But why Far Lux? Despite Telemmier’s dire warnings about Berlenhof being a beacon, it was some far-flung colony making history. It was insignificant, except for one thing. Far Lux was where the peace had happened, where humanity’s Intermediaries had finally reached out and touched the universe’s destructive gods. Three Intermediaries – and one had been Idris Telemmier.
Idris
They had spread the Ints wide, after Berlenhof, to try and protect the Human Sphere. The battle had at least proved that Intermediaries could affect the Architects’ movements. Even slowing an attack would mean thousands more evacuated. And the Intermediary Program itself was constantly brainstorming, thinking up strategies, welcoming new ideas . . . Saint Xavienne, her Ints and the Program’s researchers were working from first principles, assembling a patchwork science of suppositions and second guesses. Xavienne was even discussing the unthinkable – making contact with their enemy. Idris had no idea if this was a Colonial initiative or if she was off on her own. It wasn’t as if anyone was qualified to oversee her. And her Ints would have done anything for her. After all, they had been born from pain and madness with her as their midwife.
And Idris had gone to Far Lux along with Olumu Garrison and Tess Mangolign. And if their Partheni captain had rankled a little at letting these three Colonials take turns in the pilot’s chair, dragging her vessel hither and yon across the Human Sphere, well, that was tinted with the superstitious awe people had back then for the Ints.
One thing Xavienne had wanted was an early warning system. Ints were sensitive to the impending arrival of an Architect. Idris remembered that from Berlenhof. He believed you could tell where they were going to arrive, plenty of Ints did, although the actual hit rate of their predictions was too low to be useful. Still, his instincts had brought the three of them to the small mining colony in the little Partheni runner Yennenga. They’d found it peaceful, going about its business. Idris had half felt that the appearance of the Yennenga in their skies should have been like a comet in the olden times, chaos and panic and portents of the end of days.
And the Ints had delivered their warning, but the frightened Colonials had just been angry at the false alarm. They’d chewed out the scaremongering Ints over the comms, because what were they supposed to do? Just pack up and leave, because three crazy people told them it was the end of the world?
Then all three Ints had gone dead silent, staggering as though the ship’s a-grav had faltered. Two minutes later the Architect had torn its way into the system. It tumbled out of unspace and righted itself, its million serried spines directed at the planet.
Olumu was a small, dark man, older than Idris-as-was. He’d die two years later, in space as a spacer should, when the freighter he was piloting suffered a catastrophic systems failure at the exact moment it opened a path to unspace. Tess was an angular woman, starveling-thin, half her face a tinted plastic mask because she wouldn’t get her reconstructive surgery until after the war. Ints were too valuable to take out of circulation for that long. She’d join the Cartography Corps and bow out of Colonial history that way. Vanished into unspace, searching for new Throughways and planetary systems, fate unknown but not coming back.
But they would live to die later. All three of them would live, as would every soul aboard the Yennenga, and the entire population of Far Lux. For this was the day the war ended.
There was no fleet gathered at Far Lux that day, no valiant holding action planned to buy time for an evacuation. Everyone planetside was simply running for the ships, for the landing fields. The orbitals’ personnel were clearing out already, all except for a skeleton staff who stayed at their posts to coordinate the escape effort below. Idris had thought of them as the Yennenga moved forwards, a solitary mote against the immensity that was descending on the planet. Bureaucrats, data-pushers, planners and accountants – they were all giving their lives to save just a few more families of miners and factory workers.
Numb, he’d felt numb then. He’d been living through the holocaust of war all his life. And he couldn’t remember a single moment of security; always the Architects ridding the galaxy of humanity one world at a time. He’d spent his childhood crammed into the hold of one ship after another, his family lost long ago. Maybe they were dead, or just scattered by too many losses and too much stress. Then as soon as he was old enough, he’d gone for active service. Because what else was there? The war didn’t spare civilians anyway, so why not? As soon as he’d heard about the new Intermediary Program, he’d signed up for that too. He’d been chosen due to some arcane criteria he never understood. And he’d survived it, when most volunteers hadn’t. He’d been remade into something else inside his head, something not quite human. Then he’d gone to war. He’d been at Berlenhof. He’d touched the mind of the enemy.