Faith

by John Love

  “Use photon drive? If you order it, Commander. But…”

  “But you’re not Kaang.” At least, thought Foord, we still finish each other’s sentences.

  Faith remained at rest, while they digested what She had done to them and tried to run from it. But what She had done was already inside them, ahead of Her missile. It concerned Joser.

  •

  They ran for ninety seconds, and were still alive. The Bridge screen showed the Belt corkscrewing around them. Thahl showed no obvious signs of stress, but he never did.

  “Nothing yet,” Smithson said.

  “The one She intended for us.” Joser was repeating the phrase as regularly as Cyr had repeated her beam-firings; and with the same accuracy. As far as they could, they ignored him.

  Had She, thought Foord, somehow possessed Joser’s mind? That was the obvious explanation, but Foord knew it was wrong. The truth was more subtle, and much worse: not possessed it, predicted it. But so precisely that mere possession was unnecessary.

  “Something out there,” Smithson said. “An echo. No, it’s gone. But the signature was unusual. It’s big.”

  “The one She intended for us.”

  “Stop saying that,” Cyr said.

  “Leave him, he can’t hear you,” Smithson said.

  “And anyway,” Foord added, “it’s all he’ll ever say.”

  This was the first real event of the engagement; all the others had been fakes, fought in different languages. In their language Her attacks had been real, and had only just been beaten off by the abilities of Smithson, then Kaang, then Cyr. In Her language there had only ever been one attack, as gradual and patient as erosion, and She had directed it—all of it—at Joser.

  “There, another echo!” Smithson shouted.

  “The one…”

  “Gone again. But it’s big.”

  “…She intended for us.”

  “I’d like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said.

  The ship shuddered as it ploughed through some asteroid debris. Thahl quickly righted it.

  Foord glanced at the screen. The speed was impossible. The Belt whipped past them, boiling, and flung bits of itself at them like antibodies. He knew Thahl couldn’t sustain this, but said nothing yet.

  Merely being run ragged by an opponent’s superiority would not have done this to Joser. What She had used on him over all those hours was more than just technical superiority. His failure was not the cause of his collapse, only a symptom. He was finished long before then.

  “More echoes,” Smithson said. “I think I can pinpoint it, though…”

  She might have killed Joser there and then just by telling him what She was, but that wasn’t how She worked. Not by telepathy, and not by possession. The truth was more subtle, and much worse. She arranged the events he experienced; and then, because She knew him and knew all of them, She predicted, to the second, how he would react. She used events to make him believe, gradually, that he wasn’t as bad as the others believed him to be, or as he feared himself to be; She did it piece by piece, letting him see things on his inadequate scanners which She could easily have concealed. Then, when he’d started despite himself to believe, even to the point where he could exchange banter with Cyr, She dashed him by making him miss things he should easily have spotted, even on his inadequate scanners; and She predicted, down to the last second, when this would prove insupportable to him.

  By the time Her third missile was launched, he was already finished.

  “I need the missile’s position,” Foord said, a minute later. They were still alive.

  “You can’t have it,” Smithson said.

  “What?”

  “It’s shrouded, so I’m only getting random echoes. You’ll get the position when I can trust our scanners.”

  “Recall Kaang, Commander,” Cyr whispered.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Kaang’s not fit. There isn’t time.”

  “There already isn’t time. Look at the screen. How long can Thahl keep doing this?”

  “Smithson, we need that position.”

  “Later. There are too many echoes.”

  “The one…” Joser began.

  “I’d really like him to stop saying that,” Cyr said, and this time he did stop, because they hit another swarm of asteroid debris, more heavily this time, and went reeling.

  “The one…”

  For entire seconds they were out of control, and then the manoeuvre drives fountained and Thahl started to right them, but Foord didn’t notice any of this. He had heard someone speak, just before the Impact alarms murmured.

  “Kill the alarms, I can’t hear!” Foord yelled.

  “…She intended for us.”

  “What? What was that?”

  “I said, The one She intended for us.”

  Foord froze, horrified: it was Smithson, not Joser, who had spoken.

  “Why,” he said carefully “did you say that?”

  “Position of Her third missile,” Smithson said, “is 05-03-06 and closing. And,” he added, killing the alarms and what was left of Foord’s composure, “this time She means it. It’s sixty feet long.”

  The Bridge screen was shot through with light. The shroud fell away, and the third missile appeared, another featureless ovoid but bigger. They watched it push through its shroud into sudden existence, as if something invisible had just given it birth.

  “It’s just a ship’s length away,” Smithson breathed. “Impact imminent.”

  It filled half the rear screen: grey, featureless and huge. Foord stared at it, for too long.

  “Impact imminent!” Smithson bellowed at him.

  “No,” he whispered. “Check its speed.”

  It was keeping an exact distance. It was plunging with them through the Belt, more a companion than a pursuer, its grey elliptical dot behind their slender silver delta making a deformed exclamation mark; and because it could hit them at any time, it wouldn’t yet.

  Smithson swore. “It’s cut speed to match ours! It’s…”

  “Playing with us,” Foord agreed.

  “I have ten percent ion speed left, Commander,” Thahl said.

  “Use it, please.”

  He did, and so did the missile. On the screen, since it maintained distance exactly, nothing happened.

  “That’s enough. Cut back to ninety percent, please. We have to leave ourselves something.”

  “For what?” Thahl kept his voice carefully neutral, but he cut back, and so did the missile. On the screen its position and distance were unchanged. Thanks to Thahl’s evasive manoeuvres, which it parallelled exactly even in their growing raggedness, it was the only other object in the Belt which wasn’t trying to fling itself at them or away from them.

  Cyr was already attacking it with closeup weapons. It carried flickerfields, and even used them for a few seconds, but then ceased: perhaps there was no need. Either She would make it hit, or Thahl would get exhausted, or both, long before Cyr could damage it.

  There was a huge explosion, but not the missile; not yet. They had clipped the rim of an asteroid fragment, and went reeling again until Thahl righted them. The missile reeled and righted itself with them, and maintained exact distance.

  Another asteroid loomed ahead, and Thahl wrenched them over its horizon, with the missile following, and plunged into a swarm of asteroid debris. Somehow he got through it, and somehow so did the missile. They ran before it through the Belt, sidewinding and somersaulting. They ran like a dog through dustbins, hitting some and missing others; a dog trying to escape its own tail, and turning rabid because it couldn’t.

  “The one…”

  “Please keep him quiet, Commander.”

  They entered another swarm of debris. The minor impacts mounted, and Thahl ignored them. Cyr kept firing at the missile, and it ignored her. Joser was trying to speak to Foord, and Foord ignored him.

  The next major asteroid marked the change. It wasn’t a sudden looming obstacle to be avoided: Thahl wa
s actually making for it. It was large, potato-shaped and lumpy. Its face grew until it filled the forward section of the Bridge screen—and continued to grow, until Forward became Down and they were diving into it. Diving, Foord thought, into a giant face of W. C. Fields…there was where the hat should be, and there the cigar. It even had the complexion, veined and pocked and wrinkled, the details hurtling into and inside focus as it rushed up at them.

  To their credit, none of them shouted at Thahl to pull out of the dive until they were sure he’d left it too late; and then he ignored them. He held the dive until they were inside final landing height, then turned the ship in its own length, heading up and back into the Belt. The ion drive, where he turned, hit the asteroid’s face like a broken bottle.

  And the missile followed them. It did not, as Thahl hoped, dash itself to pieces on the asteroid. It turned as quickly as they did, and was where it had always been: on the rear Bridge screen, a ship’s-length away. It was as though Kaang was piloting it.

  Smithson began a long vomit of foul language, which seemed to splatter over the walls of the Bridge and hang dripping like Kaang’s faeces; though it made no difference to the missile. Nothing did. Joser couldn’t detect it, Thahl couldn’t lose it, Cyr couldn’t destroy it, and Foord—

  Foord couldn’t take his eyes off it. Whatever it did to them finally, right now She was using it to speak to them, mocking them for surrendering in seconds of retreat what they’d gained after hours of pursuit. Foord even thought he recognised the tone of voice She used to mock them: understated and ironic, like voices used to be on the Charles Manson.

  Joser was trying to speak to Foord, but the wrong words kept coming out. He kept saying “This is the one She intended for us,” and Foord heard but ignored him.

  They reached a rare pocket of open space in the Belt. Thahl paused, then wrenched them to port, heading for the next asteroid, and Smithson snorted in derision. So, almost, did Foord, and for the same reason: they were running ragged, a frothing dog diving for the dark of the nearest alley.

  But literally an alley this time.

  The asteroid for which Thahl was running was BZ-1014. It was huge, the size of a small planet. He flung them into orbit around it—after nodding briefly to himself, as if he actually knew what he was doing—and it spread out below them, like a giant unmade bed. It was humped and folded from horizon to horizon, a landscape of craters and mountains. Pulled this way and that by the Belt’s shifting gravity, it breathed in slow geological violence. One of its breaths was ten of their lifetimes.

  Thahl tightened orbit; the effect, of dropping closer to the surface while maintaining speed, was like a surge of acceleration. As BZ-1014’s landscape rushed below, vomited out by one horizon and swallowed by the other, he turned and looked directly at Foord.

  “Particle beams,” he managed to say; and “Alley.”

  And then Foord understood, and had to fight an impulse to laugh out loud—in relief that Thahl had found something they could still do, and in disbelief at what it was.

  “You heard him, Cyr. Fire particle beams.”

  “And destroy the asteroid? When we’re on top of it?”

  “No,” Foord said, “when we’re inside it.”

  Cyr was too amazed, and frightened, to reply. She glanced up at Foord; then at Smithson, who also understood; then at Thahl, who was going to do it anyway; and nodded.

  They ran for their alley.

  At ninety percent ion speed, Thahl tightened and lowered orbit; then dived

  vertically

  for the largest of the craters.

  The particle beams—even stronger than Hers, the one weapon She couldn’t match—stabbed ahead, perfect and recoilless, and ate.

  The asteroid spasmed. Now they could see it breathe. Its metabolism sped, accelerating to match theirs, until its internal processes were running—and would run out—as quickly as theirs. Its surface contours turned liquid, concentrating a thousand years’ movements into seconds, and its voice, now as audible as its movements were visible, roared up at them through the throat of the crater as they dived, and entered Thahl’s Alley.

  Because particle beams were recoilless, the Charles Manson broke through the asteroid’s surface without impact. There was only a soft concussion, as of a finger poking into an eyeball; and then, abruptly, a shuffle and flicker of universes. The forward screen simply shifted from one frame, where they broke orbit and dived vertically, to another, where space turned to rock and outside to inside. Cause and effect tripped over each other. The screen showed impossible events by the light of impossible colours.

  Thahl’s Alley was a moving wormhole. They were the forward tip of a burrowing internal wound which opened ahead as it closed behind. Rock turned viscous, roared and fell away boiling before them where the beams ate it, but Thahl’s Alley only existed ahead. Behind them it collapsed and coagulated, its collapse chasing but never quite catching them. Ahead and Behind worked in counterpoint, like a pair of thighs, to draw them deeper inside.

  “Missile still there?”

  “Yes, Commander,” said Smithson, and swore. “Even through this.”

  And again, the engagement turned on itself. Their orders were to engage and destroy Faith in single combat, and now those orders—even the shapes of the words—melted. Thahl had injected them into an asteroid, and they were burrowing for its core where their beams would annihilate it and (perhaps) burst them free of its explosion in a manoeuvre not even Kaang had attempted; and all of this to destroy, not Faith, but just Her third missile.

  The beams ate, they moved forward, the wound closed behind them, the beams ate, they moved forward. By now Cyr was laughing aloud (“Kaang should see this! Thahl, it’s brilliant. It might even work!”) and firing continuously, and the colours were breathtaking. Ahead of them where the wound opened, the beams had made something which was almost a sun, a swirling whiteness of molten colours fracturing and recombining, but its colour never reached the Bridge screen. The dark bruise-blue of the beams filtered its glare down to polite pastels of peach and mauve and lilac: delicate, lying colours which imparted a wash of wonder to their creation of Thahl’s Alley, but drained it of its enormity. And hid its ending.

  “There’s no more I can do for now, Commander,” Thahl said. “Not until we reach the core.”

  Foord nodded. For the last few minutes—it felt like seconds, but the screen said minutes—he had watched Thahl as closely as the screen, because the idea that Thahl could have devised this was as bewitching as any of the roiling interior-decorator pastels ahead. He knew less of Thahl, after years, than he did of Faith, after days.

  More minutes passed. The beams ate, they moved forward, the wound closed behind them, the beams ate, they moved forward. It was a simple internal-combustion cycle, driven by post-Einsteinian physics. Foord would have given a lot to see what Thahl’s instruments (roll, pitch, yaw, speed, spatial coordinates) were making of it; they were still on ninety percent ion speed, but inside an asteroid. And the missile…

  “Still there, Commander,” Smithson said.

  “And,” Thahl added, “we’re not on ninety percent speed. We’re on ninety percent power, but speed is down because we’re not moving through space.”

  Did I think aloud? Foord asked, or thought he asked, And did I ask aloud if I was thinking aloud, or only think it? And did I—

  That was when it started to change. They were slowing down, like his thoughts. Their speed had dropped when they entered the asteroid, and was dropping further. Nearer the core, matter was denser and penetration harder, the pastel illusion of an alley ahead growing darker and closing tighter. The colours themselves were slowing down and deepening. Events were suddenly gradual, slowing too fast; even sounds came more slowly.

  “The one. She intend. Dead. For us.” Joser’s voice crawled around his head, trying to get in.

  “Can you tell us how long before we reach the core?” Foord heard himself asking Thahl.

  “No, Comma
nder, because I can’t predict our rate of slowing. Maybe we won’t.”

  “Won’t?”

  “If we reach the core the beams will explode the asteroid. If we don’t we’ll be embedded. Like…”

  Like the Book of Srahr in its crystal, Foord thought. Or said.

  The beams ate; they edged forward; the wound closed behind them.

  The air was as thick as tree-resin, trapping events like insects. It smothered light and sound, made thoughts meander, and conversations mumble to nowhere. Time inverted itself. Minutes stretched into seconds, or longer.

  Foord found himself repeating his last conversation with Thahl. He walked around the words. They stood like stones in a cemetery. This time there were three voices in the conversation, not two. The third voice was a roaring which obliterated some words at random like an idiot’s finger daubing a page.

  “Can you”

  “Us how long before we reach the”

  “Won’t?”

  “Like the Book of Srahr in its”

  Then the third voice reversed itself, and became the words it obliterated. Tell. Core. Crystal. The words crumbled, and the voice was wordless again. It chased its own echoes, caught them and became continuous, and Foord began to dread it, so he went away.

  Back in the cemetery the words were still standing like stones, but something else was there too. Where the word Crystal should have stood was a darkness. It spread. First it put out thin tendrils, like hairline cracks in the air; then thicker tendrils, which chased and caught the thinner ones and wandered among the words, engulfing and denying them. Then it joined itself and became a black web, as large as a planet. It turned to face Foord, swivelling on him simultaneously from above and below and all around, and—suddenly intimate—it pulled aside part of itself and showed him its inner recesses. Foord dreaded it. He went away, back to his ship, but the darkness followed him there, where it became the third voice.

  The third voice was the voice of the asteroid, roaring at them from above and below and all around, swelling towards explosion: the rending of rock through which a dark web of fault-lines radiated, first thin then thick, chasing each other. It was wordless but held hints of words, growing and dying inside it; and Foord, returning to his ship from wherever he had been, found himself returning to a madhouse.