Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “That’s… great, well done.” Idris had no idea what that even meant. “I’m sure that’ll go well for you if we survive.”

  Trine’s face beamed at him benevolently. “Oh, I rather feel our survival is in the bag, my old crew-fellow. We bear with us the one known defence against the Architects—mounted within a fighting ship for the first time. What is our enemy going to do, precisely?”

  “Take it down a notch, Delegate,” Solace told them. They rolled their projected eyes but the flow of words stopped and they returned to the regalia. The relics still looked like corroded old junk to Idris, but apparently they were doing their thing. That was all that mattered.

  “Ready now?” Hope addressed them then fired off a dense patter of Parsef to Solace.

  “We’re close now. Under other circumstances, at this distance, we’d be risking the Architect’s attention,” Solace translated. “We have gravitic shields up anyway, in case Trine’s wrong. But so far, it’s just continuing to advance on Berlenhof. We’re matching its trajectory. And we’re ready for you.”

  Idris nodded convulsively, and Xavienne squeezed his arm. Then she went over to the Liaison Ints and murmured some words of encouragement. Both of them looked ashen and frightened, and Idris suspected he looked the same. Not inside, though. Inside him something had woken that had slept since the war. It sent fire though his veins, and he both loathed and loved the sensation. This was what made him a monster and a war-ender.

  He met Solace’s eyes and she saw it there too, the wolf within the lamb. Old Times. She smiled at him and that was Old Times too, and it felt good.

  “Medical crew will stand by,” Hope told them, because at Far Lux he’d almost killed himself, just as a side-effect of doing his job. Right now he felt invulnerable. His mind was streaming with memories: Berlenhof and Lux; the pain of the Intermediary Program; all the hungry, terrified years of growing up with a war on.

  He let his mind out, the wolf loping through the door of its cage after long captivity. Out there, beyond the eggshell walls of the Heaven’s Sword, was the vast, serrated face of the Architect. And again he made himself small, a dagger, a dart, a needle. He folded his mind until he could hurl his consciousness out along the gravity curve, down towards its immensity. He remembered doing this in hate at Berlenhof, as their armada was torn apart around him. He remembered Far Lux, where he had done this in hope—and had been met by the enemy in its own halls.

  You said you’d go away forever. Untrue and he was anthropomorphizing, but still. Why are you here, now? In his baffled frustration he bounced off it, falling away from the crystalline complexity of its internal architecture. Then he was back on the Heaven’s Sword bridge, head already splitting and blood roaring in his ears.

  He risked a glance at his fellows. Davisson had blood running from his nose. Andecka’s fists were balled up in front of her face, cheeks wet with tears. Xavienne stood ramrod straight, head tilted back and lined face without expression.

  Again…

  He fell back into that space—the deformation between unspace and the real, where the Architect’s consciousness resided. He entered its vast complexity immediately, this time, this mind as big as a moon… He was blundering like a moth, battering the mirrored surfaces within its substance. And somewhere in there was a window onto the thinking part of the Architect, which knew why it did what it did… The thing that made planets and ships into art, and murdered billions. And its species hadn’t even known or cared, until it met Idris Telemmier over Far Lux.

  Why now? Why come back? Had they been busy exterminating some other species, while two fleeting human generations had come and gone? Had they only granted a stay of execution, and Idris had simply misunderstood? He didn’t think so.

  What’s changed? He rushed headlong through the maze of its mind. He was looking for the monster at the heart of it—so he could demand answers, demand recognition and a future for his people. He sensed the others, as though he was stumbling over the tangled string they left behind. As though he saw their faces briefly in the shimmering confusion of the place. Xavienne’s calm determination; Davisson breaking up, mind fracturing; the deadly earnestness of Andecka Tal Mar. She was terrified beyond all reason but was still fighting.

  He thought he saw himself in that maze, the Idris that had been. The Idris from Far Lux who had found that one sublime thread to the very heart of the labyrinth, tea with the minotaur, diplomatic relations with the unthinkable. Then as he headed down that way, in search of the warren’s heart, he found the Idris from Berlenhof-that-was… he’d been panicked, maddened, failing even as the Heaven’s Sword had failed. And yet he had achieved just enough back then, slowed the enemy just enough…

  For a moment he was back on that bridge again, hearing shouted orders in Parsef, the cries of pain, the accelerators singing, and he didn’t know which Heaven’s Sword he was on. Then he forced his mind out again, following the trail he’d blazed. Davisson was shrieking in his ears like an animal being butchered. Solace was shouting, a hand gripping his shoulder. But he was losing himself again inside the mind of the monster, hunting it, aware that it was hunting too. It was concentrating on something. Something new, different. He was the expert, after all. He knew when an Architect’s mind felt wrong.

  What are you doing? But it couldn’t hear him. It was concentrating, that unthinkably vast edifice focusing on something infinitesimally small—something on the human level, like a giant trying to thread a needle. His ears were flooded with screaming now, too many voices, weapons discharging, a sound like stone tearing, a choir of hornets in a rage… He had no frame of reference for these sounds, and couldn’t guess if they were real or not.

  Then he was out again, the fresh contortions of the Architect’s mind excluding him without ever acknowledging him. He stared at the torn-up bridge of the Heaven’s Sword and reeled. Solace was shaking him by the arm, had been for some time. Abruptly his legs gave out and he fell into her. He was trying to form words but was forgetting how they were made. There were great rents in the metal walls of the bridge and, everywhere, medics were crouching by bodies. He saw Exemplar Hope lying crooked nearby, too much of her insides ripped out for her to have survived. A dozen other officers and crew had been served likewise and there were myrmidons amongst them. Their beautiful armour was rent and buckled, accelerators lying where they’d been dropped from dead hands.

  “What—?” Idris said. Because none of this was battle damage. This wasn’t what happened to a ship when an Architect took it and mauled it. This was… trivial, small-scale stuff. This was more like the damage people did to one another, for all it left the victims just as dead. This wasn’t what happened when they were struck by an entity that could reshape planets.

  Mind still whirling, he looked to his fellow Ints.

  Andecka was kneeling, clutching at her head. He thought she must still be locked in combat with the Architect, still vainly trying to reach it. Davisson was… dead, he had to be dead. Something had ruptured inside his skull, hard enough to push the whole left side of his head out of shape. Xavienne…

  He ran over to her, already stuttering denials. This was not Architect damage. Something had struck her, something physical, something sharp. It had carved into her thin body and smashed her to the ground. There were medics here, the Partheni prioritizing her over their own fallen—desperately stitching her and her life together as best as they could. The sight of her injured, perhaps dying, was like a spike into Idris’s own heart.

  “Idris, stay still,” Solace was imploring him. “You’re hurt. Let the medics get to you.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he mumbled, tasting blood in his mouth. He spat it out past his chewed-up tongue. Then he saw Trine. The Hiver’s bad leg had been removed completely, severed at the hip, and a handful of their arms were just stumps. Their false face flickered and stuttered as it tried to speak. But its expressions and the movement of its lips didn’t match the words that thrummed from their torso.

/>   “Gone!” they buzzed. “Gone!”

  Idris’s eyes went to the framework the Hiver had set up for the regalia. They were gone, as Trine said.

  “What happened?” he managed, meeting Solace’s wide gaze. There was blood on her face, he saw.

  “They came for the regalia,” she told him.

  “They who?”

  “Things, soldiers from the Architect. Crystal things. They punched into the ship. We couldn’t fight them, couldn’t stop them. Took the relics and left. Idris, we—”

  One of the surviving officers yelled something in Parsef, then the whole ship shuddered as bulkheads ground against one another. Sparks flashed from buckled panels and half the screens went dark. It was almost reassuring in its familiarity. Now that’s an Architect attack.

  There was more rapid back and forth between the bridge crew, and Solace said tightly, “We can’t survive another strike like that. The shields barely held us together.” And it was, Idris thought, a remarkable thing that they were still in one piece. That this work of human hands had endured the wrath of an angry god.

  But not twice, and so he was breaking from Solace, bounding over to the pilot’s station. “Give me unspace, someone. I am plotting a course,” as clearly as possible. He heard Solace translate for him, trusting him. Someone was objecting that they were right in the Architect’s gravity shadow and couldn’t leave the real. Solace was telling them that they could, with Idris as navigator. Didn’t they know what he was? Her hand was bruisingly tight on his shoulder, the tension giving the lie to her words.

  They gave him everything he wanted and, for that moment, he had the power of a top-of-the-range Parthenon warship at his fingertips. Except before an Architect, that didn’t mean very much.

  The appalling mass of the thing gave them no clearance at all to get into unspace. It narrowed their options to a single equation, a needle to thread. They were caught between the hungry weight of the world-destroyer and the world it was set upon destroying. But Idris was on fire, half out of his mind, half in unspace already. It was as though the universe simply drew him a new Throughway, for one use only, just for him. He took the battered Sword and whipped it out from under the Architect’s descending hammer. He yanked them through unspace for a handful of traumatizing, unprotected moments. It would feature in the nightmares of everyone aboard for the rest of their lives. And he had saved the ship, and everyone still living on it. At least until the Architect caught up.

  29.

  Idris

  They shot Idris full of drugs to bring down the inflammation in his brain, and to stem the internal bleeding. Then there were more drugs to combat the sluggishness brought on by the first batch. At least they quietened the hallucinations he’d been getting, of motion at the corners of his vision plus a sense of impending doom. Although as doom was in fact impending maybe that hadn’t been a symptom of anything other than actual current events.

  He was in a Hugh infirmary, on an orbital over Berlenhof. And if he listened carefully, he could hear staff arguing about which patients could be got out on what ships. He reckoned that same conversation would be dominating the planet below, too. Oh, the powerful and wealthy who owned estates across the beautiful sun-kissed archipelagos of Berlenhof would have their own transport, but right now a fair proportion of Hugh’s entire bureaucratic staff would be performing the hard maths with every vessel they had left, working out who could be saved. Luckily, he had a ride. Solace had told him the Vulture God had docked at the same orbital. She’d gone to call the crew and tell them their errant son was still alive.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “It’s never attacked like that before. Was it because we had the regalia?”

  Beside his bunk, Delegate Trine was perched in a basic walker frame. Both legs had been removed, so he could be given a matching pair. Trine was sick of limping.

  “If you’re asking me to make an educated guess, old confederate, I don’t know.” The Hiver’s face was disconcertingly absent, their projectors having literally given up the ghost. The remaining silvery bowl showed nothing but a smear of Idris’s reflection. “Perhaps this is what Architects do, if they encounter Originator gear on a ship? But really, if it can deal with regalia on a ship, why not on a planet? If I were the Hegemony I’d start getting very nervous indeed.”

  The Architect had launched a couple of its smallest spines into the Heaven’s Sword, inflicting significant but incidental hull damage. Then the spines had begun fragmenting out into… soldiers, Trine had said. Individual mobile units. They had been made of the same crystal as the spines and took on many shapes. Some were humanoid, most were not: many legs, no legs, serpentine, arachnoid, flying ray-forms and other less recognizable things. Hearing the unfamiliar descriptions, Idris had a creeping fear these were species the Architects had met, and there was only one way that meeting ever went. They were drawn from a great funerary list of extinct civilizations—one with a space on it reserved for humanity.

  The stuff the soldiers were made from was simultaneously stone-hard and malleable. Accelerator shot that would pierce a starship’s hull had just ploughed into and through them without damage. Energy weapons had refracted from them in rainbows of blinding light. One intruder had been cut in half when Partheni techs explosively triggered a blast door. Overall, though, they had rampaged through the ship to the bridge without serious opposition. There they had taken the regalia. And, when the deck crew and Trine had tried to stop them, they’d responded with lethal force.

  “Quite remarkable, really,” the Hiver reflected. “They used their limbs to cut and bludgeon close in. But they could also just shoot shards of themselves like living accelerator guns, just chewing up their mass as ammunition. I count myself lucky that I merely lost a few limbs.”

  Idris closed his eyes but found he couldn’t imagine it. “How did they do it?”

  “Ah, well.” The loss of much of their body hadn’t damaged Trine’s pedantic tone. “As it happens, old chum, I was able to take some readings.”

  “While they were attacking?”

  “Indeed yes.”

  “While they were killing everyone?”

  “For science. I judged that, when my time came to stand between these soldiers and their prize, I would prove a short-lived barrier. Judged correctly, as it happened. But before then, I was able to perform a little impromptu research—and the data raises some fascinating possibilities. I believe the soldiers were just puppets, manipulated by the Architect through incredibly precise application of gravitic force.”

  Idris’s eyes shot open and he sat up in the bunk. “Yes.”

  “I am glad you concur.”

  “That makes sense. It was doing something, when I was trying to contact it. It was… absorbed, had to bend all its concentration to it. It was making its puppets dance.”

  “Ah, the power,” said Trine wistfully. “The precision. If it weren’t so horrible it would be rather wonderful, don’t you think?”

  Idris grunted. “I guess Borodin and the others are mad at the Parthenon for taking the relics out there. Now we’ve lost them.”

  “Most likely, although the loss of the chance to study them is patently the greater woe,” Trine said airily. “Honestly, though? I suspect the councillors have bigger things on their minds right about now. Such as saving their families.”

  Solace came back then, with a chair. It didn’t look as smooth as the Partheni model he’d had, and he’d been terrible at driving that.

  “I can walk,” he told her, hoping it was true. “What’s going on?”

  “The crew is waiting for you,” she said.

  In the end he could walk, just. But only after Solace found him a cane. Leaning on it and on Solace, he finally made his way down to the docking ring and into what was surely the smartest, cleanest berth the Vulture God had ever enjoyed. Behind him came the merry clatter of Trine’s surrogate frame on its six legs.

  Olli was working on the ship in her Scorpion, and Idris saw
a fair amount of clutter littering the pristine junk; parts that had been inside and were now outside. Making room for refugees, he realized. Even the Vulture God was needed. Kris had been sitting with Kit and another Hannilambra over a holographic Landstep board, but she jumped up when Idris came in. From her face, she’d expected to see him wheeled in on a gurney. Her relief was palpable.

  She hugged him, too hard so that he winced and she flinched away. Then Olli tapped him on the top of the head with one of her manipulator arms, and Kit fiddled a greeting from his game.

  “I notice nobody is particularly concerned about my wellbeing,” Trine pointed out.

  “We don’t know you, Buzzboy,” Olli told them.

  “Entirely your loss.” Trine waved their remaining arms dismissively.

  “They said you were hurt.” Kris looked Idris up and down.

  “I am hurt.”

  “They said you failed?” Olli added.

  Idris met her gaze, finding only the usual frankness, not an accusation.

  “The Architect is still coming,” he confirmed. “We lost the relics, and the ship got crippled.”

  “He brought us home,” Solace said defensively. Olli bristled, then just nodded.

  “We’re shipping out,” Olli said. “They’re finding us twenty colonists we can take. Twenty through unspace with no beds, Idris. But everyone’s carrying. They’re jamming three, four, into packet runners, even.” Her face was set against tragedy, the way Colonials had lived during the war and in the lean times after. It was habit that came back easily. “I mean, could be worse, right? Matey over there with Kit, name something like Hullaway or some damn thing, came in with a fleet of freighters. Now they’ve dumped their entire cargo into space, that’s maybe another thirty thousand people, if they can cram them in. If they can get them up from planetside in time.”

  “The Architect…?”

  “Still coming,” Kris confirmed.

  “The Thunderchild put out to meet it,” Solace said tonelessly. “Also the Blake and the Perihelion, those two Hugh warships that turned up. ‘Buying time with steel.’”