Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Orders, Agent?”

  He’d made his decision, he realized. It was a bittersweet one, but today was not the day to die for a good cause, not even for Mordant House.

  “Get me the Vulture,” he said.

  Idris

  The crew of the Vulture had been desperately trying to get the Hammer on comms. The sudden arrival of a Hegemony maybe-warship hadn’t gone unnoticed by them either. And when Havaer’s voice finally came through, as they crowded around the captain’s chair, the release of tension was an almost physical shock.

  “Some old friends of yours,” Havaer told them. “Broken Harvest. Demanding we give you up.”

  “And are you going to?” Kris demanded.

  “Telemmier there?”

  “What?” Idris demanded, leaning in beside Kris. “Why me?”

  “Get to your pilot’s station, Telemmier,” Havaer told him shortly. “This is how it’s going to go. We’re pulling back, but not as fast as their ship’s coming on. And it’s a full-on Hegemony fighting ship, which means my little sloop won’t hold her off for long.”

  “So what now?” Kris demanded, as Idris squeezed past Trine’s metal body to get to his seat.

  “So I’m decoupling you. I want you to fall into unspace as quickly as you can, just jump right out and we’ll do the same. Telemmier, I’ll link you to my navigator. Make sure we don’t end up clashing.”

  “So we stutter-jump together, in-system?” Idris asked politely. He was already calculating a course to the deep void, but felt the illusion of cooperation was worth maintaining.

  “We both know you’ll go on the lam straight off.” The knowing edge in Havaer’s voice cut deep. “Maybe that’s best for now. And once you’re clear of us, I know full well that I’ve got no hold on you. I’m Hugh, and you spacers will take every chance to buck authority.”

  “Not entirely fair,” Kris protested, although Olli shouting, “Damn right!” over her probably didn’t help.

  “It’s like this,” Havaer’s voice went on. They could hear the faint babble of his crew behind him, as they readied ship systems to face the Broken Harvest. “Mordant House is only interested in the Architects—this isn’t about you. And I know you all have very different loyalties, but this is way bigger than any one government. If the Architects are back, everyone needs to know. I am therefore pleading with you to get your ship to Berlenhof—with or without the Oumaru. Berlenhof has embassies for every major galactic power. And specifically for Executor Solace, you should know that the Heaven’s Sword—your own damn sorority ship—is there right now along with the Thunderchild, in the most overt display of gunboat diplomacy I ever saw. All because of even the first sniff of Architect involvement. If you value anything beyond your own skins and profits, come testify there. You’ll be heroes. And once this is all out and public, you’ll be safe.”

  Idris wondered how much of that the man believed.

  “We need to discuss it,” Idris told Havaer over the comms.

  “Just think about it,” came the reply, and then, “Right, they’re on us. Decoupling you.” The umbilical had already withdrawn and Idris’s board showed him a warning that the Hammer’s clamps were retracting.

  “Ready,” Idris replied. He coaxed a drachm of force from the Vulture’s reaction drives, to push them away from the Hammer the moment they were free.

  Perhaps the Broken Harvest assumed they were fulfilling its demands, as it changed course to intercept the smaller vessel while keeping its weapons targeted on Havaer’s ship. Idris let the Vulture tumble as though drifting away from the Hammer, while calculating the space between the vessels. Mass screwed with gravity, so a complex gravitic operation like entering unspace wasn’t wise when in another ship’s shadow. Especially if that ship was already plotting its own jump.

  He had a weird sense, then, as if the universe really was a sheet and three fingers were pressing dimples into it. Here he was, here was the Hammer’s leash-contracted navigator, and there was the alien mind that guided the Broken Harvest. Ogdru, the species was called. He pictured it like a predatory whale, vast bulk, long jaws.

  The others weren’t all in suspension pods yet, but they’d just have to go through the final motions on the other side. Even as the Harvest swooped in, he activated the Vulture’s gravitic drive and yanked them into unspace. And they fell away from the Jericho system into the deep abyss.

  21.

  Idris

  Or that was the plan.

  Something seared like a knife into Idris’s skull. Space around the Vulture God abruptly contained vast volumes more than it should, every axis of distance receding away from them. Including that vital step from here to there that would remove the ship from the real and place it within unspace. The salvage ship’s gravitic drives were clawing at the substance of the universe, running at full power as they went absolutely nowhere.

  An angry rainbow of warning lights spread across his board and all that power had to go somewhere: use it, lose it or it would tear the ship in two. He remembered how the Broken Harvest’s interceptor had been so careful not to shoot at the Oumaru. Possibly the hoods thought the relics were still hidden aboard that wreck, because apparently the Vulture God didn’t warrant the same kind of deference. Or maybe they had given the relics up for lost and were avenging the utmost heresy.

  Gravitic interdiction was theoretical tech. He knew Colonial scientists had a model around the end of the war but had got nowhere with it. He didn’t think the Parthenon had it either. Apparently the Hegemony did, though. Apparently even rogue Hegemony gangsters had it. War with the Hegemony had always been a possibility should the Colonies decide not to allow one of their worlds to secede to the alien empire. Fighting the force of the Hegemony gravity net, Idris had a really bad feeling about how that fight might go, because just maybe the Essiel’s non-confrontational manner didn’t stem from their not being able to put the boot in when they needed to. Havaer Mundy would doubtless have some interesting reports to file—if he escaped this mess.

  Right now, Idris felt space stretching to infinity on all sides, making the mere idea of travel in any direction laughable. Behind it, he sensed the mind of the Hegemony pilot, the Ogdru. It was like an arrowhead, a killer. There was no real sentience there, just an animal hunger—a predator whose environment was space, both real and otherwise. Unspace would hold no horrors for this creature; it didn’t have brain enough for existential dread. And the Essiel had given it access to ship systems so it could hold prey in its net as it stalked them.

  Yet the net wasn’t perfect. There was a gradient to it, as though the Vulture was caught in a bag full of water with a leak in one corner. Perhaps it simply wasn’t possible to isolate space perfectly. A maze, then.

  Idris closed his eyes and cut himself off from his senses, searching. The hunter was undulating towards him like some vast underwater thing. His imagination cast it with a thousand eyes, tentacles, toothy jaws—all the sea monsters that had ever troubled human dreams. It was a shadow beneath him, rising from the depths, opening out like the rose petal structure of its own vessel, seeking to engulf…

  And while his conscious mind shrank from the horrors he’d concocted, the rest of him had taken that gradient, analysed and followed it. He’d found the flaw in the trap and instinctively solved the proofs required to exploit it. Any human catching a ball must solve complex three-dimensional equations of space and velocity without conscious thought. And for Idris, this wasn’t much different.

  The Vulture God twisted, tangled in reality, halfway between everywhere and nowhere. It was both real and unreal all at once. Idris felt a terrible wrench in his mind, which resonated equally in the keening ring of the ship’s drives, and then they were gone. They’d skidded sideways out of reality and into the underlying mechanics of the universe.

  There was a moment when Idris wasn’t sure they’d survived it. Instead of the transition into the familiar nothingness of unspace, what greeted him was too bright, too unfocused.
The ship around him seemed to exist in five or six different slightly out-of-phase versions. And he thought: We’re lost, we’re coming apart. He felt they were suffering a loss of integrity, not physically but philosophically. Perhaps only his own waning belief was holding the ship to this side of existence.

  He faced this doubt by screaming at it, there in unspace where nobody would ever hear. Just a mad animal bellow of I am here! The ship shuddered around him, then came sharply back together in a way that owed nothing to material sensation. Finally the glare turned into the dead-screen radiance of unspace. He felt his heart slamming painfully against the cage of his ribs. His lungs burned as though he’d been breathing something other than air. His splitting headache was like an axe to the skull.

  Idris Telemmier sagged in his seat, weeping. He wished more than anything that he could let go, just let himself lose consciousness like any sane human being. Who even cared if they were all lost to unspace? Just a moment’s peace, a moment’s rest. But he was denied that release. It just wasn’t in him anymore. The Intermediary Program had taken that part of his mind out. He’d signed a waiver for it and everything. The Program had affected all of them differently, but this was why he was such a good Int. Even when he wanted to give in to the darkness, he couldn’t.

  He threw calculations together, hasty and slipshod, sending the Vulture out beyond the Throughways, off beyond everything—and who cared where? Just away for now. Away into the void where nobody would ever find them. There was always more void. It was the universe’s greatest resource and you could mine it forever and never run out.

  Twenty minutes and he drove them back into real space. He’d sunk even lower in his seat, pale and sweating, thinking: Why do I do this? Why would anybody do this? But what else could I do? Then he ordered the ship’s higher systems to reassemble themselves, and woke everyone up.

  *

  “You look like shit,” was Olli’s considered response.

  “Good.” Idris tried for a smile but barely felt his lips twitch, “Hate false advertising.”

  None of them looked particularly perky, he thought. Having to get yourself into suspension after hitting unspace would do that. Nobody seemed to have noticed the whole we-almost-ceased-to-exist thing either. That particular struggle must have only been apparent to someone with Int senses.

  “Seriously, though,” Kris pressed. “What the hell happened there?”

  “The Broken Harvest had countermeasures,” was all he said. No point spooking people more.

  “Unspace countermeasures?” Solace’s look confirmed she was aware of the theory, and plainly the Parthenon didn’t have the tech yet either.

  “Feel free to tell your bosses next time you check in.” It seemed the maverick actions of one Essiel hood could do more to prime the galaxy for war with the Hegemony than decades of regular contact.

  “Oh, I will.” And of all of them, Solace looked the least hit. Even Kit’s body language said he was suffering: with unsteady legs and many twitches of the mandibles. His screens broadcast jagged bands of static. Solace, though, looked as though she could get back in her armour and fight the Colonial navy at a moment’s notice.

  For Idris, that thought brought their whole political crisis roaring back. If they really did have mobile Originator relics, who the hell should end up with them? The crew all had their own separate loyalties. Unless the things weren’t genuine, of course.

  “What about these trinkets, then?” he asked the cabin at large. “Now we have Trine.”

  The Hiver’s ghostly face raised its eyebrows. “Well apparently you’ve got me,” they noted. “And I appreciate your collective arrival at Jericho was not some magical gift from the universe, responding to my distress at people trying to kill me. So: what service might this humble academic perform?”

  “We have some Originator relics—and we need you to look at them,” Olli told him flatly.

  Trine’s false face didn’t bat an eyelid. “Of course you have. Provenance?”

  “No idea. Just… found them.”

  As patronizing expressions went, Trine’s was no less effective for being insubstantial. “You are of course aware, my nomadic naifs, that just taking a souvenir robs the object of practical value? Its functionality ceases the moment it goes off-planet. And without an idea of its source, its scholarly value is similarly negligible…”

  “It’s in some sort of Hegemony suitcase thing,” Olli said, deadpan, watching. “In suspension. You know, that trick they do that nobody ever saw.”

  Trine’s face froze. Their voice, abruptly disconnected from its lips, said, “Excuse me. You have… what, exactly?”

  “Just show them,” Solace said. Olli scowled at her but went to retrieve the relics. They had all agreed this was the one thing they wouldn’t mention to Havaer Mundy, because there was not a hope in hell they’d be allowed to keep them if Mordant House got so much as a sniff at their existence.

  “We need you to analyse them,” Solace explained, as Trine bent over the floating rods and parts. They looked like so much dusty detritus, broken things the Originators would doubtless have binned had they still been around. Detritus that could save a world from destruction. “Analyse without disturbing them, obviously. Just let us know if they’re the real thing. And there’s something else.” She nipped into her quarters and came back with a corkscrewed piece of hull metal. “I cut this from the Oumaru. I know Architects have a signature, and that there’s a registry of each one still, from the war. This came from a ship taken by one. Recently. I want to know anything that can be known—is this a new Architect that isn’t up to speed with the war being over? Is it an old one that’s come back…? Can you do that too?”

  Trine’s face blinked mildly. “Well you put quite a price on my rescue, old friend, old soldier. But I put quite a price on my continued instantiation, so we can call it quits. Yes, I can perform both analyses. It’s a low-level plod, that kind of work, but it will take my units considerable time. I’ll set aside a portion of myself for rote functionality and we’ll get the results in due course.”

  Solace understood that. Part of the colony that was Trine would become a non-sentient cluster, performing the legwork. Then Trine would “know” the results when this cluster rejoined the whole. As Trine themself would be reduced while divided, it wasn’t something Hivers did on a whim.

  Kit sorted out some food then, printing a selection. They all sat together in the drone bay to eat as the Vulture God drifted, hidden in the cloak of deep space. A little food seemed to take the edge off the superspatial nausea Idris had been feeling, made him feel human again. The company helped, too. Olli and Solace were being civil to one another and nobody was mentioning the thunderhead of the future. Kit had some music on, some of that string-and-percussion-sounding stuff that was his favourite. Idris even found his foot tapping along to the shifting beat as he started to relax.

  Then he felt…

  He stood up, spilling his tray, unable to form words. He could feel the universe skewing sideways, the underlying layer of unspace shifting, even as real space stayed still. Everyone else was staring at him. Kris was at his elbow, calling for a medical kit. Possibly she thought he was having a stroke.

  “Beds, everyone!” he got out. “Suspension! Beds! Now!” For a moment he couldn’t get his body to work, then he was rushing towards the command capsule, sandals skidding as he ran.

  “Idris, what?” They weren’t taking him seriously, because another impossible thing was happening and he couldn’t articulate it properly. Even as he hurtled headlong into the pilot’s station the proximity alarm went off and another ship was right there. No, the other ship. The Broken Harvest, with its hungry predator’s mind at the helm. The Ogdru had tracked them, tracked him. They’d followed his trail through unspace.

  This time, wise to it, he could actually see them building the unspace net beneath real space, trying to box him in. He had no time.

  “Get to your beds!” he hollered into the
comms. “Whatever happens, get to your beds!” And he had the engines charging up, killing every safety and failsafe there was, to plunge the Vulture into the abyss before the trap could close on them.

  They fell away from the real, and he felt the Ogdru’s anger. No, not anger—it was enjoying this. The chase was something it lived for, buried deep in its species’ evolutionary history. One more reason never to meet an Ogdru. It would be after him as swiftly as the technology that encased it allowed. He imagined it straining at the leash that was the Harvest’s technical specs.

  Somewhere, the Vulture God would be in chaos, every member of the crew alone and plunged into the nightmare of unspace. They’d be stumbling for their couches, feeling the yawning hunger of the place just beyond each wall, behind every door, at every shoulder. He hoped they’d just focus, get themselves bedded down and in suspension. As if they were children—and pulling the covers over their heads meant the monster couldn’t get them.

  He had no covers. Whatever monster was out there could absolutely get him.

  He had dropped into unspace with no course, but it wasn’t the first time. He found another deep void point and let the ship fall towards it through a series of incremental calculations. He was bargaining with the devil to take them from here to there, shortcutting twenty light years in a matter of minutes. The headache was back and his stomach was trying to return everything he’d eaten, with a side order of acid reflux, but he fought it down. Nothing I’ve not felt before.

  But the Ogdru was breathing down his neck, if it even breathed. He could imagine the questing dart of its head as it sought his trail. In its mind it swam an endless ocean, navigating rip tides that translated into working the Broken Harvest’s gravitic drives. The complex maths that challenged Idris’s conscious mind was effortless instinct to this creature. He’d always thought he was at home in unspace, but he saw he was a clumsy intruder.

  They roared out of unspace together, and Idris jumped immediately—borrowing energy from the interstice between real and real. Then the Vulture was falling away again, and again, and again… making a series of short jumps from space to space, zigzagging back and forth within the cube of a single light year. In, out, back, forth. Each transition frayed Idris’s nerves a little more. His hands were shaking at the controls. This wasn’t how you did space travel. This was how you drove yourself mad. There were now too many maps of the universe, real and unreal, overlaying one another inside his mind. He heard the Ogdru. In his head it was like angry whalesong, a deep, long cry dripping with murder. Idris slung them into real space again.