He came to himself in the aftermath. All he heard were groans and whimpers, because the Partheni did not scream when someone else’s orders needed to be heard. Survivors on all sides were trying to save those caught in the gravitational focus of the Architect’s brute swipe. They were loosing their weapons, accelerators and gravity cannon. The second in command was barking orders in Parsef as tears ran down her face. Half the crew were dead, one side of the bridge a sparking, mangled ruin. And as they hauled the pilot’s body from her seat, Idris dropped in to take her place. He could sense the angry grasping of the Architect as it swatted and crushed in unconscious irritation at these gnats that had troubled it.
And he got them out. Without even considering the impossibility of it, he jumped them away from the crushing mass-shadow of the Architect. Jumped in-system, the thing you never did.
He limped them back to the Heaven’s Sword. He was vaguely amazed that not one of the warrior-elite had objected to him commandeering their ship. They’d just taken his participation in their stride, accepting his help without a word.
There had been no peace on the Heaven’s Sword either. It’d been Solace marching him to the bridge the moment he was on board. All of Berlenhof’s defenders were rushing forwards to meet the Architect. Somewhere out there the battered Naeromathi Locust Ark was gouting out fleets of constructor drones and factory ships converted into one-shot massdrivers. Hiver orbital frames vented clouds of little killers into space like swarming bees. Refitted Castigar freighters and crescent-shaped Hanni merchant venturers were about to live out their final moments as unlikely warships, their alien crews bound to this desperate purpose by fellow feeling or quid pro quo. A hundred separate human vessels were being flung out in a mad suicide bid to buy the evacuation another few minutes.
Then there was the pride of the Parthenon – the big battalions, the warrior angels come to save humanity from extinction. Heaven’s Sword, Ascending Mother, Cataphracta: the most advanced warships ever made by human hands. They’d been fitted with outsize gravitic drives to shield them against the Architects and power the colossal new mass looms meant to do to the enemy what the enemy did to the rest of the universe.
‘Menheer Intermediary!’ one of the officers called to him the moment he arrived on the bridge. ‘Front and centre, if you please – snap snap!’ Her Colvul was sharply accented and—
‘Compret, mother.’ Solace was there at his elbow, moving him to a quartet of screens at the bridge’s heart. Each was screeding information about the Architect or modelling relative positions in space.
‘What am I supposed—？’ he managed to say.
‘Whatever you can do,’ that same officer told him sternly, ‘do. Once we see what that breeds, we can work with it.’ She sounded as though she didn’t believe in him, which he’d have sympathized with an hour before. Now he had met the enemy. Now he knew he actually could do.
Solace, that younger Solace without the Executor to her name, gave him a tight smile.
The bridge was busy with fast-flowing Parsef, reports and orders, efficient and regulated as percussion. The vanguard of the planetary defence had already reached the Architect, and he began to see its hand extend across them, points of animation with nametags winking out, too many for anyone to remark. Colonial ramshackles and swift Hanni raiders coursing into attack runs they were never able to complete. A long, elegant Castigar ranger taken and twisted as a child might a stick. Hiver spaceframes wrecked, their colonies spilling out into space, all ruined parts and extinguished composite minds. Then the Cataphracta had focused its mass loom. It bent the force of its gravitic drives to clench ten square kilometres of substance within the very heart of the Architect.
And nothing. The thing had seemingly shrugged the weapon away. But then the scanner teams were calling out fractures within its substance. The Heaven’s Sword targeting computers were throwing up best options. Something roared through the warship’s hull like angelic voices declaiming the end of the universe. Idris realized it was their own loom speaking, unleashing a wave of stresses that sent their every bulkhead and strut complaining in eerily beautiful harmony.
And he had it. He wasn’t even the first Int to the breach, but he had it. He remembered how he had reached into the Architect’s mind before. He folded himself small, like a letter, like a needle, like an idea, and pried his mind into that incandescent mass of angry thought. And it was angry. It did not know him, did not know any of them, yet it perceived an environment that was resisting it. Making its life difficult, impeding the creation of its apocalyptic art form. Idris screamed, entering the outer reaches of the Architect’s consciousness as though he was entering the photosphere of a star.