When he reached Command, they were all there: Olli in her walker, Kris in Rollo’s chair, Kittering in his own. And Trine too, to his surprise. Their arms were still mangled, but they had new legs and their face had been restored to its phantom glory. Solace stepped in behind him and leant on the back of the pilot’s chair, as he took his place at the board.
‘Look . . .’ he started awkwardly.
‘You’re going to say we don’t need to come, that it’s dangerous,’ Kris told him. ‘Idris, in the general ranking of “people important enough to get a berth off-planet”， just where do you think we fit? If we’re not getting out on the Vulture, we’re not getting out at all. So we’re sticking on board, thank you very much.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Trine declared. ‘Some of us are an ambassador.’
‘Taking her out,’ Olli announced, and the ship’s bones creaked around them as they lifted off from the dock and passed out of the station’s gravitic field into open vacuum. ‘Idris, she’s yours when you’re ready. Take her away.’
*
He’d wanted the crew in suspension beds, even for the stutter-jump in-system. But there wasn’t time. They’d been through it before anyway, were practically unspace veterans. He argued the case as he slung the Vulture God away from the orbital, ignoring the angry comms chatter they left in their wake. A couple of Hugh military skiffs hailed them, but they were too little, too late. Enough politics.
He sketched out the maths of the stutter-jump always with the sense of Berlenhof as a crushing weight poised at his back. His target destination was unexpectedly complicated, a nightmare maze of gravitic distortions – even without the Architect itself with its disproportionate mass-shadow. Seeing the mess he was dropping into, he couldn’t quite believe he’d lifted the Heaven’s Sword out of it. But then it wasn’t just the enemy out there anymore.
The fighting’s started. Even at this remove, he could sense the slight shudder as the Thunderchild and its impromptu allies deployed their gravitic weapons. They were trying to crack the substance of the Architect, as its ponderous will sought to pin them down.
And the God was In, falling away from the real into the dream that was unspace and—
Out, exploding back into existence and into the thick of it. For a moment he could still see the ragged shawl of space-time, bent a thousand ways by the fighting. The Partheni warship was deploying its mass loom, four times the power of the batteries they’d used at the first Battle of Berlenhof. Idris saw a spray of cracks flower across those crystal mountains as the strike hit home. But they blurred into wholeness just a moment later, as the Architect reshaped its own substance to heal. Further off, Idris’s instruments reported on the Blake, a Colonial-built monster shaped like a lump hammer. It had launched a withering storm of super-accelerated shot from its cannon, most of which whirled off to oblivion as the Architect leant on the universe to shift the gradient.
Solace took her place at Idris’s back, medkit ready in her hands. Kris and Kittering were just staring at the monstrosity dominating space outside.
‘We’re too late,’ the Partheni whispered.
‘Not too late,’ Idris insisted. Although even as he spoke, he felt the Architect wrench space around the Thunderchild, breaching its overstressed hull in three places. ‘I need a pilot.’
Silence from the drone bay.
‘Olli? You there?’
‘I . . . Holy fuck, look at that thing.’
‘It’s just like before,’ Idris told her. ‘No different to last time.’
‘She wasn’t at Berlenhof the first time,’ Solace said quietly.
‘Idris, you famie bastard, I was born in Ninety-fucking-Four,’ Olli threw in over comms. ‘Believe it or not, this is my first Architect, see right?’ But she sounded more together now.
‘Olli, I—’
‘You need a pilot,’ Olli’s voice came over the comms. ‘I got it. Show me where to go.’
The others were waking from the spell, too. ‘Survival opportunities few and falling,’ Kit announced, skittering over to his own board. He was throwing up unwelcome statistics, specifically the efficacy of the Vulture God’s gravitic drive once the Architect caught hold of them. They punched a long way above their weight, but they weren’t a warship. Shielding wasn’t what they were optimized for.
‘I know, Kit, I . . . Take us in, Olli, I’ll . . . find a way. I promise.’ I don’t have a way. Maybe it won’t look at us. Maybe we’re too small for it to see. But he knew that wasn’t true. To the Architect, a single atom and an entire planet were equally worthy of adjustment.