Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The ship shuddered around her and for a moment there was no internal gravity at all. Then it snapped back, wrenching her arm—and all the other bruised and abused parts of her. She heard Olli shout over the comms.

  “We’re away!” Then, on its heels came, “Fuck me, everyone’s away. What’s the hurry?”

  “What now?” Solace forced herself not to sit down and pass out. Instead, she hustled over to the nearby drone bay, where she could raise some working screens. She found herself looking at the petalled mass of the Broken Harvest—although from their perspective it was upside down. The Vulture’s instruments had caught the Corday as it sped off, and Solace hoped her sisters had all made it out alive with Kris and Trine. Another ship was underway further out—a blocky Colonial wedge a little bigger than the Vulture God. She enlarged the image to see it was covered in arcane-looking patterns in gold, red and purple—marking it as Sathiel and company making good their escape. Then she saw what Olli must have spotted, which had triggered the exodus. The Harvest’s gravitic drives were powering up, reaching for unspace.

  “We’re too close!” she said, as Olli did her best to haul them as far from the bigger ship as possible.

  “Good luck to you, you bastard,” came Olli’s voice. “We are going to have trouble with the ol’ Unspeakable again, you realize that?”

  “Yes,” Solace agreed tightly.

  “But still…” Olli went on, then the Vulture’s instruments froze briefly, refusing to process the space around them in any meaningful way. Perhaps they were throwing up major philosophical objections to the universe bending out of shape. Then they unlocked, reporting that the Broken Harvest had vanished itself away.

  In its wake, the Corday was hailing them. Before Olli could create a major diplomatic incident and demand Kris’s return, Solace patched into their comms from the drone bay.

  “Corday to Vulture and Myrmidon Executor Solace,” came the crisp voice of one of her sisters. “Myrmidon Executor Grace speaking. We are for the Heaven’s Sword. Follow us in. Welcome home, sister.”

  On another channel, one that excluded the Corday, Olli’s voice came in calm and flat. “It’s like that, is it? And I bet you’re already in your shiny tin suit with that hole-maker in your hands, right?”

  “That would have been a good idea.” The thought of getting into her armour seemed so logistically exhausting that Solace found herself swaying. “What’s your plan, Olli? Idris needs help. Kit needs help. I know absolutely nothing about Hanni med. My people can help. And do you really trust Hugh anymore?”

  She’d expected a barrage of expletives, but Olli was quiet, thinking, the channel still open between them. “I can see you now,” she said at last. “You really haven’t tooled up, have you, you dumbass? I could just open the hatch on you. You’re practically standing on it.”

  “I appreciate that I’m not making the best tactical decisions at the moment,” Solace said.

  Olli made a disgusted sound. “I wouldn’t just abandon Kris to your lot, would I?” But there was less venom in her tone than her words might have suggested. “Tell the executioner we’re on our way to the scaffold.”

  Solace wanted to correct her: Executor, one who does. It’s not about killing people. But “does” implied a wide remit, and killing was in there somewhere. Olli wasn’t going to let her off that hook so easily.

  “Vulture to Corday,” she told the other ship. “Lead on, sister. We’ll follow.”

  26.

  Idris

  In Idris’s memories, the Architect died. And in dying, its final energies lashed out across space. The gravitic convulsion whiplashed through the Heaven’s Sword, shattering bulkheads, opening compartments to space, rupturing its gravitic drive. The colossal mass loom—which had done so much damage—was caught as it prepared for another salvo, the frustrated energy it had harvested from unspace set catastrophically free. Then the front third of the ship was smeared into a spray of fragments, each worked into a filigreed caltrop as unique as a snowflake. Abruptly, the ship was dying, dealt a single all-consuming blow its shielding had been unable to deflect.

  Idris’s mind was ripped from the dying Architect and he had a moment of utter revelation. Infinite clarity where the universe extended away from him, forever, and he was so insignificant that he lost himself in the midst of it.

  Even as Solace pulled him away he could still feel the Architect’s mind, the last dregs of it, surrendering to oblivion. Did it call out to its fellows? He felt that it did. Not to whip up vengeance or summon help, but just so that they knew. So that the gargantuan world-breaker did not die alone. He lost consciousness too when it finally let go, the spark of it winking out like the extinction of a star.

  When he woke, Solace was holding his hand still. Or, in retrospect, again. Because several days had passed, and presumably she hadn’t just been glued to his side like someone’s pining pet. But she’d stayed there, this random Partheni soldier who’d been told to look after him. All around them the beds had stretched away, a camp of the injured and dying too big to station in orbit. The shockwave of the Architect’s death had crippled half the fleet and ruptured a dozen orbitals too. The sheer fallout of their triumph had bred more wounded than the actual battle. Architects didn’t normally leave many injured in their wake.

  “Hi,” he croaked and squeezed her hand. She must have been half dozing herself because she jumped and yelped. Then she stared down at him, a slow smile spreading across her face.

  They were in the camp together for two weeks. Solace was fully recovered long before he was, but there just weren’t enough ships to take the wounded away. Of the pride of the Partheni, only the Ascending Mother still existed as anything other than scrap, and she was already overcapacity with survivors from the Cataphracta and Heaven’s Sword. More vessels were on the way but, until they arrived, everyone had more leisure time than the war had ever allowed. Idris even found himself forgotten by the Intervention Program for a blessed while. So he became an honorary Partheni, playing Landstep and Go and Two Worlds with Solace and her sisters. He lay beside her at night, tucked into the warmth of her body, just two veterans given a moment of peace.

  *

  He opened his eyes. Here. Now. She was still holding his hand. She hadn’t really aged since Berlenhof, but then neither had he, for other reasons. The only change was the infirmary, which was a big open room in Partheni blue and grey. For a nasty moment, he thought this was still his memories bleeding into one another, because the insignia on the wall was the familiar winged blade of the Heaven’s Sword, and that ship had very definitely not survived the Battle of Berlenhof. Except now he recalled they’d just reused the name, honouring the fallen by giving it to the next ship of the same class to come out of the yards. Heaven’s Sword II, then. And, for some reason, he was aboard it.

  “Hi,” he croaked, and just like before Solace jumped. She looked about as beaten-up as last time, too. Badly bruised and with a thin medical sleeve over one arm.

  “Medic!” she snapped. “He’s awake!” She kept hold of his hand, though. And again he felt it was as much for her benefit as his.

  The doctor who hurried over wasn’t Partheni—a lean, hawk-faced man in white, his hollow cheeks scruffy with salt-and-pepper stubble. His clothes looked Hugh-issue, something governmental.

  “Menheer Telemmier,” he said, his voice severe. “Your readings are still slightly outside what I’m comfortable with. I’d advise you not to think too hard about anything—but it’s probably unavoidable, under the circumstances.” He seemed somehow distant, dismissive, as though dealing with a commodity not a person.

  Idris was about to thank him when the clothes and manner threw up an unpleasant suggestion. “You’re Liaison Board, aren’t you?” The body that had taken over from the old Intervention Program when Hugh decided it needed a corps of Peacetime Ints and didn’t much care about how it got them.

  The doctor stared at him with faint outrage. Maybe he wasn’t used to being add
ressed by experimental subjects. Solace squeezed his hand again.

  “We had to reach out to them,” she said flatly. “Who else knew Int neurology?”

  “So… what does it mean?” Idris asked weakly, still eyeballing the doctor. “We’re on one of your ships but there’s… a Hugh medical team or…?”

  “Not just a medical team,” she confirmed. “Because you and the others are here, and Trine and the regalia, that means everyone’s here. Hugh diplomats, Hegemonic cult, everyone.”

  “Aklu?”

  “Well, not quite everyone, then,” she admitted. “Thankfully. Look, people are going to want to talk to you. If you’re up to it?”

  “I want to talk to people. Let’s have all the people. Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Idris—”

  “Thank you.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “For sticking with me. Then and now.” He closed his eyes. “We’re over Berlenhof, right? That was where I was trying to get us. That was the only landmark… Because of what we did back in the war. Well good. Let’s get it done. Let’s open the diplomatic bag.”

  Solace went to pass that on. But of course, the united diplomatic staffs of the major galactic powers weren’t going to assemble at Idris’s personal request. So that left him in the infirmary, sampling the Partheni a-grav, which always seemed a hair stronger than Colonial standard.

  “The others will want to know you’re awake,” Solace said when she came back. “Kris has been frantic.”

  “What happened, exactly?” He was asking Solace, but the Liaison Board doctor was suddenly at his elbow, running a rod-like instrument over his head like a magician.

  “You suffered a recursive loop from too many subordinate layers,” the man told him. “How many sequential jumps, precisely?”

  “Lost count. I was being hunted.” Idris glared mulishly at the man.

  “The sensation of a predatory presence is entirely the human mind’s reaction to the peculiar properties of unspace,” the doctor told him. “The modern literature is fully in agreement.”

  “That’s what you tell your convicts is it? Before you screw with their brains?” Idris asked, smiling pleasantly. “I was being hunted by an Ogdru navigator. They can track a mind through unspace. Who knew?”

  “That is entirely impossible,” the doctor told him, spreading condescension like a rich man with butter.

  “You’d better hope we don’t really end up in a war, because we’re so screwed with people like you in charge.” Idris was maintaining his smile, though he felt it was tearing at the edges.

  That saw off the doctor, but not Solace’s judging expression.

  “They did bring you back,” she pointed out. “I don’t even know what a recursive subordinate loop layer is.”

  “Neither do I,” Idris admitted. “I think they imported all the long words after my time. He blinked at her. “You haven’t been sitting there all this time, have you?”

  “Sometimes it was Olli. Sometimes Kris. Kit’s been in a tank most of this time, but he was on his feet today. Came round to look at you. So there’s a Hanni mercenary-surgeon on board too, by the way. On the Parthenon’s tab, all of this, in case you were wondering.”

  “Well, I hope they’re not saving my friends’ lives just to bribe me.” He smiled weakly, but it was far more genuine than what he’d offered the doctor. Solace’s expression, though, told him that might be exactly what was happening here. And that the Partheni’s offer was going to come up sooner rather than later—probably delivered direct from her superiors.

  She went off to get him something to eat and fetch the others. In her absence, he tried to work out how he felt about her. It was about time he did. After all, he’d woken up precisely twice in the last six decades and she’d been there both times. Had to mean something. It wasn’t as though he’d fallen madly in love with the beautiful warrior angel, like some mediotype. But they’d been forged in that same thirty minutes of fire, and she’d got him out. They’d lived when so many hadn’t. And when she’d come back into his life, even with her ulterior motive, he’d felt something. Perhaps she had too. He didn’t know what to do with any of it. His life hadn’t exactly equipped him for this kind of thing.

  As he lay there, introspecting, a squad of soldiers walked into the infirmary. These weren’t Partheni but Colonial navy men. He tensed, expecting Mordant House, the Liaison Board, some kind of trouble. Seeing who it was, though, he blinked, mouth suddenly dry.

  “Hi, Big Sis.”

  Not his actual sister of course. She’d died in the Polyaspora when he was very small indeed. But all of that first class out of the Intermediary Program had ended up using that nickname. She was the one woman who’d gone ahead of them, the original, the proof of concept. Xavienne Torino, known to the post-war Colonies as Saint Xavienne.

  She was a few years his senior. At the time of the “Miracle at Forthbridge” she’d been fifteen, just a barefoot girl on the freighter Samark. She’d faced up to an Architect and sent it away, saved her ship, saved a planet. Saved humanity because suddenly there was hope. Idris had first met her when the Intermediary Program reached the human subject stage, eight years later. This was after the scientific establishment had finally accepted that Xavienne’s mind really did interact with unspace in unique ways. Then they’d taken over three hundred volunteers like Idris and killed ninety per cent of them trying to replicate the effect. Nobody had stopped them. Idris didn’t even hold it against them. The times had been desperate; each Architect attack killed millions at a stroke. And the experiment had worked.

  She was seventy years old now, he reckoned, give or take. And unlike him, she’d aged. Seventy was old for a Colonial. Most spacers and frontier locals wouldn’t look as healthy or whole by that age, especially those who’d grown up on the refugee transports. Idris remembered her toughing it out with everyone else during the war: a thin, dark woman in outsize military surplus and cheap printed sandals, eyes huge and bright in her lean face. She’d been everyone on the Program’s big sister—the only person in all the universe a budding Int could go to with their fears. She’d wept for the dead, like they all had. Yet she’d gone on working, nobody harder. Then, after the war, everyone had wanted to know her story; she’d been the public face of victory. People had her on posters, medallions, mass-produced commemorative plates that somehow reproduced her likeness without any of that starveling look about the eyes. Eventually she went into seclusion, finding her own private retreat away from the supplicants and the pilgrims and the occasional death threats. Idris wondered if the Parthenon had ever dared to woo her. Though surely they couldn’t bring their match to that powder keg, not unless they really were serious about a war with Hugh.

  And here she was, on a Partheni battleship no less. But would her military escort really be enough? Would it stop some of the local high-ups considering just how much they wanted their own Intermediaries right now…?

  “Idris.” She sat where Solace had been, lowering herself carefully.

  “What are you even…? I mean, it’s so good to see you, but…” He hadn’t ever thought he would see her again, not once the war was done. Idris Telemmier had just wanted to disappear.

  “They needed this old brain again.” Her face was lined, a map of all the triumphs and cares that had brought her this far. The unruly explosion of curly hair he remembered was grey-white now. The patterned robe she wore wasn’t from a printer. Someone’s hands had made that, and serious money had paid for it. He felt a stab of vicarious pleasure that she’d done well for herself, over those past years. If anyone deserved it, it was Saint Xavienne.

  “The Partheni asked for you?”

  “Doctor Justinian did,” she corrected. “The Liaison Board don’t deal with ‘originals’ these days. They needed to reference my scans as a baseline, and so I came out of retirement one more time.”

  “You talk to the Board much?” He almost asked: Do you know what they’re doing, in your
name? But that wouldn’t be fair.

  “As little as possible. But for one of my little brothers… You’re almost the only one left, you know that? Demi Ulo’s with the Cartography Corps still, and Chassan’s on Berlenhof with Hugh. But they’re old, both of them, just like me. You’ll outlive all of us… unless you keep pulling stunts like that.”

  “No promises.”

  She regarded him then, expecting something and seeing he plainly didn’t know what. At last she said, “You don’t have any message for me?”

  “For you?” He frowned. “I didn’t even know I was going to run into you. What—?”

  “I was told… At the planetside elevator link, when we were waiting for the car. An old friend turned up, said you’d have something to say.”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” he confessed. “I… Old friend? But not one of the ‘family’?”

  She nodded, eyes flicking to her escort.

  He made a little dumbshow for her, two hands up, one with fingers spread, one making a “talk-talk” gesture with fingers and thumb. A mime for an alien of a particular shape. Ash, the Harbinger.

  Xavienne’s nod was all he needed. Abruptly his fragile sense of wellbeing was entirely gone. His hallucination of the Harbinger in unspace had been quite enough. He didn’t want Ash, of all things, to be paying him any heed. Just want to disappear, get back into space, move on before anyone catches up with me. Except events had well and truly headed him off at the pass, and here he was.

  “Nothing you haven’t already heard,” he told her, and then there was a babble of voices from outside—he recognized Olli’s strident tones—and Xavienne stood suddenly.