Thermopylae. Roland at the pass. When it got to us we would blow the horns and meet it head on. But that was in the fables.
I began to think of other parts of the story, Lancelot’s part, how he had to be brave and be the strongest of all.
And of what the rest of us must be.
Lance slept for a while, and I snuggled up under his chin and slept too, happy for a while, although I couldn’t have said why ... something as inexplicable as psych-set, except that it was a nice place to be, and I found it strange that even in his sleep he held onto me, not the closeness we take for warmth, and far from sex too ... just that it was nice, and it was something—
—like in the tape, I thought. I wondered who I was to him. I reckoned I knew. And being only Elaine, I took what small things I could get. Even that gave me courage. I slept.
Then the hammering started again on the hull.
I tensed, waking. Lance sat up, and we held onto each other, while all about us the others were waking too. It wasn’t the patterned hammering we had heard before. It came randomly and loud.
Gawain piled out of bed and the rest of us were hardly slower, excepting Vivien, who sat there clutching her sheet to her chest in the semidark and looking when the lights came on as if it was all going to be too much for her.
But she moved, grabbed for her clothes and started dressing. Modred was out the door first, and Percy after him; and Gawain and Lynette right behind them. Lance and I stopped at least to throw our clothes on and then ran for it, leaving Viv to follow as she could.
We ran, the last bit from the lift, breathless, down the corridor to the bridge. The crew had found their places. My lady and Griffin were there, both in their robes, and my lady at least looked grateful that we two had shown up. I went and gave her my hand, and Lance stood near me—not that presumptuous, not with one of my lady’s lovers holding the other.
“They say it’s the same place as before,” Dela informed us as Vivien showed up and delayed by the door. “But it doesn’t sound like a signal.”
It sounded like someone working on the other side of the hull, to me. Tap. Bang. And long pauses.
The crew was talking frantically among themselves—Modred and Percy answering questions from Lynn and Gawain, making protests. Griffin let go my lady’s hand and walked into that half U near them, leaning on the back of Percy’s chair.
Only my lady Dela stood there shivering, and went over to a bench and sat down. I sat down and put my arms about her, and Lance hovered helplessly by while I tried to keep her warm in her nightgown. She was crying. I had never seen Dela cry like this. She was scared and trembling and it was contagious.
“Give us vid,” Griffin was saying. “Let’s see if we can’t figure out what happened to the rest of the ships around us. See if they’re breached in some way.”
Vid came on, all measled red and glare, shading off to greens and purples where some object was. “Forward floods,” Modred said “Wayne.”
“Just let it alone,” Dela snapped. “Let it be. If we start turning the lights on and looking round out there we’ll encourage it.”
Modred stopped. So did Gawain.
“Do it,” Griffin said. And when they did nothing: “Dela, what are we going to do, wait for it?”
“That’s all we can do, isn’t it?”’
“It’s not all I choose to do. We’re going to fight that thing if it has to be.”
“For what good?”
“Because I’m not sitting here waiting for it.”
“And you encourage it and it gets to us—”
“We still have a chance when we know it’s coming.—Put the floods on,” he said to Gawain.
Gawain looked at Dela. “We think the sound is coming from inside the wheel ... not one of the smaller ships: from where we contact the torus.”
Dela just shivered where she sat, between us; and Viv hovered near the door, frozen.
“Dela,” Griffin said, “go on back to bed. Give the order and go back to bed. Nothing’s going to happen. We look and get some clear images of where it’s coming from, that’s all.”
Dela gave the order, a wave of her hand. The floods went on and played over blacknesses that were other ships. We sat staring into that black and red chaos, at ships bleeding light through their wounds. Dela turned her face into my shoulder and I locked my arms about her as tightly as I could, stared helplessly into that place that I remembered of a sudden, that chaos senses had to forget the moment it stopped. I turned my face away from it, looked up at Lance’s face which was as chaos-lost as I felt; and Viv, Vivien holding on to the door. It was hard to look back again, and harder not to. Griffin was still giving orders—had the cameras sweep this way and that, and there was that ship next to us, the delicate one like spiderweb; and a strange one on our other side, that we had slid up against when we were grappling on; we couldn’t see all of it. And mostly the view dissolved in that red bleeding light. But when the cameras centered on our own bow, we could almost see detail, like it was lost in a wash of light across the lens, something that was like machinery. A cold feeling was running through my veins. “I don’t remember our nose like that” I said. No one paid attention to me.
“See if you can fine it down now,” Griffin said. “What happened to your last setup on that?”
“Everything’s shifted,” Modred said. I hoped he meant the figures.
Griffin swore and turned away, paced the floor. Maybe it was hard for him to stare at the screens for any length of time. I know it got to my stomach; and even the crew looked uncomfortable, jolted out of sleep, with that terrible banging never ceasing. Tap. Bang. Bang. Tap-tap-tap.
Lynette turned around at her place. “We might ungrapple,” she offered, looking at Dela, not Griffin. “We can push off and disrupt whatever they’re doing on the other side.”
“ Doit,” Dela said, snatched at that with all the force in her. Griffin looked like he wanted to say something and shut his mouth instead. Lynn turned about again, all coolly done. She touched switches and boards came alight.
“Take hold,” Percy warned us. We hurried and got Dela and Griffin to the emergency cushions, got ourselves snugged in, Viv first, and Lance and myself together, holding hands for comfort.
Moving would delay things. It would give us time. But maybe the thing out there had guns, I thought; maybe when we moved it would just start shooting and all we would have of life would be just the next moment, when the fragile Maidwas blown apart.
Did Lynn and the others think of that? Was that what Griffin had almost said? Maybe my listening to his tapes, all those things about wars and killing people, let me think such things. I felt like I was sweating all the way to my insides.
The crew talked to each other. It took them forever ... judging, I guessed, how hard and how far and what we were going to grab to next that might make it harder for whatever was trying to hammer through our bow. Finally: “Stand by,” Lynette said.
VIII
And Vivien answer’d frowning yet in wrath:
“O ay; what say ye to Sir Lancelot, friend,
Traitor or true? that commerce with the Queen,
I ask you. ...”
It came simultaneously, the clang of the grapples disconnecting, the shudder that might be our engines working.
“Shut it down,” Percy cried. “Shut it down!”
“No,” Lynn said, and the shuddering kept up, like out-of-tune notes quavering through metal frame and living bone. Lynn reached suddenly across the board. The harmonies stopped. Gawain, beside her, made a move and the grapples slammed on again.
“We didn’t move,” Dela said softly; and louder: “We didn’t move.”
Lynn swung her chair about. “No.” There was thorough anguish on her freckled face. “Something’s got a grapple on us. We can’t break it loose.”
“Do it!” Dela was unbuckling the restraints. She got them undone as the rest of us got out of ours. She stood up and thrust Griffin’s hand off when he got up and tried to put his hand on her shoulder. “You find a way to do it.”