There weren’t many places on Roshu for high-profile guests, but the Aspirat – the Parthenon’s covert ops division – had an account with the Orrery of Man. It was part hotel, part monument to poor taste and gold paint, but at least it was in a ‘good’ part of the moneyed upper dome. More scowls were evident as she entered the lobby, and that concerned her a little more. The Partheni were always going to be anathema to the grass-roots ‘real humans for real humans’ movement within Hugh. By Nativist lights they were vat-grown genetic freaks, and they’d become a military threat when they left Hugh’s control thirteen years ago. Hostile stares from snooty staff and the cosseted rich, even in this hellhole, didn’t bode well for the future. Fear not the gun but the finger on the trigger, as the saying went.
Soon after, a very different Solace slipped out of a staff exit, dressed in olive-coloured ship clothes and sandals. She retained the bleeding wing tattoo under her left eye, but Roshu’s underside was rough, diverse and full of transients of all descriptions.
The Parthenon’s Aspirat section maintained a sympathizer in the city administration – a grey-haired woman with the stern demeanour of a vengeful librarian. Solace only needed to say, ‘Show me the Vulture God,’ and she received a packet of information, delivered hand to hand – the old way, so nobody could pluck it from the kybernet in transit.
The Vulture’s file held only its most recent flight plan and a crew manifest with images and biometrics, mostly so local authorities could identify any bodies after bar fights. Solace flicked across the pictures: hostile-looking moustache, good-looking woman with a double chin, half-face guy, better-looking woman with a scarf and an intriguing grin, cheap-ass Hanni, battered-looking Hive frame . . . and there was her mark.
Idris Telemmier. She stared at the picture below the sparse details. It wasn’t even listed that he was an Int. Another agent might have queried her superiors. Are you sure?
Except she knew. As Ash said, this was an old friend. A fellow veteran.
Of course she remembered him. She remembered Berlenhof, default HQ of the Council of Human Interests – wealthy and beautiful even before Earth fell. And she’d never forget the conflict that followed. She’d been with the first Heaven’s Sword, a shining new ship with the latest mass loom technology. And after the battle, her surviving sisters had become the core of a new sorority for the next ship to bear the name.
Before the battle, with the Architect making its graceful approach past the outer planets, the Partheni had met Berlenhof’s fellow defenders on one of its orbitals. While her superiors had discussed hard tactics with their opposite numbers, she’d sat with her fellow soldiers and just talked. This was back in the day when the Parthenon was humanity’s great hope. The angels with their martial resolve and top-of-the-range technology. Their mission: to hold back the inevitable.
She felt a wave of nebulous emotion. A clutch of loss mixed with the soaring nostalgia of When We Were Heroes. She’d been twenty-five and had never seen anything more than a skirmish before. There had been Castigar warrior-caste members spoiling for a fight; Hannilambra merchant venturers, humans from every corner of the Colonies. And there had been a special weapon too. Four men, three women, one nonbinary. Intermediaries, the first class of them, right out of the labs; the weapon that a little corner of human science had been working on ever since the Miracle at Forthbridge.
Idris Telemmier had been among the group. Later, he’d become the first man she’d ever met. A little younger than she was, dark bronzy skin like most Colonials, black unruly hair hacked short by someone whose barber status was defiantly amateur. Mostly she remembered how nervous he’d looked, flinching from every loud noise. And he had big ears, really quite outsize for his face. Odd what stayed with you.
Now she looked at his image and saw the same man, when she should have been looking at a face that might have belonged to his grandfather. Solace herself had been born over seventy years before, Earth standard, but she’d spent a lot of that time in suspension, a weapon waiting for an appropriate war. Colonials didn’t do that; they only put themselves under when they travelled and, for Ints, not even then. She could only assume the image was seriously out of date.
Three of the eight Ints had died, at Berlenhof, and another two had been driven irretrievably insane in the course of duty. Idris could easily have been next. Yet when she met him on-planet after the battle, in the infirmary camp converted from a luxury hotel, he’d been lucid. Shaken, but that was to be expected after you’d touched the vast alien consciousness of an Architect with your mind.