*
After that, the crew waited. Idris had guided the Vulture God in as delicately as he could, clasping the most intact part of the Oumaru’s hull, of which there was little enough. To an onlooker, the two vessels would have looked as if a winged crab was trying to tackle some vastly strung-out jellyfish.
He had the gravitic drives running low, but enough to extend a field across Oumaru’s near end. Solace’s armour and Olli’s Scorpion both had gravitic handles that could claw a purchase in that field, allowing them to manoeuvre in vacuum. Idris watched them jockey out of the Vulture’s airlock and jink in zigzag lines across the tortured curve of the freighter’s violated hull. They were heading for the ragged edge where the Architect had exposed the vessel’s innards.
What if this is it? That’s what everyone must be thinking. What if this is the war?
Forty years ago, Idris and two of his peers had gone before an Architect at Far Lux and made contact. For a mind-splitting moment, human thought and the ponderous cognition of a moon-sized entity had existed in the same frame of reference. The Intermediaries had done what they were created for.
They hadn’t brokered an understanding. There hadn’t even been a détente. But the Architect had become aware of them. And it had gone away, leaving the colony at Far Lux – mid-evacuation – untouched. And no Architect had been seen since. Humanity had been saved.
A generation had grown up since, without that terrible annihilating shadow. Except Idris was of the war generation, and could never forget.
‘There’s no sign of any crew,’ came Olli’s voice. ‘I can see clear through to the far end of the ship. Everything in here’s been . . . Architected. The inside’s as fucked as the outside. Crew and most of the cargo must have just . . . been blown out. It wouldn’t have taken long to do this, right?’
‘A ship of this size? Seconds,’ Idris confirmed hollowly, trying not to remember all the times he’d seen it happen. Planets took longer. Earth’s reconfiguration had taken a whole hour, they said.
‘What a mess,’ Olli said, and Idris suspected she wasn’t referring to the ship’s internal structure. Then, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’
‘Taking samples,’ from Solace.
‘Souvenirs, Patho?’ Olli sounded disgusted.
‘Samples,’ Solace repeated. ‘Architects have a signature, like fingerprints, when they affect matter. If nothing else, we can see if this is one we know – or some new one, fresh out of whatever hell they come from.’
*
Barney suggested leaving the ship behind, but Rollo vetoed that. ‘My child, we have a job to do. There has been an unexpected complication. That is all.’ He sounded very much like a man trying to reassure himself. ‘We bring it back. We get paid. We go away and try to forget this ever happened.’
‘Seriously?’ Olli demanded, slouched back in her walker frame now.
‘This may just be . . . an aberration,’ Rollo said mildly, a wave of his hand dismissing the Architects and all they had done. ‘One incident. It’s not . . .’
‘The end of the world,’ Olli finished sourly.
‘Ready to haul her back, my son?’ Rollo asked Idris.
There was a fretting little fear at the back of Idris’s mind that, when he moved the hulk into unspace, there would be something else attached to it. Something invisible in real space, but manifest in all its ghastly glory in the imaginary spaces beyond.
He would have plenty of time to dwell on happy thoughts like that on the journey through the deep void back to port.
‘I suppose you’d better get to your pods then,’ he told the crew.
Factor Leng had asked them to plot an exit point far from any traffic, if they found anything problematic. She’d been thinking of sabotage and anti-Hegemony slogans, but he reckoned this counted. Idris brought them out well away from anyone who might catch sight of their grotesque cargo, and sent a single encrypted image to Lung-Crow Admin.
‘I don’t envy whoever gets to make a statement about this,’ Kris mused, once the crew had woken. ‘I mean, not our problem. But . . .’
‘It’s going to be a pain in the ass to do business anywhere for at least half a year,’ was Barney’s massively understated contribution.
Due to suspension and unspace travel, a spacer’s life usually involved surprisingly little waiting aboard ship, but with their covert approach, it would be a few hours before the Leng’s Coffin could reach their position. They played Landstep and Brag, and Kris pulled out a curated handful of mediotypes from her collection. Throughout, Idris was aware of Solace’s eyes boring into his back. Her unspoken offer hung in the air, visible only to the two of them.