‘This is your ship now, Menheer.’ And, because he was shaking again, she snapped at him. ‘Name, Menheer?’
He twitched. ‘Telemmier. Idris Telemmier. Intermediary. First class.’
‘They say you’re a weapon. So now you have to fight.’
He was shaking his head, but then she had him out of the lift and the officers were calling for him.
The battle displays formed a multicoloured array in the centre of the bridge, showing the vast fleet as it moved to confront the Architect. Solace saw that they were finally about to fire on it: to do what little damage they could with lasers and projectiles, suicide drones, explosives and gravitic torsion. But their goal was only to slow it. A victory against an Architect was when you made yourself enough of a nuisance that they had to swat you before they could murder the planet.
They got Idris in front of the display, though Solace had to hold him upright.
‘What am I—？’ he got out. Solace saw he didn’t have the first clue what was going on.
‘Whatever you can do, do,’ an officer snapped at him. Solace could see and feel that the Heaven’s Sword was already on its attack run. She wanted desperately to be on-shift at the mass loom consoles, bringing that ersatz hammer against the shell of the Architect. She didn’t believe in this Intermediary any more than she believed in wizards.
Still, when he turned his wan gaze her way, she mustered a smile and he seemed to take something from that. Something lit behind his eyes: madness or divine revelation.
Then their sister ship’s mass loom fired and Solace followed the Cataphracta’s strike through the bridge readouts. It was a weapon developed through studying the Architects themselves, a hammerblow of pure gravitic torsion, aiming to tear a rift in their enemy’s crystalline exterior. Operators read off the subsequent damage reports: fissuring minimal but present; target areas flagged up for a more concentrated assault. The Heaven’s Sword’s Zero Point fighters were flocking out of its bays now and dispersing, a hundred gnats to divert the enemy’s time and attention from the big guns.
The whole bridge sang like a choir for just a moment as their own mass loom spoke, resonating through the entire length of the ship. Solace felt like shouting out with it, as she always did. And kept her mouth shut, because here on the bridge that sort of thing would be frowned on.
Idris gasped then, arching backwards in her arms, and she saw blood on his face as he bit his tongue. His eyes were wider than seemed humanly possible, all the whites visible and a ring of red around each as well. He screamed, prompting concerned shouts from across the bridge, eclipsed when the Fleet Exultant in command called out that the Architect had faltered. Impossible that so much inexorable momentum could be diverted by anything short of an asteroid impact. But it had jolted in the very moment that Idris had yelled.
The mass loom sang again, and she saw the Cataphracta and the Ascending Mother firing too, all targeting the same fractures in the Architect’s structure. Smaller ships were wheeling in swarms past the behemoth’s jagged face, loosing every weapon they had, frantic to claim an iota of the thing’s monstrous attention. She saw them being doused like candles, whole handfuls at a time. And then the Architect’s invisible hands reached out and wrung the whole length of the Cataphracta and opened it out like a flower. A ship and all its souls turned into a tumbling metal sculpture and cast adrift into the void. And it would do exactly the same to Berlenhof when it reached the planet.
The Locust Ark was annihilated next, fraying into nothing as it tried to throw its disintegrating mass into the Architect’s path. Then the Sword’s loom spoke, but the choir was in discord now, the very seams of the warship strained by the power of her own weaponry. Idris was clutching Solace’s hands painfully, leaning into her and weeping. The Architect had halted, for the first time since it entered the system, no longer advancing on the planet. She felt Idris vibrate at that point, rigid as he did something; as he wrestled the universe for control over the apocalyptic engine that was the Architect. Her ears were full of the rapid, efficient patter of the bridge reports: stress fractures, targeting, the elegant physics of gravity as a bludgeoning weapon. Damage reports. So many damage reports. The Architect had already brushed them once and Solace had barely realized. Half the decks of the Heaven’s Sword were evacuating.
‘It’s cracking!’ someone was shouting. ‘It’s cracking open!’
‘Brace!’ And Solace had to brace for herself and Idris too. Because his mind was somewhere else, doing battle on a field she couldn’t even imagine.