Solace stared at her. ‘Hope,’ she said.
‘Which one of you was Hope?’ the specialist asked blankly.
‘No, I mean the . . . the idea of hope.’ Solace frowned. ‘My people will be hoping we don’t have to just walk away. They’ll be hoping there’s a diplomatic solution. And . . . ’
‘And what? They’re going to be our warrior angels all over again, throw themselves in the way if the Architects come?’
‘Yes.’ Solace was blinking rapidly. ‘Yes, Olli. Exactly that.’
Idris wondered how much of this vaunted hope was her own, that her people were still the heroes she remembered. She’d been in suspension for a long time and the universe had turned.
‘The Angels of Punching You in the Face,’ he pronounced sadly, but ending with a smile. God knew he needed something to lighten the mood. Solace rounded on him, looking for mockery, finding none.
‘Enquiry – crew logistical arrangements on sudden failure of diplomacy?’ Kittering piped up. He’d been crouching in one corner, puzzling over his backscreen, currently spread on the floor in several pieces.
‘Good point. I’m guessing your people won’t have time to just drop us off, if you do decide to leg it home,’ Kris agreed.
‘Well,’ Solace shifted awkwardly. ‘They did ask . . . would you agree to come with us? I mean, war or peace, diplomacy or not, I’m supposed to ask.’
‘And if we say no, that means they let us go, right?’ Olli asked, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Maybe give us a little hamper of rations for the journey, complimentary mint candy, that kind of thing?’
‘We – they – we would contract with you, on good terms. For the services of the Vulture God and all crew.’
‘So long as crew includes Idris,’ Kris finished for her.
‘Why not just take him?’ Olli said suddenly. ‘I mean, you can. The Vulture’s in your ship’s hold. Even we were able to storm this damn bucket when we needed to. You have all the supermarines in the universe, right outside the hatch. Why this goddamn pussyfooting around?’
‘We don’t want to . . . That’s a step we can’t un-take, and what use are any of you under duress? You ever think about trying to force an Int to do something, really? Hugh might have all the leash contracts in the world, but you can’t tell me the Liaison Board doesn’t invest massively in psych-conditioning too. Maybe they have slaver cut-outs or some killer implant to keep their hooks in, even. Because it’s like those birds they keep on Magda, the expensive hunting ones. The whole point of them is to let them fly, and if they fly then maybe they never come back. But more than that, we don’t want to. And I don’t want to. At least consider a contract . . . Largesse or Halma or goods in kind, however you want it. Most spacer crews would be scrabbling over each other for this sort of deal. Is it so bad that it’s us?’
Olli opened her mouth for the quick retort, then shut it, looking around at her fellows. ‘Fuck,’ she said at last. ‘Actually, hate to admit it, that’s not a bad pitch.’
‘Well it comes down to Idris,’ Kris noted. ‘I mean . . . I’d be for it. I, er, always wanted to see the Parthenon. But Idris?’
He was silent. Their voices had become very far away. He was gripping the edge of the pilot’s board, to stop himself falling into the vast well he could feel forming. The jabber of the news mediotype had become no more than static.
His name again, from Kris, then Solace. Then Olli lifted a leg of her walker frame to prod him with its tip. There might have been the tinkle and clatter of Kit reassembling his screen, taping over the cracks. Trine’s phantom face with its vacant beatitude. All so far away.
Just outside the ship, the curve of space fell into a void, pulled down by the leaden weight of nothingness. Gravity without mass, because its cause was on the other side of the membrane. In unspace. He knew that Saint Xavienne would be feeling just this, wherever she was. And over where the Liaison Board plied its trade, its conscript Intermediaries would be clutching at their heads, wailing, waking from nightmares – because none of the poor bastards would know what they were sensing. It hadn’t happened before in their lifetimes. They weren’t veterans, like him and Xavienne.
‘It’s coming,’ he told the crew. ‘It’s here.’
28.
Solace
Her sisters let Solace stand with the Vulture’s crew, in the hastily convened meeting that followed. It was a fiction, obviously. Solace was a Myrmidon Executor of the Parthenon, not some free spacer. Except there was a fierce loyalty to the crew inside her, and it didn’t have to clash with her lifelong devotion to her sisters just yet.