by John Love
Its volume had increased. Now it covered the entire floor, to a depth of inches.
•
On the Bridge, Foord cried out as he watched Thahl die in the crater. He had stayed outwardly impassive when the others went down, even himself, but now he could not look across the Bridge at Thahl; they were both embarrassed.
He watched the pools become beads, and the beads combine and recombine.
“Get us out of here, Kaang.”
“Commander, our spiders—”
“Forget them, Cyr, they’re already finished. Get us out of here, Kaang. Now.”
The Charles Manson’s manoeuvre jets fountained, a gesture of parting. It turned away, engaged its ion drive at seventy percent, and ran. We keep moving backwards and forwards, thought Foord, like masturbation.
•
The carpet of liquid silver stretched continuously from the mouth of the crater to its recesses, where the darkness hung. Points on its surface rose into small conical shapes or sank into small conical depressions, within a vertical range of no more than plus or minus an inch; they formed and disappeared randomly, as though caused by the first isolated drops of a rainstorm. Colours—cobalt, violet, burgundy, dark bluish grey—swirled across its surface like cloud shadows.
About thirty spiders were in the crater; the others still floated outside. They walked through the silver liquid—it no longer flowed around them—picking their steps with human delicacy, swivelling to find recognisable shapes of opposition but seeing none. They saw the Charles Manson turn away from them and run, but it meant nothing to them; its location was not in their mission parameters, not until they had done what they came to do and were ready to leave Her.
Near the mouth of the crater a small conical point rose to about an inch above the surface, but did not subside. It continued to rise, drawing more liquid up after it. It was still silver but grew duller as it solidified and cohered and became the shape Foord had expected: man-sized, a triangular body with three jointed limbs pushing up and out from each corner, and no face.
If there was a moment when it could be said to have started its existence, it was when it stepped clear of the silver liquid, leaving a hole behind it which closed Plop, and pivoted to survey the Charles Manson’s spiders around it. They looked back impassively. Rising on first one corner of its body and then another, moving in spasms of right-angles and diagonals like a new chessboard figure, it plunged amongst the dark spiders and shredded three of them before they could react. A fourth, remembering the earlier encounters on the Charles Manson, snipped a joint off one of its legs, but this time the silver spider did not subdivide down to nothing. It stopped and looked, facelessly, into the recesses of the crater, where others like itself were forming.
Initially there were three more. The silver closed Plop behind them, Plop Plop, as they stepped clear of it and started their existence without ceremony. They joined the first and arranged themselves into a diamond, moving with stop-go oddness. They shifted from one direction to another, and from stillness to speed and back to stillness, with an abruptness which made the Charles Manson’s spiders look human.
•
The Bridge screen, without being told to, had maintained its local magnification on the crater as they ran. At a hundred and fifty thousand feet Kaang stopped the Charles Manson and turned it in its own length to face Her.
The screen showed more silver spiders forming. As they rose up out of the liquid carpet, the remains of their opponents—dismembered swiftly and without mess or passion by the original four—were dissolving down into the silver. It welcomed them.
The crater was now full of silver spiders. It seethed with the oddness of their movements as they stepped clear of the silver liquid; the Plops of the liquid closing behind them, if the Bridge screen had transmitted sounds, would have been like a choir of sphincters. Sideways, forwards, diagonally, they flicked themselves into diamond formations, four to a diamond, and made their way to the mouth of the crater, where they fired their onboard motors in sequence and launched themselves outwards.
The Bridge screen panned back. A vomit of silver spiders burst out of Her midsection crater and hit the rest of the Charles Manson’s spiders, still floating alongside the crater mouth, and the second and larger part of the massacre began.
96, said the screen’s headup display impassively, against 261.
It was like Sakhrans fighting humans—more so, because Sakhrans fought as individuals and the silver spiders fought with perfect co-ordination. On the Charles Manson, they’d chosen to collapse and subdivide when damaged, and even then, any one was a match for at least six opponents. Now, they were outnumbered only three to one.
95, said the headup display, facing 187. 95, facing 163.
Two to one, Foord corrected himself, his horror rising as the odds fell; less than two to one. He had foreseen this, so his horror contained no panic; it was as coldly mathematical as the Bridge screen’s accounting. What was happening was devoid of drama or uncertainty, but still horrifying.
94, said the headup display, facing 123.
The silver spiders were not fighting their opponents, they were merely shredding them and parcelling them into manageable pieces which were handed back down the line into the mouth of the crater where the silver liquid welcomed them into itself.
94, said the headup display, facing 87.
It was an industrial operation. They were loading cargo, not fighting a battle, and seemed genuinely unaware that the cargo was trying to resist them while they loaded it. And now that the operation was into its final stages, it accelerated.
93, said the Bridge screen, facing 45. 93, facing 9.
“Particle beams?” Cyr asked. Her voice betrayed nothing.
“No, not on the crater,” Foord said. Neither did his.
93, facing 0.
“I meant on them, Commander, if they come for us.”
“They won’t. She’s taken enough of us. Now She wants Sakhra.”
•
Nobody spoke on the Bridge. They were thinking the same thing but wouldn’t say it aloud. They all go into the dark, Foord recited to himself, they all go into the dark and become part of Her.
He wasn’t thinking of the ninety-three that had just entered Her. Neither was he thinking of their own spiders, dismembered and parcelled into the crater, or of the spiders and hull-plates taken before from the Charles Manson and swallowed by the crater; that was just hardware and substances.
He was thinking of the original five silver figures; ourselves, blinking at us from out of that hole in Her side, the hole we made. Ourselves. Those five figures carried our souls, and our souls have become part of Her.
Not Have Become: Always Were.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “impossible things. So have you. We can’t leave them unspoken.”
“I thought that’s exactly what we do on your ship,” Smithson said.
Foord ignored that. “Those five figures, we knew when we first saw them that they were us. We saw it behind their eyes. All our memories and motives. Even souls, if we have them. Everything that animates us, animated them.
“And She already knew it. When She made those five, She already knew what we are. She put it into them when She put them in the mouth of the crater. She took it back into Herself when She took them back. I think She’s always known what we are. Since before we existed.”
“Commander,” Thahl said, almost gently, “we’ve turned away from the Commonwealth. We don’t know what we are. Where do we belong now?”
“Perhaps more with Her than the Commonwealth. There’s more of us in Her than we ever gave to the Commonwealth.” What did I just say?
“Commander,” Smithson said, “do you know what you’re saying?”
“Are you saying you haven’t thought the same thing?”
“Are you saying this, Commander?” Cyr asked.
“She means…” Thahl began.
“I know what she means. Is it me speaking,
or Her?”
Again, nobody spoke on the Bridge.
“This is me speaking.” Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure. “I won’t submit to passive submission to a higher power—Her, or the Commonwealth. Nothing outside of me has the right to know my soul. I never really knew what I meant when I said Instrument of Ourselves, but I do now. It means that.”
Foord looked at the Bridge screen where She still floated, apparently immobile. She was further away now, a hundred and fifty thousand feet instead of sixteen hundred, and travelling faster through the Gulf than before, but the screen maintained magnification and their course and speed matched Hers, and the Gulf was empty of reference points. It was as if they were both stationary, and She was only sixteen hundred feet away. She seemed always to be only sixteen hundred feet away.
“The Commonwealth has taken a lot from us, but not as much as She has. The Commonwealth is just a machine, not a god. We must fight the god. We must go on and destroy Her, no matter what things we learn about Her. There can be no time or space except the time and space we take to destroy Her.” He knew he was close to incoherence, but he went on. “No space in front or behind. No time before, after, or during.”
He only understood half of what he said, and had no idea what any of them would say next, himself included. And he would never know, because there was an interruption from somewhere outside.
“Commander,” Thahl said, “we have incoming.”
“I thought I told you not to—”
“The signal isn’t from Sakhra, Commander. Or from Earth. It’s from Her.”
8
She had sent Her signal openly, with no attempt to disguise its origin. She even followed the standard Commonwealth ship-to-ship protocols, prefacing it with a code on the usual hailing frequency; in effect, a formal request for their acceptance of a communication, which with equal formality they refused. She ignored their refusal, and tried to bypass their defences and put Her signal directly onto the Bridge screen.
“Block it, please, Thahl.”
“Commander, it might be….”
Foord looked up at him sharply. “Block it.”
Her image on the Bridge screen became blurred and overlaid with static, a normal and temporary side-effect of the blocking of an incoming signal. When the block was accomplished, the static would clear from the screen; which ought to have been now.
“Thahl?”
“The signal’s growing more powerful, Commander. I’ll try to…”
“Thahl, the screen.”
The Bridge screen had never before gone dark while the ship was operational. The sudden absence of its light was like the sudden absence of air, a visual suffocation. Thahl switched to backup and it relit, showing Her image again, overlaid with static; and again it fell dark. The screen had many backups and failsafes, and Thahl used them all. It stayed dark.
“Smithson,” Foord began, carefully controlling his voice, “do we…”
“Yes, Commander, we still have Her on scanners, and She hasn’t changed course.” His voice tailed away.
The screen relit. It glowed with a soft opalescence, but it was absolutely blank. Worse than dark. And it was changing, in a way it had no business to: changing its texture and surface contours.
The screen covered the curved wall of the Bridge, as thinly and closely as a coat of paint; but now its surface rippled like silk, and something was trying to form on it, behind it, which was impossible. On the segment of the screen facing Foord, two shapes were trying to push through it, a rectangle and an oval. Their meaning was clear to Foord, because the oval sat above the rectangle and suggested a head and shoulders, pushing through a silk shroud.
“Her face,” Thahl said. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“No!” Foord shouted. “Not on my screen, not on my Bridge, it belongs out there. Thahl, we don’t want to see this. Please, block it.”
“It might be Her face, Commander.”
“I said block it!”
Thahl pressed some panels. Nothing happened. He pressed some more. The silken texture, and the shapes forming behind it, slowly drained from the Bridge screen. The screen sank back to its normal contours, went dark and relit, this time with Her image, magnified as before so She seemed only sixteen hundred feet away. Her drives were flickering through the wreckage at the stern in a way they had not done before, and the screen’s headups said that Her course was unchanged but Her speed had dropped to thirty-five percent; Kaang matched it. The midsection crater remained dark.
Foord slowly let out his breath. Something had told him that they should not, absolutely not, see whatever had tried to form on the screen. He knew that no signal from another ship, however powerful, could force itself on the Charles Manson if they decided to block it; finally they had, but he was still uneasy. He knew Her abilities with communications. Or rather, he didn’t know them, not all of them.
“Blocked, Commander.” Thahl’s voice was carefully neutral.
Foord nodded briefly, and looked again at Her image on the screen. Something about Her wasn’t right. She had slowed to thirty percent, said the headups, and Her stern drives were flickering fitfully. He thought again of naked bulbs in cellars. We’re fighting Her through a solar system, and She compresses it down to cellars and dripping alleys.
The alarms murmured.
“What—”
“Another signal, Commander,” Thahl said.
Nothing reached the screen. Her image was still there. She was now down to twenty-five percent, and Her stern drives were cutting out, refiring, and cutting out again.
“Where? Where is Her signal?”
Thahl’s hands flew over his console. His claws started to unsheath and retract, almost but not quite in time with the on-off stuttering of Her stern drives. For a moment he seemed close to panic, something Foord had never seen in him before; then he subsided, and resumed his normal demeanour. He looked round at Foord.
“This signal isn’t aimed at the screen, Commander. It’s aimed directly in here, into the Bridge….”
“What?”
“….and so far, we can’t block it.”
A white light filled the Bridge, like the light they had seen in the midsection crater. They blinked in it. It made them feel cold. It had no source and cast no shadows. It went everywhere; even the air glowed with it. It washed over them, turning their faces to pocked landscapes and their figures to dishevelled statuary.
Foord held his hand in front of his face and studied it, as he had seen himself do in the mouth of the crater. The ripe sweat under his clothes turned fish-cold and clammy. His breath actually frosted in front of his face, stinging his lips and nostrils; and through its vapour he saw, strewn over the floor, the rubbish and debris which he’d refused to move.
Now it started to move itself.
It swirled across the floor in miniature vortexes which sprang up and died at random, like the life-forms on Horus 5. A figure forming in the middle of the Bridge was making it swirl. The figure was solidifying out of the light. It was still indistinct and shifting, a hollow latticework of vapour, like the vapour of Foord’s breath; but it had a head and shoulders, arms and legs, in approximately human proportions.
Foord drew his sidearm. Cyr had already drawn hers and was aiming, and Thahl had started towards it.
“Don’t!” Smithson bellowed. “Don’t touch it! Don’t go near it.”
The headups on the Bridge screen kept assessing and reassessing it: it was a hologram, it was a solid object, it was neither, it was both, it was unreadable. It was also unexpectedly beautiful, a roiling hollow vapour-shape lit from within. It flicked on-off as it tried to form. On the Bridge screen, Her stern drives flicked off-on in the same rhythm.
Her speed dropped to nineteen percent and She started to pitch and yaw. The energy required to project something into the Bridge against all their inbuilt defences was unthinkable, just as the act itself was unthinkable; not even another Outsider could have done it.
&nb
sp; “Commander,” Smithson said , “She’s draining Herself. Just to communicate with us, She’s draining Herself!”
“And your point is?”
“My point is, She might be vulnerable to our particle beams, so why haven’t you thought of using our particle beams? And,” to Cyr, “why haven’t you?”
“You’re right,” Foord muttered. You’re always right, you smug slug. “Fire them, Cyr. Not into the craters, but everywhere else.”
The beams lanced out. Her flickerfields met them and held them, but—said the Bridge screen headups—only just. Her stern drives went dark, stuttered and refired, and the still-unformed figure standing in the middle of the Bridge actually doubled over, as if in pain.
“You see? You see?” Smithson shouted, adding unnecessarily “That’s what you should have done!”
“Again, Cyr. Keep firing them.”
Cyr did so, again and again, imagining her finger was not pressing a firing-button but digging into one of Smithson’s eyes. Always, always, he was right, and always, always, she could never forgive him for it.
Her flickerfields still held the beams, but each time Cyr fired, the figure on the Bridge weakened in definition. It threw its arms up around its head. If they had been able to see its face properly, it might have been screaming. The vapour which made up its outline started to disperse, as if blown by a wind. It was fading, and finally faded to nothing, but the white light which had brought it, and out of which it had formed, still filled the Bridge. The debris still swirled fitfully across the floor. Their breath still frosted in front of their faces. They still felt cold.
Her stern drives fell dark and did not refire, and She came to a halt. The Charles Manson halted with Her, and Cyr continued stabbing out the particle beams. Her flickerfields—coloured a distinctive neon purple, unlike those of any other ship—were getting paler and thinner. When they deployed you could still see through them to the silver of Her hull underneath, and the screen headups showed that their power was dropping, and that She was deploying them nanoseconds later. With every firing, the beams were getting closer to penetrating the fields; to actually hitting Her.