Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And the Ints had delivered their warning, but the frightened Colonials had just been angry at the false alarm. They’d chewed out the scaremongering Ints over the comms, because what were they supposed to do? Just pack up and leave, because three crazy people told them it was the end of the world?

  Then all three Ints had gone dead silent, staggering as though the ship’s a-grav had faltered. Two minutes later the Architect had torn its way into the system. It tumbled out of unspace and righted itself, its million serried spines directed at the planet.

  Olumu was a small, dark man, older than Idris-as-was. He’d die two years later, in space as a spacer should, when the freighter he was piloting suffered a catastrophic systems failure at the exact moment it opened a path to unspace. Tess was an angular woman, starveling-thin, half her face a tinted plastic mask because she wouldn’t get her reconstructive surgery until after the war. Ints were too valuable to take out of circulation for that long. She’d join the Cartography Corps and bow out of Colonial history that way. Vanished into unspace, searching for new Throughways and planetary systems, fate unknown but not coming back.

  But they would live to die later. All three of them would live, as would every soul aboard the Yennenga, and the entire population of Far Lux. For this was the day the war ended.

  There was no fleet gathered at Far Lux that day, no valiant holding action planned to buy time for an evacuation. Everyone planetside was simply running for the ships, for the landing fields. The orbitals’ personnel were clearing out already, all except for a skeleton staff who stayed at their posts to coordinate the escape effort below. Idris had thought of them as the Yennenga moved forwards, a solitary mote against the immensity that was descending on the planet. Bureaucrats, data-pushers, planners and accountants—they were all giving their lives to save just a few more families of miners and factory workers.

  Numb, he’d felt numb then. He’d been living through the holocaust of war all his life. And he couldn’t remember a single moment of security; always the Architects ridding the galaxy of humanity one world at a time. He’d spent his childhood crammed into the hold of one ship after another, his family lost long ago. Maybe they were dead, or just scattered by too many losses and too much stress. Then as soon as he was old enough, he’d gone for active service. Because what else was there? The war didn’t spare civilians anyway, so why not? As soon as he’d heard about the new Intermediary Program, he’d signed up for that too. He’d been chosen due to some arcane criteria he never understood. And he’d survived it, when most volunteers hadn’t. He’d been remade into something else inside his head, something not quite human. Then he’d gone to war. He’d been at Berlenhof. He’d touched the mind of the enemy.

  And so it was war he wanted to bring. The three of them were a living spearhead, and they were going to stab into the brain of the oncoming Architect. What else was there? Nobody thought they’d win, not anymore. Perhaps they’d manage a nomadic existence like the Naeromathi, limping from system to system. Stripping worlds to build more ships, so they could limp some more. Or perhaps they’d be gone, like Harbinger Ash’s people. No doubt there were many other races they’d never know, because they had been so thoroughly and comprehensively removed from the universe.

  The Partheni captain knew they were courting death. She didn’t hesitate, though. Idris and the others wanted to fly straight into the teeth of the Architect, and so they went. They were a tiny fleck of dust against that barbed landscape as it readied itself to turn Far Lux into another barren sculpture.

  Idris imagined his mind like origami, small, so small. All the complexity of it folded down to a point, so he could drive it deep into the vastness of the Architect. They’d learned that whole expanse was the entity’s mind, as well as its substance. He could feel Olumu and Tess making the same preparations. They couldn’t coordinate, not quite, but they struck almost simultaneously. Their minds ranged across the outer reaches of the enemy, prying for a way in, becoming ever smaller, smaller… until they could slip their consciousnesses into the radiant labyrinth of its being. Then they could chase through the canals of its thoughts, looking for something to break, something to tear.

  The voices of the Partheni crew were in his ears, reporting and receiving orders. Every slight variance within the Architect was measured and broadcast back to the planet. So that the data could travel with the refugees and get back to the Program. Because there was always another battle to prepare for, another lesson to learn. Nobody knew this would be the end.

  Idris struck. His mind was a lance, driven as far as it would go into his enemy. He sought vulnerable tissue, baffled by the sheer scale of it. As well try to stab a man to death with a needle an atom wide. He clawed at it. He screamed in the halls of its brain, beat his fists against the walls of its mind, and it didn’t sense him. It felt the intrusion, but didn’t understand what he was. He was turbulence, interference, static. A bad dream. But he was nothing it recognized in any meaningful way. The Architect trembled ever so slightly as the three Intermediaries tried to break it, and just shouldered on. Then the Yennenga fell back as the nightmare accelerated towards Far Lux. It had singled out the system’s inhabited world, as Architects always did. Because they must have their art, and their art demanded death.

  No Architect ever reworked a lifeless desert world into a planet-sized sculpture. Idris knew they understood the teeming lives they snuffed out, and he hated them for it. In that moment something in him broke and he made himself big again, inside its mind. He unfolded all that careful origami, shattered that needle point, pressed himself against every wall at once, inside his mind, inside its mind… and he pushed outwards.

  On the bridge of the Yennenga he’d been screaming, lying on the floor with the captain shouting for a medic. He’d been rigid, muscles wrenching at bones so that he’d ache for a solid month after. Idris’s face had been awash with tears from clenched-shut eyes, blood flowed from his nose, spittle from his locked-open mouth.

  And Idris had been there. With it. All that maze of complexity within the Architect had focused, in that moment, into a single consciousness. This was an entity with the power to reshape worlds, and he had its attention. Not a mote of dust in its eye, not a pebble beneath its foot or a thorn pricking its thumb. He had a mind, as it had a mind. He was a thing that, minuscule as he was, it saw as real.

  He’d roared in: hating, angry, terrified. He’d driven into the Architect’s mind on a flame of negative emotions, knowing only that it was the executioner of worlds. And now he touched the truth of it. He understood that until now no human—perhaps no denizen of any planet it had ruined, in its millennia of life—had ever existed for it. At his/its back was the world of Far Lux. And Idris could see through its senses that the planet was mottled with a kind of rot, a disfiguring decay that the Architect needed to clear away. That rot was thought, the collected minds of all the people living there. They exerted a pressure on the fabric of space that the Architect, for reasons Idris had never grasped, felt the need to release.

  For a measureless time he and the Architect had confronted one another. He had sampled the immensity of its mind and it had taken a magnifying lens and studied him, as a human might examine a microbe. A thing so small that it might as well not be there at all. He had no anger left, at that point. There was nothing of the white-hot fire that had taken him so far. Such emotions withered and died in the face of that godlike scrutiny. How foolish it was to rage over the deaths of so many microbes, the extermination of something almost invisible.

  Yet it saw him and understood him. Perhaps it unfolded the page of his mind to its fullest extent, ironing flat the crenulations of his brain until he was spread so thin and wide that he finally became visible to it. His past and present and all the complexities of his being, all exposed for study as never before—and still the most insignificant thing the Architect had ever been called upon to recognize.

  He’d stopped screaming then. He stared sightlessly towards the ceilin
g of the Yennenga’s bridge as the medics restarted his heart and used machines to keep his lungs working.

  There was a moment he recognized as regret. He was never sure if he’d felt the being’s regret over all its kind had done. Or if this was some perverse personal response to the Architects departing, now they wouldn’t be continuing their work. For they would not, he understood. For now, at least, and who knew what “now” meant to beings so vast. Perhaps they would go and think about what they’d done for a hundred million years, before coming back to pick up where they’d left off. Perhaps they’d wait until the suns had all gone out and the universe was cold.

  The Architect had fallen back into unspace and not returned. And that was the last anyone saw of them. That day was the last day of the war, although it was months before anyone dared suggest it was so.

  *

  Decades later, in diplomatic isolation aboard the Vulture God, Idris caught the news out of Far Lux and felt as though someone had taken his guts out. It was all for nothing, he thought, but of course that wasn’t true. Humanity had been given fifty years to consolidate and grow; people who would have died had been given decades to live. It had been his achievement—him and Tess and Olumu, and he the only survivor of the three. He had ended the war, there at Far Lux, and on the back of that, he tried to become irrelevant. Just be Idris Telemmier on a succession of crappy ships towards the outskirts of the Human Sphere. He’d had his fill of making history.

  Now, sections of the Hugh administration on Berlenhof were being yanked out of decades-old mothballs. The next unspace shipment from Far Lux would be a wave of refugees. Everyone was scrambling to set up camps, kitchens, shelter, medical supplies. And at the same time, less savoury engines were turning their wheels.

  “There’s Sathiel, the fucker,” Olli said, jabbing a finger at the screen. They’d all crammed into Command, where the Vulture was displaying rolling news. “We should’ve had a sweepstake on it.”

  They could see the cult hierograve’s benevolent white-bearded face. It was as if he’d never committed the biggest fraud of the last forty years. Instead, he was talking animatedly about the protection the Essiel would be only too happy to extend—and for such a small price. Idris waited for the interviewer to mention the Oumaru, but somehow it never came up. Suddenly the cult had gone from clowns in costumes to everyone’s new best friend, someone who might be called upon for an urgent favour sometime soon.

  Two Colonial warships had turned up at Berlenhof, ostensibly to defend against any Architect incursion. Idris knew full well they’d have set off before the news broke, and had come to lean on the Partheni.

  “They want the regalia, of course,” Trine announced mournfully, having lost his chance to work on the things. “Which are here, on this very ship, a mere hundred metres away. And suddenly they are of a far more than academic interest to the authorities on Berlenhof.”

  “They could, what, just take them down there and make the whole planet Architect-proof?” Olli asked him.

  “I’d be willing to wager my ambassadorial status that Hugh is digging up absolutely everything it knows about the process, my old comrade-in-adversity,” Trine agreed. “And maybe it isn’t anything more significant than just having the things there. We’re all aware that the Hegemony loves ritual for ritual’s sake.”

  “But Hugh don’t have the regalia,” Kris pointed out.

  “No, they don’t,” Trine agreed. “But—what coincidence!—suddenly they have warships here. How fortuitous.”

  “They can’t just start shooting. How will that end?” demanded Kris.

  “They think they’ll be able to threaten, and we’ll cave,” Solace said hollowly. “But we won’t. It’s not what we do. Also, top-of-the-line Colonial does not beat top-of-the-line us. They can’t stop us just leaving if we want to go.”

  “Then why haven’t you?” Olli needled. “Just leg it. Everything’s simpler for you if Berlenhof gets hit, right?”

  Solace stared at her. “Hope,” she said.

  “Which one of you was Hope?” the specialist asked blankly.

  “No, I mean the… the idea of hope.” Solace frowned. “My people will be hoping we don’t have to just walk away. They’ll be hoping there’s a diplomatic solution. And…”

  “And what? They’re going to be our warrior angels all over again, throw themselves in the way if the Architects come?”

  “Yes.” Solace was blinking rapidly. “Yes, Olli. Exactly that.”

  Idris wondered how much of this vaunted hope was her own, that her people were still the heroes she remembered. She’d been in suspension for a long time and the universe had turned.

  “The Angels of Punching You in the Face,” he pronounced sadly, but ending with a smile. God knew he needed something to lighten the mood. Solace rounded on him, looking for mockery, finding none.

  “Enquiry—crew logistical arrangements on sudden failure of diplomacy?” Kittering piped up. He’d been crouching in one corner, puzzling over his backscreen, currently spread on the floor in several pieces.

  “Good point. I’m guessing your people won’t have time to just drop us off, if you do decide to leg it home,” Kris agreed.

  “Well,” Solace shifted awkwardly. “They did ask… would you agree to come with us? I mean, war or peace, diplomacy or not, I’m supposed to ask.”

  “And if we say no, that means they let us go, right?” Olli asked, with heavy sarcasm. “Maybe give us a little hamper of rations for the journey, complimentary mint candy, that kind of thing?”

  “We—they—we would contract with you, on good terms. For the services of the Vulture God and all crew.”

  “So long as crew includes Idris,” Kris finished for her.

  “Why not just take him?” Olli said suddenly. “I mean, you can. The Vulture’s in your ship’s hold. Even we were able to storm this damn bucket when we needed to. You have all the supermarines in the universe, right outside the hatch. Why this goddamn pussyfooting around?”

  “We don’t want to… That’s a step we can’t un-take, and what use are any of you under duress? You ever think about trying to force an Int to do something, really? Hugh might have all the leash contracts in the world, but you can’t tell me the Liaison Board doesn’t invest massively in psych-conditioning too. Maybe they have slaver cut-outs or some killer implant to keep their hooks in, even. Because it’s like those birds they keep on Magda, the expensive hunting ones. The whole point of them is to let them fly, and if they fly then maybe they never come back. But more than that, we don’t want to. And I don’t want to. At least consider a contract… Largesse or Halma or goods in kind, however you want it. Most spacer crews would be scrabbling over each other for this sort of deal. Is it so bad that it’s us?”

  Olli opened her mouth for the quick retort, then shut it, looking around at her fellows. “Fuck,” she said at last. “Actually, hate to admit it, that’s not a bad pitch.”

  “Well it comes down to Idris,” Kris noted. “I mean… I’d be for it. I, er, always wanted to see the Parthenon. But Idris?”

  He was silent. Their voices had become very far away. He was gripping the edge of the pilot’s board, to stop himself falling into the vast well he could feel forming. The jabber of the news mediotype had become no more than static.

  His name again, from Kris, then Solace. Then Olli lifted a leg of her walker frame to prod him with its tip. There might have been the tinkle and clatter of Kit reassembling his screen, taping over the cracks. Trine’s phantom face with its vacant beatitude. All so far away.

  Just outside the ship, the curve of space fell into a void, pulled down by the leaden weight of nothingness. Gravity without mass, because its cause was on the other side of the membrane. In unspace. He knew that Saint Xavienne would be feeling just this, wherever she was. And over where the Liaison Board plied its trade, its conscript Intermediaries would be clutching at their heads, wailing, waking from nightmares—because none of the poor bastards would know what t
hey were sensing. It hadn’t happened before in their lifetimes. They weren’t veterans, like him and Xavienne.

  “It’s coming,” he told the crew. “It’s here.”

  28.

  Solace

  Her sisters let Solace stand with the Vulture’s crew, in the hastily convened meeting that followed. It was a fiction, obviously. Solace was a Myrmidon Executor of the Parthenon, not some free spacer. Except there was a fierce loyalty to the crew inside her, and it didn’t have to clash with her lifelong devotion to her sisters just yet.

  The conference chamber was decidedly more crowded than before. The Hegemonic cult had a seat at the table, which made nobody very happy. Sathiel, in his full finery, was the only person in the room with a smile. And Solace wanted to live up to her sorority’s name and punch his teeth in.

  “Obviously,” the hierograve was saying, “the Divine Essiel are far above me.” His self-effacement was so shallow as to be two-dimensional. “Their will filters through to humble agents such as myself but dimly. However, their mercy and grace is without bounds. They would, I am sure, extend their protective benevolence over your Colony worlds… if the Council pledged unconditional fealty to the Hegemony. Perhaps a diplomatic barge could even emerge in time to consecrate Berlenhof? The Architect, though it has manifested in-system, appears to be considering the ephemeral grave of its kin before beginning its approach. We may yet have time.”

  Neither Borodin nor Tact liked any of that. But the mere fact that Sathiel was here was telling. If all else fails…

  “So—what if they take the anti-Architect goods and then say, ‘Ho, ho, just kidding,’ when the Essiel want their back taxes?” Olli murmured.