by John Love
•
“You added a word to the standard service,” Kaang heard Smithson say to Foord.
“Perhaps,” Foord said.
“Yes,” Smithson said. “Perhaps. It’s not in the service.”
“Perhaps it ought to be…. Is the comm still on?”
It was. Work had not resumed. All over the hull, they were still staring into the Bridge screen.
“This opponent,” Foord said into the comm, “is like none we’ve ever encountered. Before we finish repairs and go after Her, I want us to consider Her. To consider what She is.”
“Commander,” Cyr began, “this isn’t—it won’t—”
“It is and it will. This is important. I have my reasons. You’ll see.”
The figures on the hull were motionless. All of them, including the mechanicals and synthetics, seemed to be listening intently.
“Kaang, you start. What is She?”
“Commander, what’s happened while I’ve been away?”
“What do you mean?”
“Our orders said destroy Her and ignore what She is. You said that. What’s happened to make you change?”
“I’m sorry, Kaang, it was unfair to start with you. I’ll come back to you later, but listen and you’ll see why I’m asking….Thahl, what about you? What do you think She is? Is She from the Commonwealth, maybe a rebel?”
“Perhaps, Commander. But a ship like that—”
“Like what? We’ve been fighting Her all this time, and we haven’t seen her yet.”
“We know what She looks like, and we know some of what She can do, from records of previous engagements…She’s not a Commonwealth ship.”
“Or maybe She is, but just not one that we know of.”
Thahl paused. “Then maybe we don’t know what She looks like. She can bend and confuse scanners. Maybe how she appeared in previous engagements isn’t how She really is.”
“Maybe. So what is She?”
Thahl thought for a moment, then glanced up at Foord.
“Maybe She’s been secretly built and funded by some of the I2Js,” (he meant those Invited To Join) “to strike back at the Commonwealth.”
A ripple of something, perhaps amusement, went through the Bridge. It was impossible to tell, from the heavily-suited figures on the screen, whether whatever it was had been echoed outside.
“Better,” said Foord. “But it’s not what you really think…Smithson, what is She?”
“How about something made secretly by the Commonwealth to eliminate Outsiders? You know what they think of us, Commander.”
“Much better,” approved Foord. “I like that one, it’s so self-obsessed and so paranoid. So: Kaang.”
“Commander?”
“What is She?”
“I wish I could take part in this, Commander, but you know I can’t. We agreed. I’m only a pilot.”
“Come on, Kaang.”
“I really don’t know…perhaps your suggestion, that She’s some kind of rebel.”
“Too obvious, and She’d need a better pilot. She’d have tried to recruit you…Cyr, what is She?”
“Do we have to go on with this, Commander?”
“Yes. What is She?”
“Maybe She really is just an alien. Maybe this is the first real threat we’ve ever known. The first of many. Maybe this is the start of a war, against the first enemy we’ve ever met who can really match us.”
“She came here three hundred years ago, Cyr. It wasn’t the start of a war against Sakhra.”
“It didn’t need to be. Whatever She did was enough for Her to leave and let Sakhra decline.” She glanced at Thahl, who remained expressionless. “The Commonwealth is bigger. Maybe a war is more appropriate.”
When the silence on the Bridge had grown long enough to be uncomfortable, Cyr added “You did ask me. And it’s what we all heard back on Sakhra.”
“And is it what you think?”
“Yes, Commander, because it’s the most likely. The best fit.”
“Except that the Commonwealth has ordered us to engage and destroy Her alone. Just us.”
“That doesn’t make it untrue.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, Cyr.”
“Oh? Then what is all this about, Commander? You told us—”
“To consider what She is. Not discover. Not decide. Consider! Consider all the explanations, because all the explanations, whether they’re true or not, tell us the same thing.”
“Do you have an explanation for us, Commander?”
“Yes, I think She’s an alien. But not like you described, Cyr. Something quite different. Perhaps…”
“I meant an explanation for your behaviour here, Commander.”
“…Perhaps what we’ve been fighting all this time isn’t even a ship. Perhaps it doesn’t have a Commander, or crew, or pilot. Perhaps it’s a single life-form, evolved to live in space like a fish in water. Or a marine mammal, which looks like a fish but preys on fish. Yes: it looks like a ship but preys on ships.”
“And how,” Cyr inquired politely, “does it prey on ships? Does it eat them?”
“Absorbs their energies,” Smithson offered. “You know, feeds on their feelings of mortification, after it’s defeated them in various elaborate and enigmatic ways.”
“Yes! And,” Cyr went on delightedly, “and its drives, its scanners, its beams, its missiles, all the things that make it look like a ship, they’re evolutionary mimicry.”
“You see? It’s getting better. You’re adding details. Building internal consistencies.” Foord stood up and gazed round the Bridge. His gaze was almost feverish, but it had something almost like certainty. Kaang saw each of them, herself included, try but fail to hold it.
“All the explanations, even the wrong ones—even that last one of mine, which is the most wrong—tell us the same thing. Even the explanations we haven’t thought of yet, when we think of them, will tell us the same thing.”
Abruptly, he turned and walked back to where Kaang sat at her console. As before, he went around the walls rather than directly, kicking debris as he went, and when he reached Kaang he towered over her.
“Let’s recap. A renegade who hates the Commonwealth, and strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. A resistance force from the I2Js who hate the Commonwealth, and strike at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. Something made by the Commonwealth, because the Commonwealth hates us and strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. Something from another civilisation, the first ever to threaten the Commonwealth; and it strikes at us because we’re its most dangerous instrument. You see where this takes us?”
Kaang felt the base of her neck aching as she stared up at him, trying to read what was in his face.
“We’re alone. Trust nothing. Trust nobody. We’re all we’ve got.”
He glanced at the screen. The comm was still working, and none of the figures on the hull had moved. And Kaang, who didn’t yet understand his meaning but had started to sense it from his voice, felt her scalp tingling.
“This is why I don’t care who or what She is. I never have and never will. We’re an Outsider, one of only nine, and we’re alone. The Commonwealth created Outsiders as its ultimate weapon. It kept them outside normal command structures. It named them after killers and loners. It crewed them with killers and loners, people unable to fit normal social structures, but too brilliant and too valuable to discard.
“And when they came into those nine ships they brought only their abilities, and nothing else. No shared culture and no friendship. They were alone together. The other eight are still like that, but we’ve encountered Her and it’s made us different. And this is why we can destroy Her. Because we know what we are.”
On the screen, in the distance, there was a brief and silent flare. The required standard period had elapsed and Joser’s coffin ignited, returning him to the set of possibilities he had always been. Perhaps.
; “We’re going after Her. We’ll repair the structural damage and drives; but the surface damage, stays as it is. The shit over the hull, stays as it is. The Bridge, stays as it is. We, stay as we are. We’ll taste and smell each other. This is what we are.
“Joser won’t be replaced on the Bridge; we’ll share his duties. And when we next face Her, it won’t be for Joser, or the Commonwealth, or friendship or professional pride, it’ll be because of what She made us. She was right: everything outside this ship is an illusion, and it hates us. Or She was lying, and everything outside this ship is real; and it still hates us. We’re all we have, and outside this tin can we can trust nothing and nobody. We’re all there is. Nothing else exists. That, out there, is painted scenery.
“We’re no longer an Instrument of the Commonwealth. We’re an Instrument of Ourselves.”
9
For once, thought Smithson, Kaang was ahead of everyone. She had sensed Foord’s meaning before anyone else—even before he, Smithson, sensed it. He saw that shudder, that frisson, go through her before Foord said Instrument of Ourselves. Afterwards he saw it go through everyone on the Bridge, and everyone outside on the hull, and he’d felt it go through himself; his long grey body, with its almost random construction, visibly rippled. Nobody cheered—this was, after all, still the Charles Manson—but Foord’s words had an impact. They had gone everywhere.
When Foord finished, most of them just nodded briefly—to themselves rather than to each other, because again this was still the Charles Manson—and resumed work. Smithson too. Oh yes, he’d said to himself, I can buy some of that. Fuck everyone except us. Fuck the universe. Painted scenery. And, he thought sourly as he looked out from the Bridge at the stars, not even very well painted. Those stars look alive but most of them, by the time their light reaches us, are dead or dying. They look alive but they’re dead. Trust nothing.
The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith. Her current position was unchanged, and had been for some time, even while Her third missile chased them. She was on the inner edge of the Belt, at the asteroid CQ-504. She could have moved off ahead of them, out of the Belt and deeper into Horus system, and they could not have stopped Her, as She was out of beam range. But She didn’t move off. It was curious, thought Smithson. She seemed to be building some kind of structure there.
Cyr too was considering what Foord said. She took each word, held it up and examined it from every angle: port, starboard, ventral, dorsal, front, rear. She particularly liked Instrument of Ourselves. It resonated. He made it sound spontaneous, but she knew he was too careful, and too clever, to say it without calculation. But it had a resonance. Now, we know what we are.
Cyr didn’t like the bit about being able to smell and taste each other. She understood the symbolism perfectly; but she liked to be immaculate. To be anything less than immaculate was a high price to pay—for her, almost the ultimate price—but she weighed it carefully and decided it would be worth it. And she could already smell and taste Foord.
The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith and the asteroid CQ-504. It was curious, Cyr thought to herself. She was apparently building some kind of structure there.
Kaang kept remembering The Shudder. Having felt instinctively what Foord said, she tried again and again to analyse it literally, the way Cyr and Smithson and Thahl would do; and failed. It didn’t matter. She knew that what Foord said would change them all. It meant a shift in some previously immovable balance. And more specifically, it meant that she would be needed. She didn’t understand where her extraordinary skills came from, but they would be needed and she was back in time to provide them, so that was alright. She missed Joser, though.
The Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt, towards Faith. It was curious, Kaang thought. She was apparently building some kind of structure on CQ-504. She had shrouded it against their probes, but they intended to know more about it by the time they reached Her.
Since Foord spoke, Thahl had been thinking about the Book of Srahr, and how one day—if they survived this—Foord would return to Sakhra and would be permitted to read it. And then a pattern would be completed, a long slow pattern three centuries old.
Thahl made himself turn to specifics. The Charles Manson was the most formidable ship in the Commonwealth; and what Foord said made it more so. Even She, when they next engaged Her, wouldn’t know that. She would expect them to act like an Instrument of the Commonwealth, which they no longer were. Foord was right. Now we can beat Her, because now we know what we are. An Instrument “—of Ourselves,” Foord repeated, as the Charles Manson nosed its way carefully through the Belt. “And we have to make it irreversible. So…” He picked up the incongruous microphone on his console, the one with a channel to the Department, dashed it on the floor of the Bridge and ground it with his heel. He drew a breath. “Thahl, please close down ALL external comm channels.”
Thahl glanced up, but did not hesitate. Foord watched his hands, slender talons with two opposed thumbs, moving over his illuminated console, leaving darkness wherever they landed.
“Done, Commander. We’re alone.”
The microphone was only symbolic. Thahl knew the Department would have put several other probes on the ship; he knew about most of them, but not all. Later, Foord would order him to disable them, which he would do, but he wouldn’t get them all. So, the microphone was only symbolic, but the symbolism was powerful.
The Department would want to retaliate. If they destroyed Her, they would put themselves beyond the Department’s retaliation, and if they didn’t destroy Her then She’d destroy them; and they’d be beyond the Department’s retaliation. Either way, Foord had now locked them outside. They were genuinely outside the Department’s reach.
The symbolism was very powerful, but Thahl knew Foord had also calculated it carefully, as he always did. And it wasn’t only, or at least wasn’t entirely, a mere cynical calculation—Thahl, too, had felt The Shudder. They all had. Exactly as Foord had calculated.
•
There was a silence on the Bridge. Even when they started speaking the silence remained in their speech, jumping from the end of one sentence to the beginning of another.
“They’ll want to know why,” Kaang said.
“When this is over,” Cyr said, “and when we rejoin, we can tell them.”
“Perhaps we won’t rejoin,” Smithson said.
“Of course we will,” Cyr said. “Instrument Of Ourselves is right for what we need now, but we’ll have to rejoin. When She’s gone, there will be…”
“Nowhere else to go,” finished Kaang. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Smithson said, “but for now I prefer it like this. It feels right.”
The silence was quite unlike the Charles Manson’s usual repertoire of silences: reflective, rather than pregnant. Some of them gazed out across the plane of the Belt, in the direction of the inner edge where She waited. The stars twinkled. Some of them were dead.
“Some of us will die,” Smithson said.
“Yes,” Foord said. “But now we really can defeat Her. And She doesn’t know it, yet.”
“She’ll know,” Kaang said, unexpectedly, “when we engage Her. Ships have a body language.”
“What will She…” Cyr began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Kaang. “What will She do when She finds out?”
“It isn’t important,” Thahl said suddenly. “We all know, She isn’t concerned either way.”
The others looked at him.
“Anything sent up to stop Her is irrelevant. She may destroy it, play with it, or let it go. She isn’t concerned either way.”
“For once…” Foord began, then stopped for a moment and glanced curiously at Thahl. “For once, I think you’re wrong. Where we’re concerned, She is concerned. She won’t run ahead of us to Sakhra, and She won’t stay put in the Belt. She wants to fight us all the way through the system. Al
l the way back to Sakhra. I know it.”
And then something else occurred to Foord. These pieces of knowledge about Her which he’d been gathering so carefully, based on his observation and research and on what he thought was his growing instinct about Her, perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were planted by Her, as She had done with Joser. Not by telepathy, but events. She does things, and predicts their effect on us, which means that somehow She already knows us.
He was so struck with this idea that he scarcely noticed when Cyr excused herself from the Bridge. Something I need to check in the weapons bays, she had said. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. He nodded abstractedly.
•
Unnecessary, Cyr told herself, as she picked her way through the cramped corridor leading to the weapons bays, Unnecessary. Like the kid you shot at Blentport. It was a vicious thing to say, more like something I’d say, and it made him sound ugly. I should have spoken to him. She imagined the conversation, in his study. —You wanted to see me? —Yes, what you said. How could you say that, after I’d just destroyed Her missiles? —Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Was there anything else? Foord had a habit of receiving an attack, draining it, and tossing it back to the attacker like a dead empty thing; it was a habit Cyr knew he could apply to his personal dealings as well as his military ones.
The main corridor branched into several narrower corridors, with naked lights and unfinished plaster, and she took the one leading to the bay she wanted. On the way she had to squeeze past one of her junior officers, a young woman called Hollith, so tightly that at least one of them enjoyed it, and then she was in the particular bay she had come to visit, staring up at Foord’s two missiles.
She had come here to try and figure them out: not what they did, but how he’d use them. Everyone knew he delivered every time, against every opponent, but how would he deliver this time? And against this opponent? Even Smithson, arguably the cleverest of them, had not been able to see how Foord would use these things. Smithson, in fact, had been quite disparaging about them, perhaps irritated by their simple design and by Foord’s cryptic answers to his questions.
