Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Vulture God streaked on, a battered old junk-hauler that had no place in the war zone. The other Hugh cruiser out there, the Perihelion, was hailing them. It was warning them off, as though they might somehow have missed the crystal half-moon out there murdering everyone. Kris proclaimed they were the cavalry, the Intermediary Program here to save the day.

  “Kit,” Idris said through clenched teeth. “I know we’re basically screwed, but do what you can with the drive to get us some shielding. Just enough to fend off the worst.”

  The Hanni’s reply went untranslated, which was probably just as well. But Kittering bent to the task anyway, slender mandibles rattling away at his board, sabotaging the clean running of the gravitic drive to twist space around them. Meanwhile, Olli had the brachator system hauling them forward from point to point, clipping them in a zigzag course into the heart of the fight. Idris would rather be doing that himself—it was his skill set, after all—but he had a different job right now, and one nobody else could help him with.

  Solace’s hand closed on his shoulder and he felt a moment of perfect stillness. It was as though all the duelling gravities and energies out there had cancelled each other out, just for a fraction of a second, leaving only calm and peace.

  Idris felt the Architect then, its vast and incurious mind that was focused on turning all these vessels into junk art and filigree. Remaking the universe one clutch of matter at a time. He made himself small and sharp and stabbed like a rapier. And everything receded from him: Kris’s voice over the comm, Olli’s swearing… his own body, with all its frailties and injuries, all someone else’s problem.

  We are here. Stop killing us. We are here.

  He could feel the Architect’s ponderous attention shifting from place to place across the battlefield. Here a Zero Pointer was snuffed out—pilot and vessel turned into lace and sent spinning into the endless void. There, clawing for the Perihelion, the Hugh ship’s shielding failing, the ring of its gravitic drive rupturing into space. Idris felt the shift and shunt of the Architect’s thoughts as it caught the ship’s broken pieces and remade them. Each one became a work of art, worthy of a master. Some of the pieces had been crew but the Architect made no distinction. In his far, far distant ears, over Kris’s comms connection, Idris could hear screaming.

  He felt that he was standing by the feet of a great, slow giant as it tore down a city, block by block. The buildings fell, the people in them screamed and then they were crushed. But the giant only cared about urban clearance. It didn’t understand that there were living things in the stone edifices it ripped down.

  Except it must. They learned it at Far Lux. That’s why they stopped.

  He was a tiny little man beating at the giant’s heel, hammering at its smallest toe, shrieking himself hoarse. He was the mote in the mind of God, lost in that labyrinth of mirrors and moving parts.

  Why have you come back?

  And one of his tiny ant punches registered, because the faintest feather edge of the Architect’s consciousness acknowledged his existence.

  Then he was slammed back into his body because the Vulture God was spinning out of control. Trine slammed complaining into the wall and Idris was half out of his chair. He was only saved from breaking his head by Solace grabbing him and hauling him back. Olli was incandescent over the comms. She turned a cubic mile of void blue with oaths Idris had never even heard before, as her Scorpion frame slid across the drone bay to crash into its closed hatch. For a moment she lost all connection to ship systems and they were helpless, adrift. Then she had The Vulture underway again, limping and shuddering.

  “No more thank you no,” Kit rattled off, sending damage reports to all boards. The Vulture was just about in one piece, but they’d accrued ten years of wear and tear in as many seconds.

  “We’ve lost the Perihelion,” Kris choked out. “Gone, dead.”

  “No more no further impact all tolerances exceeded no,” Kittering insisted.

  We’re not going to make it. The moment the Architect turned back to find them—that would be it. They couldn’t move fast enough, shield hard enough. They just weren’t strong enough to wrestle the monster for control of local space for even a moment. And if tiny Zero Pointers could be pinched into oblivion, detected by the all-seeing Architect—how could they escape its notice?

  Idris felt his throat go dry.

  Unless…

  “Olli,” he yelled into comms.

  “Busy!”

  “You’re linked to the ship?”

  “I’m flying the fucking ship, what do you think?”

  “Linked, really linked, right?”

  Space shuddered about them, the gravitic shockwave of someone else being wrung out of existence. Yet even with its focus elsewhere, he could still feel the thereness of the Architect. This close, it felt as though its crystal needles were being driven into his brain.

  “I’m going to stutter-jump us again.” And Olli would think he was quitting, getting them out, but he went on, “Only for a fraction of a second. You’ll feel it like a big old shock to the system, but no more.”

  “Idris, I—”

  “I need you to just keep flying her, Olli. I’m feeding you coordinates for where you’ll be flying from when we exit unspace. And I’ll keep doing it, again, then again—and you have to keep up with me, okay? So are you linked to the ship? Nav systems, sensor suite, all that stuff. Your eyes, your limbs?”

  Olli made a croaking sound over the comms. He chose to interpret that as a yes and jumped them…

  … into unspace. Except the moment they crossed out of the real, he was slamming them back in again. He could hear Kris’s yelp, the skreeling complaints of Kittering. They were demanding to know what he was doing, and the ship was just tumbling now—falling towards the jagged horizon of the Architect, utterly without control.

  “Olli!”

  “I got it, I got it, damn you, Idris, give me a…” And the brachator drive kicked in. Hauling them away, hand over hand—further from that hungry crystal landscape. Idris felt the Architect register them once more, reach for them, and he jumped them again. Once more, he fed Olli his calculations a split second before they went. Again they were gone, becoming unreal. Then they were back, a hundred kilometres from where they’d been. Now his head was splitting. The pain of those abrupt seat-of-the-pants jumps, the pain of trying to contact the Architect. All getting together and raising a family inside his skull.

  But Olli was on it now. She was managing the ship from the moment it burst out of unspace—barrelling them through a formation of Zero Pointers, winking like stars on every side, flying the Vulture God as though she’d been born with wings. Olian Timo, born a stranger to her human body, had decided, why limit her efforts to that? Any frame, any surrogate shell could be hers. Now she was riding the Vulture God’s sensor data, eating the nav information Idris fed her. She saw each new emergence point and assimilated it before they popped into existence there. Always desperately fleeing ahead of the Architect’s angry strikes.

  And even as his hands jumped and jumped them, Idris let his mind out again. Once more, he fell into the fractured maze of the Architect’s body—that was simultaneously its brain. Again, he was seeking that point of consciousness within. Seeking an audience, so he could plead for the survival of his people.

  He was plunging through ablating crystalline layers of thought and desire. His mind shouted We are here. But the Architect knew this already. It didn’t care. And this time around, it really did want to kill them. To unmake their worlds—despite knowing that myriad little minds lived upon them. Why? Why hate us now?

  I don’t hate you.

  Those weren’t the words; it wasn’t quite like that. But his mind took the stimuli it encountered and translated them, awkward as Kittering’s artificial voice trying to give words to Hannilambra concepts. Stunned, he was back in his body—just as a great fist slammed against the Vulture God’s hull and made it ring like a gong. Abruptly alarms and red w
arning signs were all over his board and Kit was reeling off the damage.

  “Drone bay!” Kris got out. “Breach in the drone bay. Olli!”

  “Still here,” came her grim voice. “Air’s gone but I got my own, haven’t I. Fucking clinging on, aren’t I? Only…” There was a pause. Idris blinked, finding the world red-washed. He had blood in his eyes and his head jumped and stuttered as randomly as their course through unspace. Solace tore open his tunic, the cheap printed fabric parting like paper. She clamped something to his chest, part of the grab-bag of medkit junk the Vulture had accumulated over the years. Was it interacting with his heart in some way? He felt only a distant curiosity, as he waited for Olli to keep speaking. He hoped Olli would keep speaking.

  “Trine,” the drone specialist said at last.

  “Here and present.”

  “Get in here. Need your help. I… I’ve got a lot of failing systems. Took a bit of a knock here.”

  “I am not a technician,” the Hiver said uncertainly.

  “You are proof against vacuum, you roach bastard. I need you to get in here and do what you can to the Scorpion, before my life support gives. Okay? I would do it myself, but I’m too busy saving all your asses.”

  “Well, in that case, I shall lower myself,” Trine said with dignity. “Myrmidon Solace, as requested,” and they passed something to the Partheni. “If I should not return from this—”

  “Just go!” Kris shouted at them. The phantom face looked mortally offended, but they went.

  I’m going in again. We’re jumping, Idris tried to say. But he couldn’t get the words out, probably because he didn’t seem to be breathing. Solace was on it, though. Whatever she had plugged into his heart had oxygenated his blood, until his autonomic systems stopped sleeping on the job. His brain was still fed, and that was all he needed. He rolled his eyes in thanks but she had no time for that, absorbed in the job of keeping him alive.

  So he just continued, passing another set of sums to Olli, keeping them always one jump ahead of the Architect’s next sally. And he forced his mind back into it, trying to pick up where he’d left off. If you don’t hate us, why kill us? He met a vast wall of alien thought and scaled it, driving his hands into the gaps between nameless concepts. He navigated impossible logical contradictions, finding a mind so old that human concepts of time did not apply. A focus so powerful that it could rework a planet at the molecular level—not as an act of brute force but one of loving, careful artistry. Placing every atom perfectly in place. Fit for purpose.

  What purpose, though? Why did the Architects rebuild the universe, one inhabited world at a time? Surely not merely because they could?

  Another near miss, distant cursing from Olli, Kris trying to liaise with the Blake and the Thunderchild. Idris fell out of the Architect again, clawing at it, plummeting forever. The space around them was a constellation of ships—hundreds of Zero Pointers bringing their gravitic drives together to fracture those crystal spines. All while the Thunderchild’s mass looms boomed and hammered soundlessly and the Blake unleashed hell. It was pumping out such blistering salvos of accelerator shot that even the Architect could not catch every falling sparrow of it. And it was still not enough. It was not even a hundredth of enough. They were flies in the face of God. They were just powerful enough to be worth obliterating.

  And still Idris tried to get to the centre of the Architect. He was beating on the doors of its brain, but he couldn’t get in.

  “New challenger. Unexpected potential trouble!” Kit reported. He harvested more data from the boards, while trying to shore up their shielding. Idris came back to himself, realizing that another ship had stutter-jumped into the midst of the fight. The Hugh military launch that had hailed them as they fled the orbital.

  You can’t be serious. They’ve come to arrest us? Don’t they know there’s a war on? The Hugh ship was just tumbling, the shock of the in-system jump throwing its crew. But if they stutter-jumped that means—

  He sensed the other mind then, scrabbling at the Architect’s consciousness. Andecka Tal Mar, the volunteer. She’d come out here like he had, still volunteering, trying to make a difference.

  He fed another set of coordinates to Olli. And presumably Trine was doing some good down there, because she was still alive and guiding the ship. There was the shock of another jump and now he couldn’t see, couldn’t open his eyes. There was Kris’s voice, Solace’s voice, all very distant now. The whooping of alarms too, thoroughly someone else’s problem.

  Perhaps we’ve just hit the limit of the Vulture’s medical kit. Ah well…

  He could feel Andecka out there, fighting and failing—but she’d caught the Architect’s attention, just for a moment. He couldn’t coordinate with her but he could adapt to what she did. He slid in past her, using the gaps she’d opened in the Architect’s concentration. Its mind was elsewhere as it tried to discover the cause of this latest pinprick irritation.

  And he was in.

  It happened as easily as that, the perfect insertion of mind into mind. Thread the goddamn needle one last time. And he was in a place of eerie stillness, of pure Zen calm. A single step away in every direction he could see it all: the battle, the ships, the planet, the wider universe… All as remote as if painted in some abstract, expressionist style onto canvas and hung on a wall. A way of looking at the universe that made it seem like no more than bad art—something that could be reimagined, perfected.

  He sensed a presence then, though not the looming, brooding Presence that attended unspace. This was something transcendent and beautiful, wise yet infinitely destructive. It was the thing he had howled We are here! to, back at Far Lux, so long ago, which had ended the war. It was the mote of I am within the vast structure of each Architect.

  It became aware of him. Not as it was aware of the ships, as burrs and abrasive parts of the universe outside, that must be sanded down for it to pass smoothly by and achieve its purpose. But as him, Idris Telemmier: the thinking individual; the Intermediary.

  Why? Stop, please. He tried to picture all the people on Berlenhof, failed almost immediately, but something got through. He perceived something in response—but not thoughts, not feelings. These were vast shunting blocks of intent and desire that had to be crammed into a funnel, crushed down meaninglessly small in order to be apprehended by a human consciousness.

  We do not hate you.

  We do not want to kill you.

  And then Idris saw a barrage of images as it picked apart his memories, fragment by fragment. It dissected him, laid out the complete contents of his mind upon a table. Filed him, catalogued, tried to understand this odd evidence of a primitive civilization on the very point of extinction.

  He found himself thinking—without consent or volition—about the Liaison Board. And about the Boyarin Piter Uskaro, trying to lay claim to him under Magdan law. He thought about the Hivers fighting to gain independence from their human creators. About the darkest parts of old-Earth history, back when they still taught it. About shackles and chains, duress, mastery and ownership. The Architect found all these things as it taxonomized the contents of his mind, and judged them relevant to the topic under discussion.

  He kept expecting it to manifest as a kindly old grandfather, a white-bearded god, even as a monstrous demon. But it was never able to reduce itself to anything so banal or human. All it could do was pick over his thoughts like a beachcomber, holding those which caught its attention up to the sunlight… until he understood.

  You stopped before.

  Whips, thumbscrews, chains, orders, punishment, servitude.

  Please, not here. Not now. Please.

  He had the Architect’s whole attention now. Out there, the Thunderchild and the others were battering away ineffectually at its substance. But it had ceased to retaliate. The whole awful majesty of its concentration was on one Idris Telemmier, Intermediary, first class.

  Please…

  The moments cascaded about him, stolen from his m
emories and thrown in his face. Grief, loss of family, trauma, love, curling up beside Solace in the infirmary camp. Saying harsh words about Rollo, because he’d loved the man like family and that was how you did it. Shouting at Havaer Mundy on Lung-Crow station, because he was terrified of ending up with the Liaison Board and all their evils.

  Please… Asking for himself, now. Because he didn’t want to be the man who’d failed to save Berlenhof. Because, even though he was definitely dying, he’d never be able to live with himself.

  A moment of perfect clarity.

  The acceptance of pain, the willingness to go back to punishment. Because, of the two of them there, one of them must face failure. The choices were between Idris punishing himself, or the Architect meeting the wrath of… who? What possible power could compel them? But there was something there—that was what he had learned. There was an intent behind the Architects. A purpose that was not native to them. A hand that brandished the whip.

  Please…

  And it left, the whole immensity of it falling away into unspace from the real. It abandoned the Berlenhof system, leaving a scattering of ships and filigreed debris spinning in its wake.

  30.

  Kris

  When Idris regained consciousness, it was Kris’s turn on watch. She’d been spending the time recording responses to the Liaison Board’s demands, all of which mentioned Idris’s name. Some of the demands talked of patriotism. Some spoke of Idris’s recuperation and his need for their specialized care. Still more dealt with tenuous legal rights. Her real concerns centred on what wasn’t being said. She was worried that some cabal of Hugh representatives was being hastily convened to make an executive order allowing them to march in and take Idris for the good of the Colonies. That would leave her with no legal power to stop them.