Then Idris croaked something, and she watched as he finally opened his eyes. Across the room, Trine abruptly stirred themselves, face flickering into being with their usual slightly superior smile. Trine had to stay in the room, apparently, or it wasn’t a proper embassy. Or that was their understanding of their responsibility.
Kris’s eyes flicked to the medical readouts, which all seemed within tolerance. The Liaison Board’s doctor had been in again, although, when he found out the list of things that had happened to Idris’s poor body, he had just about given up in disgust. There was, he announced in high dudgeon, nothing more he could do. Apparently, the crew had already broken every rule of his profession and trampled all over the Hippocratic Oath in the bargain. Not that, Kris suspected, he had much truck with any such oath himself, given his employers.
‘Right then,’ Idris said quietly, even as Kris was sending an alert to Kit, Olli and Solace. ‘I feel dreadful.’
‘I’m beginning to think,’ she told him, ‘that you pick fights with Architects because it’s the only way you can get a night’s sleep.’ It was a terribly witty, brave little line. She’d spent ages handcrafting it as she waited by his bedside. Now it came out ruined because her voice was shaking. ‘How much do you remember? Do you . . . even remember?’
‘Too much,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I remember the Architect left. And that was when . . . Actually, I remember a whole lot of me hurting. Though that might be just the reminder I’m getting now, from all the parts that are still hurting. Damn, Kris, I feel like I died.’
‘You maybe did,’ she choked out.
‘Again, huh?’
‘You . . . Solace said you lost all brain function.’
‘That right?’
‘For ten minutes, nothing. Then you were back like you’d never been away. That’s what she said. I mean, I was busy shouting at the Liaison Board ship.’
‘They were helping too,’ he told her. ‘Or one of them was.’
‘Well I know that now.’
‘I think . . .’ And his eyes weren’t seeing her anymore, or the room, or anything so quotidian. ‘I think it took my mind into it.’
‘What?’
‘Just . . . reproduced the pattern of my mind. All the electricity of it, the precise organization that was me, and constructed it inside itself. And then it put me back, when it was done. Exactly as I had been. Every neuron picking up where it had left off.’
‘That’s patently impossible. Probably Solace got it wrong. I mean, she’s not a doctor. I mean probably your brain just died.’
‘Or that, yes.’ Idris blinked philosophically and one hand reached up to scratch at his chest. Kris stopped him.
‘What?’ His eyes widened. ‘I . . . seem to have a scar there.’
‘You do, yes.’ Kris glanced at Trine, who was trying to look disinterested.
‘The sort of scar you mostly see after someone’s tried to investigate cause of death. Big Y-shaped fellow, you know,’ Idris couldn’t help noting.
‘That’s right. Solace opened you up,’ Kris confirmed.
‘In the Vulture’s command capsule?’
‘Right there, yes.’ Kris suddenly began to feel the strain of the last few days, all at once. She clasped her hands to stop them trembling. ‘She did it because your heart had stopped and she couldn’t restart it. You weren’t reacting to the drugs, or to the shocks she was giving it, and we didn’t have any nanotech. But she’d thought ahead. She had a contingency plan.’
‘I guess she kept me going, somehow?’ Idris looked like he wanted to probe the sealant that had closed up the incision, ‘Did she put something in there?’
‘Indeed,’ Trine observed. ‘“Something.”’
‘What was that, then?’
‘Me.’
Idris opened his mouth, closed it. Raised his eyebrows.
‘At the good myrmidon’s request, I donated three of my units to act as a pacemaker. She used them to restart and manage your cardiac functions. They remain inside you, so I suppose this makes us family or something? Personally, I feel a grand swell of sibling feeling somewhere within me. I’m sure you do too.’
Idris tentatively fingered the ridge of sealant, still staring at Trine.
‘They are on autonomous secondment to your cardiovascular system, severed from my swarm. I won’t be, ahaha, manually tugging on your heartstrings, my old confederate-turned-proxy-relation, worry you not.’ Trine’s face looked insufferably pleased with itself.