The Vulture’s file held only its most recent flight plan and a crew manifest with images and biometrics, mostly so local authorities could identify any bodies after bar fights. Solace flicked across the pictures: hostile-looking moustache, good-looking woman with a double chin, half-face guy, better-looking woman with a scarf and an intriguing grin, cheap-ass Hanni, battered-looking Hive frame… and there was her mark.
Idris Telemmier. She stared at the picture below the sparse details. It wasn’t even listed that he was an Int. Another agent might have queried her superiors. Are you sure?
Except she knew. As Ash said, this was an old friend. A fellow veteran.
Of course she remembered him. She remembered Berlenhof, default HQ of the Council of Human Interests—wealthy and beautiful even before Earth fell. And she’d never forget the conflict that followed. She’d been with the first Heaven’s Sword, a shining new ship with the latest mass loom technology. And after the battle, her surviving sisters had become the core of a new sorority for the next ship to bear the name.
Before the battle, with the Architect making its graceful approach past the outer planets, the Partheni had met Berlenhof’s fellow defenders on one of its orbitals. While her superiors had discussed hard tactics with their opposite numbers, she’d sat with her fellow soldiers and just talked. This was back in the day when the Parthenon was humanity’s great hope. The angels with their martial resolve and top-of-the-range technology. Their mission: to hold back the inevitable.
She felt a wave of nebulous emotion. A clutch of loss mixed with the soaring nostalgia of When We Were Heroes. She’d been twenty-five and had never seen anything more than a skirmish before. There had been Castigar warrior-caste members spoiling for a fight; Hannilambra merchant venturers, humans from every corner of the Colonies. And there had been a special weapon too. Four men, three women, one nonbinary. Intermediaries, the first class of them, right out of the labs; the weapon that a little corner of human science had been working on ever since the Miracle at Forthbridge.
Idris Telemmier had been among the group. Later, he’d become the first man she’d ever met. A little younger than she was, dark bronzy skin like most Colonials, black unruly hair hacked short by someone whose barber status was defiantly amateur. Mostly she remembered how nervous he’d looked, flinching from every loud noise. And he had big ears, really quite outsize for his face. Odd what stayed with you.
Now she looked at his image and saw the same man, when she should have been looking at a face that might have belonged to his grandfather. Solace herself had been born over seventy years before, Earth standard, but she’d spent a lot of that time in suspension, a weapon waiting for an appropriate war. Colonials didn’t do that; they only put themselves under when they travelled and, for Ints, not even then. She could only assume the image was seriously out of date.
Three of the eight Ints had died, at Berlenhof, and another two had been driven irretrievably insane in the course of duty. Idris could easily have been next. Yet when she met him on-planet after the battle, in the infirmary camp converted from a luxury hotel, he’d been lucid. Shaken, but that was to be expected after you’d touched the vast alien consciousness of an Architect with your mind.
Six years later, the war would end, thanks to Berlenhof’s hard-won insights. In the Far Lux system, the Intermediary Program would finally establish contact with an Architect. No formal détente, no treaties, no demands. According to the surviving Ints, there had just been a… noticing. The Architects had discovered that humans existed. The war, which had raged for eighty years and cost billions of lives, had been fought without the knowledge of one of its parties. And on becoming aware of humanity, the Architects had simply vanished. Nobody knew where they went. Nobody knew where they had come from or why they’d done what they did. They had never been seen again.
*
When the Vulture God came into port, Solace put herself into a position to greet it. That was her initial plan: just step forward and raise a hand. She watched the same faces from the manifest appear, or most of them. Then it was Telemmier’s turn, and Solace simply stared. If he’d had the slightest awareness about him, he’d have seen her immediately, all her training fled.
He really hadn’t changed. The image she’d seen was up to date. Here was the man she’d known in the war. The man with the big ears and the worried expression from fifty years ago, not aged a day.
For a moment she was back in the war, when things had been simultaneously better and so much worse. Back fighting the Architects, which couldn’t be fought in any meaningful way. Until they’d wheeled out Idris and his fellows, their secret weapon, the hope of humanity.
She stared, missed her moment, and the crew walked right by her.
The majority were very plainly out for a night on the town, or whatever passed for it on Roshu. Idris and Moustache peeled off from them, and Solace wanted to just shout his name, go and grab his shoulder. She was a soldier, after all, and he’d been her comrade-in-arms once. Easy to forget she was a spy now.
So she forced down all those easy, blunt ways of doing things and just skulked after them, awaiting her moment, fending off people who tried to sell her things or interest her in their dubious services. Food, games, mediotypes, even…
“Forbidden delights of the warrior angels, Menheer?”
The words actually stopped her and she turned incredulously. For a moment—a very brief moment—she thought she saw a Partheni soldier soliciting a lurching freighter pilot. Then the garish lights opposite switched orientation, revealing a very risqué “uniform.” The spacer obviously found the look authentic enough, because he changed tack and stumbled through the open door of the institution. The young woman posted outside looked speculatively at Solace.
“Mesdam, you?” She stretched a smile across her tired face. “Who knows the pleasures of our sex better than the wicked angels of the Parthenon?” Behind her, the frontage of the establishment lit up with decals of wings and phallic spaceships.
I should tell her, Solace thought, amused. She was curious as to what counted as “forbidden” on decadent Roshu. But she just shook her head and hurried to make up lost ground.
But she was too late. Through being circumspect, she’d lost her quarry to someone who had just done the soldierly thing and accosted them. Idris and Moustache were now in the company of a pair of decorated military clowns. Given the way the crowd was parting, they were recognized by the locals as having some manner of authority. Or perhaps it was merely that they were big men, plainly kitted out by someone with Largesse to spare.
For a moment she was going to just wade in, pit her Partheni skills against the brute squad and show them who bred better soldiers. However, she was in Colonial space, these two could be Hugh security services and that was how wars were started.
She brought out a slate and recorded the whole mess, tailing them until they reached what she identified as a bastion of the local administration. This validated her decision not to kick anyone’s head in. Yet.
So what now? It wasn’t as though the Parthenon had any diplomatic sway here on Roshu. She needed allies if she wasn’t going to simply storm in like a one-woman army. And the Vulture’s remaining crew were the only possible candidates… Wherever they were, they would be spending credit—her accomplice could pinpoint which dive was fleecing them. Then she could use them to break up whatever the hell was going on with Telemmier and friend. Solace flicked through the profiles of Idris’s crewmates until she found the one she wanted—the woman with the scarf and the grin—and put her plan into action.
Her contact located the crew at a gaming den, where their Hannilambra factor was hustling two miners and a freighter pilot at Landstep. Solace was just in time to see the engineer, Barnier, heading off with a man and a woman. The trio looked very friendly, bound for one of the upstairs rooms. The woman Solace wanted was at the bar, looking far too elegant for Roshu, knocking back a beaker of the notoriously potent Colonial moonshine. She g
lanced at the approaching Solace briefly, then fixed on her. After all, Solace did have the distinctive Partheni face. It was inevitable when you grew your people out of vats from a carefully curated gene-line.
Solace saw her eyes widen, and knew the Colonial woman could denounce her to the entire establishment. It was time for her soldier routine, whether Solace wanted to go there or not.
“Your friends are in trouble,” she said, to forestall a scene. “Your captain and navigator. They need you.” Of all the crew, this woman’s particular civilian talents were required right now. But because Roshu was that kind of place, and the uniforms had seemed that kind of people, she added, “and you need me.”
4.
Idris
Magda was an Earth-like planet, cold but with a relatable biochemistry. Back Before, the colony had already been expanding, the original founders becoming an overclass above a mass of new colonists—introduced to run the expanding agricultural industry. Magda was the largest exporter of foodstuffs to overburdened Earth.
After, refugees had fled to Magda in their millions, knowing only that here was a planet with room for them. And the planet’s landowners, the Boyarin, had taken in everyone, turned not one ship away. Which sounded grand until you understood that to set foot on Magda was to accept the life they gave you, one of service in the factories or fields. It was never quite slavery under Hugh definitions, but then Magda was one of the big dogs of Hugh. Remarkable how the authorities there could end up “not quite” any number of bad things. The word most enlightened outsiders applied to Magdan society was “serfdom.” The Boyarin themselves called the system the “robot,” which seemed to adequately sum up how they regarded the mass of their people.
It was one of the Boyarin themselves who came to look in on Rollo and Idris, shortly after they were consigned to one of Roshu Admin’s holding cells.
He looked young, although the Boyarin were certainly amongst those few with the wherewithal for a long life. His clothes were flamboyant: a loose-sleeved shirt of shimmering orange, hand-embroidered at the throat and cuffs; tight trousers and tight boots; a black half-cloak ornamented with gold. His body was lean and fit, his coldly handsome features graced with a small upwards-tilted moustache and a neat scar that curved from the corner of his mouth to his ear. The Magdan elite liked their duels, Idris had heard. His heavies—presumably Voyenni, house guards—stood impassively after announcing him as “The Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro.”
Piter Uskaro was all skin-deep smiles, and he had eyes for Idris alone. “What fortune attends our meeting,” he announced. It was as if his “guests” weren’t stuck in a cramped, oven-hot metal box with one clear plastic wall. His tones, heavy with the Magdan accent, came to them through a speaker in the ceiling.
“Your Grandness, there’s been some mistake,” Rollo tried. “We’re just salvagers. We’re no criminals. I can provide references, work history.”
Uskaro waved the virtual paperwork aside, still grotesquely pleasant, as though just waiting for a servant to turn up with wine. “Deep void work, yes. Which means you have in your possession a rare gem, a commercial Intermediary. Yet imagine my surprise when I asked after the details of your leash contract with the Liaison Board. And, alas, none is filed!” He rolled his eyes as though they were all just victims of Hugh bureaucracy. “Which can only mean that your man here is a fugitive from his contract, and you have been abetting him. I’m sure it’s witless, Captain Rostand. Do I mean witless? Innocent, maybe, is the word. I’m sure you had no idea your man here was a dangerous renegade fleeing the service he owes to his people. Bad trouble, Captain. Very bad. You will of course be grateful when I take him off your hands. It is not the first time such a one has been apprehended by the Boyarin’s tireless efforts in our drive for justice. We spearhead the advancement of our species, Captain. Our tireless navigators seek out Throughways as yet undiscovered, that we may open up a wealth of planets hitherto hidden from us. The future of humanity, Captain! Fresh colonies, perhaps even new Originator sites. Treasures beyond imagining!” His teeth were blinding white and perfectly even when he smiled.
Idris squinted into the sun of that expression and wasn’t fooled. His fight-or-flight response was screwing his body into overdrive. Awkward, given he could do neither.
“What,” he managed, “did your last Int die of?”
That perfect smile didn’t falter. “It so happened that my family’s best navigator suffered a mishap. How lucky for me that we were able to locate a replacement so swiftly. I am just concluding the legalities with Roshu kybernet, after which we shall be off. And then I shall decide whether charges should be filed against your captain here, as your accomplice. Perhaps a residual concern for his wellbeing will encourage you to accept your rightful lot. It’s time you served the species that made you what you are.”
“Your Grandness,” Rollo started. “He is not under leash. He is a free man. You have no right—”
Uskaro gave him the look of a man who can purchase any right he wishes. “The kybernet is processing the matter now, Captain Rostand. I shall return shortly to take possession of my new property. What happens to you depends on your decorum between now and then.”
When he was gone, Rollo sat on the floor and stared at his sandalled feet. “Fuck all paymasters,” he said, less a specific jibe at Uskaro so much as a familiar spacer oath.
Idris was still standing. He couldn’t sit. His skinny body was vibrating with adrenaline which had nowhere to go. I will fight, he decided. I will not go. And he knew they couldn’t force him, not really. They couldn’t make him navigate for them. But they could beat and brutalize him, condition him, drug him. Drive implants into his brain, until his ability to resist their demands had been pared down to nothing. Mostly with the Liaison Board Ints, the Commercial Ints, it wasn’t necessary. They came pre-compliant, resigned to drudgery until the horrors of unspace unhinged them. But when one of them went renegade and fled, well, you heard all sorts…
And he wasn’t renegade. He’d never been on a leash. But it wasn’t the first time someone had made the convenient assumption, and this time Kris wasn’t here to sort it out.
“I won’t go,” he said, because the thought had bounced back and forth in his head so much it had to escape.
“We’ll jump them,” Rollo suggested. “On the way to their ship…” As though Rollo would even be getting out of the cell, Idris thought. “Or we’ll come after you.” As though they could, without Idris in the pilot’s chair. “We’ll… something.” As though there was anything.
*
Around fifty-five years back, in the heart of the war, the freighter Samark exited unspace to find every wartime pilot’s worst nightmare: an Architect bearing down on them. They were bound for Forthbridge Port, packed to the gills with displaced refugees. Faced with their imminent demise, the crew started packing people into shuttles and escape pods, of which there was an entirely inadequate supply. Meanwhile, the Architect reached out for them, intent on peeling the ship and arranging the hull into a configuration more pleasing to its alien aesthetics.
Yet, even as it began to warp the hull, it stopped. For a long moment the passenger freighter and the colossal alien entity hung there in space, both speeding towards Forthbridge Port. Then it withdrew. For the first time ever, an Architect just went away. What happened on board the Samark became legend. The most popular mediotype showed one of the passengers, a girl of fifteen, running onto the bridge. She was clutching her head, speaking in tongues, blood running from her nose. What was clear to everyone was that Xavienne Torino had somehow made the Architect leave. Her own testimony confirmed she’d forged a link between them, mind to mind.
She had been the first Intermediary, a natural. Over the next decade, humanity’s best scientists would work with Saint Xavienne—as she became known—to try and replicate her abilities. The new corps would get its first outing at the Battle of Berlenhof in 78 After, and would go on to end the war.
But before
that, everyone had realized Ints were good for more than just driving away Architects. That same uncanny sense let them tap into the fabric of unspace, to navigate beyond the established Throughways in a way no instrument or device could. Some species could manage something similar: the Castigar and the Hegemony for example. But even with them it was rare, and humanity had abruptly joined that select club. Ints went from being a secret weapon to a trading advantage. So the Liaison Board was born. They took in humanity’s unwanted and they turned out a handful of commercial Intermediaries, through harsh conditioning and unrelenting surgery. All who survived the Program left under leash contracts, making them nothing but property until they’d paid back the colossal cost of their “treatment.” Which meant, to all intents and purposes, never.
Idris was a free man, created before the Board existed, but who would believe him? And almost all the other free wartime Ints were dead. These cheery thoughts occupied him until the Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro returned, with his retinue, to “take possession.”
“All is achieved,” he said cheerfully to the two station guards. One opened the cell so a Voyenni trooper could pull Idris out; the other ensured Rollo stayed inside. Then they hauled him out to the clerks’ office, where the staff did their best not to notice what was going on.
“Look at your face like thunder,” Uskaro remarked drily to Idris. “You’d think you didn’t want to serve humanity. You don’t want people to take you for a betrayer, do you?” Idris noted that the word was given a particular spin and he suppressed a shudder. The “pro-humanity” Nativists had a strong foothold on Magda and they talked a great deal about betrayal. By the Parthenon, by aliens, by Intermediaries somehow in league with Architects. Anything to explain why humans didn’t run the universe.
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