Idris felt his throat go dry.
Unless . . .
‘Olli,’ he yelled into comms.
‘Busy!’
‘You’re linked to the ship?’
‘I’m flying the fucking ship, what do you think?’
‘Linked, really linked, right?’
Space shuddered about them, the gravitic shockwave of someone else being wrung out of existence. Yet even with its focus elsewhere, he could still feel the thereness of the Architect. This close, it felt as though its crystal needles were being driven into his brain.
‘I’m going to stutter-jump us again.’ And Olli would think he was quitting, getting them out, but he went on, ‘Only for a fraction of a second. You’ll feel it like a big old shock to the system, but no more.’
‘Idris, I—’
‘I need you to just keep flying her, Olli. I’m feeding you coordinates for where you’ll be flying from when we exit unspace. And I’ll keep doing it, again, then again – and you have to keep up with me, okay? So are you linked to the ship? Nav systems, sensor suite, all that stuff. Your eyes, your limbs?’
Olli made a croaking sound over the comms. He chose to interpret that as a yes and jumped them . . .
. . . into unspace. Except the moment they crossed out of the real, he was slamming them back in again. He could hear Kris’s yelp, the skreeling complaints of Kittering. They were demanding to know what he was doing, and the ship was just tumbling now – falling towards the jagged horizon of the Architect, utterly without control.
‘Olli!’
‘I got it, I got it, damn you, Idris, give me a . . .’ And the brachator drive kicked in. Hauling them away, hand over hand – further from that hungry crystal landscape. Idris felt the Architect register them once more, reach for them, and he jumped them again. Once more, he fed Olli his calculations a split second before they went. Again they were gone, becoming unreal. Then they were back, a hundred kilometres from where they’d been. Now his head was splitting. The pain of those abrupt seat-of-the-pants jumps, the pain of trying to contact the Architect. All getting together and raising a family inside his skull.
But Olli was on it now. She was managing the ship from the moment it burst out of unspace – barrelling them through a formation of Zero Pointers, winking like stars on every side, flying the Vulture God as though she’d been born with wings. Olian Timo, born a stranger to her human body, had decided, why limit her efforts to that? Any frame, any surrogate shell could be hers. Now she was riding the Vulture God’s sensor data, eating the nav information Idris fed her. She saw each new emergence point and assimilated it before they popped into existence there. Always desperately fleeing ahead of the Architect’s angry strikes.
And even as his hands jumped and jumped them, Idris let his mind out again. Once more, he fell into the fractured maze of the Architect’s body – that was simultaneously its brain. Again, he was seeking that point of consciousness within. Seeking an audience, so he could plead for the survival of his people.
He was plunging through ablating crystalline layers of thought and desire. His mind shouted We are here. But the Architect knew this already. It didn’t care. And this time around, it really did want to kill them. To unmake their worlds – despite knowing that myriad little minds lived upon them. Why? Why hate us now?
I don’t hate you.
Those weren’t the words; it wasn’t quite like that. But his mind took the stimuli it encountered and translated them, awkward as Kittering’s artificial voice trying to give words to Hannilambra concepts. Stunned, he was back in his body – just as a great fist slammed against the Vulture God’s hull and made it ring like a gong. Abruptly alarms and red warning signs were all over his board and Kit was reeling off the damage.
‘Drone bay!’ Kris got out. ‘Breach in the drone bay. Olli!’
‘Still here,’ came her grim voice. ‘Air’s gone but I got my own, haven’t I. Fucking clinging on, aren’t I? Only . . .’ There was a pause. Idris blinked, finding the world red-washed. He had blood in his eyes and his head jumped and stuttered as randomly as their course through unspace. Solace tore open his tunic, the cheap printed fabric parting like paper. She clamped something to his chest, part of the grab-bag of medkit junk the Vulture had accumulated over the years. Was it interacting with his heart in some way? He felt only a distant curiosity, as he waited for Olli to keep speaking. He hoped Olli would keep speaking.
‘Trine,’ the drone specialist said at last.