People went mad, tried to destroy themselves, tried to destroy their ships. The alternative would be coming face to face at last with It… and that was literally unbearable. You’d do anything to avoid looking into that mirror.
And the fact that everyone who came out of unspace sane and hale reported the same “delusion” was not a comfort. Because Kris couldn’t stop thinking, surely there was only one logical explanation to everyone having the same experience… That, despite everything, there really was something out there. Unspace had a single and inimitable denizen, and she was trapped in here with it.
Now she felt It creep closer, silent, utterly undetectable, imaginary, except that she knew it was there.
She was playing a game as she walked through the Vulture God, feeling that other take a step for every one of hers as it stalked her. She was in the God’s command pod now, with its empty pilot’s chair. It lurked just on the other side of the door. She knew it for certain. For god’s sake, Kris, keep it together.
Her hand had drifted up to the door panel of its own accord. She absolutely did not want to see what was there. Yet her hand wanted to remove the one thin barrier between her and It. And she wondered: What if this is what happens to those who end themselves? They look into Its face.
Or what if some who come out of unspace aren’t even the same people anymore? Their minds twisted by this “Other”?
Her arm twitched convulsively, pushing towards the door control.
I can’t stop myself. She knew with utter horror that she was going to open the door.
Then the world dropped out from underneath her, the Vulture God wrenched its way out of unspace into the real—and she opened the door.
Olli was on the far side, in her Scorpion, one battered manipulator extended to do exactly the same. They shared a wide-eyed stare.
“Check in, please,” came Idris’s voice over the comms.
“Here,” Kris confirmed, and saw Olli’s lips shape the same word. Kittering and Solace followed suit, from wherever they had ended up in the ship.
What if I’d been on the same side of the door as Olli, she wondered, trembling slightly. It didn’t happen, somehow. As though people, no matter how alone, retained some knowledge of what space was already occupied.
“Let’s not do that again,” she suggested, shipwide. They’d wanted to get clear of Tarekuma as fast as possible, and bedding down would have taken precious time. Idris hadn’t liked the idea but they’d wanted him to just get them the hell out of there. Idris doesn’t ever go into suspension. Kris felt sick at the thought—and simultaneously wretchedly grateful that someone would do this dreadful thing for her, so she’d never have to do it again.
*
Inside the wreck of the Oumaru they found a compartment, set into the wall of what had once been the hold. It was just large enough to hold the box the hijackers had retrieved.
Inside that box, held in some manner of suspension, was a handful of corroded, broken-ended rods and a spiked disc, all apparently made of some ancient greenish-black stone. To the untutored eye, all that was available, they looked disturbingly like Originator regalia.
“Fakes,” Olli said flatly, into a silence. “Must be fakes. You can’t just… lug them about. Everyone knows that.”
“Hegemonics can,” Solace said softly. “No one knows how, but we know they can.”
They stared at the box, now resting at a slant on one of the command consoles. It was still open, displaying its impossible contents for all to see.
“This is…” Idris started, and then stopped. Kris knew why. This was big. They had found something literally worth a world’s ransom. What wouldn’t a Colonial government, a Hanni trade consortium or a Castigar world council give for this? For protection against the Architects—especially now? What wouldn’t the Hegemony give too, to get these relics back? Assuming they were genuine. No. Even if they’re not. After all, how would you go about testing them? Money back if the Architects destroy your world?
“Inestimable value here,” Kittering spoke up, calculations scrolling down his arm-screens too fast to follow. “Literally inestimable. Priceless. Price, less. Invaluable. Without value.”
“What are you babbling about?” Olli snapped at him. “You could sell these…” She trailed off.
“If we were Broken Harvest, maybe we could sell them for some stupid amount that was still stupidly low for what they’re worth,” Kris said. “But we’re just us. And the moment we tried to put these on the market, a thousand different groups would work out we’re far easier to just kill. Even if we sold them for a song.”
“Arses,” Olli breathed, staring at their newfound treasure.
“Anyway,” Idris put in. “We have something else to do first.”
Spacer funerals weren’t elaborate. There was no grand ritual to it, no protected ceremony, fancy hangings or pretty caskets. Most of the human race simply hadn’t been able to pack those old-Earth traditions when the evacuation call went out.
And so the “spacer’s wake” tradition came about.
“Captain Rollo Rostand,” Olli announced. They were in the Vulture’s drone bay, because there was more room there. It was a novelty for spacers to have a physical body present. Not knowing what else to do, Kris had printed out Rollo a fresh set of shipboard clothes and dressed him in his father’s old jacket. He had newly printed sandals on his cold, dead feet and they were slightly askew. Kris kept wanting to adjust them, as though Rollo might get blisters wherever he was going.
Olli took a deep breath. “Born 73 After, on Orbital Nexus Seven over Tormaline,” she said, and looked around at the others.
“Terrible gambler,” Kris put in dutifully, staring down at the man’s body. He had been by far the best captain she and Idris had signed on with, despite his flaws. Because of his flaws. No slave-driver, no profit-chaser, no margin-cutter, and so never quite the successful man of business some of his peers were. But a far better captain to work under, for all that.
“Too quick with his fists, by half,” Idris said faintly. He looked to Kittering but the Hanni was tilted forwards, screens dark and arms motionless.
The silence stretched out until Kris elbowed Solace. Olli looked as though she would object to the Partheni getting a word in, but then scowled and subsided.
“No sense of delegation.” And to her credit, Solace looked as upset as any of them, despite only having known Rollo for a short time. Kris wondered what they’d taught her to expect of a Colony man with a command position. Nothing good, probably, so maybe meeting Rollo had shaken her preconceptions.
Olli sighed. “Our father, he was, our grandfather, our uncle, a captain of his own ship. Loyal to his crew and safe hands. Died in space where we all die, where he belonged. One of ours, he was.”
Kris mumbled the last few words along with her, adding this grief to the others stored up inside her, the way spacers did. And some time in the future there’d be somewhere to drink, some place that didn’t need clear minds and constant maintenance to keep it together, and then the grief would get a round bought for it, and more than one, and have its edges dulled.
“This is not… not not correct,” Kittering’s translator piped up. “Observation of set protocols is recognized and observed but… But no, not for him. Grand tragedy of a lost nurse demands pledges of furtherance and dedication.”
They stared at him. Kris glanced to Olli, finding the same lack of understanding there.
“He produced zero offspring in continuation of his germ line,” Kittering’s translator rattled, turning Hanni concepts into their nearest human equivalents. “He dedicated himself to the nurturing of others, of us, of we. He nursed us. He was our teacher. Our teacher.” And there were nuances of meaning that just weren’t coming through. “I pledge to him that when I give up myself to continuation, he shall be added to the pool of names. I dedicate nineteen eggs to Captain Rollo Rostand.”
Later, Kris slept on this, and on what she knew of the Hannilamb
ra, and thought she understood. Right then, none of it had made sense—save that the little alien was as upset as any of them and needed to express this in his own way, beyond the stripped-down envelope of a spacer’s funeral. Before they sent Rollo off to roam the universe on his last, eternal voyage.
*
And after that: there was the box. It was still on the Vulture’s command console, open and waiting for them, its contents shimmering within a field Olli had not been able to analyse.
“Some kind of gravitic interaction,” was all she could say for certain. “No idea how there’s any kind of generator in that little box. And you don’t feel any push or pull, even when holding the case.”
“Open it up,” Kris suggested. “See how it’s done.” When the drone specialist looked at her, she shrugged. “If we find out, the information alone would be worth…”
“Every Tothiat assassin in the Hegemony after us,” Idris suggested wryly.
“It’s Hegemony tech…” Olli squinted at the box as though trying to see into its substance. “You ever hear of Transient Component Engines? The high-level Essiel stuff—not the toys they give to their underlings. They generate ghost fields in fluids, so that the substrate springs into the shapes they need. Infinitely reconfigurable tech… you need a toaster, it’s a toaster; you need a cutting torch, it’s a cutting torch.”
“They need a lot of toasters in the Hegemony?” Kris asked, intentionally trying to keep things light now the funeral was done.
“Means if you take it apart, the gubbins just splats out the bottom of the box and you’ve got nothing. Even with top-flight lab equipment, nobody’s been able to learn much from Hegemony tech. And you can bet they protect this particular golden nugget with a lot of failsafes.”
“Question,” from Kit, and his screens flashed up. “Aklu’s equivalence to Hegemony.”
“I guess its not officially Hegemony.” Idris shrugged. “But… what do the Essiel think about one of their own going renegade for a life of crime? Same as for anything. Nobody knows.”
“We can’t just sit on this,” said Solace. It was her first contribution since the funeral.
“Sure you’ve got a load of suggestions,” Olli growled.
“If these are real, we have the tools to save a planet,” Solace said. Idris glanced at her warily, sensing a slight distance that hadn’t been there before.
“Query as to which planet,” Kit chirped.
“You don’t understand. We have the tools to save any planet. If we can ship it out in time, the next planet an Architect shows up at can be saved—just by getting this box groundside,” Solace went on implacably. “Assuming these relics are genuine, which they may not be.”
“Assuming the field holding them lasts indefinitely, which it may not,” Kris added. “Aklu might have been desperate to get them back because it’s about to run out of battery.”
“Even so,” Solace said, “we have a duty—”
“Let me guess,” Olli broke in loudly. “This comes down to giving it over to the Parthenon. Slice it thin as you want, that’s what this is about, no?”
“You want to give it to Hugh?” Solace wasn’t backing down this time, meeting Olli’s angry stare. “Or maybe the Hegemony? Some Magdan Boyar with deep pockets? Kittering, you’ve a buyer lined up?”
The Hanni’s screens displayed bafflement, not following the subtext.
“We will sell the damn thing back to the Essiel before it goes to your lot,” Olli said flatly.
“Now wait—” Kris started, but Olli sent her such a murderous glower that she bit the words back.
Solace, face absolutely calm, gave that a moment to hang in the air before saying, “I know that in the Colonies they say a lot of things about my people. I’ve seen the Hugh propaganda too. We’re warmongers, we’re man-haters, we’re unnatural, born in a lab, indoctrinated, Programmed like machines. All that, I’ve heard. And nobody remembers we died for the Colonies, above a hundred worlds, during the war. We were the line.” And the softer edges of her voice were ablating off, revealing only steel beneath. Kris belatedly remembered this wasn’t just third-generation ancestral pride; Solace had been there. She had fought in the war, faced the Architects.
“We were the shield and sword of the Colonies,” the Partheni went on. “And then, when the war was over, you started asking why we had to keep on being different to you. Why couldn’t we just come back and be your wives and daughters again? You really think we quit Hugh because we had some designs on your planets? Because we wanted to line all your menfolk up against a wall, and make everyone else like us? We left because you hated us and would have used your laws to break us if we’d stayed.” She stood, jabbing a finger at Olli. “All we ever did was put our lives on the line for you. And you still hate us for it.”
“That,” Olli spat back, “is not why I hate your bloody kind.” And Kris blinked, because she’d noted the friction between the two, the scowls and frowns from Olli. She’d taken it for a clash of personalities, the rigid soldier against the prickly spacer.
“Look at me, Myrmidon Executor Solace.” Olli twisted in the capsule of her walking frame, stump arms and stump leg shifting. “Your precious eugenics wouldn’t ever have made me, would it? You see a thing like me growing in your vats, you’d flush the contents out into space. Not fit for your perfect society, am I?”
Kris saw anger twist Solace’s face, rage there for a moment like a trapped beast, then just… go, leaving a hollow expression on her face. The Partheni sat down abruptly.
“I… what do you think we’d…? Well, no, but…” Solace’s eyes were fixed on Olli, and everyone else was silent. Eventually she said, in quite a small voice, “I don’t know what to say. I mean… you’re probably right. It would be before you were you, but… with the fleet’s resources we could… I mean…”
Kris waited for Olli to go on the attack again, exploiting the breach. But the drone specialist had sagged back in her capsule, looking unhappy. “Listen, there will be a war between us, some day, maybe even when I’m alive to see it. Your side don’t want it, Hugh sure as fuck doesn’t want it, but it’ll happen.”
“There won’t—” Solace started, but Olli just rolled over her words.
“A war,” she repeated. “And you’ll win, probably. You have the best ships. But we Colonials, we’re awkward buggers, we won’t just behave ourselves. So you’ll have to make us better people, won’t you? Just like your Parthenon is full of better people than us. And you know what better people means? It means that people who aren’t like you don’t have a future, if you win. So the Parthenon doesn’t get this box.”
Solace took a deep breath. “That wouldn’t happen. We don’t want to change people.”
“You said yourself, we hate you,” Olli told her quietly. “That’s a real grand high horse. You can look down from on high, knowing that you’re hated by dumb, regular, inferior humans. Gives you the moral right to do all sorts of things for the greater good. You going to straight up swear to me that there’s no chance, none at all, it’d go like that?”
There was quite a silence, after that. Probably Solace should have been advancing all sorts of guarantees about the future intentions of her government. But Kris reckoned she was a fundamentally honest person.
“I am actually starting to hope these things are fake,” Idris dropped in, when the quiet had become unbearable.
“Overwhelming possibility,” agreed Kit. Kris watched the tilt of his mandibles as they whittled against one another. There was a language to the angles there: you could tell something of his mood—not Hanni moods in general but Kittering in particular. Because he’d been around humans for years and had taken something of them into himself. Right now he was unhappy, plain enough.
“Then let’s focus on that. If we have the real deal or not,” Solace suggested.
“Oh, right, I’ll get my artefact verification tools out, shall I?” Olli snapped, then looked away. “Fine. Okay. Not constructive.”
“It’s all right.” Solace pressed her hands to her face, briefly. Then she was abruptly bright, businesslike, everything else pushed away. “If you do want to check their veracity first, I have a suggestion. And it’s not, ‘Take them to a Partheni assessor,’ before you ask. Idris, do you remember Trine?”
Idris twitched at his name, then frowned. “Do I…? Wait… you mean the research hive? That Trine?”
Kris looked from one to the other as Solace nodded, sensing the submerged weight of their unspoken memories.
“But they… can’t still be around. They’d have gone back to the Assembly, surely. Whatever Trine is now…” Idris stuttered to a halt.
“The longest-instanced Hiver consciousness, ever. Almost as old as we are,” Solace said drily.
“How…?”
“An expert’s an expert. I was sent to consult with them, years back. They’ve been working on dig sites across multiple jurisdictions ever since the war. I can find out where they are now. We can go there… If that’s what people want.”
“Explain,” Olli pressed.
“This was—”
“Back in the war, sure,” Olli agreed. “Who or what is Trine? A Hiver?”
“After Lycos, studying Originators became top priority,” Idris explained. “They set up a whole war department to find out how their relics repelled the Architects. Needless to say, that’s not something anyone ever found out. Then there was Karis, when we realized we knew even less than we thought. They flew a team from one site to the next, gathering data, late on in the war. Partheni ships, because they could get out of trouble best; Int pilots, because we cut corners fastest. I hadn’t thought any of those guys were still around but… Trine was a Hiver. Or, back then, Trine was just an asset of the archaeology team, because Hivers weren’t people. But they talked like a person. They curated all the data for the others, which meant they basically knew more than anyone. I… it’s hard to believe that instance of them is still around, honestly.”
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