by John Love
Thahl knew, because he had calculated, that he probably had no more than twenty seconds to live. The guns of Boussaid’s troops were trained on him from all sides—those around him and Boussaid swung away from the airlock and towards him, and those along the twin lines of the gauntlet followed soon after. He settled down to wait for the shock of what he had done, and the mixed motives of those with the guns, to corrode their hesitation.
It was impossible, and had never been his intention, to shelter behind Boussaid. He was an open target. Nobody had yet fired because his claws remained at Boussaid’s throat, as precise as micromanipulators; but not all of them regarded the safe return of Foord, or the survival of Boussaid, as a priority. Once they had thought that through, somebody—perhaps whoever had shot the driver—would turn his gun on Thahl, or on Foord, standing alone and all but forgotten near the landchariot, or even on Boussaid himself. It would take, Thahl estimated, about twenty seconds. (Foord made it ten to fifteen, because from where he was standing he could see something Thahl could not see: a look almost of acceptance on Boussaid’s face, as though he had known all along that he would have to die to get them across the last few metres to the ship. Foord remembered the photograph in his office, and his heart almost burst.)
Then, at last, the Charles Manson came to life.
There was something alien about the ship’s instant shift from extreme silence to extreme action. It was unrelated in scale to any external event; it was not caused or provoked; it did not build up in any stages of lesser action, which might at least have been understood as a response or warning. It was abrupt and jagged, like the darting of a tarantula.
The Charles Manson’s hull was no longer featureless or quiet. Blaring with lights and alarms, throbbing as if with disease, it sprouted blisters which swelled and split open to reveal the mouths and lips and orifices of its closeup weapons array. Nobody had even bothered to preset them on particular targets. Some of them tracked backwards and forwards or up and down, others were aimed directly into the Grid, others vaguely into thin air. It did not matter. There were proximity lasers, coilguns, tanglers, friendship guns, disruptors, breathtakers, harmonic guns, motive beams, and others whose use in a confined area on a planetary surface would have been excessive even if the Charles Manson were under direct attack from the whole of Horus Fleet; and they sprouted from a ship crewed by people who had lost, or never had, the motives of people. Thahl had designed his move on Boussaid to win a specific period of time, a period he had calculated to within seconds; now, it seemed, there was all the time in the world.
The main airlock irised open. A ramp tongued out of it to the ground. Many of the Charles Manson’s crew of sixty-three had, like Foord, received Special Forces training, and now ten of them moved quickly, but carefully, down the ramp to surround and cover the group around the airlock, the group in whose midst were Thahl and Boussaid. Behind them at the top of the ramp stood Cyr, darkly beautiful, carrying a single handgun with which she motioned Foord to come aboard, and behind her was the Charles Manson, massive and motiveless, threatening everything and explaining nothing.
One by one, the men surrounding Thahl laid down their weapons. Some of those along the lines of the gauntlet did the same, but others kept their guns trained on Thahl, or swung them round to cover Foord as he started walking. Thahl read their postures carefully, remembering that postures were not, as with Sakhrans, an auxiliary language, and tried to anticipate which of them would fire first and at who. His grip on Boussaid neither tightened nor relaxed.
As he walked towards his ship—now such a short distance, the last few metres of a long and unpleasant journey—Foord was trying to anticipate the same event as Thahl. If anyone did shoot, he thought it would be one of those in the lines of the gauntlet. It might be a shot in the back—in which case he could do nothing, short of walking to his ship backwards, which he did not intend to do—but that would be relatively deliberate, and on balance less likely. No, if it happened it would be someone’s judgement snapping, the act of someone who had endured all this but could not endure seeing him walk past unharmed; perhaps a shot from ahead, but more likely from either side, where he felt faces and gun-barrels swivel as he passed, as if each one was connected to him by gossamer wires, anchored in his flesh with little pins.
His calculations were less exact than Thahl’s, but nevertheless he got it right. When it happened it came as he expected from the side, from someone in the line on his right, someone he was just about to walk past. Everything went smoothly: he sensed a figure in the line tensing, saw the gun-barrel start to move towards him, and long before he was in any danger Foord turned and drew his own handgun and was looking down its barrel at the face of a young soldier, so young he had acne, looking suddenly terrified at the thought of what he had tried to do. Foord’s finger relaxed on the trigger. So far so good: his reflexes had been up to it, he wouldn’t need to shoot, and he knew Thahl would have reached the same conclusion. Then, to his extreme surprise, he found himself looking down the barrel of his gun at only half a face, trying to decide whether half a face could still wear a frightened expression when the other half was gone.
The shot had come from the Charles Manson. From Cyr, standing at the top of the ramp in the open airlock.
Foord was so surprised that for a moment he was unable to move. Unaware that he was still looking down the barrel of his gun, he watched the young soldier’s body rise in the air and commence a long back-somersault, limbs flailing with momentum but not with life; and as it landed, as the men kneeling around it saw its face and started to turn their gaze on him, he decided he had nothing to say to them. He turned away and started walking back to his ship—such a short distance, now—unsure if he would ever reach it, but certain there was nothing else he could do. Unnecessary, he kept repeating to himself under his breath, the second syllable keeping unconscious time with his long strides, Unnecessary. It was an arid word, as arid as his anger.
He tried to project the manner of someone neither frightened nor guilty, but merely bent on an important errand elsewhere. He walked briskly (but did not break into a run; that would have been fatal) while around him everything, every single thing, which Boussaid had kept at bay for so long now started to happen. There were shouts from the crowd for revenge, only half as bitter as his own impulse to give up and let them take it. The VSTOLs settled lower over the Charles Manson and turned their guns towards the open airlock. Soldiers who had laid down their guns were snatching them up and starting to level them. Foord continued to walk.
When the first sounds of gunfire came from behind him he did not tense or turn around; when it continued for some time he assumed, correctly, that they were killing the six chimaera and probably raking the landchariot and the driver’s body. With some difficulty he put it out of his mind, even the web in the window, and continued to walk. He neither slackened nor increased his pace. The two lines of the gauntlet moved in his wake as he passed between them, as though they were trying to fill a vacuum generated by his passage. He was now only a few paces from his ship but he knew that the lines would break before he reached it, and that then he would die in a way quite unlike any he had ever imagined.
Ahead of him he saw his crew retreating. Slowly and carefully, and with guns still levelled, they were backing up the ramp to the main airlock. For the first time he looked at their faces, pleased he could recognise each of them. He also noted, with a satisfaction which was ridiculous in the circumstances, that they hadn’t made the obvious mistake; they hadn’t tried to come forward and cover him back to the ship, which would have merely hastened the inevitable. Thahl had not joined the retreat and remained standing over Boussaid, and Cyr was still standing in the open airlock. Foord avoided looking at either of them. It must have become quiet again, because Foord was suddenly aware of a small but inappropriate sound, the buzzing of his wristcom. He ignored it—though a part of him tried to imagine how it would look if he answered it—and continued walking. Such a short
distance now.
Having calculated that the lines would break when he was still a few paces away from his ship, he half-hoped that they would not. It was part of the nature of irony, whose ability to turn back on itself he was beginning to understand like a Sakhran, that the lines of the gauntlet would take longer to break; long enough for him to begin to think he might have a chance of reaching his ship after all. So he was only half-surprised to find himself no more than two or three paces from the foot of the ramp, and almost level with Thahl, when the lines finally broke and the roar he had been expecting went up behind him. Only then did he take a last look at Thahl. And the irony turned back on itself again.
Thahl leaned forward and said to Boussaid, “I’m sorry, Colonel.” As Foord walked past him and started to ascend the ramp, Thahl moved the talons of his right hand until they pierced Boussaid’s throat, once, then lifted the body and threw it writhing into the path of the soldiers who were rushing after Foord. The deliberate obscenity of the gesture made them stop just long enough for Thahl to follow Foord up the ramp and through the airlock, which immediately irised shut behind them. Just before it closed, Foord took a last look back. Medical staff from the escort vehicles had already surrounded Boussaid, and there was the approaching siren of a VSTOL ambulance, which Foord knew would be too late; the antidote to Sakhran venom needed to be administered within seconds.
“It was unnecessary,” Foord said quietly to Cyr as he strode along the cramped main corridor of his ship towards the Bridge. “I know how accurate you can be with a handgun, or any weapon. You could have wounded him. There was no need.”
“But Thahl…” began Cyr.
“What Thahl did,” Foord said, still speaking quietly and without turning around, “was unavoidable. What you did was gratuitous.”
A few moments later, though this was not yet known on the Charles Manson, the irony turned back on itself a third time.
Thahl had had no intention of killing Boussaid; he had not used poison but had just given the appearance of having done so, to cause enough distraction for them to reach the ship. It had been his last throw of the dice; his claws pierced flesh without injecting venom. But Thahl was not aware that Boussaid had a heart condition. The shock and speed of Thahl’s attack triggered a massive heart seizure, from which he died.
•
The Charles Manson rested for a few more minutes on Grid 9, alien and impregnable; a single, self-contained denial of everything around it. Then, quietly and without requesting clearance from Blentport, it engaged magnetic drive and lifted off unopposed. At the requisite altitude it switched from magnetic to ion drive, left Sakhra’s atmosphere, and passed without ceremony or recognition through the silver ranks of Horus Fleet. At about the time that Boussaid’s doctors realised they were dealing not with Sakhran venom but with a heart attack, Horus Fleet was closing the ranks of its cordon behind the Charles Manson; like a woman folding back her disarranged clothes as a customer passes out of her apartment.
PART FIVE
1
Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.
“After this,” he waved a hand at the food set out in front of them, “it’s just pills and hyperconcentrates. This is our last proper meal, until the mission is over.”
“And before the mission is over,” Smithson said, tasteless as always, “one of us will betray you.”
Smithson was a mixture of reptile and mollusc, and other unclassifiable things, in a humanoid shape. For a nonbelieving nonhuman who had only travelled infrequently in the Commonwealth, he had a disconcertingly thorough grasp of human cultures and religions. And he just uses it for pisstaking, thought Foord, gazing at him speculatively. Smithson gazed back as if he knew exactly what Foord was thinking, which might well have been the case. Smithson was tall and grey and moist, and his eyes seemed to see everything; they were large intelligent eyes, as warm and golden as urine.
After a few moments, Smithson shrugged. For him, shrugging meant the brief extrusion and retraction of a secondary limb from his lower torso. Foord chose to regard the gesture as conciliatory.
Their last meal together started without ceremony, and proceeded quietly. There was some conversation, but it was muted and commonplace, scarcely louder than the sound of cutlery on plates. Thahl was still eating when the others had finished, but they had seen him eat before and registered no reaction; it was not really living meat, just a preparation from the ship’s culture vats served at body temperature and grown with a nervous system incorporating motor responses. Thahl was always careful to eat it more tidily and slowly than he would have eaten real prey.
Smithson, who had finished eating before any of them, was an extreme herbivore. He ate concentrated vegetable slime: it went everywhere. He absorbed it subatomically, as efficiently as carnivores extracted sustenance from meat. He even ate like a carnivore, quickly and violently, always looking around him as he chewed.
Foord had insisted that their infrequent meals on the Bridge should be taken together, and defied any of the humans to object. Rather to his annoyance none of them had, although his liberal gesture did irritate Thahl and Smithson: they both found humans’ eating conventions unsettling, though for different reasons, and would have preferred to eat alone.
The Bridge was a circular compartment set deep in the ship’s midsection. Bridge officers sat at consoles arranged in a circle which followed the shape of the curved walls. All of the walls were screen, a screen so thin it had almost been painted there. It showed a linked projection of what the external viewers saw from their thousands of positions over the ship’s hull; normally it showed what was humanly visible, but it could be locally magnified or filtered or altered in wavelength to make visible displays along any electromagnetic band. Merely integrating the thousands of viewers to provide a continuous and infinitely-variable 360-degree projection inside the Bridge was an exceptionally complex task, requiring a computer almost the size of Foord’s thumb.
The Bridge screen was where the Charles Manson’s nine-percent sentience most frequently communicated with the crew. Often—like a very good butler—it would anticipate their requirements before they were spoken, and patch in a local magnification or headup. Or, with its own equivalent of a polite cough, it might display something unasked which it considered important. Usually it anticipated correctly. Very occasionally Foord would overrule it.
The meal finished as quietly as it had begun. Gradually their conversation returned to matters connected with the mission. Relays clicked and mumbled and voices whispered from comms, an unnoticed background noise. The Bridge was twilit and muted, its occupants murmuring over consoles like surgeons at an operation. Foord himself, after the events preceding liftoff from Sakhra, felt immediately more comfortable here. The ship was his world, far more than any of the places where he made planetfall. On real planets, among real people, he could be surprisingly vulnerable, and often had to be saved from his ill-judged liberal impulses by others like Thahl or Cyr or Smithson. But on his ship he was supreme. It was his home, far more than the arid apartment he kept on Earth, and far more even than his home planet, where he was no longer welcome.
They were fifty minutes out of Sakhra, headed for Horus 5, the outer planet of the system, where She was expected to make an emergence.
•
Foord gazed around the Bridge. One by one, they fell silent.
“Status reports, please,” he murmured.
“Sakhra says they’ve detected no emergence, Commander,” Thahl said, on Foord’s immediate left.
“And your view?”
“They’re probably right. If She had entered the system undetected, our instruments should by now have picked up some residual ripples, and all they’re showing is normal background interference.”
“And Director Swann, has he called again?” Foord asked, implying a continuation of the subject of background interference.
“Not so far, Commander.”
Foord passed to Joser, o
n Thahl’s left. Joser was of average build, with suspiciously pleasant and open features. He reminded Foord of the priests at the orphanage.
“Could there have been an emergence?”
“She has emerged undetected in other systems, Commander, but our scanners are more sensitive. On balance, I think not.”
“Thank you.”
“Also, the amount of energy released by a ship emerging from MT Drive at the periphery of a solar system is so large that…”
“Yes, thank you.” Foord’s gaze continued round the circle of consoles to the next one, opposite him.
“The weapons array,” Cyr said, “will work satisfactorily. If,” she shot a glance at Joser, “we can locate Her. We may already have failed to do that.”
“The signature of a ship emerging from MT Drive into the solar system would be so large that…”
“That you would have detected Her. But you aren’t sure,” Cyr said, quite unreasonably.
Foord raised an eyebrow.
“Status reports,” he quietly informed the air just above their heads, “should be confined to facts unless I ask for opinions, and should be addressed to me.”
Tension subsided abruptly. The ship’s environment was cramped and potentially explosive and Foord kept everything, especially personal interaction, low-key. Conversation was by undercurrents, nuances and inflexions, by things left unsaid. A raised eyebrow on the Charles Manson was equivalent to a raised fist anywhere else.
Cyr tossed her dark hair and smiled, formally. “You’re right, Commander. For my part I apologise.” She thrust up three manicured fingers, waited just long enough to make it a gesture, and counted off. “One, long-range weapons array. Two, medium-range. Three, closeup weapons, including the two missiles built to your specification. I listed them all together because the report is the same: they all tested perfect after the refit.”
