There was a planet there, a star, a whole system. He had a sight of pale ice, of blue about the equator, browns and greens. He caught a buzz of electromagnetism that could have been natural or artificial. He had no time to analyse it because he had to drop again, hands weaving a new course at random, far away across the galaxy from this unknown sun and its unknown world. Maybe he could find it again, maybe not.
They skidded into unspace once more, spiralling away like a bird with a clipped wing. He was losing track of how many jumps he’d made. He was…
Lost.
His mind went completely blank. He was lost. He didn’t know where he was. And he always knew where he was. That was the thing about unspace. It was connected to points in real space. That was the essence of it. That was what people used it for.
They were falling through unspace and he had lost all connection to where they’d been or where they were going. The Ogdru was gone, outfoxed, howling somewhere because it didn’t know where its prey had gone. But its prey was just as clueless.
Idris clutched the board, trying to find… a beacon, a landmark. Except unspace had none. Unspace only had…
The Presence moved, within the ship. In all the panic he’d been almost oblivious to it, but now it had his full attention. It had been waiting patiently for him to pause. Now he felt it had coughed politely, just to show it was there. And, yes, he knew all the caveats about the Presence being a trick of the mind. Except Idris had no doubt whatsoever that there was something out there in unspace. Perhaps the sole real thing in all of that notional realm.
He fixed his attention on the board. Usually the Presence at least started off outside the ship. Usually it didn’t try to confront him—he was just aware it was there. Until the very dread of existing in the same space was enough to make him want to tear his own face off. Right now, though, it…
Was in the command capsule with him. He felt it precisely as he would have been aware of another person. Not the sound of breath, the scuff of sandals, but some subconscious certainty. Something is at my back, in this room. A shadow seemed to flicker at the corner of his vision and he stared straight ahead, at the board, through the board. He reached out into unspace in the hope of finding some way out into the real. But they had no origin point and no destination, and that meant they were going to be here forever.
He all but felt its breath on the back of his neck.
“You’re not real,” he told the board. “You’re just the universal response of a—a conscious mind to the peculiar parameters of a non-material space.” It took him three tries to get the words out without stammering.
“You know it’s all coming back, Idris.”
The slightest whimper escaped him.
“You know why you don’t want to admit it to yourself.”
A pleasant enough voice, gender-neutral, familiar.
“You’ve felt those big battalions on the move, deep within unspace. Like great old blocks of stone being shunted down there; like locomotive engines.” The owner of that voice had always been fond of old-Earth images. They’d had a whole library of salvaged ancient film: non-interactional pre-mediotype stuff. It was Lois T’Sanko, a classmate out of the first Intermediary Program. They’d gone out with him in the vanguard at Berlenhof, had Lois, and had vanished into unspace, never to be seen again.
“Not real, no one’s there…” It’s just a ghost. But what happens to people who die in unspace? What if the usual rules don’t apply? But then the Presence was leaning right over his shoulder. He screwed his eyes up to avoid seeing it, and its voice was Rollo’s now.
“Your problem, my child, is that if you admit the bastard Architects are back—then what was the point? What was the point of anything you did? All that war, just to buy a little breather? Hardly worth it, see right?”
Abstractly, he wondered if he was undergoing some kind of breakdown: brain death, stroke, some unspace-specific malady…
All around him, the featureless plain of nothing extended forever, a prospect too awful for the human mind to grasp. He’d failed all of them. Better if the Ogdru had caught him.
Except…
And a shadow was indeed passing through the depths of unspace. A dread shadow he thought he’d left behind decades ago, but that some part of him had always looked out for. It’s true then. The Oumaru was just the start. The Architects are back and we’re lost.
Except…
Something caught at his mind, a texture within the absence of everything, a scar. Impossible, obviously, because unspace didn’t really exist. And no matter what you did, you couldn’t mark it. You couldn’t create any persistent landmarks here, in the absence of everything. But it was there.
“Intermediary Telemmier.” The voice was deep, human-sounding but not human. The voice of the Harbinger, Ash, who had first warned humanity of the Architect threat. And it wasn’t dead, insofar as Idris knew. “You should be more at home here,” Ash told him. “Don’t buckle now.”
“What do you know about it?” Idris demanded through clenched teeth.
“You think I don’t know about this?” Ash could always do any kind of human tone it wanted. Right now it was bantering, punchy. “You think I got to Earth by walking? What, you’re going to just let your crew die here? Come on, Telemmier. Pull yourself together.”
“Screw you.” But that scar, that scar. It was like an asteroid impact, the shock of its landing written into the deep crystalline structure of the rock. Something cataclysmic had happened to create that scar. Something of appalling scale. It wasn’t the only such mark in all the universe but there were few, very few. And he knew it. He’d seen this one created.
*
The Presence was looming behind him and to both sides, far too close. And now it was shorn of personality again, no T’Sanko, no Rollo, no Ash. Just that incredible hunger, that distant curiosity. What is this human mind and how can I break it? Idris wasn’t breathing, wasn’t even able to blink as he fed the computations in. Gave the ship a course, a direction, a vector back to reality.
“You’re not real,” he whispered to the universe.
It laid a hand on his shoulder and he screamed and passed out.
*
Kris
Kris jerked awake to the echo of alarms, sound and vibration from another room, a catastrophe happening to someone else.
She was in her suspension pod, and she had been a spacer long enough to recognize the shuddering aftershock of a sudden wake-up, without the cushioning chemical cocktail that usually transitioned her to wakefulness.
“Hello?” she called, but comms had nothing but ghosting static for her, and the lid of her pod wasn’t opening. She rapped on it hopefully, in case Solace or Olli were just on the other side. But a creeping dread had been stealing up on her. Something was terribly wrong.
She hit the emergency release and the pod popped open, retracting its medical paraphernalia so that she could sit up. The inside of the suspension bay was empty. Olli had bedded down in her bubble in the drone bay. Kit had his own pod in his quarters. Her only neighbour was Solace. And the Partheni was…
Not there.
“Hello, Kris to anyone, what’s shaking?” she asked to shipwide comms. Maybe Solace had just woken up already. Maybe everyone was waiting for her. Somewhere. Utterly silent and not responding to her calls. Then she knew.
We’re still in unspace.
“Idris?” she called to comms. “Idris, what’s going on?” But that was wasted effort because they were in unspace. Meaning no Idris, no Solace, no any of them. Just her and the vast chasming universe.
Something’s gone wrong. Some failsafe had tripped and the ship must have known to wake her. Probably it had woken everyone… But that didn’t help, because there was no “everyone” in unspace. Just Keristina Soolin Almier, who didn’t know how to fix spaceships.
Get to command. She stumbled out of the suspension bay, feeling the dimensions of the ship around her all subtly wrong—too big, too small, rece
ding off into unexpected, nameless directions. And empty, so very empty.
Not entirely empty.
Kris knew this was how it went, but knowing didn’t help. Her shoulders itched, sensing that thing somewhere on the ship, somewhere close… intolerable. Human myth was full of creatures that were anathema to the sane mind. Look upon them and you’d die, meet their gaze and be turned to stone. Had some ancient sage somehow touched unspace, in an age before humans had ever climbed up out of the gravity well? Because that was the Presence in a nutshell.
As Kris crept through the vacant chambers of the Vulture God she felt it closing on her, matching her step for step. But its paces were longer, so it grew fractionally closer every time she moved. It was every shame, nightmare and rejection she’d ever had. It was all these things given teeth and claws, weaponized to be her ultimate nemesis. She slipped her knife from her sleeve, thinking, Well I have something for you too, nemesis.
Then she was through into Command, seeing the captain’s chair, the pilot’s board. She tried diagnostics, but the ship systems were all stripped down to the minimum. It couldn’t tell her what was wrong. It didn’t seem to know why it had woken her. According to the ship, everything was absolutely fine. Peachy even. Why was she asking?
Everything was not fine. Kris had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. She needed to…
Something scraped, a long rasping sound, outside the command capsule.
She gripped the back of the captain’s chair, almost losing hold of her knife. I couldn’t have heard that. There were no other physical presences aboard. Nothing long and disjointed, dragging along the wall outside Command. She stared at the minimal ship display, seeing but not processing. It had moved, it was right outside. Kris could sense it reaching, fumbling its way along like a blind man. There was one precise moment when its search paused, and she knew it had become aware of her.
No, no, come on, there must be something here. What’s going on? She called up all the information the ship could give her. Why am I awake? There were no mechanical errors, nothing was flagged, except… she was awake because an order had been sent to wake her. Emergency codes, overriding the failsafes that would normally keep her under.
Idris…? But what if it hadn’t been Idris? What if Idris was blithely doing his thing, and instead something else had woken her? Sprung her into this vacant, insubstantial vessel so it could hunt her down?
And it was there, in Command with her, right behind her. The Inimical, the thing she couldn’t ever see. The horror of it flooded her, fingers digging into the back of the captain’s chair like claws.
Kris lifted her knife, catching a glimpse of her reflection in its gleaming blade. She looked away hurriedly, in case she saw something over her own shoulder. The knife, yes. The knife—that would be no use whatsoever against the other, but she could still use it. She could sever the ties binding her to this place. She could rob the Presence of its prey.
It loomed closer: worse than pain, worse than death, the incarnation of All Bad Things. She brought up the knife.
The ship fell from unspace with a sudden wrench. There was no physical shock but Kris stumbled anyway. She found herself a metre from where she’d thought she was, with Solace’s elbow in her face. In that moment of reflexive surprise, she almost cut her own throat. She locked eyes with the Partheni over the poised edge of her knife and allowed Solace to take her hand and gently push it away.
“What…?”
“Here, attend!” Kit was crouching on the pilot’s board. There was a peculiar yellowish foam about his small limbs that Kris had never seen from a Hanni before, and his six feet were rattling back and forth erratically. He had brought them out of unspace, she realized, done it manually using Idris’s console.
“Sound off,” Solace snapped into the comms. “Olian? Trine?”
Kris pulled herself together, checking the readouts. “Both still under. The general wake-up order only went to the suspension beds. Olli’s in the drone bay and Trine just put themselves under standing up. Idris, why’d you wake us?” Kris blinked. “Idris?”
The pilot was slumped in his seat, staring, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. For a terrible moment she thought he was dead. Solace tried to take his pulse the old-fashioned way, but Kris grabbed Command’s ancient medalyser from its niche by the door. It established he was still with them, but blood pressure, respiration and brain activity were all flagged as problems. Kris felt panic clutch inside her. Idris was out, and he was never out. He didn’t even sleep. But right now, there was nobody behind those staring eyes and his brain was burning up.
“We need help, medical help. Unless you…?” She looked hopefully at Solace but the Partheni just shook her head.
“This goes beyond battlefield trauma. Where even are we?” Her words created a silence that rippled out as Kris just stared at her. Because if they’d exited unspace in the deep void then that was it. Unless they could get Idris back, none of them could get the ship anywhere. Nobody would ever find them again, a grain of sand in the immensity of an empty universe.
“Kittering, when you brought us out…?” Solace started slowly.
“Zero navigational data was available,” the Hanni’s translator confirmed. Figures flashed up on its arm-screens. According to the computers they’d been going from nowhere to nowhere with a pilot catatonic at the helm. Jumping them out into the real was the only thing Kit could have done.
Kris thought about the doomed freighter Gamin, which had ended up in the deep void and died there in desperation and madness. Unless they could get Idris awake and able to fly, then…
“Wait,” Solace said. “We have transmissions. I’m getting… news mediotypes, entertainment? A rewatch of last cycle’s Heirs of Space… what?”
“Trash,” said Kris, who secretly enjoyed it. “Terrible, terrible slush.” She had never been happier to stumble upon bad media in her whole life. “Origin?”
“We’re…” Solace tapped at the screens. “Huh.”
“What?” Kris craned past her to see what their rebooting computer was showing them, as it reformed its map of local space. “Holy equity… did Idris do this?”
They were still a long way out, far further than any normal exit from unspace would have deposited them. But there was an inhabited world out there. A familiar one, well travelled and populous. Berlenhof, heart of the Colonial Sphere.
PART 5
BERLENHOF
22.
Idris
In the seventy-eighth year of the war, an Architect came to Berlenhof.
Idris had put out in the Pythoness. All the Intermediaries at Berlenhof had been deployed, sent out in separate ships on an eggs and baskets basis. All of them, bending their minds towards the Architect. Motes in the eye of its vast crystalline grandeur.
A bulk like a moon, its near half a crazed mountain range of gleaming crystal spines a hundred kilometres long. The light of Berlenhof’s star touched them and gave back rainbows, cut apart into its constituent frequencies. The dark side of the Architect was a faceted hemisphere, semi-translucent, monstrous suggestions of form all the way down. A machine or a rogue world or a force of nature; no mere human could fathom it.
Saint Xavienne had seen further than most, though. There was a singular mind at the heart of all that crystal, a consciousness as vast as oceans. The Architect possessed a will and the ability to inflict that will upon the universe. And it was one of many. Only one had come to Berlenhof—only one had ever been seen at once—but human science had already discovered distinct flourishes attributable to individuals, at the macro and molecular level. They were not a lone threat, but a crusade.
The Pythoness arrowed in under the direction of its Partheni crew, dodging back and forth. A little ship trying to get Idris close, without that awful invisible hand turning them into artfully refigured scrap. And somewhere out there, Idris’s classmates had been dying.
The Partheni crew, Solace’s sisters, handled
the little launch adroitly. They were following patterns—hard-learned from ships that had evaded Architect notice for just long enough to get away. Except this time they weren’t trying to get away.
And Idris was young and a fool and thought he wanted to fight.
“Elsinore reports contact…” an officer was translating Partheni chatter for him. “Ching Shi reports contact. Ocasio in contact.” She was listing the other Int-carriers that had engaged the Architect.
“Whenever you’re ready, Menheer Telemmier,” said the Pythoness’s captain in heavily accented Colvul, as she flicked his shoulder. Idris realized he’d been holding back. He opened his senses, his expensive, ruinous new senses, and found the Architect.
He had expected to feel a point, a single seat of reason deep in the crystal depths of the behemoth. Instead it was all mind, the entire multi-million-tonne edifice. Or maybe its mind and its substance had no meaningful division. He met a will like God, as amenable to his fighting it as the physical vastness would be if the Pythoness had turned its little weapons against those jagged mountains of crystal. He was peripherally aware of the efforts of his fellows. They were grappling for purchase against the smooth wall of its intellect, beating their mental fists against it. Trying for that moment Saint Xavienne had achieved—when she had touched the mind of God and stopped leviathan in its tracks.
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