Faith

1

Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.

“After this,” he waved a hand at the food set out in front of them, “it’s just pills and hyperconcentrates. This is our last proper meal, until the mission is over.”

“And before the mission is over,” Smithson said, tasteless as always, “one of us will betray you.”

Smithson was a mixture of reptile and mollusc, and other unclassifiable things, in a humanoid shape. For a nonbelieving nonhuman who had only travelled infrequently in the Commonwealth, he had a disconcertingly thorough grasp of human cultures and religions. And he just uses it for pisstaking, thought Foord, gazing at him speculatively. Smithson gazed back as if he knew exactly what Foord was thinking, which might well have been the case. Smithson was tall and grey and moist, and his eyes seemed to see everything; they were large intelligent eyes, as warm and golden as urine.

After a few moments, Smithson shrugged. For him, shrugging meant the brief extrusion and retraction of a secondary limb from his lower torso. Foord chose to regard the gesture as conciliatory.

Their last meal together started without ceremony, and proceeded quietly. There was some conversation, but it was muted and commonplace, scarcely louder than the sound of cutlery on plates. Thahl was still eating when the others had finished, but they had seen him eat before and registered no reaction; it was not really living meat, just a preparation from the ship’s culture vats served at body temperature and grown with a nervous system incorporating motor responses. Thahl was always careful to eat it more tidily and slowly than he would have eaten real prey.

Smithson, who had finished eating before any of them, was an extreme herbivore. He ate concentrated vegetable slime: it went everywhere. He absorbed it subatomically, as efficiently as carnivores extracted sustenance from meat. He even ate like a carnivore, quickly and violently, always looking around him as he chewed.

Foord had insisted that their infrequent meals on the Bridge should be taken together, and defied any of the humans to object. Rather to his annoyance none of them had, although his liberal gesture did irritate Thahl and Smithson: they both found humans’ eating conventions unsettling, though for different reasons, and would have preferred to eat alone.

The Bridge was a circular compartment set deep in the ship’s midsection. Bridge officers sat at consoles arranged in a circle which followed the shape of the curved walls. All of the walls were screen, a screen so thin it had almost been painted there. It showed a linked projection of what the external viewers saw from their thousands of positions over the ship’s hull; normally it showed what was humanly visible, but it could be locally magnified or filtered or altered in wavelength to make visible displays along any electromagnetic band. Merely integrating the thousands of viewers to provide a continuous and infinitely-variable 360-degree projection inside the Bridge was an exceptionally complex task, requiring a computer almost the size of Foord’s thumb.

The Bridge screen was where the Charles Manson’s nine-percent sentience most frequently communicated with the crew. Often—like a very good butler—it would anticipate their requirements before they were spoken, and patch in a local magnification or headup. Or, with its own equivalent of a polite cough, it might display something unasked which it considered important. Usually it anticipated correctly. Very occasionally Foord would overrule it.

The meal finished as quietly as it had begun. Gradually their conversation returned to matters connected with the mission. Relays clicked and mumbled and voices whispered from comms, an unnoticed background noise. The Bridge was twilit and muted, its occupants murmuring over consoles like surgeons at an operation. Foord himself, after the events preceding liftoff from Sakhra, felt immediately more comfortable here. The ship was his world, far more than any of the places where he made planetfall. On real planets, among real people, he could be surprisingly vulnerable, and often had to be saved from his ill-judged liberal impulses by others like Thahl or Cyr or Smithson. But on his ship he was supreme. It was his home, far more than the arid apartment he kept on Earth, and far more even than his home planet, where he was no longer welcome.

They were fifty minutes out of Sakhra, headed for Horus 5, the outer planet of the system, where She was expected to make an emergence.

•

Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.

“Status reports, please,” he murmured.

“Sakhra says they’ve detected no emergence, Commander,” Thahl said, on Foord’s immediate left.

“And your view?”

“They’re probably right. If She had entered the system undetected, our instruments should by now have picked up some residual ripples, and all they’re showing is normal background interference.”

“And Director Swann, has he called again?” Foord asked, implying a continuation of the subject of background interference.

“Not so far, Commander.”

Foord passed to Joser, on Thahl’s left. Joser was of average build, with suspiciously pleasant and open features. He reminded Foord of the priests at the orphanage.

“Could there have been an emergence?”

“She has emerged undetected in other systems, Commander, but our scanners are more sensitive. On balance, I think not.”

“Thank you.”

“Also, the amount of energy released by a ship emerging from MT Drive at the periphery of a solar system is so large that…”

“Yes, thank you.” Foord’s gaze continued round the circle of consoles to the next one, opposite him.

“The weapons array,” Cyr said, “will work satisfactorily. If,” she shot a glance at Joser, “we can locate Her. We may already have failed to do that.”

“The signature of a ship emerging from MT Drive into the solar system would be so large that…”

“That you would have detected Her. But you aren’t sure,” Cyr said, quite unreasonably.

Foord raised an eyebrow.

“Status reports,” he quietly informed the air just above their heads, “should be confined to facts unless I ask for opinions, and should be addressed to me.”

Tension subsided abruptly. The ship’s environment was cramped and potentially explosive and Foord kept everything, especially personal interaction, low-key. Conversation was by undercurrents, nuances and inflexions, by things left unsaid. A raised eyebrow on the Charles Manson was equivalent to a raised fist anywhere else.

Cyr tossed her dark hair and smiled, formally. “You’re right, Commander. For my part I apologise.” She thrust up three manicured fingers, waited just long enough to make it a gesture, and counted off. “One, long-range weapons array. Two, medium-range. Three, closeup weapons, including the two missiles built to your specification. I listed them all together because the report is the same: they all tested perfect after the refit.”

Foord thanked her elegant fist, still raised, and added “Take special care of those two missiles.”

•

“It was unnecessary,” Foord had said quietly to Cyr, fifty minutes earlier 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.”

Ten minutes later, she reported to his study.

“You wanted to see me, Commander.”

“Come in. Close the door, please.” She did so, and remained standing.

Outsider crew members were allowed individual leeway over uniform. Cyr’s was a dark blue tunic with a box-pleated skirt, over a white long-sleeved shirt. She had several others like it, all personally and expensively tailored for her. She wore it because she knew it aroused Foord. It made him remember the uniforms of the girls at the orphanage, one of whom he had raped.

“You know why you’re here.” Foord did not make it a question, and she did not give it an answer. She merely stared back at him.

Foord often wondered how much of her was human. Certainly the outside—that was almost more than human—but inside she could seem full of poison. She was disturbingly beautiful. Her face, like that of a classical statue depicting something like Justice or Liberty, was too perfect to be alive. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders; it was black, with hints of violet iridescence like birds’ plumage or (which Foord thought more appropriate) beetles’ wing-cases. Her lipstick and manicured nails were also, today, dark blue; other days they might be maroon or dark grey or purple or black, to match her other tailored tunics.

Despite her intelligence and beauty, Foord found her cold and predatory and often disgusting.

“Why did you kill him?”

“He was about to kill you.”

“You could have wounded him.”

“I couldn’t be sure he’d drop his gun.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“Because I wanted to.”

Foord locked eyes with her, then looked down at his desk, where he had placed a heavy hardwood ruler, nearly three feet long. It was a souvenir; the priests at the orphanage had used it on him, often, and he was minded to use it on Cyr. She saw him eyeing it and knew what he intended. It would be totally against regulations, even the deliberately ambiguous Department regulations written for Outsiders, but Foord’s authority was such that Cyr would have accepted it.

He wanted to do it, more than anything except destroy Faith, and he infuriated himself by finally deciding not to. He knew she would have accepted it, but not to atone for the life she had taken so unnecessarily. She did not perform acts of atonement.

“Why did you kill him?” he repeated.

“Because I wanted to,” she repeated; and added, as a thought she did not speak, To make sure you lived.

“I thought this would be pointless. Just go.”

She held his gaze for a moment; then turned to leave, the pleats of her skirt fanning out.

•

Foord thanked Cyr’s elegant fist, still raised, added “Take special care of those two missiles,” and passed to the console on her left.

“The MT Drive has been shut down since we used it to make the Jump to Horus system,” announced Smithson. “All the others are…”

“Is it operational if needed?”

“Of course it is. But if you’re thinking of using the MT Drive inside a solar system…”

“Just give me an itemised report on the Drives, please. Do you understand?”

Smithson bristled, not an easy accomplishment for someone so moist, and snapped “Yes, Commander, I understand. Itemised.” He shifted in his strengthened chair, extruded a limb from his stomach and held it aloft in a ghastly and deliberate imitation of Cyr, and began counting. “One, Photon Drive. Two, Ion Drive. Three, Magnetic Drive. Four, Manoeuvre Drive. Five, Six, Seven, Fusion Drive, Fusion Power Core, Backup Power Core.” His auxiliary limb extended and retracted a digit as each item was counted, and in a further imitation of Cyr he added “I listed them all together because the report is the same: they all tested perfect after the refit.”

“Thank you,” Foord said, with genuine enjoyment. On the Charles Manson, conversations were often coldly venomous; even on a good day, they could be as distant as conversations between Sakhrans. But, unlike Sakhrans, those on his ship were somehow more than the sum of their individual selves, and that was what gave him enjoyment.

Like an invisible clockhand the initiative moved on round the Bridge; and juddered to a premature halt, on Foord’s right.

“Kaang?”

She was absorbed in some task or other, and did not hear him. He watched her for a moment, thinking how ordinary she seemed: slightly pudgy, with a pasty complexion and medium-length fair hair cut in an uninteresting bob. She did not look remotely like someone who, at her one particular task, was so gifted that Genius was an inadequate term; although, it was fair to say, in every other respect she was almost worthless to him.

“Kaang, I’d like your status report, please.”

“I’m sorry, Commander. We’re fifty-nine minutes out of Sakhra. I’m holding us on photon drive at thirty percent, as instructed. We’re crossing the Gulf and heading for the outer planet, Horus 5. Detailed positions are on the screen.”

“Thank you.” Foord reclined his chair. “No further orders.”

Thirty percent of maximum speed on photon drive was still enough to produce relativistic effects. Stars burned fitfully at the edge of darkness, like Sakhrans’ autumn fires. Without the automatic compensating filters and rectilinear adjustments of the Bridge screen, infrared radiation would start to become visible, red light would shift to green, green to violet, and violet to invisible ultraviolet. And the cold stars ahead and behind would crowd into an ever-narrowing sector, becoming finally a corridor to and from infinity. But none of that happened, because the ship compensated for it, and compensated for its compensations, until the screen gave them a workable visual analogue: a necessary lie. It did this quietly and unnoticed and without needing instructions. The Charles Manson was nine percent sentient; no other Commonwealth ship was more than five percent.

The ship was a graceful silver delta, slender and elongated. It was just over one thousand six hundred feet long, and three hundred feet wide at its widest point, at the stern where its array of main drives was concentrated.

Radiating from the Bridge were the other inhabited sections where the crew of fifty-seven, excluding the six on the Bridge, were embedded. There was no room for any place where the entire crew, or even part of it, could gather; no crew member was likely to see more than six or seven others during a mission. It was a quiet and nonsocial environment, compartmentalised to the extent that if an inhabited section became irreparably damaged (unlikely, but not impossible) it could be shut off and forgotten and its functionality transferred elsewhere, leaving the ship free to go on without it as if a diseased part had been amputated.

•

“Cyr?”

“Nothing since my last report.”

“Smithson?”

“Nothing since her last report.”

“Commander,” Thahl whispered, “I have Director Swann again. He asks why you haven’t yet ordered maximum speed to Horus 5.”

“Tell him…”

“He insists you speak to him, Commander.”

“Insists.”

“His word.”

“Later. My word.”

And the Outsider Class cruiser Charles Manson, Instrument of the Commonwealth, plunged on at its own chosen speed. It was a silver jewel-box full of functionality: drives and weapons and sentience cores, bionics and electronics and power sources, scanners and signals and life support, all packed to almost dwarf-star density. Externally beautiful, but internally dark and cramped, like a silver evening gown hiding ragged underwear.

The Outsiders took existing technology as far as it could possibly go; as far as it would ever go. They were not the largest of the Commonwealth’s various warships, but they were the closest to perfection, and would not be improved upon until the currently stale physical sciences were shaken by the next major breakthrough. At an unvarying thirty percent photon speed the Charles Manson went on to its appointment, silent and catastrophic.

2

HORUS SOLAR SYSTEM. Your ship’s Codex has all the detail. This summary may, however, suggest some of the system’s more unusual, and usable, features.

Horus is a main sequence star, 1.6 times the size of Earth’s Sun, and at a similar stage in its life. It has three inner planets, then the Gulf, then two outer planets separated by an asteroid belt.

Horus 1 and 2 are respectively 59 million and 90 million miles mean distance from Horus. Both are uninhabited; Horus 1 is molten slag and Horus 2, bare rock. Horus 3 is Sakhra: the third of the inner planets, 118 million miles mean distance from Horus.

After Sakhra comes the system’s first unusual feature: the Gulf between inner and outer planets. From Sakhra to Horus 4, the Gulf extends for 980 million miles, the largest empty space in any known solar system. It ends at the orbit of the system’s second unusual feature, the planet Horus 4.

Horus 4 has a mean distance of 1100 million miles from Horus. It is the most massive planetary body in the known galaxy. Its mass and density and gravity are extraordinary: it has some of the properties of a small neutron star, as well as those of a large planet.

The Asteroid Belt extends 400 million miles, between Horus 4 and Horus 5. It too is unusual, both in its extent and in the number and size of its asteroids; many are the size of small planets. Almost certainly, the Belt is Horus 4’s doing: the remains of two or even three very large planets inside the orbit of Horus 5, torn to pieces by Horus 4’s gravity.

Horus 5 has a mean distance of 1540 million miles from Horus, and is the system’s outermost planet: a gas giant with a thick hydrocarbon atmosphere and a swarm of moons.

If She makes an emergence in Horus system, you will face Her alone and unconstrained, as the Department promised. If that happens, you may find the unusual features of this system helpful, though of course the authors of this briefing would not presume to advise you on how to engage Her.

Foord had no intention of considering any advice on how to engage Her, whether it came from the Department or the Sakhran authorities or even his own crew, unless it suited him. He had been reflecting for some days on the strategy and tactics he would employ if She emerged at Horus, and had found something which seemed genuinely to have escaped everybody’s notice.

For the next few days, just as for the last few days, all the planets of Horus system would be roughly in alignment: like an antique clockwork orrery, with its brass balls quivering on the ends of their brass rods.

Maybe, Foord had thought, when She emerges at Horus 5, at the outer edge of the system, She’ll wait for us to reach Her. Why? Because, he imagined, She’ll want to meet us there, almost formally, so She can fight us all the way through the system, planet by planet, back to Sakhra. And why should She do that? Because, Foord further imagined, She would think it fitting; because She would have found out that in this system alone, She could enter into a single combat with the only other ship in known space able to match Her.

It was a recurrent daydream, or conceit, of Foord to think about Her so. But it also suited his purposes. He had analysed Her known capabilities and previous documented encounters, and the features of Horus system (using the real data on his ship’s Codex, not the Department’s rather patronising and flippant briefing) and had concluded where it would be best to engage Her: in the Gulf, and in the outer parts of the system. So he wanted to fight Her all the way back to Sakhra.

For the same sound operational reason, She would probably have done a similar analysis and reached a similar conclusion—that is, if whatever lived inside Her worked and thought in that way.

•

Things were as quiet and well-ordered as usual on the Bridge. So, after the meal had finished and he had taken status reports, Foord decided to go for a walk; there was something he needed to see.

“Back in twenty minutes,” he told them, as the Bridge door irised shut behind him. “Thahl, you have the ship.” The others glanced up, but said nothing.

He walked through the cramped main corridor. It was more like a burrow, with conduits and cables and wires and circuitry pressing down from above, prodding sideways from the walls, and pushing up from the floor: a burrow through the ship’s densely-packed working parts, which occupied almost every inch of its sixteen hundred feet. The main corridor forked into secondary burrows even more cramped, and he followed them, occasionally having to stoop.

The secondary burrows looked unmade, like a building site. Their walls were unfinished plaster and cement. They were lit by naked light fittings, which worked efficiently (everything worked efficiently, whatever it looked like) but were fixed at random angles and irregular intervals. This was what the Charles Manson really was, inside itself. Its crew, human and nonhuman, moved like germs through its elegant but densely-packed body.

He continued walking until he reached one of the ship’s many weapons holds. In this one were stored the two missiles built to his specification at Blentport.

This was the first time, after carrying their picture in his head, that he had actually seen them. He remembered the skepticism in the Blentport machine shops when he’d explained what he wanted. Of course we can build them, they’d said, but why should we? He knew Smithson would have made sure they were built exactly to specification, but he still needed to see for himself.

They towered over him. They were low-tech almost to the point of being primitive: ugly and utilitarian, made of blue-black welded cast iron plates, with a drive bulge at the rear which swelled so fatly it looked like a growth. He wished he’d asked Blentport for more, though two should be enough, if they worked, and if the occasion for using them arose. He knew exactly how and when and where they’d be used, but he still wasn’t sure how the idea had occurred to him. It was as though it had always been there, but dormant. After looking at them for a couple more minutes he turned and made his way back to the Bridge.

He met only two other crew members on the journey there, and one on the way back. He greeted them by name and rank, and they greeted him with a muttered “Commander.” They had to struggle past each other like termites. The ship’s burrows were imperfect and unfinished, cobbled together almost as an afterthought to accommodate mere people.

He returned to the Bridge, greeting them, and being greeted, quietly. He sank back into his contour chair. The Bridge was murmurous and discreet, with restful soft light and muted sounds in different registers and keys. Like any good butler, the ship had unobtrusively but thoroughly attuned itself to Foord’s preferences. It made the alarms, when they sounded, discreet and murmuring; understated, like him. It had done the same for the electronic noises at the Bridge consoles, and for the Bridge lighting, without his having to instruct it. Like Jeeves, he thought, and that reminded him of his father’s old books, now neatly shelved in his study: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and all the usual classics, plus some P.G.Wodehouse.

Time passed. They continued through the Gulf towards Horus 5, at an unvarying thirty percent.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have another call from Director Swann.”

“Is it on the same matter as before?”

“Yes, Commander. He says She could make an emergence at any time. He demands to know why we aren’t making more speed towards Horus 5.”

“Is Demands an advance on Insists?”

“I don’t know, Commander.”

“The answer is the same, Thahl. Tell him, Later.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Cyr looked across her console at Foord and half mouthed, half whispered, Piling Indignities On Him. It was as though their conversation in his study had never taken place. She and Thahl had already moved on from what had happened at Blentport, but for different reasons. Cyr considered it trivial. Thahl, being a Sakhran, would not waste time wishing for it to unhappen.

Foord looked around the Bridge.

“We’ll do this as I said at our first briefing. We’ll cross the Gulf at thirty percent photon speed, switch down to ion drive, and make a wide pass around Horus 4. A very wide pass. Then we’ll cross the Belt to Horus 5. Questions?”

There were none. Foord went on.

“Director Swann seems to think we should rush to keep our appointment with Her. I think we don’t need to. When She makes Her emergence, I believe She’ll wait for us.” He paused for effect, looking round at them, and added “Why should that be? …Well, I found out something recently. Something which nobody seems to have noticed.”

“You mean that thing about the planets being in alignment?” Smithson asked. “I thought everybody knew that.”

Foord’s moment hung in the air, dissolving.

The ship plunged on. Round the circumference of the Bridge screen, and at the consoles which followed its circumference, components clicked and hummed and shone, reporting the fiction of the ship’s movement—fiction because it moved through a medium whose absolute motion, geared down from universe to galaxy to solar system to planet to ship, was too vast to discern; and fiction also because its own movement, like that of space, was subdivided into the movements of its larger and smaller parts. The slender arrowhead hull moved towards the outer planet of Horus system, and the scanners and weapons tracked endlessly back and forth through a notional sphere of which the star Horus was centre; the synapses in its Codex, the aggregation of its nine sentience cores, moved back and across and back in latticeworks; the subatomic particles in its bionics and electronics moved in orbits around their nuclei. The ship was an illusion moving through an illusion. With nine percent sentience, it only nine percent knew itself. It faded in and out of self-awareness, not unlike people.

Foord yawned and settled deeper into his contour chair. “Status reports, please.”

Joser hit the alarms. “Commander, an unidentified ship has just entered the Gulf.”

3

“Battle stations, please,” Foord murmured.

Darkness grew like fur on the Bridge. The main lights dimmed, leaving only the glow from the consoles and from the stars on the circular Bridge screen. Seats extended to full harness configuration. Alarms sounded politely through the ship’s inhabited burrows.

“Thahl, please request the intruder to make identification.”

A tall beaker of amber fluid—a sleep and defecation inhibitor—had appeared in Foord’s chairarm dispenser. He sipped it thoughtfully.

“Well?”

“No reply, Commander.”

“Keep trying, will you? Joser, position of intruder, please.”

“12-19-14, Commander. Behind us, coming from the direction of Sakhra.”

“Thank you. Kaang, please turn us to face that reference. Then hold.”

There was a muffled bump, which just failed to ripple the fluid in the beaker which Foord had left balanced on his chairarm, as the photon drive shut down and the gravity compensators cut in. Other compensators swept the screen invisibly, turning the starfield from an analogue to a real image.

“Joser?”

“Preliminary readouts indicate that the intruder is a Class 097 cruiser of Horus Fleet, Commander. A visual will follow shortly.”

The Charles Manson turned, manoeuvre jets playing like fountains from the outlets grouped round the nose, midsection and rear of its hull, Kaang first activating jets for the turn and then others to counter it, and others to counter those, and so on; normally an operation left to computers, but Kaang did it manually for greater speed. The starfield stretched around the circular screen as if it was a tight skin inside which the Bridge rotated. The ship came to rest.

“Joser, you’re sure that’s a Horus Fleet ship?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Sure enough to attack it if you were Her?”

Joser blinked at the strangeness of the question, but said “Yes, Commander. I’m now getting detailed readouts which are quite definite. And the visual is coming up now.”

“Thank you. Superimpose it when it’s ready, please. Thahl?”

“Still no reply to our requests for identification, Commander.”

“Then get Horus Fleet Directorate at Sakhra, please.”

“I’ve already done so, Commander. They absolutely deny ordering any ship to shadow us.”

“Then please get me Director Swann personally.”

“Here’s your visual, Commander.”

From a widening point dead ahead, the imaginary skin round the circumference of the Bridge screen was ruptured and a locally-magnified image slapped against it, like a plaster over a wound. The visual was so good that for a moment the details were more prominent than the whole: silvered overlapping hull plates, rings of manoeuvre drive blisters like plague scars, oxidation streaks, and, clearest of all, Horus Fleet insignia and identification markings. The ship was large and heavily built and looked close enough for collision.

“When we stopped and turned,” Joser said, “it switched down from photon to ion drive. It’s approaching us very slowly, at about five percent. And it’s on battle stations.”

“Yes,” Foord said. He noted the hooded viewports like eyeslits in a perhaps-empty suit of armour, and the weapon ports housing extended nozzles which tracked back and forth.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have Director Swann.”

“Thank you. Put him through, please.”

Silence.

“Has something gone wrong, Thahl?”

“I’m sorry, Commander. Director Swann just cut the channel.”

“Position of intruder is 12-18-14 and closing slowly,” Joser said.

“Cut the channel? I don’t understand.”

“I told him you needed to speak urgently. He said ‘Later’, and cut the channel.”

Foord smiled faintly.

“Commander,” Cyr spoke for the first time, “we’re still at battle stations.”

“And?”

“And I have no orders. I’d like to ask if you intend to…”

“If I intend to attack that ship?”

“Our orders were quite explicit, Commander.”

“Yes, I got a copy of them. I know what may have to be done.”

“Commander,” Joser began, “for the record I must…”

“No, for the record you mustn’t. Please confine yourself to readouts of the intruder’s position. Can I have the latest one?”

“12-17-14 and closing slowly.”

“Thank you. Thahl?”

“Still no reply, Commander. From the intruder, or Director Swann.”

“Get me the Director’s chief of staff, please. Tell him I have a message.”

“Intruder is now 11-17-14 and…Commander, he’s decelerating!”

Foord glanced up at the screen. Manoeuvre jets were blazing in sequence from the front of the ship like a visible scale played up and down organ pipes. Scanners and weapons peered ahead from the dark semicircular recesses of their housings. The Bridge screen, before it was asked, patched in a view from another angle, showing the name and Fleet ident, SABLE 097 CX 141, bulging over the corrugations of its flanks. The ship came to rest.

“Kaang, please take us forward slowly on ion drive, no more than five percent. Thahl?”

“I have Director Swann’s chief of staff, Commander.”

“Oh, and Cyr: no further orders for now. Thank you, Thahl. Put him through on sound only; visual won’t be necessary.”

“Commander Foord? I’m not getting your…”

“Forgive me. You’re Director Swann’s chief of staff?”

“I am. Commander, I’m not getting your visual.”

“But you can hear me clearly?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Then please give the Director this message. Tell him that it appears that the Sable, a Class 097 cruiser of Horus Fleet, number CX 141, has disobeyed orders and shadowed us into the battle area. Emphasize the word Appears. Tell him I have orders to engage and destroy an unidentified ship whose specification—are you recording all this?”

“Every word. Please go on, Commander.”

“An unidentified ship whose specification is largely unknown, but whose documented abilities include evading and confusing scanners.” He glanced briefly at Joser as he said this. “Horus Fleet has been recalled to defensive positions around Sakhra, and my orders entitle me to rely on Horus Fleet to ensure that I engage that ship alone.”

“Commander, we’ve already received an enquiry from one of your officers on this matter. I assure you we’re treating it with the utmost urgency. If any ship has broken formation it will be ordered back and if necessary brought back by force.”

“I think,” Foord said, “that you may have misunderstood. Let me complete the message, and then I’ll leave it to you to pass it to the Director. This unidentified ship—I’ll use the name Faith, most people do now—can evade and confuse scanners. My orders entitle me to rely on Horus Fleet to ensure that I engage Her alone. The ship shadowing us has repeatedly failed to identify itself. Please tell the Director that I must assume this ship is Faith, and that somehow She’s contrived to appear on our scanners as a Horus Fleet ship. I’m therefore going to engage and destroy Her.”

“Commander,” Joser said quietly, “I must tell you on the record that I have detailed readouts on that ship, and it’s definitely a Class 097. Drive emissions, dimensions, mass, they can’t be faked.”

Foord appeared not to have heard, though in the sudden silence on the Bridge that was quite impossible.

“Thahl, you’ve continued to request identification?”

“Yes, Commander. No reply.”

“Continue sending, right up to the moment we open fire.”

“Commander,” Joser persisted. “It would be…”

“Don’t!” Cyr snapped, before Foord could answer, “Don’t say it would be murder!”

“Thank you, Cyr, that’s enough,” Foord said.

But for Cyr, it wasn’t. “Unsolicited comments,” she hissed at Joser, “from unproven Bridge officers, are not helpful.”

“Thank you, Cyr, that’s enough.”

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have Director Swann.”

4

“Commander Foord.”

“Director Swann.”

“This conversation is long overdue.”

“It’s overdue; don’t expect it to be long.”

“I’ve been handed a message from you.” On the screen, Swann looked like a badly-drawn cartoon of Foord. He too came from a heavy gravity planet, and had the same large frame and the same dark hair and beard; but his frame was less toned, and his hair and beard less well groomed, than Foord’s. “Let me make sure I understand you. You’re about to destroy a Class 097 cruiser of Horus Fleet. Is that correct?”

“Position of intruder,” Joser said, “is 11-17-14 and holding.”

Foord glanced at the magnified section of the circular Bridge screen. The large silver ship remained at rest, the only movement coming from the nozzles in its weapons ports and scanner housings which tracked side to side, side to side, much as an underwater current might move the minor appendages of something long since drowned.

“I’m about to engage a ship which I have to believe is Faith,” Foord said.

“Have to believe?”

“I’m at war with everything in the system not in the immediate vicinity of Sakhra, where my orders tell me I can assume it belongs to you. And I’m at war with anything which follows me into the Gulf and fails to identify itself.”

“You attack that ship, Commander, and you’re at war with Horus Fleet.”

“We both know that isn’t true.” But if it was, we’d probably win.

“Commander, listen to me.”

“Holding on ion drive at five percent, Commander. Shall I continue?”

“Thank you, Kaang, yes.”

“Commander, listen to me. The Sable shadowed you without my knowledge and in defiance of my orders. I now know what made its Captain commit this error. It’ll be the last error of his career, but it is just an error. The Sable has a crew of ninety. It’s only an 097. It wouldn’t stand a chance against you.”

“Not if it’s really an 097. But why hasn’t it identified itself?”

“Stop this, Foord! That’s a real ship with real people. I can prove it to you, I have documented evidence that the Sable joined the cordon and then broke formation and followed you.”

“Not enough. She could have heard all that when She monitored your comms, and decided to appear as the Sable.” Foord knew this was almost inhumanly unreasonable, but it was how Swann would expect him to behave. Perversely, he was enjoying it.

“Commander, please listen to me. The Captain of the Sable has been under strain recently. He broke the cordon because…”

“You’re making my point. I don’t need to know his motives, but if She became aware of them through monitoring your comms, that’s another reason to doubt whether that ship is any ship of yours.”

“Commander, if that’s Her out there and not the Sable, why hasn’t She already attacked you?”

“If She always attacked when people like you expected Her to, I wouldn’t have been sent here.”

It continued. The more desperate Swann’s voice got, the more even Foord’s stayed. The more disshevelled Swann looked, the more poised Foord appeared. They were both acutely aware of the contrast.

“Still no reply to requests for identification,” Thahl said. “Shall I continue sending?”

“Yes, I think so, though it seems pointless…I’m sorry, Director, but it also seems pointless continuing this conversation.”

“Then let us try ordering the Sable to identify itself to you.”

“You mean you haven’t already?”

“Let me try. Personally. I’ll order its Captain to call you now.”

“Not enough. It could still be Her.”

“Then we’ll send out two or three ships of our own to bring it back. On tractor beams if necessary.”

“Not enough. They could be two or three of Her. Anything in Horus system, not in the cordon, I’m at war with.”

Swann played his final card.

“If the Sable doesn’t identify itself, I could send out two or three ships….”

“You already said that.”

“…to destroy it, Commander.”

“Not enough. I can do that myself. Director, I want you to treat us how you want to treat us, like we’re infected. I want you to leave us so alone that we can assume anything else we meet is hostile. If any ship of yours leaves the cordon, it’s hostile.”

“Then you are at war with us.”

“Orders, Director.”

“If I had your orders I would…”

“Have you ever in your life had orders like mine?”

“I’ve never in my life had to deal with anyone like you, Commander. Whatever I thought about your ship coming here, I still offered you courtesy and hospitality and you ignored it. I arranged receptions to welcome you and your crew. I gave your ship’s refit total priority. I gave you assistance to return to your ship. I even made sure that the unspeakable events on your last day here didn’t stop your liftoff. So please, tell me what will stop you destroying the Sable.”

“Nothing, Director. I can’t and won’t stop.”

“Commander!” Joser said. “Scanners have just registered an emergence at Horus 5.”

“Do you have detailed readouts?”

“Yes, Commander. It’s Her.”

5

“Yes, Director,” Foord said, “you did hear me correctly. I said we’ve detected an emergence at Horus 5. I said our first readouts indicate a ship matching the known specification of Faith. And I said I refuse to move.”

“You have orders,” roared Swann, “and I demand you obey them!”

“I have orders to engage Her alone. I’ve now got two unidentified ships, one at Horus 5 and one here in the Gulf.”

“Then fuck off, and engage Her alone, and I’ll see to it that the Sable doesn’t follow you.”

“I can see to that myself. What’s the difference?”

“Ninety lives, if that is the Sable, which you now know it is. Come on, Foord. She’s arrived. She’s here waiting for you, like you always wanted. Somewhere down here we’ve probably picked Her up too, and they’re probably checking and rechecking before they tell me. And then there’s the cordon to complete, which was held up so you could leave Blentport, and the evacuation into the lowlands, and the civil chaos when the news breaks that She’s here, which is something you couldn’t begin to imagine because you don’t spend much time among real people, do you?”

“What’s the point you’re trying to make?” Foord said, adopting a tone of puzzlement. He was beginning to overdo it, he thought.

“A moment, please.” Swann’s face turned to one side, where someone off screen was whispering to him.

Foord too turned away from the screen. “Positions, please,” he asked Joser.

“The Sable, I mean the first intruder, is 11-17-14 and holding. The second intruder is 99-98-96 and holding. Readouts on the second intruder conform to Faith’s known profile; heavily shrouded on all wavelengths.”

“Foord,” Swann resumed, “that was the expected message, and our readouts match yours. So stop talking about unidentified ships. That ship at Horus 5 is Faith, and that ship which shadowed you into the Gulf is a Horus Fleet ship!”

Foord glanced at Joser, who nodded vigorously.

“Then I’m about to order the destruction of a Horus Fleet ship. I will not engage Her until I know for certain that I’m engaging Her alone.”

“When this is over, Foord”—Swann’s voice had lost its desperation; now it was oddly calm—“when this is over I’ll make sure that whatever’s left of the Commonwealth knows what you did, and disowns you.”

“It’s already disowned us.”

“Commander. Please. My last try. Give me two minutes to contact the Captain of the Sable, and I’ll make it go away. Two minutes, Commander.”

“You have as long as it takes me to give the order. But I’ll speak slowly.”

6

The Bridge was silent as they watched the big silver ship on the magnified section of the screen, in an effort to confirm visually what the scanners had already told them. Slowly, gradually, it happened. One by one the weapons nozzles ceased tracking and retracted into their housings; a dull red aura spread from the stern as the ion drive restarted at low intensity; manoeuvre jets flared and fountained in shifting combinations; and then, quite deliberately, and with the same lack of communication which had characterised its first appearance, the Sable turned away.

Not once, thought Foord, did it make any contact with us. Not even now.

On the Bridge, banks of subdued red warning lights continued to glow at every console. Alarms continued to murmur at discreet intervals.

“Position of Sable…” began Joser, then stopped as Foord glanced up at him sharply. “…of first intruder, is still 11-17-14, but the turn will register shortly. And…”

“Excuse me. Thahl?”

“No call yet, Commander.”

“Thank you. Please keep us at battle stations. Joser?”

“Position of second intruder is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”

The ship on the screen continued to turn away. Now it was almost sideways on, repeating the view the screen had patched in earlier. Like before, SABLE 097 CX 141 bulged over the long contours of its flanks. Class 097s were heavy cruisers. The Sable was bigger than the Charles Manson, but much less powerful; like Foord against Thahl, it wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have a call from Director Swann.”

“Thank you. Put him through, please.”

“Well, Commander Foord.”

“Well, Director Swann.”

“As you can see, the Sable is leaving the Gulf. When can I expect you to do the same, in the opposite direction?”

“As soon as we’ve tracked him for a reasonable distance.”

“Of course,” Swann said, magnanimously. He was visibly more relaxed; his face had the equivalent of a spring in its step. Foord’s manner, on the other hand, was precisely the same as before. “But when you’ve tracked him I want you to go, Commander! Do you hear?”

“What will happen to him, Director?”

“You know perfectly well what will happen to him.”

“And his crew?”

“That’s another matter. But for Captain Copeland, it’s all over.”

“Copeland?”

“Yes. It was his brother at Anubis.”

•

“If you can’t stop Her,” Swann had said to Foord, as the Charles Manson was making ready to re-engage photon drive and head through the Gulf towards Horus 5, “then She’ll have to get past Horus Fleet to reach Sakhra. If the Fleet can’t stop Her, neither will Sakhra’s normal defences, but by then the evacuation will have progressed and if She ever reaches here She’ll find military areas full of civilians and most of the movable defences gone to the highlands. If everything else fails I’ll gamble on Her not attacking civilian targets.”

Foord had not answered.

“And don’t give me any of your silences, Foord, not after what your people did here! My family have been evacuated too. They’re taking the same risk as everyone else. I was born here, and so were my parents and my children, and I’ll defend it any way I see fit.”

Foord had not meant his silence to imply disapproval. Insofar as the evacuation interested him at all, which was not very much now that he’d left Sakhra, he could see it made some sense; Thahl had persuaded him of that. His silence was merely a suggestion that they both had other things they should be doing.

“We’re just about to move off, Director. Was there anything else?”

“We need you to stop Her, Foord; but…”

“But you think the cure is worse than the disease?”

“Your ship isn’t a cure. It’s another disease.”

Foord had blinked a couple of times at the empty patch on the screen, where Swann had cut the connection, and then returned his attention to the Bridge.

“Joser, please keep a continuous check on Her position and confirm every ten minutes. Kaang, please take us out of here, heading 99-98-96, on photon drive at thirty percent rising to ninety percent.”

The conversation with Swann had taken place forty minutes earlier. The Charles Manson was now about one-quarter of the way through the Gulf, holding at ninety percent photon speed. The Bridge screen had cut in with filters and compensators at twenty percent to adjust for relativistic distortion of the starfield, and at seventy percent had blanked out entirely and substituted a simulation which showed Horus 5 in outline, and beyond it, at 99-98-96 and unmoving, a white dot which represented Her. It seemed very faint on the screen, like the last living thing in a wasteland; or the first, of millions.

At regular intervals Joser would murmur “Position of Faith is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband,” and Foord would acknowledge politely. That, and the muted voices of the others as they made regular status reports or conducted routine conversations with other parts of the ship, was the only human noise on the Bridge. When the Charles Manson went to battle stations, there were changes of degree which were barely perceptible; relationships were a little more carefully delineated, Foord was a little more courteous and attentive to detail, and noise and light were a little more subdued.

Foord was starting to feel distaste at what he’d done, as if he’d been pulling wings off flies; Swann was only trying to protect his people. He took a sip from the tumbler of inhibitor fluid put out by his chairarm dispenser. It was half-full, exactly as he left it since the encounter with the Sable, and when he replaced it it slid down into the chairarm, was replenished, and slid up again. It was a tall tumbler, filled almost to the brim, but no vibration disturbed the surface of the liquid. Had it done so Foord would have been quite disoriented. For generations, it had been an established convention that space travel was dull: empty of events, and almost devoid of distance.

It was empty of events because events could be anticipated by the ship, and either avoided, evaded, compensated or filtered, before or while they happened; so that at ninety percent photon speed the ship enabled gravity, light, elapsed time and sensory perception to function inside it exactly as if it was at rest.

It was almost devoid of distance because distances between stars could be sidestepped by the MT Drive, and distances within solar systems could be eaten up by the ship’s array of lesser drives. Since the development of Matter Transfer, distances between stars had ceased to have much meaning. Most interstellar cultures, like the Commonwealth and the old Sakhran Empire, had developed MT Drive almost by accident. It was still only partially understood. One of its features was that it could not be used within solar systems; to engage it anywhere near bodies of planetary mass would be catastrophic. Distances within solar systems, however, were no more than a minor irritation for ships with photon and ion drive.

All that, plus the existence of instantaneous communication using principles derived from MT physics, made it possible for a Commonwealth of twenty-nine solar systems to function as if each system was an apartment in the same block, divided only by thin walls and a darkened hall and staircase—darkened, because nobody needed to go out there anymore. The Gulf in Horus system was the nearest anyone would get to the old pre-MT days of space travel, when people travelled physically through the nothingness between stars, instead of sidestepping it as they did now; an MT Jump, and an emergence from it, took the same time whether the distance was one light-year or a hundred.

“Position of Faith,” Joser said, “is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”

“Thank you,” Foord replied, giving Joser a sidelong glance. Maybe, he thought, Joser would say that Foord had been unreasonable over the Sable; or that Foord had compromised on the Department’s orders. Either way, it’d sound good when whispered back to the Department.

“You have the ship,” he told Thahl. As he left the Bridge, he turned to Cyr. “I’d like to see you in my study, please. In five minutes.”

•

Foord’s study was almost adjacent to the Bridge, a very short walk down an adjoining corridor. When four minutes fifty seconds had elapsed, Cyr walked the short distance, knocked on the door, and waited. When Foord called Enter, she did so, and like last time she closed the door behind her and remained standing.

Foord was seated at his desk. He looked up at her.

“I’d like to ask you about Joser.”

“I know I spoke hastily on the Bridge, Commander, but I meant it.”

“No, it’s not that. He makes you uneasy, and I’d like to know why. You have permission to speak freely.”

He spoke as if their previous interview hadn’t happened. She noticed there was no ruler on the desktop.

She paused, and said “On the Bridge, when he told you It Would Be Murder…”

“Or tried to, until you shouted him down.”

“He told me later that he’d only said what any ordinary decent person would have said.”

“And your point?”

“Nobody on this ship has any right to be ordinary or decent… I don’t trust him, Commander.”

“Tell me why.”

“Three reasons. One, he’s always manoeuvring for position, as if he’s expecting what he does and says to be played to an audience later. Two, his work’s mediocre; he might be acceptable on an ordinary ship, but not on this one. Three, and following from One, I think he’s a Department stooge.”

“He wouldn’t be the first,” Foord said drily.

“Do I still have permission to speak freely, Commander?”

“Of course.”

“He’s dangerous. Get rid of him, get him off the Bridge, any way you can. Not because he’s a stooge, we’ve had them before, but because he’s fucking mediocre.”

Foord was silent for a couple of minutes, thinking.

“Thank you,” he said eventually. “That’s helpful. I’ll see you back on the Bridge.”

She turned and walked out, aware that he was watching the seat of her skirt, and the swaying of its pleats.

•

Foord yawned, settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and listened again to the muted background noise on the Bridge. It always reminded him of long summer afternoons from his childhood when he would lay alone with eyes closed on a crowded beach, and would listen: to the sea, to the sharp voices of other children, to the lower voices of their parents tossing everyday remarks tiredly back and forth like beachballs, and to the doppler effect of someone running towards him and past him, on the way to someone else. His childhood had been complex and solitary, but not unhappy; at least, not until the darkness came.

He had prepared carefully and thoroughly for what was about to happen, as he always did. He knew how he would destroy Her. He had worked with the ship’s Codex, the aggregation of its nine sentience cores, to extract from the onboard computers every last detail of the structure of Horus system and the known and suspected abilities of Faith. He had then constructed an intricate mechanism of initiatives, responses, failsafes and fallbacks. And now the entire mechanism, like the Charles Manson itself, was under way—as dense as a mountain of lead, as precise as an antique clock movement, and so finely balanced that his will needed only to touch it as lightly as a feather to move it all in a given direction. So he could afford to relax, for now.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “we’re now within twice the maximum distance at which She’s been known to monitor communications. You asked to be notified.”

“Thank you. From now until further notice, no external communication will be made or accepted without my prior authority. Please inform Sakhra; and then close their channels.”

It seemed everyone wanted to know about Faith: who She was, where She came from, and why She was doing this. Foord, however, was genuinely indifferent. All that concerned him was that She was an opponent—the only one, apart from another Outsider, who might match him. Others were working on Her identity and motives, and if anyone found anything they’d tell him. With a kind of cold irony which was almost Sakhran, he looked forward to destroying Her before anyone could find out who She was.

Almost everyone who served or commanded on an Outsider did so because, for various reasons, they would be unacceptable on an ordinary ship. Foord rarely thought about why he would have been unacceptable; but it might have been his reluctance to believe in things. He considered that other people, particularly those who gave him his orders, believed far too much in their own existence and in that of the universe. Human senses, unaided, could perceive the universe across a range of 10^-4 to 10⁺⁴. Optical and mechanical devices increased the range: 10^-10 to 10⁺¹⁰. Electronics made it 10^-25 to 10⁺²⁵, and the knowledge of which the Charles Manson was perhaps the last product made it 10^-50 to 10⁺⁵⁰. Upon the perception gained at each stage a body of knowledge was constructed, and upon that construction grew further constructions—philosophical, political, cultural, social. There was the clockwork of Newton, then the relative chaos of Einstein, though Einstein only wanted harmony; then the smaller and deeper chaos of quantum uncertainty, and then back to a post-Newtonian clockwork. Beyond that was a deeper and vaster level of chaos, not yet quite visible; by the time it was, people would no longer be travelling in things like the Charles Manson.

Each stage proved its predecessor an illusion, and waited to be proved an illusion by its successor. But they all continued to be part of the same accretion over time; because, Foord thought, they all shared the quality of illusion. In the universe which was currently believed to exist, Foord served current institutions by applying current knowledge and techniques to the orders he was given, but the difference between Foord and those who gave him his orders was that they believed it had a meaning, whereas he knew it did. But only in terms of itself.

•

Eighty minutes later, the Charles Manson passed uneventfully out of the Gulf and crossed the orbital path of Horus 4, giving the planet a wide berth as Foord had stipulated. Kaang commenced deceleration for entry into the Belt. As photon drive subsided to seventy percent and below, the simulation disappeared from the Bridge screen and was replaced by a real visual, overlaid by rectilinear filters and compensators to correct for spectral shift; and these overlays themselves dwindled and disappeared as the photon drive subsided to twenty percent and below.

“Switching to ion drive” said Kaang.

“Position of Faith is still 99-98-96 and holding,” Joser said, not needing to raise his voice above the faint velvet thud which, together with a brief play of lights from Kaang’s console and a grunt of something which might have been approval from Smithson, was the only indication that a switch of drives had occurred.

“And no detectable movement or activity on any waveband,” Joser added.

“Ion drive engaged,” Kaang said. “Ninety percent and falling.”

“Thank you,” Foord said. “Joser, from now on I’d like those positional checks every five minutes. Smithson, Cyr, I’ll be requesting your status reports when we complete deceleration, so please have them ready. Oh, and Joser, one other thing…”

•

The Charles Manson entered the Belt on ion drive at exactly thirty percent, and slid through it unhurriedly and without incident. Status reports were given quietly and received politely, while the ship picked its way between bodies ranging in size from large boulders to small planets. It stolidly maintained its own up and down as asteroids rolled and turned around it; the surfaces of the bigger ones loomed on the encircling Bridge screen, sometimes below them like floors pocked with craters, sometimes to either side like walls veined with crevasses, sometimes above them like ceilings from which mountain ranges hung inverted. Foord stole a glance at Kaang, and thought, We may have to come back through the Belt a lot faster than this. And with less leisure for observation.

The asteroids grew smaller and dwindled away to the rear and the last phase of the journey began, the crossing of space between the Belt and Horus 5. Foord called for the adoption of the final stages of battle stations. Bulkheads slid across corridors to seal off the Bridge and the burrows of the ship’s nine other inhabited sections—no more than a ritual gesture, since each section was self-sustaining and its functions could be transferred elsewhere if damaged, and in any case Foord tended to run his ship as if the bulkheads were always there. On the Bridge, and in the sub-centres of each inhabited section, seats configured to full harness. Communications were shut off, except through Foord. The Codex told its sentience cores to tell the onboard computers to ignore everything outside the mission parameters. Finally, the ship switched to a navigational sphere of reference of which it was the centre.

Until further notice, the ship designated itself the centre of the universe.

The caretaker went out into the darkened hallway. He had put a lot of time and care into his preparations, as he always did. He had forgotten the tenants of the twenty-nine apartments who summoned him when they heard footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; it was their business to speculate about the cause and origin of the footsteps, his to make sure they were never heard again.

7

Horus 5 clamoured over all wavelengths. It boiled with upheavals—gravitational, magnetic, ionospheric, volcanic, tectonic—and continued to exist because of them, borrowing and re-borrowing its existence from the accountancy which decreed that creation and destruction must balance each other. The red upper levels of its atmosphere were shot with lightning and swirling with vortexes; at its surface there was enough pressure to liquefy rock, and more heat than had ever filtered down from Horus; and in the purple and ochre of its middle atmosphere it bred new hydrocarbon-based lifeforms to replace the old ones it was destroying. They were strange and beautiful things, tinting the thick atmosphere as they slid through it. It was said they were sentient, and lived in family groups.

Horus 5 would still have clamoured if nobody was there to hear it, but now it had the Charles Manson, floating almost at rest just inside its orbit; and something else, perhaps not unlike the Charles Manson, floating at absolute rest just outside. The Charles Manson was approaching very slowly, on a course which kept the planet between them.

“Status reports, please.”

“Nothing, Commander,” Thahl said. “Sakhra has not attempted to communicate. Neither has Faith.”

“All our probes have been blocked, but otherwise She’s inert,” Joser said. “And shrouded. We’ve detected no probes from Her. Her position is 99-98-96 and—”

“Use the self-centred sphere of reference from now on, please,” Foord said with a trace of impatience.

“I’m sorry, Commander. Her position is 09-07-09 and holding.”

“Proceeding on ion drive at one percent,” Kaang said. “At a range 1.91 from Horus 5.”

“All weapons are at…” Cyr began.

There was a hiss of static from Horus 5. It ceased abruptly, and the Bridge returned to its customary near-silence.

Cyr glanced pointedly at Thahl, and waited.

“I’m sorry, that was an unusually big atmospheric discharge.”

“Are you sure,” Foord asked Thahl, “that’s all it was?”

“Yes, Commander.” Since they were not in private, Thahl did not bristle at the question, except privately. “It coincided with an upper atmospheric prominence on the planet. I’ve adjusted the filters.”

“Thank you. Cyr, please continue.”

“All weapons are at immediate readiness, Commander.”

“All drives,” Smithson said, “are at immediate readiness.”

“Including MT?” Foord asked quickly. “She might head out of the system, not in.”

“Yes, Commander, I know that. I said, All drives.”

Foord glanced up at the Bridge screen, the entire front semicircle of which was taken up by Horus 5. The planet’s upper atmosphere was purple and ochre and, predominantly, dark red; it was heavily filtered but it still bloodwashed the Bridge, almost but not quite matching the shade of the red Battle telltales which glowed politely from each console. Foord had seen many gas giants before, some more spectacular than this one—they were common in the outer reaches of main-sequence systems like Horus—and he was accustomed to being able to gaze directly into their faces for as long as he wanted. With this one, however, he couldn’t quite. He looked away, frowning.

“Joser, can you increase the screen filtering, please? I still find that light a little livid…Thank you.”

“Range now 1.88 from Horus 5, Commander,” Kaang said. “Do you wish us to come to a halt yet?”

“Not yet, thank you. I’d prefer to be a little closer, say 1.85 or less…Thahl, about that burst of static just now.”

“Yes, Commander, I’ve made the adjustments.”

“Thank you. I just want to be sure that That Planet,” he lounged in his seat against the backdrop of Horus 5 and talked about it as if he was talking about someone at a neighbouring restaurant table, and intending to be overheard, “doesn’t intrude into conversations on the Bridge. That’s all.”

They didn’t balk at his obsessiveness, even now when they were about to engage the strangest opponent they would ever face; in fact, to some extent they shared it.

She was motionless, and inert on all wavelengths. They could easily bend their long-range viewers around the planet, as (presumably) could She; but there was nothing to see, because She was shrouded. She always went shrouded into engagements, only becoming visible later, usually at some point of maximum psychological impact. The shrouding didn’t hide Her drive emissions, so if She moved, She could be tracked; but when She didn’t move, as now, She was invisible.

The Bridge screen had patched in a small insert showing a simulation of the other side of Horus 5, with a white dot marking Her position, and Foord looked at it and thought, Whatever happens next I’ve won the first point; I knew you’d wait. I would, if I was you.

“Our range from Horus 5 is now 1.85, Commander,” Kaang said.

“Thank you. Disengage ion drive and bring us to rest, please.”

With an almost insolent lack of haste, and a negligent precision like that of a diner’s fork suspended between mouth and plate during conversation, the Charles Manson brought itself to rest relative to Horus 5. The move was accomplished by the disengagement of ion drive—as always, Kaang made it barely perceptible—and a brief fountaining of manoeuvre drives round the front and midsection of the hull.

Soon, thought Foord, it will start. The two of us are already closer to each other than we’ve ever been.

He looked round at Cyr and Smithson. “Commence launch procedures, please.” It was a strangely low-key start to an engagement which, he knew, would either end his life or change it.

From a series of small bays near the ship’s nose, a swarm of slender objects slid out horizontally. From a larger ventral bay a single object, of a much different shape and size, dropped vertically towards the planet.

•

A few days earlier, when the Charles Manson had made planetfall at Sakhra, and before he had gone up to Hrissihr, Foord had attended one of Swann’s welcome receptions—as it turned out, the only one he would attend. It was a large-scale event, with figures from lowlands business, media, political and military circles. It was held in a ballroom in one of the exquisite civic buildings which Foord had seen on his way through the Bowl; this one was the Friendship House at Three Bridges, a few miles outside Blentport. Foord was there with his Bridge officers and a few other crew members. Each of them performed as they usually did on such occasions.

Cyr was gliding elegantly among the guests, for the most part ignoring the men (though this was not reciprocated) and making conversation with the women; she could make them feel ugly and untidy just by standing near them, even though she was still wearing her uniform and they were wearing evening gowns. She was well aware of her effect on them, but behaved as if she wasn’t.

Kaang was the centre of a group of Horus Fleet pilots, apologising for herself as always. Every time they were invited to events like this, her reputation went before her. Pilots would introduce themselves, would ask her how she did it, and would leave baffled or resentful, or worse, when they found she couldn’t tell them. It was a gift she had been born with, and didn’t understand. It made her many times better than they would ever be, but with none of their effort. They hated her for that, and also, perversely, for the fact she was not arrogant about it; for the fact that it embarrassed her.

Smithson was pleased to discover that someone had prepared thoroughly enough to have included, just for him, some concentrated vegetable matter; in deference to the elegance of the occasion, it was presented as small solid cakes rather than bowls of slime, but it was palatable. (Cyr told him later that Swann had called her, personally, to check on his dietary needs.)

Smithson was an Ember. His planet, Emberra, was unusually rich and self-sufficient. Emberra had made it clear to the Commonwealth that it would decline any Invitation To Join, and the Commonwealth, wisely, didn’t press the point. Instead it negotiated a network of trade agreements and political treaties, making Emberra a partner but not a part of the Commonwealth. Embers were thus not often seen on Commonwealth planets. Smithson quickly found himself the centre of an openly curious, but not initially hostile, group.

“So what’s your real name?” someone asked. “Is ‘Smithson’ a human nickname or translation or something?”

“Ember names are long multisyllables, sometimes a paragraph long. They identify us by summarising our lives and accomplishments. ‘Smithson’ is a human approximation of the last two syllables of my name.”

“Doesn’t it cramp your style a bit?”

“How do you mean?”

“When you’re rolling in bed with a female, do you whisper her full name?”

“Yes, but we speak quickly. Especially when we’re fucking each other senseless.”

Eventually, someone else asked “So how do you come to be working for the Commonwealth?”

“Well, I…”

“And how, of all things,” a lady interrupted, “do you come to be working for the Commonwealth on an Outsider?”

“I had to leave Emberra,” he said, straight faced. “I’m not welcome there. I killed my children and ate them.”

She laughed uncertainly. As he walked away from the group, which he did without any formal leave-taking, he heard someone say “Even more gross than Foord,” and someone else answer “Yes. A seven-foot walking column of snot.”

Of the rest, Joser was conversing easily and working the room—in the few months since he joined the Charles Manson, he had shown himself to be more socially adept than any of them—and Thahl was conversing less easily, but tolerably well. He was not the only Sakhran present; Swann had taken care to include several on his guest list, including Thahl’s father Sulhu, who had politely declined.

After some perfunctory and awkward circulating, Foord spotted Smithson alone and called him over. They skulked together in a corner of the elegant ballroom. That was when Foord had asked him.

“Let me be clear, Commander.” Smithson was about to say I Don’t Understand, but caught himself just in time. “You want me to devise something to use when we meet Her at Horus 5, but it’s not vital whether it succeeds?”

“Not absolutely vital.”

“Why do you think She’ll wait at Horus 5?”

“Not your concern. She’ll wait. As to whether it succeeds…I want one of your Ideas. The first time we encounter Her, I want something unusual. Something singular. If it doesn’t succeed, I still get to see how She responds to it, and that’s almost as valuable.”

“And you tell me this now, a few days before we lift off?”

“I’m not asking you to invent a new branch of physics. I’m not asking you to build something never seen before.”

“Stop telling me what you’re not asking, Commander.”

“Just use our existing weapons, but put them together into something unusual. Something singular. I already told you. Have one of your Ideas.”

“When I have an idea,” Smithson muttered, “I usually start from the premise that it will work…” But even while speaking, he began to sort and pick through the possibilities.

A string quartet had been setting up on the main stage for the last few minutes. Just as it struck up, Joser came over to join Foord and Smithson.

“Thank you,” Smithson told him, “but I don’t dance.”

“Commander,” Joser said, “Director Swann will be making a welcome speech very soon. I thought it might be useful if you were to spend a little more time with him and his party.”

“Useful?”

“He’s holding this reception for us, Commander. I do think we might….”

Foord reluctantly complied, and Smithson was left alone, still pondering. That was how he came to devise the thing which dropped out of the Charles Manson’s ventral bay which now sped towards Horus 5.

•

Foord looked round at Cyr and Smithson. “Commence launch procedures, please.”

From a series of small bays near the ship’s nose, a swarm of slender objects slid out horizontally. From a larger ventral bay a single object, of a much different shape and size, dropped vertically towards the planet. The smaller objects were conventional missiles, released in a swarm on randomly-varying orbits round Horus 5. The large single object was a Breathtaker.

Breathtakers were usually miniature closeup weapons, designed to enter an opponent’s hull and burn away atmosphere; they would consume any gas, whatever it was, and leave behind a perfect vacuum. The object Smithson had put together was, in effect, a large and long-range Breathtaker, but it wasn’t designed for Her. At least, not directly.

The missiles were launched amid a surge of noise and light at the same time as the Breathtaker dropped silently out of the ventral bay. Nobody seriously believed this would stop Her detecting the Breathtaker’s launch—Her superiority in all areas of scanners and signals technology was well known—but they tried it anyway. Similarly, nobody believed any of the missiles would actually get through, but the speed and manner of Her response, how She detected and countered them, would be illuminating.

Foord had originally wanted to launch twenty-nine missiles at Her, one for each Commonwealth solar system. Warming to his theme, he had decided to give each one the name of a Commonwealth system.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Commander,” Cyr had said.

“Why not?”

“We know She’ll almost certainly destroy them. So how will it sound if I keep announcing Horus Destroyed, Anubis Destroyed, Alpha Centauri Destroyed, Bast Destroyed, Sirius Destroyed…”

That had been exactly Foord’s intention; he liked its irony. However, he caught sight of Joser listening attentively. “Yes, all right, I see what you mean.”

“…Isis Destroyed, Aquila Destroyed, Vega Destroyed…”

“Yes, all right. We’ll just number them, Cyr.”

“One to twenty-nine, Commander?”

“One to twenty-eight. Keep one back.” He glanced at Joser. “The Commonwealth always keeps something back.”

Not yet under power, the Breathtaker dropped down through miles of Horus 5’s thickening atmospheric soup, through reds and purples and ochres. It had onboard motors, but it looked nothing like a missile. Its motors would take it towards Her, but it would never make impact. What it did would not be aimed directly at Her; only the result of what it did.

Smithson had devised and built it in a hurry, and could not, of course, test it. As far as anyone knew, nothing like it had been used before. It might fail to work, or it might work and still be destroyed by Her. If She destroyed it, it might, like the missiles, provide some insights into Her abilities. If it failed to work, it might still leave Her wondering: was its failure genuine or double-bluff?

On the Bridge screen the Breathtaker started to glow. Foord watched it fall further and further until the swirling atmosphere of Horus 5 swallowed it.

A few minutes later, Cyr said “Commander, we’ve received the first confirmation.”

“Thank you, Cyr.”

The Breathtaker was preset to descend to the middle levels of Horus 5’s atmosphere, to send its first confirmation to the Charles Manson, and then to fire its motors and commence a low-level orbit of the planet which, in about ten hours, would take it to a point directly below Her.

It was a large matt black sphere, made of heavy overlapping plates and designed to withstand the pressures found in the middle atmospheric levels of a gas giant. It contained hundreds of small Breathtakers, and a crude but large thermonuclear device. When it completed its low-level orbit and was directly underneath Her, it would send its second confirmation; the thermonuclear device would detonate and the Breathtakers, augmented and amplified by the blast, would smash a temporary vacuum in part of Horus 5’s atmosphere, a shaped vacuum, long and thin, pointing up at Faith. Into it would rush some of the liquid metal hydrogen which existed at Horus 5’s lower levels. The vacuum would very quickly be closed as Horus 5’s atmosphere rushed in to fill it, but by then, if the theory worked, a large slug of liquid metal hydrogen would be accelerated through the vacuum, directly at Her. The vacuum would act like a giant coil gun, miles long.

Maybe it wouldn’t work; maybe it would work but miss; maybe it would work but Her defensive fields—flickerfields—would hold it. Whatever happened, it would be singular: worthy of Her, and of Smithson. If She survived, which Foord fully expected, it would still leave Her wondering. That is, if whatever lived inside Her thought that way.

Joser filtered down the light from the Bridge screen a little more, and time passed quietly; the missiles and Breathtaker would need ten hours to reach Her. One by one each of the Bridge officers wound down his or her routine tasks, and communications with crew members on other parts of the ship gradually tailed off. The ship hung at rest relative to Horus 5; it was closed to communications from outside, and its parts were closed off from each other, as were those who inhabited it.

It waited, serene and invincible. As long as the parts which made up its whole continued to believe they didn’t need or care for each other, the whole could never be destroyed.

8

An hour passed uneventfully.

“Kaang,” Foord said, “if you want some rest, it would be better if you took it now. We’ll need you later, when the missiles start reaching Her.”

“Thank you, Commander, but I’d rather stay. She may not wait until later.”

“It could be hours,” Foord said, with a trace of irritation. “And do you intend to keep the ship on manual?”

“Yes, Commander. You know I prefer manual. I’m faster than the computers.”

She spoke as if explaining housekeeping arrangements; on any other subject, if she had an opinion at all, she would have been more hesitant and probably wrong. Foord let it pass. Whatever else She has, he thought, She doesn’t have a pilot like Kaang. Nobody does, not even the other eight Outsiders.

Across the Bridge, he and Cyr made brief and unexpected eye contact, and realised they were both remembering the same thing: the day Kaang first joined them.

•

Although it could fly in planetary atmospheres, the Charles Manson—like all nine Outsiders—had been built and fitted out in Earth orbit, to preserve secrecy. After its first proving flight, it was kept in orbit to receive its pilot for the second, and definitive, proving flight. When Kaang was brought up by orbital shuttle to join them, they knew of her by reputation; but they were disappointed at the pleasant, but unremarkable, young woman who entered the Bridge and reported for duty.

After the usual formalities, she smiled hesitantly at Foord as she took her place and reminded him—inconsequentially, it seemed at the time—that this was to be the definitive proving flight. Thahl, who was interim pilot, offered to take her through the controls, but she politely declined; if, she said, it was satisfactory to Foord, she would prefer to begin immediately. He agreed, and what followed was almost beyond his belief. She took the ship out of orbit and flew it, not like a sixteen-hundred-foot heavy cruiser, but like a single-seat interceptor. She made it pitch and somersault, roll and yaw, turn in its own length, and almost turn itself inside out. She switched through the array of drives from ion to magnetic to photon to nuclear to ion, from ninety percent to rest and back to ninety percent in each of them, until it seemed ready to collide with itself. She played it like a virtuoso would play a perfect instrument, to the highest level of its performance; the closest to both its perfection and its destruction. For two hours she kept it exactly balanced between the two, on the edge of fulfilling or losing the new life she had shown it. It was sublime, and terrifying. And when it was over, she resumed the hesitant smiles and awkward commonplaces.

That was seven years ago, when he had first taken command of his ship. Since then, he had learnt only three things about Kaang. First, where computers made millions of low-level calculations every second, she could jump them intuitively to see patterns; so could all good military pilots, but she was always faster, and always right. Second, the Department wanted her as pilot on the Albert Camus, the leadship of the Outsider Class, but she had declined politely; she had always, she said, wanted to serve on Foord’s ship. (He’d once asked her why. Embarrassed, she said it was because he understood she was only a pilot, and nothing more).

And that was the third thing he knew about her. Apart from her abilities as pilot, she gave him nothing of any use. She was almost worthless to him.

•

Two more hours passed uneventfully. Cyr broke the silence every few minutes with status reports on the missiles: they were all launched accurately and did not, so far, require any additional guidance or in-flight correction. A long way below them, the Breathtaker continued to plough through the heaving middle levels of Horus 5’s atmosphere. The life-forms around it, who tinted the air and who might be sentient, watched it quizzically as it thundered past them. It would kill some of them when it started functioning, a fact which concerned Foord, but not enough to decide against using it.

“Cyr?”

“The Breathtaker is on course and on schedule, Commander; just over seven hours to go. And functioning perfectly.” She glanced at Smithson.

Foord looked at the beaker on his chairarm; it was quite steady. Conceitedly, he thought it important not to look too much at the headups on the Bridge screen. If something happened, he didn’t want to look like he’d been waiting for it. So when it did, he wasn’t; he missed the first warning flicker of headup displays on the screen.

“Commander,” Joser said, “missiles Three, Eleven and Eighteen are gone.”

“How?”

“They’re just not there anymore. If She fired on them, we didn’t detect it.”

“Any pattern to it?”

“Not that we can see. They’re all on random orbits, and they weren’t close together. It seems as random as their launch pattern. And whatever She did, we didn’t detect it.”

“Yes, you said that. It’s still data, so no doubt your people will analyse it.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Thank you. You can turn the alarms off now…and Joser, this is likely to happen again. Don’t sound the alarms each time.”

Two hours passed; then “Ten, Fourteen and Fifteen have gone, Commander. No attack on them was detected.”

Thirty-five minutes later, one more. Ten minutes, two more. Two hours, and getting closer to impact, two more. Fifteen minutes, and another seven. Fifty-five minutes, three more.

They tried, unsuccessfully, to discern some mathematical progression in the times and numbers of their destruction, or some spatial pattern determining which ones were destroyed, and how they were destroyed. Nothing. Especially about how they were destroyed.

Foord tried to tell himself that it was still data, that they could still analyse it and draw conclusions. But it wasn’t, and they couldn’t. She had given them nothing. She had stayed silent and shrouded, and yet twenty-one of their missiles, so far, were gone. This isn’t a simple military engagement. It’s already stranger than that, and will get stranger still.

“And the Breathtaker?”

“Still exactly on schedule and course, Commander. Now ninety-one minutes to go.”

Foord frowned slightly.

“Are all the readings from the Breathtaker satisfactory, Cyr?”

“Yes, Commander. Atmospheric pressure is well within its tolerance, the turbulence hasn’t deflected it, and all its onboard systems are functioning.”

“I see.”

The Breathtaker was beginning to worry him. He still assumed that She would destroy it, but he hadn’t expected it to get so far without apparent detection or response. If it got much further he might start thinking it could succeed, and then the engagement would end early—something he didn’t want for a number of reasons, all of them ambiguous. Or, if She did respond, it might be something unreadable and patternless, as with the missiles. As with Her visits to Commonwealth solar systems. As with everything She did.

It was like throwing a stone into water, and watching it sink without ripples.

“Joser—”

“If it’s about the Breathtaker, Commander, we’ve scanned the entire length of its projected path since its launch.”

“Like you did with the missiles,” Cyr muttered.

“Even She,” Joser continued, still speaking to Foord, “might find it difficult to put any beam on the Breathtaker through all that atmosphere.”

“Thank you, Joser.” Foord noted the Might, but let it pass. “Cyr, any further observations?”

“No, Commander.”

Another hour passed. Five more missiles went, and then two; the last two. The Breathtaker continued to plough its way through Horus 5’s lower atmosphere with bovine unconcern—an unconcern matched, apparently, only by Her. Suddenly time was running out.

“Breathtaker’s due to detonate in six minutes,” Cyr said. Foord nodded.

“She’s going to move,” Kaang announced. She looked around, aghast at the flurry of activity this remark had produced, and added lamely “I’m sorry, I was talking aloud. I mean thinking aloud. I mean, I think She’s going to move. I mean, She must know it’s there… ”

The Bridge of the Charles Manson had many kinds of silence, for use on different occasions. The one which now lengthened around Kaang was the shape of pursed lips.

“It’s fine,” Foord said, eventually. “And I agree, She must have detected it. We never made it to be undetectable.”

“Even if She hasn’t detected it yet, She can hardly fail to when it starts making holes in the atmosphere and shooting bits of Horus 5 at Her. Can She? And then, all She has to do…” Joser trailed away.

“All She has to do is outrun it, which She probably can, and watch the slug of hydrogen lose momentum and dribble back to where it came from. We never expected it to succeed. We expected it to make Her respond, and make Her wonder.”

Of course we did, said the silence on the Bridge. The Breathtaker was a powerful weapon, but crude and unproven, and easily avoided. In fact, if it could only survive another few minutes, and if Smithson’s theory and cobbling-together worked, an absolutely devastating weapon. But easily avoided.

Cyr spoke something into one of her command needlemikes, and after a moment nodded.

“The Breathtaker has sent its second confirmation. It’s in position, directly underneath Her.”

“Arm it, please,” Foord said.

Cyr touched a sequence of panels, and looked up at him.

“The arming signal has been sent and received, Commander. Detonation in two minutes.”

“Now She’ll move,” Kaang whispered.

But She didn’t. Another minute passed, somehow.

Now perhaps She’ll move, thought Foord. He shot a glance at Joser, who was now the focus of a nest of command needlemikes. Joser shook his head; She continued to do nothing, or nothing detectable. Foord frowned—something he was now beginning to do regularly—but made no further comment.

“Forty-five seconds to detonation,” said Cyr.

It would have been a good moment for Joser to hit the alarms and announce a sudden change in Her position, or the sudden approach of a swarm of unidentified objects, but none of this happened. They entered the last thirty seconds, then the last ten, and Cyr started counting down. At Five, Joser said “It’s gone, Commander! Like the missiles, no detectable attack but there’s nothing there.”

“Zero.” Cyr said. Then, “No detonation. There’s nothing there.”

Joser turned to Smithson. “I don’t know what She did, but your weapon is gone.”

“Then,” Smithson said, “we should both be disappointed. Me, because my weapon is gone. You, because you don’t know what She did.”

Joser did not reply. He couldn’t; he was hitting the alarms.

“Unidentified object approaching, Commander.”

“That’s better,” Foord said, and genuinely meant it. “What, where, how many and how long to impact?”

“If its speed stays unchanged, just over nine minutes. Apparently a single object. Position 06-04-08 and closing. Travelling on low ion power, from the direction of Her last position. Readings suggest a missile, but a large one, about three times the size of those we launched. More results are coming in, and we should have a visual any moment.”

If; Apparently; Suggest; About; Should Have. Cyr was right, thought Foord. Mediocre. The weakest of us, in the area where She’s the strongest.

“Thank you. Please superimpose the visual, and give me the rest later. Kaang, ion drive, please, at forty percent in reverse for ten seconds; no more. Just move us further out, and hold.”

If the ion drive made any noise, it was not enough to be heard above the soft and, as always, discreet murmur of the alarms. If it produced any emission from the outlets around the ship’s snout, it was not enough to be noticed on the forward section of the Bridge screen, which would have filtered it out anyway. And if it produced any sensation of movement—which objectively it did not, because the gravity compensators would have dealt with it—it was only the illusion of the ship standing still for ten seconds while the red screen image of Horus 5 receded.

“It’s changed course to match our movement, Commander,” Joser said, “but it hasn’t changed speed. Eight minutes forty seconds to impact.”

“Thank you. Another ten seconds on ion drive at forty percent, please, Kaang. This time to starboard.”

Again the object matched them, again without changing speed.

“Here’s the visual, Commander,” Joser said.

On the screen directly ahead, a hole opened in the face of Horus 5. It was a black rectangular section of space, as though punched through the planet by some industrial machine, and in the middle of it floated a featureless grey sphere.

“Just over eight minutes to impact, Commander, and I have a full set of results. I’ll put them up on the screen.”

Foord studied the superimposed rectangle carefully. Joser’s text scrolled along its lower edge. Unasked, the screen began generating a series of schematics of the object from other angles: ventral plan, dorsal plan, side view, rear view. It wasn’t a sphere—that was only an illusion created by its angle of approach, which was head on to the Charles Manson and closing—but a cylinder. A long, thick cylinder whose snout was blunt, whose rear bulged in a manner suggesting both photon and ion drives, but whose exterior was blank and featureless. While Foord gazed at it the alarms continued to murmur on the Bridge and throughout the ship, but the normal onboard business of the ship was still conducted as quietly and calmly as if they were silent. If anything, more quietly and calmly.

“Good,” Foord said eventually. “Joser, your results suggest that it’s three times bigger than one of our standard missiles, but seven times heavier. So what’s happening inside it?”

“I’m sorry, Commander, the interior’s too heavily shrouded.”

“But your people are working to penetrate the shroud.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And what else can you tell me?”

“The hull is a conventional mixture of alloys and ceramics. It’s on ion drive at the moment, but seems also to possess photon drive. Its guidance system is obviously active and self-programming. And She must have launched it at us only a few minutes after we launched our missiles at Her.”

“Thank you, but most of that’s on the screen. Do you have anything to say about how She kept this hidden from us until now?”

“I’m sorry, Commander.”

“He means No,” Cyr whispered.

“Cyr, you have about…seven and a half minutes. Particle beams first, then closeup weapons. Kaang, hold us at this position for now. Joser, please turn off those alarms.”

The Charles Manson’s particle beams were dull blue, the colour of bruises. They stabbed out once, in two parallel and almost-solid lines. They reached the object, but what followed was unexpected. It threw up a flickerfield to meet the beams, a shimmering white aura which enveloped it. It lasted only for the nanoseconds of impact and no more—no vessel, even Faith or the Charles Manson, could sustain a defensive forcefield for any longer than the bare minimum, the millionths of a second needed to survive—but instead of the inevitable blinding concussion as the beams hit the field and either stabbed through it or were deflected, the field merely assumed their shade of dark blue and sank back into the object. The silence which followed should not have lasted so long.

“Six minutes forty seconds,” Joser said. “Still closing. No variation in course or speed.”

It was the first recorded appearance of a flickerfield which was energy absorbent and not energy repellent, and it robbed Foord of nearly half his weaponry.

“Cyr?”

“Her flickerfields are like ours, Commander, they only repel energy. You’ve seen recordings of Her other engagements.”

“I know. So why has that thing got an energy absorbent field?”

“For whatever it’s going to do next. Which won’t be just to make impact.”

“So don’t…”

“I know, Commander. Don’t use beam weapons.”

“But everything else.”

“Six minutes ten seconds to impact,” Joser said.

He knows it won’t be impact, Foord thought, but he’s too sloppy to think of another word.

“Use everything else, Cyr. Everything.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Imagine it’s some frightened kid at Blentport.”

She glanced at him, but did not reply. She was already sending orders through a nest of command needlemikes which had grown up around her.

“Five minutes fifty seconds to impact.” How, thought Foord, did we suddenly get so short of time?

Without needing any formal confirmation, the ship—having heard the conversation, and exercising its usual discretion—placed its entire resources at Cyr’s disposal. As Foord became increasingly polite and punctilious during a crisis, Cyr became increasingly passionless; Foord’s last remark, which he was already regretting, had been easy for her to ignore. Under her direction the Charles Manson turned the whole of its conventional weapons array on the approaching object, Cyr’s curiously flat voice ordering in rapid succession the use of harmonic guns, friendship guns, tanglers, disruptors, plasma clouds, and finally missiles: missiles with conventional explosive warheads, with micronuclear warheads, with bionics-disruptive and hull-corrosive warheads. And one by one, the object’s flickerfield met and repelled them, in a series of jarring concussions which the Bridge screen duly filtered out.

“Nothing’s reached it so far, Commander,” Cyr said. “I can try again, but…”

“Four minutes ten seconds to impact.”

“…but its flickerfield was reinforced by what it absorbed from our beams.”

“Thank you, Cyr. Discontinue for now, but have closeup weapons ready. We’ll resume this at close quarters.”

“They’re ready now, Commander.”

“Thank you. Kaang, when I give the word, take us towards it; ion drive, fifty percent.”

“Standing by, Commander.”

“But not yet…I think something’s happening to it. Joser?”

There was no reply. Foord glanced up.

“Joser?”

“Commander, the object is slowing down.”

“Deliberately? Or is it damaged?”

“I think…Commander, I think we may have hit it. I’m getting readings which suggest it may have sustained internal damage. Its drive emissions are…”

“One moment, please. Cyr?”

“None of our weapons reached it, Commander. I don’t think it’s damaged.”

“Neither do I. I think it’s slowing deliberately. But why?”

“Commander,” Joser continued, “it’s almost at rest now. And its drive emissions are clearly…”

“Get us out of here, Kaang! Photon drive, ninety percent, random evasion!” His voice sounded strange. It wouldn’t carry.

“Have you seen the screen, Commander?” Thahl asked.

“Kaang, I said Get us out of here!”

“Out of where, Commander? Where are we?”

“The screen, Commander,” Thahl said loudly. His voice sounded strange too. “Look at the screen.”

Apart from the object, which was still dead ahead, the Bridge screen was empty. Horus 5 was gone. The stars were gone. The distance between the stars, and the ability to measure it, was gone.

Some of the Bridge instruments sounded failure or overload alarms. Others stopped registering altogether, and fell silent. Elsewhere around the Bridge, needlemikes and navigation computers and scanners and sensors were jabbering impossibilities at each other; ordered to disprove what had happened, they were pouring out proof in stream-of-consciousness torrents. The stars and planets were gone, not merely as electronic images on the main screen or as phosphor-dot smears on computer displays but as solid objects, as sources of gravity and energy and positional reference. They were gone.

The size of the universe was the distance between the Charles Manson and the now-stationary object facing it.

From outside, a single concussion shook the ship. It was repeated, repeated again, and became a continuous vibration. It was soft and low-register, as discreet as one of the ship’s own alarms, and pitched well below the threshold of actual discomfort; but to the ship, it was more profoundly wrong than the stars’ apparent absence. Very little of what went on outside the Charles Manson should ever have been felt inside. The ship tried to define the new situation—it couldn’t fight what it couldn’t define—by telling its sentience cores to analyse what had happened, and they variously shouted, warbled, beeped and murmured back at it their inability to do so. For a moment the Bridge, unthinkably, became deafening, then the ship told them to stop. It was at least able to do that, but not much more. If it had been more sentient it would have defined what it felt as human panic, while the humans and humanoids who inhabited it remained inhumanly calm.

“Presumably,” Foord said, “that object has put something like a force-field around us.”

“Around us and itself, Commander,” Joser said. “It’s about ten times more powerful than our flickerfields, and…”

“Ten times?”

“…and it’s continuous. It’s blocking everything from outside—light, gravity, radio waves, X-rays, infrared, ultraviolet… For all I know, the universe could have ended the other side of it.”

On the screen, what had been space was now a confined space, a compartment they shared with Her missile, and with nothing else; depthless black and infinitely close. Joser’s voice still sounded strange. So did Foord’s. So did everybody’s. The reason was—

“That vibration, Joser. What is it?”

“Similar to a tractor beam or motive beam, but not powerful enough to damage the hull, or to activate our flickerfields. Very low register. And very localised.”

“I see,” Foord said slowly, covering for the fact that he didn’t, yet. There was something, but it was still unclear.

“What do you mean, localised?” Smithson spoke across Foord, completely ignoring him. “Answer carefully. Localised where?”

“At the stern, I think.”

“Fuck what you think. Localised where?”

“At the stern.”

“Smithson?…” Foord began.

But Smithson was already roaring orders down several needlemikes at once. He looked round briefly at Foord, snarled “No time. Work it out yourself.”

The vibration ceased. There was another concussion from outside. Then it resumed, louder, and this time there was a second noise accompanying it, a noise from inside the ship. A noise like the scraping of fingernails down a blackboard. Unless someone actually was scraping their fingernails down a blackboard, there was only one explanation for such a noise.

It came from the stern.

“Of course,” Foord said. “The MT Drive. That beam is trying to activate our MT Drive.” His stomach was knotting and clenching, but he spoke calmly.

Across the Bridge, Smithson started clapping two temporarily unoccupied hands together in a heavily sarcastic, and moist, parody of applause.

Foord was irritated. “It’s your MT Drive,” he told Smithson. “She’s got Her hand in your clothes. Do something.”

The noise from the stern got steadily louder.

“I already am,” Smithson muttered. He was now no longer merely operating his controls but fighting them.

The MT Drive struggled to obey Her tractor beam and activate itself, and those on the Bridge struggled not to think about what would happen if it succeeded. The noise from the stern was still increasing. It penetrated even the needlemike circuitry, distorting voices to rasping bass and overlaying them with static; communication would soon be impossible. It activated the Prayer Wheels (the stasis generators used to contain the MT Drive, so called because they were wheel-shaped, and made things around them stand still) which were essential to the Drive’s activation.

A convulsion rolled the length of the ship, as though the burrows and corridors had become a pinball machine with giant ballbearings. Round the Bridge six glasses of inhibitor fluid fell simultaneously to the floor and smashed, were replaced by the chairarm dispensers with six more which also fell to the floor and smashed, and were replaced with six more. Smithson fought back and gradually regained control. The convulsion died away, but it would be the first of many. And from the stern, the noise of the MT Drive’s awakening continued unabated.

“Cyr,” Foord shouted, in the last few seconds during which he could be sure of being heard, “whatever happens, keep all weapons powered. I think She may fly past us, into the system.”

“Commander?”

“I said, Keep all weapons powered. I think She may—”

The second convulsion began. And the the third, and the fourth, rolling up and down the length of the ship until they met and became continuous.

When ships activated their MT Drives inside solar systems—there were only five known cases, all of them years ago—they disappeared without survivors or wreckage; they were never heard of again, even as rumours. The consensus view, which was necessarily tentative since MT had been invented almost by accident, was that they had contracted instantly to mathematically dimensionless points. Every MT Drive was now loaded with inbuilt failsafes to ensure it could never activate if any one of an array of sensors registered planetary or other large bodies anywhere near. Ships’ processes and sentience cores deferred to the failsafes because they were infallible, and an equivalent of instinct; but not this time. This time an attack had come disguised perfectly, as a legitimate command, and they were going to obey it.

And when they did, and the MT Drive was activated, She would kill Her forcefield and let the universe and its gravity and radiation come flooding back in, and the Charles Manson would go wherever the other five went. A good weapon to start the engagement, thought Smithson sourly, as he fought for control. Like my Breathtaker, imaginative and singular. But better, because it fucking works.

To the MT Drive, which had no motive other than to function legitimately, everything was at first routine and normal. It awakened in the stern, found itself the recipient of what could only be a legitimate order to activate, and checked and rechecked each of its failsafes to ensure there were no planetary or other large bodies within the stipulated radius; then checked them again. Once these preliminaries were completed, it sent a stream of neural impulses to the ship’s other sentience cores (weapons, drives, life support, scanners, communications, damage control, flickerfields) giving them formal notice of its activation and requesting them to prepare appropriately; and then it paused, expecting the usual acknowledgements but receiving none. Smithson had blocked each impulse, negating and countermanding and, where necessary, burning out synapses altogether.

The Drive could never be argued into disbelieving its basic imperatives, and Smithson didn’t try to, so at first it was aware of him only as a procedural obstacle; but when he moved from blocking to counterattack, striking through his network of emergency overrides at the core of the Drive itself, it became aware of him as a set of motives. It considered him, and he it. They came together, touching intimately along their interface, and quietly agreed that they shared nothing except the need to obliterate each other. Then they moved apart and began again, but this time without rules. It was no longer a game of procedural chess, and the Charles Manson was no longer their chessboard, but their weapon.

While the alien tractor beam continued to play softly over the stern, feeling for the MT Drive like some molester’s fingers fumbling with zips and buttons—and while some parts of the ship, ambiguously, stopped resisting and started opening themselves to it—the Charles Manson began to falter. It saw its own physical and mental processes in turmoil, and since those processes were its idea of itself, it became the turmoil. It listened to the Drive telling it to cut life support from the Bridge and destroy Smithson, and to Smithson telling it to isolate and burn out the Drive, and found itself speaking those orders with its own voice while it listened to them.

The interface between Smithson and the Drive was longer than the ship, as bloodvessels when unravelled are longer than a body, and the ship knew that the interface was the scene of a terminal conflict. What remained of its lower-level systems tried to sound damage control and life support alarms, but with no more force than the reflex not to die of something dying. Smithson and the MT Drive swept through it like two infections, destroying it only as a by-product of their attempts to destroy each other, and that was the last thing the ship realised before they swamped it and its consciousness ended; that, and the fact that if it ever existed again, it would only be as one of them and not as both.

The object She had sent became suddenly inert on all wavelengths. The tractor beam fell away. The convulsions faded. The MT Drive shut down. Horus 5 and the starfield returned to the Bridge screen. Smithson had succeeded, and Foord opened his mouth to breathe again, but

“Commander,” Joser said. “She’s coming for us. Position 08-07-08 and closing rapidly.”

Time started moving again, rushing back into the ship like thoughts after a coma. Foord could actually hear the seconds rushing back: they blew through the corridors and burrows, at first slowly then faster. The next phase of the engagement was already growing out of the body of the last.

“I’m handing back what’s left of your ship, Commander,” Smithson said. Foord had never heard him sound tired before. “Most of the damage will be within the capacity of the self-repair systems, but not the MT Drive. That, you can forget. You’ll never be able to use it again.”

“Position 07-04-08, and closing rapidly.”

“Smithson…”

“I know, I know. Time. I’d finished, anyway.”

Time. Blowing cold through the corridors. Smithson had saved the ship, but it had also partly died. It had lost one of its sentience cores and one of its drives; it was now a ship for which time could run out, like it ran out for other, ordinary, ships.

“Commander! She’s 06-03-06 and closing.”

“Yes. How much time?”

“Ninety seconds, if…”

“Thahl, Cyr, feed the closeup weapons and ignore everything else—scanners, life support , drives, everything.”

He turned to face the forward section of the Bridge screen. Nothing was visible, yet. But it wouldn’t be. She was shrouded.

“Fifty seconds, Commander.”

“No, Joser. No more countdowns. Hit the alarms when there’s twenty seconds to go. That’s all.”

She continued to approach at high speed, but was still below the horizon of Horus 5. The screen continued to show Horus 5, but no simulation of Her approach; the scanners were operating at less than twenty percent capacity, and by the time they generated any simulations, She would be on top of them. The Charles Manson continued to bleed off what remained of its resources to feed its closeup weapons. It had done well. It had already grown them carefully back to near-optimum, like a crippled animal growing a perfect set of claws for its final defence.

The alarms started murmuring.

Foord heard himself thinking No. This isn’t what She wants. We must do what She wants.

“Cyr, cancel my orders! Stand down all closeup weapons.”

“Commander?”

“Thahl, stand down everything except the Bridge screen. Leave us inert. No drives, life support, scanners…” When Thahl looked up inquiringly, Foord snapped “Binary Gate. Work it out yourself. Cyr, cancel closeup weapons, now! I mean it!”

A roaring swamped the Bridge and something rose over the horizon of Horus 5.

It was a patch of empty space. Just like the empty space around it, but something was wrong. This was like a patch of empty space from another day, or seen from another angle, and it came towards them

paused, and glanced at them

and rushed past. Foord swore as the forward screen erupted with light and a deep violet afterimage settled across his eyes like a piece of hot iron, and when his sight returned the screen was still shuffling filters and the Charles Manson was left bobbing in the wake of whatever had passed.

The inert missile had been allowed to lay close by the Charles Manson ever since Smithson disabled the MT Drive; there was neither the time nor the resources to destroy it. As She came over the horizon, it quietly disappeared, collapsing itself down to nothing.

She was gone, too. Past them, and into Horus system.

There were several distinct kinds of silence. Joser’s was one of inadequacy, Kaang’s of puzzlement, Thahl’s of no comment, Cyr’s of accusation (You said She’d go closeup, Commander. You said.) and Smithson’s, of something unspoken but obscene. Put together, they made an ugly shape in the dark air of the Bridge.

Foord laughed, softly and knowingly. At least, that was what he intended. The sound he actually made was high-pitched and uneasy, which surprised him because he felt less uneasy now. He was beginning to understand Her, though only in minor things, and only in penny pieces.

“It’s alright,” he said; then, catching sight of the glances around the Bridge, he went on quickly “I mean it, it’s alright. This part is over, that’s all… Joser.”

“Commander?”

“Would you please confirm something for me? She should have started to slow down by now.”

“Slow down? But She’s just got past us and into the system! She’ll be heading for Sakhra!”

“Your scanners won’t have enough power to put an exact value on it,” Foord continued, as if Joser had said nothing, “but there should be a perceptible slowing.”

More glances around the Bridge.

“We must go after Her,” Smithson said. “I need to start damage repairs now.”

“Commander,” Joser said suddenly, “You were right. It doesn’t make any apparent sense, but She is decelerating.”

“And,” Foord resumed, “She’ll continue to decelerate. I expect Her to switch down from photon to ion drive within the next minute; though there’s no need for a countdown, thank you, Joser.”

He gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.

“She isn’t going to Sakhra, not yet. She knows we can’t follow until we’ve made repairs. She knows this will be fought all the way back to Sakhra, so She’ll wait for us. When we’re ready we’ll find Her there, in the Belt, waiting. Now…. Thahl, please cancel battle stations, and go back to secondary alert. Smithson, how long will a full damage repair operation take?”

“Four hours if we hurry, Commander.”

“Take five, and don’t hurry.”

“You realise the MT Drive is permanently down until we make port again?” He hesitated on Until; Foord knew he had been about to say Unless.

“Yes, I realise that.”

“And you’re serious about not hurrying?”

“Yes. Five hours, six hours, She’ll wait.”

“Commander,” Joser said, “She’s just switched down from photon to ion drive. Still decelerating, and heading into the Belt.”

“Good…. Smithson, we owe you.” He left a short pause, so Smithson could play out his usual game.

“You should have seen it earlier, Commander, what She was doing. I can’t always be the first to see things.”

“I did see it, eventually.”

“Eventually.”

“Tell me, do you think that inside Her there was someone like me who asked someone like you to think up something like your Breathtaker? Something unusual, to mark the start of the engagement?”

“You’d better hope not, Commander. Because if there was, Her version worked.”

“It didn’t, because you saw it in time and disabled it. Perhaps it was like ours. Not made to succeed, just to make us wonder.”

“You’re wrong, Commander, and you’re self-indulgent. Ours got snuffed out, and we don’t even know how. Hers started working, and we only just stopped it. Don’t have any illusions about what happened here. It was a near disaster.”

The alarms stopped murmuring. Red telltales disappeared one by one from the consoles, impact harnesses retracted, and the Bridge lighting increased from near-darkness to its more customary twilight. Thahl, Smithson and the others began implementing damage repair operations. Muted conversations between the Bridge and other parts of the ship restarted, like conversations at a restaurant after an altercation.

“Commander,” Smithson said, “how did you know She wouldn’t attack ?”

This time, when Foord laughed, it came out precisely as he intended.

“Because we were defenceless.”

“You gambled that She wouldn’t attack if we made ourselves defenceless.”

“Yes. She even glanced at us, to make sure. Did you see?”

“You gambled the ship that She wouldn’t…”

“Undefended civilian targets, She doesn’t attack. Undefended warships, who make themselves undefended? Yes, I gambled. Work out the odds for yourself. But only for the next five hours or so. Then we go after Her.”

•

Four hours fifty-one minutes later, Thahl announced completion of damage repairs. Foord immediately insisted on a further series of external working parties to check the hull’s integrity, even though the original repairs included external working parties, and even though the hull’s sensors confirmed no breach of integrity. He also requested a further systems overhaul to ensure the MT Drive was irrevocably dead and could never, as Smithson said, be reactivated. These operations took a further eighty minutes before they were completed to Foord’s satisfaction. Almost completely restored, he told himself; except, of course, that one of its nine sentience cores, the one controlling the MT Drive, was dead. Along with the Drive itself.

He spoke to the ship’s Codex, the agregation of its sentience cores, to verify that it understood. It told him it did, that nine were now eight, that one was amputated, and the eight would go on without it.

Status reports were taken, battle stations resumed, and the Charles Manson moved off for the Belt at an unhurried thirty percent ion speed. It arrived without incident and found Her waiting—waiting almost politely, just as Foord had expected—and the second phase of the engagement began.