Faith Page 19

  “That vibration, Joser. What is it?”

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

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

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

  “At the stern, I think.”

  “Fuck what you think. Localised where?”

  “At the stern.”

  “Smithson?…” Foord began.

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

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

  It came from the stern.

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

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

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

  The noise from the stern got steadily louder.

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

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

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

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

  “Commander?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Smithson…”

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

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

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

  “Yes. How much time?”

  “Ninety seconds, if…”

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

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

  “Fifty seconds, Commander.”

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

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

  The alarms started murmuring.

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

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

  “Commander?”

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

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

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

  paused, and glanced at them

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Commander?”

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

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

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

  More glances around the Bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Four hours if we hurry, Commander.”

  “Take five, and don’t hurry.”

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

  “Yes, I realise that.”

  “And you’re serious about not hurrying?”

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

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

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

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

  “I did see it, eventually.”

  “Eventually.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Because we were defenceless.”

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

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

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

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

  •

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

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

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

  PART SIX

  1

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

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

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