Faith

by John Love

  This wasn’t a frenzy of self-mutilation. It was steady and careful and measured. She was digesting the damaged parts of Herself at exactly the rate She needed to provide the energy to go on fighting, to go on crawling through the Gulf. Her motives were desperate but Her conclusion was cold and considered, and Her execution unfailingly accurate. Like everything She did.

  Both his parents, in the later stages of the illness which finally took them, had fought a losing battle to keep their appearance. He’d pretended not to notice the incontinence-stains on their clothing, or their subterfuges to conceal them. This was similar: something private about Her which he shouldn’t have seen.

  “What She’s doing to stay alive, Cyr, is in the craters. Go for the craters.”

  •

  For ten seconds, the golden light of the Charles Manson’s harmonic guns swept along Her flank, pumping their resonances into Her. She seemed to shudder, but it could have been the effect of the shifting colour from the craters. Lit by that colour, nothing seemed real or measurable.

  Cyr fired the harmonic guns again, once, along and back. This time she also fired the Friendship guns (used only when close) at Her flank; they shot Jewel Boxes, self-guiding shells which on impact released jagged slivers of synthetic diamond able to shred almost any known surface. They didn’t shred Faith, but each one succeeded in digging a small shallow gash in Her flank, dislodging three or four of Her thumbnail hull plates, and that was enough for Cyr’s immediate purpose. There were nineteen such gashes in an irregular line along Her flank, between the midsection and stern craters.

  Why doesn’t She respond? thought Foord. Cyr was thinking the same thing, and added Perhaps She already has.

  Cyr launched a swarm of grapples across the sixteen hundred feet. She called them Hands of Friendship, diamond-tipped claws on the end of black monofilament lines which tumbled out like spider-secretions from ventral orifices on the Charles Manson. The claws were shaped like Sakhran hands, and were self-programmed to find any irregular surface, grip it, and never let go. One, and occasionally two, of them landed on each of the nineteen shallow gashes, and held. Now, Cyr thought, we’re directly touching Her.

  Cyr’s long jewelled fingers played another combination of panels, opening another pattern of apertures on the Charles Manson, this time along the starboard midsection. The objects which emerged were globular and milky and quivering. They made their way towards Her like a slow-motion ejaculation, each one targeted at one of Her port manoeuvre drive outlets. Cyr called them Diamond Clasps, because they were plasmas of altered carbon which turned on impact into plugs of liquid, then solid, synthetic diamond. They landed on Her and dressed Her, covering each outlet with a brilliant sparkling scab. Two missed, but the other fifty-three landed accurately.

  She responded. She must have known what was coming next—that Cyr would hold Her in position and attack the craters—yet it was strangely half-hearted. She fired just three of Her port manoeuvre drives, presumably to test whether She could dislodge the diamond scabs. She couldn’t; thin streams of drive emissions squirted from underneath them, but most of their force was contained. Then, using Her starboard manoeuvre drives only, She tried to roll away, but the claws and monofilament lines of the grapples held Her. She didn’t try again.

  “Now the craters,” Foord whispered.

  “This is too easy. Something’s wrong.”

  “The craters!”

  “Commander, it’s too easy. She wants us to go for the craters.”

  “She wants you to think that, so you won’t go for them. You wanted my orders. Carry out my orders.”

  Cyr hesitated. Something, perhaps Faith, was still telling her not to attack the craters directly. As her hand hovered over a panel she hadn’t pressed before, she thought This may be wrong, it may keep Her alive. She pressed the panel.

  A long ventral aperture slid open, releasing an object like an ancient battering-ram, ninety feet long: a Diamond Cluster, a missile whose bulging warhead was a cluster of five hundred Jewel Boxes, which would explode their fractal diamond slivers simultaneously. It could shred any known Commonwealth ship. If it hit Her where She was already damaged, it should break Her in half.

  It dropped out of the Charles Manson’s underside, made one calculated burst of its motors and went dark, crossing the sixteen hundred feet to Her. On the Bridge screen they watched it entering the midsection crater. It went deep inside until, like everything else in there, it passed beyond focus. The latticeworks of wreckage and shifting colour swirled and swallowed it, like it was entering a forest of seaweed.

  It exploded, but not in a way which made any sense. First, the explosion blew out of the crater, not in. And second, it was hundreds of times slower than it should have been, so slow that it was drained of force. And third—

  The pattern of force and fragments, of blast and flying diamond-slivers, which should have erupted into Her and should have been unstoppable, came blossoming out of the crater in a slow and syrupy and ever-widening funnel, almost a gesture, reaching out to the Charles Manson; then reversed itself. The huge burst-open body of the Diamond Cluster and its multiple warhead came back together, unexploded itself, and sank back into the midsection crater like treacle down a throat. They never saw it again. But the dark watered-silk patterns around the crater’s edges turned darker.

  She’s digesting it, thought Cyr, aghast. Converting its mass to Her energy. She never cared about it exploding, She just wanted it inside Her. And we gave it to Her. Part of us is now part of Her. What have we started?

  The dark swirls continued to darken, for about fifty feet around the midsection crater. There was a shuddering at Her stern as She started to repower Her crippled main drives, and alarms were sounding on the Bridge. Cyr tried to think it out for a few seconds more. If there’s a mass-to-energy process in the crater, the dark patterns must diffuse it through Her. And if you diffused that process, if you subdivided it hundreds or thousands of times as She had done, you could change it and change the laws it obeyed. You could write the laws it obeyed.

  And we gave it to Her. “Commander…”

  Alarms sounded again on the Bridge. She had fired Her main drives and was starting to move away, and Kaang immediately matched Her course and speed: like before, She moved through the Gulf at thirty percent, in the direction of Sakhra. The two ships were travelling alongside each other, still linked by Cyr’s diamond grapples and monofilament lines; and still separated by one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet.

  Cyr felt a mounting horror. “Commander…” she repeated.

  Foord shook his head, and pointed at the screen. Something was coming out of the midsection crater.

  •

  The Bridge screen had spotted it at the same time as Foord, and patched in local magnification. It came into focus as it came out of the shifting colour. It became definite only when it left the crater, and started crawling over the surface of Her hull.

  It was about the size of a man, and shaped like a spider. Its body was triangular, with three jointed and clawed legs extending up and out from each corner. It was the same metallic-ceramic silver as Her hull, and its body was featureless, with no recognisable sensory devices, so there was no focus of its identity; no face.

  Another one emerged behind it, and another, and another.

  “Thahl?”

  “No, Commander. These are new.”

  Even so, they weren’t surprising. The Charles Manson carried its own self-programming EV synthetics, used for hull repairs and occasionally for close combat. They were not unlike these, both in shape and size.

  “Hold our position,” Foord said. “No matter what happens.”

  More came out of the crater, one by one. The Bridge screen counted them: nineteen. They darted across Her flank towards the shallow gashes where Cyr’s grapples were anchored, the diamond Hands of Friendship which were designed never to let go. The spiders dug them out of Her hull, busily and precisely, then fired onboard motors and rode t
hem, and their monofilament lines, back across the sixteen hundred feet to the Charles Manson. The lines had come out of the Charles Manson’s underside, and now they curved back on themselves as the spiders flew them back towards the Charles Manson’s dorsal surfaces. It was like they were folding a giant bedsheet.

  Hundreds more of them poured out of the midsection crater, not in the same tidy order as the first nineteen. They were climbing over each other to get out, as if they were running from something in the crater rather than running to attack the Charles Manson; but that impression lasted only a moment. Each one, as it emerged, fired its onboard motor and jumped the sixteen hundred feet, following the original nineteen. Some were blown to pieces by Cyr’s Friendship guns as they jumped, and others were vaporised by the motors of those immediately in front of them; but nearly two hundred landed on the dorsal surface of the Charles Manson’s hull, where, like prospectors in a gold rush, they ignored each other and started digging where they landed.

  Nobody ever made you fight like this before, thought Cyr, talking both to herself and to Her, as she activated the Charles Manson’s own synthetics to meet them.

  On the Bridge, the usual murmuring of alarms was again supplemented by the deeper notes of hull-integrity warnings. Faith’s synthetics dug busily; the claws which dealt so easily with Cyr’s Hands of Friendship were shredding the hull’s topsurface. Some had already penetrated to the first inner layer. They worked quickly and precisely, with an air of self-absorption, as though competing. Rising vertically above each of them, like smoke from factory chimneys, were floating columns of shredded hull-fragments.

  Groups of hull-plates on the Charles Manson’s rear dorsal areas rose up into blisters and burst open, disgorging the Charles Manson’s own synthetics. They too were like spiders, but spiders from the planet where they were designed and built, with globular bodies and eight multiclawed legs. They were the dark bluish grey of gunmetal. They were slightly bigger than their opponents, and there were more of them, five hundred against two hundred. They swarmed over the top of the Charles Manson’s hull as though they were a shadow cast by a third ship. Faith’s spiders ignored them and continued digging into the hull until the last possible moment, then turned one by one as the swarm reached them.

  One of the Charles Manson’s many external viewers picked up the moment of first contact, and patched in to the Bridge screen. One of Faith’s spiders was digging deep into the hull when three of the Charles Manson’s reached it. It stopped its work and turned to face them, though it had no face and neither did they. The three closed on it from different angles. It impaled the first, extending a leg to strike down through the dark globular body and into the hull, then rose and pivoted on that leg to grasp the second, holding it aloft while it snipped off its eight legs one by one, and rolled its body away. It completed its pivot and landed, then flicked the leg by which it held its first opponent impaled; in a torrent of cogs and gears and catarrh-coloured machine oil, the first opponent was cut in half and the two halves left painlessly but uselessly twitching. Faith’s spider seemed to consider for a moment; then carefully nudged the two sets of dismembered remains to send them floating up to join the column of hull-fragments rising above its excavation, to which it returned. The third of its opponents, which it had either forgotten or decided to ignore, leapt after it and struck downward, severing a corner of its triangular body complete with three jointed legs. Faith’s spider died, or became nonfunctional, so strangely that on the Bridge they could only stare at what happened; but the Bridge screen magnified it, and recorded it in detail.

  The two pieces of Her spider did not bleed oil or spurt mechanical innards. The surfaces where they had been severed were smooth and solid, like a stone sheared in two, with no inner cavities or workings. The two pieces grew still; then broke in half, again with a solid shear, and broke in half again and again, beyond vision, until they became nothing. Except that nothing which continually halves itself ever becomes nothing.

  The Bridge screen patched in two more viewers. They showed similar individual battles, dark against silver.

  A silver spider cut two opponents to pieces, and turned back to continue its excavation. But one of the two, its dark globular body split almost in half, and dragging the empty half of its body and the strings of its insides behind it, crawled after the silver spider on its three remaining legs. It looked like bravery, but was not; the dark spider, like Foord’s two missiles, recognised nothing in the universe except its programming. It struck down at the third joint of one of the silver spider’s legs, and severed it. The silver spider fell into halves, and subdivided down to nothing; almost as if it wanted to.

  Five dark spiders encircled a silver spider. It let them close in; then whirled balletically, pivoting on first one and then another corner of its triangular body, striking with its claws at different parts of the circle around it. Every time it struck, an opponent was mutilated. They fell back. Finally one of the five caught a claw and severed it at the joint. They stayed back and waited for it to start subdividing—which it did almost eagerly, as if that was even more important than digging into the hull—and then they moved off to the next battle.

  The Bridge screen patched in more viewers, shuffled them one after another, then subdivided them into a mosaic. Then it started to pan out. Only one side fought collectively; the other fought in intervals between attacking the hull, and then only as isolated individuals against two or three or more opponents. They never went to help—or even seemed aware of—each other.

  The Bridge screen panned out further. Along the top of the Charles Manson’s hull were nearly two hundred excavations, some of them now dangerously deep. Each was the scene of a battle, and each was marked by a floating vertical column of pieces of hull, to which were being added the dark dismembered bodies of the Charles Manson’s spiders. They were smokestacks in a diseased industrial landscape; and, like giant lice running over it, things with no faces or voices or identities fought with unrelenting vacancy.

  The Charles Manson had never before had to repel a boarding by an opponent’s synthetics, and Faith had never before had to reveal or use Her own. Both were somehow violated, but together they had made this. We work very well together, Foord thought sourly, watching it. Thahl sheathed and unsheathed his claws, Cyr unconsciously licked her lips. Smithson was expressionless. Kaang, until Foord told her to stop, had actually put her hands over her face.

  The Bridge screen again subdivided into a mosaic of individual battles. It had seen a pattern, which it judged worthy of attention. The Charles Manson’s spiders were no match individually for their opponents. In direct combat, even three or more against one, they were being annihilated. But their self-programming told them something else. They only had to sever one body-part, even the last joint of one leg, and the silver spiders would cease to operate and start subdividing down to nothing, almost as if they wanted to.

  What made you? thought Foord, staring across the sixteen hundred feet. What are you? She looked and behaved like a ship, sustained damage, showed internal substructures—they were still visible now in the craters, lit by the unnameable colour, as the two ships flew alongside each other through the dark of the Gulf. And the wreckage that had poured out of those craters, each fragment repeating the main damage and burning away to nothing. And the silver landscape. And the self-digestion, mass to energy, diffused through Her damaged body by dark swirling watered-silk traceries.

  And now the silver spiders, easily able to shred the Charles Manson’s hull and dismember its spiders but subdividing down to nothing when any part of them was severed, so they could only be whole or be nothing. And when not whole, they seemed to want to be nothing, and that was what the Bridge screen had seen. That was what had started to turn the battles.

  The Bridge screen displayed the numbers. Five hundred against two hundred became four hundred against a hundred and fifty, and then the change set in: three hundred and fifty against eighty, three hundred against twenty.
The Bridge screen patched in the end of the last silver spider. It had shredded six opponents and, moments before it was overrun, snipped off one of its own legs and subdivided down to nothing.

  The top of the Charles Manson’s hull was a leprous landscape: excavations like open sores, sprouting vertical columns of debris, and everywhere dismembered spiders. Nearly three hundred of the Charles Manson’s dark spiders remained, though few of them had all their body-parts. Without ceremony, they set about repairing the excavations. They used plugs of synthetic diamond like those Cyr had launched at Faith, carrying them to and fro across the hull in their original form, like quivering opalescent eggs. They picked their way through the debris with the slow injured gait of soldiers after a battle, except that the bodies they stepped over were only those of their own kind. Their opponents had gone, subdivided to nothing.

  The Bridge was silent except for a few exhaled breaths. Faith continued to fly alongside them. The craters continued to pulsate. The Gulf just continued, before and behind them; and so did whatever had just taken place over the topsurface of the Charles Manson. There was no sense that something had just ended successfully.

  When Smithson said “What next?” he was the first to speak. Nobody answered, because he wasn’t asking what they would do next, but what She would do next. And She had already begun.

  The columns of debris floating vertically over the abandoned excavations grew taller and thinner. They waved backwards and forwards in unison as they grew. Their waving was repetitive and hypnotic, like hair on a drowned corpse. Each backwards-and-forwards cycle left them a little more off the vertical, inclining a little more in the direction of Faith; and a little taller and thinner, as if they were not just accretions of debris but something ductile, being teased out longer and thinner by their own waving motion. As they extended and thinned they looked even more like strands of hair: diseased hair, piebald with the colours of the Charles Manson, the silver of its shredded hull-plates and the dark gunmetal of its dismembered spiders. And always getting thinner, easing gradually further in Her direction.