by John Love
Later, Foord learned that the four injured men were crew members of that ship.
Foord remembered the 047 more vividly even than the final events which were to precede the Charles Manson’s liftoff from Grid Nine, not because it proved him right about its intentions—it was only making a gesture at Foord; an actual attack was impossible—but because it proved something else, something Foord had always understood intellectually but had never seen demonstrated physically.
The ship was only an 047, but Foord had not exaggerated when he said that a hundred escort vehicles could not have stopped it; yet a thousand such ships could not have stopped the Charles Manson. There were different orders of magnitude. He sat in the lurching landchariot, darkened by the never-ending shadow of the 047’s passage, and reflected on them.
The ship finally passed overhead, continued a few hundred feet and then rose into the grey sky; it could have done that directly from Grid 14, but a gesture was a gesture. Foord opened his wristcom and made one of his own; for him, a rare one.
“Colonel Boussaid?”
“Yes, yes, I know, you were right, it didn’t attack.”
“I owe you an apology. We both knew it wouldn’t attack, but you were commanding an escort and I wasn’t. Only one of us could afford to be clever and rely on assumptions. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Commander, that’s gracious. But we haven’t made it yet. The last bit is the biggest gamble.”
Orders of magnitude, thought Foord. The 047’s power dwarfed that of the escort vehicles like a boulder would dwarf a handful of pebbles. Yet there was another scale of power looming beyond that: the power of the Charles Manson, which would dwarf an 047 like a mountain would dwarf a boulder.
And then there was Faith. And Faith—he remembered what the priests at the orphanage had beaten into him—can move mountains.
7
Grid 9 spread out below them and Foord saw his ship again for the first time in two days. And because its shape was the symbol he most recognised, because it stood at every junction in his personal roadmap, because it joined lines which for other people were joined by symbols of home or family or friends, for a moment he saw only his ship and did not see what had happened around it.
Grid 9 was full to bursting. There were dozens of maintenance and service vehicles and cargo vehicles, large and small, called in to Grid 9 from all over Blentport to speed the refit, and simply abandoned where they stood when their work was done. There were thousands—maybe five or six thousand—variously sitting, standing or walking around the Grid and the grassy slopes leading down to it. They had gathered there, slowly at first as the other refits were abandoned to give the Charles Manson priority, then more quickly as news spread of the two incidents of last night and this morning. They were mainly Blentport workers from this Grid and others, and officers and crew from Horus Fleet ships; but there was also a scattering of the slate-grey uniforms of Blentport garrison, at least three hundred. Foord assumed they were the detachment Boussaid sent earlier, who hadn’t quite mutinied, but didn’t return when ordered.
Officers, crew, Blentport workers, garrison members: they each had their own shifting motives, which might turn against each other, or focus on the Charles Manson. Their ambiguity hung murmuring over the whole Grid. It seemed, simultaneously, to stop short of open hostility and to go beyond it.
And in the middle of it was the Charles Manson. It was beautiful, a clean silver shape sixteen hundred feet long, tapering from a width of three hundred feet at its stern, where the main drives bulged, to a pointed snout so sharp a man could actually prick his finger on it. It was as concrete and emphatic as a noun written on a page, with the scattering of people and vehicles around it like prepositions.
“Soon be over now,” Boussaid said in the wristcom. Foord heard tension, or maybe it was tiredness, in his voice.
The convoy reached the turnoff leading down to Grid 9, then halted. One by one the escort vehicles cut their motors to idle. As their engine roar diminished, the murmuring of those crowding the Grid crept up the approach road to replace it. It was an indistinct sound, as indistinct as the motives which produced it.
The two VSTOLs which had shadowed them since they entered the inner gate moved off to join five others—not four, Foord noted, but five now—hovering directly over the Charles Manson, for what purpose and on whose orders Foord could not begin to imagine.
“Neither can I,” Boussaid replied when Foord called him, “so forget them. They can’t matter now.”
Most of the people on the Grid and on the grassy slopes around it were now standing and looking up at the convoy, then back at the ship. The murmur of their voices increased, maybe a semitone. Their mood was as unreadable as the ship. The Charles Manson remained still and silent, with every port and orifice closed and opaqued.
The engines of the escort vehicles thundered anew, and they and the landchariot moved down the approach road.
The Charles Manson carried many missiles, of all shapes and sizes and designs. The last fifty, including the two strange ones made to Foord’s specification, had only been loaded that morning. The special lowloader which had transported them now stood abandoned at the point where the approach road joined the Grid. So, instead of sweeping dramatically out into the choked arena, the convoy halted. The escort vehicles disgorged troops who set about lining the approach road to hold the crowd back, a job which they did amid much heel-clattering, saluting and mutual barking of orders. A corporal strode briskly towards the lowloader, presumably to drive it out of the way. He climbed the access ladder up its mountainous flank and disappeared into the cab. For a while nothing happened.
“What’s keeping you?” yelled one of Boussaid’s sergeants.
“It won’t tell me its start code.”
From the modest crowd clustered around the entrance to the Grid came a modest ripple of laughter. It increased when another sergeant grabbed a loudhailer and demanded that The Driver Of This Vehicle should Make Himself Known. It subsided slightly when, after a hurried conference, a man was found who knew how to circumvent the start codes of cargo lowloaders. He too climbed the access ladder up its side and disappeared into the cab. A moment later its multiple engines coughed mightily into life, and the lowloader lurched forward. The laughter redoubled, and began to spread to those crowding the main arena of the Grid, when the lowloader ploughed into the side of a small robot welding vehicle which, after being bulldozed for several feet, sprang into brief reflex life, extended a telescopic arm and caressed the lowloader’s flanks in a search for hull-plates. Clever, thought Foord, and genuinely unexpected. But it’s very high risk, and it won’t last.
For now, though, the fiasco continued. Eight of the ten escort vehicles roared forward and formed a large semicircle where the approach road joined the Grid, a semicircle into which nothing was allowed except the landchariot and the two remaining escort vehicles flanking it. Thus the landchariot finally clattered out onto Grid 9; and the moment it did so the semicircle became a circle, the escort vehicles joining behind it to package it in the same manoeuvre they had executed at the inner gate.
There was only a modest crowd gathered at the approach road; most people had stayed in the main arena of the Grid. Those nearby, having seen the landchariot’s entrance onto the Grid and perhaps having caught a glimpse of Foord or Thahl inside, now moved away. As they did so, soldiers poured out of the escort vehicles to move them further away; more soldiers than there were people. The convoy, still maintaining a circle around the landchariot, moved towards the Charles Manson at the centre of the Grid. The troops had to march after the convoy. By stages their march became a trot, then a run, then a ragged dash. Don’t overdo it, Foord prayed silently to Boussaid. Genuine cock-up, not slapstick. Be careful.
The ragged dash was, in any case, unnecessary. The convoy only moved fifty metres or so before it encountered another knot of abandoned vehicles, among and around which a few groups of sightseers stood or sat, waiting to be moved aw
ay. The convoy halted. Usefully, this allowed the troops to catch up with it, and since their original orders had been to move people away, they moved these people away. Less usefully, they did not ask whether any of those moved were in charge of any of the abandoned vehicles. After a hurried conference, it was decided to bulldoze them clear.
Almost inevitably, the main obstruction was a cargo lowloader. This one, however, was smaller than the previous one. Its brakes were not powerful enough to withstand the two escort vehicles bulldozing it; they gave way suddenly and it was pushed clear, skidding into the side of a second, smaller, vehicle. The smaller vehicle tottered, then crashed onto its side and burst into flames. It was a fire truck.
Foord watched as alarms sounded and a column of black oily smoke climbed skywards, as slowly and deliberately as if it was made of bricks being laid one on top of the other. He started to think that Boussaid had overdone it. But the escort vehicles carried full firefighting equipment and were around the fire truck in seconds. The fire was smothered in foam. The column of black smoke, its source cut off abruptly, hovered vertically like an exclamation mark without a dot, then slowly dissipated. There were some ironic cheers from those crowding the Grid, but not from all of them; some noticed the speed and precision with which the convoy had dealt with the fire, so at odds with how it had entered the Grid.
The convoy moved on, trailing a line of straggling troops like a freshly-whipped court jester dragging a pig’s-bladder, lurching from fiasco to fiasco, leaving in its wake a swathe of damaged, dented, charred and overturned vehicles. It picked its way through the congestion and around the crowds in a mazy series of diagonals and curlicues, and with an elephantine solemnity which deepened as the mocking laughter around it increased; but always coming a little closer to the Charles Manson. Foord went many times to call Boussaid and congratulate him, but didn’t; the effectiveness of the plan would soon wear off, and Boussaid must be desperately trying to assess how much further it would take them. And what to do when it failed.
•
When they saw the convoy edging closer to the Charles Manson, people started moving away from the outer edges of the Grid and towards the centre, where the ship stood. By the time the convoy had got within fifty metres of the ship, several hundred of them were waiting. Their mood was not yet openly hostile; a few of them were still laughing.
The convoy halted. During the brief pause, the six VSTOLs hovering directly above dropped lower until their grapples and undercarriages hung only a few metres above the ship’s dorsal ridge. The impression was not one of people converging on the ship, but of the ship having pulled them in, on invisible lines, almost like fishing for them. This impression remained even when the fragile mood Boussaid had created started to waver, and the first brittle noises of violence began.
As Boussaid’s last troops poured out of the escort vehicles for the last time to clear the crowds for the last fifty metres, Foord hardly gave his ship a glance. He was aware, as he watched heavily-armed figures striding past the landchariot’s windows, that this time the mood was different because the tension was mutual. The first angry clashes with the crowds were isolated, but they spread and got to within seconds of a full-scale riot. With fifty metres to go, Boussaid’s plan was exhausted.
A few shots were fired in the air and the crowds fell back. Immediately, the escort vehicles broke their circle and moved forwards toward the midpoint of the Charles Manson’s hull, noticeably not threatening any collisions with people or things as they had done before. They moved for the exact point on the hull, about midway, where Foord had told them the main airlock was located, though there was no interruption of the hull’s surface and no external marking to indicate this.
The ship, which dwarfed everything else on the Grid, was the least noticeable thing there; it made no movement or noise.
The soldiers funnelled back to plug the gaps between the escort vehicles, apparently without any order being given. The clatter of their weapons and shuffling of their boots as they made final positional adjustments died out only seconds after the brief roar of the escort vehicles’ engines, and the first warning shots, also died.
They weren’t funny anymore. In less than half a minute, and without overturning anything or setting anything on fire, they consolidated their final position—a gauntlet between the landchariot and the Charles Manson, a fifty-metre avenue lined so deeply on either side with vehicles and armed men that the crowd beyond it was largely obscured. And whether by accident, or as a final gesture in the last wavering moments of their protection, almost as many guns seemed to be pointing inwards as outwards.
Conventionally, the inactivity of the Charles Manson should have seemed menacing, but the ship’s silence and immobility was so profound it seemed to come from inside, as though its interior had been swept by an instantly fatal disease. It had done nothing while a near-riot boiled around it. It had done nothing while the gauntlet was formed and the escort vehicles had charged directly at it, the two vehicles leading each of the gauntlet’s parallel lines slewing to a halt only moments before collision. It had done nothing while Boussaid, who was the first out of one of the two lead vehicles, ordered a few of his men to assemble where the main airlock was located and to guard it. Foord noticed there were as many guns pointing at the airlock as there were pointing at the crowd. He snapped open his wristcom.
“You never told me the bit about covering our airlock. I assume that’s for appearance.”
“Look at them, Commander. Appearance is double-edged.”
Foord closed his wristcom, frowning at whatever it was Boussaid had meant, and glimpsed through the forward window a flicker of muscles in the driver’s neck and shoulders—this time he did not use the whip, merely jerked the reins—and they moved forward. Right to the end, Foord thought, the driver timed the landchariot’s moves with absolute precision.
The landchariot eased forward between the lines of the gauntlet, creaking and rattling in the sudden silence and dropping bits of dirt behind it. Fitful movements rippled along the lines in its wake as people craned and dodged to see inside it. The chimaera breathed heavily and rhythmically as they walked, like masturbating dinosaurs; for them, it was the last stage of a long journey.
Still the Charles Manson’s airlock did not open.
The overhang of the Charles Manson’s hull was a sheer silver cliff-face. It dwarfed everything else on the Grid, but its silence and stillness was profound; there were times when Foord almost doubted it was there. The landchariot reached it and halted. Foord took a final look at the web in the corner of the side window—he had no way of telling whether it looked back at him—and glanced across at Thahl, who nodded.
Thahl was careful to step out first. He helped Foord down and followed an unwavering three paces behind, a quiet slight figure, as Foord walked round to the front of the landchariot.
Boussaid had already detached himself from the group at the airlock and had taken a couple of steps forward, but paused at a gesture from Foord, who turned and looked up at the Sakhran driver.
“Don’t, Commander, it isn’t necessary,” Thahl hissed, but Foord ignored him.
“I understand you don’t speak Commonwealth,” he said to the driver.
The driver gazed down at him, closely but without expression, and apparently confirmed this by not replying.
Thahl stayed where he was, watching Boussaid (who had stepped back to rejoin the group covering the airlock) and Foord; he had become absorbed in the calculation of relative angles and distances between himself, Foord, Boussaid, the airlock and the two lines of the gauntlet. He knew that Foord was still talking to the driver, but had stopped listening; the words didn’t interest him.
“I speak enough Sakhran,” Foord was saying, “to say Thank You, but somehow that would seem patronising. So…”
The driver did not open his mouth, even to spit, but his gaze, dark and expressionless, never left Foord. His secondary eyelids flickered horizontally. The Grid was silent fo
r the moment and the chimaera started to shuffle restlessly, as if in embarrassment. One of them farted.
Three paces behind Foord, Thahl completed his calculations.
“So…”
Foord floundered; the words wouldn’t come. He was still floundering as the driver died. A sliver of barbed stainless steel from somebody’s needlegun—it was impossible to say whose because needleguns discharged silently, but they were standard issue for Horus Fleet crew, and for Blentport garrison—nuzzled greedily into his throat, sweeping him from the landchariot to fall in a crabbed heap at the feet of Thahl, who leaped the corpse without looking at it and made straight for Boussaid.
The difference between Thahl and everybody else was less than a second. While the first long second after the shot was still beginning, and while the reactions of everybody else were still beginning with it, Thahl whipped between their not-yet-moving bodies like a cat between dustbins and reached Boussaid. Normal time returned. In the middle of the group covering the airlock were Boussaid and Thahl. Boussaid had fallen to his knees and Thahl stood behind him, his left hand pulling Boussaid’s head back by the hair while the unsheathed claws of his right hand were touching, but not yet piercing, his throat. Had the two soldiers who were closest to Boussaid and quickest to spring to his aid been able to stop themselves when the poison claws were unsheathed, they would have done so; but they were built on the same scale as Foord, and their momentum was irreversible. They came at Thahl from behind. He dropped them both, one with the heel of his right foot and the other with the elbow of his left arm, without turning to face them and without breaking his grip on Boussaid, to whom he returned his full attention before either of them hit the ground. He had understood that they would have pulled back if possible, and had taken care not to kill them.
