This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Adrian Czajkowski
Cover design by Steve Stone
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First U.S. Edition: August 2021
Originally published in Great Britain by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, in May 2021
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936739
ISBNs: 978-0-316-70585-1 (hardcover), 978-0-316-70582-0 (ebook)
E3-20210520-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: Roshu Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: Huei-Cavor Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three: Tarekuma Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Four: Jericho Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Five: Berlenhof Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
The Universe of the Architects: Reference Glossary
Characters
Other Key Characters
Worlds
Species
Ships
Timeline
Acknowledgements
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PROLOGUE
In the seventy-eighth year of the war, an Architect came to Berlenhof.
The lights of human civilization across the galaxy had been going out, one by one, since its start. All those little mining worlds, the far-flung settlements, the homes people had made. The Colonies, as they were known: the great hollow Polyaspora of human expansion, exploding out from a vacant centre. Because the Architects had come for Earth first.
Berlenhof had become humanity’s second heart. Even before Earth fell, it had been a prosperous, powerful world. In the war, it was the seat of military command and civilian governance, coordinating a civilization-scale refugee effort, as more and more humans were forced to flee their doomed worlds.
And because of that, when the Architect came, the Colonies turned and fought, and so did all the allies they had gathered there. It was to be the great stand against a galactic-level threat, every weapon deployed, every secret advantage exploited.
Solace remembered. She had been there. Basilisk Division, Heaven’s Sword Sorority. Her first battle.
*
The Colonies had a secret weapon, that was the word. A human weapon. Solace had seen them at the war council. A cluster of awkward, damaged-looking men and women, nothing more. As the main fleet readied itself to defend Berlenhof, a handful of small ships were already carrying these “weapons” towards the Architect in the hope that this new trick would somehow postpone the inevitable.
Useless, surely. Might as well rely on thoughts and prayers.
On the Heaven’s Sword, everyone off-shift was avidly watching the displays, wanting to believe this really was something. Even though all previous secret weapons had been nothing but hot air and hope. Solace stared as intently as the rest. The Architect was impossible to miss on screen, a vast polished mass the size of Earth’s lost moon, throwing back every scan and probe sent its way. The defending fleet at Berlenhof was a swarm of pinpricks, so shrunk by the scale they were barely visible until she called for magnification. The heart of the Colonies had already been gathering its forces for dispatch elsewhere when the Architect had emerged from unspace at the edge of the system. Humanity was never going to get better odds than this.
There were Castigar and Hanni vessels out there, alien trading partners who were lending their strength to their human allies because the Architects were everybody’s problem. There was a vast and ragged fleet of human ships, and some of them were dedicated war vessels and others were just whatever could be thrown into space that wasn’t any use for the evacuation. Orbiting Hiver factories were weaponizing their workers. There was even the brooding hulk of a Naeromathi Locust Ark out there, the largest craft in-system—save that it was still dwarfed by the Architect itself. And nobody knew what the Locusts wanted or thought about anything, save that even they would fight this enemy.
And there was the pride of the fleet, Solace’s sisters: the Parthenon. Humans, for a given value of human. The engineered warrior women who had been the Colonies’ shield ever since the fall of Earth. Heaven’s Sword, Ascending Mother and Cataphracta, the most advanced warships humanity had ever designed, equipped with weapons that the pre-war days couldn’t even have imagined.
As Solace craned to see, she spotted a tiny speckle of dots between the fleet and the Architect: the advance force. The tip of humanity’s spear was composed of the Partheni’s swiftest ships. Normally, their role would have been to buy time. But on this occasion, the Pythoness, the Ocasio, the Ching Shi and others were carrying their secret weapon to the enemy.
Solace didn’t believe a word of it. The mass looms and the Zero Point fighters the Heaven’s Sword was equipped with would turn the battle, or nothing would. Even as she told herself that, she heard the murmur of the other off-shift women around her. “Intermediaries,” one said, a whisper as if talking about something taboo; and someone else, a girl barely old enough to be in service: “They say they cut their brains. That’s how they make them.”
“Telemetry incoming,” said one of the officers, and the display focused in on those few dots. They were arrowing towards the Architect, as though planning to dash themselves against its mountainous sides. Solace felt her eyes strain, trying to wring more information from what she was seeing, to peer all the way in until she had an eye inside the ships themselves.
One of those dots winked out. The Architect had registered their presence and was patiently swatting at them. Solace had seen the aftermath of even a brush with an Architect’s power: twisted, crumpled m
etal, curved and corkscrewed by intense gravitational pressures. A large and well-shielded ship might weather a glancing blow. With these little craft there would be no survivors.
“It’s useless,” she said. “We need to be out there. Us.” Her fingers itched for the keys of the mass looms.
“Myrmidon Solace, do you think you know better than the Fleet Exemplars?” Her immediate superior, right at her shoulder of course.
“No, Mother.”
“Then just watch and be ready.” And a muttered afterthought: “Not that I don’t agree with you.” And even as her superior spoke, another of the tiny ships had been snuffed into darkness.
“Was that—?” someone cried, before being cut off. Then the officer was demanding, “Telemetry, update and confirm!”
“A marked deviation,” someone agreed. The display was bringing up a review, a fan of lines showing the Architect’s projected course and its current trajectory.
“So it altered its course. That changes nothing,” someone spat, but the officer spoke over them. “They turned an Architect! Whatever they did, they turned it!”
Then they lost all data. After a tense second’s silence, the displays blinked back, the handful of surviving ships fleeing the Architect’s renewed approach towards Berlenhof. Whatever the secret weapon was, it seemed to have failed.
“High alert. All off-shift crews make ready to reinforce as needed. The fight’s coming to us!” came the voice of the officer. Solace was still staring at the display, though. Had they accomplished nothing? Somehow, this secret Intermediary weapon had shifted the course of an Architect. Nobody had made them so much as flinch before.
Orders came through right on the heels of the thought. “Prepare to receive the Pythoness. Damage control, medical, escort.” And she was the third of those, called up out of the off-shift pool along with her team.
The Pythoness had been a long, streamlined ship: its foresection bulked out by its gravitic drives and then tapering down its length to a segmented tail. That tail was gone, and the surviving two-thirds of the ship looked as though a hand had clenched about it, twisting every sleek line into a tortured curve. That the ship had made it back at all was a wonder. The moment the hatch was levered open, the surviving crew started carrying out the wounded. Solace knew from the ship’s readouts that half its complement wouldn’t be coming out at all.
“Myrmidon Solace!”
“Mother!” She saluted, waiting for her duties.
“Get this to the bridge!”
She blinked. This was a man. A Colonial human man. He was skinny and jug-eared and looked as though he’d already snapped under the trauma of the fight. His eyes were wide and his lips moved soundlessly. Twitches ran up and down his body like rats. She’d seen him before, at the council of war. One of the vaunted Intermediaries.
“Mother?”
“Take him to the bridge. Now, Myrmidon!” the officer snapped, and then she leant in and grabbed Solace’s shoulder. “This is it, sister. This is the weapon. And if it’s a weapon, we need to use it.”
There were billions on Berlenhof: the local population as well as countless refugees from the other lost worlds. Nobody was going to get even a thousandth of those people off-world before the Architect destroyed it. But the more time they could buy for the evacuation effort, the more lives would be saved. This was what the Parthenon was spending its ships and lives for. That was what the Hivers would expend their artificial bodies for, and the alien mercenaries and partisans and ideologues would die for. Every lost ship was another freighter off Berlenhof packed out with civilians.
She got the man into a lift tube, aware of the wide-eyed looks he’d been receiving as she hauled him from the dock. He must be getting a far worse case of culture-shock; regular Colonials didn’t mix with the Parthenon and before the war there’d been no love lost. Here he was on a ship full of women who all had close on the same face, the same compact frame. Human enough to be uncanny but, for most Colonials, not quite human enough.
He was saying something. For a moment she heard nonsense, but she’d learned enough Colvul to piece together the words. It was just a demand to wait. Except they were already in the lift, so he could wait all he wanted and they’d still get where they were needed. “Wait, I can’t…”
“You’re here… Menheer.” It took a moment for her to remember the correct Colvul honorific. “My name is Myrmidon Solace. I am taking you to the bridge of the Heaven’s Sword. You are going to fight with us.”
He stared at her, shell-shocked. “They’re hurt. My ship. We jumped…”
“This is your ship now, Menheer.” And, because he was shaking again, she snapped at him. “Name, Menheer?”
He twitched. “Telemmier. Idris Telemmier. Intermediary. First class.”
“They say you’re a weapon. So now you have to fight.”
He was shaking his head, but then she had him out of the lift and the officers were calling for him.
The battle displays formed a multicoloured array in the centre of the bridge, showing the vast fleet as it moved to confront the Architect. Solace saw that they were finally about to fire on it: to do what little damage they could with lasers and projectiles, suicide drones, explosives and gravitic torsion. But their goal was only to slow it. A victory against an Architect was when you made yourself enough of a nuisance that they had to swat you before they could murder the planet.
They got Idris in front of the display, though Solace had to hold him upright.
“What am I—?” he got out. Solace saw he didn’t have the first clue what was going on.
“Whatever you can do, do,” an officer snapped at him. Solace could see and feel that the Heaven’s Sword was already on its attack run. She wanted desperately to be on-shift at the mass loom consoles, bringing that ersatz hammer against the shell of the Architect. She didn’t believe in this Intermediary any more than she believed in wizards.
Still, when he turned his wan gaze her way, she mustered a smile and he seemed to take something from that. Something lit behind his eyes: madness or divine revelation.
Then their sister ship’s mass loom fired and Solace followed the Cataphracta’s strike through the bridge readouts. It was a weapon developed through studying the Architects themselves, a hammerblow of pure gravitic torsion, aiming to tear a rift in their enemy’s crystalline exterior. Operators read off the subsequent damage reports: fissuring minimal but present; target areas flagged up for a more concentrated assault. The Heaven’s Sword’s Zero Point fighters were flocking out of its bays now and dispersing, a hundred gnats to divert the enemy’s time and attention from the big guns.
The whole bridge sang like a choir for just a moment as their own mass loom spoke, resonating through the entire length of the ship. Solace felt like shouting out with it, as she always did. And kept her mouth shut, because here on the bridge that sort of thing would be frowned on.
Idris gasped then, arching backwards in her arms, and she saw blood on his face as he bit his tongue. His eyes were wider than seemed humanly possible, all the whites visible and a ring of red around each as well. He screamed, prompting concerned shouts from across the bridge, eclipsed when the Fleet Exultant in command called out that the Architect had faltered. Impossible that so much inexorable momentum could be diverted by anything short of an asteroid impact. But it had jolted in the very moment that Idris had yelled.
The mass loom sang again, and she saw the Cataphracta and the Ascending Mother firing too, all targeting the same fractures in the Architect’s structure. Smaller ships were wheeling in swarms past the behemoth’s jagged face, loosing every weapon they had, frantic to claim an iota of the thing’s monstrous attention. She saw them being doused like candles, whole handfuls at a time. And then the Architect’s invisible hands reached out and wrung the whole length of the Cataphracta and opened it out like a flower. A ship and all its souls turned into a tumbling metal sculpture and cast adrift into the void. And it would do exactly the same to Berle
nhof when it reached the planet.
The Locust Ark was annihilated next, fraying into nothing as it tried to throw its disintegrating mass into the Architect’s path. Then the Sword’s loom spoke, but the choir was in discord now, the very seams of the warship strained by the power of her own weaponry. Idris was clutching Solace’s hands painfully, leaning into her and weeping. The Architect had halted, for the first time since it entered the system, no longer advancing on the planet. She felt Idris vibrate at that point, rigid as he did something; as he wrestled the universe for control over the apocalyptic engine that was the Architect. Her ears were full of the rapid, efficient patter of the bridge reports: stress fractures, targeting, the elegant physics of gravity as a bludgeoning weapon. Damage reports. So many damage reports. The Architect had already brushed them once and Solace had barely realized. Half the decks of the Heaven’s Sword were evacuating.
“It’s cracking!” someone was shouting. “It’s cracking open!”
“Brace!” And Solace had to brace for herself and Idris too. Because his mind was somewhere else, doing battle on a field she couldn’t even imagine.
*
There was a terrible impact and the screens briefly malfunctioned. Then in the chaos, as the Heaven’s Sword died, the Fleet Exultant gave Solace her last orders. In response, she grabbed the Intermediary—the little Colonial man who might be their greatest weapon—and hustled him through the wreckage. She bundled him through the surviving sections of the ship to the life pods. She prioritized him even over her sisters because he’d been made her responsibility, but also because he was hope: the universe now had one destroyed Architect; before the Battle of Berlenhof that number had been zero.
*
Later, in the vast medical camp planetside, Solace had been there holding Idris’s hand when he awoke. They’d been surrounded by other casualties from the Heaven’s Sword, all the other lucky ones who’d managed to escape with injuries rather than obliteration. Between the fight and its explosive end, half the fleet and a dozen orbitals had been crippled.
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