Faith

by John Love

  She seemed to give up, as She had done once before against Kaang, and let them fly alongside Her. Cyr pressed a series of panels, and two of the Charles Manson’s main ventral launch bays opened. Objects dropped out of them, fired once and made their way towards Her.

  In the few seconds before Cyr’s attack hit Her, they had time to look into the craters. Both of them were lit, not by the unnameable colour but by the weak pearlescent flicker of the Prayer Wheels deep inside them (another naked bulb in a cellar, thought Foord) and they saw, despite all the ways in which She was utterly unlike them, a piece of their own likeness. She too was packed solid, almost to dwarf-star density. The stern crater was packed with the cathedral slabs of Her main drive housings, the midsection crater with a melted chaos of cables and conduits, like a bucket of dead eels; and both craters with broken latticeworks of structural girders, even with the same H cross-section as their counterparts on the Charles Manson. Angles were random and contradictory. Everything had flowed into everything else and frozen at the instant of melting. Escher and Dalí.

  The furthest recesses of each crater were still out of focus, obscured and sealed by the darkness whose surface swirled with watered-silk patterns. If She had a crew, some of them would have moved through these areas; but nothing had kept enough shape to be corridors or doors or anything else recognisable. Or to be their bodies. We did that, thought Foord, and then he froze as another thought came, a very unwelcome one.

  Maybe we only damaged Her outside, not Her inside. Maybe this is how Her inside really is. Maybe She always carries this chaos inside Her.

  •

  Cyr watched the two ninety-foot Diamond Clusters she had just launched, the last two the Charles Manson carried. Like the Prayer Wheels they had fired once and were now gliding on diverging paths towards the two craters. Like the Prayer Wheels, She must have seen them coming and should have responded but did not. Cyr had told Foord they were the best weapon to follow the Prayer Wheels into the craters. Foord still wanted beams, but Cyr persuaded him. She knew that energy weapons in the craters would be wrong.

  Cyr watched the two of them, and watched her instruments; she calculated that if Faith continued to do nothing, no final course correction would be needed. As with the Prayer Wheels, there was a moment when She could have tried rolling away, and everything would then have depended on Cyr’s preparations and Kaang’s reactions; but the moment passed. The two ninety-foot missiles reached Her and slowly entered the craters and continued and continued to enter until their entire lengths were swallowed. And this time, Cyr thought as she watched them explode, You can swallow but you can’t digest.

  They were simple explosions, massive but conventional, not linked to MT physics in any way and not affected by the stasis fields. They flashed On-Off in a nanosecond, On to light the two craters with fire—almost a mundane colour after the colour which had previously lit them—and Off to leave them lit again only by the flicker of the Prayer Wheels, which generated their own space-time and were untouched by non-MT events around them.

  This time the explosions went into Her, the way they should have done before, and She had no means of reversing them or slowing them, but the explosions themselves would not have damaged Her. It was what they released into Her, a million fractal diamond razors the size of Sakhran claws, flying through Her at a million times the speed She had slowed them to last time. They were a simple physical weapon, carried to massive extremes. Their eruption and flight inside Her had already happened. It would have lasted only another nanosecond after the two explosions, On-Off in their afterimage. If She had been a Commonwealth ship, even a battleship—or even an Outsider—She would have broken in half. Because She was not, Cyr had the next attack already prepared for the craters; and, if necessary, the one after that and the one after that.

  She came to a halt, and the Charles Manson halted with Her. Alarms murmured on the Bridge. Whatever had happened inside Her, found no other expression outside.

  Alarms murmured again. She started to move forward slowly, at twenty percent. The Charles Manson parallelled Her. She showed nothing they could read, either as life or death. Maybe the diamond razors had shredded Her interior and crew, and She was moving only on automatic, or maybe they had failed. As usual, She gave them nothing. Her interior, like SchrÖdinger’s cat, was neither dead nor alive, but something else which might become either.

  Cyr and Foord exchanged glances.

  “Commander, do we still…”

  “Yes. What else is there?”

  Cyr pressed some more panels, and the next attack began. Blisters rose and opened along the topsurface of the Charles Manson’s hull. Their three hundred remaining spiders swarmed out, fired their onboard motors, and made for the midsection crater. It was something Cyr and Foord had both wanted: to do to Her what She had done to them, to assault Her internally and intimately. Always attack the wound, Cyr said.

  “Cyr,” said Foord, “if this doesn’t work…”

  “I know. I have the next attacks ready.”

  The dark gunmetal spiders fanned out as they crossed the sixteen hundred feet. They were silhouetted against the silver of Her hull as they floated slowly towards Her. Many of them were missing limbs. As they neared the midsection crater they fired their motors and funnelled into a narrower formation—almost a coiled rope, like the one She had taken into Herself. Their silhouettes became less distinct as they came within the compass of the crater’s backdrop, where only the flicker of the Prayer Wheels illuminated them. The mouth of the crater was almost the same colour they were.

  The slowness and uncertainty of what they were doing made Foord suddenly tired. He looked across the sixteen hundred feet and almost prayed to Her, Respond.

  The alarms had earlier murmured on the Bridge, like polite punctuations to the other conversations, but now they shouted. Both craters, stern and midsection, were black. At last, She had neutralised the stasis fields, and the weak illumination from the Prayer Wheels had died.

  Cyr glanced at Foord. He shook his head, No.

  “Hold them back, Cyr. Don’t let them enter the crater. Not until…”

  He had expected to see both craters re-ignite with the unnameable colour, and to see the dark swirling patterns reappear over Her hull, indicating the resumption of Her mass-to-energy processes. So had the Bridge screen, which patched in local magnifications of both craters and of Her hull around them, but nothing showed. At least, nothing they expected.

  The midsection crater filled with shivering white light. It was so bright it hit them like a wind, crossing the space between them with almost physical force so they expected the Charles Manson to rock. It was like a billion arc lights. It silhouetted the floating bodies of the spiders, reaching itself and their shadows back at the Charles Manson like alternate dark and light fingers, projecting their silhouettes onto the Charles Manson’s flank in a broken rewriting of the earlier dark patterns on Hers.

  And it was only the midsection crater, not the stern. That remained dark. Foord had glanced back at the stern crater to check, and so missed what happened next at the midsection, and found himself wondering what the alarms and shouting were about until he looked back to the midsection crater and saw the figure which walked out of it—walked, not crawled—and which was now standing in the crater’s mouth, looking at them across the sixteen hundred feet.

  It was human-sized, and human-shaped.

  It was human, and they recognised it.

  6

  “It’s a good analysis,” said the voice, “of the events at Horus 5 and the Belt and Horus 4. The last bit, in the Gulf, is harder to read. Our analysts see it differently to yours.”

  “Our analysts,” Swann said, “had to work from limited information. From long-range monitoring of drive emissions, from radio and optical telescopes on Sakhra, and a few remote probes that happened to be in the system. We had no ships in the area, because you”—he tried to keep his voice even—“because you told us to recall them and deplo
y them around Sakhra. If you have a different view of what’s happening in the Gulf, it’s because you know more about it than we do. For once, just say yes or no.”

  Swann’s Command Centre at Blent was full of screens, most of them showing live feeds of events around Sakhra which he didn’t want to see, but Swann was speaking not into a screen but into a—superficially, at least—old-fashioned microphone. The Department of Administrative Affairs didn’t do faces on screens. It only did voices on mikes.

  “Yes, of course we do. We’d hardly build things like the Outsiders and not build in ways of monitoring them. Just because Foord has killed all communications—by the way, with us as well as you—”

  “We have only your word for that,” Swann said, then wished he hadn’t. His voice wasn’t shrill, but the remark was.

  “Just because Foord has killed all communications,” the voice went on evenly, “doesn’t mean we can’t track him. He knows that, of course. He’s neutralised some of our devices, but not all of them. And Joser wasn’t the only observer we had on the Charles Manson. Foord knows that, too.”

  “So you have information which we don’t about what those two ships are doing in the Gulf. I insist you share it.”

  “Insist?”

  The days Swann had spent in the Command Centre, since Boussaid’s death and since the Charles Manson had left to engage Her alone, seemed longer than the rest of his life. They stretched back behind him, worrying and unfathomable, noisy and fetid. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes. Neither, by his orders, had any of his staff—the military and security people he’d charged with monitoring events on Sakhra, the communications people he’d charged with tracking the Charles Manson’s engagement of Faith, and the mission analysts he’d charged with interpreting it. Their cups and meal trays and half-used toiletries were strewn over the floor, left where they fell. The atmosphere was as thick and furry as the inside of his mouth.

  Without any possibility of realising it, Swann had done to the Command Centre what Foord had done to the Bridge of the Charles Manson.

  “We have an apparently invincible opponent,” Swann said. “She’s entered the outer reaches of Horus system, almost certainly to attack Sakhra. The only ship with any chance of defeating Her has, on your orders, engaged Her alone. According to our analyses She’s made the Charles Manson shut down its MT Drive, execute a photon burst through the Belt, and burrow through a large asteroid. Then, apparently, Foord succeeded in damaging Her at Horus 4.” Swann became aware that he’d been counting the points on his fingers, the nails of which were stained and bitten; Foord’s hands, he remembered, were always immaculate. “And now there’s a series of strange closeup exchanges between them in the Gulf, and those two ships are travelling alongside each other. Through the Gulf. Towards us. And Foord won’t communicate. Maybe it’s not just one invincible opponent coming for us, but two. Yes, I said Insist!”

  The voice did not immediately reply.

  One of the screens in the Command Centre showed a live address from the President of Sakhra, appealing for calm. The irony was not lost on Swann. Apart from the disturbing but still largely isolated incidents shown on various other screens, calm was what Sakhra still had. Things were falling apart, but calmly. Since the Charles Manson’s departure from Sakhra—if She ever came here, would She cause as much chaos?—the disturbances had increased, but they were still apparently unconnected, and hard to read. The humans on Sakhra seemed to share the Sakhrans’ sense of separation, of having turned away from each other. Election turnouts were small. When Swann gave interviews, which he had done frequently in the last few days, he got ten times the President’s coverage.

  Or maybe these events were the tip of a larger pattern, as were the events in the Gulf with Foord and Her. Maybe—Swann immediately regretted this thought, because its afterecho wouldn’t go away—maybe they weren’t just hard to read, but too big to read.

  “No, not two opponents,” said the voice, eventually.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not two opponents, Director. Foord is still attacking Her.”

  “Attacking?”

  “She’s been damaged: nobody has ever done that before. She’s fighting back, so the Charles Manson is still attacking Her. We don’t fully understand what She’s doing, but She’s fighting back.”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “I told you, Foord has killed communications with us.”

  “But you have your devices. Do you or don’t you know what’s happening in the Gulf?”

  “We don’t know. He seems almost like Her.”

  “I met him here, remember. And dealt with him over Copeland. He was always like Her.”

  “But we know he’s damaged Her, Director, and we know he’s trying to finish Her. We can’t read Her responses. But we don’t interpret it as any joining of forces.”

  “You’ve contradicted yourself at least three times, but let that pass. We can agree that he’s damaged Her, and that nobody else has done that.” Despite what he felt for Foord, he remembered the genuine sense of wonder he’d had on hearing that. “So why isn’t anyone helping him? Does all of Horus Fleet have to remain around Sakhra?”

  “Director Swann, believe me. If Foord fails, you’ll need the entire Fleet.”

  “Not even the Charles Manson could take on the entire Fleet. Are you saying She can?”

  “If Foord fails, She’ll come for Sakhra. It may be over-provision, but it’s better that Sakhra’s defended with the whole Fleet.”

  One advantage of the microphone was the amount of sceptical expressions Swann could safely direct at it. Not even the voice seemed to believe that last answer.

  Swann let the silence grow long enough to become uncomfortable. “If,” he said, “they’re so closely matched that one Outsider can damage Her, how many would it take to be sure of defeating Her?”

  “What do you mean by that, Director Swann? Specifically?”

  “One Outsider’s damaged Her. Two or three more could finish Her. Send us two or three more. Is that specific enough?”

  “No. Outsiders don’t fight in teams, they fight alone. And if She defeats Foord and comes to Sakhra, the Commonwealth will need all of them for what happens next.”

  7

  Foord stood in the mouth of the midsection crater and looked across the gap, blinking, at his ship.

  He felt cold. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed his fingers. There were veins and tendons and nails—immaculate nails—but the flesh tones were gradations of grey and silver. He felt cold, then it occurred to him that he was standing open to space and didn’t have a suit. He was standing—gravity worked here—and breathing; he took in what felt like air through his open mouth, and his chest rose and fell. I’m a construct, he told himself, a construct of liquid silver made by whatever lives in this ship, but I’m also me, with all my memories and motives. I’ve just woken to life, but I remember all my life leading up to this. Why didn’t they just make something that looked like me? Why did they make me like this, full of everything I am? It seems like overengineering.

  He looked down from his raised hand, along his arm, to the rest of his body. Large, heavily muscled; toned and tidy; everything I’ve woken up to, every day, over there on the Charles Manson. How did they know it all? And why have they put me here? He felt cold.

  Outside the mouth of the crater, between him and his ship, floated nearly three hundred dark gunmetal spiders. They’d been about to pour into this crater, this open wound we made in Her side. They’d been about to enter Her and attack Her, like She had sent Hers to attack us, but when this cold light filled the crater I told Cyr to hold them back. (Did he remember that, or just assume it? He didn’t know.) And behind him, in the crater’s deepest recesses—behind the swirling darkness which hid those recesses from the Charles Manson—were the giant coils and festoons of The Rope, the thing She’d made by joining pieces of them and Her, and had then taken into Herself.

  He
felt cold. Not because he was standing open to space—that was a cold he’d never have had time to feel, he’d have died from it instantly, if he’d been alive. The cold was inside him. He knew he couldn’t possibly be alive, but he avoided the temptation of trying to define Alive. I have motives and memories and sensory inputs and outputs and a sense of myself, just like me in my ship over there. Maybe more so. I’m almost more than me. I must be looking across from the Bridge and seeing me here, but I can’t look back and see myself over there because I’m hidden in the Bridge and I don’t have a screen that gives me magnifications of things moments before I ask for them. The grammar doesn’t work, it’s too clumsy. Words don’t work. I’m here in the crater and I’m over there sixteen hundred feet away in my ship. I can’t call the Foord over there Him, it’s Me.

  Self-referential, like a book reading a book. Same software, different hardware. The software is all my memories and motives, everything I am, but I’m made of liquid silver which remains solid while it keeps my shape. I’m not organic—no, don’t go there either, don’t try defining that. I’ve been made.

  I grew out of a pool of silver on a floor somewhere behind me on this ship. I’ve been made by the people who live in this ship. (Yes, People. Who Live.) I know them as Them and People, not Her or It, because there’s more than one and they interact socially, but I don’t know what they look like or why they made me or why their ship has done these things. I know less about them than a hammer knows about the owner of the hand holding it—less than an atom in the handle of the hammer—but they made me like this, and put me here, for a reason.

  And that’s what it is, he thought, looking out at the spiders floating between him and his ship. They were motionless, dark against the silver of the Charles Manson. They floated in a narrow compressed formation so that he only saw the front five or six bodies but saw hundreds of limbs, some broken, sprouting from those behind, like figures of Kali. He knew he would try to stop them when they entered the crater. He neither wanted to nor was aware of being compelled to; it was just how he was made. It was inevitable, like breathing, though he stood open to space and wasn’t alive.