Faith

by John Love

  “…And,” Joser concluded, “Her position is 17-14-16 and holding. She’s still shrouded, of course, but we have a reliable fix on Her position, which is probably what She intended.” (A provocative assumption, which like others before it provoked no response from Foord.) “She’s outside our beam range, of course, and no doubt She’ll use Her superior low-speed acceleration to stay outside.”

  Joser’s mouth had wandered into Commander’s territory, but still Foord stayed silent.

  “We do,” Cyr snapped, “have weapons other than particle beams.”

  “Yes,” Joser said, “but we can’t use them if we can’t catch Her.”

  Why, Cyr thought, is he saying this? He’s supposed to be just a Department stooge. So why this? Is he cleverer than I thought?

  “We can catch Her!” Cyr insisted. “Our top speed on ion drive is higher.”

  “Maybe. But She’ll have calculated that.” Joser paused, but still Foord stayed silent. “She can choose where we catch Her, and what She does about it.”

  “Not,” Foord said suddenly, “if we catch Her sooner than She expects.”

  “Commander?”

  “If we catch Her. Sooner, Joser. Than She expects. Don’t you follow?”

  Looks were exchanged around the Bridge. At that stage they didn’t, except for Smithson. Insofar as his structure allowed it, Smithson went rigid at the thought of what Foord might mean.

  “You’re right, Commander,” Joser said confidently (he had discovered that he liked defining a static subject, even if it was their own possible destruction). “But you see, Her superior low-speed acceleration…”

  “If we start after Her on ion drive,” Foord mused, “and then switch up suddenly to photon drive, just long enough to get Her back in range…”

  “Commander!” Smithson bellowed. “This is a fucking asteroid belt! Ships don’t engage photon drive in asteroid belts, not even this ship! Ships have to go slow in asteroid belts, Commander, because if they go fast, the asteroids bang into them. I have a better idea. Why not just invite Her to surrender?”

  “…and it needn’t be for long, or at full photon speed. Just ten percent on photon would be way above her top speed on ion drive. About…..I’d say, about eleven or twelve seconds at ten percent photon would catch Her.”

  It was not possible that Foord could have done the necessary mental arithmetic amid the uproar which engulfed the Bridge, unless he had simply not noticed it.

  “Commander, we wouldn’t last three seconds,” Joser stammered. He had not done that calculation but he did know, quite accurately, the effect on everything he had just defined—thoroughly defined—of a new variable, even if it was a variable which tended towards their survival rather than destruction. “It’s not an acceptable risk. It can’t…it won’t…”

  “You tell him, Kaang,” Smithson invited. “He expects you to take us through part of an asteroid belt on photon drive. Let’s hear from you.”

  “For once,” Cyr added.

  “I’m only the pilot,” Kaang mumbled, miserably. “That was the agreement.”

  “Tell us,” Cyr said, “please. As a pilot. Can you do it?”

  “Perhaps,” Kaang said, “but I’m not certain.”

  “It gets better,” confided Smithson to the air above him. “The Commonwealth’s greatest pilot and weakest human being, executing the orders of a Commander who died half an hour ago. I want all this entered on the record.” He looked at Foord and lowered his voice, for tragic effect; lapsing again into self-pity. “I don’t know why, particularly. But I do. Someone may read it sometime.”

  “I don’t intend to sit around while She knocks pieces off us one by one,” Foord said mildly.

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the last thirty minutes?”

  “We might die from this engagement,” Foord answered, still mildly.

  “You’ve died from it already,” Smithson muttered.

  “Commander,” Cyr asked, “you said She might know our thoughts before we think them. So we use photon drive, and so does She. Then what?”

  “Then we both survive or both die. If we both survive, we lose and gain nothing. If we both die we get a draw.”

  “I liked you better when you were alive,” Smithson said.

  For the first time, Foord looked directly at Smithson. “This ship can’t collectively survive or die. Only its parts survive or die. Alone. When the MT Drive activated, we left you to fight it. Alone. The crew of an ordinary ship would have fought it together, and you know what would have happened.”

  A person of any sensitivity would have recognised that as the conclusion. Smithson, however, was not sensitive and only approximately a person.

  “You oversimplified just now. If we both use photon drive, we don’t necessarily both survive or die. She could survive and we could die.”

  “Of course. But only if She has a pilot better than Kaang. Do you think Her pilot is likely to be better than Kaang?”

  And that, even Smithson recognised, was the conclusion. “No, Commander.”

  Kaang sat quietly by in the half-light, following the conversation from one face to another. She often found herself like this: listening to them talking about her as if she wasn’t there.

  Smithson caused a muscle to ripple in his upper torso: not a shrug, but some other gesture Foord had never seen before. Perhaps, as he’d never seen it before, it was an apology. “Of course, that’s if She is a ship, with a crew and Commander and pilot, and not something else. But we’ve been through that before… Commander, we haven’t even seen Her yet, and She’s made us say these things. We’ve never said such things before.”

  Thought them, maybe, Cyr told herself, but never said them. What’s happening to us?

  And that was the mood in which they passed on to the details of what they were about to do. To escape it, they went over the details again and again. A ten percent photon burst to bring Her back in range, executed by Kaang who, while it lasted, would become the focus of the ship as Smithson was when he fought the MT Drive. Then, if they survived, the re-establishment of the particle beam bombardment. And first, a series of slow moves towards Her on ion drive; on the basis of Her responses, Foord would decide when to engage photon.

  The repetition of the details was like the restoration of a heartbeat after trauma. It brought the Bridge back to something like its normal quietness.

  “Photon drive is ready whenever you want to use it, Commander,” Smithson said, a few moments later.

  “Thank you. Cyr?”

  “If we survive the photon burst, I can re-establish the particle beams.”

  “Thank you. Kaang?”

  “We now have figures for the duration and course of the photon burst, Commander. Duration is fourteen seconds.”

  “Fourteen? I underestimated.”

  “The course includes eleven major evasive manoeuvres, Commander,” Kaang said evenly, “around intervening asteroids.”

  Eleven manoeuvres, in fourteen seconds, at ten percent photon speed. She might have been describing a routine parking orbit. Foord tried to match her lack of expression, and failed. He could feel expressions moving over his face, as if they were external forces. Eleven, fourteen, ten. What Kaang was about to do, on his orders, had now been given figures, and they were monstrous.

  “I understand. Then,” as the alarms politely cleared their throats, “please take us forward on ion drive, Kaang. One percent.”

  “Done, Commander.”

  The manoeuvre drives fountained. The alarms increased a semitone, but stayed well within the bounds of politeness. The ion drive cut in, almost silently. The asteroids on the encircling Bridge screen whirled and resettled as the ship established direction and attitude; otherwise there was no sensation of movement.

  “She’s moving away, Commander,” Joser said. “Ion drive, low register.”

  “Increase to three percent, please, Kaang.”

  “Done, Commander.”

  “Sh
e’s matched us,” Joser said.

  “Maintain at three percent, please, Kaang.”

  “Done, Commander.”

  Foord settled back. He glanced at Kaang. She was checking—unnecessarily, since she had already checked several times—that the navigation and drives cores had instructed their computers to make minor adjustments to the course and duration of the photon burst to allow for the last few movements. Foord knew he could do Thahl’s and Joser’s jobs about as well as they could; Cyr’s, almost as well; and Smithson’s, adequately. But Kaang’s, never.

  “Joser?”

  “Still matching us, Commander.”

  “Good.” It was settling into a pattern, muted and orderly, with the leisure to observe one’s draughtsmanship and doublecheck the details. “Kaang, we’ll stay at three percent, please. Give you time to ready the overrides for execution. And I’d like to observe Her responses a little longer.”

  “Done, commander.”

  “No, Commander, your order’s refused. I’m engaging photon drive now.”

  The first answer was what Foord expected and practically believed he’d heard. The second, delivered with exactly the same inflexion, was what he actually heard. It silenced the Bridge.

  “I’m engaging photon drive now, Commander.”

  “But the overrides—”

  Kaang pressed a palm panel and gazed calmly round the Bridge. One by one, the other five consoles went dark.

  “Done, Commander. As of now, I’m the only other living thing this ship recognises.”

  Insanely, Foord caught himself noting her use of the word Other. The alarms were rising, beyond their normal politeness; they were beginning to sound loud, like alarms on ordinary ships. And the Charles Manson, since it did indeed recognise only Kaang, was now proceeding with complete logic and reasonableness to move against all the others. To immobilise its own crew.

  “Kaang!”

  “If you didn’t see this coming, Commander,” she replied, as the ship closed its burrows and corridors and bulkheads to isolate its inhabited sections, “then maybe She won’t either.”

  Foord knew she was right. He wanted to say so, but there was no time. The last thing he was able to say, knowing that anything more would be cut short by the alarms’ rising noise and/or the ship’s destruction and/or the shutdown of internal communications, whichever was the sooner, was Cyr, if we survive this, come out firing.

  In its haste to obey Kaang’s priority overrides, the ship almost attacked itself. It slammed shut the final bulkheads; slammed down and locked the seat harnesses of its crew; burst open Kaang’s harness as the last one (Foord’s) locked; and made Kaang the focus of all its systems, sending neural implant wires to burrow into her face and head like maggots, pulsing with information. From the rest of its crew it turned away, leaving them isolated from itself and Kaang as though they were infected.

  It killed internal communications. It killed its own Damage Control systems, since Damage could not begin to describe what would happen if Kaang failed. It killed the Bridge screen and all other onboard screens except Kaang’s, because although it had nothing to say about whether a photon burst through asteroids was sanity or insanity, it knew that only Kaang was far enough from either to be allowed to see it happening. It almost killed its own crew, reducing them to sixty-two near-corpses, buried in their own harnesses and in darkness. Then, when they were no longer necessary, it killed the alarms.

  The photon drive cut straight in at ten percent. What might be the last fourteen seconds of the ship’s life had already begun; nine seconds were left.

  Two sets of events were taking place, one inside and one outside the ship. They should have been galaxies apart, not separated only by the thickness of the hull. Outside, the Charles Manson was plunging through the Belt, wrenching itself past, under, above, below and between those asteroids it had not already vaporised, ten times as quick and vicious in missing them as it had been in destroying them. Inside, everything was filtered and compensated out to almost nothing, the Bridge and corridors and burrows as dark as the vacated interior passages of a corpse; the ship might already have been dead and buried, or embedded in crystal like the Book of Srahr.

  Nine seconds to go. They dropped like water from a tap.

  Plop.

  Eight seconds to go.

  While his mother was dying his father had found a letter she had written, while she could still write, setting out her will; her last secret. And now Foord was seeing the last secret of his ship; how it had ordered its final affairs so that only Kaang, in the sense the ship would have recognised it, was still alive.

  Plop. Seven seconds to go.

  He did not actually hear the sound, just as he did not actually see the seconds poke out, one by one, into the stillness of the Bridge and fall to the floor, Plop

  Six seconds to go.

  but he realised they reminded him not only of water dropping from a tap (that was too obvious) but of human faeces dropping from…. No. He recoiled from that. That was something his own senses, deprived of input, were providing

  Plop. Five to go.

  from somewhere in his memory, perhaps Her use of faeces in the famous Isis engagement. But in one way it was accurate. Inside the Charles Manson time really was passing that slowly, and the last few seconds of the photon burst really were falling that softly; solemn, dark brown, and blunt.

  Plop. Four to go.

  The Charles Manson was not alive enough to know that it could die. But it knew all about subdivision downwards into isolated parts, and Kaang was its last moving part.

  Plop. Three.

  Except that she wasn’t Kaang any more. At Kaang’s place on the Bridge, watching on the last working screen what would have been unwatchable to the others, there was now only an object. It looked like an exploded diagram, its seat harness burst open around its waist, its face and head fountaining with neural implants. Only its eyes and hands moved. They seemed speeded up by a factor of at least ten, but still—as always—unhurried.

  Kaang was going to succeed. Foord was so certain of that that he even stopped listening for the last seconds to fall. He would never have heard them anyway. They were obliterated by the noise of a gigantic explosion. It wasn’t the ship’s destruction—that would have been beyond their hearing—but the ion drive, cutting in at full reverse thrust as the photon drive died, to kill their momentum and bring them out of the photon burst at rest.

  The ship turned away from Kaang, like it had previously turned away from the rest of its crew, and forgot her. It left her lying in the tatters of her seat harness, her face bleeding where it had pulled out its neural implants; it routed her pilot’s functions through to Thahl, and her console died as the others came back to life. It reopened its main systems along their usual channels; withdrew the bulkheads; unlocked the seat harnesses; reactivated the screens and lights and alarms; and awaited further instructions.

  They had reached their moment, but it was already dying on them. It was the one moment when She might be vulnerable; when they had done something that might genuinely surprise Her. But the moment was dying on them even as it began, and the only way to give it meaning was to forget Kaang. Like the ship, they turned away from her, not even pausing to see if she was alive. Without speaking to each other they resumed the engagement, now with Thahl as replacement pilot; and Cyr, before any of them, resumed firing the particle beams.

  4

  The smaller asteroids in the Belt were mostly irregular, as lumpy and stolid as potatoes emptied from a sack; and two perfect killing machines stalked each other through them, like tarantulas.

  At least, one was a perfect killing machine—the one which was visible and which had just executed a photon burst through asteroids, a near-impossible manoeuvre from which it had emerged with weapons firing. The other one stayed shrouded, a dark spot in darkness; it appeared to be surprised by the unheard-of manoeuvre, and appeared to be running.

  But the battle between them was complicat
ed and enigmatic. They fought in different languages, and with different weapons, and at times hardly seemed to be fighting each other at all. Their definitions of Battle and Fight and Weapon seemed to correspond only obliquely. And the space between them, by a kind of relativity, was changing as the battle changed. Things were happening to it. In some ways it was no longer space at all.

  Space joined the two ships, and separated them. It was empty, but full of the weapons they fired across it at each other. It was shapeless, but given shape by the Charles Manson’s particle beams, whose range exceeded Hers. After emerging from the photon burst, the Charles Manson had reverted to the same monotonous attrition which had worked so well before, draining Her and systematically destroying asteroids as She sought cover behind them, keeping Her always at a range from which She could not return fire, at least not with Her own beams.

  The space between them read like a book, its pages visibly crammed with the Charles Manson’s language: it was shot through with the dull blue of the particle beams, always one way, stabbing incessantly at Her. But it also contained something else, travelling back from Her to the Charles Manson; something unreadable. Something like the white areas of pages, wrapping round the Charles Manson’s beams like white spaces round printed words.

  The Charles Manson’s language was one of physical attacks on physical targets. And Faith, while occasionally replying in the same language, seemed also to be conducting another kind of battle, on different targets. On people. On a person in particular. They were all known to Her, but She fixed on one.

  5

  Two hours had passed since the photon burst. They had won back their advantage, putting Faith within their beam range and themselves out of Hers, and they were driving Her before them through the Belt; but they still remembered Kaang. Not as a colleague (they liked to think there were no such things on Foord’s ship) or as an individual (she had never been interesting enough) or even as their pilot (Thahl substituted adequately). It was much more specific than that. They remembered her because the whole Bridge stank of her shit.

  Only pack hunters tended their injured: solitary predators, like cats and Sakhrans and the Charles Manson’s crew, preferred to ignore them. For that unspoken reason, and for other reasons, they had left Kaang where she fell after the photon burst. It was nearly an hour before Foord summoned attention, and as the doctors carried her out she had defecated, massively. It had gone everywhere.