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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Doesn’t it cramp your style a bit?”

  “How do you mean?”

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

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

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

  “Well, I…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not absolutely vital.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Useful?”

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why not?”

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

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

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

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

  “One to twenty-nine, Commander?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thank you, Cyr.”

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

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

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

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

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

  8

  An hour passed uneventfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

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