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

  •

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

  Ten minutes later, she reported to his study.

  “You wanted to see me, Commander.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “He was about to kill you.”

  “You could have wounded him.”

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

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

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

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

  “Why did you kill him?” he repeated.

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

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

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

  •

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

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

  “Is it operational if needed?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Kaang?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

  “Cyr?”

  “Nothing since my last report.”

  “Smithson?”

  “Nothing since her last report.”

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

  “Tell him…”

  “He insists you speak to him, Commander.”

  “Insists.”

  “His word.”

  “Later. My word.”

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

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

  2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Is it on the same matter as before?”

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

  “Is Demands an advance on Insists?”

  “I don’t know, Commander.”

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

  “Yes, Commander.”

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

  Foord looked around the Bridge.

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

  There were none. Foord went on.

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

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

  Foord’s moment hung in the air, dissolving.

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