Faith

by John Love

  Cyr shook off the near-hypnosis of their waving motion long enough to ask herself why she wasn’t firing on them, or why none of the others had asked her; then became aware that something else was happening, back on the topsurface of the Charles Manson.

  At first it seemed like a minor optical fault on the Bridge screen, a faint double image of the landscape of the hull’s surface. There was a barely visible mirror-image of the surface of the hull, floating inches above the real surface; as though part of the hull had shed a molecule-thick layer of its skin which, as it floated upwards, retained the shape of the original. The Charles Manson’s surviving spiders, moving slowly to and fro repairing the damage done by the excavations—their movements were also repetitive and hypnotic, as if they were shadows cast by the waving columns above them—passed through the apparent double image without noticing it. Those on the Bridge saw why when the Bridge screen spotted it and attempted to magnify it locally: up close, it was almost nothing. You had to be at a distance even to glimpse it, and then you weren’t sure. But it existed. The Bridge screen didn’t deal in optical faults, even minor ones.

  It rose higher, and grew more distinct as it rose. Now it was six feet above the surface, still mirroring the shape of the hull beneath it, and had thickened and turned silver grey. And now, when the Bridge screen again magnified it locally, it had acquired substance and texture: it was granular, made up internally of swirling and eddying particles. Cyr cried out, and Foord again tasted bile along the sides of his tongue, as they both realised what they were watching.

  It was the collective ghost of the silver spiders.

  Nothing which keeps halving itself ever becomes nothing. They had divided down beyond visibility into atoms and their subatomic components, and were now recombining into something else.

  Cyr fired on it with the Friendship guns and shortrange lasers. They passed through it, leaving useless rents which closed as the particles inside it swirled back. It rose into a conical shape, as though it was a bedsheet and a figure underneath it had stood up. The conical point rose higher, pulling the rest after it until it too became a column, thicker and taller than the others. It waved backwards and forwards in time with the other columns of silver and gunmetal. Together, they took their leave of the Charles Manson.

  A soft concussion rolled up and down the hull as they moved off it in unison and started to cross the sixteen hundred feet back to Her, a slow slanting elongated armada. Cyr fired on all of them with no more effect than before.

  They converged, coiling and twining round each other, two hundred strands into a single rope which carried Her colours and theirs, and Her substance and theirs. Cyr fired tanglers and disruptors after it, and more lasers and Friendship guns, but they passed through it and spent themselves. Like a coil of matter spiralling from a captive sun into its black hole companion, the giant rope of their substance and Hers reached out towards the midsection crater on Her port side.

  Foord stared. We can’t let Her take it inside Her. But we’re too close for particle beams, there’s no time for plasma clouds, and nothing else works.

  “Kaang.”

  “Commander?”

  “Ram Her, please. Aim us at the crater.”

  The Bridge froze. Cyr glanced at Thahl.

  “Commander,” Thahl said carefully, “She’d assimilate us. All of us. And then She’d go on to Sakhra.”

  Foord nodded impatiently, gestured with a raised hand: You didn’t think I was serious, did you? “Thahl, you said we’d find out new things about Her. Look at the screen. That wasn’t a battle. She wasn’t fighting us, She was farming us.”

  The great coiled rope, light silver and dark silver, grey and gunmetal, reached closer to the midsection crater. It floated between the two ships, away from one and towards the other, touching neither of them. It had never physically linked them, had never simultaneously touched both of them, but it held them together by what it was, their substance and Hers.

  Perhaps this was all the silver spiders had wanted: to subdivide into molecular ghosts and offer themselves back inside Her for assimilation, together with the shredded pieces of the Charles Manson’s hull and spiders which they’d collected for Her and coiled together into this giant rope which would feed Her so She could go on to Sakhra. Perhaps She wanted the Charles Manson by Her side all the way back through the Gulf, to feed off it as required. Partly companion, partly farm animal.

  On the Bridge screen they watched as the midsection crater seemed to open itself to the reaching rope. It entered, and continued and continued to enter, until all its length was enfolded and swallowed into the nameless colour. As She took it into Herself a shockwave radiated out from the crater across Her flank. It was a darkening of the watered-silk lines, diffusing through Her the energy She created from the mass She had received, dividing and subdividing it down thousands of branching paths. She moved forward relative to the Charles Manson. Her ion speed increased to forty-five percent. Kaang matched it, and they stayed alongside Her; for now, they had nowhere else to go. Where do farm animals escape to?

  By one more increment, one more order of magnitude, they had become part of Her. As they flew together through the Gulf to Sakhra, there might be further increments. She would take and use what She wanted of them, and they couldn’t stop Her. That, now, was their relationship.

  •

  “Relationship? Relationship? Commander, this is a military engagement!”

  “Call it what you like, Cyr.”

  “Relationships don’t stand still, Commander. They grow. They die. And they can be changed.”

  It seemed like hours ago when Foord said that. In fact it was only minutes, and they still flew alongside Her through the featureless dark of the Gulf. She still moved with the same crippled gait—Her image lurched vertically up and down on the Bridge screen—but now She was travelling at forty-five percent, and so were they. The swirling patterns over Her hull were darker. Once they’d stalked each other through the Belt like a pair of tarantulas. Now it was different.

  “Permission to speak freely, Commander,” Cyr said.

  “Of course.”

  “You said we can’t stop what She’s doing. That’s unforgivable. In fact I wonder if it was you speaking at all.”

  Foord gazed at her steadily. “Don’t go there.”

  She held his gaze. “If you’re saying we can’t stop it, it’s my duty to go there.”

  Foord had never heard her use the word Duty before.

  “I mean it, Commander.”

  “I want to stop it, but we need a weapon that works. We’ve tried most of yours.”

  Other conversations on the Bridge had stopped. There were several paths Foord and Cyr could have taken from this point, none of them good; but they were all closed off, unexpectedly, by Smithson.

  “You’re both,” he said, “missing the point! Weapons aren’t always called weapons. Anything which produces Cause and Effect can be a weapon.”

  “That’s very true,” Foord said drily. “Like Relationships Don’t Stand Still. But do you have anything more specific?”

  “Yes, I do. Something very specific, and it makes things stand still. The Prayer Wheels.”

  The Prayer Wheels. The stasis generators used to isolate the MT Drive. The Charles Manson’s MT Drive needed three of them for safe containment. The Charles Manson always carried nine. And the MT Drive had been shut down since Horus 5, when She had tried to activate it.

  “Go on,” Foord said.

  “You know it already,” Smithson said impatiently. “Cannibalise two Prayer Wheels, launch them into those two craters. Gamble. Maybe they’ll freeze those mass-to-energy processes…”

  “Why should they?”

  “…isolate them, freeze them like an MT Drive, and then the craters will go back to being just holes in Her side, holes which we made, and we can fire whatever we want into them. Get inside Her. Break Her up.”

  “Slow down. Why should they freeze the processes like an MT
Drive?”

  “Look at those craters, Commander.”

  Foord looked. They looked back at him across sixteen hundred feet, unblinking and calm. Despite the nameless colour, despite the tricks they played with focus and perspective, they were above all calm. Stable, steady-state.

  “Commander, those are not simple mass-to-energy processes. They’ve been slowed down and subdivided, millions of times, until they sidestep the equations. To produce that steady-state energy, to diffuse it through Herself in usable amounts, probably takes only a millionth of what those craters have swallowed. But it also takes a new kind of physics.”

  “MT physics.”

  “Yes, Commander. We couldn’t do it, we don’t know enough about MT. But we know how to freeze it in stasis fields.”

  “So will She. She’ll be able to stop the Prayer Wheels.”

  “Of course She will, Commander! But immediately?”

  “I don’t know, and neither do you.”

  “Then would you rather go on like this? In the time it takes Her to stop the Prayer Wheels, She’ll be vulnerable and those craters will be open to us. Maybe. And Maybe is better than this. Now: my people can get two of them from the stern, weld some guidance systems and motors on them, and have them ready in one of the ventral launch bays in less than an hour. Is that specific enough?”

  5

  Later, Foord would realise that Smithson had probably saved the ship, simply by having an idea and getting them working on it. It almost didn’t matter whether the idea would work, though it was an extremely clever one; at that moment, if they’d had no goal, they might either have been infected by Foord’s mood, or relieved him of command. Both courses would have been fatal. So Smithson got them working, and Foord stayed in command, though his mood—and its source—remained unreadable and worrying.

  Smithson was often impatient with superiors and equals, but less often with subordinates. On this occasion his behaviour was faultless, and a source of some amazement; he was as thoughtful, meticulous and quietly authoritative as Foord himself would normally have been. The two Prayer Wheels were taken from the six reserves not connected to the MT Drive. The work of confirming they were operational, testing and welding in place the guidance and propulsion units, and manhandling them down to a conveyor tube which shot them through to one of the ventral launch bays, took Smithson’s people forty-seven minutes. Once in the launch bay, final testing and routing of the controls through to Cyr took another seven. During that time, Cyr—at Smithson’s suggestion—briefed Foord on what she would be firing into the craters, and in what order. Foord was more responsive than previously, but not much. He sat quietly with Cyr amid the rubbish and debris on the Bridge—which he still insisted should not be cleared—listening to her briefing, and watching Faith.

  Faith made no more moves towards them. She increased Her speed to forty-eight percent, and they matched it to stay alongside Her. She did not appear to notice.

  Foord was concerned about his behaviour. He tried to determine why he was concerned, but the reason kept sliding past him, as though his concern belonged with the rules of the normal universe, and his behaviour now held an MT-like ability to sidestep it. He was feeling better now, closer to what he remembered as normal, thanks (not for the first time) to Smithson’s cleverness. But he’d come close to accepting what She had done to them. Cyr was right, he should never have behaved like that. He never had before. He resolved never to again, and immediately set about reciting rules for ensuring he never would; and again it sidestepped him, and left him trying to remember why he needed to recite rules. But he felt better now, closer (he told himself) to what he remembered as normal.

  After Cyr briefed him, and after he reacted with apparent enthusiasm, she stayed with him (another suggestion of Smithson) and let him talk. Her dark pleated skirt had ridden up behind her as she whirled lithely to sit next to him, so she was not actually sitting on its fabric. The pleats were rucked up around her bottom, but he knew they would fall back gracefully into place when she stood up; they always did.

  “A millionth, Cyr.”

  “Commander?”

  “Smithson said She needs only a millionth of what She swallowed in that crater, to convert into a steady stream of usable energy. I thought She’d turn us into a farm animal and carve off bits of us to eat when She needs to, but She doesn’t need to.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “But She’ll probably do it anyway, just for the symbolism…Cyr, you see those dark patterns over Her hull?”

  “Yes, Commander. They’ve spread.”

  “They haven’t moved.”

  Originally, Cyr had just wanted to let him talk. Now she looked at him sharply.

  “How could they be spreading over Her and not have moved?”

  Because, he told her, they were always there; they’d just grown darker. And they weren’t just on Her surface. If they really did diffuse the processes through Her body then they’d have to go all the way through Her in three dimensions, like a tangle of veins and capillaries. So what we see is just the surface of something bigger; the story of this whole mission, he added wryly.

  “When they weren’t needed,” he finished, “they were invisible; the same colour as Her hull. But when She needed them, when She was damaged and had to use them, they grew darker as they…”

  “Diffused energy through Her,” Cyr said. “So if Smithson’s idea works…”

  “The process will be temporarily frozen, and the patterns will disappear.”

  She looked at him again. He smiled and said “It’s like with a new partner. When you start living together you find out new things. Intimate things, like how her varicose veins work.”

  Cyr almost smiled back. She stood up. The pleats fell gracefully back into place.

  “It’s nearly time, Commander. Will you be ready?”

  He undersood why she had to ask him that. His behaviour had been disturbing; less than was required of him. It would be tempting, and quite reasonable, to think that Faith had been working on him like She’d done with Joser. But now he felt that the truth was worse—that his behaviour came from him. Or maybe that was also Faith working on him, but more obliquely.

  “If I’m not ready,” he called after her—the pleats fanned out as she turned to face him—“you know that you must ask Thahl to consider…”

  “Yes, I know that. I’ve already come close to it.”

  •

  “They’re ready,” Smithson said, after fifty-four minutes had elapsed.

  “Thanks,” Foord said. “I owe you.”

  “For moving your furniture?”

  He smiled briefly, then nodded at Cyr. “Launch them.”

  The two Prayer Wheels dropped silently out of the ventral bay and floated underneath the Charles Manson. They were rings of dark metal nine feet in diameter, with a hub and four radiating spokes. Smithson’s people had actually rolled them, like oversized cartwheels, from the cramped MT Drive pit near the stern to one of the cargo tubes, where they were shot through to the ventral bay. The motors and guidance systems were simply metal boxes welded to their circumference at irregular intervals; they looked like bits of mud caked on the rims of real cartwheels.

  Cyr pressed a panel. The motors round the rims fired once and went dark. The Prayer Wheels glided slowly, and on diverging paths, towards the midsection and stern craters. Faith seemed not to have noticed them. They passed three hundred feet, then six hundred and nine hundred. Twelve hundred. The light in the craters glowed. As the Prayer Wheels got closer, the light formed a backdrop against which they became diminishing silhouettes.

  At fourteen hundred feet Cyr fired the final course adjustment; the motors flared and died. She glanced at Foord, on an impulse mouthed Varicose Veins, and pressed another panel. The Prayer Wheels started to turn. The dark metal of their rims became transluscent and glowed pearl-white as they began generating stasis fields. The motors and guidance systems exploded silently off the rims. The Prayer Wheel
s entered the craters and were swallowed.

  That was not what they’d expected. They’d expected Her to realise what they were doing, and to try flight, evasion, counterattack, anything, to prevent it. If She didn’t it meant either that they’d genuinely surprised Her (for the third time—first the photon burst, then the two missiles) or that it wouldn’t work. But it is working, thought Foord exultantly, as he saw things on the Bridge screen he’d never expected to see.

  The dark swirling patterns on Her flank grew faint, then darkened and grew faint again. The nameless colour which both lit and obscured the two craters died, then flared and died again. She started to do the things She should have done before. She fired Her manoeuvre drives in sequence and tried to roll so the Charles Manson wouldn’t be facing the craters, but Kaang rolled with Her, maintaining relative position and distance—still exactly one thousand, six hundred and twelve feet—and the light in the craters flared and died again. She pushed Her speed to fifty percent and Kaang matched Her. She stopped dead and resumed at forty-five percent, and Kaang stopped dead and resumed with Her. She fired Her manoeuvre drives at random—two of them exploded, bursting their diamond caps—trying to roll or pitch or yaw in any direction which would take the Charles Manson away from the craters, but Kaang mirrored everything She did; sometimes, it seemed, before She did it, as if Kaang was taking the lead and making Her follow. The two craters flared one more time, and went dark. The patterns over Her flank darkened one more time and went pale. Another of Her manoeuvre drives exploded, this one near the stern crater, and pieces of wreckage fountained out from Her. The Bridge screen tracked them. Each piece grew two replica craters of its own, but this time they flared once and went dark, like eyes closing.