Faith (44 page)

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 them, 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.

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.