Eventually the alarms sounded, giving the ‘all-wake’。 The Heaven’s Sword segued into an ordered tumult of booted feet and women’s voices. Solace was sitting on the edge of her bunk, instantly at full alert. She had a smile for him, a small one, just enough to keep him brave.
‘Do we eat yet?’ Andecka was asking, and Xavienne was stretching in careful stages. Davisson sat and stared at his hands with hollow eyes.
‘We fight,’ Idris said, his voice sounding small and ridiculous to his ears.
‘To the bridge, all speed,’ Solace confirmed. ‘Menheers and Mesdams, if you will?’
Trine met them as they entered, practically buzzing with excitement.
‘I am detecting a new modulation from within the regalia!’ they announced loudly, to the considerable annoyance of Hope and her crew. ‘And the ship’s instrumentalists are reading kindred frequencies from within the Architect. They are reacting to one another!’
‘That’s good, is it?’ Idris asked dubiously.
‘It is unprecedented, my dear old colleague!’ Trine exclaimed, their battery of arms waving excitedly. ‘This has never been observed before. This strongly suggests these mobile relics retain their properties in transit. That was by no means guaranteed. Also, these readings will be of incalculable scientific value! I am already planning a symposium.’
‘That’s . . . great, well done.’ Idris had no idea what that even meant. ‘I’m sure that’ll go well for you if we survive.’
Trine’s face beamed at him benevolently. ‘Oh, I rather feel our survival is in the bag, my old crew-fellow. We bear with us the one known defence against the Architects – mounted within a fighting ship for the first time. What is our enemy going to do, precisely?’
‘Take it down a notch, Delegate,’ Solace told them. They rolled their projected eyes but the flow of words stopped and they returned to the regalia. The relics still looked like corroded old junk to Idris, but apparently they were doing their thing. That was all that mattered.
‘Ready now?’ Hope addressed them then fired off a dense patter of Parsef to Solace.
‘We’re close now. Under other circumstances, at this distance, we’d be risking the Architect’s attention,’ Solace translated. ‘We have gravitic shields up anyway, in case Trine’s wrong. But so far, it’s just continuing to advance on Berlenhof. We’re matching its trajectory. And we’re ready for you.’
Idris nodded convulsively, and Xavienne squeezed his arm. Then she went over to the Liaison Ints and murmured some words of encouragement. Both of them looked ashen and frightened, and Idris suspected he looked the same. Not inside, though. Inside him something had woken that had slept since the war. It sent fire though his veins, and he both loathed and loved the sensation. This was what made him a monster and a war-ender.
He met Solace’s eyes and she saw it there too, the wolf within the lamb. Old Times. She smiled at him and that was Old Times too, and it felt good.
‘Medical crew will stand by,’ Hope told them, because at Far Lux he’d almost killed himself, just as a side-effect of doing his job. Right now he felt invulnerable. His mind was streaming with memories: Berlenhof and Lux; the pain of the Intermediary Program; all the hungry, terrified years of growing up with a war on.
He let his mind out, the wolf loping through the door of its cage after long captivity. Out there, beyond the eggshell walls of the Heaven’s Sword, was the vast, serrated face of the Architect. And again he made himself small, a dagger, a dart, a needle. He folded his mind until he could hurl his consciousness out along the gravity curve, down towards its immensity. He remembered doing this in hate at Berlenhof, as their armada was torn apart around him. He remembered Far Lux, where he had done this in hope – and had been met by the enemy in its own halls.
You said you’d go away forever. Untrue and he was anthropo-morphizing, but still. Why are you here, now? In his baffled frustration he bounced off it, falling away from the crystalline complexity of its internal architecture. Then he was back on the Heaven’s Sword bridge, head already splitting and blood roaring in his ears.
He risked a glance at his fellows. Davisson had blood running from his nose. Andecka’s fists were balled up in front of her face, cheeks wet with tears. Xavienne stood ramrod straight, head tilted back and lined face without expression.
Again . . .
He fell back into that space – the deformation between unspace and the real, where the Architect’s consciousness resided. He entered its vast complexity immediately, this time, this mind as big as a moon . . . He was blundering like a moth, battering the mirrored surfaces within its substance. And somewhere in there was a window onto the thinking part of the Architect, which knew why it did what it did . . . The thing that made planets and ships into art, and murdered billions. And its species hadn’t even known or cared, until it met Idris Telemmier over Far Lux.