Shards of Earth （The Final Architecture #1）
Adrian Tchaikovsky
PROLOGUE
In the seventy-eighth year of the war, an Architect came to Berlenhof.
The lights of human civilization across the galaxy had been going out, one by one, since its start. All those little mining worlds, the far-flung settlements, the homes people had made. The Colonies, as they were known: the great hollow Polyaspora of human expansion, exploding out from a vacant centre. Because the Architects had come for Earth first.
Berlenhof had become humanity’s second heart. Even before Earth fell, it had been a prosperous, powerful world. In the war, it was the seat of military command and civilian governance, coordinating a civilization-scale refugee effort, as more and more humans were forced to flee their doomed worlds.
And because of that, when the Architect came, the Colonies turned and fought, and so did all the allies they had gathered there. It was to be the great stand against a galactic-level threat, every weapon deployed, every secret advantage exploited.
Solace remembered. She had been there. Basilisk Division, Heaven’s Sword Sorority. Her first battle.
*
The Colonies had a secret weapon, that was the word. A human weapon. Solace had seen them at the war council. A cluster of awkward, damaged-looking men and women, nothing more. As the main fleet readied itself to defend Berlenhof, a handful of small ships were already carrying these ‘weapons’ towards the Architect in the hope that this new trick would somehow postpone the inevitable.
Useless, surely. Might as well rely on thoughts and prayers.
On the Heaven’s Sword, everyone off-shift was avidly watching the displays, wanting to believe this really was something. Even though all previous secret weapons had been nothing but hot air and hope. Solace stared as intently as the rest. The Architect was impossible to miss on screen, a vast polished mass the size of Earth’s lost moon, throwing back every scan and probe sent its way. The defending fleet at Berlenhof was a swarm of pinpricks, so shrunk by the scale they were barely visible until she called for magnification. The heart of the Colonies had already been gathering its forces for dispatch elsewhere when the Architect had emerged from unspace at the edge of the system. Humanity was never going to get better odds than this.
There were Castigar and Hanni vessels out there, alien trading partners who were lending their strength to their human allies because the Architects were everybody’s problem. There was a vast and ragged fleet of human ships, and some of them were dedicated war vessels and others were just whatever could be thrown into space that wasn’t any use for the evacuation. Orbiting Hiver factories were weaponizing their workers. There was even the brooding hulk of a Naeromathi Locust Ark out there, the largest craft in-system – save that it was still dwarfed by the Architect itself. And nobody knew what the Locusts wanted or thought about anything, save that even they would fight this enemy.
And there was the pride of the fleet, Solace’s sisters: the Parthenon. Humans, for a given value of human. The engineered warrior women who had been the Colonies’ shield ever since the fall of Earth. Heaven’s Sword, Ascending Mother and Cataphracta, the most advanced warships humanity had ever designed, equipped with weapons that the pre-war days couldn’t even have imagined.
As Solace craned to see, she spotted a tiny speckle of dots between the fleet and the Architect: the advance force. The tip of humanity’s spear was composed of the Partheni’s swiftest ships. Normally, their role would have been to buy time. But on this occasion, the Pythoness, the Ocasio, the Ching Shi and others were carrying their secret weapon to the enemy.
Solace didn’t believe a word of it. The mass looms and the Zero Point fighters the Heaven’s Sword was equipped with would turn the battle, or nothing would. Even as she told herself that, she heard the murmur of the other off-shift women around her. ‘Intermediaries,’ one said, a whisper as if talking about something taboo; and someone else, a girl barely old enough to be in service: ‘They say they cut their brains. That’s how they make them.’
‘Telemetry incoming,’ said one of the officers, and the display focused in on those few dots. They were arrowing towards the Architect, as though planning to dash themselves against its mountainous sides. Solace felt her eyes strain, trying to wring more information from what she was seeing, to peer all the way in until she had an eye inside the ships themselves.
One of those dots winked out. The Architect had registered their presence and was patiently swatting at them. Solace had seen the aftermath of even a brush with an Architect’s power: twisted, crumpled metal, curved and corkscrewed by intense gravitational pressures. A large and well-shielded ship might weather a glancing blow. With these little craft there would be no survivors.