to break; long enough for him to begin to think he might have a chance of reaching his ship after all. So he was only half-surprised to find himself no more than two or three paces from the foot of the ramp, and almost level with Thahl, when the lines finally broke and the roar he had been expecting went up behind him. Only then did he take a last look at Thahl. And the irony turned back on itself again.

Thahl leaned forward and said to Boussaid, “I’m sorry, Colonel.” As Foord walked past him and started to ascend the ramp, Thahl moved the talons of his right hand until they pierced Boussaid’s throat, once, then lifted the body and threw it writhing into the path of the soldiers who were rushing after Foord. The deliberate obscenity of the gesture made them stop just long enough for Thahl to follow Foord up the ramp and through the airlock, which immediately irised shut behind them. Just before it closed, Foord took a last look back. Medical staff from the escort vehicles had already surrounded Boussaid, and there was the approaching siren of a VSTOL ambulance, which Foord knew would be too late; the antidote to Sakhran venom needed to be administered within seconds.

“It was unnecessary,” Foord said quietly to Cyr as he strode along the cramped main corridor of his ship towards the Bridge. “I know how accurate you can be with a handgun, or any weapon. You could have wounded him. There was no need.”

“But Thahl…” began Cyr.

“What Thahl did,” Foord said, still speaking quietly and without turning around, “was unavoidable. What you did was gratuitous.”

A few moments later, though this was not yet known on the Charles Manson, the irony turned back on itself a third time.

Thahl had had no intention of killing Boussaid; he had not used poison but had just given the appearance of having done so, to cause enough distraction for them to reach the ship. It had been his last throw of the dice; his claws pierced flesh without injecting venom. But Thahl was not aware that Boussaid had a heart condition. The shock and speed of Thahl’s attack triggered a massive heart seizure, from which he died.

•

The Charles Manson rested for a few more minutes on Grid 9, alien and impregnable; a single, self-contained denial of everything around it. Then, quietly and without requesting clearance from Blentport, it engaged magnetic drive and lifted off unopposed. At the requisite altitude it switched from magnetic to ion drive, left Sakhra’s atmosphere, and passed without ceremony or recognition through the silver ranks of Horus Fleet. At about the time that Boussaid’s doctors realised they were dealing not with Sakhran venom but with a heart attack, Horus Fleet was closing the ranks of its cordon behind the Charles Manson; like a woman folding back her disarranged clothes as a customer passes out of her apartment.