Faith

by John Love

  They knew Her internal damage must be mounting. They knew She’d have to fire Her starboard manoeuvre drives to get out of range of their harmonic guns, and She did so; but what came out of them was not drive emissions. It was heavier and slower, dark and bulbous and glistening, like dozens of separate streams of entrails. About five hundred feet out from Her the streams joined, and became a single cloud of corrosive plasma, the colour of insects’ wing-cases: dark but crawling with iridescence. She flourished it like a cloak, and sent it billowing towards them.

  Foord immediately ordered retreat. The Charles Manson’s port manoeuvre drives fountained, and the gap between them increased to three thousand feet. Then the manoeuvre drive apertures widened, and fired a neutraliser cloud.

  Foord was right, She’d wanted to widen the gap, but She’d made them do it. And faced with a plasma cloud, they’d had no choice. They couldn’t let it near them. It would corrode their electronics, infect their bionics, eat their outer hull layers, and—worst of all—would carry on doing those things even after an engagement had been won and the enemy who launched it was destroyed. But a plasma cloud could be countered; by retreating, and by launching a neutraliser.

  Across three thousand feet, they watched their cloud billowing out to meet Hers. Theirs was light in colour and Hers was dark, but that didn’t imply any symbolism. The lightness of their cloud was the colour of dirty bandages, and the darkness of Hers carried the iridescence of jewels. They met, and this time there was no stalemate. Their cloud crawled over and under and inside Hers, putting out the jewelled colours one by one as if it had grown fingers and was poking out eyes. Her cloud collapsed under the pale crawling shadow of theirs, folding back into itself until it ceased to exist. In the space between the two ships their cloud was left suddenly alone, like something floating in a toilet. Cyr touched a panel and it folded back into nothing, like Hers.

  Iridescence, thought Cyr. I’d almost forgotten. “Commander, please have Kaang take us to sixteen hundred feet. I have an idea.”

  •

  In the Charles Manson’s underbelly, something moved. A door in the rear ventral section of the hull started to slide open; then jammed. Cyr switched to backup systems and it started moving again. At one point it actually creaked (an incongruous, gothic noise which they could hear even on the Bridge) as it resisted, but the backup systems forced it to continue. It slid back, opening a dark gash in the Charles Manson’s underside.

  The weapon which would emerge from the gash had never been used operationally. It had only been tested once, seven years ago when Foord took command of his ship on its first proving flight. The test had been successful but Foord and Cyr had both thought the weapon was too elaborate and specialised.

  Seven years later, he glanced at her.

  “Fire Opals,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  “So had I,” said Cyr. “We were both wrong.”

  The starboard manoeuvre drives fountained. Kaang brought them back to exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet. Faith did not respond, but was watching them closely. They could feel it.

  Out of the gash poured a stream of iridescent globes, each one the size and colour of an opal. The Fire Opals were designed (in Foord’s opinion, over-designed) to attack an already damaged opponent in a particularly roundabout way. Each globe was individually programmed to enter a ship’s hull through openings caused by battle damage, to seek out electronic and bionic circuits, get close to them, and burn itself to destruction. The circuits they attacked would not be destroyed outright, but—perhaps worse—would function too erratically to be trusted. Any ship they entered would be lobotomised, deprived of senses and sentience.

  Seven years ago, Foord had said that if you’d knocked a hole in your opponent you wouldn’t need such an oblique way of finishing him. Now, he told himself, if such a hole existed the Fire Opals could be decisive; and Faith, on Her unseen port side, had two.

  They dropped endlessly out of the gash in the Charles Manson’s belly like eggs out of a fish. After the darkly beautiful iridescence of Her plasma cloud, their greens and pinks and blues were as fresh as rain in sunlight. There were a hundred and ninety thousand of them.

  The Fire Opals extended underneath the Charles Manson in a long rippling filament. The door in the ship’s underbelly slid back, buckling slightly as the backup mechanisms forced it past the point where it had jammed on opening.

  Cyr touched a panel and the Fire Opals whipped out from underneath, then up, and hung quivering in the space between the two ships. She smiled to herself, then touched a few more panels. The Fire Opals formed themselves into a slender openwork sculpture: a delta shape with Her proportions, woven in opalescent ice. Cyr indulged herself further, and touched more panels. The sculpture started to hump up and down in imitation of Her crippled gait, and two holes appeared in its port side, one amidships and one at the stern.

  Faith made no response.

  “That’s enough,” Foord snapped. “Just get it done.”

  Cyr’s sculpture melted. She reached into it through her panels and pulled out the forces holding it together, and it collapsed back into what it had always been, a large swarm of small opalescent globes. The Fire Opals were still under Cyr’s control and would remain so until she locked in their path and launched them; then they would become individually self-directing, like Foord’s missiles.

  She pressed Launch, and said goodbye to them.

  The path she had locked in for them existed for microseconds and was gone, as they flowed into and out of it. It was a straight line to Faith, converging at a point only fifty feet from Her starboard, then branching in a giant Y, arching over Her and down towards the two craters on Her unseen port side. The path existed only when they travelled it, closing in their wake until all that remained of it were the two prongs of the Y above Her, pointing down at the craters like mantis claws. Then that was gone too. They had entered Her.

  Cyr locked off her panels. “They’re self-directing now, Commander.”

  Foord nodded, and stared into the Bridge screen.

  Sixty seconds’ propulsion, as they entered Her through the craters and found paths through the wreckage, seeking circuitry. Then thirty seconds’ burning. Most of them would find nothing and would fall and die alone in an unimaginable interior, in a darkness they would illuminate briefly but uselessly; but some would succeed. Maybe another two minutes, and the effect would be visible.

  It would act like a nerve poison. First convulsions, violent rolling and pitching motions; then erratic flaring of Her manoeuvre drives and what remained of Her main drives; then desperate attempts to use Her scanners and probes; then shutdown, as She realised that Her senses were crippled.

  Foord watched, across the cramped space they now shared with Her after having fought Her through half a solar system. Again he thought of a cellar with a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling. That was the kind of place where you did things like this.

  After three minutes She started to shudder. It was not a convulsion, just a gentle pitching motion which overlaid the rolling caused by the damage they had already done to Her, but it was visible. Foord leapt to his feet and stared greedily into the Bridge screen, trying to pull more movement out of Her image, but after another minute it subsided. Only the original rolling remained.

  “What…”

  Cyr waved him to silence, and continued watching the Bridge screen closely. After thirty seconds she straightened.

  “They’ve failed, Commander.”

  “You said they’d destroy Her.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “But you said…” He could hear an almost indignant note in his voice. Listen to yourself, something tried to tell him, but he ignored it. She’d wronged him: Cyr, or Faith, or both.

  “…you said they’d destroy Her.”

  “They didn’t. She’s still there.” After a moment, Cyr added “Look. You can see Her, if you study the screen. Instead of yourself.”

&n
bsp; “All of them? All of them went inside Her and all of them died?”

  Cyr threw up her hands, making her clothes move interestingly.

  “Yes, Commander. And we still have to destroy Her. If that’s what you want.”

  “Of course it’s what I want! I even…”

  “You even had the words ready. I saw your face. Playing at regret. ‘We’ll never know who or why; Her undeclared war; Her strangeness and beauty; Was there no other way?’ You had the words ready. I saw your face.”

  “But you said…”

  “Listen to yourself, Commander,” Thahl hissed.

  There was something like contempt in Thahl’s voice, and Foord suddenly shared it.

  “Cyr, I…”

  “Leave it, Commander.”

  “It was because…”

  “Because we have to destroy Her and you’re afraid not to. Leave it.”

  He should have left it, but he’d wanted too much to apologise and explain. And now, to counter that, he went into denial and started reassuring himself: at least he and Thahl still understood each other, finishing each other’s sentences. But it wasn’t real. It was whistling in the dark, the same unguessable dark where the Fire Opals had burned and died.

  On the Bridge screen, against the emptiness of the Gulf which was both huge and cramped, She did nothing but roll stolidly alongside them with the same crippled gait. On the Bridge, he saw Cyr and Thahl and Smithson—Kaang hadn’t noticed—staring at him across another gulf. As if he was on a path which would take him away from them.

  “Is She working on me, like She did with Joser?”

  “If She is, Commander,” Thahl said “it won’t be like Joser, not after what we’ve done to Her. We’re going to find out new things about Her.”

  “And She isn’t,” Smithson added,” Working On You. That’s self-indulgent, I’ve seen it before on Outsiders, too much imagination. If She’s working on one of us it won’t be you. Off this ship you can be vulnerable, but on it you’re stronger than any of us.”

  Foord looked sharply at Smithson, who added, for good measure, “Yes, you heard me correctly, Commander. If She’s working on one of us, maybe it’s me. Why else would you expect me to tell you how strong you are?”

  Foord looked at their faces. He couldn’t read them. He didn’t know if She was playing him like Joser. Or playing one of them, or all of them.

  We’re going to find out new things about Her. About ourselves. It will get strange.

  “Thahl, if I’m right, you may have to…”

  “Take command. I know. But you’re not right, Commander…”

  “Cyr, what do we do next?”

  She exchanged glances with Thahl. “I’m already doing it, Commander. Look at the screen.”

  3

  Cyr’s combat instincts were more Sakhran than human. She was unmoved by failure. It produced in her neither despair nor defiance, neither desperation nor determination; only an expressionless glance, and then she continued past it. So when the Fire Opals died, she simply switched to what had worked before: the harmonic guns. While Foord indulged himself elsewhere, she powered them up, and now a broadside of golden beams played up and down Faith’s starboard flank.

  As before, they took about ten seconds to travel the length of Her hull and back, but this time it was different. Something was happening inside Her.

  The windows and ports which lined Her hull had been dark since they first saw Her. One of them, close to Her stern, lit up. The Bridge screen immediately focussed on it, but nothing was visible inside: the light was as depthless as the dark had been. It was the same unnameable colour which burned in the two craters on Her port side, so far removed from any colour they had ever seen that they had difficulty recognising it as light.

  The window darkened. The one next to it lit and fell dark, then the one next to that. It was like a lantern floating, or being carried, inside the length of Her hull, stern to nose; then back, nose to stern, the windows lighting and darkening sequentially. When it had passed back through Her hull, it disappeared. The line of windows was dark again.

  The dark, like the light, was depthless. It seemed to be only a coating on the inner surface of each window, or to go on for an infinity behind it; either way, it showed nothing of what was inside Her. The process had taken twenty seconds.

  Cyr again fired the harmonic guns, directly into the windows. They lit and darkened again, but this time from outside, as the golden light passed over them and released its harmonics. Then, simultaneously, they exploded. Molten silver—a lighter colour than Her hull, the colour of the pyramids– gushed out of them and cascaded down Her flanks. Shards of dark glass, or crystal, or diamond, from the exploded windows fountained and swirled around Her like a swarm of dead Fire Opals, visible only against the cascading silver of Her hull, disappearing against the dark backdrop of the Gulf as they flew further away from Her. A few of them reached as far as the Charles Manson, and bounced off harmlessly.

  For the third time, Cyr fired the harmonic guns. More liquid silver poured out of the sockets of Her windows. She was bleeding ten times as copiously as before. There didn’t seem room inside Her for what was pouring out. It was no longer cascading down Her flank, but moving horizontally across it. In ten seconds it covered Her entire starboard side from nose to stern, and built contours which didn’t follow the contours of Her hull underneath it, or the contours of anything they would have recognised as a ship. She altered, and their perspective altered with Her.

  Waves of molten silver were moving over Her hull. They moved against or around each other to create peaks and troughs, in long sinuous ripple patterns like wet sand after a retreating sea; then, as the peaks rose and the troughs deepened, they started to look like something else. What was building itself over Her starboard flank made no sense if you saw it as shapes extruding horizontally from a vertical surface, or as shapes covering a ship which was alongside them. You had to be looking down on it, and then it made sense.

  Her starboard flank had become a silvered landscape, a relief map of hills and valleys and plains. The sockets of Her windows were lakes of liquid silver. The landscape filled the Bridge screen. A headup display said they were travelling through the Gulf alongside an object whose shape and size were similar to theirs, but it was a lie. They floated miles above it.

  As perspective altered, so did magnitude. The lakes became oceans, the hills became mountains, the valleys grew as deep as the Sakhran Great Bowl. Now they were floating above the face of a planet. The Bridge screen couldn’t contain it; the silver landscape filled all 360 degrees of it, and rushed out past sight beyond its top and bottom edges. They’d seen the roaring fiery face of Horus 5 and the blank blurred face of Horus 4, and this was bigger: and all done in silver, height and depth picked out in gradations of silver-white through silver-grey to silver-black. They floated miles above it, and it swam years below them.

  As perspective and magnitude altered, so did colour. Shadows welled up inside the liquid silver, never quite reaching its surface, but tinting it like internal bruises: silver green in the valleys, silver blue in the oceans, silver white on the mountain- peaks. Thahl made the Bridge screen magnify one of the oceans. Once it had been a window, then a lake. Now it had bays and inlets, and on its silver-yellow beaches things were crawling out, some to die and some to evolve.

  Then the last alteration: time. Alternate bands of light and darkness chased each other across the face of the silver, first slowly, like the turning of pages, then faster. The things which had crawled out of the ocean moved away into the land, from which others returned, altered. They made geometric shapes and grid patterns which grew and reached out lines, some straight and some curved, to cover the landscape and join each other. The pages turned faster and the patterns grew; then stopped growing and stayed the same, page after page; then dwindled and lost their connecting lines; then stayed, diminished, page after page. Was it the face of Her home planet? Or of other planets, after She had visited t
hem? It was too enormous and small, too fast and slow, to have any meaning. Or, like the layers of darkness and light on the inner surfaces of Her windows, when they had been windows, its meaning might go on forever.

  “It’s a lie,” Foord said. “Get us out of here.”

  •

  The Charles Manson turned in its own length, engaged ion drive at fifty percent, and headed away: not only to escape what She was doing or becoming, but to escape the sixteen hundred feet of confinement they shared with Her in the vastness of the Gulf. Already the oppressive weight of the last few hours, to which none of them would have admitted, began to lift.

  The image on the Bridge screen was now a rear view, but it still filled the screen because more of it poured back into the screen from its upper and lower edges as they moved away. At thirty thousand feet, which they reached almost instantly, it still hadn’t diminished. They knew it was a lie. They knew She’d done something to the screen or to the sensors feeding it, or to the fabric of the space between them, but it wouldn’t go. Thahl killed the headup displays which recorded its distance and mass and composition, and wished he could also kill the image. One was a lie, and both were meaningless.

  “No,” Foord answered Cyr before she asked, “we’re not running away…Kaang, what’s our distance?”

  “Eighty thousand feet, Commander.”

  “Take us to a hundred and fifty thousand, please. Cyr, be ready with particle beams.”

  “Commander,” Cyr said, “that silver is the same composition as Her pyramid.”

  “And it’s a lie. Whatever She’s done to our instruments or our senses, it’s a lie.”

  “We never fired beams at the pyramid! If we fire them at that, we don’t know how it’ll react.”