She’d expected a barrage of expletives, but Olli was quiet, thinking, the channel still open between them. ‘I can see you now,’ she said at last. ‘You really haven’t tooled up, have you, you dumbass? I could just open the hatch on you. You’re practically standing on it.’
‘I appreciate that I’m not making the best tactical decisions at the moment,’ Solace said.
Olli made a disgusted sound. ‘I wouldn’t just abandon Kris to your lot, would I?’ But there was less venom in her tone than her words might have suggested. ‘Tell the executioner we’re on our way to the scaffold.’
Solace wanted to correct her: Executor, one who does. It’s not about killing people. But ‘does’ implied a wide remit, and killing was in there somewhere. Olli wasn’t going to let her off that hook so easily.
‘Vulture to Corday,’ she told the other ship. ‘Lead on, sister. We’ll follow.’
26.
Idris
In Idris’s memories, the Architect died. And in dying, its final energies lashed out across space. The gravitic convulsion whiplashed through the Heaven’s Sword, shattering bulkheads, opening compartments to space, rupturing its gravitic drive. The colossal mass loom – which had done so much damage – was caught as it prepared for another salvo, the frustrated energy it had harvested from unspace set catastrophically free. Then the front third of the ship was smeared into a spray of fragments, each worked into a filigreed caltrop as unique as a snowflake. Abruptly, the ship was dying, dealt a single all-consuming blow its shielding had been unable to deflect.
Idris’s mind was ripped from the dying Architect and he had a moment of utter revelation. Infinite clarity where the universe extended away from him, forever, and he was so insignificant that he lost himself in the midst of it.
Even as Solace pulled him away he could still feel the Architect’s mind, the last dregs of it, surrendering to oblivion. Did it call out to its fellows? He felt that it did. Not to whip up vengeance or summon help, but just so that they knew. So that the gargantuan world-breaker did not die alone. He lost consciousness too when it finally let go, the spark of it winking out like the extinction of a star.
When he woke, Solace was holding his hand still. Or, in retrospect, again. Because several days had passed, and presumably she hadn’t just been glued to his side like someone’s pining pet. But she’d stayed there, this random Partheni soldier who’d been told to look after him. All around them the beds had stretched away, a camp of the injured and dying too big to station in orbit. The shockwave of the Architect’s death had crippled half the fleet and ruptured a dozen orbitals too. The sheer fallout of their triumph had bred more wounded than the actual battle. Architects didn’t normally leave many injured in their wake.
‘Hi,’ he croaked and squeezed her hand. She must have been half dozing herself because she jumped and yelped. Then she stared down at him, a slow smile spreading across her face.
They were in the camp together for two weeks. Solace was fully recovered long before he was, but there just weren’t enough ships to take the wounded away. Of the pride of the Partheni, only the Ascending Mother still existed as anything other than scrap, and she was already overcapacity with survivors from the Cataphracta and Heaven’s Sword. More vessels were on the way but, until they arrived, everyone had more leisure time than the war had ever allowed. Idris even found himself forgotten by the Intervention Program for a blessed while. So he became an honorary Partheni, playing Landstep and Go and Two Worlds with Solace and her sisters. He lay beside her at night, tucked into the warmth of her body, just two veterans given a moment of peace.
*
He opened his eyes. Here. Now. She was still holding his hand. She hadn’t really aged since Berlenhof, but then neither had he, for other reasons. The only change was the infirmary, which was a big open room in Partheni blue and grey. For a nasty moment, he thought this was still his memories bleeding into one another, because the insignia on the wall was the familiar winged blade of the Heaven’s Sword, and that ship had very definitely not survived the Battle of Berlenhof. Except now he recalled they’d just reused the name, honouring the fallen by giving it to the next ship of the same class to come out of the yards. Heaven’s Sword II, then. And, for some reason, he was aboard it.
‘Hi,’ he croaked, and just like before Solace jumped. She looked about as beaten-up as last time, too. Badly bruised and with a thin medical sleeve over one arm.