Faith

by John Love

  A half-mile in silence, with the swivelguns on the outer fence tracking them all the way, and with the tall waving grasses of Blentport looking as though any minute they would crash down in torrents to engulf the road which so tentatively parted them, and then came the middle fence, as high as the first; then a gatehouse, bigger than the first; and another assembly of military vehicles and soldiers, also bigger than the first. They were passed through quickly and politely, and escorted another half mile to the third fence and gate. The third fence was thirty feet high, partly chainlink and partly stone. From the amount of visible and conventional defences covering it (swivelguns, heat and motion sensors, lasers, arclights) Foord could imagine what else was hidden inside it, or, because it was camouflaged or microminiaturised, simply invisible on its surface.

  Everything about the third fence area was bigger: the gate and gatehouse (both large, solid, real stone constructions, unlike their more makeshift equivalents on the two inner fences), the military vehicles, and even the soldiers themselves.

  Boussaid, however, was not big; he was about Thahl’s height, balding, and plumpish. He was standing alone in front of the gate in the third fence.

  “Commander Foord! You’re very welcome.”

  All around him were lights and sirens, troops running to and fro, military vehicles gunning their engines, crews barking out orders; yet somehow, without shouting, Boussaid’s voice carried to the landchariot.

  Foord got out, followed by Thahl, and went over to Boussaid, who shook hands. His face seemed open and amiable and generous, which normally would have made Foord instantly suspicious.

  “The only real person on Blentport. Did Smithson really say that?”

  “I’m told he did. He also said you can get us back to my ship. Can you?”

  “Of course, Commander.”

  “And the landchariot?”

  “You can ride it right up to your ship, if you wish…But first,” he motioned casually towards the gatehouse, “let’s go in and talk. I need to brief you on this situation. I keep a small room or two in some of these gatehouses, and I have one just here. Come in, come in…”

  The gatehouse was a two-storey stone building, blocky and squat, not unlike some Sakhran buildings. Foord noticed as they approached it that its outlines were softened by creepers trained along its walls and even—he did a doubletake at this—some hanging flowerbaskets and windowboxes. Three plates and three water-dishes were placed in an orderly line outside the main door, where a large tortoiseshell cat, orbited by two silently fighting kittens, surveyed them impassively. They walked through a couple of anterooms and into a small inner office.

  “The kittens are Dollop and Globule. I haven’t thought of a name for their mother yet.”

  “Fundamental Particle?” suggested Thahl.

  “A nice idea, but not a name for a cat. I could give you a whole dissertation on the naming of cats…perhaps when you get back.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Thahl.

  “Do all your gatehouses have hanging baskets and cats and windowboxes?”

  “Most have cats, Commander. Members of the garrison make pets of them, or vice-versa. Flowerbaskets and windowboxes, no—only the gatehouses where I keep a small room, as here.”

  There was a desk but no other obvious office furniture, only a couple of armchairs and a sofa. Standing in front of the desk, Foord saw several documents arranged neatly—nobody would ever completely eliminate paper—which were annotated in red, green and blue, in a hand which, even upside-down, Foord could see was regular and careful. Boussaid’s writing implements were set out on the desk; they were old-fashioned, functional, devoid of personal insignia, but well maintained. Foord’s own personal possessions were similar. He began to like Boussaid.

  Apart from the documents and several comms, the only other object on the desk was a still photograph, in a plain wooden frame, of a woman and two children, all three slightly plump, amiable and open-faced. Boussaid let Foord look at it for a while before he spoke.

  “Ever see people after a really bad brawl, Commander?”

  “Oh no, Colonel, never. When we put into a port, nobody is ever less than totally welcoming.”

  “Usually,” Boussaid continued imperturbably, “the aftermath of a brawl here on the Port is messy. Cracked heads and broken bones; blood; missing teeth; people battered from head to foot, usually in an area equidistant from each.”

  Foord’s smile began just as Boussaid’s vanished.

  “But not this time, Commander. I’ve just visited some Horus crew members who were involved in this incident with your people. They’re all badly injured, one of them very badly. Probably you know this. I certainly expected it. What I didn’t expect was the way they’d been injured. It was neat and clean and deliberate, and very vicious; and totally disproportionate.” He shifted his gaze, from Foord to Thahl. “It’s as if you attacked them, apart from the bit about Vicious and Disproportionate.”

  Unusually, Thahl was taken unawares. He became suddenly and diplomatically absorbed in the indicator board on the wall: nineteen lights, one per grid.

  “Or as if,” Boussaid went on, “Faith was already here, disguised as two of your crew. That’s how clean.”

  Sixteen of the lights, Thahl noted, flashed red, indicating a ship present. This included the light for Grid Nine, which housed the Charles Manson.

  “I’m sorry it happened, Colonel. But it does happen every time.”

  Thahl saw Foord and Boussaid lock eyes and remain so for some time without either speaking. Finally Boussaid broke contact. He flipped open his wristcom, said “Confirmed. Start now,” snapped it shut and said to Foord “I’ve just activated certain plans, Commander.”

  Before Foord could reply, he noticed a red light go out on the indicator board; a small ship lifting off from one of the minor grids. Through a window he watched it ascend, noiselessly and vertically.

  His wristcom buzzed.

  “You’d better answer it, Commander. It’s connected with my call.”

  Foord did so. “Commander, it’s Cyr. I’ve just received a call from the garrison commander’s staff, with orders which they say have your authority.”

  “What are the orders?”

  “To be ready for your arrival here in about thirty minutes, and to be ready, at any time from now until you arrive, to go to Armed Shutdown. Are those orders confirmed?”

  Even Thahl could no longer maintain the polite pretence of interest in the screens. Armed Shutdown was the last resort of a grounded ship under heavy attack; it made it impregnable and immovable. To Foord’s knowledge it had never been used before by a Commonwealth ship in a Commonwealth port; not even by an Outsider.

  Foord glanced briefly at Boussaid.

  “Yes,” he said. “Confirmed.”

  “I hope Boussaid knows what he’s doing, Commander.”

  “I’m with him now,” Foord said drily, “and I believe he does.”

  He closed his wristcom, slowly and thoughtfully. From a distance, another ship lifted off and another of the red monitor lights went out. This one was a very large ship, a Class 097. For the first few hundred feet of its ascent it rode on its noiseless magnetic drive; then its atmosphere boosters cut in, their multiple trails looking—and sounding—like a set of giant fingernails screeking across the grey slate of the sky. Foord waited until the noise receded.

  “Armed Shutdown, Colonel?”

  “It may come to that. Or it may not, it’s hard to read…Excuse me.” He opened one of the comms on the table and spoke into it without activating the screen. “He’s here now, start sending, I want him to see for himself…. Thank you.” He activated the comm screen, and spun it round to face Foord, whose expression did not change.

  “This is presumably from one of your VSTOLs?”

  “Yes. I have four hovering over Grid Nine at the moment.”

  Thahl’s expression didn’t change either, but only because his face was made that way. Inside, there was a surge of
feelings he couldn’t precisely identify when he saw his ship—a slender silver delta, sixteen hundred feet long—on Grid 9. At times he’d felt he might not see it again. The sound of Foord’s voice jerked him back.

  “And the people crowding the Grid, who are they?”

  “A large part of Blentport’s civilian population. Plus the crews of Horus Fleet ships waiting to join the cordon, plus a large detachment of my troops.”

  As if on cue, the comm screen went blank. Boussaid had not deactivated it.

  “And that’s it. Nothing has happened yet but anything might. And I may be one of the last people on the Port prepared to do anything about it.”

  “You said you could get me back to my ship. How?”

  “A couple of hours ago, Commander, I sent a large detachment from what’s left of my garrison to clear Grid Nine.”

  “And?”

  “As I said, they’re still there, among that crowd. They reported initially that the mood was too tense to attempt any dispersal. Then they said that unless I actually ordered them back they’d stay, to maintain a discreet presence and contain any disorder. I understood.” He paused, then laughed softly. “They’ve become like the people they were sent to disperse. With most of my garrison in the highlands, and the problem of how to get you through that, particularly when you insist on doing it in a landchariot, the last thing I want to do is even hint at mutiny.” Again he laughed. “You may already have protected us from Faith, Commander, because every minute your ship remains here, Blentport becomes less and less worthy of Her attention as a target.”

  Out of Foord’s sight, Thahl smiled privately and thought I like him, how he looks askance at the world. Smithson was right. He usually is.

  Another ship roared overhead. Another light went out.

  “I’ve tried to defuse the situation by hurrying the liftoff of the Horus Fleet ships grounded here, some of them before their refits have been completed, but too many of them are still grounded. The call I made just now activated plans to take you—yes, and your landchariot—under heavy escort to your ship on Grid Nine, and to get you and Thahl safely aboard. I’ll be going along in the lead escort vehicle, with what remains of my garrison.”

  “How do you intend to get us aboard?”

  “You’d think it ridiculous if I told you, and there isn’t time to argue. Call it a last throw of the dice. Just go along with whatever happens.”

  Foord thought about what Smithson had said, added his own impression so far of Boussaid, and said “All right, Colonel. And thank you.”

  “One more thing before we move off, Commander. When we reach Grid Nine, and when you see what happens there, you may start to question my judgement, so remember this. I believe it’s inevitable that someone, almost certainly a member or members of my garrison, is going to die before we get you back on your ship today.”

  6

  Nobody hated Foord except Other People. Nobody would ever refuse him cooperation (indeed, left to themselves they would heap it upon him) except that there were Other People. Other People had to be considered. Other People still clung to preconceptions, still harboured gangrenous prejudices—in short, hated him—and clicked their tongues at the vast majority who would otherwise have flocked to welcome the Commander of an Outsider. These Other People even hated the shape of an Outsider, because it was unlike ordinary ships: elemental and simple, a slender delta without corrugations or excrescences or power-bulges.

  Always it was Other People. And Other People when asked would cite others, who when asked would cite others, so that wherever the Charles Manson made planetfall and Foord had to leave his ship to have dealings with what Other People would call the real world, he would find himself shunted through a series of shadowy anterooms where conversations died as he entered and restarted as he left and where always those Other People, the ones who really did hate him, had gone just moments before, leaving a chair still warm or a drink half-drunk or something daubed on a wall. He understood this and recognised that many of them genuinely believed it. In his absence, he knew they would turn to each other and remark on how much some Other People hated him.

  When he and Thahl left the gatehouse and walked back to the landchariot they found it surrounded by heavy armour, with guns peering down at it from all angles. The six medium-calibre rapidfire guns trained on the landchariot’s rear belonged to the two triple-turreted sixwheels which had followed them through the outer and middle gates; the slender swivelguns ahead, along the top of the inner fence, would coldly track anything which moved; and the heavy-calibre guns massed further ahead were mounted on ten huge armoured twelvetracks waiting to escort Foord safely across the last few miles to Grid Nine, where, it seemed, most of Blentport waited to watch him rejoin the Charles Manson. Or watch him try to rejoin it.

  Outside, a loudspeaker emitted a single harmonic and some three or four hundred troops apparently sprang from the ground and started milling silently around the ten huge twelvetracks. A second harmonic and they disappeared inside them, as if soaked up. A third, lower harmonic and the inner gate began to open: it was a large section of the fence, a chain-link and girder latticework over thirty feet wide, and it took its time. The ENTER NOW sign flashed, the driver’s whip uncoiled and spat in the heavy air, and the chimaera, heaving their great grey buttocks from side to side and forced forwards only after some abortive plunges to the left and right, reluctantly took the landchariot through the gate. The ten twelvetracks immediately clotted around it, two in front, three on either side and two behind, as though parcelling the infection entering a wound; and then the whole cavalcade—in scale, a mongrel dog escorted by ten elephants—started down the long wide road leading to the Grids at the heart of Blentport. The same slow mechanisms which had prised the gate open now closed it deafeningly behind them, causing a great voiceless flock of white birds to rise from the grass and resettle, like shaken powder.

  The swivelguns on the long curve of the inner fence, either side of the gate for hundreds of feet, tracked them through in finely graduated arcs and continued to track them into the distance; and then, ten minutes later when Boussaid signalled the gatehouse from the lead vehicle that they were ENTERING GRID AREA NOW, swung away and forgot them.

  •

  “Grid 19,” Boussaid announced over Foord’s wristcom, unnecessarily, as they passed a junction in the road where a large sign said GRID 19. “One of the outlying minor grids. About fifteen minutes to your ship, unless we encounter anything on the way.”

  “Looks like we already have,” Foord replied, referring to a VSTOL which was now following them, hovering silently a hundred feet directly above with full grappling tackle hanging underneath it like entrails.

  When Boussaid did not answer, Foord shouted, over the noise of the escort vehicles, “Is that VSTOL responding to your orders?”

  “Yes, Commander. To about the same extent as this escort.”

  Grid 19 spread out below them to the left. It was a sunken concrete and metal latticework about a thousand feet long by four hundred wide, crisscrossed with walkways and surrounded by antigrav generators set into the lawned slopes curving down to its surface, and by derricks and cranes bent over it like a mixture of tall and short surgeons over an operating table. It was ringed by a wide tree-lined road along which were more low buildings, mostly engineering facilities. The rest of the Grid’s capacity was underground. It was a minor Grid, so it would be capable of refitting anything up to light cruiser size, perhaps Class 079 or 080, but nothing larger.

  It was almost deserted. Not only did it not house a ship, but there were hardly any people—just a few at some windows, Foord noted, speaking into wristcoms as the landchariot and its escort passed by.

  Grid 14 contained a Class 047 light cruiser. As Foord looked down from the raised road and saw the Grid swept clear of everything except the ship, whose flat tapered hull shone like the blade of a throwing knife, he knew immediately what was going to happen next, even before the liftoff alarms starte
d blaring and Boussaid started yelling through the wristcom to take cover.

  “You mean we should crawl under the landchariot, Colonel?”

  “I mean that ship is lifting off now and I have no idea what it’s going to do next!”

  “Aren’t you supposed to have an idea?”

  Boussaid cut the connection.

  Outside, the liftoff alarm had risen a semitone and the escort vehicles were closing in a protective circle around the landchariot, which was lurching with the panicked movements of the chimaera. The two VSTOLs overhead increased their height and moved away to either side of the road.

  “Commander,” Thahl began, “perhaps we should….”

  “No time. That ship’s only an 047 but if he’s really going to attack, we’re finished. A hundred of those escort vehicles couldn’t stop him.”

  But to Foord it was already clear what the ship was going to do. He settled back and watched as it lifted off, with the silence and precision of the magnetic drive used for atmospheric manoeuvres, and moved towards the raised road. The escort vehicles—much less silently but with equal precision—tightened their outward-facing protective circle around the landchariot. Despite their size, they looked like models arranged on the road by a giant invisible hand, a hand which had now returned holding a silver knifeblade towards them. The ship came closer.

  It paused only once. Then, as the dust and exhaust fumes churned by the vehicles began to settle, and in a silence which was broken only by one noise which had been mounting all the time, the noise of the chimaera screaming, it passed slowly and deliberately no more than thirty feet above them. It was only an 047, but its long flat hull seemed to go on forever. The chimaera screamed not in fear, but in outrage at the wrongness of its noiseless passage above them. The ship disturbed the air no more than if it had been a long silver trapdoor sliding endlessly open, and it went on and on.