She went off to get him something to eat and fetch the others. In her absence, he tried to work out how he felt about her. It was about time he did. After all, he’d woken up precisely twice in the last six decades and she’d been there both times. Had to mean something. It wasn’t as though he’d fallen madly in love with the beautiful warrior angel, like some mediotype. But they’d been forged in that same thirty minutes of fire, and she’d got him out. They’d lived when so many hadn’t. And when she’d come back into his life, even with her ulterior motive, he’d felt something. Perhaps she had too. He didn’t know what to do with any of it. His life hadn’t exactly equipped him for this kind of thing.
As he lay there, introspecting, a squad of soldiers walked into the infirmary. These weren’t Partheni but Colonial navy men. He tensed, expecting Mordant House, the Liaison Board, some kind of trouble. Seeing who it was, though, he blinked, mouth suddenly dry.
‘Hi, Big Sis.’
Not his actual sister of course. She’d died in the Polyaspora when he was very small indeed. But all of that first class out of the Intermediary Program had ended up using that nickname. She was the one woman who’d gone ahead of them, the original, the proof of concept. Xavienne Torino, known to the post-war Colonies as Saint Xavienne.
She was a few years his senior. At the time of the ‘Miracle at Forthbridge’ she’d been fifteen, just a barefoot girl on the freighter Samark. She’d faced up to an Architect and sent it away, saved her ship, saved a planet. Saved humanity because suddenly there was hope. Idris had first met her when the Intermediary Program reached the human subject stage, eight years later. This was after the scientific establishment had finally accepted that Xavienne’s mind really did interact with unspace in unique ways. Then they’d taken over three hundred volunteers like Idris and killed ninety per cent of them trying to replicate the effect. Nobody had stopped them. Idris didn’t even hold it against them. The times had been desperate; each Architect attack killed millions at a stroke. And the experiment had worked.
She was seventy years old now, he reckoned, give or take. And unlike him, she’d aged. Seventy was old for a Colonial. Most spacers and frontier locals wouldn’t look as healthy or whole by that age, especially those who’d grown up on the refugee transports. Idris remembered her toughing it out with everyone else during the war: a thin, dark woman in outsize military surplus and cheap printed sandals, eyes huge and bright in her lean face. She’d been everyone on the Program’s big sister – the only person in all the universe a budding Int could go to with their fears. She’d wept for the dead, like they all had. Yet she’d gone on working, nobody harder. Then, after the war, everyone had wanted to know her story; she’d been the public face of victory. People had her on posters, medallions, mass-produced commemorative plates that somehow reproduced her likeness without any of that starveling look about the eyes. Eventually she went into seclusion, finding her own private retreat away from the supplicants and the pilgrims and the occasional death threats. Idris wondered if the Parthenon had ever dared to woo her. Though surely they couldn’t bring their match to that powder keg, not unless they really were serious about a war with Hugh.
And here she was, on a Partheni battleship no less. But would her military escort really be enough? Would it stop some of the local high-ups considering just how much they wanted their own Intermediaries right now . . .?
‘Idris.’ She sat where Solace had been, lowering herself carefully.
‘What are you even . . .? I mean, it’s so good to see you, but . . .’ He hadn’t ever thought he would see her again, not once the war was done. Idris Telemmier had just wanted to disappear.
‘They needed this old brain again.’ Her face was lined, a map of all the triumphs and cares that had brought her this far. The unruly explosion of curly hair he remembered was grey-white now. The patterned robe she wore wasn’t from a printer. Someone’s hands had made that, and serious money had paid for it. He felt a stab of vicarious pleasure that she’d done well for herself, over those past years. If anyone deserved it, it was Saint Xavienne.
‘The Partheni asked for you?’
‘Doctor Justinian did,’ she corrected. ‘The Liaison Board don’t deal with “originals” these days. They needed to reference my scans as a baseline, and so I came out of retirement one more time.’
‘You talk to the Board much?’ He almost asked: Do you know what they’re doing, in your name? But that wouldn’t be fair.