He felt it stumble, just for a moment. No more than a man slipping on ice for a second before catching himself, but in a knife-fight that could be fatal. The Sword’s mass loom spoke again and again, counting twenty seconds of recharge between each attack. The whole substance of the ship was shrieking with the strain. Around him, half the Partheni had their hands over their ears.
Between blasts he heard a tightly controlled shout. He caught the ship name Cataphracta and knew one of the Sword’s sisters had been ripped apart. On the screens he saw the vast Locust Ark just unravel. It was shredded across fifty kilometres of space: into wire, into artfully warped metal peelings, into frozen smears of organic material.
Idris was weeping now and his head felt as though it would explode. Elsewhere, one of his classmates just died, simply dropped dead; heart, brain and organs all failing from the biofeedback of touching minds with a god. But Idris held on. He held on and he fought for purchase, even as the Architect’s consciousness cast around for him, unable to quite conceive of anything so tiny, a giant hunting a mouse.
Each explosive detonation of the mass looms lit the way for the next. The Partheni computers bounced EM pulses off the Architect’s jagged surfaces, reading the stress patterns and damage and spitting out fresh targeting solutions. The most powerful weapons ever made by human hands, being wielded with the precision of scalpels.
Then the Architect reached for them. Idris felt it, and tried to oppose it, to deflect that space-wringing attention that would make them no more than a filigreed monument to their own stupidity. The Heaven’s Sword shuddered and groaned, the sound blending into the bitter scream of the next mass loom detonation. Damage reports poured in from every part of the ship. But Idris was transfixed. He didn’t care. His own mortality was so small a thing compared to what he was seeing.
The Ascending Mother was still loosing attacks, upping the ship’s fire rate despite the damage they were inflicting on their own hull. The Colonials, the Hanni, the Hivers, every vessel out there was unleashing whatever weapons they had, from accelerated shot to towed asteroids. All were being guided by the targeting telemetry the Partheni were broadcasting. And Idris, with his privileged front-row seat on the inside, was watching the Architect come apart.
It was still at least partly within unspace, he realized. It was even bigger than the physical manifestation that intruded into the real. But the damage done to it was cascading backwards, rippling through its entire substance. The fractures the Partheni spotters were reporting were the least of it. The mass loom attacks had been driving a chisel deeper and deeper into the creature, and now it was shearing into pieces.
Idris felt the Architect know death and trembled in anticipation of the rage and grief that must surely attend that thought. Yet it was not so. What it felt was mostly nothing a human mind could comprehend. But when others demanded he put a word to it later, he would say acceptance.
The Architect died. And, dying, its final energies lashed out across space, destroying a score of vessels and taking the Sword from merely ‘crippled’ to breaking apart. And this was where Solace would bundle him into the escape pod, because the Partheni took their duty seriously. This was where he would find himself in a medical camp on Berlenhof after the last period of non-consciousness he would know for fifty years. Except for Idris now – lost in the mad flight of the Vulture God – it didn’t happen. No Solace, no escape pod, just the eternally drawn-out moment of the Heaven’s Sword dying and the Architect dying with it, in an event so traumatic to the universe that it left a permanent scar on the substance of unspace, a persistent landmark in an infinitely transient medium. A beacon that he had found from across the galaxy, the one landmark in the featureless void.
23.
Havaer
‘Questions have already been raised about how you handled this one,’ Chief Laery said. She’d called Havaer in during her exercises. This was something she only did when she was displeased, because of how discomfiting it was. Her a-grav chair was tilted back, and a mechanical frame had one of her arms in three well-padded grips. Currents shocked the atrophied muscles of the limb and a trio of clear tubes fed urine-coloured liquids into her: high-protein muscle-builders to fight a battle her body had already given up on. The young Laery had spent a long time at deep-space listening posts without any grav tech. She’d subsisted on even less than the usual poor Colonial nutrition of the day. A combination of factors had resulted in most of her muscle mass just giving up and going away. A return to more wholesome living habits hadn’t done much to reverse the loss, and every handful of days she underwent treatments like this to try and stave off the end. Half-naked, she looked like someone who’d died of starvation a week before.