Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She tried the same with Mesmon, missing his neck but jamming a finger in his eye. At least it seemed to pain him, though nothing stopped the Tothiat. Then she had revolved to see the two remaining clowns by the drone hatch again, and they were pointing guns at her, trying for a clear shot. Rollo popped up and shot one dead, which served to distract his friend who—Solace now noticed—had a rather heavier weapon. It was a big laser, a cutting tool converted for antipersonnel use, and the man blazed it around at Rollo. Solace caught her breath as it made a slaggy mess of the wall and pipes. The captain himself was an old zero-G hand, though, pushing off before the beam’s wielder dragged it round to him. A second later he sent enough bullets towards his enemy to drive the man into cover.

  Then Kit chirped in Solace’s ear, “Access! Go go go!”

  Mesmon put a rock-shattering blow into her side, but she hardly noticed because she was no longer at the mercy of Newtonian physics. Gravity was back, and everything slammed into the floor. Everything except her: Solace had her wings again.

  The drone bay was an instant mess of crates, bodies, blood and beads of molten metal. All of it abruptly remembering what “down” meant. She saw Rollo crunch onto one knee and twist over, cursing. The laser-wielder lunged for the little box they’d retrieved, only to fall back as a shot from the captain scored the floor nearby.

  Mesmon had fallen, landing on his ass without dignity, then looking up to see the Angel of the Parthenon descending on him with righteous fury.

  The shoulders of her armour boasted gravity handles. Olli’s Scorpion had something similar. They let Solace ride the gravity fields, inside or outside a ship. They let her, in this specific circumstance, kick Mesmon very hard in the head, sending him hurtling backwards along the floor, with his neck at an unnatural angle.

  She pursued, not at all surprised to see Mesmon’s head snap back into place sporting a bloody-minded expression. He scrabbled for a gun but she knocked it from his hand and swung up to the ceiling to avoid his lunge. Then she flipped upside down to hit him in the neck, the jaw, the temple—pushing to see what his boosted physiology could endure. There must be limits to his healing, to the sheer energy his hybrid system could muster. Finally Solace darted back again and shot at him with Mr. Punch, virtually amputating one leg and scattering a handful of punctures across the rest of him.

  Mesmon went down. The leg, despite all the tear-along-the-dotted-line work she’d just done, remained attached. And already, she could see the fibres and ropes of his muscles knotting together like a nest of snakes. Still, he was down and obviously in pain. She’d just have to see how many parts were too many, when it came to him reassembling himself. And whether his head would still curse her, once she’d separated it from his shoulders.

  The laser caught her as she swooped down on the Tothiat, and her entire world dissolved into danger warnings and error messages. Solace aborted the attack instantly, using the gravity handles to scrabble backwards through the air, bobbing erratically. She had lost all the servos down one side, the plates of her armour half melted together by the heat. There was also a great deal of pain and blistered skin on the inside. But you could only heal from that if someone didn’t kill you first, so she put it out of her mind. She swung around, trying to manage Mr. Punch one-handed, trying to find her new enemy.

  She found him just as he rammed a new cell into his exhausted laser and levelled it at her, faceless behind his visor.

  Damn, she thought, and Rollo shot him, shattering that plastic mask and sending the man pitching backwards.

  Mesmon was already on his feet. She could barely believe it. She could also barely believe that the Hegemony hadn’t just put twenty Tothiat together and taken over the goddamn universe by now. But maybe they were all inveterate criminals who only obeyed orders when it let them break laws.

  She brought up her damage control. So much damage. She was half paralysed inside the crippled armour, and if she somehow got it off then her training wouldn’t be enough to beat him.

  The two of them faced off, or the three of them including Rollo, but Rollo and his little gun weren’t a big feature of this conflict. He’d have to practically force-feed Mesmon the barrel to make much of an impression. Then Olli erupted into the drone bay, still fighting the lashing, coiling length of the Castigar.

  There were two more laser scars across the Scorpion’s metal hide and the wormlike bulk of the alien was gashed and ragged. It left a smear of black ichor across the plates of the floor. Even as the pair of them burst onto the scene, the Castigar’s head-mounted weapon spoke again, spraying the room with a scatter of bullets and scribbling nonsense across the far wall with its energy beam. Then Olli finally secured a cutting claw about the headmount and ripped it off, taking a chunk of the creature’s head with it. The clutch of tentacles still attached to the creature writhed in a frenzy and its length whipped madly back and forth. Mesmon was slammed one way and Solace the other. The thrashing was pure reflex by then, and mostly post-mortem. Warrior Castigar died hard, but they still died.

  Unlike Tothiat, apparently, because Mesmon was scrambling up the Scorpion like a monkey, making straight for the cracked capsule that held Olli. One of her smaller arms snagged at his tattered EVA suit and he ripped the limb off in one smooth motion.

  Solace levelled Mr. Punch but, with only one fully functional arm, the chance of shooting Olli was too high. Instead she scrabbled against the gravity field and just flung herself at the Tothiat. Half her body was locked rigid, yet she could still pilot herself about like a remote using her gravity handles. Mesmon was straddling Olli’s capsule, one hand cocked back to strike, when she cannoned into him. She almost tore him loose altogether and got her working glove about his head, digging her fingers into his flesh as hard as she could.

  With a snarl he took her wrist and tried to break it one-handed, but he couldn’t quite get enough purchase. Instead, he just jerked at her arm—pulling hard enough to slam her into the nearest wall. Simultaneously, he drove his other elbow into Olli’s clear plastic screen, cracking it into a webwork of crazed lines. Inside, the remote specialist’s face was ashen, horrified.

  Solace was fighting to recover control of her own armour, so she missed the moment when Rollo vaulted up and put his pistol to Mesmon’s chest, opening a fist-sized hole. The Tothiat slammed back, one hand still hooked about the latch of Olli’s lid. For just a second, Solace thought that was that—they’d finally breached the tolerance of the man’s alien resilience.

  There was hardly any blood, though. And Mesmon arched forwards, keening loud enough for Solace to hear even over the yelling of her armour’s alarms. He abandoned Olli and threw himself on Rollo, knocking the man’s gun aside and smashing him across the head. The blow was hard enough to break the captain’s neck and visibly deform his skull.

  Solace’s own cry almost deafened her and it covered Olli’s shriek. A moment later the Scorpion had three different limbs on Mesmon, driving claws and clamps into his flesh. She was pulling him taut between them as though she was going to tear him into thirds. And perhaps she would have done, but he wouldn’t come apart. Solace could see the frame’s servos straining, arms juddering and whining as they tried to maintain their grisly tension.

  Then both doors of the drone bay airlock were grinding open to reveal a short umbilical—the one that connected the Vulture to the flayed, airless sculpture of the Oumaru. Immediately, the atmosphere started screaming out into the tunnel. Solace began skidding towards the open hatch, resisting with her gravity handles because she just didn’t have enough working limbs to do it any other way. What she did manage to do was swing herself so that she had one foot on Rollo’s body, even as Mesmon’s dead compatriots spun or rolled past. They ragdolled bonelessly down the umbilical, into the open wound that was the Oumaru, before being sucked out into the wider universe.

  “Kit!” she shouted, not even sure her comms were working. “Repair the envelope! Kittering!”

  Something skidded past
her as she tried to maintain her position. It was a plain metal box, but some part of her remembered its provenance and she grabbed it with her working hand. The thing Harvest had brought up from the Oumaru; the answer to why Rollo had lost his ship—and his life. Something important. Worth killing and dying for.

  Then the hatch was fully open and Olli went through.

  Solace had been thinking of this development as another attack by Broken Harvest people. Perhaps another troop of suited goons were coming up from the wreck? But Olli had control of the drone bay and she was going to do for Mesmon one way or another. Clinging to the rim of the open hatch with the Scorpion’s four feet, she thrust him out into vacuum.

  Solace stared, waiting, seeing ice form in the Tothiat’s eyes and at the corners of his mouth, as well as across the cracks in Olli’s capsule. He wasn’t dying, though. He deliberately wrenched one of his arms free of the clamp that held it, leaving plenty of suit and flesh behind. In vacuum his substance flared out in a mess of sticky strings before knitting back together.

  Olli shook him, holding him with just one claw now. Staring at her through the ice, Mesmon dug his fingers into the metal of her arm, twisting it. He wasn’t going anywhere, Solace thought. Then he was crawling up Olli’s arm towards her, tearing himself from her pincer grip an inch at a time.

  “I’m coming!” Solace shouted into the comm, but Olli snapped back, “No need,” and detonated something at the Scorpion’s shoulder joint, shooting the arm and its burden outwards, away, into the void.

  Solace lost sight of Mesmon’s face very quickly but she hoped he was fucking livid about this. Olli stayed at the hatch, watching to make sure he wasn’t able to snag any part of the Oumaru. From her satisfied look, apparently he wasn’t.

  Then she drew back in and shut the hatch, and the Vulture God’s much-abused atmosphere processors began to take up the slack. Wordlessly, she stomped over to Rollo’s body, her frame sparking and shuddering with the damage it had taken. Soon after, Kittering came pattering in, stopping dead when he saw his captain.

  A little after that, Solace caught Idris’s signal. The Harvest’s interceptor was out of the fight. By then Kit had secured the Oumaru to the Vulture—and made space for Idris to dock the Joan and come aboard with Kris. So he could get both ships out of there; so he could hear the bad news.

  As Idris ran through a scatter of hurried system checks, Solace handed the little box over to Olli so she could prise it open. She had a burning need to know what was inside. It had cost them enough.

  It’ll be nothing, she thought. It’ll be drugs, gems… some stupid thing a crime lord would sacrifice his minions to secure—and get good people killed in the bargain. It’ll do nothing but highlight our pointless losses.

  Then Olli tripped the mechanism at last and they all stared down at the contents. They really weren’t drugs or gems or any other stupid things. They were either fakes—or they were holding the fate of worlds in their hands.

  14.

  A tale of two colonies

  The colony at Lycos had been no more than a knot of hardy ecologists and xeno-agriculturalists before the waves of refugees arrived. Life on Lycos was hard, the struggle to tame enough land to support people constant, starvation an ever-present shadow. And then, in the year 48 After, the Architect came.

  It had burst from unspace without warning—back then, before the Intermediary Program, it was always without warning—and descended on the planet with unmistakable intent. Lycos had few ships. Those that had dropped off the refugees had already been deployed elsewhere. Evacuating the colony was simply impossible. The people planetside had plenty of time to understand what was about to happen to them. The Architect turned from a point of light, to a dot, to a fist, to a second satellite… whose thousand mountain-sized spines stabbed accusingly down at the planet.

  And hung there. And hung there.

  The science station at the heart of the colony had turned every appropriate instrument on the Architect, determined to gather and transmit what data it could before the end.

  And then the Architect departed, leaving Lycos somehow whole and unmolested. For the first time in humanity’s experience, the great gods of change and destruction had stayed their hand.

  The scanner records showed a signal emanating from the Architect, solitary and singular as whalesong, directed at a very specific point on-planet. A flyer expedition, hastily mounted, discovered… something. Later researchers would characterize it as an outpost. There was little of it left, and what was there was buried twenty metres down in Lycos’s acidic soil. The remains of three chambers, interconnected, spherical, partly flattened by long millennia of compression. Certain artefacts of uncertain purpose—rods, crooks and key-like objects, all small enough to be held in a human hand. Analysis of both ruin and rods failed to reveal how they were made, which in itself taught more than anything else. The fine structure of the materials did not conform to the rules of atomic bonds and molecular chemistry that applied to all “matter” discovered so far. Its substance was written in a language unrelated to the periodic table. Exact dating was similarly frustrated and the site interacted with the geology of Lycos in inexplicable ways.

  The unknown creators were dubbed the Originators. Later research would link them to the creation of the unspace Throughways too. Right then, humanity seized on to one key idea. Whoever or whatever they had been, the Architects feared them. Even their million-year-old relics were enough to send the gargantuan destroyers away.

  *

  In the wake of the Lycos discovery, a survey team on Charm Prime reported finding similar relics on that barren, blasted world.

  Charm Prime had been named by a real joker. The world was arid, devoid of life. The same hadn’t always been true. There were signs of a thriving biosphere and some kind of civilization dating from at least a hundred thousand years before, including roads and the ground-down traces of ruins. The fate of the world and its inhabitants was unclear, but lingering areas of radiation raised some grim possibilities. However, in the midst of the largest and most intact ruin was what hazmat-suited archaeologists had labelled a shrine. It didn’t seem to be made by Originators, but the contents were uncannily similar to the objects found at Lycos. They had already been old, perhaps venerated, when the Charm Prime civilization had been bombing itself and its world into oblivion.

  Nobody wanted to settle Charm Prime bar one apocalyptic religious sect. However, a short Throughway linked that world to Karis, where a commune government had been taking in large numbers of refugees. Karis was a good world, able to support many fleeing humans. And when its government took possession of the Originator relics, there wasn’t much the Charm Prime faithful or the archaeologists could do. Scientific research and faith both came second to saving lives.

  Not long after, an Architect did come to the burgeoning world of Karis. There was little attempt at evacuation. They trusted the Originators to save them.

  They were mistaken. Karis joined the ranks of reworked worlds, another planet-scale martyr to the Architects’ craft. That was how humanity learned the second lesson on Originator regalia. You cannot move them. Oh, on-planet, certainly. But the moment mankind took these objects into unspace they became just… things; useless sticks and stones. Objects of ritual significance only. Just another inexplicable mystery attached to the Originators, that hypothetical ancient civilization which raised only unanswerable questions.

  Except the relics could be moved in a way that preserved their integrity. A few years after the loss of Karis, during the thick of the war, Colonial diplomats finally disentangled the Essiel’s most important message. It was what Hegemonic representatives had been trying to communicate ever since humans first ran into them. The Hegemony was asking humans to submit to their rule, not through threats, but via a particularly potent promise.

  The Essiel knew all about the Architects, from before humans had even smelted bronze. They, too, had discovered the protection these long-gone Originators
could still provide. But they had discovered how to transport the regalia. Every single Hegemony world was protected from Architect attention. In return for the subservience and obeisance of their subjects, they offered life.

  When this became clear, human worlds began to open private channels to the Essiel. The Hegemony began to acquire human subjects, one planet at a time. And what could the Colonial governments do, precisely? It wasn’t as though they had a better offer, right then.

  Kris

  Kris had lived out of the Vulture God for four years. She knew it backwards. She knew its sounds too, but they had always been the sounds of other people: Barney cursing recalcitrant mechanisms, Olli clattering about in one of her frames as she worked on the remotes, the tap-tap of Kittering’s many feet, Rollo’s rich voice.

  Alone in unspace, the ship was ghastly. Her every step, every shuffle, echoed against the metal walls. Idris had said, be still, close your eyes as they dropped into the void, but that wasn’t an option. Without those little scuffs and rustles from her, there was only the silence… and the silence was terrible because it wasn’t quite complete.

  She was alone on the Vulture God. Or no, she wasn’t alone.

  She’d read about this, watched mediotypes: your mind populated the absence with a spurious presence. It was just sensory deprivation, operating on a hitherto unexamined sense. Pacing past the little cells of the crew cabins, Kris could sense there was something out there. When she moved, it moved, when she was still, it waited. A little closer every time, stalking her at its leisure.