Faith

1

They reached the high point of their orbit around Horus 4, broke free without difficulty, and entered the Gulf. Later they got the first images of Her on the Bridge screen, crawling brokenly ahead of them. The two great craters on Her port side, midsection and stern, were still pulsing in the same unnameable colour, like chemical fires in a derelict building. Radiating out from them, and spreading over Her hull, were dark lines in swirling watered-silk patterns.

The Bridge screen patched in closeups. Her hull plates, the size of thumbnails, were diamond-shaped and bounded by submicroscopic hairlines which both joined and separated them. The dark swirling lines cut across these boundaries, and (from earlier time-lapse closeups) were spreading like a skin infection. Further from the craters they grew paler, their colour finally merging into the silver of Her hull.

Apart from the craters and the spreading dark lines, She showed nothing. No light or movement behind the windows and ports and apertures which punctuated Her hull, and no emissions other than the damaged main drive.

“A ship, like us,” Cyr said.

“Not like us,” Smithson said.

“Substructures,” Cyr said. “Windows. Ports. Drives. Even hull plates.”

“Not like us,” Smithson repeated.

“Something was in there once,” Kaang said. “I don’t think it’s there any more.”

Foord looked at her curiously.

“Body language, Commander. You can usually tell.”

“Cyr: particle beams, please.”

“I thought you wanted it closeup, Commander.”

“That’s all finished. Just destroy Her.”

The beams stabbed out. Her flickerfields deployed, and held them.

“It seems…” Cyr began.

“Again,” said Foord. And “Again.”

Again the flickerfields held. Other than that, She did not respond.

“You were right,” he told Cyr. “It does seem.”

“So we go closeup?”

“Yes…Kaang, slow approach, please. On Her port side.”

The Charles Manson’s manoeuvre drives fountained, and they shifted to port; theirs, and Hers. They were still at long range, behind and above Her. They had chosen Her port side because of the craters.

Her starboard manoeuvre drives fountained, and She shifted to port—Hers, and theirs. Like a clock-face where She was at the centre and they were at the periphery, She had only to move a fraction of the distance they did to keep Her port side turned away. Other than that, She did not respond. She was dark and inert on all wavebands, and continued to crawl brokenly ahead of them.

Cyr said “It seems that She doesn’t want us there.”

“Again, Kaang,” Foord said.

Again Her manoeuvre drives fountained to match them.

“Again,” Foord said.

And again.

“Fine. Kaang, make it starboard.”

Their port manoeuvre drives fountained, and they commenced a slow approach to Her starboard side. She did not respond.

•

The Bridge screen stopped shuffling and magnifying Her image; as they drew closer it enlarged naturally. Something did seem to have gone out of Her, and left only an empty container. No longer light made solid, or the junction of lines stretching to infinity.

They had cut their speed to a couple of percentage points above Hers. Their approach was so gradual that Foord was almost taken by surprise when Thahl stopped reading out spherical co-ordinates, and was replaced by Kaang reading actual closing distances.

“Fifteen thousand feet. No response.”

There was a dorsal ridge running the length of Her slender delta hull, from the needlepoint tip of the nose to the flat, wide main drive outlets at the stern—both of these extremities, like much in between, resembled corresponding features on the Charles Manson—and it divided Her damaged and undamaged sides. The damaged port side faced away from them and was hidden, but even the undamaged starboard side had been somehow lessened. It was no longer even half of perfection or half of infinity, if that was mathematically possible. It was half of a lessened whole.

“Twelve thousand feet. No response.”

The dark lines were apparently spreading over both sides of Her hull, uninterrupted by the dorsal ridge. None of them gave any readings when probed. They wrote patterns on, and over, and around, all Her other features: windows, portals, manoevre drive outlets, weapons apertures. All were dark and silent, like the outside of a deserted building. Something really had gone from Her.

“Eight thousand feet. No response.”

Once Foord had found an injured turtle, dragging itself across a beach. Its face was expressionless. Great birds wheeled above it waiting to pluck out its entrails and eyes, but the turtle wanted only to make one step follow another; to cross the beach to the sea, dragging its injuries with it. The way She crawled across the Gulf towards Sakhra made Her both lesser and greater than before. Lesser, because She was crippled and had lost whatever animated Her. Greater, because She was crippled and had lost whatever animated Her, and still crawled.

Foord caught himself thinking that they’d seen Her just once when She was perfect, when She unshrouded. No one would ever see Her like that again.

“Six thousand feet. No response. Commander, it’s like we don’t exist for Her.”

They were at the distance where, on more routine occasions, they would be commencing docking procedures. She filled the Bridge screen now, both horizontally (with the entire length of Her undamaged starboard side) and vertically (with Her wounded up/down rolling motion). The surface features of Her hull, some similar to theirs but others unguessable, were sharply detailed—no clearer than when the Bridge screen had patched in local magnifications, but now they were closer to Her than they’d ever been, and genuine closeness somehow let you see better.

“Four thousand feet, Commander,” Kaang said. “Still no response.”

Foord glanced at Cyr.

“For what you want to do, Commander, it needs to be closer.”

“Kaang, take us to one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet.”

“Commander?”

“The length of our hull and the measurement of Her pyramid…Is that close enough, Cyr?”

“It’s exactly close enough, Commander. Do you think She’ll notice?”

“The distance? Yes, but I don’t care either way. The gesture is for us, not Her.”

“One thousand, six hundred and twelve feet,” Kaang said, “and holding. She’s made no response.”

“Thank you, Kaang.” He turned to Cyr. “Well?”

“Tractor beams first, Commander, as we discussed. Then, everything else.”

Tractor beams were what you used on a beaten opponent, merely to hold him in place while you tore him to pieces with other closeup weapons. They were the birds’ claws, before the beaks went in.

“Agreed. Deploy tractor beams, please.”

Then She made Her response, and it erupted in their faces.

2

She had found a conclusion. She woke and fought for Her life, desperately and passionately.

Tractor beams were invisible on normal wavelengths, so the Bridge screen displayed them in glowing red: fat red lines, moving slowly, heavy with torsion. When Foord gave the order, Cyr did not send just one or two. She launched them in a swarm, from points along the entire length of their hull, aimed at points along the entire length of Hers. They extended slowly out from the Charles Manson across the sixteen hundred feet in a classic Hands formation of groups of five, each group with two leading and three trailing: fat red sausage fingers, feeling for Her in fives.

They never reached Her. She put out a swarm of Her own, one of Hers for each of theirs, in the same Hands formation—they also showed red until the Bridge screen adjusted, and displayed them as pale blue—but they never reached the Charles Manson, because She never meant them to.

They watched unbelievingly as the Bridge screen showed each of Her beams hitting each of theirs headon, halfway across the sixteen hundred feet. The two colours bled into each other. It was like an injured fighter suddenly recovering to throw punches, not at his opponent but at his opponent’s punches. And each one was accurate.

Foord swore. When he’d started to think She had no more mysteries left, he’d found at least two: desperation and passion. There was also the unfailing accuracy, but he already knew about that.

It continued. Seen unaided, there was nothing but sixteen hundred feet of empty space between them. Seen on the Bridge screen there was a moving diagram of two sets of beams: a tangle of two sets of motives, one to destroy, one to survive. The two formations of fat fingers met and interlocked in a multiple handshake, red and blue and purple. Where two opposing beams met, they subdivided into branches—always one of Hers for one of theirs, and Hers always accurate—and where branches met they subdivided into tendrils, tendrils into threads, threads into veins, vanishing into complexity; like their motives.

The initial exchanges—their beams attacking, Hers defending—were replayed in denser concentrations, inside the tangle of the thing which grew between the two ships. As the tangle got denser, the red/blue/purple colours bled deeper into each other and were shot through with further subdivisions: violet and mauve, lilac and pink, burgundy and cobalt.

The original formation of their beams had been deliberately conventional. Cyr swept a hand over her console and randomised it. The red fingers extending from the Charles Manson swirled like seaweed in a sudden current, then ceased to be groups of five and attacked in an undefined swarm. Faith randomised the pattern of Her own beams to mirror theirs, again one for one and again unfailingly accurate.

Foord thought, Could we have done that? And where’s She getting Her power?

He watched Cyr, who had stayed cool and resourceful throughout, as she launched another swarm, this time of inceptor beams. Inceptors were high-power tractor beams, ten times fatter and stronger. Cyr had had enough of complexity and tangling. She had decided simply to punch the inceptors through the thing between them and get a direct hold on Her.

They never reached Her. She launched inceptor beams of Her own which met theirs one for one and tangled them like She had tangled their tractor beams, so the result was the same.

Stalemate.

On the Bridge screen, the thing which had grown up between the two ships now filled the sixteen hundred feet. It was bigger than either of them, and almost as complex. Red fingers from their hull, and blue fingers from Hers, poured into it and fed it. It was a living thing which they’d created together and were feeding together. It swelled and pulsed. Colours chased each other across its surfaces.

Cyr swore. So did Foord, and gestured at the thing on the screen. “Kill it, Cyr. Cut the beams.”

“But Her beams—”

“Were intended to stop ours, not to reach us. When ours go, Hers will go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. But if you’re not, cut them one at a time. Cut one.”

Cyr cut one tractor beam. On the Bridge screen one red finger disappeared, together with its branches and subdivisions, leaving empty tunnels in the body of the thing between them.

Faith immediately cut one of Her beams; a blue finger disappeared, leaving a mirror-image network of empty tunnels.

“You see? Now cut the rest, one by one.”

Cyr did so, and so did Faith, one of Hers for one of theirs. It was like taking veins and arteries out of a body, one at a time. They’d created and fed it together; now they pulled it apart, together.

It proceeded slowly but methodically. We work well together, thought Foord sourly, watching it on the Bridge screen. We almost belong like this, working with each other. Building up something that doesn’t exist unless you see it on a screen, and then dismembering it.

Eventually it was done, and the space between them on the Bridge screen was as empty as it had been in real space. The two ships were still separated by sixteen hundred feet. They still travelled together through the Gulf, side by side, at a matched thirty percent. They regarded each other. Whether She watched them as they watched Her, through eyes and screens, they didn’t know. But they could feel their gaze returned.

“I need your next orders, Commander.”

“Everything, Cyr. Hit Her with everything.” He looked at Thahl, who looked away.

•

A new set of apertures opened along the port side of the Charles Manson’s hull: short-range crystal lasers. They stabbed at Her like horizontal rain. The range was too close for Her flickerfields—or theirs, if She responded—and every one of them hit Her, but spattered off like raindrops. Cyr shrugged, then boosted their strength to maximum. A few of them brought small puffs of surface debris from Her hull, but did not penetrate. Cyr boosted them again, beyond maximum.

For the first time, She attacked. She fired a broadside of low-intensity light beams. Their colour was pale gold.

“Harmonic guns,” Foord muttered. Cyr nodded, apparently unconcerned.

Faith’s harmonic guns were like those of the Charles Manson—multiband harmonic noise generators, running up and down the audible and inaudible scales to disrupt the molecular structure of a ship’s hull. In previous engagements they had torn apart the hulls of at least three Commonwealth cruisers, but the Charles Manson was different: stronger by several magnitudes.

The harmonics were encoded in the light beams, and the light beams, when they hit, released them. They sounded like an organ toccata and fugue overlaid with too much bass, and a choir singing in counterpoint overlaid with too much treble, both sequences of notes deconstructed and put back together at random.

They played—literally—over the Charles Manson’s hull. They set up resonances which rolled through the Bridge and the cramped corridors and living-spaces. They brought noises like those from Horus 4, noises of torsion as the ship’s inner skins were twisted in opposite directions to each other, and to the outer skin. They brought concentric ripples to the surfaces of the drinks in the chairarm dispensers, and stirrings from the rubbish on the floor of the Bridge. They induced nausea and muscle cramps, but nothing more; they were designed to tear ships apart, not their occupants. And they failed, because they weren’t strong enough. They rolled the length of the Charles Manson and back again, then subsided.

Cyr boosted the crystal lasers to danger level, and held them there; they brought more puffs of surface debris from Her hull. Cyr glanced at Foord, smiled briefly, and fired the Charles Manson’s harmonic guns. Their golden beams reached across the sixteen hundred feet and released their encoded notes over Her hull, which was still being hit by the crystal lasers. They couldn’t hear the music of their harmonic guns, but they knew it would resonate inside Her at least as powerfully as Hers had, inside them.

For ten seconds, the time it took to run the sequence of notes up and down Her hull, She didn’t respond. That was enough to suggest She was being damaged; and the crystal lasers were adding to it, persistently and in penny pieces. Cyr powered up the harmonic guns for another broadside.

Her hull blurred and shone, like Her soul was leaking out of it, and at the same time the Charles Manson was hit with a series of small impacts. While they were still trying to understand what had happened, the Bridge screen patched in local magnifications and showed them. At each place where the crystal lasers had been hitting Her, the thumbnail-sized scales of Her hull had silvered over and reshaped themselves into collimating mirrors, raised at angles to reflect back the Charles Manson’s lasers; not just to hit it, but to hit it on the corresponding points of its hull. Again, desperation; again, unfailing accuracy; and again, Foord swore.

Cyr recovered quickly. The reflected lasers were causing only limited surface damage, like they had done to Her, and it was easily remedied; Cyr turned them off. She glanced at Foord and fired a second broadside of harmonic guns. Again they reached Her and played their notes up and down Her hull, and again She didn’t respond. Cyr fired a third broadside.

They knew Her internal damage must be mounting. They knew She’d have to fire Her starboard manoeuvre drives to get out of range of their harmonic guns, and She did so; but what came out of them was not drive emissions. It was heavier and slower, dark and bulbous and glistening, like dozens of separate streams of entrails. About five hundred feet out from Her the streams joined, and became a single cloud of corrosive plasma, the colour of insects’ wing-cases: dark but crawling with iridescence. She flourished it like a cloak, and sent it billowing towards them.

Foord immediately ordered retreat. The Charles Manson’s port manoeuvre drives fountained, and the gap between them increased to three thousand feet. Then the manoeuvre drive apertures widened, and fired a neutraliser cloud.

Foord was right, She’d wanted to widen the gap, but She’d made them do it. And faced with a plasma cloud, they’d had no choice. They couldn’t let it near them. It would corrode their electronics, infect their bionics, eat their outer hull layers, and—worst of all—would carry on doing those things even after an engagement had been won and the enemy who launched it was destroyed. But a plasma cloud could be countered; by retreating, and by launching a neutraliser.

Across three thousand feet, they watched their cloud billowing out to meet Hers. Theirs was light in colour and Hers was dark, but that didn’t imply any symbolism. The lightness of their cloud was the colour of dirty bandages, and the darkness of Hers carried the iridescence of jewels. They met, and this time there was no stalemate. Their cloud crawled over and under and inside Hers, putting out the jewelled colours one by one as if it had grown fingers and was poking out eyes. Her cloud collapsed under the pale crawling shadow of theirs, folding back into itself until it ceased to exist. In the space between the two ships their cloud was left suddenly alone, like something floating in a toilet. Cyr touched a panel and it folded back into nothing, like Hers.

Iridescence, thought Cyr. I’d almost forgotten. “Commander, please have Kaang take us to sixteen hundred feet. I have an idea.”

•

In the Charles Manson’s underbelly, something moved. A door in the rear ventral section of the hull started to slide open; then jammed. Cyr switched to backup systems and it started moving again. At one point it actually creaked (an incongruous, gothic noise which they could hear even on the Bridge) as it resisted, but the backup systems forced it to continue. It slid back, opening a dark gash in the Charles Manson’s underside.

The weapon which would emerge from the gash had never been used operationally. It had only been tested once, seven years ago when Foord took command of his ship on its first proving flight. The test had been successful but Foord and Cyr had both thought the weapon was too elaborate and specialised.

Seven years later, he glanced at her.

“Fire Opals,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“So had I,” said Cyr. “We were both wrong.”

The starboard manoeuvre drives fountained. Kaang brought them back to exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet. Faith did not respond, but was watching them closely. They could feel it.

Out of the gash poured a stream of iridescent globes, each one the size and colour of an opal. The Fire Opals were designed (in Foord’s opinion, over-designed) to attack an already damaged opponent in a particularly roundabout way. Each globe was individually programmed to enter a ship’s hull through openings caused by battle damage, to seek out electronic and bionic circuits, get close to them, and burn itself to destruction. The circuits they attacked would not be destroyed outright, but—perhaps worse—would function too erratically to be trusted. Any ship they entered would be lobotomised, deprived of senses and sentience.

Seven years ago, Foord had said that if you’d knocked a hole in your opponent you wouldn’t need such an oblique way of finishing him. Now, he told himself, if such a hole existed the Fire Opals could be decisive; and Faith, on Her unseen port side, had two.

They dropped endlessly out of the gash in the Charles Manson’s belly like eggs out of a fish. After the darkly beautiful iridescence of Her plasma cloud, their greens and pinks and blues were as fresh as rain in sunlight. There were a hundred and ninety thousand of them.

The Fire Opals extended underneath the Charles Manson in a long rippling filament. The door in the ship’s underbelly slid back, buckling slightly as the backup mechanisms forced it past the point where it had jammed on opening.

Cyr touched a panel and the Fire Opals whipped out from underneath, then up, and hung quivering in the space between the two ships. She smiled to herself, then touched a few more panels. The Fire Opals formed themselves into a slender openwork sculpture: a delta shape with Her proportions, woven in opalescent ice. Cyr indulged herself further, and touched more panels. The sculpture started to hump up and down in imitation of Her crippled gait, and two holes appeared in its port side, one amidships and one at the stern.

Faith made no response.

“That’s enough,” Foord snapped. “Just get it done.”

Cyr’s sculpture melted. She reached into it through her panels and pulled out the forces holding it together, and it collapsed back into what it had always been, a large swarm of small opalescent globes. The Fire Opals were still under Cyr’s control and would remain so until she locked in their path and launched them; then they would become individually self-directing, like Foord’s missiles.

She pressed Launch, and said goodbye to them.

The path she had locked in for them existed for microseconds and was gone, as they flowed into and out of it. It was a straight line to Faith, converging at a point only fifty feet from Her starboard, then branching in a giant Y, arching over Her and down towards the two craters on Her unseen port side. The path existed only when they travelled it, closing in their wake until all that remained of it were the two prongs of the Y above Her, pointing down at the craters like mantis claws. Then that was gone too. They had entered Her.

Cyr locked off her panels. “They’re self-directing now, Commander.”

Foord nodded, and stared into the Bridge screen.

Sixty seconds’ propulsion, as they entered Her through the craters and found paths through the wreckage, seeking circuitry. Then thirty seconds’ burning. Most of them would find nothing and would fall and die alone in an unimaginable interior, in a darkness they would illuminate briefly but uselessly; but some would succeed. Maybe another two minutes, and the effect would be visible.

It would act like a nerve poison. First convulsions, violent rolling and pitching motions; then erratic flaring of Her manoeuvre drives and what remained of Her main drives; then desperate attempts to use Her scanners and probes; then shutdown, as She realised that Her senses were crippled.

Foord watched, across the cramped space they now shared with Her after having fought Her through half a solar system. Again he thought of a cellar with a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling. That was the kind of place where you did things like this.

After three minutes She started to shudder. It was not a convulsion, just a gentle pitching motion which overlaid the rolling caused by the damage they had already done to Her, but it was visible. Foord leapt to his feet and stared greedily into the Bridge screen, trying to pull more movement out of Her image, but after another minute it subsided. Only the original rolling remained.

“What…”

Cyr waved him to silence, and continued watching the Bridge screen closely. After thirty seconds she straightened.

“They’ve failed, Commander.”

“You said they’d destroy Her.”

“They didn’t.”

“But you said…” He could hear an almost indignant note in his voice. Listen to yourself, something tried to tell him, but he ignored it. She’d wronged him: Cyr, or Faith, or both.

“…you said they’d destroy Her.”

“They didn’t. She’s still there.” After a moment, Cyr added “Look. You can see Her, if you study the screen. Instead of yourself.”

“All of them? All of them went inside Her and all of them died?”

Cyr threw up her hands, making her clothes move interestingly.

“Yes, Commander. And we still have to destroy Her. If that’s what you want.”

“Of course it’s what I want! I even…”

“You even had the words ready. I saw your face. Playing at regret. ‘We’ll never know who or why; Her undeclared war; Her strangeness and beauty; Was there no other way?’ You had the words ready. I saw your face.”

“But you said…”

“Listen to yourself, Commander,” Thahl hissed.

There was something like contempt in Thahl’s voice, and Foord suddenly shared it.

“Cyr, I…”

“Leave it, Commander.”

“It was because…”

“Because we have to destroy Her and you’re afraid not to. Leave it.”

He should have left it, but he’d wanted too much to apologise and explain. And now, to counter that, he went into denial and started reassuring himself: at least he and Thahl still understood each other, finishing each other’s sentences. But it wasn’t real. It was whistling in the dark, the same unguessable dark where the Fire Opals had burned and died.

On the Bridge screen, against the emptiness of the Gulf which was both huge and cramped, She did nothing but roll stolidly alongside them with the same crippled gait. On the Bridge, he saw Cyr and Thahl and Smithson—Kaang hadn’t noticed—staring at him across another gulf. As if he was on a path which would take him away from them.

“Is She working on me, like She did with Joser?”

“If She is, Commander,” Thahl said “it won’t be like Joser, not after what we’ve done to Her. We’re going to find out new things about Her.”

“And She isn’t,” Smithson added,” Working On You. That’s self-indulgent, I’ve seen it before on Outsiders, too much imagination. If She’s working on one of us it won’t be you. Off this ship you can be vulnerable, but on it you’re stronger than any of us.”

Foord looked sharply at Smithson, who added, for good measure, “Yes, you heard me correctly, Commander. If She’s working on one of us, maybe it’s me. Why else would you expect me to tell you how strong you are?”

Foord looked at their faces. He couldn’t read them. He didn’t know if She was playing him like Joser. Or playing one of them, or all of them.

We’re going to find out new things about Her. About ourselves. It will get strange.

“Thahl, if I’m right, you may have to…”

“Take command. I know. But you’re not right, Commander…”

“Cyr, what do we do next?”

She exchanged glances with Thahl. “I’m already doing it, Commander. Look at the screen.”

3

Cyr’s combat instincts were more Sakhran than human. She was unmoved by failure. It produced in her neither despair nor defiance, neither desperation nor determination; only an expressionless glance, and then she continued past it. So when the Fire Opals died, she simply switched to what had worked before: the harmonic guns. While Foord indulged himself elsewhere, she powered them up, and now a broadside of golden beams played up and down Faith’s starboard flank.

As before, they took about ten seconds to travel the length of Her hull and back, but this time it was different. Something was happening inside Her.

The windows and ports which lined Her hull had been dark since they first saw Her. One of them, close to Her stern, lit up. The Bridge screen immediately focussed on it, but nothing was visible inside: the light was as depthless as the dark had been. It was the same unnameable colour which burned in the two craters on Her port side, so far removed from any colour they had ever seen that they had difficulty recognising it as light.

The window darkened. The one next to it lit and fell dark, then the one next to that. It was like a lantern floating, or being carried, inside the length of Her hull, stern to nose; then back, nose to stern, the windows lighting and darkening sequentially. When it had passed back through Her hull, it disappeared. The line of windows was dark again.

The dark, like the light, was depthless. It seemed to be only a coating on the inner surface of each window, or to go on for an infinity behind it; either way, it showed nothing of what was inside Her. The process had taken twenty seconds.

Cyr again fired the harmonic guns, directly into the windows. They lit and darkened again, but this time from outside, as the golden light passed over them and released its harmonics. Then, simultaneously, they exploded. Molten silver—a lighter colour than Her hull, the colour of the pyramids– gushed out of them and cascaded down Her flanks. Shards of dark glass, or crystal, or diamond, from the exploded windows fountained and swirled around Her like a swarm of dead Fire Opals, visible only against the cascading silver of Her hull, disappearing against the dark backdrop of the Gulf as they flew further away from Her. A few of them reached as far as the Charles Manson, and bounced off harmlessly.

For the third time, Cyr fired the harmonic guns. More liquid silver poured out of the sockets of Her windows. She was bleeding ten times as copiously as before. There didn’t seem room inside Her for what was pouring out. It was no longer cascading down Her flank, but moving horizontally across it. In ten seconds it covered Her entire starboard side from nose to stern, and built contours which didn’t follow the contours of Her hull underneath it, or the contours of anything they would have recognised as a ship. She altered, and their perspective altered with Her.

Waves of molten silver were moving over Her hull. They moved against or around each other to create peaks and troughs, in long sinuous ripple patterns like wet sand after a retreating sea; then, as the peaks rose and the troughs deepened, they started to look like something else. What was building itself over Her starboard flank made no sense if you saw it as shapes extruding horizontally from a vertical surface, or as shapes covering a ship which was alongside them. You had to be looking down on it, and then it made sense.

Her starboard flank had become a silvered landscape, a relief map of hills and valleys and plains. The sockets of Her windows were lakes of liquid silver. The landscape filled the Bridge screen. A headup display said they were travelling through the Gulf alongside an object whose shape and size were similar to theirs, but it was a lie. They floated miles above it.

As perspective altered, so did magnitude. The lakes became oceans, the hills became mountains, the valleys grew as deep as the Sakhran Great Bowl. Now they were floating above the face of a planet. The Bridge screen couldn’t contain it; the silver landscape filled all 360 degrees of it, and rushed out past sight beyond its top and bottom edges. They’d seen the roaring fiery face of Horus 5 and the blank blurred face of Horus 4, and this was bigger: and all done in silver, height and depth picked out in gradations of silver-white through silver-grey to silver-black. They floated miles above it, and it swam years below them.

As perspective and magnitude altered, so did colour. Shadows welled up inside the liquid silver, never quite reaching its surface, but tinting it like internal bruises: silver green in the valleys, silver blue in the oceans, silver white on the mountain- peaks. Thahl made the Bridge screen magnify one of the oceans. Once it had been a window, then a lake. Now it had bays and inlets, and on its silver-yellow beaches things were crawling out, some to die and some to evolve.

Then the last alteration: time. Alternate bands of light and darkness chased each other across the face of the silver, first slowly, like the turning of pages, then faster. The things which had crawled out of the ocean moved away into the land, from which others returned, altered. They made geometric shapes and grid patterns which grew and reached out lines, some straight and some curved, to cover the landscape and join each other. The pages turned faster and the patterns grew; then stopped growing and stayed the same, page after page; then dwindled and lost their connecting lines; then stayed, diminished, page after page. Was it the face of Her home planet? Or of other planets, after She had visited them? It was too enormous and small, too fast and slow, to have any meaning. Or, like the layers of darkness and light on the inner surfaces of Her windows, when they had been windows, its meaning might go on forever.

“It’s a lie,” Foord said. “Get us out of here.”

•

The Charles Manson turned in its own length, engaged ion drive at fifty percent, and headed away: not only to escape what She was doing or becoming, but to escape the sixteen hundred feet of confinement they shared with Her in the vastness of the Gulf. Already the oppressive weight of the last few hours, to which none of them would have admitted, began to lift.

The image on the Bridge screen was now a rear view, but it still filled the screen because more of it poured back into the screen from its upper and lower edges as they moved away. At thirty thousand feet, which they reached almost instantly, it still hadn’t diminished. They knew it was a lie. They knew She’d done something to the screen or to the sensors feeding it, or to the fabric of the space between them, but it wouldn’t go. Thahl killed the headup displays which recorded its distance and mass and composition, and wished he could also kill the image. One was a lie, and both were meaningless.

“No,” Foord answered Cyr before she asked, “we’re not running away…Kaang, what’s our distance?”

“Eighty thousand feet, Commander.”

“Take us to a hundred and fifty thousand, please. Cyr, be ready with particle beams.”

“Commander,” Cyr said, “that silver is the same composition as Her pyramid.”

“And it’s a lie. Whatever She’s done to our instruments or our senses, it’s a lie.”

“We never fired beams at the pyramid! If we fire them at that, we don’t know how it’ll react.”

“Whatever it does, will also be a lie.”

“Commander, you seem…”

“No. This is me talking, Cyr. Not Her.”

“That could be Her talking.”

“No. She doesn’t do possession, She does events and predicts our reactions.” Because, he was beginning to suspect, but didn’t dare say, She knows us and has always known us.

•

At one hundred and fifty thousand feet, the image stopped filling the screen. For the first time they could see the whole of it receding, just as if it was a real object, but that only made it stranger.

They had expected that when they could see its boundaries, when they could see the whole of it floating against the backdrop of the Gulf, the lie of its magnitude would give way to what it really was: just a ship, like them. But the silver extrusion blurred its edges and made it look like an oil-smear on a wet pavement. It turned the distance between them into an imagined alleyway, smelling of rain and urine.

Kaang turned the Charles Manson in its own length and brought it to rest, facing Her.

“Thank you, Kaang. Cyr, particle beams, please.”

They stabbed out. Foord imagined them as a wind blowing through the wet alleyway, making rubbish stir on the ground, and posters flap against walls like bats nailed there by one wing. All of this was a lie: particle beams were near-instantaneous, and while Foord’s imaginings were still forming, the beams had already impacted Her starboard side. She did not use Her flickerfields.

The silver extrusion turned the bruise-colour of the beams, then flared white. It swirled away from Her hull, cleanly and easily, as if it had never been more than a cloak someone had thrown over Her which She was now throwing back. As it swirled away from Her, it used the beams’ energy to re-order itself, and became something else. A replica of Her, done in gradations of grey.

“Full-size,” Foord said to Cyr. “Yours was less than quarter-size.” She shot him a venomous glance.

The replica moved slowly towards them, leaving the original behind it. Like the original, it was sideways-on to them, presenting its starboard side. It stopped. Foord motioned Cyr to hold fire.

In front of it, between them, light grey and dark grey shadows of tractor beams—Hers, and theirs—fought each other to stalemate, forming a tangled mass from which, one by one, they removed themselves and were gone. Pallid grey washes of harmonic-gun light played up and down the length of its hull. Grey shadow-lines of lasers peppered it, and were turned back as some of its hull-scales became pewter-grey mirrors. Pale Fire Opals branched in a giant Y above it, swarmed down to enter the two great craters on its unseen port side, and were gone.

More harmonic-gun fire. Light moved inside the replica, an unnameable shade of grey. A line of its windows exploded. From the replica burst a replica of the silver extrusion from which the replica was made. It became a landscape, then a planet’s face. It was a lie, telling a replica of a lie. Pages of light and darkness chased each other across its surface, networks of lines grew over it and diminished, and then it rushed towards them, filling the screen. The shadows of its surface details grew larger. The moment before it hit them one of the grey seas, which had been a lake and before that an exploded window, opened to swallow them.

The replica passed over, under and around them, raking their hull. The Bridge screen switched to a rear view showing it swirling away, dissipating back to what it had always been: almost nothing. Thahl reinstated the Bridge screen headups, and they said it was insubstantial and incapable of analysis. Smithson relayed damage reports one by one: superficial striations on the hull, to add to those they already carried. She should have continued to infinity, Foord thought: one replica makes another, which makes another.

Ahead of them, She remained at a hundred and fifty thousand feet. Nothing of the silver extrusion was left on Her. The Bridge screen, before anyone instructed it, focussed on the line of exploded windows.Their edges were jagged where the explosions had torn out a few surrounding hull-plates, but in each one, set deeper inside than the dark glass had been, was an opaque surface the same dark shade as the patterns spreading over Her. It looked as if they’d been boarded up from inside.

“Particle beams, please, Cyr.”

This time there was no illusion of a dripping alleyway. The beams reached Her immediately, and immediately She deployed Her flickerfields. They held, and continued to hold, with no detectable weakening, as the beams fired again and again. She even returned fire with Her own beams, just once. It was no more than a gesture, and the Charles Manson’s flickerfields held it easily; but the gesture stayed, hanging between them. Maybe, thought Foord sourly, it was only a replica of a gesture.

Again Foord had the beginnings of an erection and the taste of vomit along the sides of his tongue. He still carried the compulsion to destroy Her, and the ambivalence that went with it. He wondered if the compulsion came from him and the ambivalence from Her, but he knew the truth was worse: the ambivalence was his too.

All of this made it a bad time for Cyr to say what she said next.

“‘Insubstantial and incapable of analysis.’ It wasn’t real. We’re still here.”

His glance at her was as venomous as the one she had given him.

“Why is She still here?”

“Because you haven’t done what I suggested, Commander. We should go for Her port side.” She returned his glance; they shared, not body fluids, but venom.

“Kaang.”

“Commander?”

“Take us closeup again. Same distance as before, but this time on Her port side. And Kaang.”

“Yes, Commander?”

“This will be difficult. She doesn’t want us there.”

Faith crawled through the Gulf at thirty percent ion speed. The crippled gait, a mixture of roll and pitch produced by Her impaired drives flowing over the wreckage of the stern crater, was asymmetric and repetitive. Her hull was covered in the swirling watered-silk patterns, dark against the silver of the hull plates. It was like the darkness of the Gulf was bleeding into Her.

A hundred and fifty thousand feet away, Cyr watched Her on the Bridge screen and considered the dark swirling patterns, and how they lessened Her; Foord’s two missiles had changed everything. Made Her fight for Her life. But we haven’t seen a hundredth of what She’ll do to live. It’ll get strange.

Kaang also looked at the patterns. Like an airless version of oxidation, she thought, and forgot them.

The Bridge screen panned back, and back. Faith became invisible against the immensity of the Gulf. Ahead of Her were the inner planets, Sakhra and Horus 1 and 2. They were so far away they showed only as specks, scarcely more visible than Faith, and indistinguishable from the backdrop of stars. Only Horus itself was bigger than the other stars, and not by much.

A sound like doors slamming in a corridor ran up and down the ship. It was the locking of seat harnesses, for everyone except Kaang; hers would come later. She glanced across at Thahl and noticed that he had extended the claws of one hand and was tapping them absently on the rim of his console, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap. The sequence was irregular but, when Thahl repeated it, became part of a larger regularity; the same rhythm as the sequence of Her rolling motions, which Thahl was echoing as he watched Her on the screen. Repetition: the watered-silk patterns spreading over Her had of course been analysed for repetition, but none was found. Perhaps if there was another one of Her, or another million, the end of the sequence would be seen and it would start to repeat. That was as near, and as far, as they could get to the meaning of what was happening to Her.

Kaang watched the screen for a few moments more. Her face was expressionless.

She locked her seat harness, and wrenched the Charles Manson to port. The starboard manoeuvre drives erupted as she pushed them directly from zero to overload, and she augmented them by vectoring the main drives. The Charles Manson whipped sideways and diagonally, and flung them down a straight line which would end sixteen hundred feet on Her port side. The move was too quick for the gravity compensators, and everything loose on the Bridge exploded into midair. The ship strained and shrieked as loudly as it had at Horus 4, but there it was only fighting one force; Kaang was throwing forces at it from all directions. By the time the debris on the Bridge had landed, but before it bounced, they had almost reached the point on Her port side for which Kaang had aimed; but She rolled with the move, and still presented Her starboard side to them. Kaang did not decelerate but flew past Her, turned at fifty thousand feet and executed the same move, with the same result. She executed it again, turning the Charles Manson at twenty thousand feet this time, standing it almost vertically on its nose and plunging it under Her, to come up again on Her starboard side because Faith, again, had rolled with Kaang’s move. Kaang turned immediately and headed back, apparently on a ramming course; at nine hundred feet she wrenched the Charles Manson above Her, but again Faith rolled and presented Her starboard side. Kaang had expected this and fired the ventral manoeuvre drives, then vectored the main drives to augment them. It looked like the Charles Manson had hit an invisible wall. It stood for an instant on its stern, then pitched backwards over Her, aiming again for a point sixteen hundred feet on Her port side. This time it was closer, but still Faith rolled with the move and kept Her starboard facing them. When Kaang saw it had failed she did not decelerate or turn but continued until they were eighty thousand feet from Her, and still facing Her starboard side. Kaang brought them to rest, and glanced around the Bridge.

One by one, minor damage alarms sounded. She ignored them. She glimpsed the expressions of Foord and the others, and ignored them too. She knew it was always going to be unequal; whatever move she made, however complex and spectacular, Faith had only to wait for it and roll with it. Kaang shrugged, and started over again.

She fired the starboard manoeuvre drives, more gently this time. They fountained, and the Charles Manson moved—very slowly—to port. Kaang made some minor balancing adjustments to the ion drive, so the Charles Manson maintained distance at exactly eighty thousand feet, and began circling Her. On the Bridge screen they saw Her starboard manoeuvre drives fountain briefly, then cut; fountain again, then cut; and repeat the sequence, so that She turned minutely as the Charles Manson circled Her massively, always presenting Her starboard side. It linked them together, as if they were at opposite ends of the minute-hand of a giant clock face, they at the outer rim and She at the centre: a fixed relationship, defined by clockwork. They both knew it was a lie, and when she was ready, Kaang ended it.

She went straight to a hundred and ten percent ion drive and shot the Charles Manson down the invisible line of the minute hand. At sixteen hundred feet, when everyone expected Kaang to decelerate, she didn’t; she held the impossible speed but poured it into a series of rolls and slides and feints and somersaults which plunged them back seven years, to when she had first piloted the ship. She vectored the main drives to augment the manoeuvre drives, pushed the manoeuvre drives to thirty percent above danger level—two of the outlets burst after ten minutes, a third after fifteen minutes, and she ignored the alarms—and executed all her previous moves over and under and around Faith, but this time within the compass of only sixteen hundred feet, so She had less time to roll with the moves. But She did roll; although Her main drives were impaired Her manoeuvre drives were still operational, and they fountained in changing combinations up and down Her flank as She played them, just as Kaang did. The two ships tempted and toyed with each other as if they were knifeblades in the hands of two invisible but closely-matched opponents. Her pilot, thought Kaang after twenty minutes, is good but he isn’t a freak like me. Why can’t I find another freak like me?

After twenty-three minutes alarms were sounding throughout the Charles Manson, the minor-damage alarms now joined by the deeper notes of hull-integrity warnings, and Kaang ignored them. This will be difficult, Foord had said, She doesn’t want us there. Kaang neither knew nor cared why. She had no idea what they’d see when she finally got them there, or what they’d do about it; that wasn’t her territory. She blocked out everything except the imperative to pile move upon move until they emerged on Her unseen port side, and as time went on—it was now over thirty minutes—each move was getting them closer, and each of Her rolls was getting a little later. A little closer to too late.

Kaang poured more and more moves into the compass of sixteen hundred feet. If she’d left a visible trail, it would have looked like the tangle of tractor beams. She knew the balance was shifting but her face remained expressionless. Her hands blurred over the panels of her console, bringing convulsions to the Charles Manson with every touch, but she still seemed unhurried. The alarms and hull-integrity notes and warning headups on the screen were multiplying, and Kaang continued to ignore them. With each move she built her advantage and edged closer to a final outflanking, but with each move something burst or broke or failed. She knew exactly what she was doing to the ship, without needing alarms or headups, and she knew she was getting close to its real limits. She knew, even better than Foord, that the Charles Manson was almost alive and she was almost killing it.

Kaang sensed what would happen next, just before it happened. Faith stopped firing Her manoevre drives; She had given up.

Kaang cut the move she had just started and let momentum take them, slowly, in an arc over Faith’s dorsal surfaces, and down, facing Her port side. On the Bridge, and up and down the length of the Charles Manson, seat harnesses burst open with hisses of compressed air. It was like the ship was letting out a breath.

Kaang finally brought them to rest, at a distance of exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet, and they saw.

4

The two great craters on Her port side, one amidships and one near the stern, were still there. She hadn’t miraculously repaired them. Around their edges, and in their interior where twisted latticeworks of substructures could still be glimpsed, the craters pulsed with the same unnameable colour. It shifted between all the colours they knew, without becoming any of them.

The craters went at least fifty feet into Her flank. Nothing poured out of them any more.They were filled with wreckage near Her surface, but the deeper they went the stranger they became. There was a darkness at the back of them which seemed either depthless or infinite: a curtain of something neither gas nor liquid nor solid, with a pattern of whorls like watered silk. It reminded Foord of the patterns on the endpapers of his father’s books.

The craters pulsed into and out of focus, their apparent depth growing and diminishing as the light inside them shifted. Sometimes they seemed only as deep as they really were. Sometimes they seemed deeper than Her hull was wide, making corridors into somewhere else which was also filled with wreckage, like cameras taking pictures of cameras taking pictures into infinity. Then the light would shift again, and the craters would return to what they really were: something that nobody had ever done to Her before.

The damage was not only in the craters. Around their edges the fabric of Her outer hull had been torn back so violently that it produced an effect of inversion, as though the two missiles had burst out of Her, not in. The dark swirling patterns covered Her port side more densely than Her starboard, and around the edges of the craters they were darkest and densest of all.

The damage was massive. But it looked like it had gone beyond damage, and become something else.

Something about the craters had started to worry Foord. Thahl too, because before Foord could ask him he superimposed on the Bridge screen an earlier image of the craters, when the missiles first hit Her. The ship picked up on Thahl’s request, and added text headups before Thahl asked for them.

The two craters had grown in area, by about two percent according to the headups; but they remained exactly the same shape as before, down to the smallest indentation, as though the present image was merely a slight magnification of the earlier one. They still looked like pulsing wounds, but wounds didn’t spread so uniformly. They had the appearance of stability; of balance. Of the achievement of steady state.

Steady State, thought Foord, and froze as he started to understand.

“Commander,” Cyr said loudly, “we need your orders.”

Cold, organised shock hit Foord. It should almost have killed him, but it didn’t; instead it spread through him steadily and uniformly, a replica of what was happening in the craters. He’d just learned, as Thahl promised, something new about Her. Something truly new; and intimate, and obscene.

She’s eating Herself.

“Commander!” Cyr was shouting now. “We need your orders!” She turned to Thahl, and whispered “What’s eating him?”

“No orders,” Foord said quietly. “No questions. Please, listen to me.”

This, he told them, was how She could go on crawling through the Gulf to Sakhra when the damage they’d done should have destroyed Her. She’d reached a conclusion. For the first time someone had made Her fight for Her life, and She’d fought desperately and passionately; and this was how. This was where Her conclusion led.

She’d turned the craters into a controlled process of self-digestion, mass to energy.

He waved away their questions. Maybe where She comes from, he said, this is what every living thing does when it’s wounded: puts its muzzle into the wound and eats, to give the rest of itself, the unwounded part, strength to go crawling on. Maybe whoever built Her put replicas of that reflex into Her, as we put crude analogues of ours into our ships. And No, he said, I don’t have evidence. How could I, when nobody’s ever been able to probe Her? But you’ve seen what’s happened to Her since Horus 4, and I know I’m right.

Their questions died out.

Foord remembered a character in one of his father’s books, a minor Dickens character, who kept saying “If I’m wrong I’ll…I’ll eat my head.” The sheer impossibility of it had entranced him; he had pondered it for days. He thought, If She ever reaches Sakhra at this crawling pace, She’ll have eaten Herself entirely and She won’t exist. Yes She will. What’s eaten will still exist, but it will be something quite different…

This wasn’t a frenzy of self-mutilation. It was steady and careful and measured. She was digesting the damaged parts of Herself at exactly the rate She needed to provide the energy to go on fighting, to go on crawling through the Gulf. Her motives were desperate but Her conclusion was cold and considered, and Her execution unfailingly accurate. Like everything She did.

Both his parents, in the later stages of the illness which finally took them, had fought a losing battle to keep their appearance. He’d pretended not to notice the incontinence-stains on their clothing, or their subterfuges to conceal them. This was similar: something private about Her which he shouldn’t have seen.

“What She’s doing to stay alive, Cyr, is in the craters. Go for the craters.”

•

For ten seconds, the golden light of the Charles Manson’s harmonic guns swept along Her flank, pumping their resonances into Her. She seemed to shudder, but it could have been the effect of the shifting colour from the craters. Lit by that colour, nothing seemed real or measurable.

Cyr fired the harmonic guns again, once, along and back. This time she also fired the Friendship guns (used only when close) at Her flank; they shot Jewel Boxes, self-guiding shells which on impact released jagged slivers of synthetic diamond able to shred almost any known surface. They didn’t shred Faith, but each one succeeded in digging a small shallow gash in Her flank, dislodging three or four of Her thumbnail hull plates, and that was enough for Cyr’s immediate purpose. There were nineteen such gashes in an irregular line along Her flank, between the midsection and stern craters.

Why doesn’t She respond? thought Foord. Cyr was thinking the same thing, and added Perhaps She already has.

Cyr launched a swarm of grapples across the sixteen hundred feet. She called them Hands of Friendship, diamond-tipped claws on the end of black monofilament lines which tumbled out like spider-secretions from ventral orifices on the Charles Manson. The claws were shaped like Sakhran hands, and were self-programmed to find any irregular surface, grip it, and never let go. One, and occasionally two, of them landed on each of the nineteen shallow gashes, and held. Now, Cyr thought, we’re directly touching Her.

Cyr’s long jewelled fingers played another combination of panels, opening another pattern of apertures on the Charles Manson, this time along the starboard midsection. The objects which emerged were globular and milky and quivering. They made their way towards Her like a slow-motion ejaculation, each one targeted at one of Her port manoeuvre drive outlets. Cyr called them Diamond Clasps, because they were plasmas of altered carbon which turned on impact into plugs of liquid, then solid, synthetic diamond. They landed on Her and dressed Her, covering each outlet with a brilliant sparkling scab. Two missed, but the other fifty-three landed accurately.

She responded. She must have known what was coming next—that Cyr would hold Her in position and attack the craters—yet it was strangely half-hearted. She fired just three of Her port manoeuvre drives, presumably to test whether She could dislodge the diamond scabs. She couldn’t; thin streams of drive emissions squirted from underneath them, but most of their force was contained. Then, using Her starboard manoeuvre drives only, She tried to roll away, but the claws and monofilament lines of the grapples held Her. She didn’t try again.

“Now the craters,” Foord whispered.

“This is too easy. Something’s wrong.”

“The craters!”

“Commander, it’s too easy. She wants us to go for the craters.”

“She wants you to think that, so you won’t go for them. You wanted my orders. Carry out my orders.”

Cyr hesitated. Something, perhaps Faith, was still telling her not to attack the craters directly. As her hand hovered over a panel she hadn’t pressed before, she thought This may be wrong, it may keep Her alive. She pressed the panel.

A long ventral aperture slid open, releasing an object like an ancient battering-ram, ninety feet long: a Diamond Cluster, a missile whose bulging warhead was a cluster of five hundred Jewel Boxes, which would explode their fractal diamond slivers simultaneously. It could shred any known Commonwealth ship. If it hit Her where She was already damaged, it should break Her in half.

It dropped out of the Charles Manson’s underside, made one calculated burst of its motors and went dark, crossing the sixteen hundred feet to Her. On the Bridge screen they watched it entering the midsection crater. It went deep inside until, like everything else in there, it passed beyond focus. The latticeworks of wreckage and shifting colour swirled and swallowed it, like it was entering a forest of seaweed.

It exploded, but not in a way which made any sense. First, the explosion blew out of the crater, not in. And second, it was hundreds of times slower than it should have been, so slow that it was drained of force. And third—

The pattern of force and fragments, of blast and flying diamond-slivers, which should have erupted into Her and should have been unstoppable, came blossoming out of the crater in a slow and syrupy and ever-widening funnel, almost a gesture, reaching out to the Charles Manson; then reversed itself. The huge burst-open body of the Diamond Cluster and its multiple warhead came back together, unexploded itself, and sank back into the midsection crater like treacle down a throat. They never saw it again. But the dark watered-silk patterns around the crater’s edges turned darker.

She’s digesting it, thought Cyr, aghast. Converting its mass to Her energy. She never cared about it exploding, She just wanted it inside Her. And we gave it to Her. Part of us is now part of Her. What have we started?

The dark swirls continued to darken, for about fifty feet around the midsection crater. There was a shuddering at Her stern as She started to repower Her crippled main drives, and alarms were sounding on the Bridge. Cyr tried to think it out for a few seconds more. If there’s a mass-to-energy process in the crater, the dark patterns must diffuse it through Her. And if you diffused that process, if you subdivided it hundreds or thousands of times as She had done, you could change it and change the laws it obeyed. You could write the laws it obeyed.

And we gave it to Her. “Commander…”

Alarms sounded again on the Bridge. She had fired Her main drives and was starting to move away, and Kaang immediately matched Her course and speed: like before, She moved through the Gulf at thirty percent, in the direction of Sakhra. The two ships were travelling alongside each other, still linked by Cyr’s diamond grapples and monofilament lines; and still separated by one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet.

Cyr felt a mounting horror. “Commander…” she repeated.

Foord shook his head, and pointed at the screen. Something was coming out of the midsection crater.

•

The Bridge screen had spotted it at the same time as Foord, and patched in local magnification. It came into focus as it came out of the shifting colour. It became definite only when it left the crater, and started crawling over the surface of Her hull.

It was about the size of a man, and shaped like a spider. Its body was triangular, with three jointed and clawed legs extending up and out from each corner. It was the same metallic-ceramic silver as Her hull, and its body was featureless, with no recognisable sensory devices, so there was no focus of its identity; no face.

Another one emerged behind it, and another, and another.

“Thahl?”

“No, Commander. These are new.”

Even so, they weren’t surprising. The Charles Manson carried its own self-programming EV synthetics, used for hull repairs and occasionally for close combat. They were not unlike these, both in shape and size.

“Hold our position,” Foord said. “No matter what happens.”

More came out of the crater, one by one. The Bridge screen counted them: nineteen. They darted across Her flank towards the shallow gashes where Cyr’s grapples were anchored, the diamond Hands of Friendship which were designed never to let go. The spiders dug them out of Her hull, busily and precisely, then fired onboard motors and rode them, and their monofilament lines, back across the sixteen hundred feet to the Charles Manson. The lines had come out of the Charles Manson’s underside, and now they curved back on themselves as the spiders flew them back towards the Charles Manson’s dorsal surfaces. It was like they were folding a giant bedsheet.

Hundreds more of them poured out of the midsection crater, not in the same tidy order as the first nineteen. They were climbing over each other to get out, as if they were running from something in the crater rather than running to attack the Charles Manson; but that impression lasted only a moment. Each one, as it emerged, fired its onboard motor and jumped the sixteen hundred feet, following the original nineteen. Some were blown to pieces by Cyr’s Friendship guns as they jumped, and others were vaporised by the motors of those immediately in front of them; but nearly two hundred landed on the dorsal surface of the Charles Manson’s hull, where, like prospectors in a gold rush, they ignored each other and started digging where they landed.

Nobody ever made you fight like this before, thought Cyr, talking both to herself and to Her, as she activated the Charles Manson’s own synthetics to meet them.

On the Bridge, the usual murmuring of alarms was again supplemented by the deeper notes of hull-integrity warnings. Faith’s synthetics dug busily; the claws which dealt so easily with Cyr’s Hands of Friendship were shredding the hull’s topsurface. Some had already penetrated to the first inner layer. They worked quickly and precisely, with an air of self-absorption, as though competing. Rising vertically above each of them, like smoke from factory chimneys, were floating columns of shredded hull-fragments.

Groups of hull-plates on the Charles Manson’s rear dorsal areas rose up into blisters and burst open, disgorging the Charles Manson’s own synthetics. They too were like spiders, but spiders from the planet where they were designed and built, with globular bodies and eight multiclawed legs. They were the dark bluish grey of gunmetal. They were slightly bigger than their opponents, and there were more of them, five hundred against two hundred. They swarmed over the top of the Charles Manson’s hull as though they were a shadow cast by a third ship. Faith’s spiders ignored them and continued digging into the hull until the last possible moment, then turned one by one as the swarm reached them.

One of the Charles Manson’s many external viewers picked up the moment of first contact, and patched in to the Bridge screen. One of Faith’s spiders was digging deep into the hull when three of the Charles Manson’s reached it. It stopped its work and turned to face them, though it had no face and neither did they. The three closed on it from different angles. It impaled the first, extending a leg to strike down through the dark globular body and into the hull, then rose and pivoted on that leg to grasp the second, holding it aloft while it snipped off its eight legs one by one, and rolled its body away. It completed its pivot and landed, then flicked the leg by which it held its first opponent impaled; in a torrent of cogs and gears and catarrh-coloured machine oil, the first opponent was cut in half and the two halves left painlessly but uselessly twitching. Faith’s spider seemed to consider for a moment; then carefully nudged the two sets of dismembered remains to send them floating up to join the column of hull-fragments rising above its excavation, to which it returned. The third of its opponents, which it had either forgotten or decided to ignore, leapt after it and struck downward, severing a corner of its triangular body complete with three jointed legs. Faith’s spider died, or became nonfunctional, so strangely that on the Bridge they could only stare at what happened; but the Bridge screen magnified it, and recorded it in detail.

The two pieces of Her spider did not bleed oil or spurt mechanical innards. The surfaces where they had been severed were smooth and solid, like a stone sheared in two, with no inner cavities or workings. The two pieces grew still; then broke in half, again with a solid shear, and broke in half again and again, beyond vision, until they became nothing. Except that nothing which continually halves itself ever becomes nothing.

The Bridge screen patched in two more viewers. They showed similar individual battles, dark against silver.

A silver spider cut two opponents to pieces, and turned back to continue its excavation. But one of the two, its dark globular body split almost in half, and dragging the empty half of its body and the strings of its insides behind it, crawled after the silver spider on its three remaining legs. It looked like bravery, but was not; the dark spider, like Foord’s two missiles, recognised nothing in the universe except its programming. It struck down at the third joint of one of the silver spider’s legs, and severed it. The silver spider fell into halves, and subdivided down to nothing; almost as if it wanted to.

Five dark spiders encircled a silver spider. It let them close in; then whirled balletically, pivoting on first one and then another corner of its triangular body, striking with its claws at different parts of the circle around it. Every time it struck, an opponent was mutilated. They fell back. Finally one of the five caught a claw and severed it at the joint. They stayed back and waited for it to start subdividing—which it did almost eagerly, as if that was even more important than digging into the hull—and then they moved off to the next battle.

The Bridge screen patched in more viewers, shuffled them one after another, then subdivided them into a mosaic. Then it started to pan out. Only one side fought collectively; the other fought in intervals between attacking the hull, and then only as isolated individuals against two or three or more opponents. They never went to help—or even seemed aware of—each other.

The Bridge screen panned out further. Along the top of the Charles Manson’s hull were nearly two hundred excavations, some of them now dangerously deep. Each was the scene of a battle, and each was marked by a floating vertical column of pieces of hull, to which were being added the dark dismembered bodies of the Charles Manson’s spiders. They were smokestacks in a diseased industrial landscape; and, like giant lice running over it, things with no faces or voices or identities fought with unrelenting vacancy.

The Charles Manson had never before had to repel a boarding by an opponent’s synthetics, and Faith had never before had to reveal or use Her own. Both were somehow violated, but together they had made this. We work very well together, Foord thought sourly, watching it. Thahl sheathed and unsheathed his claws, Cyr unconsciously licked her lips. Smithson was expressionless. Kaang, until Foord told her to stop, had actually put her hands over her face.

The Bridge screen again subdivided into a mosaic of individual battles. It had seen a pattern, which it judged worthy of attention. The Charles Manson’s spiders were no match individually for their opponents. In direct combat, even three or more against one, they were being annihilated. But their self-programming told them something else. They only had to sever one body-part, even the last joint of one leg, and the silver spiders would cease to operate and start subdividing down to nothing, almost as if they wanted to.

What made you? thought Foord, staring across the sixteen hundred feet. What are you? She looked and behaved like a ship, sustained damage, showed internal substructures—they were still visible now in the craters, lit by the unnameable colour, as the two ships flew alongside each other through the dark of the Gulf. And the wreckage that had poured out of those craters, each fragment repeating the main damage and burning away to nothing. And the silver landscape. And the self-digestion, mass to energy, diffused through Her damaged body by dark swirling watered-silk traceries.

And now the silver spiders, easily able to shred the Charles Manson’s hull and dismember its spiders but subdividing down to nothing when any part of them was severed, so they could only be whole or be nothing. And when not whole, they seemed to want to be nothing, and that was what the Bridge screen had seen. That was what had started to turn the battles.

The Bridge screen displayed the numbers. Five hundred against two hundred became four hundred against a hundred and fifty, and then the change set in: three hundred and fifty against eighty, three hundred against twenty. The Bridge screen patched in the end of the last silver spider. It had shredded six opponents and, moments before it was overrun, snipped off one of its own legs and subdivided down to nothing.

The top of the Charles Manson’s hull was a leprous landscape: excavations like open sores, sprouting vertical columns of debris, and everywhere dismembered spiders. Nearly three hundred of the Charles Manson’s dark spiders remained, though few of them had all their body-parts. Without ceremony, they set about repairing the excavations. They used plugs of synthetic diamond like those Cyr had launched at Faith, carrying them to and fro across the hull in their original form, like quivering opalescent eggs. They picked their way through the debris with the slow injured gait of soldiers after a battle, except that the bodies they stepped over were only those of their own kind. Their opponents had gone, subdivided to nothing.

The Bridge was silent except for a few exhaled breaths. Faith continued to fly alongside them. The craters continued to pulsate. The Gulf just continued, before and behind them; and so did whatever had just taken place over the topsurface of the Charles Manson. There was no sense that something had just ended successfully.

When Smithson said “What next?” he was the first to speak. Nobody answered, because he wasn’t asking what they would do next, but what She would do next. And She had already begun.

The columns of debris floating vertically over the abandoned excavations grew taller and thinner. They waved backwards and forwards in unison as they grew. Their waving was repetitive and hypnotic, like hair on a drowned corpse. Each backwards-and-forwards cycle left them a little more off the vertical, inclining a little more in the direction of Faith; and a little taller and thinner, as if they were not just accretions of debris but something ductile, being teased out longer and thinner by their own waving motion. As they extended and thinned they looked even more like strands of hair: diseased hair, piebald with the colours of the Charles Manson, the silver of its shredded hull-plates and the dark gunmetal of its dismembered spiders. And always getting thinner, easing gradually further in Her direction.

Cyr shook off the near-hypnosis of their waving motion long enough to ask herself why she wasn’t firing on them, or why none of the others had asked her; then became aware that something else was happening, back on the topsurface of the Charles Manson.

At first it seemed like a minor optical fault on the Bridge screen, a faint double image of the landscape of the hull’s surface. There was a barely visible mirror-image of the surface of the hull, floating inches above the real surface; as though part of the hull had shed a molecule-thick layer of its skin which, as it floated upwards, retained the shape of the original. The Charles Manson’s surviving spiders, moving slowly to and fro repairing the damage done by the excavations—their movements were also repetitive and hypnotic, as if they were shadows cast by the waving columns above them—passed through the apparent double image without noticing it. Those on the Bridge saw why when the Bridge screen spotted it and attempted to magnify it locally: up close, it was almost nothing. You had to be at a distance even to glimpse it, and then you weren’t sure. But it existed. The Bridge screen didn’t deal in optical faults, even minor ones.

It rose higher, and grew more distinct as it rose. Now it was six feet above the surface, still mirroring the shape of the hull beneath it, and had thickened and turned silver grey. And now, when the Bridge screen again magnified it locally, it had acquired substance and texture: it was granular, made up internally of swirling and eddying particles. Cyr cried out, and Foord again tasted bile along the sides of his tongue, as they both realised what they were watching.

It was the collective ghost of the silver spiders.

Nothing which keeps halving itself ever becomes nothing. They had divided down beyond visibility into atoms and their subatomic components, and were now recombining into something else.

Cyr fired on it with the Friendship guns and shortrange lasers. They passed through it, leaving useless rents which closed as the particles inside it swirled back. It rose into a conical shape, as though it was a bedsheet and a figure underneath it had stood up. The conical point rose higher, pulling the rest after it until it too became a column, thicker and taller than the others. It waved backwards and forwards in time with the other columns of silver and gunmetal. Together, they took their leave of the Charles Manson.

A soft concussion rolled up and down the hull as they moved off it in unison and started to cross the sixteen hundred feet back to Her, a slow slanting elongated armada. Cyr fired on all of them with no more effect than before.

They converged, coiling and twining round each other, two hundred strands into a single rope which carried Her colours and theirs, and Her substance and theirs. Cyr fired tanglers and disruptors after it, and more lasers and Friendship guns, but they passed through it and spent themselves. Like a coil of matter spiralling from a captive sun into its black hole companion, the giant rope of their substance and Hers reached out towards the midsection crater on Her port side.

Foord stared. We can’t let Her take it inside Her. But we’re too close for particle beams, there’s no time for plasma clouds, and nothing else works.

“Kaang.”

“Commander?”

“Ram Her, please. Aim us at the crater.”

The Bridge froze. Cyr glanced at Thahl.

“Commander,” Thahl said carefully, “She’d assimilate us. All of us. And then She’d go on to Sakhra.”

Foord nodded impatiently, gestured with a raised hand: You didn’t think I was serious, did you? “Thahl, you said we’d find out new things about Her. Look at the screen. That wasn’t a battle. She wasn’t fighting us, She was farming us.”

The great coiled rope, light silver and dark silver, grey and gunmetal, reached closer to the midsection crater. It floated between the two ships, away from one and towards the other, touching neither of them. It had never physically linked them, had never simultaneously touched both of them, but it held them together by what it was, their substance and Hers.

Perhaps this was all the silver spiders had wanted: to subdivide into molecular ghosts and offer themselves back inside Her for assimilation, together with the shredded pieces of the Charles Manson’s hull and spiders which they’d collected for Her and coiled together into this giant rope which would feed Her so She could go on to Sakhra. Perhaps She wanted the Charles Manson by Her side all the way back through the Gulf, to feed off it as required. Partly companion, partly farm animal.

On the Bridge screen they watched as the midsection crater seemed to open itself to the reaching rope. It entered, and continued and continued to enter, until all its length was enfolded and swallowed into the nameless colour. As She took it into Herself a shockwave radiated out from the crater across Her flank. It was a darkening of the watered-silk lines, diffusing through Her the energy She created from the mass She had received, dividing and subdividing it down thousands of branching paths. She moved forward relative to the Charles Manson. Her ion speed increased to forty-five percent. Kaang matched it, and they stayed alongside Her; for now, they had nowhere else to go. Where do farm animals escape to?

By one more increment, one more order of magnitude, they had become part of Her. As they flew together through the Gulf to Sakhra, there might be further increments. She would take and use what She wanted of them, and they couldn’t stop Her. That, now, was their relationship.

•

“Relationship? Relationship? Commander, this is a military engagement!”

“Call it what you like, Cyr.”

“Relationships don’t stand still, Commander. They grow. They die. And they can be changed.”

It seemed like hours ago when Foord said that. In fact it was only minutes, and they still flew alongside Her through the featureless dark of the Gulf. She still moved with the same crippled gait—Her image lurched vertically up and down on the Bridge screen—but now She was travelling at forty-five percent, and so were they. The swirling patterns over Her hull were darker. Once they’d stalked each other through the Belt like a pair of tarantulas. Now it was different.

“Permission to speak freely, Commander,” Cyr said.

“Of course.”

“You said we can’t stop what She’s doing. That’s unforgivable. In fact I wonder if it was you speaking at all.”

Foord gazed at her steadily. “Don’t go there.”

She held his gaze. “If you’re saying we can’t stop it, it’s my duty to go there.”

Foord had never heard her use the word Duty before.

“I mean it, Commander.”

“I want to stop it, but we need a weapon that works. We’ve tried most of yours.”

Other conversations on the Bridge had stopped. There were several paths Foord and Cyr could have taken from this point, none of them good; but they were all closed off, unexpectedly, by Smithson.

“You’re both,” he said, “missing the point! Weapons aren’t always called weapons. Anything which produces Cause and Effect can be a weapon.”

“That’s very true,” Foord said drily. “Like Relationships Don’t Stand Still. But do you have anything more specific?”

“Yes, I do. Something very specific, and it makes things stand still. The Prayer Wheels.”

The Prayer Wheels. The stasis generators used to isolate the MT Drive. The Charles Manson’s MT Drive needed three of them for safe containment. The Charles Manson always carried nine. And the MT Drive had been shut down since Horus 5, when She had tried to activate it.

“Go on,” Foord said.

“You know it already,” Smithson said impatiently. “Cannibalise two Prayer Wheels, launch them into those two craters. Gamble. Maybe they’ll freeze those mass-to-energy processes…”

“Why should they?”

“…isolate them, freeze them like an MT Drive, and then the craters will go back to being just holes in Her side, holes which we made, and we can fire whatever we want into them. Get inside Her. Break Her up.”

“Slow down. Why should they freeze the processes like an MT Drive?”

“Look at those craters, Commander.”

Foord looked. They looked back at him across sixteen hundred feet, unblinking and calm. Despite the nameless colour, despite the tricks they played with focus and perspective, they were above all calm. Stable, steady-state.

“Commander, those are not simple mass-to-energy processes. They’ve been slowed down and subdivided, millions of times, until they sidestep the equations. To produce that steady-state energy, to diffuse it through Herself in usable amounts, probably takes only a millionth of what those craters have swallowed. But it also takes a new kind of physics.”

“MT physics.”

“Yes, Commander. We couldn’t do it, we don’t know enough about MT. But we know how to freeze it in stasis fields.”

“So will She. She’ll be able to stop the Prayer Wheels.”

“Of course She will, Commander! But immediately?”

“I don’t know, and neither do you.”

“Then would you rather go on like this? In the time it takes Her to stop the Prayer Wheels, She’ll be vulnerable and those craters will be open to us. Maybe. And Maybe is better than this. Now: my people can get two of them from the stern, weld some guidance systems and motors on them, and have them ready in one of the ventral launch bays in less than an hour. Is that specific enough?”

5

Later, Foord would realise that Smithson had probably saved the ship, simply by having an idea and getting them working on it. It almost didn’t matter whether the idea would work, though it was an extremely clever one; at that moment, if they’d had no goal, they might either have been infected by Foord’s mood, or relieved him of command. Both courses would have been fatal. So Smithson got them working, and Foord stayed in command, though his mood—and its source—remained unreadable and worrying.

Smithson was often impatient with superiors and equals, but less often with subordinates. On this occasion his behaviour was faultless, and a source of some amazement; he was as thoughtful, meticulous and quietly authoritative as Foord himself would normally have been. The two Prayer Wheels were taken from the six reserves not connected to the MT Drive. The work of confirming they were operational, testing and welding in place the guidance and propulsion units, and manhandling them down to a conveyor tube which shot them through to one of the ventral launch bays, took Smithson’s people forty-seven minutes. Once in the launch bay, final testing and routing of the controls through to Cyr took another seven. During that time, Cyr—at Smithson’s suggestion—briefed Foord on what she would be firing into the craters, and in what order. Foord was more responsive than previously, but not much. He sat quietly with Cyr amid the rubbish and debris on the Bridge—which he still insisted should not be cleared—listening to her briefing, and watching Faith.

Faith made no more moves towards them. She increased Her speed to forty-eight percent, and they matched it to stay alongside Her. She did not appear to notice.

Foord was concerned about his behaviour. He tried to determine why he was concerned, but the reason kept sliding past him, as though his concern belonged with the rules of the normal universe, and his behaviour now held an MT-like ability to sidestep it. He was feeling better now, closer to what he remembered as normal, thanks (not for the first time) to Smithson’s cleverness. But he’d come close to accepting what She had done to them. Cyr was right, he should never have behaved like that. He never had before. He resolved never to again, and immediately set about reciting rules for ensuring he never would; and again it sidestepped him, and left him trying to remember why he needed to recite rules. But he felt better now, closer (he told himself) to what he remembered as normal.

After Cyr briefed him, and after he reacted with apparent enthusiasm, she stayed with him (another suggestion of Smithson) and let him talk. Her dark pleated skirt had ridden up behind her as she whirled lithely to sit next to him, so she was not actually sitting on its fabric. The pleats were rucked up around her bottom, but he knew they would fall back gracefully into place when she stood up; they always did.

“A millionth, Cyr.”

“Commander?”

“Smithson said She needs only a millionth of what She swallowed in that crater, to convert into a steady stream of usable energy. I thought She’d turn us into a farm animal and carve off bits of us to eat when She needs to, but She doesn’t need to.”

“Apparently not.”

“But She’ll probably do it anyway, just for the symbolism…Cyr, you see those dark patterns over Her hull?”

“Yes, Commander. They’ve spread.”

“They haven’t moved.”

Originally, Cyr had just wanted to let him talk. Now she looked at him sharply.

“How could they be spreading over Her and not have moved?”

Because, he told her, they were always there; they’d just grown darker. And they weren’t just on Her surface. If they really did diffuse the processes through Her body then they’d have to go all the way through Her in three dimensions, like a tangle of veins and capillaries. So what we see is just the surface of something bigger; the story of this whole mission, he added wryly.

“When they weren’t needed,” he finished, “they were invisible; the same colour as Her hull. But when She needed them, when She was damaged and had to use them, they grew darker as they…”

“Diffused energy through Her,” Cyr said. “So if Smithson’s idea works…”

“The process will be temporarily frozen, and the patterns will disappear.”

She looked at him again. He smiled and said “It’s like with a new partner. When you start living together you find out new things. Intimate things, like how her varicose veins work.”

Cyr almost smiled back. She stood up. The pleats fell gracefully back into place.

“It’s nearly time, Commander. Will you be ready?”

He undersood why she had to ask him that. His behaviour had been disturbing; less than was required of him. It would be tempting, and quite reasonable, to think that Faith had been working on him like She’d done with Joser. But now he felt that the truth was worse—that his behaviour came from him. Or maybe that was also Faith working on him, but more obliquely.

“If I’m not ready,” he called after her—the pleats fanned out as she turned to face him—“you know that you must ask Thahl to consider…”

“Yes, I know that. I’ve already come close to it.”

•

“They’re ready,” Smithson said, after fifty-four minutes had elapsed.

“Thanks,” Foord said. “I owe you.”

“For moving your furniture?”

He smiled briefly, then nodded at Cyr. “Launch them.”

The two Prayer Wheels dropped silently out of the ventral bay and floated underneath the Charles Manson. They were rings of dark metal nine feet in diameter, with a hub and four radiating spokes. Smithson’s people had actually rolled them, like oversized cartwheels, from the cramped MT Drive pit near the stern to one of the cargo tubes, where they were shot through to the ventral bay. The motors and guidance systems were simply metal boxes welded to their circumference at irregular intervals; they looked like bits of mud caked on the rims of real cartwheels.

Cyr pressed a panel. The motors round the rims fired once and went dark. The Prayer Wheels glided slowly, and on diverging paths, towards the midsection and stern craters. Faith seemed not to have noticed them. They passed three hundred feet, then six hundred and nine hundred. Twelve hundred. The light in the craters glowed. As the Prayer Wheels got closer, the light formed a backdrop against which they became diminishing silhouettes.

At fourteen hundred feet Cyr fired the final course adjustment; the motors flared and died. She glanced at Foord, on an impulse mouthed Varicose Veins, and pressed another panel. The Prayer Wheels started to turn. The dark metal of their rims became transluscent and glowed pearl-white as they began generating stasis fields. The motors and guidance systems exploded silently off the rims. The Prayer Wheels entered the craters and were swallowed.

That was not what they’d expected. They’d expected Her to realise what they were doing, and to try flight, evasion, counterattack, anything, to prevent it. If She didn’t it meant either that they’d genuinely surprised Her (for the third time—first the photon burst, then the two missiles) or that it wouldn’t work. But it is working, thought Foord exultantly, as he saw things on the Bridge screen he’d never expected to see.

The dark swirling patterns on Her flank grew faint, then darkened and grew faint again. The nameless colour which both lit and obscured the two craters died, then flared and died again. She started to do the things She should have done before. She fired Her manoeuvre drives in sequence and tried to roll so the Charles Manson wouldn’t be facing the craters, but Kaang rolled with Her, maintaining relative position and distance—still exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet—and the light in the craters flared and died again. She pushed Her speed to fifty percent and Kaang matched Her. She stopped dead and resumed at forty-five percent, and Kaang stopped dead and resumed with Her. She fired Her manoeuvre drives at random—two of them exploded, bursting their diamond caps—trying to roll or pitch or yaw in any direction which would take the Charles Manson away from the craters, but Kaang mirrored everything She did; sometimes, it seemed, before She did it, as if Kaang was taking the lead and making Her follow. The two craters flared one more time, and went dark. The patterns over Her flank darkened one more time and went pale. Another of Her manoeuvre drives exploded, this one near the stern crater, and pieces of wreckage fountained out from Her. The Bridge screen tracked them. Each piece grew two replica craters of its own, but this time they flared once and went dark, like eyes closing.

She seemed to give up, as She had done once before against Kaang, and let them fly alongside Her. Cyr pressed a series of panels, and two of the Charles Manson’s main ventral launch bays opened. Objects dropped out of them, fired once and made their way towards Her.

In the few seconds before Cyr’s attack hit Her, they had time to look into the craters. Both of them were lit, not by the unnameable colour but by the weak pearlescent flicker of the Prayer Wheels deep inside them (another naked bulb in a cellar, thought Foord) and they saw, despite all the ways in which She was utterly unlike them, a piece of their own likeness. She too was packed solid, almost to dwarf-star density. The stern crater was packed with the cathedral slabs of Her main drive housings, the midsection crater with a melted chaos of cables and conduits, like a bucket of dead eels; and both craters with broken latticeworks of structural girders, even with the same H cross-section as their counterparts on the Charles Manson. Angles were random and contradictory. Everything had flowed into everything else and frozen at the instant of melting. Escher and Dalí.

The furthest recesses of each crater were still out of focus, obscured and sealed by the darkness whose surface swirled with watered-silk patterns. If She had a crew, some of them would have moved through these areas; but nothing had kept enough shape to be corridors or doors or anything else recognisable. Or to be their bodies. We did that, thought Foord, and then he froze as another thought came, a very unwelcome one.

Maybe we only damaged Her outside, not Her inside. Maybe this is how Her inside really is. Maybe She always carries this chaos inside Her.

•

Cyr watched the two ninety-foot Diamond Clusters she had just launched, the last two the Charles Manson carried. Like the Prayer Wheels they had fired once and were now gliding on diverging paths towards the two craters. Like the Prayer Wheels, She must have seen them coming and should have responded but did not. Cyr had told Foord they were the best weapon to follow the Prayer Wheels into the craters. Foord still wanted beams, but Cyr persuaded him. She knew that energy weapons in the craters would be wrong.

Cyr watched the two of them, and watched her instruments; she calculated that if Faith continued to do nothing, no final course correction would be needed. As with the Prayer Wheels, there was a moment when She could have tried rolling away, and everything would then have depended on Cyr’s preparations and Kaang’s reactions; but the moment passed. The two ninety-foot missiles reached Her and slowly entered the craters and continued and continued to enter until their entire lengths were swallowed. And this time, Cyr thought as she watched them explode, You can swallow but you can’t digest.

They were simple explosions, massive but conventional, not linked to MT physics in any way and not affected by the stasis fields. They flashed On-Off in a nanosecond, On to light the two craters with fire—almost a mundane colour after the colour which had previously lit them—and Off to leave them lit again only by the flicker of the Prayer Wheels, which generated their own space-time and were untouched by non-MT events around them.

This time the explosions went into Her, the way they should have done before, and She had no means of reversing them or slowing them, but the explosions themselves would not have damaged Her. It was what they released into Her, a million fractal diamond razors the size of Sakhran claws, flying through Her at a million times the speed She had slowed them to last time. They were a simple physical weapon, carried to massive extremes. Their eruption and flight inside Her had already happened. It would have lasted only another nanosecond after the two explosions, On-Off in their afterimage. If She had been a Commonwealth ship, even a battleship—or even an Outsider—She would have broken in half. Because She was not, Cyr had the next attack already prepared for the craters; and, if necessary, the one after that and the one after that.

She came to a halt, and the Charles Manson halted with Her. Alarms murmured on the Bridge. Whatever had happened inside Her, found no other expression outside.

Alarms murmured again. She started to move forward slowly, at twenty percent. The Charles Manson parallelled Her. She showed nothing they could read, either as life or death. Maybe the diamond razors had shredded Her interior and crew, and She was moving only on automatic, or maybe they had failed. As usual, She gave them nothing. Her interior, like SchrÖdinger’s cat, was neither dead nor alive, but something else which might become either.

Cyr and Foord exchanged glances.

“Commander, do we still…”

“Yes. What else is there?”

Cyr pressed some more panels, and the next attack began. Blisters rose and opened along the topsurface of the Charles Manson’s hull. Their three hundred remaining spiders swarmed out, fired their onboard motors, and made for the midsection crater. It was something Cyr and Foord had both wanted: to do to Her what She had done to them, to assault Her internally and intimately. Always attack the wound, Cyr said.

“Cyr,” said Foord, “if this doesn’t work…”

“I know. I have the next attacks ready.”

The dark gunmetal spiders fanned out as they crossed the sixteen hundred feet. They were silhouetted against the silver of Her hull as they floated slowly towards Her. Many of them were missing limbs. As they neared the midsection crater they fired their motors and funnelled into a narrower formation—almost a coiled rope, like the one She had taken into Herself. Their silhouettes became less distinct as they came within the compass of the crater’s backdrop, where only the flicker of the Prayer Wheels illuminated them. The mouth of the crater was almost the same colour they were.

The slowness and uncertainty of what they were doing made Foord suddenly tired. He looked across the sixteen hundred feet and almost prayed to Her, Respond.

The alarms had earlier murmured on the Bridge, like polite punctuations to the other conversations, but now they shouted. Both craters, stern and midsection, were black. At last, She had neutralised the stasis fields, and the weak illumination from the Prayer Wheels had died.

Cyr glanced at Foord. He shook his head, No.

“Hold them back, Cyr. Don’t let them enter the crater. Not until…”

He had expected to see both craters re-ignite with the unnameable colour, and to see the dark swirling patterns reappear over Her hull, indicating the resumption of Her mass-to-energy processes. So had the Bridge screen, which patched in local magnifications of both craters and of Her hull around them, but nothing showed. At least, nothing they expected.

The midsection crater filled with shivering white light. It was so bright it hit them like a wind, crossing the space between them with almost physical force so they expected the Charles Manson to rock. It was like a billion arc lights. It silhouetted the floating bodies of the spiders, reaching itself and their shadows back at the Charles Manson like alternate dark and light fingers, projecting their silhouettes onto the Charles Manson’s flank in a broken rewriting of the earlier dark patterns on Hers.

And it was only the midsection crater, not the stern. That remained dark. Foord had glanced back at the stern crater to check, and so missed what happened next at the midsection, and found himself wondering what the alarms and shouting were about until he looked back to the midsection crater and saw the figure which walked out of it—walked, not crawled—and which was now standing in the crater’s mouth, looking at them across the sixteen hundred feet.

It was human-sized, and human-shaped.

It was human, and they recognised it.

6

“It’s a good analysis,” said the voice, “of the events at Horus 5 and the Belt and Horus 4. The last bit, in the Gulf, is harder to read. Our analysts see it differently to yours.”

“Our analysts,” Swann said, “had to work from limited information. From long-range monitoring of drive emissions, from radio and optical telescopes on Sakhra, and a few remote probes that happened to be in the system. We had no ships in the area, because you”—he tried to keep his voice even—“because you told us to recall them and deploy them around Sakhra. If you have a different view of what’s happening in the Gulf, it’s because you know more about it than we do. For once, just say yes or no.”

Swann’s Command Centre at Blent was full of screens, most of them showing live feeds of events around Sakhra which he didn’t want to see, but Swann was speaking not into a screen but into a—superficially, at least—old-fashioned microphone. The Department of Administrative Affairs didn’t do faces on screens. It only did voices on mikes.

“Yes, of course we do. We’d hardly build things like the Outsiders and not build in ways of monitoring them. Just because Foord has killed all communications—by the way, with us as well as you—”

“We have only your word for that,” Swann said, then wished he hadn’t. His voice wasn’t shrill, but the remark was.

“Just because Foord has killed all communications,” the voice went on evenly, “doesn’t mean we can’t track him. He knows that, of course. He’s neutralised some of our devices, but not all of them. And Joser wasn’t the only observer we had on the Charles Manson. Foord knows that, too.”

“So you have information which we don’t about what those two ships are doing in the Gulf. I insist you share it.”

“Insist?”

The days Swann had spent in the Command Centre, since Boussaid’s death and since the Charles Manson had left to engage Her alone, seemed longer than the rest of his life. They stretched back behind him, worrying and unfathomable, noisy and fetid. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes. Neither, by his orders, had any of his staff—the military and security people he’d charged with monitoring events on Sakhra, the communications people he’d charged with tracking the Charles Manson’s engagement of Faith, and the mission analysts he’d charged with interpreting it. Their cups and meal trays and half-used toiletries were strewn over the floor, left where they fell. The atmosphere was as thick and furry as the inside of his mouth.

Without any possibility of realising it, Swann had done to the Command Centre what Foord had done to the Bridge of the Charles Manson.

“We have an apparently invincible opponent,” Swann said. “She’s entered the outer reaches of Horus system, almost certainly to attack Sakhra. The only ship with any chance of defeating Her has, on your orders, engaged Her alone. According to our analyses She’s made the Charles Manson shut down its MT Drive, execute a photon burst through the Belt, and burrow through a large asteroid. Then, apparently, Foord succeeded in damaging Her at Horus 4.” Swann became aware that he’d been counting the points on his fingers, the nails of which were stained and bitten; Foord’s hands, he remembered, were always immaculate. “And now there’s a series of strange closeup exchanges between them in the Gulf, and those two ships are travelling alongside each other. Through the Gulf. Towards us. And Foord won’t communicate. Maybe it’s not just one invincible opponent coming for us, but two. Yes, I said Insist!”

The voice did not immediately reply.

One of the screens in the Command Centre showed a live address from the President of Sakhra, appealing for calm. The irony was not lost on Swann. Apart from the disturbing but still largely isolated incidents shown on various other screens, calm was what Sakhra still had. Things were falling apart, but calmly. Since the Charles Manson’s departure from Sakhra—if She ever came here, would She cause as much chaos?—the disturbances had increased, but they were still apparently unconnected, and hard to read. The humans on Sakhra seemed to share the Sakhrans’ sense of separation, of having turned away from each other. Election turnouts were small. When Swann gave interviews, which he had done frequently in the last few days, he got ten times the President’s coverage.

Or maybe these events were the tip of a larger pattern, as were the events in the Gulf with Foord and Her. Maybe—Swann immediately regretted this thought, because its afterecho wouldn’t go away—maybe they weren’t just hard to read, but too big to read.

“No, not two opponents,” said the voice, eventually.

“What do you mean?”

“Not two opponents, Director. Foord is still attacking Her.”

“Attacking?”

“She’s been damaged: nobody has ever done that before. She’s fighting back, so the Charles Manson is still attacking Her. We don’t fully understand what She’s doing, but She’s fighting back.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“I told you, Foord has killed communications with us.”

“But you have your devices. Do you or don’t you know what’s happening in the Gulf?”

“We don’t know. He seems almost like Her.”

“I met him here, remember. And dealt with him over Copeland. He was always like Her.”

“But we know he’s damaged Her, Director, and we know he’s trying to finish Her. We can’t read Her responses. But we don’t interpret it as any joining of forces.”

“You’ve contradicted yourself at least three times, but let that pass. We can agree that he’s damaged Her, and that nobody else has done that.” Despite what he felt for Foord, he remembered the genuine sense of wonder he’d had on hearing that. “So why isn’t anyone helping him? Does all of Horus Fleet have to remain around Sakhra?”

“Director Swann, believe me. If Foord fails, you’ll need the entire Fleet.”

“Not even the Charles Manson could take on the entire Fleet. Are you saying She can?”

“If Foord fails, She’ll come for Sakhra. It may be over-provision, but it’s better that Sakhra’s defended with the whole Fleet.”

One advantage of the microphone was the amount of sceptical expressions Swann could safely direct at it. Not even the voice seemed to believe that last answer.

Swann let the silence grow long enough to become uncomfortable. “If,” he said, “they’re so closely matched that one Outsider can damage Her, how many would it take to be sure of defeating Her?”

“What do you mean by that, Director Swann? Specifically?”

“One Outsider’s damaged Her. Two or three more could finish Her. Send us two or three more. Is that specific enough?”

“No. Outsiders don’t fight in teams, they fight alone. And if She defeats Foord and comes to Sakhra, the Commonwealth will need all of them for what happens next.”

7

Foord stood in the mouth of the midsection crater and looked across the gap, blinking, at his ship.

He felt cold. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed his fingers. There were veins and tendons and nails—immaculate nails—but the flesh tones were gradations of grey and silver. He felt cold, then it occurred to him that he was standing open to space and didn’t have a suit. He was standing—gravity worked here—and breathing; he took in what felt like air through his open mouth, and his chest rose and fell. I’m a construct, he told himself, a construct of liquid silver made by whatever lives in this ship, but I’m also me, with all my memories and motives. I’ve just woken to life, but I remember all my life leading up to this. Why didn’t they just make something that looked like me? Why did they make me like this, full of everything I am? It seems like overengineering.

He looked down from his raised hand, along his arm, to the rest of his body. Large, heavily muscled; toned and tidy; everything I’ve woken up to, every day, over there on the Charles Manson. How did they know it all? And why have they put me here? He felt cold.

Outside the mouth of the crater, between him and his ship, floated nearly three hundred dark gunmetal spiders. They’d been about to pour into this crater, this open wound we made in Her side. They’d been about to enter Her and attack Her, like She had sent Hers to attack us, but when this cold light filled the crater I told Cyr to hold them back. (Did he remember that, or just assume it? He didn’t know.) And behind him, in the crater’s deepest recesses—behind the swirling darkness which hid those recesses from the Charles Manson—were the giant coils and festoons of The Rope, the thing She’d made by joining pieces of them and Her, and had then taken into Herself.

He felt cold. Not because he was standing open to space—that was a cold he’d never have had time to feel, he’d have died from it instantly, if he’d been alive. The cold was inside him. He knew he couldn’t possibly be alive, but he avoided the temptation of trying to define Alive. I have motives and memories and sensory inputs and outputs and a sense of myself, just like me in my ship over there. Maybe more so. I’m almost more than me. I must be looking across from the Bridge and seeing me here, but I can’t look back and see myself over there because I’m hidden in the Bridge and I don’t have a screen that gives me magnifications of things moments before I ask for them. The grammar doesn’t work, it’s too clumsy. Words don’t work. I’m here in the crater and I’m over there sixteen hundred feet away in my ship. I can’t call the Foord over there Him, it’s Me.

Self-referential, like a book reading a book. Same software, different hardware. The software is all my memories and motives, everything I am, but I’m made of liquid silver which remains solid while it keeps my shape. I’m not organic—no, don’t go there either, don’t try defining that. I’ve been made.

I grew out of a pool of silver on a floor somewhere behind me on this ship. I’ve been made by the people who live in this ship. (Yes, People. Who Live.) I know them as Them and People, not Her or It, because there’s more than one and they interact socially, but I don’t know what they look like or why they made me or why their ship has done these things. I know less about them than a hammer knows about the owner of the hand holding it—less than an atom in the handle of the hammer—but they made me like this, and put me here, for a reason.

And that’s what it is, he thought, looking out at the spiders floating between him and his ship. They were motionless, dark against the silver of the Charles Manson. They floated in a narrow compressed formation so that he only saw the front five or six bodies but saw hundreds of limbs, some broken, sprouting from those behind, like figures of Kali. He knew he would try to stop them when they entered the crater. He neither wanted to nor was aware of being compelled to; it was just how he was made. It was inevitable, like breathing, though he stood open to space and wasn’t alive.

Something made him turn round and look back into the recesses of the crater. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw coming out of it to join him and stand by him, in the crater’s open mouth, facing the spiders.

•

On the Bridge they were dumbstruck as they looked at the single figure which stood, looking back at them, in the mouth of the midsection crater. The others saw what the figure looked like, but Foord saw what it was. He took in every detail of its body-language and posture and demeanour. He knew what was behind its eyes.

The Bridge screen patched in a closeup of its face.

“That isn’t just…” Foord began, then his throat closed up. He took a deep breath through his open mouth, his chest rising and falling.

“That isn’t just a replica. It isn’t just a construct. It’s me, everything I am, soul and self-awareness and everything.”

“How can you know that?” Smithson asked.

“The same way you’d know, if that was you standing there. It knows it’s everything I am, but it knows it was made, and it’s trying to understand why. Not It, Me. I know I was made, and I’m trying to understand why…There aren’t words for this, words don’t work.”

Foord looked through the Bridge screen into his own icy silver soul. He felt cold.

On the screen, the figure turned round to look back into the recesses of the crater. Other figures were walking out to join it, one by one, and to stand at its side.

•

Foord turned to see them walking out of the crater to join him.

Cyr was first. She too was silver and grey, the grey ranging from almost-white to almost-black. She raised a hand in greeting. Her fingernails, immaculately manicured like his and dark blue back on the Charles Manson, were here almost black, at the tips of long silver fingers. Her tunic and shoes, dark blue on the Charles Manson, were here dark grey. Her skirt swung gracefully as she walked, just as it always did, and Foord could feel himself getting the first stirrings of an erection, just as he always did.

They even let me have erections, he thought. He wanted to take it out and look at it, but thought it probably wasn’t the time. He expected it would be silver and grey.

She smiled at him. “Commander.”

“Hello, Cyr.”

And they’ve let me hear spoken words, open to space. You can’t hear noises in space. But you can’t stand in it or breathe in it either, and Cyr was breathing like him; her chest rose and fell under her tunic. And her voice sounded just like it did on the Charles Manson, just like he remembered.

He looked her up and down. “I know you wear that to arouse me,” he said, “and it does. It looks good on you. You’re beautiful.”

Before she could reply they were joined by Thahl, Kaang and Smithson. Thahl, slender and graceful like Cyr but slighter. Kaang, pleasant but unremarkable, a little plump, and looking terrified. And Smithson—

Smithson was the strangest of all, because back on the Charles Manson he was naturally grey. Only his eyes really differed; normally they were warm and golden, here they were mid-grey. When he extended a limb in greeting, Foord heard the wet plop.

They all had self-awareness. As Foord on the Charles Manson had realised when he first saw himself, something about them made it obvious. They had everything, physically and spiritually, which they’d ever woken up to every morning of their lives; yet they knew they were made, and knew they would defend the crater. They knew also that they should go back into the ship and find the people who made them, but they knew they never would.

They came and stood at Foord’s side in the mouth of the crater, imagining (they could also imagine; they’d been given that too) what their other selves on the Charles Manson—no, their selves: words didn’t work properly for this—would be thinking.

•

“You see?” Foord said to the others on the Bridge. “They’re us. They’re everything we are. Tell me they’re not.”

“What are we going to do, Commander?” Kaang said. She was looking at herself and the other four figures in the crater, and sobbing.

“What are they going to do?” Cyr asked. She too was unable to take her eyes off the crater.

“You already know,” Foord said. “She made them and She put them there. Put us there. To defend the crater against our spiders.”

“But She could have made ordinary devices,” Kaang said. “Ordinary synthetics. Even if they looked like us, they didn’t have to be us.”

“Yes they did,” Smithson said bleakly. “That’s the whole point. Make us fight them and kill them.”

The silence returned. The way they each thought about family and loved ones, if they had any, varied with their biology and culture and circumstances, but the way they thought about themselves did not vary. Some of them could even imagine killing loved ones or family, but this was worse. Worse than suicide. Deliberately killing something with sentience, when that sentience was your own, and when you knew—unlike suicide—that you’d still be alive and aware of what you’d done….

“We have to attack the crater,” Foord said.

“I know, Commander,” Cyr said. “And if they defend it we have to kill them. Kill us. I wish the words would work better.”

“She never did anything like this,” Thahl said, “when She last came to Sakhra.”

“You said we’d find out new things about Her.”

“Yes, Commander, I did. But this…”

“This is because we hurt Her. Made her fight for Her life. Nobody’s seen this, because nobody’s done that before.” He took a long breath, and felt it rasp through his throat. “We have to watch ourselves die.” He nodded to Cyr, who sent out the signal to the spiders.

•

They stood together in the open mouth of the midsection crater, and watched as the spiders started moving towards them.

“Why have they brought me here, too?” Kaang asked. “I’m nothing to do with this, I’m only a pilot. We’ll die here.”

Foord laughed. “Are we alive enough to die?”

“Commander, we’re only five against…how many?”

“Nearly three hundred,” Cyr said.

“And we’re unarmed,” Smithson said. “Not even sidearms.”

“Five against three hundred or three thousand. It hardly matters,” Foord said. “They didn’t make us like this and put us here just to be wiped out.”

“Didn’t they?” Smithson said. “Maybe that’s the whole point. Make us, over there, kill ourselves over here.”

The spiders were moving slowly towards the mouth of the crater; so slowly they were almost drifting.

“I think,” Thahl said, “that when they made us, they must have given us some special abilities.”

“I think,” Foord said drily, “that you have them already.”

“No, Commander. Extra abilities. Otherwise why would they…?”

“I’m not aware,” Cyr said, “of anything over here that I don’t have over there.”

“We ought to go back through this crater and find them,” Smithson said. “But we know we can’t. That’s something we don’t have over there.”

“Then,” Foord said, “over here we’ll die. Fighting our own weapons.”

The spiders drifted closer. Without thinking, they all stepped back from the mouth of the crater, to allow room for the first ones to enter.

“When they snip our arms and legs off,” Smithson muttered, “will we subdivide down to nothing?”

“Nothing,” Thahl said, deadpan, “is ever completely nothing.”

“Thahl, were we...” Foord began.

“...like this over there?” Thahl finished. “I don’t remember, Commander. Maybe we left more things unsaid.”

•

Foord looked around the Bridge, and focussed angrily on Cyr.

“Watch the screen! Don’t turn away. They’re us. We’d want that dignity. We wouldn’t want us to turn away.”

“You’re right, Commander. I’m sorry.”

Cyr had been the only one on the Bridge to turn away. Normally she would have been first to watch what her weapons were about to do. She enjoyed the use of weapons, but not against these opponents. She turned back to the screen, where her replica and the others stood blinking back at her through the cold light in the crater, and reached a conclusion. There was something she could do.

She pressed a series of panels.

•

The spiders floated closer, and the first one entered the mouth of the crater. It was missing one of its middle limbs and had gouges all over its body. It crawled forward. It did not make for Foord, but for Cyr. She moved away from the others, to isolate herself. She guessed what she had done, back on the Charles Manson.

“Cyr?”

“I have to be first, Commander, not you.”

“Why?”

“Because back on our ship, I’m controlling them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The spider approached her clumsily; almost, it seemed, by accident. The missing limb gave it an awkward rolling gait. Cyr saw it silhouetted against the silver hull of her ship, sixteen hundred feet away. On the Charles Manson, those on the Bridge saw it silhouetted against the silver figure of Cyr, slender and graceful.

Cyr took another step sideways. As she expected, no other spiders had yet entered the crater. She looked into its nonexistent face. It was her weapon. She was controlling it on the Charles Manson. It stepped towards her, its feet clacking on the floor of the crater; it extended a couple of forelimbs as if in greeting, and reconfigured the claws to manipulator mode. Cyr was making calculations about how long she could engage it, how long she could hold it off before those who made her were triggered into revealing whatever abilities they had given her to counter it. While she was making her calculations, it rose on its hindlimbs and pronged out her eyes. She screamed. Foord thought it was more in horror than pain, but couldn’t be certain because he’d never heard her scream before. More spiders floated into the crater and settled, and more waited behind them. Cyr continued screaming. Her screams didn’t incorporate obvious phrases like My Eyes or Help Me, but were entirely wordless. Foord motioned to the others to fan out. This can’t be, he thought. If they made us, why would they let us be massacred like this? They must have given us something. But what?

•

On the Bridge, Cyr watched the local magnification on the screen. Her palms were bleeding where her fingernails dug into them; her manicured nails, painted darker than the blood they drew. In the crater, her nails and her blood were the same shade of almost-black. She could see it clearly on the Bridge screen, because in the crater Cyr had sunk to her knees and held her hands over her eyes and was screaming, and Foord had motioned to the others to fan out and face the spiders which had entered the crater and were now climbing over each other, pushing each other aside, to get at them.

“You told that first one to go for you, not for me.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And you told it exactly what it should do to you.”

“Yes, Commander.” Cyr held Foord’s gaze. Her eyes were dark and unreadable. “It was one thing I could do for them, I mean us, in the crater. They’d know I’d order the spiders to attack them. So I did it to myself first, in the most vicious way I could.”

Foord went to say How can you think of something that vicious, but he already knew; it was how she was made.

In the crater they had turned away from each other; they were fighting separate battles, and they were going down. Cyr was still alive while the spider which had taken her eyes continued to work on her face, making it as featureless as its own. Only then did it finish her, slashing her throat. Her blood—dark grey, almost black—should have floated around her in globules, but gravity worked in the crater.

Foord went down easily, more easily than he expected. A spider simply stabbed him in the stomach—his entrails glistened silver and grey—then slit his throat. He didn’t call to the others for help but just fell forward, shaking his head No, this can’t be, and the spider stepped delicately over him and over Kaang, impaled on the claw of another spider and already dead, towards Smithson and Thahl. They knew Smithson and Thahl would be more difficult, because their programming said so.

On the Charles Manson, Smithson watched on the Bridge screen as five of them surrounded him and took it in turn to slice him, vertically. He felt grief but concealed it beneath outrage. He swore at them, as he was swearing at them in the crater while they sliced steaks off his body; his flesh in the crater had the same moist consistency as it did on the Charles Manson. They had severed one of his two main forelimbs, but he extruded a secondary limb, picked up one spider and used it to dash two others to pieces, then collapsed as the spiders halved and rehalved him.

Then there was only Thahl. They surrounded him, nine against one, with more and more entering the crater. He concentrated on disabling them by breaking their limbs with blows from his hands and feet. He had already disabled five, moving among them like a Sakhran customarily moves in combat—not only using his own speed and grace, but seeming to radiate something which made his opponents slow and clumsy. Just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly, but he knew he couldn’t disable them faster than they were entering the crater. He knew that those who made him, and made the others, had put them in the crater to face the spiders, but he was puzzled.

There must be something they’ve given us to fight the spiders with.

The others hadn’t revealed it, and neither had he, but it must be there. He wondered again what it was, and when and how it would show. He kicked away a couple of disabled spiders to make room to face the newcomers who were surrounding him. Then he realised what it was, and smiled.

•

On the Bridge, Thahl carefully studied himself as he fought in the crater.

The others on the Bridge had done what Foord demanded. They had watched themselves die, even when their emotions were insupportable. Thahl did not allow himself to show any emotion, even when he saw what they did to Cyr, though there was an irony about it because that was what Cyr over here—words didn’t work properly—had told them to do to herself. He continued to show no emotion when Foord went down so easily, and still showed none now, when he watched himself fighting—though he studied the screen closely, looking for but not finding any modification of his abilities.

He knew there had to be more.

She made us and She put us in the crater to defend it. She must have given us the ability to defend it, something extra beyond ourselves, and he wondered how and when it would show. He watched himself moving among the spiders—just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly—and then it occurred to him that just as he made the spiders look slow and clumsy, so had Her spiders, each one a match for at least six of theirs until they…

Then he knew, and smiled to himself. On the Bridge screen, which had focussed on him in closeup as he was the last of them left, he smiled back at himself from the crater.

•

In the crater the spiders Thahl had disabled were strewn around him, most of them limbless or broken-limbed but still rocking backwards and forwards to get at him. Now others had entered the crater and surrounded him: nine, ten, eleven. They made cautious feints to draw him out, but did not yet attack directly. More were joining them.

That was when he had smiled to himself.

I’d like to have lived longer, he thought, which is reasonable considering how they made me. They gave me self-awareness, and all my memories and motives. He might have added, And my soul, but Sakhrans—perhaps because of how they reproduced, or how they organised themselves socially—were not particularly religious. So not Soul, he thought, but my sense of what I am. And because they made me like this, I can do what comes next more easily. It won’t be as complete as dying, because I also live over there.

He became still. He folded his arms across his chest, and collapsed into himself.

The process began at the top of his head and worked down through his body to his feet, like an ice-sculpture melting. He turned, from his head downwards, into liquid silver. Because it started at his head, his consciousness dissolved away while the rest of him was still collapsing. His last thought was They didn’t make us telepathic. I wish I could tell them over there that our opponent is not just a Her or an It, there are people living here. Perhaps they’ll find out. Even see them.

The liquid silver which had been his head cascaded down his body, which in turn cascaded down his legs to pool at his feet, which in turn became part of the pool. When Thahl was gone, the same thing happened to the bodies of the others. Cyr, Foord, Kaang and Smithson collapsed into themselves, leaving silver pools; five pools, including the one which had been Thahl. Suggestions of rainbow colours swirled across their surfaces, but otherwise the pools were inert. The spiders peered and poked at them, indifferently, because they did not signify opposition.

Simultaneously the five pools burst into thousands of separate silver beads, each the size of a fingernail. For a moment they stood apart from each other, quivering; then flicked across the floor of the crater, between and around the clacking feet of the spiders, combining and recombining until they became a single thing: a floorcovering of rippling silver, only molecules deep. Its shape was like a map, defined by the spiders around which it flowed and formed. It moved back into the depths of the crater, through the out-of-focus dark curtain, to where the silver-grey coils of the Rope festooned the walls. It rose and touched the Rope’s coils, welcoming it down from the walls and into itself; the coils entered it, and continued and continued to enter. Then it flowed back towards the mouth of the crater.

Its volume had increased. Now it covered the entire floor, to a depth of inches.

•

On the Bridge, Foord cried out as he watched Thahl die in the crater. He had stayed outwardly impassive when the others went down, even himself, but now he could not look across the Bridge at Thahl; they were both embarrassed.

He watched the pools become beads, and the beads combine and recombine.

“Get us out of here, Kaang.”

“Commander, our spiders—”

“Forget them, Cyr, they’re already finished. Get us out of here, Kaang. Now.”

The Charles Manson’s manoeuvre jets fountained, a gesture of parting. It turned away, engaged its ion drive at seventy percent, and ran. We keep moving backwards and forwards, thought Foord, like masturbation.

•

The carpet of liquid silver stretched continuously from the mouth of the crater to its recesses, where the darkness hung. Points on its surface rose into small conical shapes or sank into small conical depressions, within a vertical range of no more than plus or minus an inch; they formed and disappeared randomly, as though caused by the first isolated drops of a rainstorm. Colours—cobalt, violet, burgundy, dark bluish grey—swirled across its surface like cloud shadows.

About thirty spiders were in the crater; the others still floated outside. They walked through the silver liquid—it no longer flowed around them—picking their steps with human delicacy, swivelling to find recognisable shapes of opposition but seeing none. They saw the Charles Manson turn away from them and run, but it meant nothing to them; its location was not in their mission parameters, not until they had done what they came to do and were ready to leave Her.

Near the mouth of the crater a small conical point rose to about an inch above the surface, but did not subside. It continued to rise, drawing more liquid up after it. It was still silver but grew duller as it solidified and cohered and became the shape Foord had expected: man-sized, a triangular body with three jointed limbs pushing up and out from each corner, and no face.

If there was a moment when it could be said to have started its existence, it was when it stepped clear of the silver liquid, leaving a hole behind it which closed Plop, and pivoted to survey the Charles Manson’s spiders around it. They looked back impassively. Rising on first one corner of its body and then another, moving in spasms of right-angles and diagonals like a new chessboard figure, it plunged amongst the dark spiders and shredded three of them before they could react. A fourth, remembering the earlier encounters on the Charles Manson, snipped a joint off one of its legs, but this time the silver spider did not subdivide down to nothing. It stopped and looked, facelessly, into the recesses of the crater, where others like itself were forming.

Initially there were three more. The silver closed Plop behind them, Plop Plop, as they stepped clear of it and started their existence without ceremony. They joined the first and arranged themselves into a diamond, moving with stop-go oddness. They shifted from one direction to another, and from stillness to speed and back to stillness, with an abruptness which made the Charles Manson’s spiders look human.

•

The Bridge screen, without being told to, had maintained its local magnification on the crater as they ran. At a hundred and fifty thousand feet Kaang stopped the Charles Manson and turned it in its own length to face Her.

The screen showed more silver spiders forming. As they rose up out of the liquid carpet, the remains of their opponents—dismembered swiftly and without mess or passion by the original four—were dissolving down into the silver. It welcomed them.

The crater was now full of silver spiders. It seethed with the oddness of their movements as they stepped clear of the silver liquid; the Plops of the liquid closing behind them, if the Bridge screen had transmitted sounds, would have been like a choir of sphincters. Sideways, forwards, diagonally, they flicked themselves into diamond formations, four to a diamond, and made their way to the mouth of the crater, where they fired their onboard motors in sequence and launched themselves outwards.

The Bridge screen panned back. A vomit of silver spiders burst out of Her midsection crater and hit the rest of the Charles Manson’s spiders, still floating alongside the crater mouth, and the second and larger part of the massacre began.

96, said the screen’s headup display impassively, against 261.

It was like Sakhrans fighting humans—more so, because Sakhrans fought as individuals and the silver spiders fought with perfect co-ordination. On the Charles Manson, they’d chosen to collapse and subdivide when damaged, and even then, any one was a match for at least six opponents. Now, they were outnumbered only three to one.

95, said the headup display, facing 187. 95, facing 163.

Two to one, Foord corrected himself, his horror rising as the odds fell; less than two to one. He had foreseen this, so his horror contained no panic; it was as coldly mathematical as the Bridge screen’s accounting. What was happening was devoid of drama or uncertainty, but still horrifying.

94, said the headup display, facing 123.

The silver spiders were not fighting their opponents, they were merely shredding them and parcelling them into manageable pieces which were handed back down the line into the mouth of the crater where the silver liquid welcomed them into itself.

94, said the headup display, facing 87.

It was an industrial operation. They were loading cargo, not fighting a battle, and seemed genuinely unaware that the cargo was trying to resist them while they loaded it. And now that the operation was into its final stages, it accelerated.

93, said the Bridge screen, facing 45. 93, facing 9.

“Particle beams?” Cyr asked. Her voice betrayed nothing.

“No, not on the crater,” Foord said. Neither did his.

93, facing 0.

“I meant on them, Commander, if they come for us.”

“They won’t. She’s taken enough of us. Now She wants Sakhra.”

•

Nobody spoke on the Bridge. They were thinking the same thing but wouldn’t say it aloud. They all go into the dark, Foord recited to himself, they all go into the dark and become part of Her.

He wasn’t thinking of the ninety-three that had just entered Her. Neither was he thinking of their own spiders, dismembered and parcelled into the crater, or of the spiders and hull-plates taken before from the Charles Manson and swallowed by the crater; that was just hardware and substances.

He was thinking of the original five silver figures; ourselves, blinking at us from out of that hole in Her side, the hole we made. Ourselves. Those five figures carried our souls, and our souls have become part of Her.

Not Have Become: Always Were.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “impossible things. So have you. We can’t leave them unspoken.”

“I thought that’s exactly what we do on your ship,” Smithson said.

Foord ignored that. “Those five figures, we knew when we first saw them that they were us. We saw it behind their eyes. All our memories and motives. Even souls, if we have them. Everything that animates us, animated them.

“And She already knew it. When She made those five, She already knew what we are. She put it into them when She put them in the mouth of the crater. She took it back into Herself when She took them back. I think She’s always known what we are. Since before we existed.”

“Commander,” Thahl said, almost gently, “we’ve turned away from the Commonwealth. We don’t know what we are. Where do we belong now?”

“Perhaps more with Her than the Commonwealth. There’s more of us in Her than we ever gave to the Commonwealth.” What did I just say?

“Commander,” Smithson said, “do you know what you’re saying?”

“Are you saying you haven’t thought the same thing?”

“Are you saying this, Commander?” Cyr asked.

“She means…” Thahl began.

“I know what she means. Is it me speaking, or Her?”

Again, nobody spoke on the Bridge.

“This is me speaking.” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. “I won’t submit to passive submission to a higher power—Her, or the Commonwealth. Nothing outside of me has the right to know my soul. I never really knew what I meant when I said Instrument of Ourselves, but I do now. It means that.”

Foord looked at the Bridge screen where She still floated, apparently immobile. She was further away now, a hundred and fifty thousand feet instead of sixteen hundred, and travelling faster through the Gulf than before, but the screen maintained magnification and their course and speed matched Hers, and the Gulf was empty of reference points. It was as if they were both stationary, and She was only sixteen hundred feet away. She seemed always to be only sixteen hundred feet away.

“The Commonwealth has taken a lot from us, but not as much as She has. The Commonwealth is just a machine, not a god. We must fight the god. We must go on and destroy Her, no matter what things we learn about Her. There can be no time or space except the time and space we take to destroy Her.” He knew he was close to incoherence, but he went on. “No space in front or behind. No time before, after, or during.”

He only understood half of what he said, and had no idea what any of them would say next, himself included. And he would never know, because there was an interruption from somewhere outside.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “we have incoming.”

“I thought I told you not to—”

“The signal isn’t from Sakhra, Commander. Or from Earth. It’s from Her.”

8

She had sent Her signal openly, with no attempt to disguise its origin. She even followed the standard Commonwealth ship-to-ship protocols, prefacing it with a code on the usual hailing frequency; in effect, a formal request for their acceptance of a communication, which with equal formality they refused. She ignored their refusal, and tried to bypass their defences and put Her signal directly onto the Bridge screen.

“Block it, please, Thahl.”

“Commander, it might be….”

Foord looked up at him sharply. “Block it.”

Her image on the Bridge screen became blurred and overlaid with static, a normal and temporary side-effect of the blocking of an incoming signal. When the block was accomplished, the static would clear from the screen; which ought to have been now.

“Thahl?”

“The signal’s growing more powerful, Commander. I’ll try to…”

“Thahl, the screen.”

The Bridge screen had never before gone dark while the ship was operational. The sudden absence of its light was like the sudden absence of air, a visual suffocation. Thahl switched to backup and it relit, showing Her image again, overlaid with static; and again it fell dark. The screen had many backups and failsafes, and Thahl used them all. It stayed dark.

“Smithson,” Foord began, carefully controlling his voice, “do we…”

“Yes, Commander, we still have Her on scanners, and She hasn’t changed course.” His voice tailed away.

The screen relit. It glowed with a soft opalescence, but it was absolutely blank. Worse than dark. And it was changing, in a way it had no business to: changing its texture and surface contours.

The screen covered the curved wall of the Bridge, as thinly and closely as a coat of paint; but now its surface rippled like silk, and something was trying to form on it, behind it, which was impossible. On the segment of the screen facing Foord, two shapes were trying to push through it, a rectangle and an oval. Their meaning was clear to Foord, because the oval sat above the rectangle and suggested a head and shoulders, pushing through a silk shroud.

“Her face,” Thahl said. He seemed to be talking to himself.

“No!” Foord shouted. “Not on my screen, not on my Bridge, it belongs out there. Thahl, we don’t want to see this. Please, block it.”

“It might be Her face, Commander.”

“I said block it!”

Thahl pressed some panels. Nothing happened. He pressed some more. The silken texture, and the shapes forming behind it, slowly drained from the Bridge screen. The screen sank back to its normal contours, went dark and relit, this time with Her image, magnified as before so She seemed only sixteen hundred feet away. Her drives were flickering through the wreckage at the stern in a way they had not done before, and the screen’s headups said that Her course was unchanged but Her speed had dropped to thirty-five percent; Kaang matched it. The midsection crater remained dark.

Foord slowly let out his breath. Something had told him that they should not, absolutely not, see whatever had tried to form on the screen. He knew that no signal from another ship, however powerful, could force itself on the Charles Manson if they decided to block it; finally they had, but he was still uneasy. He knew Her abilities with communications. Or rather, he didn’t know them, not all of them.

“Blocked, Commander.” Thahl’s voice was carefully neutral.

Foord nodded briefly, and looked again at Her image on the screen. Something about Her wasn’t right. She had slowed to thirty percent, said the headups, and Her stern drives were flickering fitfully. He thought again of naked bulbs in cellars. We’re fighting Her through a solar system, and She compresses it down to cellars and dripping alleys.

The alarms murmured.

“What—”

“Another signal, Commander,” Thahl said.

Nothing reached the screen. Her image was still there. She was now down to twenty-five percent, and Her stern drives were cutting out, refiring, and cutting out again.

“Where? Where is Her signal?”

Thahl’s hands flew over his console. His claws started to unsheath and retract, almost but not quite in time with the on-off stuttering of Her stern drives. For a moment he seemed close to panic, something Foord had never seen in him before; then he subsided, and resumed his normal demeanour. He looked round at Foord.

“This signal isn’t aimed at the screen, Commander. It’s aimed directly in here, into the Bridge….”

“What?”

“….and so far, we can’t block it.”

A white light filled the Bridge, like the light they had seen in the midsection crater. They blinked in it. It made them feel cold. It had no source and cast no shadows. It went everywhere; even the air glowed with it. It washed over them, turning their faces to pocked landscapes and their figures to dishevelled statuary.

Foord held his hand in front of his face and studied it, as he had seen himself do in the mouth of the crater. The ripe sweat under his clothes turned fish-cold and clammy. His breath actually frosted in front of his face, stinging his lips and nostrils; and through its vapour he saw, strewn over the floor, the rubbish and debris which he’d refused to move.

Now it started to move itself.

It swirled across the floor in miniature vortexes which sprang up and died at random, like the life-forms on Horus 5. A figure forming in the middle of the Bridge was making it swirl. The figure was solidifying out of the light. It was still indistinct and shifting, a hollow latticework of vapour, like the vapour of Foord’s breath; but it had a head and shoulders, arms and legs, in approximately human proportions.

Foord drew his sidearm. Cyr had already drawn hers and was aiming, and Thahl had started towards it.

“Don’t!” Smithson bellowed. “Don’t touch it! Don’t go near it.”

The headups on the Bridge screen kept assessing and reassessing it: it was a hologram, it was a solid object, it was neither, it was both, it was unreadable. It was also unexpectedly beautiful, a roiling hollow vapour-shape lit from within. It flicked on-off as it tried to form. On the Bridge screen, Her stern drives flicked off-on in the same rhythm.

Her speed dropped to nineteen percent and She started to pitch and yaw. The energy required to project something into the Bridge against all their inbuilt defences was unthinkable, just as the act itself was unthinkable; not even another Outsider could have done it.

“Commander,” Smithson said , “She’s draining Herself. Just to communicate with us, She’s draining Herself!”

“And your point is?”

“My point is, She might be vulnerable to our particle beams, so why haven’t you thought of using our particle beams? And,” to Cyr, “why haven’t you?”

“You’re right,” Foord muttered. You’re always right, you smug slug. “Fire them, Cyr. Not into the craters, but everywhere else.”

The beams lanced out. Her flickerfields met them and held them, but—said the Bridge screen headups—only just. Her stern drives went dark, stuttered and refired, and the still-unformed figure standing in the middle of the Bridge actually doubled over, as if in pain.

“You see? You see?” Smithson shouted, adding unnecessarily “That’s what you should have done!”

“Again, Cyr. Keep firing them.”

Cyr did so, again and again, imagining her finger was not pressing a firing-button but digging into one of Smithson’s eyes. Always, always, he was right, and always, always, she could never forgive him for it.

Her flickerfields still held the beams, but each time Cyr fired, the figure on the Bridge weakened in definition. It threw its arms up around its head. If they had been able to see its face properly, it might have been screaming. The vapour which made up its outline started to disperse, as if blown by a wind. It was fading, and finally faded to nothing, but the white light which had brought it, and out of which it had formed, still filled the Bridge. The debris still swirled fitfully across the floor. Their breath still frosted in front of their faces. They still felt cold.

Her stern drives fell dark and did not refire, and She came to a halt. The Charles Manson halted with Her, and Cyr continued stabbing out the particle beams. Her flickerfields—coloured a distinctive neon purple, unlike those of any other ship—were getting paler and thinner. When they deployed you could still see through them to the silver of Her hull underneath, and the screen headups showed that their power was dropping, and that She was deploying them nanoseconds later. With every firing, the beams were getting closer to penetrating the fields; to actually hitting Her.

“She’s weakening,” Cyr said.

“No She isn’t,” Smithson snapped. “Her fields are weakening, because She’s diverting their power.” He looked across the Bridge. “Into that.”

The figure had returned to the Bridge, but it was fainter than before. It faded almost to nothing, reappeared, then faded again.

“Soon She’ll be defenceless,” Cyr hissed, “and the beams will reach Her.”

All through the engagement their particle beams had been the only weapon which consistently outmatched Her. They pushed and probed through Her fields, a little closer to Her with each firing.

She had put everything into what She was trying to project, but it was not enough. Although the white light still filled the Bridge, the figure failed to re-form out of it, and the beams were still reaching for Her. Eventually She gave up, and routed power back to Her drives and flickerfields. Her stern drives stuttered and refired and She began moving through the Gulf at thirty percent—Kaang matched Her speed and course—and Her fields redeployed. Cyr continued firing, but Her fields held firm now. The white light drained from the Bridge. So did the figure which had tried to form.

Stalemate again.

The Bridge returned to its normal subdued lighting. The screen displayed the latest analyses of what She had attempted, but they added nothing new. What had entered the Bridge—Entered The Bridge, Foord read aloud, in outrage—was an electromagnetic signal which acquired physical substance. It was unreadable. Almost certainly, announced Smithson sonorously and unnecessarily, another example of Her superior use of MT physics.

“And that’s it?”

“Of course not,” Smithson snapped. “Commander, whatever She wanted to say to us, She still wants to say it. She endangered Herself to say it. She won’t give up.”

“And how will She not give up?”

“She didn’t have enough power to put that thing on the Bridge and fight our beams. So…”

“So She’ll find more power. And you know where She’ll find it, don’t you?”

Unusually, Smithson said nothing.

“You’re always right,” Foord told him, almost as an aside while motioning Thahl to divert power back to their signal-blocking, “but you’re not always right at the right time. Thahl! That figure will be back again, and this time it will…”

The crater in Her midsection started to glow, not with the cold white light but with the unnameable colour, the colour which hid inside the normal spectrum. In whatever universe it came from it might be familiar and everyday, perhaps the colour of sky or grass. In this one it was many words, all beginning with Un.

There was an explosion in the midsection crater. She rolled with it, presenting Her undamaged underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces, and then, as She completed the roll, Her port side again with the midsection crater facing them. Headups crowded the Bridge screen, telling them what they expected and could already see. The midsection crater was two percent larger but exactly the same shape, lit with the colour which burnt steadily and patiently inside it.

Perhaps it was only another millionth of what She had taken into Herself—including their five simulations, and their spiders and hull-plates, as well as pieces of Her—but She was consuming it, and turning it into power which partly fed Her flickerfields, partly Her drives, but mostly this projection of white light into the Bridge which, this time, trampled down their defences and solidified into the figure standing in front of them. Not a simulation in silver and grey but a real figure, with real flesh tones, blinking in the light of the Bridge as it looked round at each of them, its breath frosting in front of its face like theirs.

•

Aaron Foord stood in the middle of the Bridge, blinking. He was about thirteen, dark-eyed and quiet. He wore the orphanage uniform, a white shirt and dark blue trousers. He felt cold.

He looked at Foord.

“Are you what I became?”

“Are you what I grew out of?”

Aaron Foord again gazed round at the others, and stopped at Cyr. “You’re a bit old to be wearing that,” he said, “but it looks good on you. You’re really beautiful.”

He turned back to Foord, and asked “Who are these people with you?”

“Weren’t you told, before you were sent here?”

“No.”

“They’re like me,” Foord said.

“The ones who sent me, the ones in that ship over there…”

“We call it Faith. Or Her.”

“…seem to know you.”

“What do they look like?”

“They wouldn’t let me remember.… You don’t know anything about them, do you?”

“No.”

“Later you will.”

“I must admit,” Foord said, “you’re even more convincing than the figures in the crater. But you’re still made by Her.”

“What do you mean, figures in the crater? I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re not me. You’re not even yourself. She made you, you’re a simulation of me when I was younger.”

“What did you mean, figures in the crater?”

“How do you think you got here from the orphanage? Why do you think you’re here?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember.”

“You’re not me. You’re not even yourself. She made you, and when you’ve spoken to me, and said whatever She told you to, She’ll unmake you. Your life exists only between being made and unmade, and it’s short and pointless.”

“And you’re not me. How much do you remember about me?”

“I remember nothing about you because you’ve only just been made and soon you’ll be unmade. About me, I remember.”

“No you don’t. Maybe that’s why I’m here, to tell you what you’ve forgotten.”

(“Ghost of Christmas Past,” Cyr whispered.)

“Ah,” Foord said. “This is it. We’ve been circling around it, but you’re right, this is why you’re here. To tell me how I went into the orphanage and turned away from people and made my life tight and tidy and made myself unreachable and became Commander of a ship full of loners and outsiders like me, and I’m the loneliest and furthest outside of all of them. Because all the other circles of Hell get hotter and hotter, but the final circle is cold and quiet and sterile, like me. Is that what She sent you here to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re done. She’ll take you away from here and unmake you. Your life has been short and pointless.”

“Cold and quiet and sterile…”

“What?”

“Cold. Quiet. Sterile. If you’re what I became, it has been short and pointless.”

Foord did not reply.

The next time Aaron Foord spoke, it was to someone else.

“I want you to take me away from here, please. I want you to unmake me.”

Foord began “I shouldn’t…”

Aaron Foord’s figure stood there, but Aaron Foord was gone from inside it. Something moved across its surface: a swirl of silver, from its head down to its feet, washing away his features and colours and shape.

“I shouldn’t…” Foord tried again. “I shouldn’t have said that to him. But he...”

“He’s gone, Commander,” Thahl said. “Let it go.” He reached out to put a hand on Foord’s shoulder. They both drew back; he had not retracted his claws.

“I’m sorry,” they both said, each for several different reasons.

The figure remained in the middle of the Bridge, blank and unmoving. It changed its shape and posture, growing slimmer, and standing at an awkward angle. Features pushed out from inside it, reached its surface, and stabilised. Colours and flesh tones followed. It had a new inhabitant.

•

Susanna Cyr stood in the middle of the Bridge. She did not blink, and as for feeling cold, she always felt cold. She was over ninety. She looked round at them one by one, until she found Cyr.

“Are you what I grew out of?”

“Are you what I became?” Cyr answered.

“Yes, exactly right, this is what you became. Look at it.”

She was gaunt, where she had once been slim, and her voice bubbled through mucus. She still wore dark lipstick, but now its colour matched that of the burst veins beneath the stretched skin of her face. Her clothes—an expensive dark linen jacket and skirt—somehow did not hang properly on her.

“Why are you standing at that angle?”

“Arthritis. And incontinence pants.”

“You’re as convincing as the other one,” Cyr said. “Flesh tones, details, everything.”

“What other one?”

“You know that She made you and sent you here, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. What did you mean, Other One?”

A quiet movement to one side made them both look round. Thahl had discreetly re-routed Cyr’s Weapons functions to his own console, just in case.

They turned back, and locked eyes again.

“At least,” Cyr said, “the other one was a copy of someone who did exist, in the past. You’re sixty years in the future. You’re a copy of someone who hasn’t existed yet.”

“This is supposed to be news to me? I already told you that.”

“You didn’t,” Cyr said, “but I figured it out…Were you sent here to talk to me?”

“Oh, I see. Like the Other One. What am I, number two? Three more to go, then. Or four, if She does Joser too.”

“And what would She have told you to say? Something like, There Are Many Possible Futures?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Oh, you know, that the future isn’t fixed, that it can be altered, that I might not turn into you and get a face like a sanitary towel, but first I have to Change. Everything the Commonwealth pays me to do, everything I do best, everything involving weapons and killing, I have to stop liking it. Liking it makes me a loner and an outsider, even on this ship. I have to Change. I might seem beautiful now but inside I’m full of poison, and unless I Change, the inside will push through to the surface. Like it has with you. But I can still Change: I can still turn my life round and find another future…Is that what She told you to say?”

“Every word of that,” said Susanna Cyr, “is wrong, including And and The. Your future is fixed. You can’t change. You can’t turn your life around. You will become me. And you’re a loner and an outsider because…”

“Because I like it too much?”

“Because nobody will want you. The future is fixed. Nobody will want you: not as a lover, partner, companion, or even friend. You have only colleagues. Most of them, you frighten. The ones you don’t frighten—like these here—you sicken.”

Cyr wanted to look around her, but could not.

“Occasionally,” Susanna Cyr went on, “you think that Foord might want you, as much as you want him, and occasionally he does. He thinks you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but also the most sickening he’s ever known. You can make him ejaculate and vomit with equal ease, and in almost equal amounts….Yes, ejaculate. Sometimes in his cabin he thinks of you and masturbates.”

Susanna Cyr paused, and laughed; the same kind of laugh Cyr occasionally did, which made her ugly.

“Always the same Foord. He can never share it, even with you. He’d rather take it with him and go off somewhere on his own. And you know, sometimes he can’t ejaculate; that’s when he thinks of what’s between your ears, rather than what’s between your legs.”

Thahl was already moving towards Cyr, but maybe he hesitated; or maybe, for once, even he was not fast enough. She emptied her sidearm into Susanna Cyr’s body. Bits of torn parchment flesh and broken struts of bone and bloodsoaked dark linen erupted from Susanna Cyr’s midriff and chest and shoulders and thighs: real substances, not silver. She doubled over, then straightened. She did not fall, despite her arthritic hip, and the bits blown from her body floated around her in midair, stopped at the moment they left her. She looked like an exploded diagram. She smiled at Cyr.

“Why didn’t you just aim for my face?”

Cyr could not reply, even to shake her head. Thahl’s micromanipulator claws were around her neck, almost but not quite piercing her skin. She dropped the sidearm. Thahl’s claws retracted, and his hands left her.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Susanna Cyr. “I’m done here anyway. I’ll see you in sixty years. The future is fixed. Your life will be long and pointless. I know, I’ve lived it.”

Cyr sank to her knees. Thahl still stood behind her. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrank away, even though his claws were sheathed.

Susanna Cyr’s figure had emptied. As the exploded pieces returned to it, it washed itself clear of her features and identity and posture, and became blank.

“Ghost of Christmas Future,” Cyr hissed. She locked eyes with Foord. Strangely, neither of them was embarrassed.

“Do you really do that? On your own?”

“Yes,” said Foord.

“Why?”

“Habit.”

Thahl looked from one to the other. He had only a partial understanding of human sexual dynamics, but a very good understanding of the nuances of human speech, and of things left unsaid.

“Kaang,” Foord said, “get us away from here. Hard to port, eighty percent. Maybe that signal will weaken with distance.”

She did so, though she didn’t believe him. Neither did any of the others.

•

They fled through the Gulf. She made no attempt to follow them, but Her white light still filled the Bridge, and they still felt cold.

For the first time since Joser’s death there were six and not five on the Bridge, but the sixth was blank and unmoving and empty. For those reasons Cyr—who knew it was essential to appear unaffected—hit on the rather spiteful device of calling the empty figure Joser. When she got unsteadily to her feet after Susanna Cyr left and Foord gave the order to run, she pointed to the figure. Forcing lightness into her voice, she asked Thahl

“Which of us will fill Joser next? You?”

When Thahl did not answer, she lowered her voice and said “Remember I was too quick for you. And please put the Weapons functions back to my console.”

Thahl glanced at Foord, who nodded.

Cyr, without taking her eyes off Thahl, said “He didn’t order you to reroute my Weapons functions. You don’t need him to order you to put them back.”

“The functions are back.”

“Thank you.”

“I would never have killed you, Cyr.”

“I know. But you tried to stop me doing what I wanted.”

And later, while they continued to run from Her in a silence broken only by operational remarks, Cyr turned to Foord and said “Is Joser still solid? Or does he seem to be turning back to vapour?”

The headups on the Bridge screen showed She was hundreds of miles away; soon it would be thousands. Her image had dwindled to almost nothing. In the absence of instructions, the screen had not seen fit to magnify it.

“I meant it, Commander. Look at him. Around his edges. Don’t you see it?”

Foord tore himself away from her gaze and looked again at the empty figure. It took him a few seconds to see what Cyr had already seen: the figure was less distinct. It started to sway. The motion was most pronounced at its head while its feet stayed unmoving, and as it swayed it left flakes of itself, like scurf, floating alongside it until they dissolved in the light. It was bleeding away into the light, in a reversal of the process by which it had first appeared.

“It is weakening with distance!” Foord shouted.

The screen headups showed She was now several thousand miles away. The figure on the Bridge was keeping its shape but losing its substance, turning back to an open basketweave of vapour. For the first time since Susanna Cyr had inhabited it it made a deliberate movement, putting what had once been its hands up to what had once been its throat. If it had been more distinct, it might have looked like it was trying to breathe.

She was now tens of thousands of miles behind them, less than a smear on the Bridge screen. The screen chose that moment to return to the original magnification, patching in Her image as if She was sixteen hundred feet away, and She chose that moment to consume another millionth of what was in the midsection crater. Again there was an explosion in its recesses and again the unnameable colour burned there; but this time, as She rolled with the force of the explosion, something was different. She rolled along Her entire length but also pivoted around Her midsection, backwards and forwards and side to side, turning the roll into a clumsy figure-of-eight movement which She fought to bring under control. Nothing She does is clumsy, thought Foord. She’s in trouble.

They caught fragmented glimpses of Her underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces as She rolled. Her manoeuvre drives fountained to correct the movement and the roll ended before the port side came back into view; then began again in the opposite direction, dorsal to starboard to underside. Her manoeuvre drives fountained again to correct the movement, and again to correct the correction, and overcompensated. She rolled a third time, underside to starboard to dorsal to port, and came unsteadily to rest. They stared, across tens of thousands of miles and sixteen hundred feet, at Her port side. Maybe, they thought, these projections were damaging Her internally.

Cyr pounded her console in pleasure, then swore viciously as she thought how she’d look if she hit something important—not what damage she’d do, just how she’d look. Foord and Thahl were still watching the screen.

“Cyr…” Foord began.

“Yes, Commander, we’re still in beam range.”

Foord nodded, and looked at the midsection crater; it glowed exactly as before, steadily and patiently. It might have been another screen, patching in a picture from another universe. Alarms murmured.

The empty figure on the Bridge, Foord noticed, was no longer empty.

•

Elizabeth Kaang stood blinking in the cold light, her breath frosting in front of her face. She looked round the Bridge at them, one by one, and found Kaang. Their eyes locked.

“What’s missing?” Kaang asked.

“Nothing, I think,” said Elizabeth Kaang. “I’m just the same as you.”

To the others on the Bridge, she was: blonde, plumpish, a pale complexion verging on pastiness, and pleasant but unremarkable features.

“I’m sorry,” Kaang said, “but something’s missing.”

“Oh, that. Over there,” Elizabeth Kaang pointed at the Bridge screen, where Faith hung in silent counterpoint to their mundane conversation, “they said you’d spot it immediately. To me it doesn’t feel any different. It was never in me to begin with.”

“Over there. Who are they?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember.”

“What do they look like?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember. Look, I’m nothing, really. What they told me to say will only take a few moments, less time than the others, and then I’ll go. …This ship has only two things which can outperform them. The first is its particle beams, which are stronger than theirs, but that’s only tactical.”

“And the second,” Kaang said, “must be me.”

“Yes. Over there they have nothing, living or otherwise, to match you. You know that yourself. You’re nothing really—I can say that, you see, because I’m the same as you—except for what you do as pilot. Even genius doesn’t describe it. Genius comes once in a lifetime, but what you have may never be repeated. You’ve always had it, and you’ve never had to work at it, and you don’t know what it is. Neither does the Commonwealth.”

Kaang glanced down at her console to check; Thahl had rerouted her Pilot’s functions through to himself. “Nobody,” she said, “has any idea what it is.”

“They do, over there,” said Elizabeth Kaang.

“No! I don’t believe you!” Kaang’s voice shook. “I don’t believe you, you’re lying.”

“I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth Kaang, “but they told me exactly what it is and how it works. Of course I didn’t understand, and anyway they wouldn’t let me remember.”

“No! You’re lying!”

“They made me without it, to show that if it ever leaves you, the rest of you will be unchanged.”

“You can’t prove any of that!”

“The first thing you said to me is ‘What’s Missing?’”

“You still can’t prove it. You’re lying!”

“Look, I said I won’t take as long as the others, and I’m almost finished. You have a gift that you don’t understand and didn’t ask for. You’re on an Outsider ship with a crew of outsiders, and it even sets you apart from them. They need you because of what you can do, but you’re not anything like them, not in any way. You’re a different kind of outsider. You’ve never done bad things. You wouldn’t know how to decide to do bad things.” She smiled, almost apologetically, and her features started to sink into the substance of the figure.

The last thing she said, sounding further and further away, was “I asked them over there, if they understood your gift, could they copy it and make others like you? They answered me, but they wouldn’t.”

“Let.”

“Me remember.”

“I’m alright, Commander,” Kaang told Foord, for the second time. “There was nothing there I didn’t already know…Thahl, can you route my Pilot’s functions back to me? Thank you.”

“Kaang, She didn’t intend any of us to come through this unaffected. She took damage, just to put that thing into the Bridge. So please, go and rest.”

“Because I’m nothing really? Because except for what I do as your pilot, I’m the weakest one here?”

Foord paused. “Yes.”

“I’m glad you answered plainly, Commander. If you’d said anything except Yes, even Yes But, you’d have been lying.”

Foord did not reply.

“But I can’t rest, Commander. If She really does understand what I have, I need to be here. If She really can make others like me, She’ll come after us.”

“She doesn’t, and She can’t,” said the figure on the Bridge. “She was lying.”

•

The empty figure had become a seven-foot column, approximately humanoid. It was grey and glistening, and its eyes were startlingly large and intelligent; warm, and golden.

“She was lying,” it repeated.

“And what business,” Smithson said, “have you here?”

The rest of their conversation was conducted in Smithson’s own language, a series of scratches and chirps made by the rubbing together of chitinous surfaces in the neck, amplified through the throat and modulated by the mouth: a language of almost electronic speed and intensity, evolved by Smithson’s ancestors when they were herds of plains planteaters who needed to develop a more sophisticated social organisation than the packs of impressively-organised carnivores and omnivores who hunted them. That, and their physical strength, and their development of the most efficient digestive system in the galaxy for extracting energy from plant matter—it worked subatomically, and meant they didn’t have to spend all their time grazing, but could develop intellectually—let them turn evolution upside down and become the dominant lifeform.

Foord could not understand, afterwards, why the conversation was conducted in Smithson’s language. Initially he suspected it contained things She didn’t want them to hear. But in fact, as they found out later when the Bridge screen played back the recordings with translations added, it covered matters of which they were already well aware.

The simulation began by reciting Smithson’s original name, the one he’d had in his youth. This was a polysyllabic word the length of several paragraphs, enumerating his youthful achievements, both physical and intellectual. The word of his name was a mechanism which grew as he grew, some parts taken away and larger parts added, to show what he was and point to what he would become—how he might grow into his expanding future. And then, abruptly, it ended.

The simulation paused—it had only taken a few seconds, but the translation would last several minutes—and then recited Smithson’s present name, the one which would never grow any further, because now he had no future. It followed the polysyllabic structure of his earlier name, and ended with two syllables which the Commonwealth had humanised to their nearest pronounceable equivalent: Smithson.

Smithson was where his present name ended. After it, no further additions would ever be made. It was an Ember slang expression, most closely translated as Septic Knob.

Children and accomplishments were of overriding importance to Smithson’s people. They needed both, in massive amounts, for the strength and intelligence to beat off several predator species, any one of which would normally have become Emberra’s dominant lifeform. Males and females alike piled up their accomplishments, used by the outstanding ones as bargaining-chips in their drive to create, at the expense of lower achievers, more descendants to strengthen an already rapidly-strengthening gene pool. This compulsion, to achieve to procreate to achieve, was fundamental to the social organisation the Embers had developed on the plains. It pervaded all their institutions. They were an impossibility: dynamic, aspirational herbivores.

And Smithson, even among the other high achievers, was pre-eminent. His position on Emberra was almost that of Srahr on Sakhra. But it had all ended when he was diagnosed as a carrier of the incurable disease known colloquially—Ember humour was always cruel—as Septic Knob. As a carrier he would not suffer its horrific degenerative effects, which spread out from the sexual organs to engulf the body and mind; but his children would. So he killed them, and then—because, he said bitterly, they would have become vegetables anyway, and he was a vegetarian—he ate their remains, hoping he would become infected; but carriers were immune. So he turned away from his people and his accomplishments—irrelevant now, because no more females would ever mate with him—and was recruited by the Department.

“And is that,” Smithson said, reverting to Commonwealth, “all you came here to say? Everyone here knows it already.”

The simulation laughed. “It bought some time. For Her to make more like Kaang.”

“Only about one minute of their time,” said Smithson. “And She can’t make more like Kaang, that was a lie.”

“Of course it was. That’s why I’m here. To tell you a lie about it being a lie.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“You tried that, too. Remember? You still couldn’t get infected.”

•

Later, Foord remembered to check the figure on the Bridge. It was empty and unmoving. Smithson’s dimensions and features had drained out of it; what remained was smaller, roughly humanoid, but blank.

“Getting ready for me, Commander,” Thahl said.

“Why did She leave you to last?”

“We’re in beam range, Commander,” Kaang said.

“Thank you. Hold this position. Cyr, start firing, please.”

Cyr had already started. Even before Kaang brought them to rest the beams were stabbing out, and even before they reached Her, Foord had seen something which made him shout in triumph. He had been watching the Bridge screen readouts, and it was clear She had made a mistake.

She had again diverted only minimal power to Her flickerfields, leaving them almost transparent and deploying them whole nanoseconds late. Cyr’s dark blue beams punched into them and almost through them; but not quite. They dissipated less than fifty feet from Her flank. Foord felt his shoulders drop—that had been their best chance, maybe their only one—but Cyr swore, loudly and sickeningly, and fired again. This time She diverted more power to the fields. They were transluscent now and they deployed earlier, but they were still below strength and the beams again almost penetrated them; and again, dissipated less than fifty feet from Her. Cyr screamed at the image on the Bridge screen, smashed a fist into her console, and fired again, and again. She was firing manually; automatic fire would have preserved intervals for the beams to power up, and Cyr would not tolerate any intervals, even if she overloaded the beams. She said so, out loud, staring wildly round the Bridge where they stared back at her; she explained it to them, in terms, but it came out of her only as a scream. Foord had never heard her scream before, not on the ship.

Only Kaang and the beams can hurt Her, Cyr explained, and She might already know what’s inside Kaang, so there might only be the beams, and the beams might only work now, when Her fields are underpowered, and Might Might Might the future isn’t fixed and I won’t, not Might but won’t, limp around in incontinence pants at ninety. She explained it to them, in terms, but it came out of her only as a scream, broken by fits of coughing when she tried to draw breath, but couldn’t.

Foord stared at her and thought, I’ve heard you be many things—spiteful, vicious, even merely unpleasant—but always in packets of words. You always choose words. I’ve never heard you like this. What’s happened to you?

“Cyr! That’s enough. Go back to automatic, you’ll overload the beams.”

She couldn’t speak. She shook her head No, and tried to form words, then pointed at the Bridge screen.

Words came. “Fuck yourself!” she spat. Literally spat; it was dribbling down her chin. Her mouth was like one of Smithson’s orifices.

“That’s enough. Put the beams on automatic. Now.”

She was still firing manually. The beams were still punching through the fields to within fifty feet of Her, but no further.

Cyr broke into more coughing. “Do you realise,” she managed to say, “how close I was?”

“And put your emotions on automatic too.”

Cyr glared at him, wiped the spit from her face and flung it in his direction—a gesture he chose to ignore, fortunately for both of them. Then she shrugged, and complied. The beams went back to automatic fire, and it settled into the usual pattern: their beams, and Her fields.

The beams continued on automatic, and She used their powering-up intervals to divert more power to the fields. As She did so, the cold white light on the Bridge started to diminish, and the unmoving blank figure diminished with it. It went from opaque to transluscent, as Her fields powered up from transluscent to opaque. The beams continued to fire, but got no closer. There was almost a co-operation in the way both ships settled into their usual stalemate.

This was part of what had incensed Cyr. She locked eyes with Foord.

“What’s happened to you?” he asked.

“You wanted Her more than anything,” she told him, “more than you wanted me, and I could have given Her to you, but you wanked it away.”

Foord had no answer. She’s like my own skin, he thought, even when she sickens me I can never cast her off. He turned to Smithson and asked “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Commander. All it did was recite my two names. It said nothing you don’t already know.” He performed a deprecatory movement of his upper torso. “The translations will be ready by now. Play them if you wish; we seem to have time.” He gestured towards the Bridge screen, where the stalemate of beams and flickerfields continued.

Foord wasn’t so sure about having time. The stalemate suited both ships, but only until one of them found how to do something extraordinary. Like, in Her case, duplicating Kaang’s abilities.

“Kaang, what do you think? Was She lying?”

“I don’t know, Commander,” she said, unhappily. She never liked these conversations, and Foord usually let her avoid them. But not this time.

“Try. I need your opinion.”

“You once told me that if the Commonwealth ever understood what I have, and if they could copy it and put it into others, they’d kill me to get it. Remember?”

“Maybe the Department rather than the Commonwealth, but I remember” said Foord, shifting his gaze between Kaang and the screen, where something had caught his attention.

“They tried everything to understand it, and they never could. Neither could I.”

“Yes. And so?” While she spoke, Foord stole more glances at the screen. Something there was wrong.

“So I don’t know if She was lying.”

“Oh. I see.” Foord would normally have been exasperated, but something else had distracted him. When he realised what it was he went to shout Cyr’s name, but before he could do so, Kaang continued.

“We went through this when I joined you, Commander. I’m only your pilot. Please don’t ask me about other things.”

“Right, I won’t…Cyr!”

More of the white light drained from the Bridge, and the empty figure in front of them started to fade. The reason was that She had diverted more power to Her flickerfields, and the reason for that was that Cyr had killed the automatic override on the beams and was again firing manually. On the Bridge screen they were stabbing at Her almost continuously. The fields too were almost continuous, a thick purple cloud roiling around Her; She looked like something bleeding underwater. Cyr’s continuous fire was still punching almost through the fields, despite their extra power; the purple cloud was being pulled this way and that by the dark blue shafts Cyr was throwing into it, from different directions and angles.

Cyr had become quiet, as abruptly as she had become incoherent. Now she was playing her firing-panels coldly and without apparent haste, the way Kaang would pilot the ship; taking the beams almost but not quite to overload, the way Kaang would take the ship almost but not quite to destruction.

“Cyr!”

“No, Commander, I’ve almost got Her, I can give you what you want.”

“Go back to automatic, Cyr. That’s an order.”

“Commander,” Smithson said, “let her go on firing manually. I have an idea.” He spoke briefly into his comm, and nodded. “Yes, we can do it. Commander, let her go on firing manually.”

“Smithson, what—”

“No time.” Smithson’s gaze swept the Bridge. “Brace for an emergency. This will seem worse than it is.”

But there was only a near-quietness, punctuated by the ship’s murmurings to itself and the low rhythmic pulse of the particle beams. In the dwindling light the blank figure was barely visible. It stood among them like a dead tree in a copse of living ones, with evening falling.

There was a dull faraway explosion in the Charles Manson’s midsection, in the area of the particle beam generators. The alarms sounded, and the Bridge screen patched in a view of the starboard midsection, where some hull plates had been blown away. The ship lurched, but Kaang immediately righted it. Repair synthetics were already scuttling over the hull.

“It’s nothing, Commander,” Smithson said, over the shouts and alarms, “it’s a fake. Best we could do at short notice, but She might buy it. Damage is minor.”

“Damage?”

“Cyr,” Smithson continued, “cut the beams’ power by twelve point five percent.”

“What?”

Foord said “Cyr, I see what he wants. Do it now. Don’t disobey me again.”

Cyr did it, and started to understand.

“Twelve point five percent,” Smithson intoned smugly, “is consistent with a blowout of one beam generator. You overloaded the beams. Remember?”

“You mean,” Cyr said, “that if She thinks a generator’s blown, She might…”

“Might cut the power to Her fields and divert it back here, yes. So if that thing over there comes back to life and starts talking to us, you get your shot. You can fire your beams on full power.”

Cyr laughed, softly. “You clever bastard.”

The near-silence was still punctuated by the ship’s murmurings to itself and the low rhythmic pulse of the particle beams; the beams were on automatic and firing on reduced power, and the thick purple flickerfields held them easily. The empty figure standing among them was almost nothing, a bruise on the surface of the air. A minute hung, quivering, and dropped. Foord felt something like vertigo, as if the floor had turned to glass and cracks were racing across it; he suddenly saw how much might hang on the next few moments.

Cyr caught his expression as it raced across his face.

“Are you scared She might not buy it, Commander?”

“Not scared. Unsure.”

“Don’t be. She’ll buy it. Then, you can be unsure.”

“What made you say that?”

“The future isn’t fixed. Least of all for you, Commander.”

Foord glanced at her curiously, started to reply, then forgot her. The temperature plummeted. Cold light was flooding back into the Bridge, Smithson was bellowing I Told You So, and the empty figure was starting to fill. The light went everywhere, and the figure drew substance out of it; then shape; then surface textures, and skin colour, and posture. And lastly, identity.

When it finally stood before them, slender and graceful and slight of build, it surprised none of them.

•

Thahl’s replica did not blink in the light—Sakhrans rarely blinked—and it did not look round the Bridge to find the one it came for. Apart from a brief glance at Foord, it paid no attention to anyone except Thahl. It was not Thahl’s exact double; perhaps slightly older, though signs of aging were difficult to gauge in Sakhrans.

“Well,” Thahl said.

“Well,” said the replica.

“Why did She leave me to last?”

“Because,” said the replica, “the others were more interesting.”

“Yes, of course. No secrets about me.” Thahl’s face and voice, like those of the replica, were expressionless; Sakhran humour was as quiet as Ember humour was cruel.

“Me neither,” agreed the replica. “I have nothing to reveal.”

On the Bridge screen, the stalemate of beams and flickerfields continued. Cyr had no intention of firing the beams on full power yet—it would be too early, and too obvious—but Foord still watched her closely.

“Or almost nothing,” added the replica. “There’s your mission.”

“Well?”

“Well, it turned out satisfactorily. Three years ago—three years ago for me—the Charles Manson pursued Her through the Gulf to Sakhra, and finally destroyed Her one-to-one in front of Horus Fleet.”

“Yes, that would be satisfactory,” Thahl agreed. “And there’s nothing else you have to tell us?”

“No, nothing,” agreed the replica.

Foord still watched Cyr; she still fired the beams on reduced power, and made no move yet to go to full power.

“Or almost nothing. There’s Foord.”

“Foord?”

“Foord left me—sorry, left you—on Sakhra while he returned to Earth and enjoyed the glory. But on Sakhra we knew what Srahr had written. We knew what Faith was, and we knew She would always come again. There will always be more Faiths.”

For some reason, the replica paused.

“Was there any more,” Thahl prompted, “about Foord?”

The replica seemed embarrassed; unusual for a Sakhran, even a replica. When it next spoke, its voice was different. Almost apologetic.

“Foord could never stop thinking about Her. Finally he returned to Sakhra, and read the Book. Then he wrote one of his own, which in deference to us he called the Second Book of Srahr, and he did to the Commonwealth what Srahr did to us. When they read what She was they turned away from each other, like we did. Something went from their lives, and they never got it back.”

Cyr fired the beams on full power. The future consumed another millionth of itself, and exploded all the way back to Sakhra.

9

Something unexpected had happened in the Gulf, and Swann was about to feel its first ripples.

When the Charles Manson lifted off from Sakhra, and the strange civil disturbances began, Swann had retreated to his Command Centre at Blentport. Like a dying pharaoh, he had ordered that his staff be buried there with him. Through the days following, it had been full of their noise and movement and smell, and the mounting layers of their detritus. They had grown hot and dirty and tired together, struggling to read things which were unreadable: the disturbances on Sakhra, and the events in the Gulf.

The Command Centre had once been spacious, symmetrical and well-ordered; now it was crowded, not only with people but with chaotic piecemeal additions. The space between its orderly rows of consoles was filled with other consoles. It was walled and even ceilinged with screens, most of them—like the consoles—commandeered from other parts of Blentport. The screens were wide-angle and high-definition, paper-thin so they could be stuck like posters over any spare flat surface. Some of them showed the final stages of Horus Fleet’s deployment round Sakhra, now almost complete, and all the others—except one—showed the civil disturbances.

Sakhra was not being engulfed by some mass uprising—neither Sakhrans nor Sakhran humans did their politics like that—but it was being prodded, here and there, by outbreaks of unease. Swann rubbed his forehead, feeling grit and sweat in his fingers. He was hot and dirty and tired from trying to read unreadable things. The disturbances were bad enough, but the events in the Gulf were worse.

There was one screen in the Command centre, the largest, which showed no images, only binary readouts and schematics and text headups, their windows crowding untidily over each other like a miniature of all the other screens on all the other walls. This was where Swann’s analysts tried to piece together the engagement in the Gulf. All through the days of Swann’s confinement it had been adding and subtracting information, as the analysts did sweep after sweep of their limited and partial data sources, updating them in sequence. The updates moved round the screen like an invisible clock hand, rippling the words and figures as it rearranged them. Each sweep took about a minute; then after thirty seconds the next one began, and the next, as unnoticed as the rise and fall of breathing.

The screen flickered as the latest sweep was completed; then attempted to turn itself inside out as it tried, and failed, to correlate what it had been fed. It went blank, then relit showing only gibberish. It started its next sweep. The invisible clock hand moved round it, casting shadows as it rearranged words and symbols and figures, but it was still meaningless.

To one side of the big screen was the old-fashioned floor-standing microphone—five feet tall with a weighted circular base—which Swann had swept to one side after his last troubling conversation with the Department. The weighted circular base had kept it from falling over.

It started to buzz, and its monitor light flashed Attention Now.

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

“Yes, yes, I know you’re real, cut the foreplay.”

“There’s been a development.”

“I can see that. What does it mean?”

“Foord has had a success. A major success.”

•

Whatever else they were, the inhabitants of Faith were sentient. They were not in immediate danger from the chaos Foord had brought them—they had never had, or needed, the capacity to feel personal danger—but neither could they ignore it. They reflected.

Nothing else in the universe was quite like them. They were invincible, but not immortal. They had always known what they were made for. For other sentient beings this might have been revealed by one unusual individual, who might have written a Book which would change their lives, but not for them: they had always known. It was part of the balance of the universe, part of its clockwork, that they were invincible. If they weren’t, the universe was wrong.

•

“Foord has had a success. A major success.”

“Good! How major?”

“He’s damaged Her again, more seriously than the first time…We think the balance has started to shift. We think he’s winning.”

“There’s something in your voice. What’s wrong?”

The microphone stayed silent. As Swann watched it, it seemed—without moving—to acquire its own body language, reflecting the uncertainty he heard in its silence.

Behind the microphone, the big screen completed another update sweep. The invisible clockhand again moved over the words and figures and diagrams, and Swann’s staff milled around it. They shouted things at him, but the silence from the microphone drowned them out.

When the voice next spoke, it seemed different, and Swann was bewildered when he realised why. The voice actually sounded embarrassed.

“You see, there’s been a development.”

“I know. You told me. Foord’s winning.”

“No; it’s us. We’re not unanimous any more.”

“About what?” Make it be about something physical, or something operational, Swann prayed silently to the microphone. Not something unreadable.

“Some of us think we might not have fully appreciated something.”

And Swann knew then that something was wrong. That something enormous was enormously wrong. If the voice had been merely frightened, he could have been frightened with it; that was normal when you encountered operational setbacks, and you could be frightened and still have a chance of putting them right. But the voice was embarrassed. You only sounded embarrassed when there was something you couldn’t put right.

“And what is it,” he asked carefully, “that you Might Not have Fully Appreciated?”

“Foord. We know what might happen if he loses. But if he wins, it might be worse.”

“What?”

“If he loses, it might threaten the Commonwealth. But if he wins, it might threaten more than the Commonwealth.”

“What can be more than the Commonwealth?”

“Everything.”

•

It was part of the balance of the universe, part of its clockwork, that they were invincible. They did the work of gods, without being gods themselves. No single one of them was significantly more intelligent than Foord, or Smithson, or Thahl, or Cyr. But they were made differently. Nothing else in the universe had ever been made like them.

They would never encounter any opponent who wasn’t already part of them. The motives and memories, hopes and fears, history and future of every opponent they had met or would ever meet, were contained in them at an unplumbable depth: in the curved and recurved space between the unique particles which made them, in interstices where no other physical laws reached. All of it was there to be drawn on when they met their next opponent and the next and the next, into eternity or for as long as the universe lasted. They didn’t know why they did it, or who made them, but how they did it was a function of how they were made.

For an almost geological time they had faced opponents, singly and in multitudes. No opponent’s abilities could ever be unknown to them. No opponent’s ship could ever outfight or outperform theirs. And no opponent had ever done to them what this one had done.

•

“Everything.”

“I don’t—”

“Remember when you demanded we send the other Outsiders to the Gulf? We even thought of doing it, but now it’s impossible. You’re on your own. So are we. Everyone’s going to be on his own.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t listen. Listen. Keep Horus Fleet in a defensive cordon, like we told you. Those two ships are still far away, but they’re coming. They’ll cross the Gulf and arrive at Sakhra, locked in combat, or in whatever else they’re doing to each other. Pray that neither of them wins. Pray that they keep fighting for another year, or ten years, or a thousand.”

•

No opponent had ever done to them what this one had done. They still had superiority, because of their unique ship and their own uniqueness, but now for the first time they felt a stir of unease. Not for themselves—they had never had, or needed, the capacity to feel personal danger—but for the balance, the clockwork, they served. If that was wrong, everything was wrong.

They still had superiority. Foord had done something unexpected, but they could still do other things, beyond even Foord’s abilities. They reflected.

10

“Something went from their lives,” said Thahl’s replica, “and they never got it back.”

Cyr fired the particle beams on full power. They tore through Faith’s underpowered fields and hit Her, twice. She killed Her main drives, killed the signal She was putting into the Bridge, killed all the other things She had primed for later, and threw everything into Her fields, but by then Cyr—who was firing manually and continuously—had hit Her again, and again, and again: five times before Her fields, too late, reached full power.

Smithson’s idea had worked; his ideas always worked. But this one would go on working, long past the point where it gave them what they wanted.

On the Bridge screen they saw Cyr’s five shots raking along Her flank between the midsection and stern craters, vaporising Her hull plates and leaving five parallel clawmarks; then Her fields reached full power, turning opaque and almost solid when Cyr’s beams touched them, and not even the Bridge screen could see through them. No further shots penetrated.

When She killed the signal She was putting into the Bridge, She killed Thahl’s replica with it. It was swept to one side as if by a wind, dividing into particles which further divided into light, and then into nothing. The replica died abruptly and without ceremony, like a real Sakhran, and left nothing behind it.

The white light of Her signal disappeared, plunging the Bridge into the darkness of normal light. The cold went away, and their breath no longer frosted in front of their faces. Foord motioned Cyr to stop firing; Her fields cleared, and the Bridge screen showed what had happened beneath them.

There should have been at least one new crater, or even five new craters, gushing liquid silver and glowing with a nameless colour and throwing out pieces of wreckage which grew five miniature clawmarks and burnt away to nothing. Instead there were only five dark parallel lines, which the beams had scored along Her flank between the two craters; they looked like lines ruled on a very long sheet of writing paper. The Bridge screen did measurements and patched in a closeup: each line was nearly nine hundred feet long and less than a foot wide, the width of a few of Her thumbnail hull plates. The beams had scored out the plates as they raked along Her flank, uncovering the dark pewter of Her second hull layer, gleaming and undamaged.

“Surface only,” Foord hissed at Smithson. “The beams were supposed to be the only thing, apart from her”—he gestured at Kaang, but continued to glare at Smithson—“which gave us an edge!”

“She said that, Commander,” Kaang said. “Or rather, my replica did.”

Foord ignored her, and turned to Cyr. “Craters. Where are the craters?”

“Commander,” Thahl said, “our probes are detecting something inside Her.”

“Our probes have never detected anything inside Her!”

“This is the first time.”

•

It was a movement, slow and vast like something oceanic.The Bridge screen patched in some data, but it was gibberish; it said the movement had occurred nine thousand miles inside Her. The probes lost it and found it again, nearer the surface. Now it was only three thousand miles inside.

“What is it, Thahl?”

“You can see the readouts, Commander. I don’t know.”

“What have we started?” Foord whispered to Smithson, and to Thahl “Why isn’t it showing?”

“I don’t know.”

The midsection and stern craters flared like before with the nameless colour. But this time they flared only fitfully, and when the Bridge screen went to patch in closeups of them, Foord for once overruled it—“Leave it. That’s nothing. Go there”—and ordered it back to the five clawmarks on Her flank. Immediately the light from the craters died, as if She had heard or anticipated him.

The Bridge screen tracked along the clawmarks.

“There.”

At a spot three hundred feet from the edge of the midsection crater, something was rippling Her flank; pushing up from underneath and moving Her hull plates, like Foord had sometimes seen the smaller muscles in Thahl’s forearms moving the diamond-shaped scales of his skin. The screen patched in a closeup.

The movement covered an area no larger than the page of a book, fitting easily between two of the clawmarks; it made a slight bulge in the hull plates. The microscopic distance between the edge of each plate and its neighbours increased fractionally, showing a thin line of pewter underneath—Her second hull layer, uncovered like the clawmarks had uncovered it, but on a much smaller scale. Without being ordered, the screen panned out.

There was another one, a hundred feet away; then a third, then dozens, always between the parallel clawmarks, and only deep enough to uncover, beneath the edges of the plates as they moved apart, the dark pewter of the second hull layer. Now there were hundreds. Because they appeared only between the parallel lines along Her flank, they started to look like writing—an effect heightened by their regularity, because they always followed the outlines of the hull plates. The screen went to closeup again.

The lines made by the gentle parting of the hull plates, which from a distance had looked like lines of cursive writing, were almost granular when seen closeup; like ink under a magnifying glass, sinking into the weave of parchment. The screen went closer still, becoming almost a microscope. It concentrated on just two plates. Their edges, where they had gently eased apart to reveal the dark layer underneath, were like torn paper, with trailing filaments waving microscopic goodbyes to each other as they moved fractionally apart. The screen held the magnification for a few seconds, then panned out again.

Now there were thousands of them. The localised ripplings in Her flank were starting to join and become a concerted outward bulge along nine hundred feet. The fine cursive lines were visible again from a distance; that, and the fact that they all continued to stay within the lines of the clawmarks, made the suggestion of writing irresistible. They almost formed the shapes of recognisable letters: letters arranged in words, words in sentences, with an underlying grammar. Foord had to fight a temptation to try and read it.

Here and there, as the bulging increased, hull plates were gently popping off Her surface, uncovering a small solid blob of the dark pewter layer underneath. The screen patched in closeups of some of the plates: they didn’t develop five miniature clawmarks of their own and burn away to nothing, they just lifted gently off and floated alongside Her. It was gradual, and did not seem threatening. The screen panned out again.

More hull plates were lifting off; dozens, then hundreds, leaving dark solid blobs behind them. Hundreds became thousands. The impression of unreadable writing along Her flank changed; now it looked more like a musical notation, and Foord fought the temptation to read a tune into it. Smithson even started trying to hum it.

Foord glared at him. “Stop that. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Smithson was unabashed. “What do you mean, Wrong?”

“What is She doing?”

“She isn’t, Commander, it’s being done to Her. She can’t stop it because She’s diverted Her power to the fields. To keep us off Her.”

“Then we should be pleased, and you should be saying I Told You So. We’re not, and you aren’t. So what’s wrong?”

Smithson did not reply.

“What have we started?”

Nine hundred feet of Her flank, between midsection and stern, blew open. There was no explosion. It blew open slowly, layer by layer, as if She was undressing for them.

•

Perhaps She really couldn’t stop it, and could only slow it down; if so, She had slowed it thousands of times. It had the shape of an explosion, but not the speed. Every surface feature on the nine-hundred-foot section of Her flank detached itself and floated gently outwards: silver thumbnail hull plates in hundreds of thousands; lines of windows plugged with darkness; manoevre drive nozzles, scanner outlets, weapons apertures. Most of them floated away complete and undamaged, turning end over end, and when the Bridge screen showed closeups of them there were no miniature echoes of larger damage and no burning away to nothing. They lifted off and came to rest floating alongside Her.

There was no gushing of liquid silver and no nameless colour. Where the outer hull layer had lifted away, the second layer remained underneath: unbroken dark pewter, featureless except for echoes of the windows and apertures of the outer layer. Then it too blew slowly open.

The second layer was an unbroken whole, not miniature plates like the outer layer. All nine hundred feet of it blew out in five pieces, so large they retained fractions of the original curvature. The screen showed them in closeup as they lifted away. When they were clear of Her they broke into smaller pieces, always with clean sharp edges, and floated alongside Her where they bumped and nuzzled into the remains of Her outer layer.

Below the second layer was a cavity filled with a latticework of structural members and subassemblies which had linked it to the third layer, also dark pewter. After the second layer blew out, so did the latticework. They had glimpsed it once before when their missiles hit Her and opened the two craters, but now they saw it in detail as the screen went to closeup. Then, the explosions of their missiles had torn into it, breaking and twisting it; now it was exerting its own force, a thousand times slower but irresistible, to pull itself gently free from its fastenings to the third layer and float away from Her. Like before, some of it was recognisable and had counterparts in the Charles Manson: girders with an H cross-section, ducting, conduits, circular pipes squashed to ovals where they were sheared, platings with screw-fastenings and giant bolts (the screen even showed their threads in closeup, gleaming as they unscrewed themselves from their anchorage points). Other parts were unrecognisable, discs and triangles and polyhedrons made of something which hovered between gas and solid and liquid. It all lifted gently out of the nine-hundred-foot gash in Her flank, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, and floated alongside Her.

For once, Foord thought, Smithson’s wrong. This isn’t being done to Her, She’s doing it to Herself.

The third layer of Her hull, like the second, was dark pewter. All along the nine-hundred-foot gash, it was scarred and dented where the structural members had pulled free and floated outwards. The Bridge screen, anticipating that the third layer would also go, patched in closeups of sections along its length. When it blew out, the screen calculated, the gash would reach deeper into Her than the craters and they would see Her interior. But it didn’t blow out. The gash in Her side became dark, either depthless or infinite, and nothing else came out of it. The screen’s headups said the gash was a molecule deep, then nine thousand miles deep, then infinite, and then the headups cancelled themselves and said Unable. It belonged to another universe where physical laws unravelled and time went, not forwards or backwards, but sideways and inside out. Unable.

“Kaang,” Foord managed to say, “you see that?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Fly us into it.”

Around the Bridge, they turned on him in disbelief.

The alarms started murmuring.

“Commander,” Kaang stammered, “do you really…”

“Alright, no. Cyr, fire the beams into it.”

“We don’t know what it is, Commander!”

“That’s why.”

Cyr went to press the firing-panel, then looked round at the others.

“I gave you an order.”

The alarms were murmuring, louder because they were unanswered.

“Look at the screen headups, Commander!”

The alarms were murmuring because, for only the second time, their probes had detected something moving inside Her. The screen headups, like before, were unreadable. They said it was nine thousand miles inside Her, and ten times bigger than the previous movement; then three thousand miles inside, and a hundred times bigger.

“I’ve seen the readouts. Fire on it.”

The beams stabbed out, but Her fields met them on full power, opaque and almost solid, and held them. Cyr stopped firing and the fields cleared. The movement had not yet reached the surface of Her hull. The screen said it was only a molecule’s thickness inside Her and a million times larger than before, then cancelled. Unable.

Nothing further happened.

“She’s waiting for us to go back to Her,” Foord said, mostly to himself. New things about Her. “Kaang, take us to fifty thousand feet and hold us there.”

Kaang did so.

•

When Kaang brought them to rest, She continued.

Something started to emerge from the darkness of the gash in Her flank. It was not a hundred times or ten times or a million times bigger than before, but it would become bigger than She was and it was impossible. Earlier, She had survived by eating Herself. Now, She defecated.

What came out of the gash looked like the fingers of a giant hand: five separate fingers, thicker than Sakhran trees, at intervals of about two hundred feet along the entire length of the gash. They were separate, but moving in a way which suggested that back inside Her, behind the darkness, they were linked together in a hand. They were dark blue, at first almost invisible against the darkness in the gash; then, as they emerged, they became visible against the silver of Her hull.

They were a particular shade of dark blue, the colour of bruises. They were the five strands of their particle beams which had hit Her, slowed down millions of times, so they looked like treacle. They even glistened like treacle. They crept glutinously out of the wound, and as they emerged—and continued and continued to emerge—they lifted and undulated away from Her horizontally, reaching like blind worms towards the cloud of wreckage floating alongside Her.

They kept coming out of Her, nanoseconds of energy slowed millions of times to mass, but mass greater than their energy when they had hit Her, as if She had reversed the mass-to-energy multiple; or imported another multiple from another universe. The screen analysed them. It said their composition was that of the particle beams, but their mass was impossibly big, then reverted to Unable.

They reached the cloud of wreckage and nuzzled into it, gently bumping aside some of the larger pieces. Inside the cloud each of the five fingers subdivided into thinner fingers, and thinner into thinner until the thickest were only threads. They moved inside the cloud of wreckage, binding its pieces and organising them and spinning them, with the instinctive delicacy of spiders, into an openwork sphere which was bigger than She was.

The five fingers kept coming out of the gash in Her flank, across the gap and into the openwork sphere. They turned pale blue, then transparent; and they were hollow. Objects were being carried along inside them in suspension, pumped out of Her and into the sphere: at first only dozens, but then hundreds. The five transparent tubes pulsed with them. Foord told the screen to show closeups, but it had already done so, and he already knew what they were: everything She had ever taken from them, and everything they had ever thrown into Her, and more, in mounting and impossible quantities.

There were things the size of a human head, black and sickle-shaped, each with a diamond tip and a trailing tangle of monofilament: pieces of the grapples Cyr called Hands of Friendship. Then hundreds of slivers of fractal diamond, which their Jewel Boxes had exploded inside Her. Then something larger, a turning tumbling curvature of dark metal: a broken rim from a Prayer Wheel. Then dark pieces of carapace from their dismembered spiders, trailing gears and claws and circuitry. They were coming in hundreds, through each of the five fingers, and the Bridge screen was labelling and classifying them in headups which flashed on-off in nanoseconds, as quickly as the beams had flashed when they were energy and before She had turned them to tubes of treacle. The screen tried to keep up, identifying and labelling each object in what Foord recognised, too easily, as monomania.

The objects were still coming in hundreds, out of Her and into the sphere. The five fingers were no longer just shaping and organising the sphere but feeding it, in quantities which could never have existed inside Her. Now the sphere was bigger than both ships put together.

Through the fingers the whole of their engagement, the whole of the last few days of their lives, poured out of Her. Silver hull plates which Her spiders had excavated so industriously and which She had taken back inside Her in giant entwined cables. The Fire Opals which had fallen and died somewhere inside Her. More jagged slivers of diamond, this time hundreds of thousands, from their giant Diamond Clusters. Even cylindrical bits of the the Diamond Clusters themselves, reduced to digestible pieces. More bits of Prayer Wheels showing fractions of curvature and attached spokes. And more hull plates, more diamond slivers, more bits of their spiders and more dead Fire Opals. Thousands and thousands of everything.

“There’s too much,” Smithson muttered. “Like the beams. There’s more coming out than we put in.”

“She’s making them,” Foord whispered. “Thousands of everything. What have we…”

“Started? Who knows.” Thahl answered him.

The five fingers changed colour again. Different objects gushed through them into the sphere, objects which were not theirs but Hers, in silver and grey: Thahl’s head, Smithson’s torso, Cyr’s eyeless face. Not one of each but hundreds. Foord saw his own simulation at least a hundred times. And then other things of Hers, but these were complete and not mutilated: the replicas of Aaron Foord, Susanna Cyr, Elizabeth Kaang, Smithson and Thahl, the ones which had stood on the Bridge, forming out of cold white light and dissolving back into it. Again there were hundreds of them. They bent and conformed to the contours of the five transparent fingers as they poured through them, like dead children on a slide, tumbling out empty-faced into the openwork sphere. The hundreds became thousands and the sphere was no longer openwork but dense and solid, a mixture of colours and textures and shapes from Her and from them.

The fingers came to an end. They never did turn into a hand. One by one they completed their emergence from the unplumbable darkness of the gash in Her flank, their trailing ends floating across to the sphere and entering it. The darkness, either a molecule deep or as deep as the distance between galaxies, remained.

Between the two ships the sphere, bigger than either of them, hung motionless.

A mixture of us and Her, thought Foord. “Fire on it,” he told Cyr; but Cyr was not able to, because it became something else.

It started to compress, as if invisible hands were crumpling it prior to throwing it away. The compression was not uniform but abrupt and jagged. Its volume halved in a nanosecond, then halved again in five seconds, then stabilised; then halved again and again, to the size of a boulder and the size of an apple; then compressed, finally, to almost nothing. The two ships faced each other, speechless, across the space where it had been and still was.

The Bridge screen tracked it and would not let it go, chasing its collapse down from the size of an apple to a grain of sand to a molecule. The screen had become as obsessive as Foord; it would not say Unable again. It chased the sphere’s collapse further down, past the size of a molecule. It ignored the lunacy of its own readings, refocussing down and down with the definition of a microscope, and showed the Bridge an empty point in space with Faith looming out of focus behind it, and told them There, at that point, was what Her sphere had become: either an atom or a universe.

It was not an atom.

•

It exploded, back to the size of a grain of sand. Then expanded, to the size of an apple. Then expanded further, but more slowly.

The screen had chased it down through its first collapse, and back through the explosion of its creation, the expansion of its infancy, and the stability of its steady state. All through the chase the screen had told them what it was or wasn’t or might be, deleting and rewriting its readouts, combining contradictions into conclusions. Finally, like the object itself, the screen’s conclusions collapsed to almost nothing, exploded outwards, expanded, and reached relative stability.

It was a universe, said the screen, the size of an apple. Inside it would be galaxies like molecules, solar systems like subatomic particles, lives and civilisations which would go from birth to extinction in nanoseconds. In maybe five minutes, said the screen, the explosion of its creation would reverse and it would collapse.

The screen magnified it beyond focus, and got only its surface. Its face filled the screen like Horus 4 had done, but was even less distinct. Its outer surface was impenetrable; more than solid. Its colour was the nameless colour from Her craters, but flat and unlit. And while it existed, it brought a noise they would always associate with it. Not its own noise but theirs, a dissonant mismatched chorus of all their instruments trying to probe or understand it, failing, and saying so.

If it was a universe, then what they saw wasn’t its surface; that had no meaning. They saw its outer boundary, and that also had no meaning. What did the boundary of a universe look like from outside? Or from inside? If it was a universe it was infinite; inside was neverending so outside, where they were, was neverbeginning.

The dissonant chorus of instruments continued. Everything in the ship tried to probe it, but it was denser than Horus 4, or a neutron star, or billions of either. It couldn’t exist in their universe, and the Bridge screen said it didn’t; or couldn’t, which was different. If it did exist its gravity would have annihilated both ships in the instant of its creation, but to one side of it was Faith and to the other side, further away, was the Charles Manson, and they registered no gravity. The thing between them, separating them by a few thousand feet and billions of light-years, behaved as if they didn’t exist, just as it didn’t exist for them; or couldn’t, which was different.

Smithson was laughing. Not cruelly, as he usually did, but in wonderment.

“She’s actually done it.”

“The screen may be wrong.”

“No, Commander. It may be wrong about details, how and when it collapses, but not about what it is.” He laughed again, softly. “The only way She could hold us off is to put a universe between us. Can there be a bigger compliment? We thought we’d learn new things about Her.”

“I don’t…”

“Yes you do, Commander, you do understand. You were right, She made it deliberately. And it’s made of us and Her. Together. Its life will be only seconds or minutes to us, but to them it’s eternity.”

“Them?”

Smithson looked away. He seemed to be blinking.

Thahl said “Commander, he means the living things that will grow and die inside it. They must have already evolved…we may all meet again in there, Commander, and not know it.”

Foord looked away. He too seemed to be blinking.

“Commander,” Cyr said, “do we still fire on it?”

“Not this time. Whatever She’s done, it must play itself out.”

“But…”

“First, it’s not really there. Second, if it is it’s beyond our weapons. And third…I’ve destroyed ships. I might destroy cities if I had to. But a universe?”

“Made by Her.”

“The fourth reason. We’re part of Her. We always were.”

Again he found himself blinking back tears.

It hung before them on the screen. The ship’s voice—its instruments, all unable to reach a conclusion—sang it through its life.

•

The alarms murmured. The two ships faced each other across Her universe, which could not exist as a discrete object between them because it was infinite.

In five seconds and a billion years following its creation, it formed its time and space and physical laws. It formed nebulae; nebulae congealed locally into stars; stars were organised and spun into galaxies, measuring molecules and light-years across their spiral arms. Around some stars it formed planets.

Fifteen seconds and three billion years into its existence, it was teeming with life and death. A minority of lifeforms developed civilisations, and a minority of civilisations flourished, lasting millionths of a second and thousands of years. A smaller minority of civilisations spanned more than one solar system. There was even an unidentified ship, prowling the dark spaces between galaxies. More than one, but they rarely met or communicated.

Her universe, like any other, was mostly empty. Its emptiness dwarfed suns, whose light guttered like cigarette-ends dropped in a derelict building. Only one time in millions would light produce life where it landed. Civilisations began and ended their lives along its timeline, in packets of millionths of a second and thousands of years. The atoms and subatomic particles of Foord and Thahl and Cyr and Smithson and Kaang—of their replicas in the crater, or their replicas from the Bridge, or the thousands of reproductions of both which had tumbled out of Her—went into Her universe and reappeared in living things. Occasionally they existed in the same galaxy; less occasionally, in solar systems close to each other; almost never, in the same solar system; less than almost never, on the same planet; and less than that, in forms that would recognise each other.

Once, on a planet circling a dying red sun, an individual with some of Foord’s particles came within a few feet of an individual with some of Thahl’s.They glanced at each other and passed by. One was chitinous, part of a collective hive; the other was feathered, pecking at a fruit like an apple. Later they died. Five seconds and a billion years afterwards, their sun went nova. An unidentified ship watched it from a distance of atoms and light-years, and turned away towards the next solar system.

•

She began Her endgame. For the second time the Bridge screen went dark, and She brought them into Her universe. There was no compression: they stayed as they were, but reality around them changed, instantly, from outside to inside.

Every part of Her universe, because it was infinite, touched every part of theirs. It welcomed them with a noiseless rushing. Foord shouted to them, above the noiselessness, We’ll come out at Sakhra, then all this will be finished. Finished abruptly. After everything which had gone before, Her endgame was simple and abrupt. Fast, and final. It was Her last throw of the dice.

Foord knew Her better now, and knew what She had done. She was a conventional ship with a conventional opponent, and the opponent was matching Her—perhaps, with Foord’s careful penny pieces, more than matching Her. She was also something else, something which could make and encompass universes, and She had drawn on the second identity to meet the threat to the first. But that, Foord knew, would also threaten the second identity.

They passed through Her universe like ghosts, unseeing and unseen. They were almost nothing: a movement of air, an echo, a deepening of colour. As they passed, their traces altered with the magnitude of what they passed through—a planet, a continent, a room.

It contained random particles from them and Her, and multitudes from neither. It contained civilisations which grew and died in different galaxies at different times, without knowing each other. Some resembled the Commonwealth or the Sakhran Empire, and some were unimaginably different. Some were visited by an unidentified ship, and collapsed or declined after it left them. Some had an individual who wrote a book about what the ship was. Some sent an opponent to engage it singly.

They saw no more of Her universe than it did of them. For seconds, and billions of years, they ghosted through it. Orders of magnitude. If it was a universe, they passed only six of its planets, in six different solar systems in six different galaxies, on the route She had set to bring them out at Sakhra. It was a short journey, less than the span of one grain of sand on a beach; and in the mere seconds and billions of years it lasted, Foord finally understood.

I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote.

•

On an uninhabited planet of dark slate, their passing was an extra quiver in a column of smoke. The smoke rose from a hut standing by itself on the slopes of a mountain. Someone had come there, to live and die alone.

On a grey-blue basalt planet their passing was a momentary darkening of one vein of mineral in a wall of cliffs.The cliffs were honeycombed with tunnels eaten into them by acid rain. They overlooked a beach.

A tsunami was coming, nine hundred feet high and nine hundred miles an hour. It dragged the shallow water across the beach towards it. It sent a nine-hundred-mile-an-hour wind ahead of it, which tore through the tunnels in the cliffs and made them scream.

In a room at the summit of a stone tower, their passing was a momentary deepening in the grain of a wooden floorboard. The room held the world’s last two living things, a father and daughter, opponents of an unspeakable theocracy. The theocracy had impregnated them with a cellular stasis field, which halted their ageing and even their need for sustenance; then, having made them almost immortal, it sentenced them to life imprisonment. If Foord had been able to see them, he would have remembered his own father’s old volume of King Lear: We’ll wear out, in a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.

And they did. They lived to see, through barred windows, the extinction of their species. But they had become something else, and it no longer mattered to them.

On a planet once visited by an unidentified ship, their passing was a small vortex of wind in a pile of dead leaves. It had been the first planet of a civilisation that spanned half a galaxy, and would have dwarfed the Commonwealth. The spires of its cities were so tall they pierced the ionosphere, and so numerous they made the planet look like a pincushion. They were still unblemished, centuries after they were built, each one standing in parkland. After the unidentified ship left, people had turned away from each other; they no longer lived in cities or visited parks, and were no longer people. Small vortexes of wind played among the dead leaves in the parks, like the ghosts of terriers.

In a half-lit apartment, their passing was an unnoticed flicker in a lamp swinging from the ceiling. A couple had taken to meeting there, despite the sectarian and political forces ranged against them. Later they died, but their children founded a new society. It too died, but gradually and gracefully, and while it lived—hundredths of a second, and tens of thousands of years—it was glorious. Its systems of thought were so powerful that they lived on as ghosts, heard and seen in the dreams of the historians and chroniclers and archaeologists who sifted its ruins.

Their passing was a moment’s dilation of an eye pupil in something which walked vast plains. It was a solitary carnivore with the same shape as the members of the herd it walked with. It had evolved the shape and smell and voice of herd members, so it could live among them. It would even help defend them against packs of other predators. It lived with them and outside them, and fed with them and on them.

•

I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote. Her universe died. In four minutes, not five as the Bridge screen had said, but four, it went from singularity to universe to singularity. It collapsed, and they came out of it at Sakhra.

They cried out as the screen relit. It seemed months or years since they had last seen Sakhra. It pulsed before them as if lit by a naked swinging bulb, the main continent covering an entire hemisphere, the Great Bowl filling most of its interior. It looked like a giant eye.

She was waiting. For the first and last time, She spoke directly.

I almost love you, said Her words on the screen, in a cursive script like the one they thought they had seen spreading over Her earlier, but this time they could read it. I almost love you too, Foord thought, and almost love can almost never die.

She moved to exactly one thousand six hundred and twelve feet from them and they resumed fighting, if that was what it was.

•

The two ships passed by Sakhra, well outside its orbit. Horus Fleet, in its careful defensive cordon, watched them pass. Faith carried a huge gash which had opened up two-thirds of Her port side, and the Charles Manson was covered in shit and striations and an apparent infection of boils where its dorsal hull surfaces had been attacked. They were throwing closeup weapons at each other when they emerged at Sakhra, and continued as they passed by and left its orbit and headed for the two inner planets, and neither of them gave Horus Fleet more than a glance. Horus Fleet made no move towards them and no attempt to contact them. They were gone.

They approached the orbit of Horus 2, and it finished. There were nearly fifty impacts from missiles She had made, replicas of Foord’s two, which had been floating inert all around them. They hit every part of the Charles Manson, even the Bridge. It wasn’t Her private universe which had destroyed them, it was Her copy of Foord’s idea. Now, thought Foord, looking for his closest friend, I really do understand Sakhran irony. And he’s always been my closest friend.

The damage they did to Her was enough; she consumed herself. She was not able to turn back and attack Sakhra. She limped off, and passed out of Horus system, and would never come back.

Foord’s ship died like Jeeves would have died: carefully, ordering its affairs, collapsing tidily and progressively, informing survivors of the disposition of lifeboats. It had always been in Foord’s nature to wonder how Jeeves would have died.

The Bridge was wrecked. Kaang and Smithson were unhurt, but Thahl had died instantly and Cyr lay on the floor amid wreckage and rubbish. Foord went to her, and held her in his arms. He’d never touched her before, except once, more than seven years ago, to shake hands when she joined his ship. Now they kissed, tongues and everything.

Cyr looked up at him. “Almost,” she said, and died.