Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Idris felt his legs start to go, and Solace slid a crate behind him so he could collapse in safety.

  “The Heaven’s Sword barely survived the first direct hit,” he said hollowly. “The ships out there, they won’t buy Berlenhof more than a cupful of time. It won’t help.”

  “I’ll book you another big diplomatic meeting, you can discuss it with them,” Olli said. “In the meantime, you coming with us or not? Because if you’re out, we can fit in another couple people when we go.” But she was watching Idris with a sharpness that belied her air of unconcern.

  I failed. But it wasn’t too late. He pictured the Architect riding the skies of doomed Berlenhof, visible even during the daytime, crystals catching the sunlight. They’d have every trainee Int at the Liaison Board working to stop it… maybe that would be enough. But he didn’t believe it. He could stay behind on the orbital and try one last time. But by the time the Architect was that close, its mass dragging at the planet below, it would be too late.

  “I need a ship,” he said.

  The others were all staring at him. “Ships are kind of busy,” Olli pointed out.

  “Any ship with a gravitic drive—a packet runner, a shuttle, some rich kid’s speedster, anything,” Idris said desperately. “I need a second chance. I have to get out there and do it again. I can save everyone. I know I can…”

  “Idris, you were on the way to dying when you broke off,” Solace told him.

  “Then it’s my right to die trying!” he shouted at her, then put his hands over his mouth, horrified at the great gout of anger and frustration that had come out of him.

  Solace nodded, then nodded again, convulsively. “Come on. We’ll go see Tact.”

  The orbital’s corridors were cluttered with people and it was hard to push through. Some were plainly evacuating—clutching bags, cases and treasured possessions that were mostly going to end up on the dock floor. We forgot, Idris thought numbly. We forgot what it was like to be hunted. And I’ve lived to see it again. He wondered if it had been his destiny to see events travel full circle, the reason for his unnatural longevity. So he should now wither to bones and dust, curse suddenly lifted.

  Then they found themselves facing a wall of purple, red and gold, a hurrying band of men and women in high-collared robes. They were led by a man who had finally lost his geniality somewhere along the way.

  “Hierograve Sathiel,” Solace addressed him coldly. “Get out of the way.”

  He gave her a wide-eyed stare, but there was neither fight nor authority in him at that moment. He shrank aside and his people flowed past, giving Solace plenty of clearance.

  “You wanted people to worry about the Architects? Happy now?” she shouted after him, with venom worthy of Olli. Sathiel made no reply as he fled.

  Monitor Superior Tact was closeted with Lucef Borodin when they arrived, but Solace made sufficient noise that they were allowed in. Idris suspected that the two diplomats didn’t have much to discuss anyway, at this stage. Borodin hadn’t shaved that morning and there were bags under Tact’s eyes.

  “I need a ship,” Idris insisted, because he was all out of pleasantries.

  “Menheer Telemmier.” He couldn’t tell if Tact’s cold manner was just her, or if she was judging his failure. And why shouldn’t she? He certainly did.

  “A ship,” he repeated. “Get me out there again, on a ship.”

  “The military force going to face the Architect has already left,” she said.

  “Bring one back.”

  “Menheer Telemmier, there’s no time. They will be engaging shortly.”

  “They…” He had a sudden sense of disjointed time. The drugs had upset all his internal clocks. “I need another chance.”

  Tact regarded him, her expression ambiguous. “That’s it, is it?”

  “Please. Get me out there.”

  She glanced at Borodin. “I’ll see what I can—”

  “No,” the other diplomat said. He didn’t seem very happy about it, but the word was out there.

  Tact raised an eyebrow. Idris felt time cascading like sand falling from a broken hourglass into the void. There would be no chance to turn it over again, no more when it was spent.

  “The Colonial citizen Idris Telemmier will be leaving aboard the liner Sepulchrave, which is currently standing by,” Borodin said flatly. “Good ship, actually. My own family are on it, as are all non-essential Hugh staff. I’ll be heading there soon.”

  “No,” Idris told him. “I’ll leave on the Vulture God then. With my crew.”

  “You won’t.”

  He felt a keen need for Kris. But who’d have thought this old argument would raise its head now. “You can’t—”

  “Menheer Telemmier,” Borodin addressed him, “Saint Xavienne died. They couldn’t save her.”

  Idris made a sound like grieving. “No.”

  “She died,” Borodin said heavily. “And that makes you almost the last of the first wave. The hope our new Intermediaries need. Which means we can’t let you rush off and get killed facing this particular Architect. I’m sorry.”

  “I need a ship. I can save your fucking planet!” Idris shouted at him, at them both, at all the universe. “Just get me out there. I have a right to screw with my own head, if that’s what I want.” His eyes narrowed, words coming too fast for thought. “You’re Magdan, right? Is that what this is about? Lose Berlenhof—then Magda’s centre of the Colonies? That what you want?”

  “Idris.” Solace’s hand was on his arm, trying to rein in his temper.

  Borodin just looked sad. “I’m going to have my people take you to the Sepulchrave now.”

  Idris looked to Tact. “Do something.”

  She didn’t meet his gaze. “This is very much out of my hands, I’m afraid.” And a warning look passed from her to Solace. “Right now, Partheni writ is running very thin. This is a Hugh matter.”

  Colonial soldiers were coming in, four of them. Solace tensed, but under Tact’s stern gaze she was not going to make a diplomatic incident of it.

  “I could save everyone,” Idris said, not shouting now, barely audible. “You just have to let me.”

  “Get him away, keep him safe,” Borodin told his soldiers. “I’ll be along in time for the launch.”

  *

  Borodin’s people took Idris’s stick and put him in a chair, which they drove for him. He kept trying to get out but, each time, one of the soldiers pushed him back down. Not forcefully; respectfully, even.

  In that part of his head that made him an Intermediary, Idris felt the Architect out there, getting closer. He didn’t feel the world full of people about to be obliterated, but they weighed on him anyway. Bleakly, he knew that Borodin and Hugh were going to be disappointed in him. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself and this failure. He’d put himself outside their control, even if release came via the edge of a razor.

  After his first attempts at Berlenhof, and Far Lux, it seemed profoundly unjust that he’d be remembered as the man who let a planet die. It was as though the Architects were personally invested in erasing every good thing he’d ever done.

  Then they wheeled Idris into what would have been the wealthy passenger lounge, in better times. It was currently crammed full of people shouting, crying, arguing and holding each other. Through the clear far wall, he could see the sleek flank of the Sepulchrave, painted with a hotch-potch of colours—a rich man’s attempt to replicate the old mismatch of Colonial scarcity. There were ten hatches with umbilicals connected to the ship, and Hugh staff were diligently trying to hurry people aboard as efficiently as possible. The transparent window also revealed some of the planet below. Idris could see the lights of shuttles and lifters rising up from the gravity well, each one surely filled to the brim with the desperate and the lucky.

  I could just shout, “Hey, someone else want my place?” and start a riot, he thought. But he said nothing, just sat in the chair while his escort jockeyed, threatened and pulled rank to get
closer and closer to the nearest hatch.

  I could… I could… But he couldn’t. There was nothing he could do.

  They reached the hatch, with a trail of angry people resenting their every step. He wondered, with new horror, whether someone at the back of the queue had lost their place for his sake.

  “I’m not going,” he said and made a game effort to get out of the chair.

  “Remain seated for your own safety, Menheer,” one of the soldiers said. Idris grabbed at the hand that came for him, but he was too weak. And even if he’d been strong, the man would have been stronger.

  “Help,” he said, ridiculously. “I’m being kidnapped. I don’t want to go. I can save the world…” In the general hubbub, almost nobody heard him. And those who did plainly thought he was deranged. “I’m an Int,” he squeaked as the soldier shoved him back again. “I can stop it. Get me on a ship!” Which was even more stupid because they were getting him on a ship. Just not in the way he wanted.

  “I’ll take it from here, Sergeant,” a new voice broke in. Idris stopped shouting, because it sounded familiar.

  “Who the hell are you?” the lead soldier demanded.

  The newcomer was standing behind his chair, and Idris caught a flash of a holographic ID. “Intervention Board,” the man said. “We’re intervening.”

  The soldiers were all suddenly quite still. “Sir, we have orders…”

  “Mordant House has orders too. We’re requisitioning him.”

  “Sir—”

  “Let’s get out of the way and let these people board, shall we?”

  When the soldier obeyed, Idris knew he wasn’t going to end up on the Sepulchrave after all. Mordant House was the bogeyman of the Colonies. Mordant House knew all your secrets. It protected the Human Sphere against all threats, and good luck if that threat was you.

  “You need that chair, or can you walk?” and at last Idris shifted around enough to recognize the narrow, suspicious face of Havaer Mundy.

  “If you take my arm, I can walk.”

  “Fine.” Mundy helped him up. The soldiers looked daggers but none of them would challenge Mordant House.

  “So,” Idris said, as Mundy helped him out of the lounge, against a tide of panicked refugees. “You have some Mordant House ship or something? That can get me out there?” Please don’t tell me I’m just trading one kidnapping for another.

  His heart sank when Mundy said, “Not exactly,” but at least they were leaving the Sepulchrave far behind, as they moved around the orbital ring towards the shabbier docks. They had to jostle and fight through every corridor, but Mundy seemed to have a way of finding every gap in the current to get ahead. Idris just let himself be tugged along. The man’s way with crowds was like navigating unspace to the uninitiated—something magical and mysterious. They were well into the docking band that dealt with freight now, though the only freight shipping here was more people. And all the while the Architect was getting closer.

  “Agent Mundy,” he said at last. “Where are we going?”

  “Where’d you think?”

  “I’m not going to be some spook asset.” Idris pulled back trying to resist. He might as well fight gravity; Mundy’s long-boned frame bought him a lot of leverage. “I refuse to be some black ops sneak-pilot for your assassins.”

  Mundy stopped. “‘Black ops sneak-pilot’?” he queried. “That’s a job description where you come from, is it?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Telemmier. I am risking a great deal on my assessment of you—not least my job. So just shut your yap and come with me, would you? Because right now I am attracting all the bad kind of paperwork. And I am just desperate to get started on the last report of my career, after I drop you off.” He gave Idris’s arm a final yank, hit a door release with his elbow and they were standing in a familiar dock. And there was the Vulture God.

  Idris looked from the ship to Mundy and back. Solace was heading towards them, her eyes on the Mordant House man.

  “I didn’t think you’d do it,” she said.

  “Well, I reckon you and I are both exceeding our orders today,” Mundy replied. “You’re shipping out with them, right?”

  “You want a berth?”

  He laughed harshly. “That would just about put the nail in the coffin, wouldn’t it? No, I’ll stay here and clean up the mess I made. Telemmier.”

  Idris jumped. “What?”

  “I met you.”

  “What?”

  “I sat down with you, remember? We had a chat, back before the Harvest turned up and we had to part ways. Right now, I am really hoping I’m as good a judge of character as I want to be. You want a ship, here’s your ship. If you can talk them into it. I’ve also got you departure clearance, at least until someone clocks on and overrules me. Go use it.” Then the man was retreating, seeming to shift crabwise out of the hangar before vanishing. Because Mordant House never did anything in a straightforward way.

  Idris turned to the ship, the unlovely, oft-repaired scavenger-hauler that was the Vulture God. The drone bay hatch was open, but he couldn’t see any of the crew.

  “I know you all heard that,” he called. “Well?”

  “Okay, are we going or not?” Olli’s voice boomed from the speakers. “Because I just spent ten minutes getting us all ready to leave. Just get your ass on board. Her too.”

  When he reached Command, they were all there: Olli in her walker, Kris in Rollo’s chair, Kittering in his own. And Trine too, to his surprise. Their arms were still mangled, but they had new legs and their face had been restored to its phantom glory. Solace stepped in behind him and leant on the back of the pilot’s chair, as he took his place at the board.

  “Look…” he started awkwardly.

  “You’re going to say we don’t need to come, that it’s dangerous,” Kris told him. “Idris, in the general ranking of ‘people important enough to get a berth off-planet,’ just where do you think we fit? If we’re not getting out on the Vulture, we’re not getting out at all. So we’re sticking on board, thank you very much.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Trine declared. “Some of us are an ambassador.”

  “Taking her out,” Olli announced, and the ship’s bones creaked around them as they lifted off from the dock and passed out of the station’s gravitic field into open vacuum. “Idris, she’s yours when you’re ready. Take her away.”

  *

  He’d wanted the crew in suspension beds, even for the stutter-jump in-system. But there wasn’t time. They’d been through it before anyway, were practically unspace veterans. He argued the case as he slung the Vulture God away from the orbital, ignoring the angry comms chatter they left in their wake. A couple of Hugh military skiffs hailed them, but they were too little, too late. Enough politics.

  He sketched out the maths of the stutter-jump always with the sense of Berlenhof as a crushing weight poised at his back. His target destination was unexpectedly complicated, a nightmare maze of gravitic distortions—even without the Architect itself with its disproportionate mass-shadow. Seeing the mess he was dropping into, he couldn’t quite believe he’d lifted the Heaven’s Sword out of it. But then it wasn’t just the enemy out there anymore.

  The fighting’s started. Even at this remove, he could sense the slight shudder as the Thunderchild and its impromptu allies deployed their gravitic weapons. They were trying to crack the substance of the Architect, as its ponderous will sought to pin them down.

  And the God was In, falling away from the real into the dream that was unspace and—

  Out, exploding back into existence and into the thick of it. For a moment he could still see the ragged shawl of space-time, bent a thousand ways by the fighting. The Partheni warship was deploying its mass loom, four times the power of the batteries they’d used at the first Battle of Berlenhof. Idris saw a spray of cracks flower across those crystal mountains as the strike hit home. But they blurred into wholeness just a moment later, as the Architect reshaped its own
substance to heal. Further off, Idris’s instruments reported on the Blake, a Colonial-built monster shaped like a lump hammer. It had launched a withering storm of super-accelerated shot from its cannon, most of which whirled off to oblivion as the Architect leant on the universe to shift the gradient.

  Solace took her place at Idris’s back, medkit ready in her hands. Kris and Kittering were just staring at the monstrosity dominating space outside.

  “We’re too late,” the Partheni whispered.

  “Not too late,” Idris insisted. Although even as he spoke, he felt the Architect wrench space around the Thunderchild, breaching its overstressed hull in three places. “I need a pilot.”

  Silence from the drone bay.

  “Olli? You there?”

  “I… Holy fuck, look at that thing.”

  “It’s just like before,” Idris told her. “No different to last time.”

  “She wasn’t at Berlenhof the first time,” Solace said quietly.

  “Idris, you famie bastard, I was born in Ninety-fucking-Four,” Olli threw in over comms. “Believe it or not, this is my first Architect, see right?” But she sounded more together now.

  “Olli, I—”

  “You need a pilot,” Olli’s voice came over the comms. “I got it. Show me where to go.”

  The others were waking from the spell, too. “Survival opportunities few and falling,” Kit announced, skittering over to his own board. He was throwing up unwelcome statistics, specifically the efficacy of the Vulture God’s gravitic drive once the Architect caught hold of them. They punched a long way above their weight, but they weren’t a warship. Shielding wasn’t what they were optimized for.

  “I know, Kit, I… Take us in, Olli, I’ll… find a way. I promise.” I don’t have a way. Maybe it won’t look at us. Maybe we’re too small for it to see. But he knew that wasn’t true. To the Architect, a single atom and an entire planet were equally worthy of adjustment.

  The Thunderchild had launched a flight of Zero Points now, little single-woman fighters. Their size wouldn’t help, but many could make a difference. The Architect had a limit to how much it could divide its goliath-like attention. And yet they would die, all of them. They knew it. They were buying time for Berlenhof, just the same as before.