Faith (29 page)

Plop.
Seven seconds to go.

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

Six seconds to go.

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

Plop.
Five to go.

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

Plop.
Four to go.

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

Plop.
Three.

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

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

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

Kaang didn’t reply. He tried again.

“How are you, Kaang?”

“I’m in Medical, Commander.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s acting as pilot, Commander?”

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

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

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

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

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

He snapped his wristcom shut, too abruptly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thahl.”

“Commander?”

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

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

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

“Disturb us again?”

“Yes, Commander.”

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

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

•

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