Faith

1

The weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen.

Cyr sighed; she had been grooming her nails. She rested her right hand palm down on a panel, and pressed. The Charles Manson’s particle beams lanced out. Target Destroyed, said the headup display redly; it was referring to AN-4044, a minor asteroid near the outer rim of the Belt, scarcely larger than a small city and only just large enough to merit a classification number. Faith had been using it as cover for the last five minutes, which was all the weapons core had instructions to allow. Now it was vaporised, neatly and hygienically, by the beams; reduced to almost nothing. She was running again, and the Bridge screen simulation depicted Her movements. She was too distant for a visual, and in any case was still shrouded. It did not matter. Shrouding could not hide Her drive emissions, despite Her occasional half-hearted attempts to disguise them.

Kaang now joined in. Her instructions, like Cyr’s, had been pared down by repetition to an unfailing routine. The manoeuvre jets fountained and the ion drive played up and down the register as she made the Charles Manson parallel exactly Faith’s ducking and weaving. The Charles Manson’s particle beams had superior range, and Kaang kept Her always at an exact distance.

For six hours they had bombarded Her monotonously through the Belt. It seemed like six days. She had not succeeded in hitting back, though the constant use of Her flickerfields would be draining Her more than the constant beam-firings were draining the Charles Manson. Her counterattacks had been irregular, and were dwindling.

Cyr fired the beams again. Target Reached, said the screen headup. The weapons core predicted where She would go for cover, ignoring the evasive manoeuvres, and aimed the beams accordingly. As usual, the prediction was correct, and as usual Her flickerfields held; just. She made cover again, a small unclassified asteroid this time, and the weapons core started counting off another five minutes. The headup display dimmed. Kaang brought the ship to rest, still exactly at maximum beam range, and Cyr resumed grooming her nails. It was not a theatrical gesture; there was little else to do. Their tactics had been successful, but grindingly repetitive.

Most asteroid belts were sparse and meagre, but this one was huge, and it teemed. Horus 4 had created it by destroying two, maybe three, giant planets, leaving the Belt crowded with surrealist shapes and quivering with gravity. Its outer rim areas, where they were stalking Her, consisted mainly of smaller and more irregular asteroids, hanging in space at contradictory angles, like rock formations growing out of nothing. Parallax made some of them look so close they were about to collide. Gravity in the Belt was a latticework of forces, near and distant, small and large. The asteroids exerted it on each other, and had it exerted on them by Horus 4 and Horus 5 and the sun Horus. They moved in whole or partial orbits, balancing and counterbalancing each other like one of Foord’s brass clockwork mechanisms.

Smaller asteroids crowded the rim areas of the Belt. Larger asteroids, the largest as big as small planets, crowded the middle. There were so many asteroids that only those about the size of a city, or larger, had classification numbers. Even then, there were hundreds of thousands; and ten times as many unclassified.

Five minutes later the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen. Cyr fired once (Target Destroyed) and twice more (Target Reached) as She started running and Kaang parallelled Her movements. Cyr was about to resume grooming her nails, but this time there was a slight break in the usual pattern. The warning harmonic sounded again, louder.

“Counterattack coming,” Joser said. “She’s charging down our throats, like She did with the Cromwell.”

“That’s the second time in two hours,” Cyr said, with a trace of irritation.

But it was now only a matter of standard procedure. It was dealt with routinely, as on the previous occasion; Foord’s preparations included an array of counters to the Cromwell Manoeuvre. By the time Cyr finished complaining, it was over. The Charles Manson’s weapons had refocussed on Her without difficulty as She rushed towards them; Kaang had matched Her course and speed, but in reverse, to maintain beam range; She had slowed, realising the manoeuvre was compromised, and Cyr had beaten Her off with a succession of beam-firings. Her flickerfields held and She retreated deeper into the Belt, to find fresh cover. Kaang moved them slowly forward, maintaining range. The weapons core started counting another five minutes.

“I wonder,” Kaang said, to nobody in particular, “why Her fields aren’t energy absorbent, like those on that missile?”

“The missile was unmanned,” Joser said. “Maybe energy-absorbent fields are harmful to living things.”

“Are you assuming,” Cyr asked, “that there are living things on that ship?”

“Are you assuming,” Smithson asked, “that it’s a ship?”

“I hardly think,” Foord murmured, “we have time for metaphysics.”

“Yes we do, Commander,” Cyr said. “If it goes on like this, we do. I’ll start on my toenails next.”

Almost unnoticed, one of the ship’s other sentience cores updated the navigation files by deleting various numbered asteroids from the Belt. It was a thoughtful and necessary exercise; the Charles Manson had already rewritten the map of a substantial part of the Belt’s outer rim, and would probably continue to do so. Proper and accurate records had to be kept.

Five minutes later the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen. Her cover was AL-4091, a mid-sized asteroid whose destruction took two beam-firings. She broke and ran, again deeper into the Belt, and Cyr reached Her with four shots before She found cover. Kaang took the Charles Manson forward sufficiently to maintain beam range.

The second phase of the engagement had now lasted six and a half hours. Foord called a short break for status reports; they were duly made and he duly listened, though they revealed nothing more than the quietly satisfactory situation of which he was already well aware.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “No further orders.”

He nodded to Cyr, and the weapons core started counting another five minutes. Allowing for the taking of status reports, it was eight minutes elapsed time when the core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. The break in the rhythm was noticeable, like a delayed heartbeat, but the iterative cycle easily reimposed its pattern. The warning harmonic warbled politely, and the headup displays and target simulations reappeared on the Bridge screen. Her cover was AK-5004, another mid-sized asteroid whose destruction took two firings. She broke and ran, still going deeper, and Cyr reached Her with five shots before She found fresh cover. Kaang parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. Another five-minute count began.

“Cyr.”

“Commander?”

“If we were Her, how much more of this could we take before the use of our flickerfields started to drain us?”

“Fifty hours before actual danger, but noticeable impairment after thirty.”

“Smithson, can we assume…”

“If She’s a ship like us, and not something else, Her flickerfields are likely to drain Her at a similar rate. Say impairment after thirty hours. But we’ll bore Her to death in ten.”

And that, thought Foord comfortably, would be just as acceptable. He had entered the second phase strangely unaffected by the near-disaster of the first, yet he entered it with the most ordinary and commonplace of strategies: careful, dogged, monotonous, unvarying attrition. After nearly seven hours the advantage it yielded was still only slight; but it was measurable, like a pile of shopkeeper’s pennies. And it was growing, in penny pieces. There had been no sudden realisation that they were the first opponents ever to gain any advantage over Her; like the advantage itself, the realisation came gradually and without drama.

Ironically, the institutional processes to which Foord had been subjected, the learning of conventional methods before being allowed unconventional ones, had often been useful to him. At Horus 5, he had wanted to open with a flourish of the unexpected. In the Belt, he had decided to open with conventional, mind-numbing routine. A free-form battle in the Belt would have played to Her advantages, whereas this monotonous attrition played to one of his—the superior range of their particle beams. And it was working. Even if Her flickerfields didn’t drain Her, She still couldn’t break out of the stalking pattern they had locked on Her; and if they did drain Her, and the pattern could be held for long enough, She would be impaired, perhaps fatally.

“Communication, Commander,” Thahl said.

“I thought I told you we’re accepting no…”

“I think you should accept this one, Commander.”

Thahl pointed at the antiquated microphone which stood incongruously on Foord’s console. Its red Incoming light was glowing. Such microphones were the Department’s standard means of communication. They were voice only—the Department did not do visuals—and carried a dedicated MT channel from Earth; they were not as antiquated as they looked.

“Department of Administrative Affairs to Foord, Charles Manson. Acknowledge, please.”

Foord saw Joser stiffen; then irritated himself by wondering, Did I see it because I was looking for it?

“This is Foord. Identify yourself, please.”

“Clerical Officer Lok, Office of Miscellaneous Vehicles, Department of Administrative Affairs. The Department is sorry to trouble you, Commander; this is a routine procedural matter only. If it’s not convenient…”

“Hold for validations, please.”

Foord glanced at Thahl and Joser, who began checking—Thahl for the source of the signal, Joser for its distinctive embedded signature and its voice pattern. These were three of the validations: the fourth was vocabulary and forms of address.

So far, the fourth appeared to check. In the unlanguage in which the Commonwealth clothed its private parts, the Department dealt with many Affairs, none of them Administrative; it never felt sorrow, or anything else, for those it troubled; the Office of Miscellaneous Vehicles was the Department’s Outsider section; Clerical Officers had more power than generals; and routine procedural matters, were not.

“Commander,” Lok said, “I have a message from the Department. Will you hurry the validations, please?”

“Joser? Thahl?”

”I’m rechecking the voice analysis, Commander,” Joser said.

“Rechecking?”

“It doesn’t completely match Lok’s pattern.”

“Commander, it’s a fake!” Thahl said. “It’s from Her.”

“Cyr, fire before She breaks cover!”

Cyr, swearing loudly, was already doing so. She overrode the five-minute count. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen, but

“Too late, Commander, She’s gone. Out of range. Heading into the Belt on ion drive, high acceleration.”

Foord swore, more softly and less obscenely than Cyr, then subsided. It had only taken Her a second to divert them, but now She might as well have been hours gone.

“Commander,” Kaang said, “I can get Her back in range if we move now.”

“No, not this time. There’s no need.”

“I’m sorry, Commander….No Need?”

Foord glanced at her, surprised. Kaang never questioned tactics; part of their understanding was that she was only a pilot.

“She isn’t running, Kaang, so we don’t need to catch Her. She’ll wait.”

“Commander,” Cyr said, “with respect, I think you should reconsider.”

“What’s Her speed and course, Joser?”

“It’s on the screen, Commander. She’s going into the Belt at sixty percent, but the speed’s dropping.”

“Take us forward on Her course, please, Kaang. Thirty percent.” He turned to Cyr. “You’re right, we can’t just sit here. But we won’t have to chase Her. Now She’s out of range, She’ll wait.”

Like Foord, the Bridge swore softly to itself and subsided.

Kaang quietly engaged ion drive and took them deeper into the Belt. Foord turned an icy gaze on the microphone, whose Incoming light still glowed.

“You can go now” he told it.

There was no reply. The light stayed on.

“I said, You can go now. You aren’t real.”

“Neither are you. Neither is the Department. Neither is the Commonwealth.”

2

Both ships possessed a similar array of drives, and a similar performance in each of them. When they entered the Belt, Kaang had cleverly feinted and doublebluffed Her into range of their beams, but that wasn’t going to happen again. In fact, quite the opposite: the second part of their engagement in the Belt was a reversal of the first.

For ninety minutes, She danced in front of them exactly beyond the reach of their beams, countering even the attempts of Kaang to get Her back in range. She did sideslices and curlicues, rolls and tumbles and even the occasional somersault; She hopped behind asteroids which were just outside beam range, breaking out and running for cover just before they came within range. They still couldn’t see Her—She hadn’t yet decided it was time to unshroud—but they tracked Her path, including the dancing manoeuvres, easily enough through Her drive emissions, as of course She wanted them to. It was deadpan and sly, like a Sakhran might mock a human.

“Bring us to rest, please, Kaang,” Foord said, ninety minutes later. He gazed around the Bridge. “If Kaang can’t get Her back in range, we need something else.”

Kaang carefully refrained from comment, as did Thahl, but the silence of the others was more pointed. He repeated wearily She’ll wait, She’s not running, we don’t have to chase Her. He knew that for certain; one by one, he was adding pieces to the huge clockwork he had designed to engage Her. But he was still shivering from what She had done, how She’d faked a Department call but hadn’t even bothered, apparently, to fake it properly. What if She decided next time to fake it properly?

He needed time, to see if they were affected as badly as he was. To draw out their reactions. But his first attempt was ill-judged.

“She spoke to us in that call,” he said. “She’s never spoken before.”

“She didn’t speak,” Joser said. “It wasn’t Her voice. It was a fake, and not even a very good one.”

“It was good enough,” Smithson said sourly.

Foord tried again.

“She spoke,” he insisted. “She said we aren’t real.”

“Why didn’t She fake it better?” Joser was almost plaintive.

“It was good enough,” Smithson repeated. “It got Her out of range.”

“She should have faked it better.”

“Perhaps,” Cyr said to Joser, spitefully, “it really was the Department.”

“But the voice patterns and signature…”

“They could have been testing you. They’re at least as clever as She is.”

“It said we aren’t real.”

“Then it must have been the Department. Call them back.”

Good, thought Foord. Smithson and Cyr seem unimpaired. Kaang doesn’t count, not in this. Joser is suspect, but always was. So that leaves

“Thahl,” he said. “This was the first time anyone’s got an advantage over Her, and it disappeared because She distracted us...”

“Yes, Commander.”

“…but maybe She let us get an advantage, so She could show us how easily She could make it disappear.”

Thahl looked up sharply at him. “Do you really believe that, Commander?”

“Of course not!” he said, a little too loudly.

There was a silence. Feeling a need to fill it, Foord rushed on.

“Thahl, how did She know the vocabulary and forms of address? Is She able to monitor the Department’s MT channel to us? Because if She is…”

“No, Commander, it’s more likely She monitored the Department’s calls to Director Swann. Sakhra’s a communications beacon at the moment. We could probably monitor it ourselves.”

“Yes, that must be it.”

“I said More Likely, Commander. We can’t be certain.”

Foord didn’t reply. Is he, thought Thahl, waiting for me to make a suggestion, or is he faking? He can be irritating, sometimes.

“Commander, you already decided to kill normal communications. I suggest you kill the Department’s MT channel. It’s as useless as the MT Drive, and for the same reason: She got into it.”

“If we kill that channel, we’re alone. And another part of us goes down.”

“You wanted to be alone when we faced Her. You insisted on it. And as for another part going down…”

As for another part going down, Foord completed what Thahl did not need to say, this is an Outsider. Each of its parts, and each of us, has no perception of needing each other. A Sakhran would know that better than anyone. We can go through each phase of this engagement having limbs lopped off one by one, and still the mouth will bite.

“Yes, you’re right,” Foord said eventually. “Kill the Department’s channel.”

Thahl and Foord briefly made eye contact across the Bridge. Foord was thinking I’m not only unsure how much he’s faking, I’m unsure how much I’m faking. Thahl was thinking the same thing.

“Joser, what’s Her situation?”

“Still heading into the Belt, Commander. Forty percent ion speed and dropping. Position 12-16-14.”

Foord was silent for a minute. Then he smiled.

“Take us back out of the Belt, please, Kaang.”

“Commander?”

“Back the way we came. Ion drive, five percent.” He looked round the Bridge. “Yes, I know. But I want to see what She does about it.”

He looked across at Thahl and mouthed, Nothing is simple.

Foord and Thahl were perhaps the only two people on the Charles Manson who shared anything like trust, but just then they were both unsure.

Thahl looked back across the Bridge at Foord and mouthed, Nothing is real.

The manoeuvre drives fountained. Kaang turned the ship in its own length and commenced a slow, elegant departure towards the rim of the Belt, back in the direction of Horus 5.

A few minutes passed.

“She’s still moving into the Belt, Commander,” Joser said. “Position 14-17-15. But She’s slowing. Like you said,” he added, hopefully.

“Not quite like I said. I’d have expected Her to stop by now. I wonder if we should increase speed? No, let’s not over-embellish...”

Another few minutes passed. The asteroids grew perceptibly smaller and sparser, but the Charles Manson still picked its way through them with the same unhurried delicacy. At only five percent, it would be a long time before they left the Belt; not that they expected to.

“She’s cut Her drives at last, Commander,” Joser said eventually. “But She’s at rest, not following.”

“Joser, watch Her position,” Foord said. “I think She’s going to…”

Foord studied the white dot on the screen showing Her current position. Still just out of range, of course. It wasn’t that She’d stopped—She didn’t need to stop in order to launch weapons—but he had a feeling this would be something unusual.

“Commander, She’s launched something. It’s not shrouded. I’ll have a visual soon.”

•

It was a cone-shaped object, tumbling towards them end over end; about thirty feet long by twenty feet wide at its base, said the Bridge screen. It offered no resistance to probes, and the probes showed it to be quite empty. It was not travelling under power (though outlets at its base indicated pulse motors) and there were no guidance or homing signals, so the screen concluded it must be on a preset course. As if to confirm this, it fired its motors briefly on-off to avoid a cloud of asteroid debris, then resumed its course towards them.

And, although the screen did not add any comment about this feature, its colour was pink; bright, nursery pink.

Comical and conical, Foord thought; still pisstaking.

“Stay at rest for now, please,” he said. “Joser, the screen says there are no guidance signals.”

“That’s right, Commander: no guidance or homing signals. And ETA is ninety-nine seconds.”

“So no guidance, and apparently—if we believe the probes—nothing inside it. So what’s it there for? What’s it mean?”

A section of the Bridge screen became locally magnified. The usual series of schematics was generated, unasked, by the screen: ventral, dorsal, side, front and rear. They added nothing not already visible.

“Cyr: lasers, please. I want to see inside it.”

A single laser stabbed out, one of the ship’s shortrange crystal lasers. It hit, and a section of the cone sheared off. Inside was as pink as outside; it really did seem empty. It still came on, tumbling end over end, but now more erratically.

“ETA fifty-nine seconds, Commander.”

“Again, please, Cyr.”

Two more shots, two more bits sliced off the cone, two more views of an apparently empty and featureless interior.

Still plenty of time, Foord thought, to destroy it. So what’s it going to do to confound us at the last moment? He told Kaang to move them to port a few hundred feet and bring them to rest, which she did. The cone fired its motors, on-off, as it had done to avoid the cloud of debris, changing course so it still came at them, still tumbling end over end.

“ETA forty-five seconds, Commander.”

“Cyr, finish it, please. Lasers.”

If anything’s going to happen it will be now, thought Foord. But it didn’t. The cone exploded, not very spectacularly, and was reduced to pink dust which drifted away to add itself to the map of the Belt which Foord had been so assiduously rewriting.

Foord took a sip of inhibitor fluid—the tumbler had remained undisturbed on his chairarm during the recent flurry of activity—and settled back in his chair. He let out a long breath.

“Joser, what’s Her position, please?”

“Unchanged and stationary, Commander.”

“Good… So what did She mean with that missile?”

“Mean?”

“Yes. It was slow, empty, had no shrouding and no flickerfields, was coloured pink, and looked silly. Right?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And apart from the two occasions it fired its motors it wasn’t travelling under active power. Right?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Yet it changed course when we did. Which means, doesn’t it, that it either had an active homing system or was receiving guidance signals from Her.”

“There were no homing or guidance signals, Commander!”

“You mean you failed to detect them.” Foord did not say it unkindly, or accusingly. “Come on, this is the area She has most advantage over us. I just need to know how much advantage. I need to see how we failed to detect them.”

“Detecting no homing or guidance signals is not the same as failing to detect them, Commander. I didn’t fail to detect them. There were no signals.”

“That’s a clever answer,” Foord replied, “but not a helpful one.”

“Commander,” Thahl said quietly, “you asked what She meant by that missile.”

“Well?”

“It seems to have been empty. So, suppose it really didn’t have an onboard homing system, and suppose it really wasn’t able to receive guidance signals.”

“Well?”

“Then its movements must have been preset by Her when She launched it. Including the move to follow our last-minute turn to port. She preset that move when She launched it. Before you gave the order to turn.”

3

The Charles Manson was partly alive, but not alive enough to know that it could die. Its partial life made it serene and invincible; it knew that as long as the parts which made up its whole continued not to need each other, the whole could not be destroyed. It understood that when Foord, of all people, broke down it would probably not be noisy or sudden; with Foord it was more likely to be a careful, phased collapse. So it waited for the expected confirmation. It would then simply continue, minus the discarded part.

The ship had noted his increasingly unusual behaviour, the speech patterns and vocal nuances and repeated unanswered questions. It had prepared for his replacement by Thahl, or (if there were further contingencies) by Cyr or Smithson; Joser and Kaang were not on its list. It had noted that Thahl would normally be next, but had detected minor aberrations in him, too. It made no judgements—it wasn’t able to—but only calculated contingencies. The contingencies were programmed into the computers which served its sentience cores which, when they came together, were its Codex.

But Foord did not break down. His reaction, when it came, was perhaps worse.

“What is She, Thahl?” he kept asking; the one question he always said he wouldn’t ask. “What is She? How can She reach into our MT Drive and our communications and our thoughts before we think them? How is it She already knows us?” Eventually he stopped asking and fell silent, and then his reaction became clear: not breakdown, but withdrawal. He turned inwards, back to the time when the darkness came.

•

“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord was one of these, and he looked round in bewilderment. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”

Twenty-five years ago, when Aaron Foord was twelve, his mother was diagnosed. She died within six months, and his father, after nursing her and becoming infected, within a further six weeks. He had no other relatives still living, so he went to a State Orphanage. He went because he was literally an orphan, though the term Orphanage was also figurative: it was a place for those Orphaned from the State, which considered itself their true parent. In other words, a centre for the treatment of young criminal and political offenders. The handful of genuine orphans who also went there did not usually survive unaffected.

It was not a stereotypical institution, at least in appearance: there was no forbidding architecture, only a collection of bland functional buildings with curtains and walls and furniture in beige and orange and brown. It was reasonably clean, and not immediately threatening. Aaron Foord noticed, with a sense of novelty, that things like teapots and saucepans and cooking vessels were all industrial size. All the things he had been used to doing alone, or as one of a family of three—eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, reading and working and playing—he now did among dozens, or hundreds.

His parents had stayed together through his childhood. He couldn’t define or recognise love, either then or later, but he noted carefully the details of their companionship, their ease with each other. He remembered summers on beaches, the murmur of voices. He always liked voices murmured and nuanced, and would try later to recreate them on his ship. His mother and father had given him a solitary childhood, but not an unhappy one. They were quiet and orderly people, and he grew up liking quietness and order.

He knew the Morning Assembly welcome was ambiguous. He knew there were unspoken words behind the spoken ones, and soon found out what they were: corporatist psychobabble. No room for optouts. No room for outsiders. You’re Us or the Enemy. Community, Greater Good, One Of Us, There Is No I In Team. Most heavy gravity planets supplied Special Forces and mercenaries to other parts of the Commonwealth, and their societies were corporatist and authoritarian. Aaron Foord’s planet was no exception.

The orphanage was run by State officials, some of whom were civilians and some, to his surprise, priests. The priests had a particular way about them. They had open regular faces and smiled a lot. They didn’t walk but strolled. They didn’t shout but spoke quietly, something he found likeable until he started listening to them. They punctuated their speech with swingings of their rulers, those instruments of love and certainty; three feet long and made of dark heavy hardwood and even marked with calibrations, though he never once saw them used as instruments of measurement. Some of the priests, he learned, liked beating girls, some of them boys, and some of them both. Some did it out of simple cruelty, some out of complex cruelty. Others, the worst, did it out of genuine love.

The girls wore uniforms with box-pleated skirts. He had raped one of them, the last one he should ever have forced, the one who had shown him how to make places where the priests couldn’t reach. She was a year younger than him, and came a year later. Her name was Katy Bevan.

“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord noticed her among the newcomers. The others were bewildered or afraid or defiant, but not her; she was different. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”

Afterwards, he went up to her.

“Where is it?”

“Where is what?” She was unusually small and slight; blonde, with sharp features. She had a way of looking askance, as if smiling privately.

“The place you go to escape them when they’re talking.”

“Oh, that. It’s in my head.” She glanced at him. “You’re the first one who’s seen. I’ll show you how to do it.”

She called it Subvocal Subversion. Where did she get that from, he thought, at twelve? Politically deviant parents? She never told him why she’d been sent there and he never asked. “You create a space where they can’t reach you, and the way you do it is by simple subvocal denial of everything they say. Even if the denials are contradictory. Actually it’s better if the denials are contradictory, because it means that what they say is too. And follow their grammar, so the denials are grammatical. But think it, don’t say it, and don’t ever ever write it. Then it stays where they can’t reach. It won’t make their institutions collapse, but it’ll give you a place they can’t reach. Everybody needs that.”

They did it together in Assembly, stealing glances at each other.

“Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time. We know (No you don’t) this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can (No you won’t) to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community (No we won’t), but you’ll find we particularly value new friends….”

It was a small private act of rebellion, invented by a small private person. She did it when they were beating her, and telling her why they were beating her; and he adopted it when they were beating him. It worked, because it existed only as thought. But it was small and silent and private, and what the priests taught was large and loud and public, and supremely confident of its ability to prevail. They heard its confidence echoing in the Principal’s voice at every Assembly. Even the dust motes were scared.

“This community we share has a mighty strength. It will not be denied. It embraces all of us and each of us, and it will not be denied. It demands to make us greater than we are, and it will not be denied. Compared to it, we are almost nothing. Like pebbles before a mountain. Like the atoms in pebbles before a mountain. Almost nothing. My reading this morning is from Job, chapter 9.

He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength.

He removeth the mountains, and they know not: He overturneth them in His anger.

He shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.

He commandeth the sun, and it riseth not: and sealeth up the stars...”

But the Subvocal Subversion still worked for Katy Bevan and, increasingly, for Aaron Foord. It was small and private, like Katy, and perhaps that was why. Reach outwards, the priests said, become part of something bigger than you. No, she said, turn inwards. Build a private space where they can’t reach you. Then another and another. Add them together and make a universe. It’ll last you the rest of your life.

And it did. The more they thrashed him, the vaster the private spaces he created. He always carried his private universe, then and for the rest of his life. Apart from Katy Bevan, he made few friendships. To the others around him he was always an outsider, indifferent to their shifting cliques. They learnt to leave him alone, because of his physical prowess and his strangeness.

But don’t always turn away, she said, on another occasion. I didn’t, from you. I had to reach out to you to make you turn inwards. She laughed and said, That’s ironic. He laughed too, then quietly consulted a dictionary. He didn’t completely understand the word then, but would later.

Two years passed. Puberty came late to him, because of his circumstances. But when it came, it mated with his obsessiveness and created a monster. He started looking at the box-pleated skirts. He liked their swing and sway, and the shape and regularity and tidiness of the pleats: inviolate, and symmetrical. He longed for them with the same fastidiousness and thoroughness which he carried into adulthood. He longed to lift them and see what was underneath. To lift them slowly and carefully, without resistance. When Katy Bevan resisted him, it all became untidy and his hands became more urgent and afterwards he couldn’t meet her gaze and he went away from her.

She refused to tell the Principal who raped her. That was a more serious crime than the rape itself, because she was deliberately putting herself beyond the community, denying the community its absolute right to help one of its own, and they thrashed her. When Aaron Foord burst into the Principal’s study there were five of them, each one about three times her size, five massive adults thrashing a small private person who’d made a small private act of rebellion. She was bent over a desk (the second time he’d seen what was underneath her skirt) while two held her down and the other three thrashed her with their rulers, even taking turns and deferring to each other, You next, No you next. What, he screamed, do you believe in which makes this right? This is what we believe in, they said, that we love her so much we’d even do this for her, and he knew they meant it. He was one fifteen-year-old against five adults but he discovered instincts he would keep for the rest of his life (the Principal was right about that) and he killed two of them with his hands, wishing he could find a Sakhran who might teach him how to kill more of them, more efficiently.

Days later, the Department heard of it and called for his psychological and physical and academic records, which they studied. Then they recruited him.

Years later, Katy Bevan became Director of State Orphanages, kicked out the priests, and gradually made things better; not perfect, but better. The priests were still embedded in other State institutions, but she stopped them sniffing around the classrooms and playgrounds of the orphanages. By then Foord had at last met a Sakhran and knew more about the meaning of Irony, so he was able to ask himself, Which of us has made the most of our years? Which of us has been the most use? He never asked questions to which he didn’t know the answer.

Also years later, he had learnt enough to know that the Commonwealth was not an Evil Empire. Most of it was not corporatist or authoritarian; in twenty-nine solar systems, planets like his were a small minority. The Commonwealth was not the same as the Department, either; it sometimes needed the Department to do certain questionable but necessary things, that was all. He added all that to his private universe, under Nothing Is Simple.

Foord only returned once to his planet and was not made welcome. He wanted to see Katy Bevan again, but didn’t; he had already intruded on her once, and knew that he’d hurt her as viciously as the priests. More viciously, because his love for her wasn’t as genuine as theirs.

•

Half an hour passed. Still neither ship moved.

Foord had fallen silent and seemed, for a couple of minutes, almost to have died. The others studied him, noting details with the quiet precision they’d learnt from Foord himself, and putting a value to each of them: voice inflexions, broken sentence constructions, repetition of unanswered questions. They assessed him in the same way as his own ship assessed him, ascribing values. Perhaps they should have considered discarding him; the ship had that on its list of options, but the ship was only partly alive. And when he fell silent, none of them felt equal to filling the empty space; except, unexpectedly, one.

“…And,” Joser concluded, “Her position is 17-14-16 and holding. She’s still shrouded, of course, but we have a reliable fix on Her position, which is probably what She intended.” (A provocative assumption, which like others before it provoked no response from Foord.) “She’s outside our beam range, of course, and no doubt She’ll use Her superior low-speed acceleration to stay outside.”

Joser’s mouth had wandered into Commander’s territory, but still Foord stayed silent.

“We do,” Cyr snapped, “have weapons other than particle beams.”

“Yes,” Joser said, “but we can’t use them if we can’t catch Her.”

Why, Cyr thought, is he saying this? He’s supposed to be just a Department stooge. So why this? Is he cleverer than I thought?

“We can catch Her!” Cyr insisted. “Our top speed on ion drive is higher.”

“Maybe. But She’ll have calculated that.” Joser paused, but still Foord stayed silent. “She can choose where we catch Her, and what She does about it.”

“Not,” Foord said suddenly, “if we catch Her sooner than She expects.”

“Commander?”

“If we catch Her. Sooner, Joser. Than She expects. Don’t you follow?”

Looks were exchanged around the Bridge. At that stage they didn’t, except for Smithson. Insofar as his structure allowed it, Smithson went rigid at the thought of what Foord might mean.

“You’re right, Commander,” Joser said confidently (he had discovered that he liked defining a static subject, even if it was their own possible destruction). “But you see, Her superior low-speed acceleration…”

“If we start after Her on ion drive,” Foord mused, “and then switch up suddenly to photon drive, just long enough to get Her back in range…”

“Commander!” Smithson bellowed. “This is a fucking asteroid belt! Ships don’t engage photon drive in asteroid belts, not even this ship! Ships have to go slow in asteroid belts, Commander, because if they go fast, the asteroids bang into them. I have a better idea. Why not just invite Her to surrender?”

“…and it needn’t be for long, or at full photon speed. Just ten percent on photon would be way above her top speed on ion drive. About…..I’d say, about eleven or twelve seconds at ten percent photon would catch Her.”

It was not possible that Foord could have done the necessary mental arithmetic amid the uproar which engulfed the Bridge, unless he had simply not noticed it.

“Commander, we wouldn’t last three seconds,” Joser stammered. He had not done that calculation but he did know, quite accurately, the effect on everything he had just defined—thoroughly defined—of a new variable, even if it was a variable which tended towards their survival rather than destruction. “It’s not an acceptable risk. It can’t…it won’t…”

“You tell him, Kaang,” Smithson invited. “He expects you to take us through part of an asteroid belt on photon drive. Let’s hear from you.”

“For once,” Cyr added.

“I’m only the pilot,” Kaang mumbled, miserably. “That was the agreement.”

“Tell us,” Cyr said, “please. As a pilot. Can you do it?”

“Perhaps,” Kaang said, “but I’m not certain.”

“It gets better,” confided Smithson to the air above him. “The Commonwealth’s greatest pilot and weakest human being, executing the orders of a Commander who died half an hour ago. I want all this entered on the record.” He looked at Foord and lowered his voice, for tragic effect; lapsing again into self-pity. “I don’t know why, particularly. But I do. Someone may read it sometime.”

“I don’t intend to sit around while She knocks pieces off us one by one,” Foord said mildly.

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the last thirty minutes?”

“We might die from this engagement,” Foord answered, still mildly.

“You’ve died from it already,” Smithson muttered.

“Commander,” Cyr asked, “you said She might know our thoughts before we think them. So we use photon drive, and so does She. Then what?”

“Then we both survive or both die. If we both survive, we lose and gain nothing. If we both die we get a draw.”

“I liked you better when you were alive,” Smithson said.

For the first time, Foord looked directly at Smithson. “This ship can’t collectively survive or die. Only its parts survive or die. Alone. When the MT Drive activated, we left you to fight it. Alone. The crew of an ordinary ship would have fought it together, and you know what would have happened.”

A person of any sensitivity would have recognised that as the conclusion. Smithson, however, was not sensitive and only approximately a person.

“You oversimplified just now. If we both use photon drive, we don’t necessarily both survive or die. She could survive and we could die.”

“Of course. But only if She has a pilot better than Kaang. Do you think Her pilot is likely to be better than Kaang?”

And that, even Smithson recognised, was the conclusion. “No, Commander.”

Kaang sat quietly by in the half-light, following the conversation from one face to another. She often found herself like this: listening to them talking about her as if she wasn’t there.

Smithson caused a muscle to ripple in his upper torso: not a shrug, but some other gesture Foord had never seen before. Perhaps, as he’d never seen it before, it was an apology. “Of course, that’s if She is a ship, with a crew and Commander and pilot, and not something else. But we’ve been through that before… Commander, we haven’t even seen Her yet, and She’s made us say these things. We’ve never said such things before.”

Thought them, maybe, Cyr told herself, but never said them. What’s happening to us?

And that was the mood in which they passed on to the details of what they were about to do. To escape it, they went over the details again and again. A ten percent photon burst to bring Her back in range, executed by Kaang who, while it lasted, would become the focus of the ship as Smithson was when he fought the MT Drive. Then, if they survived, the re-establishment of the particle beam bombardment. And first, a series of slow moves towards Her on ion drive; on the basis of Her responses, Foord would decide when to engage photon.

The repetition of the details was like the restoration of a heartbeat after trauma. It brought the Bridge back to something like its normal quietness.

“Photon drive is ready whenever you want to use it, Commander,” Smithson said, a few moments later.

“Thank you. Cyr?”

“If we survive the photon burst, I can re-establish the particle beams.”

“Thank you. Kaang?”

“We now have figures for the duration and course of the photon burst, Commander. Duration is fourteen seconds.”

“Fourteen? I underestimated.”

“The course includes eleven major evasive manoeuvres, Commander,” Kaang said evenly, “around intervening asteroids.”

Eleven manoeuvres, in fourteen seconds, at ten percent photon speed. She might have been describing a routine parking orbit. Foord tried to match her lack of expression, and failed. He could feel expressions moving over his face, as if they were external forces. Eleven, fourteen, ten. What Kaang was about to do, on his orders, had now been given figures, and they were monstrous.

“I understand. Then,” as the alarms politely cleared their throats, “please take us forward on ion drive, Kaang. One percent.”

“Done, Commander.”

The manoeuvre drives fountained. The alarms increased a semitone, but stayed well within the bounds of politeness. The ion drive cut in, almost silently. The asteroids on the encircling Bridge screen whirled and resettled as the ship established direction and attitude; otherwise there was no sensation of movement.

“She’s moving away, Commander,” Joser said. “Ion drive, low register.”

“Increase to three percent, please, Kaang.”

“Done, Commander.”

“She’s matched us,” Joser said.

“Maintain at three percent, please, Kaang.”

“Done, Commander.”

Foord settled back. He glanced at Kaang. She was checking—unnecessarily, since she had already checked several times—that the navigation and drives cores had instructed their computers to make minor adjustments to the course and duration of the photon burst to allow for the last few movements. Foord knew he could do Thahl’s and Joser’s jobs about as well as they could; Cyr’s, almost as well; and Smithson’s, adequately. But Kaang’s, never.

“Joser?”

“Still matching us, Commander.”

“Good.” It was settling into a pattern, muted and orderly, with the leisure to observe one’s draughtsmanship and doublecheck the details. “Kaang, we’ll stay at three percent, please. Give you time to ready the overrides for execution. And I’d like to observe Her responses a little longer.”

“Done, commander.”

“No, Commander, your order’s refused. I’m engaging photon drive now.”

The first answer was what Foord expected and practically believed he’d heard. The second, delivered with exactly the same inflexion, was what he actually heard. It silenced the Bridge.

“I’m engaging photon drive now, Commander.”

“But the overrides—”

Kaang pressed a palm panel and gazed calmly round the Bridge. One by one, the other five consoles went dark.

“Done, Commander. As of now, I’m the only other living thing this ship recognises.”

Insanely, Foord caught himself noting her use of the word Other. The alarms were rising, beyond their normal politeness; they were beginning to sound loud, like alarms on ordinary ships. And the Charles Manson, since it did indeed recognise only Kaang, was now proceeding with complete logic and reasonableness to move against all the others. To immobilise its own crew.

“Kaang!”

“If you didn’t see this coming, Commander,” she replied, as the ship closed its burrows and corridors and bulkheads to isolate its inhabited sections, “then maybe She won’t either.”

Foord knew she was right. He wanted to say so, but there was no time. The last thing he was able to say, knowing that anything more would be cut short by the alarms’ rising noise and/or the ship’s destruction and/or the shutdown of internal communications, whichever was the sooner, was Cyr, if we survive this, come out firing.

In its haste to obey Kaang’s priority overrides, the ship almost attacked itself. It slammed shut the final bulkheads; slammed down and locked the seat harnesses of its crew; burst open Kaang’s harness as the last one (Foord’s) locked; and made Kaang the focus of all its systems, sending neural implant wires to burrow into her face and head like maggots, pulsing with information. From the rest of its crew it turned away, leaving them isolated from itself and Kaang as though they were infected.

It killed internal communications. It killed its own Damage Control systems, since Damage could not begin to describe what would happen if Kaang failed. It killed the Bridge screen and all other onboard screens except Kaang’s, because although it had nothing to say about whether a photon burst through asteroids was sanity or insanity, it knew that only Kaang was far enough from either to be allowed to see it happening. It almost killed its own crew, reducing them to sixty-two near-corpses, buried in their own harnesses and in darkness. Then, when they were no longer necessary, it killed the alarms.

The photon drive cut straight in at ten percent. What might be the last fourteen seconds of the ship’s life had already begun; nine seconds were left.

Two sets of events were taking place, one inside and one outside the ship. They should have been galaxies apart, not separated only by the thickness of the hull. Outside, the Charles Manson was plunging through the Belt, wrenching itself past, under, above, below and between those asteroids it had not already vaporised, ten times as quick and vicious in missing them as it had been in destroying them. Inside, everything was filtered and compensated out to almost nothing, the Bridge and corridors and burrows as dark as the vacated interior passages of a corpse; the ship might already have been dead and buried, or embedded in crystal like the Book of Srahr.

Nine seconds to go. They dropped like water from a tap.

Plop.

Eight seconds to go.

While his mother was dying his father had found a letter she had written, while she could still write, setting out her will; her last secret. And now Foord was seeing the last secret of his ship; how it had ordered its final affairs so that only Kaang, in the sense the ship would have recognised it, was still alive.

Plop. Seven seconds to go.

He did not actually hear the sound, just as he did not actually see the seconds poke out, one by one, into the stillness of the Bridge and fall to the floor, Plop

Six seconds to go.

but he realised they reminded him not only of water dropping from a tap (that was too obvious) but of human faeces dropping from…. No. He recoiled from that. That was something his own senses, deprived of input, were providing

Plop. Five to go.

from somewhere in his memory, perhaps Her use of faeces in the famous Isis engagement. But in one way it was accurate. Inside the Charles Manson time really was passing that slowly, and the last few seconds of the photon burst really were falling that softly; solemn, dark brown, and blunt.

Plop. Four to go.

The Charles Manson was not alive enough to know that it could die. But it knew all about subdivision downwards into isolated parts, and Kaang was its last moving part.

Plop. Three.

Except that she wasn’t Kaang any more. At Kaang’s place on the Bridge, watching on the last working screen what would have been unwatchable to the others, there was now only an object. It looked like an exploded diagram, its seat harness burst open around its waist, its face and head fountaining with neural implants. Only its eyes and hands moved. They seemed speeded up by a factor of at least ten, but still—as always—unhurried.

Kaang was going to succeed. Foord was so certain of that that he even stopped listening for the last seconds to fall. He would never have heard them anyway. They were obliterated by the noise of a gigantic explosion. It wasn’t the ship’s destruction—that would have been beyond their hearing—but the ion drive, cutting in at full reverse thrust as the photon drive died, to kill their momentum and bring them out of the photon burst at rest.

The ship turned away from Kaang, like it had previously turned away from the rest of its crew, and forgot her. It left her lying in the tatters of her seat harness, her face bleeding where it had pulled out its neural implants; it routed her pilot’s functions through to Thahl, and her console died as the others came back to life. It reopened its main systems along their usual channels; withdrew the bulkheads; unlocked the seat harnesses; reactivated the screens and lights and alarms; and awaited further instructions.

They had reached their moment, but it was already dying on them. It was the one moment when She might be vulnerable; when they had done something that might genuinely surprise Her. But the moment was dying on them even as it began, and the only way to give it meaning was to forget Kaang. Like the ship, they turned away from her, not even pausing to see if she was alive. Without speaking to each other they resumed the engagement, now with Thahl as replacement pilot; and Cyr, before any of them, resumed firing the particle beams.

4

The smaller asteroids in the Belt were mostly irregular, as lumpy and stolid as potatoes emptied from a sack; and two perfect killing machines stalked each other through them, like tarantulas.

At least, one was a perfect killing machine—the one which was visible and which had just executed a photon burst through asteroids, a near-impossible manoeuvre from which it had emerged with weapons firing. The other one stayed shrouded, a dark spot in darkness; it appeared to be surprised by the unheard-of manoeuvre, and appeared to be running.

But the battle between them was complicated and enigmatic. They fought in different languages, and with different weapons, and at times hardly seemed to be fighting each other at all. Their definitions of Battle and Fight and Weapon seemed to correspond only obliquely. And the space between them, by a kind of relativity, was changing as the battle changed. Things were happening to it. In some ways it was no longer space at all.

Space joined the two ships, and separated them. It was empty, but full of the weapons they fired across it at each other. It was shapeless, but given shape by the Charles Manson’s particle beams, whose range exceeded Hers. After emerging from the photon burst, the Charles Manson had reverted to the same monotonous attrition which had worked so well before, draining Her and systematically destroying asteroids as She sought cover behind them, keeping Her always at a range from which She could not return fire, at least not with Her own beams.

The space between them read like a book, its pages visibly crammed with the Charles Manson’s language: it was shot through with the dull blue of the particle beams, always one way, stabbing incessantly at Her. But it also contained something else, travelling back from Her to the Charles Manson; something unreadable. Something like the white areas of pages, wrapping round the Charles Manson’s beams like white spaces round printed words.

The Charles Manson’s language was one of physical attacks on physical targets. And Faith, while occasionally replying in the same language, seemed also to be conducting another kind of battle, on different targets. On people. On a person in particular. They were all known to Her, but She fixed on one.

5

Two hours had passed since the photon burst. They had won back their advantage, putting Faith within their beam range and themselves out of Hers, and they were driving Her before them through the Belt; but they still remembered Kaang. Not as a colleague (they liked to think there were no such things on Foord’s ship) or as an individual (she had never been interesting enough) or even as their pilot (Thahl substituted adequately). It was much more specific than that. They remembered her because the whole Bridge stank of her shit.

Only pack hunters tended their injured: solitary predators, like cats and Sakhrans and the Charles Manson’s crew, preferred to ignore them. For that unspoken reason, and for other reasons, they had left Kaang where she fell after the photon burst. It was nearly an hour before Foord summoned attention, and as the doctors carried her out she had defecated, massively. It had gone everywhere.

For the twenty-fourth time in the two hours since the photon burst, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen. Her cover this time was AD-2049, a small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran. Cyr reached Her with eight shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes. Somehow the time didn’t seem to pass as slowly as when Kaang had been pilot. Thahl’s competence was monotonous, but Kaang’s near-perfection was even more so.

They had counted out the last two hours in careful five-minute pieces like this one; but the first five minutes, following their emergence from the photon burst, really counted, because they had done something remarkable. They had become the first of Her opponents ever to surprise Her. When She had seen the only other ship in Horus system which might be able to threaten Her, emerging from the insanity of a photon burst through asteroids and coming at Her firing, She had—not exactly panicked, but hurried. And in the first few minutes, the engagement had been reshaped.

She fled from them so hurriedly that by the time She found fresh cover (Cyr reached Her with seven shots that time, all of which Her flickerfields held), She was two-thirds of the way through the Belt. Now, two hours later, She was three-quarters through and still running. Occasionally She tried other tactics—missiles on parabolic courses, decoys, even a shrouded mineswarm—but each time Joser spotted them and Cyr destroyed them.

The five minutes were eventually counted. For the twenty-fifth time, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic; headup displays; target simulations. Her cover this time was AD-2025, a miserably small asteroid (they all were, now that the Belt was starting to peter out) whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran, trying to double back on them—She tried this every third or fourth time—but was easily headed off by the particle beams. Cyr reached Her with eleven shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes.

“You’re getting better at this,” Cyr remarked to Joser.

Joser gave her a slight nod of acknowledgement. “It’s the repetition. I like the repetition,” he said, and meant it.

The Bridge was pleasantly quiet, and Foord, quietly pleased. The Belt was dwindling, the asteroids She was using for cover were getting smaller, the spaces between them larger, and each time She broke and ran She had to take more of Cyr’s unwaveringly accurate beam-firings. She was being drained; not only, it seemed, of energy through Her flickerfields, but of will. Even Her occasional counterattacks carried no real conviction. And most important, they had locked Her back in beam range and She seemed unable to break out of it.

Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

“Commander, may I talk to you?” Kaang sounded as bad as she had looked the last time Foord saw her.

“Kaang. It’s good to hear your voice again.” (It wasn’t.) “How are you?” (“How is she?” Foord had asked, an hour ago, of one of the doctors he had finally called to the Bridge. “She was half-dead, Commander, when the ship discarded her. She’s still half-dead.”)

Kaang didn’t reply. He tried again.

“How are you, Kaang?”

“I’m in Medical, Commander.”

“Ah,” Foord said. He had never been able to sustain a conversation with Kaang about anything, except her duties as pilot. He tried again; this time, the last resort of any visitor to any sickbed. “Is there anything you need?”

“That’s what I want to talk about, Commander. The doctors say there’s no permanent damage.”

“That’s good…Kaang, I don’t know how to tell you what we owe you.” This was literally true: he genuinely didn’t know how to say such things. He had blurted the words out, as though admitting to some personal disease.

“Commander, I think I should return to duty.”

“No.” Foord was relieved; this at least was familiar territory. “When you’re fit, yes, but not before. Until then we have adequate cover.”

“Who’s acting as pilot, Commander?”

“Thahl. Both he and I hold current Pilot’s Certificates.”

“Commander, excuse me.” The one area where she would show resistance. “What did you and Thahl score on your last annual tests? Seventy-five percent?”

“Thahl scored seventy-five. I scored seventy-four.”

“The best military pilots score about eighty. I’ve never scored below ninety-five. She won’t let you stalk Her forever, Commander. You need me back on the Bridge.”

“And you need rest, according to my medical advice.” (“She’s gone unattended for an hour longer than necessary, Commander,” the doctor had snapped, his forearms covered in shit and blood, “and she needs rest. More particularly, a rest from you.”) “I most need you back, Kaang, when we’ve finally driven Her out of the Belt and this engagement really begins. If it is one. Until then we have adequate cover.”

He snapped his wristcom shut, too abruptly.

Joser sniffed the air. “It’s like she’s never been away,” he murmured to Cyr.

“Her absence,” Cyr agreed, “has been deeply smelt.”

Foord glanced at them curiously. The rapport between them had started to grow after the photon burst, and coincided with Joser becoming more effective. It was not something he would have expected.

He gazed round the Bridge. “I believe I asked for status reports.” He hadn’t. “Do I have to ask for them again?”

While the reports were being given—they were short, satisfactory and required only half his attention—he was thinking about Kaang.

“Thahl.”

“Commander?”

“Block off communications from Kaang, please. I don’t want any more calls like that.”

In the first few minutes after the photon burst, when they erupted upon Her, they’d had no choice but to leave Kaang where she fell. But later, when the engagement resettled into the dual monotony of asteroid-hopping and beam-firing, they continued to ignore her. Their agreement to do so, like much on Foord’s ship, was unspoken. Each of them found tasks to attend to, rather than attend to her—tasks which often required them to speak to each other over, and around, and through, where she was slumped at her console. It was only much later, and almost too late, when Foord summoned help. Outsiders always went self-contained during missions; it was their nature to turn inwards.

“That’s all seen to, Commander. She won’t….”

“Disturb us again?”

“Yes, Commander.”

Everybody else on this ship, thought Foord—himself, even Joser, even the three doctors he summoned—had at some time either given or received violence. But never Kaang. She was the purest specialist, the least violent and least interesting of all the Charles Manson’s inhabitants. When the violence of the engagement touched her, it touched the ship’s most private part. By not dying, she made it impossible for them to deny it.

And the result was monumentally disgusting: the smell, the stains on the lower areas of her light grey uniform, the facepack of dried blood and yellow moustache of mucus. Her breath had smelt, too. Foord did not even stop to think that at least she was still breathing, only that her breath smelt.

•

For the twenty-sixth time, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic; headup displays; target simulations. Her cover this time was AC-1954, another small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. Cyr reached Her with nine shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before realising that Her target simulation, the white blip on the screen indicating Her position, had not moved.

At AC-1954, She had stopped running.

Cyr was surprised enough to glance up at Foord, but not enough to stop firing. Fourteen shots, fifteen. What, she wondered as she continued to fire, is She about to do that’s worth this drain on Her?

The same thought had occurred to Foord. “Joser, I expect this is another missile. Check it, please, will you?”

“Already done, Commander. It is a missile. Closing at twenty percent. Details and a visual will be on the screen shortly.”

“And the other missiles?”

“Other missiles, Commander?”

“Other missiles, Joser. Remember? She tries this every third or fourth time. The first one is a diversion for the others, coming in on parabolic courses while the first is on a straight course.”

That speech had taken Cyr up to twenty-three shots.

“I remember, Commander. I’ll find them.”

“Yes, I think you will. She used to run you ragged, but not any more. Perhaps when we have more time”—Foord was dangerously unaware, then, how little they had—“you’ll tell me how you did it.”

Thirty shots. She remained still, Her flickerfields holding the beams.

“Here are the details, Commander. Visual will follow.”

The Bridge screen displayed headups confirming the missile was under remote guidance from Faith, and showed its position and speed: 26-14-19 and closing, at ninety percent.

“Ninety percent!”

“It was twenty—”

“It’s now ninety, Joser. Impact in seventy-nine seconds, it says. Cyr, get it, please.”

(Smithson scowled at the headup display. “Something wrong about that missile,” he hissed at Joser. “It doesn’t need remote guidance. Too fast to manoeuvre, and on a straight course. So why guidance?” Joser shrugged, oddly and mechanically, as though remotely operated. Smithson turned to repeat the question to Foord, then decided not to. Oddly, he never knew why. It was one of his very few bad decisions.)

The long-range gas and semiconductor lasers lanced out at the missile, almost but not quite parallel to the particle beams which Cyr was still stabbing at Faith. The particle beams were malignant dull blue, the lasers brilliant white. The particle beams reached their target, the lasers didn’t. The approaching missile simply avoided them. It flicked to one side, let them pass by, and returned to its course. All at ninety percent.

Smithson swore. “That’s why remote guidance,” he muttered.

Joser’s expression was unreadable, almost shrouded. “Impact in sixty-four seconds.”

The missile was now visible on the Bridge screen—though Joser had omitted to supply local magnification—and the screen generated the usual side, ventral and dorsal images, and, unasked, added magnification: a grey ovoid, about twenty feet long, with no markings or external features. Considering what it had just done, it should not have looked so ordinary.

“Cyr,” Foord inquired, carefully—but his voice fooled nobody— “how can it do that?”

“Do you want it explained, Commander, or destroyed?”

Again the lasers lanced out. Again they missed.

“How can it do that?”

“Impact in forty-four seconds.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Cyr whispered, probably to herself. The missile’s performance was extraordinary, and whoever on Faith was guiding it was reacting so quickly that Cyr was actually firing lasers and missing—almost unheard-of, and she took it very personally.

The lasers lanced out again and again, and missed both times.

“Something wrong,” repeated Smithson. Joser did not reply; as the missile got closer, he seemed to get further away.

“Impact in thirty-seven seconds.”

“Behind it!” Smithson bellowed. “Look behind it.”

“Thahl,” Foord began, “can we—”

“Yes, Commander, we can outrun it. But if we run, we put Her out of beam range.”

“No!” Joser shouted, but only at Thahl’s grammar. “It’s not it, it’s them.” He paused, oddly, as though afraid of being overheard. “There’s a second one, Commander. Directly behind the first. Duplicating its movements. Hidden in its drive shadow. And when the first one’s destroyed, the second one will…”

Explosions flickered on-off in front of them, knotting space like a muscle cramp.

“Got you, you bastard,” hissed Cyr, who after her setbacks had switched to shortrange crystal lasers and had simply kept firing.

“…the second one will come straight for us. Impact in nineteen seconds. I’m sorry, Commander.”

And as the second grey ovoid hurtled towards them through the wreckage of the first, something else flickered on-off: a glance between Smithson and Foord, concerning Joser. They left it unspoken. Other things mattered more, like the need to get out of Cyr’s way so she could defend them against a rapidly approaching, largely unexpected and wholly ridiculous death.

But now, perversely, Cyr was enjoying herself. The weapons array was her language, and she used it fluently. She composed in it. She hunted the second missile with every closeup weapon in her vocabulary. To the crystal lasers she added motive beams, harmonic guns, tanglers, disruptors and others; she put them together like words in a haiku, each one amplifying each other’s meaning until her composition grew dense and ferocious. She continued also to tap out an unwavering barrage of beam-firings directly at Faith, but that was only punctuation to the main composition. Cyr’s attack on the second missile was an almost perfect statement of her abilities. It lasted exactly nineteen seconds, and then the missile hit the Charles Manson; but it hit as a hundred pieces of wreckage.

And in its wake something else, equally alien, engulfed them. From his console in one of the weapons bays, Cyr’s deputy, Nemec, started cheering. Others on other parts of the ship heard and joined him. The sound was distant and tinny, at first difficult to recognise because even the comm channels which carried it to the Bridge were designed only for muted individual voices; but then, when Thahl formally confirmed only minimal impact damage, the congratulations redoubled and even spread, at first tentatively, to the Bridge.

It was Cyr’s moment and she basked in it, though not to the extent of forgetting her beam-firing. Seventy-two shots, said the screen headup display. Seventy-three.

Foord’s gaze flicked from the screen to Cyr; then to Joser, where it rested for a moment; then back to the screen. He stayed silent.

“…very fast and manoeuvrable,” Cyr was explaining to the Bridge in an it-was-nothing-really drawl, punctuated with glances at Foord, “but they had no flickerfields. They weren’t a new type of missile, just one of Her known types, but stripped down for speed—probably nothing but drives, warheads and guidance. They had no defences.”

“Like that kid you shot at Blentport.”

Seventy-eight, said the headup display. Cyr’s beam-firings did not waver, even after Foord’s remark. Seventy-nine.

Even Smithson gasped at what Foord had said. The Bridge fell silent, then the silence died down into uproar. Foord stopped it with a glance.

“Thahl, this is an emergency. Get us out of here, now!”

The manoeuvre drives fountained. The Charles Manson began to turn away—from Faith, who had seemed at its mercy, and from the nuzzling wreckage of Her missiles—and ran.

“Why?” Cyr demanded. “You ordered Her missiles destroyed and I destroyed them!”

“Two of them.” Foord laid the words down in front of her, like small corpses. “Ask Joser about the third.”

“Third?” Cyr screamed at Joser, then “Oh no.” She had seen Joser’s face.

“There’s no third missile,” Joser said with quiet precision.

“No,” Cyr kept saying, not to Joser but to herself. “No.”

“If there’s a third missile,” Joser said with quiet precision “the scanners will detect it.”

Thahl took the ion drive to ninety percent, almost as smoothly as Kaang. An hour seemed to pass.

“The scanners won’t detect it,” Joser said with quiet precision. He had just bitten completely through his lower lip. “Not this. This is the one She intended for us.”

Foord glanced at the headup display—now, at last, Cyr had stopped firing the particle beams; the count was eighty—and turned back to Joser.

“See,” he said. “What’s been done to us.”

He might have been talking to Joser about Faith, or to the rest of the Bridge about Joser. Both, suddenly, made sense.

They ran. At ninety percent ion drive Thahl took the Charles Manson back into the Belt, surrendering in seconds the ground they had won in penny pieces over hours, rolling and swerving at random because they might still evade whatever pursued them; they might have entire minutes left.

Foord looked at Joser. “I want you to relinquish scanners. Please hand them to Smithson.”

“The one She intended for us.”

Joser’s console went dark. He hadn’t relinquished —probably hadn’t heard —but Thahl did it for him, routing the scanners through to Smithson. Later, thought Foord, I’ll get him removed. But not now. Definitely not now.

“While Thahl is pilot,” Foord asked Smithson, “can you do scanners as well as drives?”

“Running out of people.”

“Can you do scanners as well as drives?”

“Of course I can, Commander. I can also take in your laundry, if you wish.”

“Two out of three will be enough.”

“Then forget the scanners and I’ll take in your laundry.”

“The one She intended for us.”

“Thahl,” began Foord, “could you…”

“Use photon drive? If you order it, Commander. But…”

“But you’re not Kaang.” At least, thought Foord, we still finish each other’s sentences.

Faith remained at rest, while they digested what She had done to them and tried to run from it. But what She had done was already inside them, ahead of Her missile. It concerned Joser.

•

They ran for ninety seconds, and were still alive. The Bridge screen showed the Belt corkscrewing around them. Thahl showed no obvious signs of stress, but he never did.

“Nothing yet,” Smithson said.

“The one She intended for us.” Joser was repeating the phrase as regularly as Cyr had repeated her beam-firings; and with the same accuracy. As far as they could, they ignored him.

Had She, thought Foord, somehow possessed Joser’s mind? That was the obvious explanation, but Foord knew it was wrong. The truth was more subtle, and much worse: not possessed it, predicted it. But so precisely that mere possession was unnecessary.

“Something out there,” Smithson said. “An echo. No, it’s gone. But the signature was unusual. It’s big.”

“The one She intended for us.”

“Stop saying that,” Cyr said.

“Leave him, he can’t hear you,” Smithson said.

“And anyway,” Foord added, “it’s all he’ll ever say.”

This was the first real event of the engagement; all the others had been fakes, fought in different languages. In their language Her attacks had been real, and had only just been beaten off by the abilities of Smithson, then Kaang, then Cyr. In Her language there had only ever been one attack, as gradual and patient as erosion, and She had directed it—all of it—at Joser.

“There, another echo!” Smithson shouted.

“The one…”

“Gone again. But it’s big.”

“…She intended for us.”

“I’d like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said.

The ship shuddered as it ploughed through some asteroid debris. Thahl quickly righted it.

Foord glanced at the screen. The speed was impossible. The Belt whipped past them, boiling, and flung bits of itself at them like antibodies. He knew Thahl couldn’t sustain this, but said nothing yet.

Merely being run ragged by an opponent’s superiority would not have done this to Joser. What She had used on him over all those hours was more than just technical superiority. His failure was not the cause of his collapse, only a symptom. He was finished long before then.

“More echoes,” Smithson said. “I think I can pinpoint it, though…”

She might have killed Joser there and then just by telling him what She was, but that wasn’t how She worked. Not by telepathy, and not by possession. The truth was more subtle, and much worse. She arranged the events he experienced; and then, because She knew him and knew all of them, She predicted, to the second, how he would react. She used events to make him believe, gradually, that he wasn’t as bad as the others believed him to be, or as he feared himself to be; She did it piece by piece, letting him see things on his inadequate scanners which She could easily have concealed. Then, when he’d started despite himself to believe, even to the point where he could exchange banter with Cyr, She dashed him by making him miss things he should easily have spotted, even on his inadequate scanners; and She predicted, down to the last second, when this would prove insupportable to him.

By the time Her third missile was launched, he was already finished.

“I need the missile’s position,” Foord said, a minute later. They were still alive.

“You can’t have it,” Smithson said.

“What?”

“It’s shrouded, so I’m only getting random echoes. You’ll get the position when I can trust our scanners.”

“Recall Kaang, Commander,” Cyr whispered.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Kaang’s not fit. There isn’t time.”

“There already isn’t time. Look at the screen. How long can Thahl keep doing this?”

“Smithson, we need that position.”

“Later. There are too many echoes.”

“The one…” Joser began.

“I’d really like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said, and this time he did stop, because they hit another swarm of asteroid debris, more heavily this time, and went reeling.

“The one…”

For entire seconds they were out of control, and then the manoeuvre drives fountained and Thahl started to right them, but Foord didn’t notice any of this. He had heard someone speak, just before the Impact alarms murmured.

“Kill the alarms, I can’t hear!” Foord yelled.

“…She intended for us.”

“What? What was that?”

“I said, The one She intended for us.”

Foord froze, horrified: it was Smithson, not Joser, who had spoken.

“Why,” he said carefully “did you say that?”

“Position of Her third missile,” Smithson said, “is 05-03-06 and closing. And,” he added, killing the alarms and what was left of Foord’s composure, “this time She means it. It’s sixty feet long.”

The Bridge screen was shot through with light. The shroud fell away, and the third missile appeared, another featureless ovoid but bigger. They watched it push through its shroud into sudden existence, as if something invisible had just given it birth.

“It’s just a ship’s length away,” Smithson breathed. “Impact imminent.”

It filled half the rear screen: grey, featureless and huge. Foord stared at it, for too long.

“Impact imminent!” Smithson bellowed at him.

“No,” he whispered. “Check its speed.”

It was keeping an exact distance. It was plunging with them through the Belt, more a companion than a pursuer, its grey elliptical dot behind their slender silver delta making a deformed exclamation mark; and because it could hit them at any time, it wouldn’t yet.

Smithson swore. “It’s cut speed to match ours! It’s…”

“Playing with us,” Foord agreed.

“I have ten percent ion speed left, Commander,” Thahl said.

“Use it, please.”

He did, and so did the missile. On the screen, since it maintained distance exactly, nothing happened.

“That’s enough. Cut back to ninety percent, please. We have to leave ourselves something.”

“For what?” Thahl kept his voice carefully neutral, but he cut back, and so did the missile. On the screen its position and distance were unchanged. Thanks to Thahl’s evasive manoeuvres, which it parallelled exactly even in their growing raggedness, it was the only other object in the Belt which wasn’t trying to fling itself at them or away from them.

Cyr was already attacking it with closeup weapons. It carried flickerfields, and even used them for a few seconds, but then ceased: perhaps there was no need. Either She would make it hit, or Thahl would get exhausted, or both, long before Cyr could damage it.

There was a huge explosion, but not the missile; not yet. They had clipped the rim of an asteroid fragment, and went reeling again until Thahl righted them. The missile reeled and righted itself with them, and maintained exact distance.

Another asteroid loomed ahead, and Thahl wrenched them over its horizon, with the missile following, and plunged into a swarm of asteroid debris. Somehow he got through it, and somehow so did the missile. They ran before it through the Belt, sidewinding and somersaulting. They ran like a dog through dustbins, hitting some and missing others; a dog trying to escape its own tail, and turning rabid because it couldn’t.

“The one…”

“Please keep him quiet, Commander.”

They entered another swarm of debris. The minor impacts mounted, and Thahl ignored them. Cyr kept firing at the missile, and it ignored her. Joser was trying to speak to Foord, and Foord ignored him.

The next major asteroid marked the change. It wasn’t a sudden looming obstacle to be avoided: Thahl was actually making for it. It was large, potato-shaped and lumpy. Its face grew until it filled the forward section of the Bridge screen—and continued to grow, until Forward became Down and they were diving into it. Diving, Foord thought, into a giant face of W. C. Fields…there was where the hat should be, and there the cigar. It even had the complexion, veined and pocked and wrinkled, the details hurtling into and inside focus as it rushed up at them.

To their credit, none of them shouted at Thahl to pull out of the dive until they were sure he’d left it too late; and then he ignored them. He held the dive until they were inside final landing height, then turned the ship in its own length, heading up and back into the Belt. The ion drive, where he turned, hit the asteroid’s face like a broken bottle.

And the missile followed them. It did not, as Thahl hoped, dash itself to pieces on the asteroid. It turned as quickly as they did, and was where it had always been: on the rear Bridge screen, a ship’s-length away. It was as though Kaang was piloting it.

Smithson began a long vomit of foul language, which seemed to splatter over the walls of the Bridge and hang dripping like Kaang’s faeces; though it made no difference to the missile. Nothing did. Joser couldn’t detect it, Thahl couldn’t lose it, Cyr couldn’t destroy it, and Foord—

Foord couldn’t take his eyes off it. Whatever it did to them finally, right now She was using it to speak to them, mocking them for surrendering in seconds of retreat what they’d gained after hours of pursuit. Foord even thought he recognised the tone of voice She used to mock them: understated and ironic, like voices used to be on the Charles Manson.

Joser was trying to speak to Foord, but the wrong words kept coming out. He kept saying “This is the one She intended for us,” and Foord heard but ignored him.

They reached a rare pocket of open space in the Belt. Thahl paused, then wrenched them to port, heading for the next asteroid, and Smithson snorted in derision. So, almost, did Foord, and for the same reason: they were running ragged, a frothing dog diving for the dark of the nearest alley.

But literally an alley this time.

The asteroid for which Thahl was running was BZ-1014. It was huge, the size of a small planet. He flung them into orbit around it—after nodding briefly to himself, as if he actually knew what he was doing—and it spread out below them, like a giant unmade bed. It was humped and folded from horizon to horizon, a landscape of craters and mountains. Pulled this way and that by the Belt’s shifting gravity, it breathed in slow geological violence. One of its breaths was ten of their lifetimes.

Thahl tightened orbit; the effect, of dropping closer to the surface while maintaining speed, was like a surge of acceleration. As BZ-1014’s landscape rushed below, vomited out by one horizon and swallowed by the other, he turned and looked directly at Foord.

“Particle beams,” he managed to say; and “Alley.”

And then Foord understood, and had to fight an impulse to laugh out loud—in relief that Thahl had found something they could still do, and in disbelief at what it was.

“You heard him, Cyr. Fire particle beams.”

“And destroy the asteroid? When we’re on top of it?”

“No,” Foord said, “when we’re inside it.”

Cyr was too amazed, and frightened, to reply. She glanced up at Foord; then at Smithson, who also understood; then at Thahl, who was going to do it anyway; and nodded.

They ran for their alley.

At ninety percent ion speed, Thahl tightened and lowered orbit; then dived

vertically

for the largest of the craters.

The particle beams—even stronger than Hers, the one weapon She couldn’t match—stabbed ahead, perfect and recoilless, and ate.

The asteroid spasmed. Now they could see it breathe. Its metabolism sped, accelerating to match theirs, until its internal processes were running—and would run out—as quickly as theirs. Its surface contours turned liquid, concentrating a thousand years’ movements into seconds, and its voice, now as audible as its movements were visible, roared up at them through the throat of the crater as they dived, and entered Thahl’s Alley.

Because particle beams were recoilless, the Charles Manson broke through the asteroid’s surface without impact. There was only a soft concussion, as of a finger poking into an eyeball; and then, abruptly, a shuffle and flicker of universes. The forward screen simply shifted from one frame, where they broke orbit and dived vertically, to another, where space turned to rock and outside to inside. Cause and effect tripped over each other. The screen showed impossible events by the light of impossible colours.

Thahl’s Alley was a moving wormhole. They were the forward tip of a burrowing internal wound which opened ahead as it closed behind. Rock turned viscous, roared and fell away boiling before them where the beams ate it, but Thahl’s Alley only existed ahead. Behind them it collapsed and coagulated, its collapse chasing but never quite catching them. Ahead and Behind worked in counterpoint, like a pair of thighs, to draw them deeper inside.

“Missile still there?”

“Yes, Commander,” said Smithson, and swore. “Even through this.”

And again, the engagement turned on itself. Their orders were to engage and destroy Faith in single combat, and now those orders—even the shapes of the words—melted. Thahl had injected them into an asteroid, and they were burrowing for its core where their beams would annihilate it and (perhaps) burst them free of its explosion in a manoeuvre not even Kaang had attempted; and all of this to destroy, not Faith, but just Her third missile.

The beams ate, they moved forward, the wound closed behind them, the beams ate, they moved forward. By now Cyr was laughing aloud (“Kaang should see this! Thahl, it’s brilliant. It might even work!”) and firing continuously, and the colours were breathtaking. Ahead of them where the wound opened, the beams had made something which was almost a sun, a swirling whiteness of molten colours fracturing and recombining, but its colour never reached the Bridge screen. The dark bruise-blue of the beams filtered its glare down to polite pastels of peach and mauve and lilac: delicate, lying colours which imparted a wash of wonder to their creation of Thahl’s Alley, but drained it of its enormity. And hid its ending.

“There’s no more I can do for now, Commander,” Thahl said. “Not until we reach the core.”

Foord nodded. For the last few minutes—it felt like seconds, but the screen said minutes—he had watched Thahl as closely as the screen, because the idea that Thahl could have devised this was as bewitching as any of the roiling interior-decorator pastels ahead. He knew less of Thahl, after years, than he did of Faith, after days.

More minutes passed. The beams ate, they moved forward, the wound closed behind them, the beams ate, they moved forward. It was a simple internal-combustion cycle, driven by post-Einsteinian physics. Foord would have given a lot to see what Thahl’s instruments (roll, pitch, yaw, speed, spatial coordinates) were making of it; they were still on ninety percent ion speed, but inside an asteroid. And the missile…

“Still there, Commander,” Smithson said.

“And,” Thahl added, “we’re not on ninety percent speed. We’re on ninety percent power, but speed is down because we’re not moving through space.”

Did I think aloud? Foord asked, or thought he asked, And did I ask aloud if I was thinking aloud, or only think it? And did I—

That was when it started to change. They were slowing down, like his thoughts. Their speed had dropped when they entered the asteroid, and was dropping further. Nearer the core, matter was denser and penetration harder, the pastel illusion of an alley ahead growing darker and closing tighter. The colours themselves were slowing down and deepening. Events were suddenly gradual, slowing too fast; even sounds came more slowly.

“The one. She intend. Dead. For us.” Joser’s voice crawled around his head, trying to get in.

“Can you tell us how long before we reach the core?” Foord heard himself asking Thahl.

“No, Commander, because I can’t predict our rate of slowing. Maybe we won’t.”

“Won’t?”

“If we reach the core the beams will explode the asteroid. If we don’t we’ll be embedded. Like…”

Like the Book of Srahr in its crystal, Foord thought. Or said.

The beams ate; they edged forward; the wound closed behind them.

The air was as thick as tree-resin, trapping events like insects. It smothered light and sound, made thoughts meander, and conversations mumble to nowhere. Time inverted itself. Minutes stretched into seconds, or longer.

Foord found himself repeating his last conversation with Thahl. He walked around the words. They stood like stones in a cemetery. This time there were three voices in the conversation, not two. The third voice was a roaring which obliterated some words at random like an idiot’s finger daubing a page.

“Can you”

“Us how long before we reach the”

“Won’t?”

“Like the Book of Srahr in its”

Then the third voice reversed itself, and became the words it obliterated. Tell. Core. Crystal. The words crumbled, and the voice was wordless again. It chased its own echoes, caught them and became continuous, and Foord began to dread it, so he went away.

Back in the cemetery the words were still standing like stones, but something else was there too. Where the word Crystal should have stood was a darkness. It spread. First it put out thin tendrils, like hairline cracks in the air; then thicker tendrils, which chased and caught the thinner ones and wandered among the words, engulfing and denying them. Then it joined itself and became a black web, as large as a planet. It turned to face Foord, swivelling on him simultaneously from above and below and all around, and—suddenly intimate—it pulled aside part of itself and showed him its inner recesses. Foord dreaded it. He went away, back to his ship, but the darkness followed him there, where it became the third voice.

The third voice was the voice of the asteroid, roaring at them from above and below and all around, swelling towards explosion: the rending of rock through which a dark web of fault-lines radiated, first thin then thick, chasing each other. It was wordless but held hints of words, growing and dying inside it; and Foord, returning to his ship from wherever he had been, found himself returning to a madhouse.

“The one…” Joser began.

“Got you,” Cyr whispered, firing, and “Now hurry up and die.” The asteroid rushed to obey her.

“…She intended for us.” Joser was talking to himself, and being ignored.

“Still there!” Smithson bellowed, jabbing at the rear screen. “And it won’t ever go away!”

And Thahl, the most shocking of all, because Foord had never heard him shout before. Too early, it’s exploding too early, we haven’t reached the core yet and I’m not ready—

“Thahl?”

“Commander. I’m glad you’re back. I thought you’d gone away.”

“I thought so too.”

“Look out there, Commander. Look at what we’ve done.”

They were talking quietly together, as if nothing else existed; as if the ship wasn’t trying to collapse around them, as if the asteroid wasn’t trying to pull open the walls of Thahl’s Alley and make itself burst.

“So the beams—”

“Were too strong for it, Commander.”

Still, thought Foord, finishing each other’s sentences. “I didn’t think it would go quite so quickly, though.”

“Didn’t you? It was only an asteroid.”

They both shrugged, a gesture equally fitting as an end to their conversation, or to their years together; then they turned back to the Bridge screen, and considered what they had done.

The air changed. Thickness and slowness drained out of it. It turned sharp and crystalline. Light and events, having almost stopped, began to move again; but away from each other, parallelling the movement of each atom in the asteroid. They were all moving away from each other, like Sakhrans after reading the Book of Srahr.

Time restarted. Light shook itself free of the brown rotting gloom, crawled back through familiar pastels and burst into solar white, breeding new events like life-forms.

Thahl’s Alley opened out into light. Fault-lines radiated from it, reaching through the asteroid’s body like the fingers of a hand, and when they reached the surface the asteroid exploded, blowing through the fingers like sand.

6

Grains of sand.

Time restarted, multiplied, became abundant. Even events couldn’t breed fast enough to fill it, and as the asteroid exploded and the ship fought to outrun the explosion, Foord had time to reflect on those events: on their scale of magnitude. Scales of magnitude had occupied him a lot, ever since he saw a perfectly ordinary Class 037 cruiser pass endlessly overhead at Blentport.

When they approached the asteroid, it was breathing in long geological cycles, heaving its flanks in response to the Belt’s gravity. On a scale of magnitude, they and their ship were microbes in a phial, approaching a mountain.

Sometimes you could trust scales of magnitude. They were simple and linear. For example, two scorpions fighting. They would clack their claws and wave their stings, faces moving like gearboxes, while lesser things around them scurried away aghast. Then an elephant would step on them as it wandered by.

But sometimes, scales of magnitude were ambiguous, hinting that small events were the tip of something larger. For example, two animals glancing at each other, but they were the last dinosaur and the first mammal. Or a small pallid corpse on a beach, but the corpse of the first creature to crawl from the sea.

And sometimes, scales of magnitude were treacherous. They could turn full circle, letting the smallest overpower the largest. The microbes in the phial approaching the mountain were not themselves a threat, but they had made the phial which carried them, and it had the power to explode the mountain; and did so.

She remained at the outer edges of the Belt, still shrouded, and watched them. She had seen them execute a photon burst through the Belt, then burrow through an asteroid to explode it from within, and then try to outrun the resulting explosion. She still held all the advantages; they might not escape the explosion, and Her missile had come out of the asteroid with them and was still dogging them, and She knew they couldn’t shake it off. But still, they had done such things that She was beginning to take notice.

7

“This is the one,” Joser was saying “She intended for us this is the one.” He was trying to say something and didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t that. Every time he tried to speak to them it came out as those words, but it didn’t matter because nobody heard him or, at that time, even remembered him.

They ran, just ahead of the asteroid’s explosion. The Bridge was chaotic and unrecognisable. Part of the minor core which ran the Bridge’s gravity compensators had been damaged, and now was not the time to repair it. Things which had no business but to be fixed pieces of furniture and equipment had taken to an aerial existence, ricochetting off walls and ceilings like shoals of fish frightened one way and another. They went everywhere. Foord and the others were shouting, not in fear but in outrage that mere external events could dishevel them so.

After what they’d done it would have been fitting to have burst clear and to have seen the asteroid explode from a safe distance. It would even have been fitting, though less satisfactory, to have perished instantly in the centre of the explosion. The fact that their situation was neither of these, but something less than either, was an outrage.

They had burst clear of the explosion, but it had not stopped. It was gathering a wavefront behind them which was now racing and radiating through the Belt, so huge it would be visible to instruments on Sakhra. And their own instruments told them that if they ran as they were now—desperately, at ninety-five percent ion drive, because Thahl wasn’t Kaang and couldn’t use photon drive—then the wavefront would catch them before it dwindled to nothing.

It would hit them in about five minutes. They’d probably survive, the screen added insolently, but whether the damage would be serious or minor couldn’t be predicted.

So they ran, just ahead of the wavefront. How could one asteroid, however massive, go on and on exploding like that? It was throwing out more matter than it was made of. As though someone at the other end of the galaxy had found an MT wormhole where the asteroid exploded, and was throwing fresh debris down it. As though the people in the apartment next door had knocked a hole in the wall and were shovelling things through it: cans, and cornflake cartons, and cat litter, and condoms.

“And the third missile?”

“I already told you, Commander,” Smithson snapped. “We didn’t lose it. It’s still there, a ship’s-length away.”

“And damage reports? I want damage reports.”

“No time, Commander, it came out with us and it’s still there and it’s like none of this ever happened.”

“I said, damage reports. Cyr, closeup weapons; Thahl, try to lose it.”

“I’m already trying to lose it, Commander.”

“Like none of this happened,” Smithson muttered.

“And I’m already using closeup weapons,” Cyr said. Just like before, and they didn’t work then either, she thought, but didn’t say.

“The one She…”

Foord turned again to Smithson. “I said, Damage reports.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Look behind us.”

Her missile was still there, so close it filled half the rear screen. But behind it, filling the entire rear screen, was the wavefront which, like Foord’s elephant, threatened to squash them all without noticing. In about three minutes, added Smithson.

The wavefront rolled on and on. It seemed like it would reach back to Sakhra. They had already rewritten part of the map of the Belt, in the form of the asteroids they had vaporised; now, a bigger part was being rewritten right behind them, and seeking to include them.

That extraordinary missile, Foord mused, and that wavefront. Two ticking bombs.

“This is. The one She.”

Three, with Joser. Three was too many, so again he forgot Joser.

“Intended for us.”

“Thahl, use the last five percent ion drive, please.”

He did, and so did the missile.

Still stationary, relative to them. Filling half the rear screen. Neither gaining nor falling back. Like before, it had started deploying its flickerfields against Cyr’s attacks, and like before it stopped. No need. No time, either to drain it or destroy it. It had perhaps two or three percent ion drive left, and they had nothing. And two minutes from now the wavefront would catch them, and they had nothing for that either.

There was an impact, but not the missile; not yet. They had ploughed into some asteroid debris, and momentarily went reeling until Thahl righted them. The missile reeled and righted itself with them. More impacts. Thahl’s control of the ship was collapsing; he was fighting the collapse carefully and intelligently, but losing.

The Belt closed in on them. Asteroids and asteroid fragments came at them from ahead and above and below, looming and roaring and whipping past and leaving afterimages through which new ones loomed and roared. The Bridge screen listed them coldly and without comment as they passed, some of them the remains of those destroyed earlier. AN-4044, AL-4091, AD-2025. A series of minor impacts, and then something more serious, a sickening impact to port as they hit and glanced off a fragment from a smallish asteroid, AC-1954. Foord remembered that one. The alarms sounded: real damage.

“Port manoeuvre drives impaired, at least twenty percent,” Smithson said.

Foord shrugged. They didn’t, at that time, have any pressing need for manoeuvre drives. “And the wavefront?”

“Fifty seconds, Commander. But it’s dwindling.”

Joser tried again. He had something to tell Foord but not the words he’d been repeating. His mouth his mouth wouldn’t make any other words.

“This is the one She intended for us.”

He screamed, and it came out as those words. Shouted, and it came out as those words. Then he drew a last breath, dredged up all his willpower, dragged himself back to sanity, and spoke in clear ringing tones; but it came out as those words.

“This is the one She intended for us. This is the one She intended for us. This is the one She intended for us.”

This the way the world ends, thought Foord, picking up the rhythm with a line of old poetry, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a

BANG.

It was, amazingly, the report of a pistol. A big, blue-black, old-fashioned pistol which Joser was holding. He had just shot himself in the temple, and seemed to be staring down at the pistol through his nostrils, since the half of his face which still remained began from the nostrils downwards. He slumped, and the seat took him.

His blood and brains, like Kaang’s faeces, went everywhere. As with Kaang, they turned away.

“She’s actually killed one of us,” Cyr said.

“She did that long ago,” Foord said, as the wavefront caught and hit them.

“And,” he added, “none of us is One Of Us.”

•

The wavefront was already dying. The further it reached the more insubstantial it became, until finally when it caught them it passed over them like sand. Their desperate flight from it had been just enough. The ship still spasmed as it hit, but the flickerfields held; and then it was gone, roaring past them and dwindling, in the forward screen, to nothing.

But the missile was still there.

“Smithson: damage reports, please.”

“Hull, rear dorsal section, and manoeuvre drives, port and rear dorsal. Nothing we couldn’t repair, if we had time.”

The Bridge was suddenly quieter. Foord watched the asteroids looming and whipping past. Despite what had happened, they seemed almost peaceful.

“Missile’s gaining. She’s decided it should hit now, I think.”

“Commander…” began Thahl.

“It’s OK. There’s no need.”

The grey ovoid swelled slowly in the rear screen, since its speed exceeded theirs by only one or two percent. Naturally they deployed their flickerfields, but were past surprise when it somehow slipped inside them; this was a missile like none they had ever encountered. They watched it grow larger, then blur prior to impact as it passed inside the screen’s final focus. But there was no explosion, just a soft thump; and something obscuring the rear screen.

“No. I don’t believe it.”

“What?” Foord said. “Who’s that speaking?”

“Slesar, Commander. Officer Joser’s deputy. I’m sorry, my call should have gone through to him.”

“Never mind that, what’s happened?”

“It’s on the screen, Commander.”

The rear Bridge screen refocussed, and became a stained-glass window of dark red and terracotta, of burnt umber and sienna streaked with ochre. Headup displays provided a spectrographic analysis, but it wasn’t necessary. As soon as Smithson started laughing, they knew.

The third missile had been packed full of shit, probably the last of Her stock from Isis. It was as though Kaang had returned to them, on a grand scale.

8

Two hours later, Kaang did return to the Bridge. She found that it and its occupants had changed; perhaps for better or worse, but certainly for good.

“Welcome back, Kaang.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

She stood in the main doorway, swaying slightly, and blinking at what she saw.

“Yes, I know,” Foord said, waving an arm around, “A mess.” His voice was still quiet, but he spoke more quickly, and with more emphasis, than she was used to. “One small repair, to one small gravity compensator, and all this debris would disappear. But I wanted it left like this. I ordered it left like this. I had my reasons. You’ll see.”

Joser’s body was gone—she knew about Joser—and the Bridge consoles were impeccably tidy as usual, but everything else seemed chaotic. Kaang was bewildered. She had never seen it like this.

“Thahl has rerouted the pilot’s functions back to your console, Kaang.”

She nodded and began to pick her way, slightly unsteadily, through the mess and wreckage. Foord took her arm—he had never touched her before—and walked alongside her. His movements were different, somehow more abrupt and jagged; she was used to him moving about his ship silently and carefully. He kicked pieces of debris out of the way, and led her (not directly, but following the walls) to her console.

The others nodded as she passed—she mouthed Thank You to Thahl—but said nothing. Their expressions were hard to read.

She looked diminished. Her hair was lank and greasy, the scars on her face and forehead from the neural implants had not yet healed, and her eyes were larger and duller.

“Smithson,” Foord called over his shoulder, “damage reports?”

“Moderate structural damage to rear ventral hull. Manoeuvre drives severely impaired to port, moderately impaired to starboard. MT Drive shut down and inoperable. And we’re covered in shit.”

“How long?”

“Another five hours. But we can’t completely restore the port manoeuvre drives; they’ll still be ten percent impaired.”

“And Faith?”

“No change, Commander. She’s stationary at the inner edge of the Belt, and out of beam range. At asteroid CQ-504.”

“What’s She doing there?”

“It’s strange, Commander, She’s—”

“No, leave it. I remember, you told me before…” He turned to Kaang. “You see?”

She blinked up at him. “What, Commander?”

He pointed to the Bridge screen. “What She’s done to us.”

She saw, though it took her a moment to adjust. The screen was subdivided into a mosaic of smaller screens. Each one showed views of the ship from outside, transmitted to the Bridge from remotes floating under, over and around the hull. The hull itself was swarming with figures, human and nonhuman, living and mechanical and synthetic. Apart from the six (now five) on the Bridge, the Charles Manson had a crew of fifty-seven. About thirty, Kaang estimated, were on the hull, outnumbered by mechanicals and synthetics.

The slender delta shape at first looked, as ever, perfect and inviolate; until random stabs of the arc-lights from the working parties threw into sudden relief the jagged edges of damage, mostly around the rear and port sections. Kaang could see the gashes and striations which, suddenly lit then dark then lit again, seemed to pulse like infected areas. And as her eyes adjusted further she saw where the hull was streaked and daubed.

She resumed her seat at her console. She seemed to grow back a little, but only a little, into her normal shape and identity.

“Thahl’s rerouted the pilot’s functions back to you, Kaang.”

“Yes, Commander. You told me.”

“He has rerouted them back.” Foord spoke as if he had to be certain of that before he could say anything else to her, about anything. “We have a lot to do. Now you’re back, we’ll begin. By saying goodbye to Joser.”

•

They waited for Foord’s signal. When he gave it, each of them—including the synthetics and mechanicals—stopped working on the hull and turned to face the nearest remote, so that back on the Bridge Foord could see them all looking into the screen. The sealed capsule containing Joser’s body was ready for ejection through one of the ventral airlocks.

Like most of those on the Charles Manson, Joser had no family or relatives—or none with whom he kept contact—and had elected, In The Event Of My Death In Service, for burial in space. The nine Outsiders had standard words for such occasions. Foord spoke them over the comm.

“Before he was born, he already existed. As a set of possibilities. As something unknowable. While he lived, he was the visible tip of that same thing. Now let him return to it, and still exist. Perhaps.”

Joser’s capsule ejected from the rear ventral airlock, and drifted away.

Faith’s first victim went out in the same direction as that taken by Her third missile, after it impacted the ship. The missile had collapsed its molecular structure, become an irregular inert object about three feet across, and drifted away. Nobody felt disposed to follow it. Joser did, now.

•

“You added a word to the standard service,” Kaang heard Smithson say to Foord.

“Perhaps,” Foord said.

“Yes,” Smithson said. “Perhaps. It’s not in the service.”

“Perhaps it ought to be…. Is the comm still on?”

It was. Work had not resumed. All over the hull, they were still staring into the Bridge screen.

“This opponent,” Foord said into the comm, “is like none we’ve ever encountered. Before we finish repairs and go after Her, I want us to consider Her. To consider what She is.”

“Commander,” Cyr began, “this isn’t—it won’t—”

“It is and it will. This is important. I have my reasons. You’ll see.”

The figures on the hull were motionless. All of them, including the mechanicals and synthetics, seemed to be listening intently.

“Kaang, you start. What is She?”

“Commander, what’s happened while I’ve been away?”

“What do you mean?”

“Our orders said destroy Her and ignore what She is. You said that. What’s happened to make you change?”

“I’m sorry, Kaang, it was unfair to start with you. I’ll come back to you later, but listen and you’ll see why I’m asking….Thahl, what about you? What do you think She is? Is She from the Commonwealth, maybe a rebel?”

“Perhaps, Commander. But a ship like that—”

“Like what? We’ve been fighting Her all this time, and we haven’t seen her yet.”

“We know what She looks like, and we know some of what She can do, from records of previous engagements…She’s not a Commonwealth ship.”

“Or maybe She is, but just not one that we know of.”

Thahl paused. “Then maybe we don’t know what She looks like. She can bend and confuse scanners. Maybe how she appeared in previous engagements isn’t how She really is.”

“Maybe. So what is She?”

Thahl thought for a moment, then glanced up at Foord.

“Maybe She’s been secretly built and funded by some of the I2Js,” (he meant those Invited To Join) “to strike back at the Commonwealth.”

A ripple of something, perhaps amusement, went through the Bridge. It was impossible to tell, from the heavily-suited figures on the screen, whether whatever it was had been echoed outside.

“Better,” said Foord. “But it’s not what you really think…Smithson, what is She?”

“How about something made secretly by the Commonwealth to eliminate Outsiders? You know what they think of us, Commander.”

“Much better,” approved Foord. “I like that one, it’s so self-obsessed and so paranoid. So: Kaang.”

“Commander?”

“What is She?”

“I wish I could take part in this, Commander, but you know I can’t. We agreed. I’m only a pilot.”

“Come on, Kaang.”

“I really don’t know…perhaps your suggestion, that She’s some kind of rebel.”

“Too obvious, and She’d need a better pilot. She’d have tried to recruit you…Cyr, what is She?”

“Do we have to go on with this, Commander?”

“Yes. What is She?”

“Maybe She really is just an alien. Maybe this is the first real threat we’ve ever known. The first of many. Maybe this is the start of a war, against the first enemy we’ve ever met who can really match us.”

“She came here three hundred years ago, Cyr. It wasn’t the start of a war against Sakhra.”

“It didn’t need to be. Whatever She did was enough for Her to leave and let Sakhra decline.” She glanced at Thahl, who remained expressionless. “The Commonwealth is bigger. Maybe a war is more appropriate.”

When the silence on the Bridge had grown long enough to be uncomfortable, Cyr added “You did ask me. And it’s what we all heard back on Sakhra.”

“And is it what you think?”

“Yes, Commander, because it’s the most likely. The best fit.”

“Except that the Commonwealth has ordered us to engage and destroy Her alone. Just us.”

“That doesn’t make it untrue.”

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, Cyr.”

“Oh? Then what is all this about, Commander? You told us—”

“To consider what She is. Not discover. Not decide. Consider! Consider all the explanations, because all the explanations, whether they’re true or not, tell us the same thing.”

“Do you have an explanation for us, Commander?”

“Yes, I think She’s an alien. But not like you described, Cyr. Something quite different. Perhaps…”

“I meant an explanation for your behaviour here, Commander.”

“…Perhaps what we’ve been fighting all this time isn’t even a ship. Perhaps it doesn’t have a Commander, or crew, or pilot. Perhaps it’s a single life-form, evolved to live in space like a fish in water. Or a marine mammal, which looks like a fish but preys on fish. Yes: it looks like a ship but preys on ships.”

“And how,” Cyr inquired politely, “does it prey on ships? Does it eat them?”

“Absorbs their energies,” Smithson offered. “You know, feeds on their feelings of mortification, after it’s defeated them in various elaborate and enigmatic ways.”

“Yes! And,” Cyr went on delightedly, “and its drives, its scanners, its beams, its missiles, all the things that make it look like a ship, they’re evolutionary mimicry.”

“You see? It’s getting better. You’re adding details. Building internal consistencies.” Foord stood up and gazed round the Bridge. His gaze was almost feverish, but it had something almost like certainty. Kaang saw each of them, herself included, try but fail to hold it.

“All the explanations, even the wrong ones—even that last one of mine, which is the most wrong—tell us the same thing. Even the explanations we haven’t thought of yet, when we think of them, will tell us the same thing.”

Abruptly, he turned and walked back to where Kaang sat at her console. As before, he went around the walls rather than directly, kicking debris as he went, and when he reached Kaang he towered over her.

“Let’s recap. A renegade who hates the Commonwealth, and strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. A resistance force from the I2Js who hate the Commonwealth, and strike at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. Something made by the Commonwealth, because the Commonwealth hates us and strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. Something from another civilisation, the first ever to threaten the Commonwealth; and it strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. You see where this takes us?”

Kaang felt the base of her neck aching as she stared up at him, trying to read what was in his face.

“We’re alone. Trust nothing. Trust nobody. We’re all we’ve got.”

He glanced at the screen. The comm was still working, and none of the figures on the hull had moved. And Kaang, who didn’t yet understand his meaning but had started to sense it from his voice, felt her scalp tingling.

“This is why I don’t care who or what She is. I never have and never will. We’re an Outsider, one of only nine, and we’re alone. The Commonwealth created Outsiders as its ultimate weapon. It kept them outside normal command structures. It named them after killers and loners. It crewed them with killers and loners, people unable to fit normal social structures, but too brilliant and too valuable to discard.

“And when they came into those nine ships they brought only their abilities, and nothing else. No shared culture and no friendship. They were alone together. The other eight are still like that, but we’ve encountered Her and it’s made us different. And this is why we can destroy Her. Because we know what we are.”

On the screen, in the distance, there was a brief and silent flare. The required standard period had elapsed and Joser’s coffin ignited, returning him to the set of possibilities he had always been. Perhaps.

“We’re going after Her. We’ll repair the structural damage and drives; but the surface damage, stays as it is. The shit over the hull, stays as it is. The Bridge, stays as it is. We, stay as we are. We’ll taste and smell each other. This is what we are.

“Joser won’t be replaced on the Bridge; we’ll share his duties. And when we next face Her, it won’t be for Joser, or the Commonwealth, or friendship or professional pride, it’ll be because of what She made us. She was right: everything outside this ship is an illusion, and it hates us. Or She was lying, and everything outside this ship is real; and it still hates us. We’re all we have, and outside this tin can we can trust nothing and nobody. We’re all there is. Nothing else exists. That, out there, is painted scenery.

“We’re no longer an Instrument of the Commonwealth. We’re an Instrument of Ourselves.”

9

For once, thought Smithson, Kaang was ahead of everyone. She had sensed Foord’s meaning before anyone else—even before he, Smithson, sensed it. He saw that shudder, that frisson, go through her before Foord said Instrument of Ourselves. Afterwards he saw it go through everyone on the Bridge, and everyone outside on the hull, and he’d felt it go through himself; his long grey body, with its almost random construction, visibly rippled. Nobody cheered—this was, after all, still the Charles Manson—but Foord’s words had an impact. They had gone everywhere.

When Foord finished, most of them just nodded briefly—to themselves rather than to each other, because again this was still the Charles Manson—and resumed work. Smithson too. Oh yes, he’d said to himself, I can buy some of that. Fuck everyone except us. Fuck the universe. Painted scenery. And, he thought sourly as he looked out from the Bridge at the stars, not even very well painted. Those stars look alive but most of them, by the time their light reaches us, are dead or dying. They look alive but they’re dead. Trust nothing.

The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith. Her current position was unchanged, and had been for some time, even while Her third missile chased them. She was on the inner edge of the Belt, at the asteroid CQ-504. She could have moved off ahead of them, out of the Belt and deeper into Horus system, and they could not have stopped Her, as She was out of beam range. But She didn’t move off. It was curious, thought Smithson. She seemed to be building some kind of structure there.

Cyr too was considering what Foord said. She took each word, held it up and examined it from every angle: port, starboard, ventral, dorsal, front, rear. She particularly liked Instrument of Ourselves. It resonated. He made it sound spontaneous, but she knew he was too careful, and too clever, to say it without calculation. But it had a resonance. Now, we know what we are.

Cyr didn’t like the bit about being able to smell and taste each other. She understood the symbolism perfectly; but she liked to be immaculate. To be anything less than immaculate was a high price to pay—for her, almost the ultimate price—but she weighed it carefully and decided it would be worth it. And she could already smell and taste Foord.

The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith and the asteroid CQ-504. It was curious, Cyr thought to herself. She was apparently building some kind of structure there.

Kaang kept remembering The Shudder. Having felt instinctively what Foord said, she tried again and again to analyse it literally, the way Cyr and Smithson and Thahl would do; and failed. It didn’t matter. She knew that what Foord said would change them all. It meant a shift in some previously immovable balance. And more specifically, it meant that she would be needed. She didn’t understand where her extraordinary skills came from, but they would be needed and she was back in time to provide them, so that was alright. She missed Joser, though.

The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith. It was curious, Kaang thought. She was apparently building some kind of structure on CQ-504. She had shrouded it against their probes, but they intended to know more about it by the time they reached Her.

Since Foord spoke, Thahl had been thinking about the Book of Srahr, and how one day—if they survived this—Foord would return to Sakhra and would be permitted to read it. And then a pattern would be completed, a long slow pattern three centuries old.

Thahl made himself turn to specifics. The Charles Manson was the most formidable ship in the Commonwealth; and what Foord said made it more so. Even She, when they next engaged Her, wouldn’t know that. She would expect them to act like an Instrument of the Commonwealth, which they no longer were. Foord was right. Now we can beat Her, because now we know what we are. An Instrument “—of Ourselves,” Foord repeated, as the Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt. “And we have to make it irreversible. So…” He picked up the incongruous microphone on his console, the one with a channel to the Department, dashed it on the floor of the Bridge and ground it with his heel. He drew a breath. “Thahl, please close down ALL external comm channels.”

Thahl glanced up, but did not hesitate. Foord watched his hands, slender talons with two opposed thumbs, moving over his illuminated console, leaving darkness wherever they landed.

“Done, Commander. We’re alone.”

The microphone was only symbolic. Thahl knew the Department would have put several other probes on the ship; he knew about most of them, but not all. Later, Foord would order him to disable them, which he would do, but he wouldn’t get them all. So, the microphone was only symbolic, but the symbolism was powerful.

The Department would want to retaliate. If they destroyed Her, they would put themselves beyond the Department’s retaliation, and if they didn’t destroy Her then She’d destroy them; and they’d be beyond the Department’s retaliation. Either way, Foord had now locked them outside. They were genuinely outside the Department’s reach.

The symbolism was very powerful, but Thahl knew Foord had also calculated it carefully, as he always did. And it wasn’t only, or at least wasn’t entirely, a mere cynical calculation—Thahl, too, had felt The Shudder. They all had. Exactly as Foord had calculated.

•

There was a silence on the Bridge. Even when they started speaking the silence remained in their speech, jumping from the end of one sentence to the beginning of another.

“They’ll want to know why,” Kaang said.

“When this is over,” Cyr said, “and when we rejoin, we can tell them.”

“Perhaps we won’t rejoin,” Smithson said.

“Of course we will,” Cyr said. “Instrument Of Ourselves is right for what we need now, but we’ll have to rejoin. When She’s gone, there will be…”

“Nowhere else to go,” finished Kaang. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Smithson said, “but for now I prefer it like this. It feels right.”

The silence was quite unlike the Charles Manson’s usual repertoire of silences: reflective, rather than pregnant. Some of them gazed out across the plane of the Belt, in the direction of the inner edge where She waited. The stars twinkled. Some of them were dead.

“Some of us will die,” Smithson said.

“Yes,” Foord said. “But now we really can defeat Her. And She doesn’t know it, yet.”

“She’ll know,” Kaang said, unexpectedly, “when we engage Her. Ships have a body language.”

“What will She…” Cyr began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Kaang. “What will She do when She finds out?”

“It isn’t important,” Thahl said suddenly. “We all know, She isn’t concerned either way.”

The others looked at him.

“Anything sent up to stop Her is irrelevant. She may destroy it, play with it, or let it go. She isn’t concerned either way.”

“For once…” Foord began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Thahl. “For once, I think you’re wrong. Where we’re concerned, She is concerned. She won’t run ahead of us to Sakhra, and She won’t stay put in the Belt. She wants to fight us all the way through the system. All the way back to Sakhra. I know it.”

And then something else occurred to Foord. These pieces of knowledge about Her which he’d been gathering so carefully, based on his observation and research and on what he thought was his growing instinct about Her, perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were planted by Her, as She had done with Joser. Not by telepathy, but events. She does things, and predicts their effect on us, which means that somehow She already knows us.

He was so struck with this idea that he scarcely noticed when Cyr excused herself from the Bridge. Something I need to check in the weapons bays, she had said. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. He nodded abstractedly.

•

Unnecessary, Cyr told herself, as she picked her way through the cramped corridor leading to the weapons bays, Unnecessary. Like the kid you shot at Blentport. It was a vicious thing to say, more like something I’d say, and it made him sound ugly. I should have spoken to him. She imagined the conversation, in his study. —You wanted to see me? —Yes, what you said. How could you say that, after I’d just destroyed Her missiles? —Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Was there anything else? Foord had a habit of receiving an attack, draining it, and tossing it back to the attacker like a dead empty thing; it was a habit Cyr knew he could apply to his personal dealings as well as his military ones.

The main corridor branched into several narrower corridors, with naked lights and unfinished plaster, and she took the one leading to the bay she wanted. On the way she had to squeeze past one of her junior officers, a young woman called Hollith, so tightly that at least one of them enjoyed it, and then she was in the particular bay she had come to visit, staring up at Foord’s two missiles.

She had come here to try and figure them out: not what they did, but how he’d use them. Everyone knew he delivered every time, against every opponent, but how would he deliver this time? And against this opponent? Even Smithson, arguably the cleverest of them, had not been able to see how Foord would use these things. Smithson, in fact, had been quite disparaging about them, perhaps irritated by their simple design and by Foord’s cryptic answers to his questions.

Smithson, arguably the cleverest of us? She did a double-take on that, just as Foord might have done. First, as he would have said, there is no Us. And second, she knew Foord operated on the principle that they were all at least his intellectual equals. Still, if even Smithson can’t figure them out and I can…Then she looked up at them again, at their ugly flanks with overlapping blue-black metal plates, their strange nosecones and obscenely swelling drive bulges. They seemed to stare back at her insolently, giving her nothing. How could Foord devise weapons whose use even Smithson couldn’t figure out, though Foord had got Smithson to build them? Two reasons, she told herself. One, because he’d put the answer in plain sight where it would be most hidden, and Two, because he was clever; at least as clever as Smithson, which meant very clever indeed.

Cyr was from a wealthy Old Earth family which provided the Commonwealth with a monotonous stream of diplomats and bankers and senior civil servants. She had opted instead for a military career, and her family had disowned her, not because of her career choice but because of another choice she made.

Her family was as large as it was wealthy. Her childhood and adolescence was full of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins; full of mahogany and velvet, lawns and landscaped gardens, parties and functions and friends; and full of the particular ease which came from wealth worn lightly. Even by their standards she was unusually clever and attractive and they adored her and surrounded her, sensing she would distinguish herself but not, then, knowing how.

For her, the darkness came later than it did for Foord, and came differently. Her fifteenth birthday was marked with a party in the grounds of her home. It lasted through most of the day and she slipped indoors to go to the bathroom. A friend of her father’s, also a diplomat, followed her inside. He had always been attentive and kind, a regular guest at the house. This is our secret, he said as he started touching her, A special birthday present. Her instincts took over; she fought back with her hands and then, when he still wouldn’t go away, with her father’s cutthroat razor. The stroke which actually stopped him was a lucky one, but he collapsed abruptly and bled copiously. It went everywhere.

It was a revelation; the birth of her private universe. It made her want to lock the door and masturbate. If he’d still been conscious she’d have let him have her. She owed him. He had written down for her, all over the walls and floor, exactly what she was.

Later the stories about him came out, how he used to cruise at night for partners, usually younger or poorer or less intelligent than himself. He had hidden it from his family and had kept it apart from his public career, as would she; but she would do it better. His attempts to hide it were really quite mediocre. She hated mediocrity.

Her early sexual experiences were unsatisfactory, and now she knew why. Sex didn’t have to be shared with others. It could be done to others, and could be heightened by hurting them. She cruised for strangers. She never chose family, or people she knew at school or university, or military colleagues: always, it was strangers. She cruised cities for them like a smaller-scale Faith, random and motiveless, beautiful and brilliant. And perhaps also like Faith, she did it out of a compulsion which she wouldn’t acknowledge, preferring to call it choice.

Occasionally she thought What have I become, but that voice was distant, and the voice that said This Is What I AM was louder and more insistent. It would not be denied. Her earliest episodes were technically rapes, but even that distinction grew blurred: some of the later ones, though disturbingly violent, were almost consensual. Nothing, even then, was simple. And occasional episodes of pain and violation in dark teeming rooms weren’t enough. She wanted more than bits of opportunism. In the future it should be larger-scale, not the exception but the rule. It should be what it really was, a regular part of her life.

That was when she made her other choice, and became something quite unusual, a female serial rapist. She preferred Multiple or Random; Serial implied a process of growth and increase, whereas she saw it as a large but stable part of her life: something important, but something which had found its allotted place and wouldn’t grow to engulf her. Later, the distinction would be lost on the media who covered her trial. Predictably, they labelled her The CYRial Rapist.

At first, her military career flourished. She was high-achieving, high-profile and glamorous. She won Commonwealth and Olympic small arms medals, but that was only her hobby. Her career was large scale weaponry, ships’ weaponry, and she excelled at it. Her ability was natural, but not like Kaang’s; she had to work hard at it. Her military colleagues, sensing this, surrounded her and adored her, unaware of the moral toxin she carried.

She had chosen this career in the hope that she would find a legitimate outlet for what was in her, but this was one of her few mistakes. The conventional military of course dealt in violence, but only as a means and not an end; and not, usually, random or gratuitous violence. It was the suspicion of fellow crew-members which finally brought her to trial.

No, she told the court, it’s absolutely not a compulsion, it’s a conscious choice. I can choose not to. Mere serial rapists have to follow a pattern. I don’t. It’s not a compulsion.The prosecuting counsel nodded in agreement, then told the court It’s a compulsion. She’s described it very precisely. Her descriptions are always very precise.

She was sentenced to indefinite confinement in a secure mental institution, and then the Department came for her. Part of the arrangement—the unwritten part—was that, in return for using her proven talents on an Outsider, she could continue cruising; she could even continue enjoying the pain and violation, but—they told her—she had to be able to prove it was consensual and negotiated. Get them to sign a contract, they told her. Here’s a draft we’ve prepared.

And she remained very wealthy; the Department supplied her with lawyers to fight her family’s attempts to disinherit her. Her family could afford the very best lawyers, but the Department’s were better.

Most of the others on Foord’s ship had done things by compulsion. She absolutely knew this wasn’t the case with her. For her it was always by choice: free, rational, conscious choice. And because she realised she wasn’t the same as the others, she treated them warily, even though many had abilities she respected. She regarded Smithson as foul and pompous but very clever, with an intuition which was irritatingly accurate; Kaang as uninteresting except for her almost supernatural ability as a pilot; Thahl as competent but enigmatic; and Joser, before he had the good taste to die, as someone whose scheming far exceeded his talent.

Foord had some of all these features, but not enough of any to unbalance or skew his performance; the best and worst of them, but mostly the best. Cyr could not deny that she had feelings for him, but they were bleak and grudging. They could hardly be anything else, given what each of them were. She often teased herself with the irony; they might almost be viable partners, if it wasn’t for everything they were.

She gave herself a project: to find out what he had done to make the Department come for him, as it had come for her.

She had the wealth and resources to uncover his story. She embarked on the project as carefully and obsessively as Foord himself might have done, and eventually she found it; all of it. His parents and the orphanage and the rape and the priests he’d killed. Even the bit where he had later told the Department that he wished he’d known a Sakhran who could teach him how to kill more priests, more efficiently. She smiled. I wish you’d known me back then, I’d have taught you; and I’d have taught you how to enjoy it.

—You realise what this is? Mr. Gattuso, the proprietor of her favourite couture house, asked her when she described what she wanted. —Yes, she said, I know exactly what it is. Please make it for me. —I don’t, Mr. Gattuso said, want to annoy one of my best customers, but I have to ask, Are you sure? If you wear this, it may produce An Effect. —I’m aware of that, she said. Now please make it for me. You know how I want it tailored. It must hang just so….

And it did produce an effect, one which amazed her. She had no idea that a mere garment could have such an extraordinary effect on grown men, but she quickly adjusted and learnt how to use it. She found it very satisfactory; she could glide among them acting as if she was unaware of it.

Prior to meeting Mr. Gattuso, she had completed her research and knew exactly what she wanted. She found the designs for the orphanage uniforms, and described them to him with her usual precision: box pleats on the front and back of the skirt and bodice, a fabric belt and belt-loops, buttons on the shoulders, and so on. Going into such details, so obsessively, was like entering Foord’s private universe. She found herself following the paths of his obsessions as tortuously as she followed the cramped burrows of his ship.

Cyr suddenly let out a laugh of delight. It startled her deputy, Nemec, who’d been lurking in a corner of the weapons bay, quietly ogling her.

She understood it. Suddenly, and instantly, and all of it. Not even Smithson had seen this. Cyr only saw it because she had an instinct for weapons and how they were used, but now she knew it all, exactly how Foord would use them. You clever bastard, she thought. She’d seen what Foord had specified: what was inside the nose cones, what kinds of charges were packed in the distended bodies, what kinds of drives they had and the range over which they’d operate, and—most important—how fucking simple they were. You clever, brilliant bastard, she thought. If only

•

So the Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith. Its MT Drive was shut down. Its port manoeuvre drives were impaired. Its hull was plastered with shit, and carried a series of jagged open wounds round its rear ventral and dorsal areas where the wavefront had caught it. It resembled Cyr after a night’s cruising: normally immaculate, but now with her makeup smeared and her perfectly-tailored clothes locally disarranged.

The Charles Manson retained at least ninety percent of its former perfection. The damage to the hull looked superficial; but it went deeper, and it was not damage. Like those inhabiting it, it had changed; perhaps for better or worse, but certainly for good.

They had executed a photon burst through the Belt; had burrowed into and out of a planet-sized asteroid; had turned away from the Commonwealth and Sakhra; and were still there, more formidable than before. Instrument Of Ourselves and Trust Nothing were powerful phrases. Eventually they found their way back to the Department, where they were noted.

•

They began their final approach to CQ-504. Faith was no longer there. Having made sure they were approaching the asteroid, She had moved away, still in the Belt but beyond the reach of their beams. They slowed, and stopped. Foord ordered local magnification of CQ-504, and for the first time they saw the structure She had built.

A silver pyramid.

CQ-504 was a smallish asteroid at the inner edge of the Belt. It was grey, lumpy and asymmetrical. The silver pyramid nestled in the folds of its lower hemisphere, pointing out and down. It might have been the first sign of an outbreak of some regular, geometrical infection.

They probed it. Apart from the surface, which read as an unremarkable mix of metallic alloys and ceramics, they got nothing.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I don’t know what this means, but the length of each side of its base is one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet. The exact length of our hull.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

They probed it again. Nothing. They probed the asteroid underneath it, and again got nothing: no excavations, tunnels or buried devices.

A short silence followed.

“What is it?” asked Foord.

“It’s the thing,” Smithson said, “She’s put there to make you ask, What is it.”

Another short silence. Foord ordered further probes on the pyramid (nothing), the asteroid (nothing) and Faith (still shrouded, position unchanged, out of range). An inconclusive start to their new incarnation as an Instrument Of Themselves.

“Cyr, has She done anything like this before?”

“No, Commander.”

“Nothing like this, in any records of Her previous engagements?”

“No, Commander. Nothing remotely like this.”

“Are you ready to fire on the pyramid?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And do you have any idea what will happen if you do?”

“No, Commander.”

“Neither do I. But we know it will be something enigmatic; something cryptic and unreadable; don’t we?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“So we know what to do next, don’t we?”

They went around it.

Maintaining exact range, now that Kaang was back, the Charles Manson turned in its own length at forty-five degrees and headed out of the Belt. In doing so it described a perfect semicircular path around, and to the left of, CQ-504, the pyramid, and—beyond them—the still-shrouded Faith. All three, when the semicircle was completed, were at the same distance from the Charles Manson as before; but this time, astern.

They headed out of the Belt and into Horus system, in the direction of Horus 4 and, ultimately, Sakhra. Whatever the pyramid would have done, had they fired on it, remained a mystery; one which they chose to ignore.

Foord glanced at the rear section of the Bridge screen, and smiled faintly. Let Her chase us now, he thought. She beat us at Horus 5, we got a draw here, and now comes Horus 4. And there, I know how to defeat Her.