‘And Saint Xav looked like she was taking him very seriously.’
‘The Saint dodged her handlers recently,’ Laery said sourly. ‘But our data suggests she met with the Harbinger.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Saints, Harbingers . . . Our predecessors could have been less fucking messianic with their naming conventions.’ At his raised eyebrows, her image waved an emaciated hand. ‘Forgive me, not been sleeping well since forever. It’s just that Ash has been poking around, making his own enquiries into this business. I have never liked or trusted that creature.’ Ash had been an established appendage of the Colonial government since long before Laery was born. Mordant House’s successive directors had never appreciated the ancient alien’s meddling. ‘We don’t know how it knows what it knows,’ she complained. ‘And I do not believe in magic or seeing the future.’
‘Nobody believed in unspace once,’ Havaer said. Unwisely, to judge from her expression. ‘Chief, I don’t know the truth of it, but I don’t think Telemmier’s fooling around here, is all. Unscientific as it is, my gut feeling says we’re in trouble.’ He swallowed. ‘How unhappy would I be if I asked about the evacuation protocols for Berlenhof?’
Laery stared at him, stony-faced. ‘I am glad,’ she said, ‘that this is a heavily encrypted channel. Because we couldn’t have realistically evacuated ten per cent of the planet even during the war. Since which time the population has increased fourfold and nobody has their go-bag and a map to their closest evac centre. So let’s not say things like that in earshot of anyone prone to panic, shall we?’
He wanted to say, ‘But what if . . .?’ but she’d told him the What If. Simply put, there was no What If – any more than there had been with Earth. And, just as with Ash’s warning to Earth, nobody was going to completely dismantle the heart of the Human Sphere just because of a crazy prophet. Except . . .
‘He said Berlenhof was a beacon.’
‘Telemmier?’
‘He said he could see it from right across unspace.’
‘And nobody else has noticed this?’ Laery demanded.
‘There aren’t that many Ints. Almost none left who were at that final battle. And maybe it’s like city lights obscuring the stars . . . you need to get further out into the countryside before you can see them clearly. Or some damn thing.’ Havaer grimaced. ‘I have bad feelings, Chief,’ and she nodded soberly.
*
He slept on it, or tried to. The Partheni had given over a whole student dorm to Hugh’s negotiating team. There were forty beds and just a handful of occupants, but the sparse Partheni design robbed the space of any sense of luxury. Spartan was the appropriate term, on a variety of levels. Havaer reflected gloomily that it was the Colonies who were supposed to be poor, but Colonial spaces were never plain. If you were rich you showed it through having stuff that people could see. If you were poor, everything was patched and home-made and botched together.
Being taller than the average Partheni, he ended up sleeping folded up in a weird position, so that something hidden down the side of the plastic mattress jabbed at his side. It turned out to be a mediotype nib, just a thumb-sized datastore. Filled with hopes of discovering Partheni secrets, he cracked it open, only to find it was crammed with episodes of some mediotype. It was prose and animation and voice drama, all about some girl from the Colonies during the war. She was living on a ship, learning to be a pilot. But mostly she was arguing with rivals and having unrequited crushes on classmates of both genders. It was possibly the least historically accurate thing Havaer had ever seen. He ended up watching it for three hours solid, feeling a weird connection to whatever Partheni naval student’s life he’d just invaded by finding her stash of cod-Colonial drama. And then he heard the alarms; his comms alerts lit up like fireworks and he knew it had happened.
Architects over Berlenhof? He wouldn’t have been at all surprised, but what had actually happened was the first ships had come in from Far Lux.
Far Lux?
The small packet runners had fled the system first, bringing urgent requests for emergency refugee facilities. And there were many more ships on the way – every ship the mining colony could get into space, and several that shouldn’t have tried it. And Far Lux had quite the population these days.
An Architect had come out of unspace in the Far Lux system and begun cruising towards the defenceless colony planet. People had crammed every ship they could find. Far more had been left behind to watch that vast crystal moon approach, then witness the end of it all.