Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And for one brief moment, he had it. He’d made himself not vaster, but smaller. He’d shrunk his image of himself until he could somehow slide himself into that mind. As subtle as a card slipped beneath a door, inviting himself, making the entity “Idris Telemmier of the Intermediary Program” nothing but data. He was a virus bearing a message: We’re here. Notice us!

  There was a shout in impenetrable Parsef, followed for his benefit by, “It’s making a two-degree deflection, Menheer!” Words came to his ears from somewhere far off. The Architect had changed its course slightly. He had found some lever within it. Perhaps it was just a machine? Perhaps he could hack it with his mind, find the steering systems, find the self-destruct…

  More rapid discussion, and then the translation came, urgent and hurried. “Registering disruption across its surface. Is that damage?” Partheni were rock calm, everyone knew. They bred them without emotions, the perfect soldier-angels. Except there was excitement in those words, elation even. They were having an effect. They were wrestling with Lucifer, about to cast him down.

  And yet, even once he was in, Idris was aware he had not struck the target. There was indeed a self there, the thing that Xavienne had brushed, but he could wander the maze of its mind for a thousand years and never find it. Even getting as far as any human ever had, they had failed. They had pricked it, discomfited it, but it was no more than a momentary jab, a thorn to the hide of an elephant.

  He felt the shudder build up within it, and he was trying to warn them, opening his mouth wide to vomit the words out, still lost somewhere between I and It… when the Architect took space between its sightless hands and wrung it.

  He came to himself in the aftermath. All he heard were groans and whimpers, because the Partheni did not scream when someone else’s orders needed to be heard. Survivors on all sides were trying to save those caught in the gravitational focus of the Architect’s brute swipe. They were loosing their weapons, accelerators and gravity cannon. The second in command was barking orders in Parsef as tears ran down her face. Half the crew were dead, one side of the bridge a sparking, mangled ruin. And as they hauled the pilot’s body from her seat, Idris dropped in to take her place. He could sense the angry grasping of the Architect as it swatted and crushed in unconscious irritation at these gnats that had troubled it.

  And he got them out. Without even considering the impossibility of it, he jumped them away from the crushing mass-shadow of the Architect. Jumped in-system, the thing you never did.

  He limped them back to the Heaven’s Sword. He was vaguely amazed that not one of the warrior-elite had objected to him commandeering their ship. They’d just taken his participation in their stride, accepting his help without a word.

  There had been no peace on the Heaven’s Sword either. It’d been Solace marching him to the bridge the moment he was on board. All of Berlenhof’s defenders were rushing forwards to meet the Architect. Somewhere out there the battered Naeromathi Locust Ark was gouting out fleets of constructor drones and factory ships converted into one-shot massdrivers. Hiver orbital frames vented clouds of little killers into space like swarming bees. Refitted Castigar freighters and crescent-shaped Hanni merchant venturers were about to live out their final moments as unlikely warships, their alien crews bound to this desperate purpose by fellow feeling or quid pro quo. A hundred separate human vessels were being flung out in a mad suicide bid to buy the evacuation another few minutes.

  Then there was the pride of the Parthenon—the big battalions, the warrior angels come to save humanity from extinction. Heaven’s Sword, Ascending Mother, Cataphracta: the most advanced warships ever made by human hands. They’d been fitted with outsize gravitic drives to shield them against the Architects and power the colossal new mass looms meant to do to the enemy what the enemy did to the rest of the universe.

  “Menheer Intermediary!” one of the officers called to him the moment he arrived on the bridge. “Front and centre, if you please—snap snap!” Her Colvul was sharply accented and—

  “Compret, mother.” Solace was there at his elbow, moving him to a quartet of screens at the bridge’s heart. Each was screeding information about the Architect or modelling relative positions in space.

  “What am I supposed—?” he managed to say.

  “Whatever you can do,” that same officer told him sternly, “do. Once we see what that breeds, we can work with it.” She sounded as though she didn’t believe in him, which he’d have sympathized with an hour before. Now he had met the enemy. Now he knew he actually could do.

  Solace, that younger Solace without the Executor to her name, gave him a tight smile.

  The bridge was busy with fast-flowing Parsef, reports and orders, efficient and regulated as percussion. The vanguard of the planetary defence had already reached the Architect, and he began to see its hand extend across them, points of animation with nametags winking out, too many for anyone to remark. Colonial ramshackles and swift Hanni raiders coursing into attack runs they were never able to complete. A long, elegant Castigar ranger taken and twisted as a child might a stick. Hiver spaceframes wrecked, their colonies spilling out into space, all ruined parts and extinguished composite minds. Then the Cataphracta had focused its mass loom. It bent the force of its gravitic drives to clench ten square kilometres of substance within the very heart of the Architect.

  And nothing. The thing had seemingly shrugged the weapon away. But then the scanner teams were calling out fractures within its substance. The Heaven’s Sword targeting computers were throwing up best options. Something roared through the warship’s hull like angelic voices declaiming the end of the universe. Idris realized it was their own loom speaking, unleashing a wave of stresses that sent their every bulkhead and strut complaining in eerily beautiful harmony.

  And he had it. He wasn’t even the first Int to the breach, but he had it. He remembered how he had reached into the Architect’s mind before. He folded himself small, like a letter, like a needle, like an idea, and pried his mind into that incandescent mass of angry thought. And it was angry. It did not know him, did not know any of them, yet it perceived an environment that was resisting it. Making its life difficult, impeding the creation of its apocalyptic art form. Idris screamed, entering the outer reaches of the Architect’s consciousness as though he was entering the photosphere of a star.

  He felt it stumble, just for a moment. No more than a man slipping on ice for a second before catching himself, but in a knife-fight that could be fatal. The Sword’s mass loom spoke again and again, counting twenty seconds of recharge between each attack. The whole substance of the ship was shrieking with the strain. Around him, half the Partheni had their hands over their ears.

  Between blasts he heard a tightly controlled shout. He caught the ship name Cataphracta and knew one of the Sword’s sisters had been ripped apart. On the screens he saw the vast Locust Ark just unravel. It was shredded across fifty kilometres of space: into wire, into artfully warped metal peelings, into frozen smears of organic material.

  Idris was weeping now and his head felt as though it would explode. Elsewhere, one of his classmates just died, simply dropped dead; heart, brain and organs all failing from the biofeedback of touching minds with a god. But Idris held on. He held on and he fought for purchase, even as the Architect’s consciousness cast around for him, unable to quite conceive of anything so tiny, a giant hunting a mouse.

  Each explosive detonation of the mass looms lit the way for the next. The Partheni computers bounced EM pulses off the Architect’s jagged surfaces, reading the stress patterns and damage and spitting out fresh targeting solutions. The most powerful weapons ever made by human hands, being wielded with the precision of scalpels.

  Then the Architect reached for them. Idris felt it, and tried to oppose it, to deflect that space-wringing attention that would make them no more than a filigreed monument to their own stupidity. The Heaven’s Sword shuddered and groaned, the sound blending into the bitter scream of the next m
ass loom detonation. Damage reports poured in from every part of the ship. But Idris was transfixed. He didn’t care. His own mortality was so small a thing compared to what he was seeing.

  The Ascending Mother was still loosing attacks, upping the ship’s fire rate despite the damage they were inflicting on their own hull. The Colonials, the Hanni, the Hivers, every vessel out there was unleashing whatever weapons they had, from accelerated shot to towed asteroids. All were being guided by the targeting telemetry the Partheni were broadcasting. And Idris, with his privileged front-row seat on the inside, was watching the Architect come apart.

  It was still at least partly within unspace, he realized. It was even bigger than the physical manifestation that intruded into the real. But the damage done to it was cascading backwards, rippling through its entire substance. The fractures the Partheni spotters were reporting were the least of it. The mass loom attacks had been driving a chisel deeper and deeper into the creature, and now it was shearing into pieces.

  Idris felt the Architect know death and trembled in anticipation of the rage and grief that must surely attend that thought. Yet it was not so. What it felt was mostly nothing a human mind could comprehend. But when others demanded he put a word to it later, he would say acceptance.

  The Architect died. And, dying, its final energies lashed out across space, destroying a score of vessels and taking the Sword from merely “crippled” to breaking apart. And this was where Solace would bundle him into the escape pod, because the Partheni took their duty seriously. This was where he would find himself in a medical camp on Berlenhof after the last period of non-consciousness he would know for fifty years. Except for Idris now—lost in the mad flight of the Vulture God—it didn’t happen. No Solace, no escape pod, just the eternally drawn-out moment of the Heaven’s Sword dying and the Architect dying with it, in an event so traumatic to the universe that it left a permanent scar on the substance of unspace, a persistent landmark in an infinitely transient medium. A beacon that he had found from across the galaxy, the one landmark in the featureless void.

  23.

  Havaer

  “Questions have already been raised about how you handled this one,” Chief Laery said. She’d called Havaer in during her exercises. This was something she only did when she was displeased, because of how discomfiting it was. Her a-grav chair was tilted back, and a mechanical frame had one of her arms in three well-padded grips. Currents shocked the atrophied muscles of the limb and a trio of clear tubes fed urine-coloured liquids into her: high-protein muscle-builders to fight a battle her body had already given up on. The young Laery had spent a long time at deep-space listening posts without any grav tech. She’d subsisted on even less than the usual poor Colonial nutrition of the day. A combination of factors had resulted in most of her muscle mass just giving up and going away. A return to more wholesome living habits hadn’t done much to reverse the loss, and every handful of days she underwent treatments like this to try and stave off the end. Half-naked, she looked like someone who’d died of starvation a week before.

  “I had to make a judgement call,” he told her. “I needed to keep our witnesses out of the hands of criminal elements.” He had been frank and exhaustive in his earlier report about the Broken Harvest and its rogue Essiel ruler. Just as well he had, or he’d be in a hole twice as deep around now.

  “You should have brought the crew aboard the Hammer and abandoned their ship,” Laery told him.

  “I didn’t think I had the time. And I didn’t need a shooting war with some spacers and a one-woman Parthenon army just as this Essiel reached us, to be honest.”

  “At the very least you should have held the Intermediary.”

  “I had no grounds.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You have standing special powers, Havaer.” A hiss escaped her as the medical frame tracked round to her other arm. “Threats to the Colonies. Especially from the damn Parthenon.”

  “I made a judgement call.”

  “A bad one.”

  He nodded. “The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”

  “Make sure you say that at your inquest,” Laery snapped. Then, after a deliberate pause, “If there is one. It’s under deliberation.”

  “What’s my current status?”

  “Active until told otherwise. We’re too short-handed to put you on ice. On a separate subject, your information regarding this Broken Harvest organization has potential.”

  “How is that a separate subject?” he asked mildly.

  “Since it makes us look good. Whereas your ‘judgement call’ looks a hell of a lot like a mistake. In retrospect. Because your damn spacers aren’t turning up at our doorstep any time soon, of that you can be sure.”

  “We’ve not reached ‘retrospect’ on that one yet,” he said, still measured.

  “You want to wait until the first Partheni warship stutter-jumps here? Hopping past Berlenhof’s orbital defences with a brand new Int Angel at the helm?”

  Glib answers fell away. “Does it look that bad?” he asked.

  Chief Laery regarded him from beneath hooded lids with reptile animosity. “Two Partheni warships are in orbit over Berlenhof right now. That look bad enough to you, Havaer? You can probably just about see the Thunderchild from my window.”

  “Sabre-rattling, surely…”

  “When they send two big new battleships to cast their shadows over Hugh’s planetside offices, it’s pretty much swords drawn.” She waved her unoccupied hand idly. “Of course, they did bring some actual diplomats. So currently ours and theirs are working their way through lists of all the usual rubbish: trade tariffs, joint action against rogue elements and the like. But you can bet the Partheni keep pressing for the Liaison Board’s raw data. Now the Architects might be back, they’re really upping their game. ‘Oh, we’d love to come save your worlds again, but we seem to be lacking a key anti-Architect weapon.’ They avoid mentioning that the Ints will be our only advantage over them, if—or should I say when—we finally engage in a shooting war.”

  Havaer took a deep breath. “Permission to speak my mind on this one, Chief.”

  “Oh, do enlighten me,” she said acidly.

  “If it comes to that, the Parthenon can put Castigar navigators on their ships. They could even go to the Hegemony for the creature-things that they use. Our Ints are good unspace pilots, maybe even the best, but they’re not unique.”

  “If it comes to that,” Chief Laery replied, “the Castigar know we’ll pay more for them to do nothing than the Partheni can pay for them to put their Savants in harm’s way. Parthenon’s gun rich but trade poor. Give us any field of combat other than actual combat and we can beat the Partheni hands down. And we all just have to hope the Hegemony won’t get involved. Which is another damn headache right about now.” She clicked her fingers, the sound like a dry twig snapping, dismissing the topic. “This one, face like a pederastic uncle, you spoke to him?”

  She called up an image of a genial-looking white-bearded man, the high collar of a Hegemonic cult robe arching over his bald head.

  “Hierograve, on Huei-Cavor. He’d been trying to get hold of the Oumaru when Broken Harvest stole it,” Havaer recalled. “Sathiel, isn’t it?”

  Laery nodded, birdlike. “His crowd is just one more breed of parasite we’ve picked up in-system. For some reason, a whole sect of them is descending on us claiming to be delegates from the Hegemony. May or may not be true, because nobody ever got a straight answer out of the Essiel. This jolly old grandpa has quite the record, you know?” The names of half a dozen systems appeared by Sathiel’s image, ending with Huei-Cavor. “I mean, the Hegemony doesn’t have hatchet-men, but if it did… This Sathiel’s game-plan is to turn up and take over the local cult chapter or whatever. Then he starts agitating, spreading rumours, schmoozing people in power, talking up the benefits of cosying with the clams. You know he’s flipped three whole systems? And as for ones he didn’t, let’s just
say Mordant kept a finger on the scales. To make sure people were exercising their free choice as freely as they were supposed to.”

  Havaer nodded without comment. He remembered his fake interview with the hierograve. The man had seemed genuine, but that came with the job, so no great surprises there. Sathiel had wanted to use the Oumaru to highlight the benefits of Hegemony protection. But again, that was to be expected. “We know he’s not in cahoots with the Harvest mob. Or he wasn’t back then.”

  “He wasn’t back then,” Laery echoed him. “What accommodations they might have reached since, we don’t know. At least nobody has the damn Oumaru now. That was the one thing your pet spacers did right. But it won’t stay lost forever.” She sighed. “If by some miracle we do find the Vulture again, you can goddamn convince them to tell you the location of that wreck. Then we can blow it to pieces and forget it ever existed.” She met his gaze challengingly. “What?”

  “You don’t think, if the Architects are really…”

  “The Architects are far away, ruining the day of some other civilization. You think we wouldn’t know by now, if they were actually back? You think they’d scrap one luckless freighter and then go on sick leave for a month? Right now we have problems with the Parthenon and the Hegemony. They’re both using the Oumaru: to get Ints; to convert more worlds. And so, if we never hear of that wreck again, maybe both of those problems might just fade away.” There was a grim finality in her voice. Hearing it, Havaer wondered what would happen if the Vulture God did reappear. It would be a shame if their galaxy-hopping ways came to an abrupt and secret end. But such thoughts were above his pay grade and it wasn’t as though there was anything he could do. He wasn’t likely to get another chance at making a “judgement call” concerning them, after all.

  *

  Solace

  Trine’s automated splinter units were still working, and had been throughout their breakneck chase through unspace. So it was that, after an hour loitering at the edge of the Berlenhof system, Trine declared they were ready to reveal some preliminary findings.