Faith

by John Love

  For the twenty-fourth time in the two hours since the photon burst, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic warbled politely through the Bridge. Headup displays and target simulations were superimposed on the Bridge screen. Her cover this time was AD-2049, a small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran. Cyr reached Her with eight shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes. Somehow the time didn’t seem to pass as slowly as when Kaang had been pilot. Thahl’s competence was monotonous, but Kaang’s near-perfection was even more so.

  They had counted out the last two hours in careful five-minute pieces like this one; but the first five minutes, following their emergence from the photon burst, really counted, because they had done something remarkable. They had become the first of Her opponents ever to surprise Her. When She had seen the only other ship in Horus system which might be able to threaten Her, emerging from the insanity of a photon burst through asteroids and coming at Her firing, She had—not exactly panicked, but hurried. And in the first few minutes, the engagement had been reshaped.

  She fled from them so hurriedly that by the time She found fresh cover (Cyr reached Her with seven shots that time, all of which Her flickerfields held), She was two-thirds of the way through the Belt. Now, two hours later, She was three-quarters through and still running. Occasionally She tried other tactics—missiles on parabolic courses, decoys, even a shrouded mineswarm—but each time Joser spotted them and Cyr destroyed them.

  The five minutes were eventually counted. For the twenty-fifth time, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic; headup displays; target simulations. Her cover this time was AD-2025, a miserably small asteroid (they all were, now that the Belt was starting to peter out) whose destruction took only one beam-firing. She broke cover and ran, trying to double back on them—She tried this every third or fourth time—but was easily headed off by the particle beams. Cyr reached Her with eleven shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before She reached fresh cover. Thahl parallelled Her movements, maintained beam range, and brought them to rest again. The computers serving the weapons core started counting off another five minutes.

  “You’re getting better at this,” Cyr remarked to Joser.

  Joser gave her a slight nod of acknowledgement. “It’s the repetition. I like the repetition,” he said, and meant it.

  The Bridge was pleasantly quiet, and Foord, quietly pleased. The Belt was dwindling, the asteroids She was using for cover were getting smaller, the spaces between them larger, and each time She broke and ran She had to take more of Cyr’s unwaveringly accurate beam-firings. She was being drained; not only, it seemed, of energy through Her flickerfields, but of will. Even Her occasional counterattacks carried no real conviction. And most important, they had locked Her back in beam range and She seemed unable to break out of it.

  Foord’s wristcom buzzed.

  “Commander, may I talk to you?” Kaang sounded as bad as she had looked the last time Foord saw her.

  “Kaang. It’s good to hear your voice again.” (It wasn’t.) “How are you?” (“How is she?” Foord had asked, an hour ago, of one of the doctors he had finally called to the Bridge. “She was half-dead, Commander, when the ship discarded her. She’s still half-dead.”)

  Kaang didn’t reply. He tried again.

  “How are you, Kaang?”

  “I’m in Medical, Commander.”

  “Ah,” Foord said. He had never been able to sustain a conversation with Kaang about anything, except her duties as pilot. He tried again; this time, the last resort of any visitor to any sickbed. “Is there anything you need?”

  “That’s what I want to talk about, Commander. The doctors say there’s no permanent damage.”

  “That’s good…Kaang, I don’t know how to tell you what we owe you.” This was literally true: he genuinely didn’t know how to say such things. He had blurted the words out, as though admitting to some personal disease.

  “Commander, I think I should return to duty.”

  “No.” Foord was relieved; this at least was familiar territory. “When you’re fit, yes, but not before. Until then we have adequate cover.”

  “Who’s acting as pilot, Commander?”

  “Thahl. Both he and I hold current Pilot’s Certificates.”

  “Commander, excuse me.” The one area where she would show resistance. “What did you and Thahl score on your last annual tests? Seventy-five percent?”

  “Thahl scored seventy-five. I scored seventy-four.”

  “The best military pilots score about eighty. I’ve never scored below ninety-five. She won’t let you stalk Her forever, Commander. You need me back on the Bridge.”

  “And you need rest, according to my medical advice.” (“She’s gone unattended for an hour longer than necessary, Commander,” the doctor had snapped, his forearms covered in shit and blood, “and she needs rest. More particularly, a rest from you.”) “I most need you back, Kaang, when we’ve finally driven Her out of the Belt and this engagement really begins. If it is one. Until then we have adequate cover.”

  He snapped his wristcom shut, too abruptly.

  Joser sniffed the air. “It’s like she’s never been away,” he murmured to Cyr.

  “Her absence,” Cyr agreed, “has been deeply smelt.”

  Foord glanced at them curiously. The rapport between them had started to grow after the photon burst, and coincided with Joser becoming more effective. It was not something he would have expected.

  He gazed round the Bridge. “I believe I asked for status reports.” He hadn’t. “Do I have to ask for them again?”

  While the reports were being given—they were short, satisfactory and required only half his attention—he was thinking about Kaang.

  “Thahl.”

  “Commander?”

  “Block off communications from Kaang, please. I don’t want any more calls like that.”

  In the first few minutes after the photon burst, when they erupted upon Her, they’d had no choice but to leave Kaang where she fell. But later, when the engagement resettled into the dual monotony of asteroid-hopping and beam-firing, they continued to ignore her. Their agreement to do so, like much on Foord’s ship, was unspoken. Each of them found tasks to attend to, rather than attend to her—tasks which often required them to speak to each other over, and around, and through, where she was slumped at her console. It was only much later, and almost too late, when Foord summoned help. Outsiders always went self-contained during missions; it was their nature to turn inwards.

  “That’s all seen to, Commander. She won’t….”

  “Disturb us again?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Everybody else on this ship, thought Foord—himself, even Joser, even the three doctors he summoned—had at some time either given or received violence. But never Kaang. She was the purest specialist, the least violent and least interesting of all the Charles Manson’s inhabitants. When the violence of the engagement touched her, it touched the ship’s most private part. By not dying, she made it impossible for them to deny it.

  And the result was monumentally disgusting: the smell, the stains on the lower areas of her light grey uniform, the facepack of dried blood and yellow moustache of mucus. Her breath had smelt, too. Foord did not even stop to think that at least she was still breathing, only that her breath smelt.

  •

  For the twenty-sixth time, the weapons core instructed the computers which served it to configure themselves to Attack, SemiManual. A warning harmonic; headup displays; target simulations. Her cover this time was AC-1954, another small asteroid whose destruction took only one beam-firing. Cyr
reached Her with nine shots, all of which She held with Her flickerfields, before realising that Her target simulation, the white blip on the screen indicating Her position, had not moved.

  At AC-1954, She had stopped running.

  Cyr was surprised enough to glance up at Foord, but not enough to stop firing. Fourteen shots, fifteen. What, she wondered as she continued to fire, is She about to do that’s worth this drain on Her?

  The same thought had occurred to Foord. “Joser, I expect this is another missile. Check it, please, will you?”

  “Already done, Commander. It is a missile. Closing at twenty percent. Details and a visual will be on the screen shortly.”

  “And the other missiles?”

  “Other missiles, Commander?”

  “Other missiles, Joser. Remember? She tries this every third or fourth time. The first one is a diversion for the others, coming in on parabolic courses while the first is on a straight course.”

  That speech had taken Cyr up to twenty-three shots.

  “I remember, Commander. I’ll find them.”

  “Yes, I think you will. She used to run you ragged, but not any more. Perhaps when we have more time”—Foord was dangerously unaware, then, how little they had—“you’ll tell me how you did it.”

  Thirty shots. She remained still, Her flickerfields holding the beams.

  “Here are the details, Commander. Visual will follow.”

  The Bridge screen displayed headups confirming the missile was under remote guidance from Faith, and showed its position and speed: 26-14-19 and closing, at ninety percent.

  “Ninety percent!”

  “It was twenty—”

  “It’s now ninety, Joser. Impact in seventy-nine seconds, it says. Cyr, get it, please.”

  (Smithson scowled at the headup display. “Something wrong about that missile,” he hissed at Joser. “It doesn’t need remote guidance. Too fast to manoeuvre, and on a straight course. So why guidance?” Joser shrugged, oddly and mechanically, as though remotely operated. Smithson turned to repeat the question to Foord, then decided not to. Oddly, he never knew why. It was one of his very few bad decisions.)

  The long-range gas and semiconductor lasers lanced out at the missile, almost but not quite parallel to the particle beams which Cyr was still stabbing at Faith. The particle beams were malignant dull blue, the lasers brilliant white. The particle beams reached their target, the lasers didn’t. The approaching missile simply avoided them. It flicked to one side, let them pass by, and returned to its course. All at ninety percent.

  Smithson swore. “That’s why remote guidance,” he muttered.

  Joser’s expression was unreadable, almost shrouded. “Impact in sixty-four seconds.”

  The missile was now visible on the Bridge screen—though Joser had omitted to supply local magnification—and the screen generated the usual side, ventral and dorsal images, and, unasked, added magnification: a grey ovoid, about twenty feet long, with no markings or external features. Considering what it had just done, it should not have looked so ordinary.

  “Cyr,” Foord inquired, carefully—but his voice fooled nobody— “how can it do that?”

  “Do you want it explained, Commander, or destroyed?”

  Again the lasers lanced out. Again they missed.

  “How can it do that?”

  “Impact in forty-four seconds.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Cyr whispered, probably to herself. The missile’s performance was extraordinary, and whoever on Faith was guiding it was reacting so quickly that Cyr was actually firing lasers and missing—almost unheard-of, and she took it very personally.

  The lasers lanced out again and again, and missed both times.

  “Something wrong,” repeated Smithson. Joser did not reply; as the missile got closer, he seemed to get further away.

  “Impact in thirty-seven seconds.”

  “Behind it!” Smithson bellowed. “Look behind it.”

  “Thahl,” Foord began, “can we—”

  “Yes, Commander, we can outrun it. But if we run, we put Her out of beam range.”

  “No!” Joser shouted, but only at Thahl’s grammar. “It’s not it, it’s them.” He paused, oddly, as though afraid of being overheard. “There’s a second one, Commander. Directly behind the first. Duplicating its movements. Hidden in its drive shadow. And when the first one’s destroyed, the second one will…”

  Explosions flickered on-off in front of them, knotting space like a muscle cramp.

  “Got you, you bastard,” hissed Cyr, who after her setbacks had switched to shortrange crystal lasers and had simply kept firing.

  “…the second one will come straight for us. Impact in nineteen seconds. I’m sorry, Commander.”

  And as the second grey ovoid hurtled towards them through the wreckage of the first, something else flickered on-off: a glance between Smithson and Foord, concerning Joser. They left it unspoken. Other things mattered more, like the need to get out of Cyr’s way so she could defend them against a rapidly approaching, largely unexpected and wholly ridiculous death.

  But now, perversely, Cyr was enjoying herself. The weapons array was her language, and she used it fluently. She composed in it. She hunted the second missile with every closeup weapon in her vocabulary. To the crystal lasers she added motive beams, harmonic guns, tanglers, disruptors and others; she put them together like words in a haiku, each one amplifying each other’s meaning until her composition grew dense and ferocious. She continued also to tap out an unwavering barrage of beam-firings directly at Faith, but that was only punctuation to the main composition. Cyr’s attack on the second missile was an almost perfect statement of her abilities. It lasted exactly nineteen seconds, and then the missile hit the Charles Manson; but it hit as a hundred pieces of wreckage.

  And in its wake something else, equally alien, engulfed them. From his console in one of the weapons bays, Cyr’s deputy, Nemec, started cheering. Others on other parts of the ship heard and joined him. The sound was distant and tinny, at first difficult to recognise because even the comm channels which carried it to the Bridge were designed only for muted individual voices; but then, when Thahl formally confirmed only minimal impact damage, the congratulations redoubled and even spread, at first tentatively, to the Bridge.

  It was Cyr’s moment and she basked in it, though not to the extent of forgetting her beam-firing. Seventy-two shots, said the screen headup display. Seventy-three.

  Foord’s gaze flicked from the screen to Cyr; then to Joser, where it rested for a moment; then back to the screen. He stayed silent.

  “…very fast and manoeuvrable,” Cyr was explaining to the Bridge in an it-was-nothing-really drawl, punctuated with glances at Foord, “but they had no flickerfields. They weren’t a new type of missile, just one of Her known types, but stripped down for speed—probably nothing but drives, warheads and guidance. They had no defences.”

  “Like that kid you shot at Blentport.”

  Seventy-eight, said the headup display. Cyr’s beam-firings did not waver, even after Foord’s remark. Seventy-nine.

  Even Smithson gasped at what Foord had said. The Bridge fell silent, then the silence died down into uproar. Foord stopped it with a glance.

  “Thahl, this is an emergency. Get us out of here, now!”

  The manoeuvre drives fountained. The Charles Manson began to turn away—from Faith, who had seemed at its mercy, and from the nuzzling wreckage of Her missiles—and ran.

  “Why?” Cyr demanded. “You ordered Her missiles destroyed and I destroyed them!”

  “Two of them.” Foord laid the words down in front of her, like small corpses. “Ask Joser about the third.”

  “Third?” Cyr screamed at Joser, then “Oh no.” She had seen Joser’s face.

  “There’s no third missile,” Joser said with quiet precision.

  “No,” Cyr kept saying, not to Joser but to herself. “No.”

  “If there’s a third missile,” Joser said with qu
iet precision “the scanners will detect it.”

  Thahl took the ion drive to ninety percent, almost as smoothly as Kaang. An hour seemed to pass.

  “The scanners won’t detect it,” Joser said with quiet precision. He had just bitten completely through his lower lip. “Not this. This is the one She intended for us.”

  Foord glanced at the headup display—now, at last, Cyr had stopped firing the particle beams; the count was eighty—and turned back to Joser.

  “See,” he said. “What’s been done to us.”

  He might have been talking to Joser about Faith, or to the rest of the Bridge about Joser. Both, suddenly, made sense.

  They ran. At ninety percent ion drive Thahl took the Charles Manson back into the Belt, surrendering in seconds the ground they had won in penny pieces over hours, rolling and swerving at random because they might still evade whatever pursued them; they might have entire minutes left.

  Foord looked at Joser. “I want you to relinquish scanners. Please hand them to Smithson.”

  “The one She intended for us.”

  Joser’s console went dark. He hadn’t relinquished —probably hadn’t heard —but Thahl did it for him, routing the scanners through to Smithson. Later, thought Foord, I’ll get him removed. But not now. Definitely not now.

  “While Thahl is pilot,” Foord asked Smithson, “can you do scanners as well as drives?”

  “Running out of people.”

  “Can you do scanners as well as drives?”

  “Of course I can, Commander. I can also take in your laundry, if you wish.”

  “Two out of three will be enough.”

  “Then forget the scanners and I’ll take in your laundry.”

  “The one She intended for us.”

  “Thahl,” began Foord, “could you…”