‘Gone!’ they buzzed. ‘Gone!’
Idris’s eyes went to the framework the Hiver had set up for the regalia. They were gone, as Trine said.
‘What happened?’ he managed, meeting Solace’s wide gaze. There was blood on her face, he saw.
‘They came for the regalia,’ she told him.
‘They who?’
‘Things, soldiers from the Architect. Crystal things. They punched into the ship. We couldn’t fight them, couldn’t stop them. Took the relics and left. Idris, we—’
One of the surviving officers yelled something in Parsef, then the whole ship shuddered as bulkheads ground against one another. Sparks flashed from buckled panels and half the screens went dark. It was almost reassuring in its familiarity. Now that’s an Architect attack.
There was more rapid back and forth between the bridge crew, and Solace said tightly, ‘We can’t survive another strike like that. The shields barely held us together.’ And it was, Idris thought, a remarkable thing that they were still in one piece. That this work of human hands had endured the wrath of an angry god.
But not twice, and so he was breaking from Solace, bounding over to the pilot’s station. ‘Give me unspace, someone. I am plotting a course,’ as clearly as possible. He heard Solace translate for him, trusting him. Someone was objecting that they were right in the Architect’s gravity shadow and couldn’t leave the real. Solace was telling them that they could, with Idris as navigator. Didn’t they know what he was? Her hand was bruisingly tight on his shoulder, the tension giving the lie to her words.
They gave him everything he wanted and, for that moment, he had the power of a top-of-the-range Parthenon warship at his fingertips. Except before an Architect, that didn’t mean very much.
The appalling mass of the thing gave them no clearance at all to get into unspace. It narrowed their options to a single equation, a needle to thread. They were caught between the hungry weight of the world-destroyer and the world it was set upon destroying. But Idris was on fire, half out of his mind, half in unspace already. It was as though the universe simply drew him a new Throughway, for one use only, just for him. He took the battered Sword and whipped it out from under the Architect’s descending hammer. He yanked them through unspace for a handful of traumatizing, unprotected moments. It would feature in the nightmares of everyone aboard for the rest of their lives. And he had saved the ship, and everyone still living on it. At least until the Architect caught up.
29.
Idris
They shot Idris full of drugs to bring down the inflammation in his brain, and to stem the internal bleeding. Then there were more drugs to combat the sluggishness brought on by the first batch. At least they quietened the hallucinations he’d been getting, of motion at the corners of his vision plus a sense of impending doom. Although as doom was in fact impending maybe that hadn’t been a symptom of anything other than actual current events.
He was in a Hugh infirmary, on an orbital over Berlenhof. And if he listened carefully, he could hear staff arguing about which patients could be got out on what ships. He reckoned that same conversation would be dominating the planet below, too. Oh, the powerful and wealthy who owned estates across the beautiful sun-kissed archipelagos of Berlenhof would have their own transport, but right now a fair proportion of Hugh’s entire bureaucratic staff would be performing the hard maths with every vessel they had left, working out who could be saved. Luckily, he had a ride. Solace had told him the Vulture God had docked at the same orbital. She’d gone to call the crew and tell them their errant son was still alive.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It’s never attacked like that before. Was it because we had the regalia?’
Beside his bunk, Delegate Trine was perched in a basic walker frame. Both legs had been removed, so he could be given a matching pair. Trine was sick of limping.
‘If you’re asking me to make an educated guess, old confederate, I don’t know.’ The Hiver’s face was disconcertingly absent, their projectors having literally given up the ghost. The remaining silvery bowl showed nothing but a smear of Idris’s reflection. ‘Perhaps this is what Architects do, if they encounter Originator gear on a ship? But really, if it can deal with regalia on a ship, why not on a planet? If I were the Hegemony I’d start getting very nervous indeed.’
The Architect had launched a couple of its smallest spines into the Heaven’s Sword, inflicting significant but incidental hull damage. Then the spines had begun fragmenting out into . . . soldiers, Trine had said. Individual mobile units. They had been made of the same crystal as the spines and took on many shapes. Some were humanoid, most were not: many legs, no legs, serpentine, arachnoid, flying ray-forms and other less recognizable things. Hearing the unfamiliar descriptions, Idris had a creeping fear these were species the Architects had met, and there was only one way that meeting ever went. They were drawn from a great funerary list of extinct civilizations – one with a space on it reserved for humanity.