‘It’s useless,’ she said. ‘We need to be out there. Us.’ Her fingers itched for the keys of the mass looms.
‘Myrmidon Solace, do you think you know better than the Fleet Exemplars?’ Her immediate superior, right at her shoulder of course.
‘No, Mother.’
‘Then just watch and be ready.’ And a muttered afterthought: ‘Not that I don’t agree with you.’ And even as her superior spoke, another of the tiny ships had been snuffed into darkness.
‘Was that—？’ someone cried, before being cut off. Then the officer was demanding, ‘Telemetry, update and confirm!’
‘A marked deviation,’ someone agreed. The display was bringing up a review, a fan of lines showing the Architect’s projected course and its current trajectory.
‘So it altered its course. That changes nothing,’ someone spat, but the officer spoke over them. ‘They turned an Architect! Whatever they did, they turned it!’
Then they lost all data. After a tense second’s silence, the displays blinked back, the handful of surviving ships fleeing the Architect’s renewed approach towards Berlenhof. Whatever the secret weapon was, it seemed to have failed.
‘High alert. All off-shift crews make ready to reinforce as needed. The fight’s coming to us!’ came the voice of the officer. Solace was still staring at the display, though. Had they accomplished nothing? Somehow, this secret Intermediary weapon had shifted the course of an Architect. Nobody had made them so much as flinch before.
Orders came through right on the heels of the thought. ‘Prepare to receive the Pythoness. Damage control, medical, escort.’ And she was the third of those, called up out of the off-shift pool along with her team.
The Pythoness had been a long, streamlined ship: its foresection bulked out by its gravitic drives and then tapering down its length to a segmented tail. That tail was gone, and the surviving two-thirds of the ship looked as though a hand had clenched about it, twisting every sleek line into a tortured curve. That the ship had made it back at all was a wonder. The moment the hatch was levered open, the surviving crew started carrying out the wounded. Solace knew from the ship’s readouts that half its complement wouldn’t be coming out at all.
‘Myrmidon Solace!’
‘Mother!’ She saluted, waiting for her duties.
‘Get this to the bridge!’
She blinked. This was a man. A Colonial human man. He was skinny and jug-eared and looked as though he’d already snapped under the trauma of the fight. His eyes were wide and his lips moved soundlessly. Twitches ran up and down his body like rats. She’d seen him before, at the council of war. One of the vaunted Intermediaries.
‘Mother?’
‘Take him to the bridge. Now, Myrmidon!’ the officer snapped, and then she leant in and grabbed Solace’s shoulder. ‘This is it, sister. This is the weapon. And if it’s a weapon, we need to use it.’
There were billions on Berlenhof: the local population as well as countless refugees from the other lost worlds. Nobody was going to get even a thousandth of those people off-world before the Architect destroyed it. But the more time they could buy for the evacuation effort, the more lives would be saved. This was what the Parthenon was spending its ships and lives for. That was what the Hivers would expend their artificial bodies for, and the alien mercenaries and partisans and ideologues would die for. Every lost ship was another freighter off Berlenhof packed out with civilians.
She got the man into a lift tube, aware of the wide-eyed looks he’d been receiving as she hauled him from the dock. He must be getting a far worse case of culture-shock; regular Colonials didn’t mix with the Parthenon and before the war there’d been no love lost. Here he was on a ship full of women who all had close on the same face, the same compact frame. Human enough to be uncanny but, for most Colonials, not quite human enough.
He was saying something. For a moment she heard nonsense, but she’d learned enough Colvul to piece together the words. It was just a demand to wait. Except they were already in the lift, so he could wait all he wanted and they’d still get where they were needed. ‘Wait, I can’t . . .’
‘You’re here . . . Menheer.’ It took a moment for her to remember the correct Colvul honorific. ‘My name is Myrmidon Solace. I am taking you to the bridge of the Heaven’s Sword. You are going to fight with us.’
He stared at her, shell-shocked. ‘They’re hurt. My ship. We jumped . . .’