‘I . . .’ In the face of her fierce certainty he didn’t know where to put himself. Despite feeling just the same, when he’d signed up with the Program.
‘Myrmidon Executor Solace is tasked as your liaison here,’ Exemplar Hope informed them. ‘We now proceed out-system towards the Architect. It currently proceeds in-system towards us. Meet her halfways, understand?’
They nodded: Davisson suspicious, Andecka radiating a wire-tense need for action. They made Idris feel old and tired.
‘Exemplar, if our attack is going to work . . .’ Idris paused. He glanced at Xavienne in case she’d rather take the lead, then at the Partheni. He was concerned Exemplar Hope wouldn’t understand him, with her shaky Colvul. But Solace was translating smoothly and Xavienne just waved him on.
‘If this is going to work,’ he repeated, ‘we will need to make contact with it. But I don’t know if we can break through if there’s a battle underway. I was on a far smaller ship before, at Far Lux. There wasn’t any chance of going toe-to-toe with conventional weapons so we didn’t try, just led with us Ints.’ He shrank a little beneath Hope’s stern stare. She was a Partheni commander, after all. Fighting was what they did and no skinny little Colonial civilian was going to tell her otherwise.
Except when she gave her reply to Solace it translated as, ‘She understands and will take her lead from you.’
‘Right then.’ Idris felt something must be wrong, because people were doing what he wanted and that hadn’t happened to him for a long time. Really? Was it war I was missing all this time? Not helpful. He faced his fellow Intermediaries. For a moment the thought of him giving them some sort of briefing, like an actual soldier, was ridiculous. But if not him, then who?
‘I’ll need a room,’ he told Hope. ‘We need to talk up a game plan.’ He shrugged. ‘Or at least, I’ll tell them how it worked out last time.’
After that, the others managed a meagre ration of sleep while the Heaven’s Sword cruised. The Partheni had put out from Berlenhof orbit in good time and the Architect was still getting underway. Perhaps it had delayed to lay a mental wreath by the scar of its sibling’s demise. Idris was left to sit alone in the dormitory Hope had given over to the Ints. Solace slept with them, curled on her side on a bunk by the door. She’d been first to slip away with a soldier’s enviable ease. Of the others, Xavienne seemed to have the same gift – lying on her back, arms folded across her chest like an ancient queen. Davisson Morlay took a while to drop off, tossing and turning and grumbling to himself. And as for Andecka Tal Mar, the volunteer. . . for a while Idris thought she truly was a kindred spirit, because her eyes never closed. But when he waved a hand before them, he realized that was just how she slept. He wondered if it had always been that way, or whether it was Tal Mar’s own personal souvenir of her transformation.
He padded over on bare feet to look down at Solace, wondering at her. She’d left some kind of hook in him, an old rusty one from long ago. If their paths hadn’t crossed he’d never have felt the metal of it, buried in his flesh. But now . . . They’d killed an Architect together. Once. And they’d been together for a little while, in that camp, amongst the mass of war-wounded.
It had been a nightmare place, really, despite Berlenhof’s wartime authorities doing everything they could. People there had suffered wounds of the body and wounds of the mind, and Idris had the latter, stricken by his experiences. It was as though the Architect’s consciousness had been radioactive in some way, and he’d received a dose just short of terminal. Then there had been Solace with her own traumas. They’d healed each other. It wasn’t his first time, not hers either – though her first with a man. Awkward and fumbling and apologetic and, in the long decades after, he got the memory out from time to time and warmed himself by it. Thinking, At least I had that going for me. Oh, there was saving a planet, killing a god and ending the war. But most of all, I lay within those arms. As if he was a poet. As if he was anything but a terrified spacer-rat, who just happened to be an Intermediary.
Kicking his heels in the dormitory, he had no idea what she thought about him, but then that was his problem with most people. Having gone where he had, or else having become what he was, reading other human beings was difficult.
He was so glad she was with him, though. Now they were doing it all again. He even encountered the unexpected revelation that, yes, he might actually go with her, if she asked him again. Forsake the Colonies, screw Hugh, sign up with the Parthenon. Be the lone Jack amongst all their Jills, just for her. A terrible reason for committing treason, really. Good thing he’d been ducking the big questions for the last fifty years.