The Interdiction

The others get told where to stand. I get told how far away.

Obsidian is patience with a barrel on it. You hold still, and you look, and eventually the thing you are looking at stops being able to hide.

The other four were up ahead where the work was. That is the arrangement and I have never once minded it.

We came out of the jump escorting the Indomitable home, and for about four seconds it was an ordinary night.

I had been looking the other way. That is the whole of my job and I had been looking the other way.

Something was holding the gate shut from this side, and it was not in a hurry.

I counted for eleven seconds and then I stopped counting and started sorting.

The big one with the mouth makes more of the small ones. You do not shoot that one first, you shoot it only.

The one with the arms can touch anything inside forty. I marked the whole volume and there was nowhere in it that was not inside forty.

And a shell, hanging open, with nothing in it.

Psyche took two off the shaft on one pass and I heard the whole comm laugh.

I killed four. It made six while I was killing four.

The sum was not close. I ran it three times because I wanted it to be close.

The rocks were the only thing out there that was on our side.

Magus killed one with a rock. He is going to tell that story for a year and it will be worth it every time.

I had a line on the arm. I also had a line on Monolyth, because they were the same line.

Then it reached past him and took Psyche instead, from further away than I would have said was possible.

Nobody decided that. It grabbed, it pulled, and the rocks were where they were.

And then it gave me the shot. Wide open, no rocks, nothing in the way.

It did not move. It stopped being somewhere.

My whole discipline is that hidden things stop being hidden if you are patient enough.

Obsidian has one failure and it is not blindness. Blindness would be a mercy.

It is that everything out there starts looking like everything else.

I did not take the shot. I want that written down somewhere.

Magus first. He was still accelerating when the lights went out of him.

Then Orca, who was turning back for him, which is the only direction Orca ever turns.

I was eleven kilometres away, which is exactly where I had asked to be.

Forty, I had said. I had marked the whole volume.

It did not kill any of us. I want to be clear about that, because it is the part that frightens me.

The berth fitted. Somebody measured.

My eye stayed on. Nothing else did.

I could see the whole inside of it and I could not turn my head.

Be still.

I have been still my whole life. I am the best in the wing at being still.

I was good at it before they gave me a frame. I was good at it before I could carry anything.

Nobody ever came up. I told myself for thirty years that this was the arrangement and that I preferred it.

He was not threatening me. He was offering me the thing I already do, forever, and expecting me to want it.

The Chambered Hall came in first, and behind it every hull the Seat could reach in one jump.

The green went out and something warm came in over the top of it, and my eye did the one thing it still could. It looked up.

He had come for a shell full of quiet and the whole planet answered him.

Five of us, scarred and whole, in the middle of an armada that had come a long way in a hurry.

I got my head back and the first thing I did was count us. Five. I counted twice.

They were bunched up. Nobody had told them to bunch up.

I have told myself for thirty years that the distance is the job.

They ran. Nobody chased them, which surprised me until I thought about it for a second.

They left the shell behind. It is still out there. Somebody will find it and not know what it is for.

I moved up to four kilometres. Nobody said anything about it and I am grateful for that.

Nobody was lost. Everybody was taken back.

And he knows our names now. He had to learn five of them and he only wanted the quiet ones.