The Thunderchild had launched a flight of Zero Points now, little single-woman fighters. Their size wouldn’t help, but many could make a difference. The Architect had a limit to how much it could divide its goliath-like attention. And yet they would die, all of them. They knew it. They were buying time for Berlenhof, just the same as before.
The Vulture God streaked on, a battered old junk-hauler that had no place in the war zone. The other Hugh cruiser out there, the Perihelion, was hailing them. It was warning them off, as though they might somehow have missed the crystal half-moon out there murdering everyone. Kris proclaimed they were the cavalry, the Intermediary Program here to save the day.
‘Kit,’ Idris said through clenched teeth. ‘I know we’re basically screwed, but do what you can with the drive to get us some shielding. Just enough to fend off the worst.’
The Hanni’s reply went untranslated, which was probably just as well. But Kittering bent to the task anyway, slender mandibles rattling away at his board, sabotaging the clean running of the gravitic drive to twist space around them. Meanwhile, Olli had the brachator system hauling them forward from point to point, clipping them in a zigzag course into the heart of the fight. Idris would rather be doing that himself – it was his skill set, after all – but he had a different job right now, and one nobody else could help him with.
Solace’s hand closed on his shoulder and he felt a moment of perfect stillness. It was as though all the duelling gravities and energies out there had cancelled each other out, just for a fraction of a second, leaving only calm and peace.
Idris felt the Architect then, its vast and incurious mind that was focused on turning all these vessels into junk art and filigree. Remaking the universe one clutch of matter at a time. He made himself small and sharp and stabbed like a rapier. And everything receded from him: Kris’s voice over the comm, Olli’s swearing . . . his own body, with all its frailties and injuries, all someone else’s problem.
We are here. Stop killing us. We are here.
He could feel the Architect’s ponderous attention shifting from place to place across the battlefield. Here a Zero Pointer was snuffed out – pilot and vessel turned into lace and sent spinning into the endless void. There, clawing for the Perihelion, the Hugh ship’s shielding failing, the ring of its gravitic drive rupturing into space. Idris felt the shift and shunt of the Architect’s thoughts as it caught the ship’s broken pieces and remade them. Each one became a work of art, worthy of a master. Some of the pieces had been crew but the Architect made no distinction. In his far, far distant ears, over Kris’s comms connection, Idris could hear screaming.
He felt that he was standing by the feet of a great, slow giant as it tore down a city, block by block. The buildings fell, the people in them screamed and then they were crushed. But the giant only cared about urban clearance. It didn’t understand that there were living things in the stone edifices it ripped down.
Except it must. They learned it at Far Lux. That’s why they stopped.
He was a tiny little man beating at the giant’s heel, hammering at its smallest toe, shrieking himself hoarse. He was the mote in the mind of God, lost in that labyrinth of mirrors and moving parts.
Why have you come back?
And one of his tiny ant punches registered, because the faintest feather edge of the Architect’s consciousness acknowledged his existence.
Then he was slammed back into his body because the Vulture God was spinning out of control. Trine slammed complaining into the wall and Idris was half out of his chair. He was only saved from breaking his head by Solace grabbing him and hauling him back. Olli was incandescent over the comms. She turned a cubic mile of void blue with oaths Idris had never even heard before, as her Scorpion frame slid across the drone bay to crash into its closed hatch. For a moment she lost all connection to ship systems and they were helpless, adrift. Then she had The Vulture underway again, limping and shuddering.
‘No more thank you no,’ Kit rattled off, sending damage reports to all boards. The Vulture was just about in one piece, but they’d accrued ten years of wear and tear in as many seconds.
‘We’ve lost the Perihelion,’ Kris choked out. ‘Gone, dead.’
‘No more no further impact all tolerances exceeded no,’ Kittering insisted.
We’re not going to make it. The moment the Architect turned back to find them – that would be it. They couldn’t move fast enough, shield hard enough. They just weren’t strong enough to wrestle the monster for control of local space for even a moment. And if tiny Zero Pointers could be pinched into oblivion, detected by the all-seeing Architect – how could they escape its notice?