Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Havaer Mundy retrieved his dossiers and reviewed his knowledge of the Vulture God and its crew.

  Kris

  After their arrest, Kris had expected them to be framed for the security staff’s deaths. She’d already prepared legal arguments by the time His Wisdom the Bearer Sathiel pitched up at their cell. Part of her was numb after seeing Barney and Medvig die. However, she was still the crew’s lawyer and she had to protect them.

  Sathiel changed all of that—and it didn’t hurt that he was pushing his own interests as well. He had a serious throw-down with station admin, accusing Leng of trying to hide the truth about the Architects. He also took responsibility for the Vulture’s crew being in the cargo bay, and Leng was plainly unwilling to arrest him or his people. Everyone ended up being turfed out of her offices onto the street.

  Sathiel rushed off to capitalize on what he had, given that the actual evidence had been whisked away from him. The Vulture crew—if that was even what they were anymore—were left abandoned as the station resounded with the agitation of people still getting to grips with a possible return of everyone’s worst nightmare.

  “Right,” said Rollo, and led them off to do their duty: to drink, brood and toast their lost companions.

  “Musoku Barnier,” Rollo said sombrely. They’d muscled everyone else out of an alcove in the nearest bar and now he stood while they sat. Even Solace, who’d never been at a spacer’s wake before. “Born 92 After,” he declared to them, “on Tsiolkovsky Orbital over Lumbali.”

  “Complaining son of a bitch,” Olli put in promptly.

  “Bad sore loser,” Kittering’s translator declared.

  “Drank too much,” Kris added.

  “Couldn’t keep money,” Idris rounded up.

  Rollo nodded, satisfied conventions were being followed. “My son, he was, my brother. Loyal to his ship and safe hands. Died in orbit—who should have died in space where he belonged. One of ours, he was.”

  And they chorused, “One of ours,” with Solace a beat behind, caught out.

  “Asset Medvig 99622,” the captain went on. “Instanced 116 After and provided to us under a medium-duration leash contract out of Peace Hive Three.”

  “Bad sense of humour,” Kris said.

  “Finicky stand-offish type,” Idris followed.

  “Never put my stuff back where it belonged,” growled Olli.

  “Very expensive to maintain,” Kit contributed.

  “My children, they were, and comrades,” Rollo said. “Good company and safe hands. Died amongst us, who should have gone back to their own, but they were ours.”

  “They were ours,” the chorus came back to Rollo, and Kris saw tears making their tortuous way down the creases on his face.

  Safe hands. For Colonial spacers, whose lives were strung from one mechanical failure to the next, for whom there would never be enough replacement parts and every little thing might be made to serve as something else just to get them into port, it was the greatest valediction.

  “Now,” Rollo said quietly, hands on the table. “In this time of grief, I have a favour to ask of you, my daughter.” And he looked Kris in the eye.

  “Oh, I know,” she agreed. “I’m on it, Captain. I will find out who the hell those waste-makers were.”

  Rollo’s smile was bleak. What, after all, could they do with the information? A handful of spacers who didn’t even have a ship… But if all they could do was spread word to their peers, they’d do that.

  Kris stood to go, shaking her sleeve slightly to make sure her duelling knife was hanging right. For a moment she thought to ask Solace to accompany her. You couldn’t get better backup than a Partheni soldier. The woman looked distracted, though, and Kris wondered if she was planning to leave them soon. Instead she glanced at Olli.

  “Oh yes,” the remote specialist said. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Bring the Scorpion,” Kris told her. “Stay back, don’t loom, but bring it.” And if they actually met any of the symbiont’s confederates, Olli would ensure they properly rued the day.

  Kris had done this sort of thing before. It was a development of the work she’d carried out as a student lawyer back on Scintilla, when the thought of a spacer’s life would have set her laughing hysterically. Students did the beat work on senior advocates’ cases, investigating witnesses, digging up dirt… which meant getting their hands dirty. She hit the Lung-Crow’s kybernet with her credentials until she found a way in, then set automated seekers into the station’s records. Next, she and Olli went around the docks, talking to spacers and the orbital’s ground crew. Where people recognized her ship name, she took their sympathy and used it ruthlessly. The rest of the time she played whatever role seemed most apt: creditor, debtor, abandoned lover, old friend. Always her queries circled the identity of the Tothiat, perhaps a Tothiat who palled around with a vermiform Castigar with a beweaponed headmount.

  The station records gave her some detail on Tothiats as a class, none of it good. They were from the Hegemony; the actual Tothir, the insect-thing, was technically a subject race of the Essiel. You didn’t see them much outside a fishtank off-world, because they were very dependent on their planet’s chemistry. However, the Essiel had many ingenious subordinates, and someone had felt it worth putting a great deal of effort into giving the nasty little critters the freedom of the universe. The solution had been to graft Tothir to other creatures—modified to produce the toxic chemicals the things needed. The results, so she read, had gone some way beyond the Hegemonic scientists’ intentions. What came off the surgeon’s table was neither host nor implant, but a conglomerate personality—seamlessly mixing both. Unsurprisingly, there were few volunteers for the process. On the other hand, Kris discovered grimly, the resulting hybrid had considerable conscious control over the host body’s metabolism. The merged creature could push itself far past its usual limits, and repair damage very swiftly. They could even survive hard vacuum for an uncomfortably long period of time.

  A super-symbiont. Great.

  Kris had never expected to end up here, not the young Keristina Soolin Almier who’d won a scholarship to the law schools of Scintilla. She’d been brought up within the Harmaster asteroid belt, home to colossal resource-stripping factories. Her parents had been members in good standing with the Iron Co-ops, whose collective bargaining and strict union lines had turned poverty and hard graft into relative comfort and affluence by the time Kris was born. Harmaster ex-pats were turning up all over the Colonies by then, bringing their work ethics and Iron Coin bursaries with them. That had been enough to get her onto Scintilla. A lucrative white-collar future had beckoned.

  Scintilla was… difficult, though. The planet was old-money rich, like Magda. It had the old families to go with it, those left to their own devices since before Earth fell. It was a cold world, with cities carved into the sides of snow-swept mountains. The older students stalked the sparse, high halls of its best law college in black furs. Their junior assistants wore monkish robes and were forbidden to talk in the corridors. And then there was the duelling. It was constrained by all manner of legal restrictions, but students were expected to argue their way out of any repercussions if caught carrying the knife—that was part of the training. And if you didn’t carry the knife, you weren’t anyone. You could buy the knives legally, train openly, and everyone obsessed over the careers of the top fighters. Even the tutors. They harangued their classes on the evils of the atavistic and reprehensible practice, yet their eyes twinkled in encouragement even as they lectured. And it was hardly ever fatal these days.

  Kris had picked up the knife because it was plain she’d never walk in the right circles unless she did. She held on to it because she found she loved it. Not the spilled blood—especially if it was hers—but everything else. It was a stupid aristocratic piece of bravado yet she turned out to be very good at it. Up to and including the point where she found her knife painted with the life’s blood of a very promising young boy of very good famil
y.

  It hadn’t been the legalities that got her, of course. She’d argued her way out of those in a way that would have made her tutors proud. But the family, they wouldn’t forget. Vendetta was a serious business amongst the legal dynasties of Scintilla. Life gave her two choices then. Get off-planet or spend her days fending off challenges and assassins. She often wondered if she’d made the right choice. Especially now, shipless and penniless.

  “We know this individual.” Her benefactor, after a morning’s enquiries, was a Hiver. This one resembled a metre-tall bird cage with six evenly spaced legs and not even the pretence of a head. They were an asset leased to the station dock crew and Kris suspected they didn’t socialize with their human peers much. “We hear he killed your companions.”

  “Two crew down and our ship gone,” she confirmed. “And we’ve no idea who they were.”

  “The absence of knowledge is a wound that will not heal.” This Hiver’s designation was Yuri, just another random label plucked from a list somewhere. “Of course I am not permitted to provide you with confidential station records, under the terms of my contract.” Their voice vibrated reedily from the cage of their body. She could see a host of little insects within, whose constant communion produced the conscious entity that called itself Yuri.

  “Well, look,” Kris told them. They were in an abandoned cargo bay, next to a tangle of wiring that the Hiver was desultorily repairing. “I can probably work up a good legal argument for why we’re entitled to this information, then spend all day getting it past the kybernet and station admin,” she said. “Or I could find the shady outfit I damn well know exists somewhere on board, and have them hack the system. But I’d rather take the Largesse my factor has made available and transfer it to you. You can’t tell me you don’t have your own account separate from your leash.”

  Yuri managed a creditable chuckle. “We won’t do it for the money,” they said. “Although we will take the money, just to clarify. However, we will do it for your loss. We have looked you up on the Tally. Your Asset spoke highly of you.”

  Kris went still, parsing that. Yes, Hivers kept a record of who did right by them and who did not. She hadn’t ever thought of Medvig doing that. But that was because, to her, Medvig had been people.

  “Your Tothiat goes by the name of Mesmon. He shipped in aboard the Sark. The Sark itself departed peaceably after your ship was taken. Not connected by security with the theft. Mesmon seems a spacer freelancer. But, to one who has worked here under leash for many years, patterns become clear. He is a sworn man with the Broken Harvest Society.”

  “Ah,” said Kris heavily, taking that in. The mob.

  She had been expecting Nativists maybe, opposing Sathiel’s cult. Perhaps even Hugh spooks. Yet the Vulture God had been stolen from them by actual thieves.

  It was nothing personal, was her guess. Nobody on the crew had tangled with the Broken Harvest as far as she was aware. She set her covert search agents in motion once more and precious little they brought back was good. It looked as though Broken Harvest operated in the Hegemony as much as in the Colonies. If they’d taken their prize across the border—or rather, deeper into Hegemonic space, now—the Vulture’s crew would be powerless to intervene.

  She took a meagre lunch with Olli in a nearby canteen and went over what she’d found. The remotes specialist nodded, her capsule opened up so she could feed herself with the Scorpion’s smaller arms.

  “Where’s the Sark out of?”

  “Registered in a place called G’murc or something, in the Hegemony. Not that it means anything,” Kris told her.

  Olli frowned, chewing mechanically. “And if we knew where they’d gone? What then?”

  “Depends where that was. Maybe we could… go after them. Book passage there? I don’t know. If we wanted to butt heads with Broken Harvest, anyway.”

  “Rollo would,” Olli decided. “Rollo is pissed. Don’t know if it’s the ship or Barney and Med, but he’s in a mood to cut the throat of God if he has to. What about you?”

  Kris blinked at her. “The throat of God?”

  “Or this Mesmon triggerman, anyway. Are you ready to do the same?”

  Kris felt within and found the same urge that had led to her carrying the knife on Scintilla—now tempered and hardened by two dead friends. “Maybe,” she allowed.

  “Then let me link to the station and I’ll show you a trick.” Olli gave her a fierce smile.

  It was simple, really. Kris almost laughed when she found out. It was the packet trade. Everyone carried news, after all. That was how word travelled from one planet to another through unspace. Everyone made a little money on the side by downloading encrypted communications to deliver at their destination. But to do so, you had to say where you were going.

  The Vulture God had obviously not taken on packets in its violent exit from Lung-Crow. On the other hand the Sark, given its innocent departure, had. It was just what you did when you travelled, natural as breathing, second nature to any crew.

  The Sark crew had taken on the packet for Tarekuma. Maybe it had been an elegant piece of misdirection. Maybe they weren’t even heading for the same destination as the stolen Vulture, but it was all they had to go on.

  10.

  Havaer

  New screens lined the corridors leading from the passenger bays. Kicking his heels at Lung-Crow customs, Havaer had plenty of time to see twenty different pundits making hay over the flight of the Vulture God. Some of the talking heads claimed the ship’s captain was responsible, but the prevailing opinion was that parties unknown had hijacked the Vulture God and vanished it away.

  There were several recordings that certainly seemed to show an Architected wreck clutched in the Vulture’s claws. And there was some panic, but there was also denial. Nobody wanted to admit what everyone was thinking. So: a fragile calm prevailed at Lung-Crow. No screaming exodus yet. In fact, now the planet was under Hegemony rule, maybe prices for a berth to Huei-Cavor would be climbing… Public opinion might sway towards the Essiel—here and elsewhere—when this news spread.

  All the more reason to find the truth about the wreck.

  At last Havaer was let through and he dusted off his credentials as mediotype opinionator, under which guise the office supplied a handful of articles a month below his byline.

  Later that same day, having pulled some local strings, he met with His Wisdom the Bearer Sathiel. The man was urbane, grandfatherly and opulently dressed, surrounded by worshipful followers. He clasped Havaer’s bony arm warmly, in the Colonial fashion, as they ordered a cup of the Caffenado that humans drank in the Hegemony. It tasted like the best parts of coffee, lemon and almonds.

  Havaer gave the man his attentive smile and decided he didn’t trust Sathiel an inch, but then the whole cult business gave him the creeps. To his mind, inventing a religion venerating extraterrestrial barnacles was a ludicrous response to meeting an alien species. Except, he admitted, it did seem to provide a framework for human–Essiel interactions.

  “You’ve been very vocal about the Oumaru rumours, Your Wisdom,” he commented diplomatically, channelling his persona of highbrow mediotype reporter. They were in a small eatery, and most patrons were wearing cult heraldry—from a simple badge to full-on robes like Sathiel. Havaer’s long-sleeved charcoal tunic, trousers and slip-ons were standard kit for someone out of the richer settled colonies, but in this mish-mash place, he stood out amongst both the spacers and Hegemonic types.

  Sathiel lifted his beaker. “Caffenado,” he breathed, as though the drink was rare and precious. “Serendipitous child of humans trying to adapt coffee to the soil of an alien world. Now one of the most widely partaken-of beverages known. A major import into the Colonies, as doubtless you’re aware. And war-caste and breeder-caste Castigar can’t get enough of it—which is an unlooked-for benefit. Goes to show what can arise, when humanity travels to the stars and welcomes the alien with open hands.”

  Havaer tried his smile again and made notes
on his slate. “Well, Your Wisdom, you’ll understand that I’m not really here as a potential convert.”

  The cultist nodded understandingly. “My point, Menheer Mundy, is that there are those, even here, who don’t drink Caffenado because of what it represents. Especially here. There are those who would do everything in their power to throw up hard barriers between humanity and its neighbours. Even if they have to murder their own to do it.”

  Havaer blinked, nodded, noted, the whole act. “Alleged proof that the Architects have returned has been taken from us—by unknown persons for unknown reasons. But are you… making specific accusations here, Your Wisdom?”

  Sathiel’s pleasant smile broadened and he looked down into the dark liquid before sipping. “I’d risk giving you, a mediotypist from the inner Colonies, something you cannot use… Your audience being less pro-alien than some?”

  “My audience is cosmopolitan,” Havaer assured him. “I mean, I’m no fool, I can see this could be controversial. If we hinted that humans tried to hide evidence of Architects, for selfish reasons. No doubt we’d get lots of angry responses, but that won’t be the majority. I cater to an open-minded base.”

  “Well then, let me be frank. There would be nothing more fatal to the Nativist, pro-human bloc than proof that the Architects have returned. Not only because the Divine Essiel have within their power the ability to protect entire worlds from their depredations, but simply because when the Architects were a present threat, that was when humanity existed hand in hand with our neighbours. Right now there are those in power who would rather push them all away. How would that be perceived, if there was a new Architect war on the horizon?” Sathiel fixed Havaer with a gaze that abruptly had all the grandfather sucked out of it, nothing but steel remaining. “My point, Menheer Mundy, is just that, and if you do pass this shocking news on to your audience, you’d be acting in their interests. I appreciate that people within the Colonies find all this…” he picked at his richly embroidered sleeve, “unsettling. Our ritual relationship to the Divine Essiel looks like idolatry, perhaps even brainwashing. But I’ll let you into a secret, Menheer. I’m not religious, not in the way you probably believe. However, the Essiel have the power to accomplish things that, try as we might, humanity cannot replicate. Humanity cannot proof our worlds against the Architects, using Originator regalia. We might happen upon a planet with Originator ruins, allowing us to keep the monsters away from only that world. But the Hegemony can ward their worlds at will. And if the Architects come back, as I believe they have; if the Architects keep coming back, what is best for humanity? To ignore the rest of the galaxy and sing stories of our greatness, until our last world is just some monstrous sculpture commemorating our end? Or should we accept that we are not self-sufficient, and take the help offered—at what is a very reasonable price?”