“Not particularly.”
“Not now. I’ll go find my cabin, but next time I’d like to at least start with ‘Hello.’”
“So you can work your way towards your offer again?”
“Yes, because that’s my mission. I want to report that I got that far, when I go back empty-handed. But also… just, hello. It’s actually good to see you. You’re the only person outside my sisters that I ever met and liked.”
She wasn’t sure whether she was manipulating him or not. When she saw his face soften, even more vulnerable when unguarded, she wondered if she should feel guilty.
*
“Look at that bedamned fancyman,” Rollo crowed. Everyone except Kittering and Barney was up in the control compartment, watching their approach to Huei-Cavor’s orbitals. It was a long time since they’d been to any world with so much traffic. Its equator was ringed with a jewelled necklace of stations, shipyards, elevator hubs and the skeletal frames of superdocks for big freight vessels. Past that, they could see the blue-yellow swell of the planet itself. It was azure-white at its visible pole, showing copper-saturated ice deposits wisped with sulphur-tinged clouds. Despite the aggressive chemistry, a lot of people lived on Huei-Cavor’s surface. Pills or body-mods enabled people to metabolize whatever the planet threw at them. Once they’d adjusted to local conditions, the regime was as good for health and longevity as a mineral spa. A number of well-heeled oldsters had set up down there over the years, funding much of the planet’s burgeoning infrastructure.
And now all that wealth was being ceremonially handed over to alien overlords. Why, if the Architects were gone? Solace wondered. Maybe it was because Huei had an older population that remembered the war. Their childhoods had been characterized by the terror that, any day, something could just appear over the planet and obliterate it. They wanted the Essiel’s much-vaunted protection.
Rollo’s “fancyman” was the Hegemonic ambassador’s enormous barge. Looking down on it, as it descended for landing, was like looking into the half-folded petals of a rose made from coral. The barge had no visible windows, engines, weapons, or any recognizable components at all. It fell towards the planet like a slow motion asteroid.
It would have a similar impact upon the planet’s political sphere, given a sizeable slice of Huei-Cavor’s population wasn’t happy about the change in management. The newscasts were showing riots, bombings and thousands-strong protests. There would be bloodshed, now and for years to come. Perhaps not the best time to visit, Solace thought.
Now the newstypes were interviewing that bald white-bearded man who seemed so popular locally. He was wearing a remarkably elaborate robe, red with eye-catching geometric gold embroidery. Its remarkably high curved collar fanned out behind him, visible over the top of his head. He was standing with a few others in lesser finery, all looking serenely pleased with themselves. This was the Hegemonic cult, Solace understood: the human faction that had been pushing for the planet to leave Hugh for years. Baldy-beardy called himself Sathiel, because high-ranking cultists tended to adopt names that made them sound religious. Sathiel was apparently a big man from the Hegemony, here to assist in a smooth handover. The Essiel liked peaceful, well-run planets. The view changed to show the enormous crowd that had gathered at the landing site. This was mostly excited neo-cultists, keen for a glimpse of their new rulers.
“Response from Lung-Crow Orbital,” Olli reported. She was reclining in the six-legged frame she used to get about the ship, after Idris had persuaded her to take a break from her control pod. She’d been trying to get hold of their contracting party aboard the nearby station. Unfortunately their new employer was the local administration, who had their plates full right now.
“Let’s hear it.” Rollo pulled comms over to his station. “This is Vulture God, reporting for duty. Do we have Lung-Crow Admin? Word is there’s deep void work going begging.”
On his screen, the Lung-Crow hung over the planet like a huge spindle. Within its windowed upper facets, people lived, worked and did business. From the slot-riddled lower half, ships passed in and out like bees from a hive. Then its image was shunted out of the way to reveal a lean woman, her eyes obscured by a battery of lenses.
“Factor Kittering?” she said doubtfully to Rollo.
The Hannilambra sent her a feed from his own console, appearing as an inset on the main screen. His mouthparts fiddled some sort of introduction.
“Ah, Captain Rostand, then. Admirably prompt.”
“And looking to be just as prompt out the door,” Rollo told her easily. “I get the impression you have plenty of bigger holes to patch than ours. You are…” A brief glance sideways. “Factor Luciel Leng, is it?”
“Your own factor there assures me you have a deep void-capable ship and navigator. I’ve seen your certification, but I want assurances that you’re not puffing your profile. Because that’s what I’m paying for.”
“If you’ve seen the papers you’ve seen how it is,” Rollo confirmed. “We’re good for it.”
Solace looked between them, wondering how many of these deals ended in fraud and acrimony. Rollo and Luciel seemed to be happy with just a word and a handshake.
“This is delicate and needs swift action. We’re after the Oumaru out of Rrrt’k.” She attacked the alien name gamely. “Mechanical failure, probably. It’s not shipping anything particularly valuable, just Hegemonic set dressing for people keen to show our new chiefs just how on-side we are; tat, basically, not worth stealing.”
“But worth blowing up for a political point,” Solace suggested.
Luciel’s faceted gaze shifted to catch a glimpse of Solace, probably wondering if the Vulture really had a Partheni on board and why. “I hope not,” she replied. “But if you find anything… controversial, come back out-system, I’ll have a Coffin on hand to bring both the Oumaru and your ship in covertly. We don’t want to offend the Hegemony or help the Nativists score points, right?”
“I see you,” Rollo confirmed. “We’re good for it.”
Luciel Leng seemed as reassured as she was going to be, relaxing back into her seat and nodding at Solace. “She real?”
“So I’m told,” Rollo told her.
“I didn’t think they were for hire?”
“The universe is wonderful and full of never-ending variety.” The captain nodded to Leng. “My factor confirms the money and escrow arrangements. Let’s go get your missing ship.” He closed the channel and declared, “Suspension pods, my childer! And everyone run your own checks too this time. Bad dreams to the minimum, see right?”
“New girl, you okay? Need help with your pod?” the engineer, Barnier, grunted at her. She gave his mismatched features a tight smile.
“I’m good.” She’d checked it over already and fixed a couple of minor glitches with the help of a built-in troubleshooter the crew hadn’t ever accessed. The suspension pod and the ship were of very different vintages, and the pod was decidedly older.
One by one the crew shuffled off to their pods, leaving Idris at the pilot’s station with Solace behind him.
He half glanced around, then looked back to his controls. “Better get yourself under. We’re going into unspace the moment we’re clear of traffic.”
“Into the deep void.”
“The abyss that gazes also,” he agreed. “You’ve done that before, have you—stayed awake on a Throughway journey?”
“Part of the training,” she agreed. “Didn’t like it.”
“Deep void’s worse,” he said, with some relish.
“I’ll bed down when we’re in. I wanted to say…” She saw him tense, and of course she’d wanted to repeat the Parthenon’s offer. But she was a soldier, not a diplomat, and a few months’ teachings didn’t change that. So she said instead, “I didn’t forget what happened, after Berlenhof.”
“Me neither.” His voice was very small. She wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, but he was slumped in the seat, hunched in on himself. He seemed as though
he’d break if she touched him. “I guess they train you not to feel things, the scars left behind. In the Parthenon. Rock-hard warrior angels, all that.” He sounded wistful.
“They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”
“You going to be doing that around here?”
“Among Colonials? No.” The thought made her feel ill. “You people never admit when you’re hurting. Sign of weakness in your culture. Or that’s what I was taught.”
He made a nondescript noise. “It must be nice, to talk.” Voice no more than a whisper.
And then he was gone, the pilot’s seat apparently empty, the ship resoundingly vacant around her. She knew they’d entered unspace and she was the only person left on board, perhaps in the universe. The only person here, but not the only thing—and that way madness lay. It was the same for everyone on board too. Or would have been, if they’d been foolish enough to stay awake. Hurriedly she skipped over to her pod and climbed in, setting it to put her on ice the moment the clamshell lid closed.
Idris
Then Solace was gone, and Idris felt the familiar infinite echo of unspace. He glanced back, looking for even a fading ghost of her. Already, the control compartment was devoid of all life. Just him and the void now. More than once Idris had wondered if the secret of his own longevity could be found in these shadowy spaces; certainly nobody else had an explanation.
Everyone was alone in unspace, even on the Throughways. But, if you stepped away from them into the deep void, you were as alone as any sentient creature had ever been. Except not quite, not entirely alone.
Every species that entered unspace reported the same feeling. Even the hardiest found the transit traumatizing; some manner of suspension or sleep was everyone’s preferred solution. It had been a prime piece of evidence in the case over whether Hivers were truly intelligent: that their composite minds reacted similarly to unspace. Unspace responded to intellect. A dumb computer couldn’t pilot you there. Before Intermediaries, humanity could only navigate the Throughways—paths through space that the vanished Originators had left behind long ago, along with their enigmatic ruins. The Throughways connected populated star systems, which were populated precisely because the Throughways led there. Easy enough for a regular pilot to set their ship to travel a Throughway. It was like positioning a paper boat in a stream, knowing that soon enough it would beach at a particular turn. Not so the deep void.
Idris felt the shift as they left it all behind: not like breaching a membrane but as though he and the ship were falling into a chasm, away from everything there ever was. Lights receded to infinity and the only thing ahead was the abyss that gazed also. This was the truth of the void, the thing that had driven the passengers of the Gamin mad. After you’d finished wishing you weren’t alone, you realized you weren’t, and then you really wished you were.
Idris had as much experience of this as any human being alive. There was a comforting body of literature about how it was just a reaction of the mind to the absence of some key sensory feedback. Idris—and every other Int he’d talked to about it—didn’t believe that for a moment.
He guided the Vulture God into the untracked spaces as if steering a ship on a horizonless ocean, past any hope of ever making land. And he knew, with absolute conviction, that far below in the depths something stirred. It slept, perhaps, but the wake that Idris’s mind made on the surface troubled its dreams. One day it would truly wake and rise, maw wide to engulf whatever unfortunate had caught its notice. Perhaps that had already happened, because ships vanished into the deep void sometimes, even those with trained Int navigators.
Idris settled deeper in his chair, letting his unique senses unfold. His mind’s eye began to draw unhelpful images of benthic abysses, slimy tresses of seaweed, chasms within chasms where lurked… something. Amidst all this distraction he was listening, reaching out. Mind’s ear attuned, mind’s fingers deft, testing the tautness of unspace as a spider plucks its web. He felt the texture of the cosmos against the tissues of his brain, each pucker and whorl a suggestion of mass and its attendant gravitic train. If he’d stayed with the Cartography Corps, or been conscripted by the Boyarin, this would have been his whole life. He’d have hunted down those traces, until at last he found something more than a mere will-o’-the-wisp: an unknown star, profitable new planets. Hopefully, even a Throughway to connect his discoveries to the rest of creation. Yet nobody stayed in the Cartography Corps for long. You got out after a tour or two, wild-eyed and trembling. Or you stayed and something went wrong in your head. Then one day you took your ship somewhere and never returned. Perhaps you finally understood what was behind that brooding sense of presence, and you went to the court of the abyss, to dance with its god-king forever and ever.
Idris kicked himself mentally.
Is it closer now? He always asked himself this. And it always seemed that the sense of something—down there, out there—was rising to meet him. He tried to write off that feeling as one more illusion and never convinced himself.
Idris Telemmier had been doing this for fifty years, wartime and after. He had endured when his peers had gone mad or killed themselves from the horror of it all. He’d outlasted the generation of Ints that came after him, and most of the next. He could have written a book, save that the final chapters would have degenerated into mystic ranting. It has a purpose for me! he could have screamed into the void.
He’d once heard another Int being bundled onto a ship during the war. Don’t make me go! the woman had been shouting. It knows me! Over and over. He hadn’t been into the deep void himself then. He hadn’t understood.
Idris Telemmier reached out into the solitary infinite, like a man feeling for some precious dropped object in a dark room. And somewhere in that sightless expanse, he felt something was reaching back to seize his hand and pull.
But not today. He’d taken the telemetry and course data of the Oumaru and let it sit at the back of his mind; let his consciousness expand into unspace and found something that felt like a ship.
As he closed the trap of his mind, he could even tell that it felt like a ship of the Oumaru’s approximate size. It was drifting out beyond the Throughways that converged on Huei-Cavor. Not so very far off course but, without an Int navigator, even going slightly off the beaten track meant you never found your way back.
He felt a spark of hope, because the Oumaru hadn’t even been lost for that long. Most likely the crew were still in suspension. Or they might be calling out for aid. How glad they’d be when the Vulture God surfaced beside them, an unlikely Samaritan.
With profound relief, he loosened the gravitic drive’s hold on the fabric of unspace, sending them bobbing up—he couldn’t not think of up and down despite himself—into real space. He was abruptly aware, somehow, of all the sleepers in their suspension pods around him. Then once more, unspace’s great impassive Presence receded into the realm of the imaginary.
Next time, he felt it was saying, but it was always that way. He tracked the blip of mass he’d identified, which might be the Oumaru. Then the Vulture’s sensors showed him an image of what he’d found.
He choked.
Jolted back in his chair.
Heart almost stopped one moment, racing the next. When he tried to send the wake-up signal to the pods, his fingers stuttered over the keys and he couldn’t. There was blood in his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue. For a moment he just wanted to send the ship back into unspace instead, to face the Presence.
The Oumaru was there, but there would be no tearfully grateful crew. The ship had been peeled, flayed and reshaped into an elegant sculpture of trailing metal, like a flower. It was a sight from the war, but the Oumaru had left dock only a few days before.
7.
Idris
“Tell me one thing only,” Rollo said hoarsely. “Is… it gone?”
The entire crew had assembled in the control compartment. They could have examined th
e images from anywhere, but this seemed a good time to be in the company of others.
Idris had already engaged his senses, examining real space and its distortions, the same he would use to get the drop on another ship. I’d know if it was here, he told himself. If there was an Architect lurking in unspace, its malign presence must have cried out to him. More lessons learned from the war.
“There’s nothing,” he managed. “It’s gone.”
“It’s gone,” echoed Kris, “but they’re back.”
“We don’t know that,” Rollo said hurriedly. Everyone goggled at him, mutely indicating the evidence on the screens. “Look, my children,” he told them, voice shaking, “we don’t know. I mean, the Arch… the Architects…” His voice went hoarse and whispery as he tried to say the word, as though it might summon them anew. “They went somewhere. Maybe the Oumaru stumbled on them there. Maybe they were intruders, they were punished and left here. A warning for us, perhaps. ‘Steer clear.’ But it doesn’t mean they’re back. It doesn’t mean…”
Kris sat down heavily next to Idris, who clasped her arm briefly, all the solidarity he could manage. Kittering was preening his minor legs obsessively, his screens showing nothing but a dimly lambent darkness. Barney reached out to Olli, who took his hand with the stumpy finger-buds at her elbow.
“Do you think they knew, at Lung-Crow?” Solace broke in. She was standing a little off from the others, outside their shared solidarity.
“No,” Rollo said at once. “Not a hope. They’d have sent people with us, if they had. Or used a Hegemony navigator to get it themselves. This was routine retrieval business—right up to now.” He mopped his brow, staring at the Oumaru’s delicately disembowelled hulk. “I want volunteers to suit up and go over there.”
“Fuck off,” Barney said immediately. “Why?”
“Because I have a bad feeling about how this job will go—and I want something we can sell, some hard data. Also, we don’t know that there are no survivors. Some of the aft compartments look intact.”
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