Faith (20 page)

“Nothing, Director. I can’t and won’t stop.”

“Commander!” Joser said. “Scanners have just registered an emergence at Horus 5.”

“Do you have detailed readouts?”

“Yes, Commander. It’s Her.”

5

“Yes, Director,” Foord said, “you did hear me correctly. I said we’ve detected an emergence at Horus 5. I said our first readouts indicate a ship matching the known specification of Faith. And I said I refuse to move.”

“You have orders,” roared Swann, “and I demand you obey them!”

“I have orders to engage Her alone. I’ve now got two unidentified ships, one at Horus 5 and one here in the Gulf.”

“Then
fuck off
, and engage Her alone, and I’ll see to it that the
Sable
doesn’t follow you.”

“I can see to that myself. What’s the difference?”

“Ninety lives, if that
is
the
Sable
, which you now know it is. Come on, Foord. She’s
arrived.
She’s here waiting for you, like you always wanted. Somewhere down here we’ve probably picked Her up too, and they’re probably checking and rechecking before they tell me. And then there’s the cordon to complete, which was held up so
you
could leave Blentport, and the evacuation into the lowlands, and the civil chaos when the news breaks that She’s here, which is something you couldn’t begin to imagine because you don’t spend much time among real people, do you?”

“What’s the point you’re trying to make?” Foord said, adopting a tone of puzzlement. He was beginning to overdo it, he thought.

“A moment, please.” Swann’s face turned to one side, where someone off screen was whispering to him.

Foord too turned away from the screen. “Positions, please,” he asked Joser.

“The
Sable
, I mean the first intruder, is 11-17-14 and holding. The second intruder is 99-98-96 and holding. Readouts on the second intruder conform to Faith’s known profile; heavily shrouded on all wavelengths.”

“Foord,” Swann resumed, “that was the expected message, and our readouts match yours. So stop talking about unidentified ships. That ship at Horus 5
is
Faith, and that ship which shadowed you into the Gulf
is
a Horus Fleet ship!”

Foord glanced at Joser, who nodded vigorously.

“Then I’m about to order the destruction of a Horus Fleet ship. I will
not
engage Her until I know for certain that I’m engaging Her alone.”

“When this is over, Foord”—Swann’s voice had lost its desperation; now it was oddly calm—“when this is over I’ll make sure that whatever’s left of the Commonwealth knows what you did, and disowns you.”

“It’s already disowned us.”

“Commander. Please. My last try. Give me two minutes to contact the Captain of the
Sable
, and I’ll make it go away. Two minutes, Commander.”

“You have as long as it takes me to give the order. But I’ll speak slowly.”

6

The Bridge was silent as they watched the big silver ship on the magnified section of the screen, in an effort to confirm visually what the scanners had already told them. Slowly, gradually, it happened. One by one the weapons nozzles ceased tracking and retracted into their housings; a dull red aura spread from the stern as the ion drive restarted at low intensity; manoeuvre jets flared and fountained in shifting combinations; and then, quite deliberately, and with the same lack of communication which had characterised its first appearance, the
Sable
turned away.

Not once, thought Foord, did it make any contact with us. Not even now.

On the Bridge, banks of subdued red warning lights continued to glow at every console. Alarms continued to murmur at discreet intervals.

“Position of
Sable
…” began Joser, then stopped as Foord glanced up at him sharply. “…of
first intruder
, is still 11-17-14, but the turn will register shortly. And…”

“Excuse me. Thahl?”

“No call yet, Commander.”

“Thank you. Please keep us at battle stations. Joser?”

“Position of second intruder is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”

The ship on the screen continued to turn away. Now it was almost sideways on, repeating the view the screen had patched in earlier. Like before, SABLE 097 CX 141 bulged over the long contours of its flanks. Class 097s were heavy cruisers. The
Sable
was bigger than the
Charles Manson
, but much less powerful; like Foord against Thahl, it wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds.

“Commander,” Thahl said, “I have a call from Director Swann.”

“Thank you. Put him through, please.”

“Well, Commander Foord.”

“Well, Director Swann.”

“As you can see, the
Sable
is leaving the Gulf. When can I expect you to do the same, in the opposite direction?”

“As soon as we’ve tracked him for a reasonable distance.”

“Of course,” Swann said, magnanimously. He was visibly more relaxed; his face had the equivalent of a spring in its step. Foord’s manner, on the other hand, was precisely the same as before. “But when you’ve tracked him I want you to go, Commander! Do you hear?”

“What will happen to him, Director?”

“You know perfectly well what will happen to him.”

“And his crew?”

“That’s another matter. But for Captain Copeland, it’s all over.”

“Copeland?”

“Yes. It was his brother at Anubis.”

•

“If
you
can’t stop Her,” Swann had said to Foord, as the
Charles Manson
was making ready to re-engage photon drive and head through the Gulf towards Horus 5, “then She’ll have to get past Horus Fleet to reach Sakhra. If the Fleet can’t stop Her, neither will Sakhra’s normal defences, but by then the evacuation will have progressed and if She ever reaches here She’ll find military areas full of civilians and most of the movable defences gone to the highlands. If everything else fails I’ll gamble on Her not attacking civilian targets.”

Foord had not answered.

“And don’t give me any of your silences, Foord, not after what your people did here! My family have been evacuated too. They’re taking the same risk as everyone else. I was born here, and so were my parents
and
my children, and I’ll defend it any way I see fit.”

Foord had not meant his silence to imply disapproval. Insofar as the evacuation interested him at all, which was not very much now that he’d left Sakhra, he could see it made some sense; Thahl had persuaded him of that. His silence was merely a suggestion that they both had other things they should be doing.

“We’re just about to move off, Director. Was there anything else?”

“We need you to stop Her, Foord; but…”

“But you think the cure is worse than the disease?”

“Your ship isn’t a cure. It’s another disease.”

Foord had blinked a couple of times at the empty patch on the screen, where Swann had cut the connection, and then returned his attention to the Bridge.

“Joser, please keep a continuous check on Her position and confirm every ten minutes. Kaang, please take us out of here, heading 99-98-96, on photon drive at thirty percent rising to ninety percent.”

The conversation with Swann had taken place forty minutes earlier. The
Charles Manson
was now about one-quarter of the way through the Gulf, holding at ninety percent photon speed. The Bridge screen had cut in with filters and compensators at twenty percent to adjust for relativistic distortion of the starfield, and at seventy percent had blanked out entirely and substituted a simulation which showed Horus 5 in outline, and beyond it, at 99-98-96 and unmoving, a white dot which represented
Her
. It seemed very faint on the screen, like the last living thing in a wasteland; or the first, of millions.

At regular intervals Joser would murmur “Position of Faith is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband,” and Foord would acknowledge politely. That, and the muted voices of the others as they made regular status reports or conducted routine conversations with other parts of the ship, was the only human noise on the Bridge. When the
Charles Manson
went to battle stations, there were changes of degree which were barely perceptible; relationships were a little more carefully delineated, Foord was a little more courteous and attentive to detail, and noise and light were a little more subdued.

Foord was starting to feel distaste at what he’d done, as if he’d been pulling wings off flies; Swann was only trying to protect his people. He took a sip from the tumbler of inhibitor fluid put out by his chairarm dispenser. It was half-full, exactly as he left it since the encounter with the
Sable
, and when he replaced it it slid down into the chairarm, was replenished, and slid up again. It was a tall tumbler, filled almost to the brim, but no vibration disturbed the surface of the liquid. Had it done so Foord would have been quite disoriented. For generations, it had been an established convention that space travel was dull: empty of events, and almost devoid of distance.

It was empty of events because events could be anticipated by the ship, and either avoided, evaded, compensated or filtered, before or while they happened; so that at ninety percent photon speed the ship enabled gravity, light, elapsed time and sensory perception to function inside it exactly as if it was at rest.

It was almost devoid of distance because distances between stars could be sidestepped by the MT Drive, and distances within solar systems could be eaten up by the ship’s array of lesser drives. Since the development of Matter Transfer, distances between stars had ceased to have much meaning. Most interstellar cultures, like the Commonwealth and the old Sakhran Empire, had developed MT Drive almost by accident. It was still only partially understood. One of its features was that it could not be used within solar systems; to engage it anywhere near bodies of planetary mass would be catastrophic. Distances within solar systems, however, were no more than a minor irritation for ships with photon and ion drive.

All that, plus the existence of instantaneous communication using principles derived from MT physics, made it possible for a Commonwealth of twenty-nine solar systems to function as if each system was an apartment in the same block, divided only by thin walls and a darkened hall and staircase—darkened, because nobody needed to go out there anymore. The Gulf in Horus system was the nearest anyone would get to the old pre-MT days of space travel, when people travelled physically through the nothingness between stars, instead of sidestepping it as they did now; an MT Jump, and an emergence from it, took the same time whether the distance was one light-year or a hundred.

“Position of Faith,” Joser said, “is still 99-98-96 and holding. No detectable movement or activity on any waveband.”

“Thank you,” Foord replied, giving Joser a sidelong glance. Maybe, he thought, Joser would say that Foord had been unreasonable over the
Sable
; or that Foord had compromised on the Department’s orders. Either way, it’d sound good when whispered back to the Department.

“You have the ship,” he told Thahl. As he left the Bridge, he turned to Cyr. “I’d like to see you in my study, please. In five minutes.”

•

Foord’s study was almost adjacent to the Bridge, a very short walk down an adjoining corridor. When four minutes fifty seconds had elapsed, Cyr walked the short distance, knocked on the door, and waited. When Foord called Enter, she did so, and like last time she closed the door behind her and remained standing.

Foord was seated at his desk. He looked up at her.

“I’d like to ask you about Joser.”

“I know I spoke hastily on the Bridge, Commander, but I meant it.”

“No, it’s not that. He makes you uneasy, and I’d like to know why. You have permission to speak freely.”

He spoke as if their previous interview hadn’t happened. She noticed there was no ruler on the desktop.

She paused, and said “On the Bridge, when he told you It Would Be Murder…”

“Or tried to, until you shouted him down.”

“He told me later that he’d only said what any ordinary decent person would have said.”

“And your point?”

“Nobody on this ship has any right to be ordinary or decent… I don’t trust him, Commander.”

“Tell me why.”

“Three reasons. One, he’s always manoeuvring for position, as if he’s expecting what he does and says to be played to an audience later. Two, his work’s mediocre; he might be acceptable on an ordinary ship, but not on this one. Three, and following from One, I think he’s a Department stooge.”

“He wouldn’t be the first,” Foord said drily.

“Do I still have permission to speak freely, Commander?”

“Of course.”

“He’s dangerous. Get rid of him, get him off the Bridge, any way you can. Not because he’s a stooge, we’ve had them before, but because he’s
fucking mediocre.
”

Foord was silent for a couple of minutes, thinking.

“Thank you,” he said eventually. “That’s helpful. I’ll see you back on the Bridge.”

She turned and walked out, aware that he was watching the seat of her skirt, and the swaying of its pleats.

•

Foord yawned, settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and listened again to the muted background noise on the Bridge. It always reminded him of long summer afternoons from his childhood when he would lay alone with eyes closed on a crowded beach, and would listen: to the sea, to the sharp voices of other children, to the lower voices of their parents tossing everyday remarks tiredly back and forth like beachballs, and to the doppler effect of someone running towards him and past him, on the way to someone else. His childhood had been complex and solitary, but not unhappy; at least, not until the darkness came.

He had prepared carefully and thoroughly for what was about to happen, as he always did. He knew how he would destroy Her. He had worked with the ship’s Codex, the aggregation of its nine sentience cores, to extract from the onboard computers every last detail of the structure of Horus system and the known and suspected abilities of Faith. He had then constructed an intricate mechanism of initiatives, responses, failsafes and fallbacks. And now the entire mechanism, like the
Charles Manson
itself, was under way—as dense as a mountain of lead, as precise as an antique clock movement, and so finely balanced that his will needed only to touch it as lightly as a feather to move it all in a given direction. So he could afford to relax, for now.