‘Here and present.’
‘Get in here. Need your help. I . . . I’ve got a lot of failing systems. Took a bit of a knock here.’
‘I am not a technician,’ the Hiver said uncertainly.
‘You are proof against vacuum, you roach bastard. I need you to get in here and do what you can to the Scorpion, before my life support gives. Okay? I would do it myself, but I’m too busy saving all your asses.’
‘Well, in that case, I shall lower myself,’ Trine said with dignity. ‘Myrmidon Solace, as requested,’ and they passed something to the Partheni. ‘If I should not return from this—’
‘Just go!’ Kris shouted at them. The phantom face looked mortally offended, but they went.
I’m going in again. We’re jumping, Idris tried to say. But he couldn’t get the words out, probably because he didn’t seem to be breathing. Solace was on it, though. Whatever she had plugged into his heart had oxygenated his blood, until his autonomic systems stopped sleeping on the job. His brain was still fed, and that was all he needed. He rolled his eyes in thanks but she had no time for that, absorbed in the job of keeping him alive.
So he just continued, passing another set of sums to Olli, keeping them always one jump ahead of the Architect’s next sally. And he forced his mind back into it, trying to pick up where he’d left off. If you don’t hate us, why kill us? He met a vast wall of alien thought and scaled it, driving his hands into the gaps between nameless concepts. He navigated impossible logical contradictions, finding a mind so old that human concepts of time did not apply. A focus so powerful that it could rework a planet at the molecular level – not as an act of brute force but one of loving, careful artistry. Placing every atom perfectly in place. Fit for purpose.
What purpose, though? Why did the Architects rebuild the universe, one inhabited world at a time? Surely not merely because they could?
Another near miss, distant cursing from Olli, Kris trying to liaise with the Blake and the Thunderchild. Idris fell out of the Architect again, clawing at it, plummeting forever. The space around them was a constellation of ships – hundreds of Zero Pointers bringing their gravitic drives together to fracture those crystal spines. All while the Thunderchild’s mass looms boomed and hammered soundlessly and the Blake unleashed hell. It was pumping out such blistering salvos of accelerator shot that even the Architect could not catch every falling sparrow of it. And it was still not enough. It was not even a hundredth of enough. They were flies in the face of God. They were just powerful enough to be worth obliterating.
And still Idris tried to get to the centre of the Architect. He was beating on the doors of its brain, but he couldn’t get in.
‘New challenger. Unexpected potential trouble!’ Kit reported. He harvested more data from the boards, while trying to shore up their shielding. Idris came back to himself, realizing that another ship had stutter-jumped into the midst of the fight. The Hugh military launch that had hailed them as they fled the orbital.
You can’t be serious. They’ve come to arrest us? Don’t they know there’s a war on? The Hugh ship was just tumbling, the shock of the in-system jump throwing its crew. But if they stutter-jumped that means—
He sensed the other mind then, scrabbling at the Architect’s consciousness. Andecka Tal Mar, the volunteer. She’d come out here like he had, still volunteering, trying to make a difference.
He fed another set of coordinates to Olli. And presumably Trine was doing some good down there, because she was still alive and guiding the ship. There was the shock of another jump and now he couldn’t see, couldn’t open his eyes. There was Kris’s voice, Solace’s voice, all very distant now. The whooping of alarms too, thoroughly someone else’s problem.
Perhaps we’ve just hit the limit of the Vulture’s medical kit. Ah well . . .
He could feel Andecka out there, fighting and failing – but she’d caught the Architect’s attention, just for a moment. He couldn’t coordinate with her but he could adapt to what she did. He slid in past her, using the gaps she’d opened in the Architect’s concentration. Its mind was elsewhere as it tried to discover the cause of this latest pinprick irritation.
And he was in.
It happened as easily as that, the perfect insertion of mind into mind. Thread the goddamn needle one last time. And he was in a place of eerie stillness, of pure Zen calm. A single step away in every direction he could see it all: the battle, the ships, the planet, the wider universe . . . All as remote as if painted in some abstract, expressionist style onto canvas and hung on a wall. A way of looking at the universe that made it seem like no more than bad art – something that could be reimagined, perfected.