Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “The Parthenon seeks Intermediaries.” Ash pronounced the words carefully.

  “And you care about that why?”

  “You know why,” it rumbled, cocking its false head at an unnatural angle. “The Partheni navy is humanity’s pre-eminent military force. Lacking Intermediary navigators impacts your ability to travel between stars. Their lack also strips you of a key weapon against the enemy.”

  “The Architects?”

  “Even so.”

  “And if the Architects are never coming back? It’s been forty years, right?”

  “They are always coming back,” Ash said.

  For a moment Solace felt a chill, presumably as intended. What does it know? Then she thought of a smaller, sadder truth. Ash claimed it was the last of its kind, sole survivor of a species destroyed by the Architects long ago. For Ash, the Architects were always coming. That was why it had devoted its life to warning others.

  “There aren’t many Intermediaries,” it observed. “Fewer than you’d think. Most human brains can’t take the conditioning. The old ones don’t last and the new ones are fragile. The transformation is hard for them.”

  Solace stared at it, meeting those glowing pits with a shock of contact, just like eyes.

  “You recall Idris Telemmier?”

  Solace blinked. “Dead, surely.” He must be ancient. He was always so frail.

  “Alive. Alive and free. Not bound to Hugh or its Liaison Board. Free to make his own choices regarding his allies. If you can win his trust. Again.”

  Somehow the damnable alien injected something salacious into its phrasing. Solace felt herself colouring. And yes, after Berlenhof, the two of them had been together—for a while. Many of her sisters had experimented. And he’d been so vulnerable and alone. To someone brought up within a culture of self-sufficiency and unity, this had exerted a strange fascination.

  I wonder if he remembers me. Because if Ash could be believed, this was what her superiors needed. An Int who could be bought or talked into coming over to the Partheni. A way of combating the Architects should they return. Or a way of cancelling out the Colonies’ one advantage…

  Her implant offered up data as it spoke, somehow routed to avoid Lune Station’s own channels. A ship’s name, a location—out on the fringes of human space, where the rule of law ran thin.

  “Thank you.” She wanted to ask questions, but didn’t want to hear the answers. A creature like Ash… maybe it would pronounce her own death, the death of her ship, her fleet, everything. It had been the voice in the night foretelling the fall of Earth. There was no kind of doom that might not follow in its shuffling footsteps.

  On the way back to the docking bay, she reported to Tact, who showed no surprise. By the time she rejoined her squad, Tact had already made arrangements. Solace was leaving her own kind to take on yet another new role. She was to play spy amongst the refugia—the human stock her people had left behind. And all I ever wanted was to be a soldier.

  2.

  Idris

  In the year “51 After” as Colonial reckoning went, in the thick of the war, an Architect had exited unspace above the colony world of Amraji.

  The colonists had begun to evacuate immediately, having seen what happened to Earth fifty-one years before. By this point, practically every human community across the galaxy was living with flight plans under its collective pillow, a bag packed and everyone ready to go.

  On the ground, everyone who’d been able to had boarded every ship there was. Then those ships got the hell off the planet as quickly as possible, fleeing even as the Architect’s bulk eclipsed half the sky. Some arrived at the nearest colonies, half their passengers traumatized, deranged, even catatonic, because there hadn’t been enough suspension beds to put everyone under before entering unspace. Some arrived with parts of their hull twisted into elaborate streamers and filigree, because they’d come too close to the Architect at work. Some never arrived. Every evacuation had its tally of lost vessels. Hurry, panic, untrained navigators, badly repaired gravitic drives, there were so many reasons why.

  The Gamin had been a mid-sized freighter, fitted out to ship live bodies for the evacuation. Not well enough, as it turned out. It had left Amraji with a crew of four and over seven hundred passengers, headed for the colony of Roshu. It never arrived.

  A year ago—over seventy years since the Gamin was lost—a Cartography Corps expedition discovered the vessel. Some error in its course had taken it off the known Throughways of unspace, and it had come out into the real so far from home its weak distress beacon had gone unheard for decades. The Cartography expedition that discovered it reported the find, then continued to reach out into unmapped unspace, seeking new Throughways that less adventurous ships might be able to use to reach unknown stars. An antiquated freighter wasn’t much use in itself, but it was an important historical artefact. Eventually the Colonial Heritage Foundation commissioned one of the few independent salvagers with the means to navigate out to where the Gamin could be found. And while the benevolent mission was talked about on all the fashionable mediotypes, the Foundation somehow never got around to mentioning that the name of the salvage craft was the Vulture God, because that might be seen as bad taste.

  You had to screw your eyes up really hard to make the Vulture God look like any kind of bird. Perhaps a very fat bird with enormous claws and stubby little wings. The central bulk of its barrel body contained its oversized gravitic drive, which could displace enough mass into unspace to bring back the Gamin. Projecting out at cross-angles were the blunt little “wings” of its brachator drive that would give it purchase on real space and let it manoeuvre. The actual mass drives for fine manoeuvring were almost inconsequential, a handful of vents about the bloat of its hull. Slung notionally “underneath”—a direction determined by onboard gravity—was the great clenched tangle of its docking arms. The Vulture could latch on to just about anything and haul it around, and now it had reached the Gamin it was ready for action.

  Idris was already awake, as always, though having stared unspace in the eye for the last day he was feeling washed-out and tired. Ready to nap for about a hundred years, not that it was going to happen.

  He alone had been awake in the deep void, guiding the Vulture God across unspace. He’d covered vast empty light years in moments to emerge, a ridiculous distance from anywhere, near where the Gamin had somehow ended up. There was the promised distress beacon, sounding loud and clear. There was the lost freighter, tumbling slowly through space, the beacon its only live system. There had been some suggestion that people might still be in suspension, aboard, but Idris knew cobbled-together ships like the Gamin and they didn’t lend themselves to miracles.

  He made some scratch calculations for an approach and burned some fuel in the mass drives for cheap and dirty momentum. Then he had the brachator drives reaching out to that liminal layer where unspace and real space met, that quantum foam of transient gravity nodes which their “grabby drives” could latch on to. The Vulture God sheared sideways through space as its inertia was shifted through thirty degrees, scudding closer towards the distant winking signal that was the Gamin. Idris tutted at his own inelegant piloting and made a few adjustments, spinning the vessel on its axis, stabilizing its drift, grabbing at another handful of the universe to pull them along a slightly different angle of approach.

  After that, he had the ship’s mind reconstitute itself enough to make him a cup of much-needed kaffe. Then he set about waking the others.

  *

  The Vulture God boasted a crew of seven, five of whom were human. They made for an odd mix by the standards of ships that stuck to the regular Throughways—the readily navigable pathways within unspace that dictated where most vessels could and could not travel. There were no standards for deep void ships, though. There just weren’t enough of them. Most species didn’t even have a means of navigating off the beaten track and, even where such means existed, they were hard to engineer and needed delicate treat
ment. Idris certainly felt like he needed treating delicately.

  He hadn’t ever been meant for this. He’d only ever been intended as a living weapon. Long past his use-by date now, Idris was still lurching on like a lot of Colonial civilization—most certainly like the Vulture God. He’d been on board for four years now, so it was hard not to be sentimental about the ship. It had always come through for them and never quite broken down beyond repair. And if there was one thing the war had taught Colonial humanity to become very, very good at, it was patch repairs on failing starships.

  Unspace had made him sweat unpleasantly, so by the time the rest of the crew were stirring he’d blasted his body clean in the dry shower and printed out fresh clothes. This was one of the delights of long-range spaceflight on a shoestring budget. They were basically the same clothes he’d taken off, chewed up and reconstituted as nominally “clean.” White undershirt, black short-sleeved tunic, grey breeches and sandals made up his outfit. When he cinched his toolbelt about his waist, he felt almost ready to deal with the universe at large.

  His quarters were down near the drone bay, which doubled as engineering control. He could hear Barney complaining loudly within about the list of systems that had developed faults since they set out. Olli would be prepping the Vulture’s claws, ready to clasp to the Gamin, and Medvig would be… doing whatever the hell Medvig did when they didn’t have anything constructive to contribute. Idris sloped forwards towards the command compartment, where Rollo was going over the initial scans.

  Rollo Rostand was a stocky, square-faced man, brown-bronzed by decades of low-level radiation exposure, his hair and moustache wispy and dark grey. He had a rare weight-retaining physiology and the Vulture had been doing well enough to keep his paunch over his belt. He supplemented the standard printed crew clothes with a military-surplus jacket he claimed had been his father’s, the war hero. The details of these heroics tended to change with the telling, but everyone of that generation had done something. Idris, the actual veteran, was more than happy with Rollo’s embellishments because it meant nobody would ask about his truths.

  “Well hola now, my children,” the man was saying as Idris ducked into the compartment. “How’s it looking across the board?”

  “Everything’s broken to shit,” came Barney’s sour voice through their comms. “I am sending you a shopping list for when we’re back on Roshu.”

  “Are you also sending Largesse to pay for it?” And, interpreting the pregnant silence as a negative, “In which case I recommend you make do and mend like a good son of Earth. Olli?”

  “One of the drones is a lost cause,” the remote specialist’s slightly distorted tones came in. She’d slept the unspace flight in her control pod, Idris knew, which was not best operating procedure.

  “Make do—”

  “And mend, I know, I know. Only it’s more making do than mending right now.”

  Rollo beamed around at Idris as though this was the best news he could have expected. “We’ve just matched tumble with our prey, my children. I’m flagging up our access point. Should bring us into the Gamin’s crew spaces. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Idris asked.

  “When they refitted that bucket for passengers nobody filed their new plans with the proper authorities, see right? So we do the best we can.” Rollo settled back in his chair and put his bare feet up on the console. “Since you’re here, my son, you do the honours,” he invited, and Idris dropped into the pilot’s seat. The Vulture God was now moving in-sync with the Gamin, so precisely that they might as well have been stationary. Idris engaged the brachator drive, nudging the salvage ship ever closer—while maintaining all the other vectors of their travel so that they drifted into the shadow of the freighter like a parasite tentatively approaching its host.

  This close, he opened up the mass drives as well, trimming their motion carefully as they ghosted across the ugly, weld-scarred hotch-potch of the Gamin’s hull. The freighter’s crew compartment was set midway into one side. Most of the space above it would be for cargo—in this case the passengers—while the gravitic drive formed a lopsided torus around the freighter’s circumference. Lopsided because part of it was missing, a section of the ring torn open and warped into strange spiralling fingers that clawed at the void.

  Rollo shook his head. “Looks like they cut it too fine getting out.” There was no mistaking Architect-inflicted damage.

  Idris couldn’t imagine what it had been like for the Gamin’s crew: enter unspace with a damaged drive or stay and risk the Architect’s attention. Likely he’d have made the same decision.

  “Olli,” he transmitted. “Ready for you.”

  “On it.” His board lit up to show she had control of the Vulture’s claws and was deploying them to bridge the final gap between vessels.

  “What are we getting besides the beacon?” Rollo asked. “Kittering, send it over.”

  Kittering’s real name sounded like nails on a chalkboard, made with a rapid stridulation of some of his mouthparts. The crab-like alien would be hunkered down in his own compartment, a space entirely adapted for his physiology and comfort. His chief role was managing accounts and logistics. Still, he was a good second engineer and when a job was afoot, everybody worked.

  Even Kris. The last member of the crew—Idris’s business partner—hadn’t shown yet. She made a habit of taking her sweet time over actually reporting for duty. And if it hadn’t been for Idris’s value to the venture, Rollo would likely have dumped her somewhere along the way. Idris needed her, though, and the Vulture needed Idris to get out into the deep void. Otherwise it was just one more salvager among many, scrabbling for work along the Throughways.

  Kittering sent over what the Vulture’s ailing sensor suite had gleaned from the Gamin. Aside from the beacon, just some low power readings: a few failing systems still labouring within the otherwise dead ship.

  “You don’t think we’ll actually…” The thought of finding working suspension pods bobbed for a moment in Idris’s mind.

  “Find people? Alive… Be the fucking heroes of the universe, hey?” Rollo shook his head. “Go on though, bet me a thousand Halma we’ll find them, bet me five-kay Largesse. Bet me anything?”

  “I won’t,” Idris said quietly, and Rollo nodded.

  “No more would I.”

  The frantic board showed that they had drifted close enough to set off all their collision alarms, but Olli had full control of the great convoluted mess of the claw. It was unfolding like a mechanical tarantula from the Vulture’s underside, to grope for the freighter’s hull. Olli was a top-notch remote operator with a rare gift—able to run non-humanoid rigs as though they were her own body. Right now she would be “in” the docking claw, its seven articulated limbs stretching and flexing until she had them clamped to the Gamin, magnetically locked.

  “Nice work, Olli, my sweet child,” Rollo told her. “Smooth as a baby’s ass. Now get the cutters ready.”

  “You’re not going to hail them?” The new voice came from the control compartment’s hatch. Idris glanced up and nodded as Kris came in. Here on board ship she was dressed in a variant of the same printed clothes, though she had one of her signature scarves about her neck, same as always. She was a dark woman a shade taller than him, her hair a carefully shaped mass of fine curls. She was also running from her own trouble, but getting out of trouble was her speciality skill.

  “Nobody to hail,” Rollo insisted, but a moment later he grudgingly went through the motions. If they cut through the hull and someone fell out and died in space, at least they could hide behind a trail of proper procedure. This was the sort of trouble that Kris specialized in.

  *

  They could just have hauled the whole ship off like an unopened present to give to the Heritage Foundation. That was all the contract required. Rollo was always on the lookout for a bonus, though. What if the Gamin held some unexpected treasure? What if there really were living refugees? Why give the kudos to the Heritage people
when the Vulture’s crew could cash in?

  They could have gone in through a hatch, like civilized people. However, four years ago a fellow salvager had been destroyed by actual honest-to-goodness booby traps left by the long-dead occupants of the ship it had opened up. Trapped in stranded ships, the mind went to strange places, especially if it had been exposed to unspace for long. The crew of the Vulture God were taking no chances, and going in through the wall instead, Olli cut smoothly along some of the pre-existing repair seams until the side of the freighter had been peeled back. There was no rush of stale atmosphere, only vacuum meeting vacuum. Could have been worse, Idris allowed.

  “Right then, let’s get this business underway,” Rollo announced. “Olli, move your remotes in, and have Medvig follow up with his little fellows. And you, shyster,” he said to Kris, “may as well get a camera drone in there. The mediotypes will be worth something. Double-time, everybody! And that does not mean double pay, before anyone asks.”

  The crew spaces of the Gamin were adrift with small objects. Back in the earliest days of space travel nobody would have dared fit out a ship with so much loose junk, but people had been taking artificial gravity for granted for generations before the Architect came to Amraji. It was a small side-use of the same engines that moved the ships through space. The Gamin’s gravitic drives were lifeless though. The viewfeed from Olli’s drones showed her remotes jetting carefully through a swirl of odd items: data clips, slates, gloves, a gleaming silver locket, a stiffly frozen plush toy. Of the crew themselves there was no sign, and Idris wondered if they had taken a shuttle and tried to get… where? Emerging unplanned from unspace in the middle of nowhere, drive burnt-out and the nearest star system light years away, where would you go?

  “Atmosphere loss by slow leak, my guess,” Olli’s glitching voice came to them. “Or this junk’d be flushed out already. Moving towards the cargo.”

  “Check if there’s pressure before each door,” came Kris’s input, following up with her cameras.