They were falling through unspace and he had lost all connection to where they’d been or where they were going. The Ogdru was gone, outfoxed, howling somewhere because it didn’t know where its prey had gone. But its prey was just as clueless.
Idris clutched the board, trying to find . . . a beacon, a landmark. Except unspace had none. Unspace only had . . .
The Presence moved, within the ship. In all the panic he’d been almost oblivious to it, but now it had his full attention. It had been waiting patiently for him to pause. Now he felt it had coughed politely, just to show it was there. And, yes, he knew all the caveats about the Presence being a trick of the mind. Except Idris had no doubt whatsoever that there was something out there in unspace. Perhaps the sole real thing in all of that notional realm.
He fixed his attention on the board. Usually the Presence at least started off outside the ship. Usually it didn’t try to confront him – he was just aware it was there. Until the very dread of existing in the same space was enough to make him want to tear his own face off. Right now, though, it . . .
Was in the command capsule with him. He felt it precisely as he would have been aware of another person. Not the sound of breath, the scuff of sandals, but some subconscious certainty. Something is at my back, in this room. A shadow seemed to flicker at the corner of his vision and he stared straight ahead, at the board, through the board. He reached out into unspace in the hope of finding some way out into the real. But they had no origin point and no destination, and that meant they were going to be here forever.
He all but felt its breath on the back of his neck.
‘You’re not real,’ he told the board. ‘You’re just the universal response of a – a conscious mind to the peculiar parameters of a non-material space.’ It took him three tries to get the words out without stammering.
‘You know it’s all coming back, Idris.’
The slightest whimper escaped him.
‘You know why you don’t want to admit it to yourself.’
A pleasant enough voice, gender-neutral, familiar.
‘You’ve felt those big battalions on the move, deep within unspace. Like great old blocks of stone being shunted down there; like locomotive engines.’ The owner of that voice had always been fond of old-Earth images. They’d had a whole library of salvaged ancient film: non-interactional pre-mediotype stuff. It was Lois T’Sanko, a classmate out of the first Intermediary Program. They’d gone out with him in the vanguard at Berlenhof, had Lois, and had vanished into unspace, never to be seen again.
‘Not real, no one’s there . . .’ It’s just a ghost. But what happens to people who die in unspace? What if the usual rules don’t apply? But then the Presence was leaning right over his shoulder. He screwed his eyes up to avoid seeing it, and its voice was Rollo’s now.
‘Your problem, my child, is that if you admit the bastard Architects are back – then what was the point? What was the point of anything you did? All that war, just to buy a little breather? Hardly worth it, see right?’
Abstractly, he wondered if he was undergoing some kind of breakdown: brain death, stroke, some unspace-specific malady. . . All around him, the featureless plain of nothing extended forever, a prospect too awful for the human mind to grasp. He’d failed all of them. Better if the Ogdru had caught him.
Except . . .
And a shadow was indeed passing through the depths of unspace. A dread shadow he thought he’d left behind decades ago, but that some part of him had always looked out for. It’s true then. The Oumaru was just the start. The Architects are back and we’re lost.
Except . . .
Something caught at his mind, a texture within the absence of everything, a scar. Impossible, obviously, because unspace didn’t really exist. And no matter what you did, you couldn’t mark it. You couldn’t create any persistent landmarks here, in the absence of everything. But it was there.
‘Intermediary Telemmier.’ The voice was deep, human-sounding but not human. The voice of the Harbinger, Ash, who had first warned humanity of the Architect threat. And it wasn’t dead, insofar as Idris knew. ‘You should be more at home here,’ Ash told him. ‘Don’t buckle now.’
‘What do you know about it?’ Idris demanded through clenched teeth.
‘You think I don’t know about this?’ Ash could always do any kind of human tone it wanted. Right now it was bantering, punchy. ‘You think I got to Earth by walking? What, you’re going to just let your crew die here? Come on, Telemmier. Pull yourself together.’