*
There was a terrible impact and the screens briefly malfunctioned. Then in the chaos, as the Heaven’s Sword died, the Fleet Exultant gave Solace her last orders. In response, she grabbed the Intermediary – the little Colonial man who might be their greatest weapon – and hustled him through the wreckage. She bundled him through the surviving sections of the ship to the life pods. She prioritized him even over her sisters because he’d been made her responsibility, but also because he was hope: the universe now had one destroyed Architect; before the Battle of Berlenhof that number had been zero.
*
Later, in the vast medical camp planetside, Solace had been there holding Idris’s hand when he awoke. They’d been surrounded by other casualties from the Heaven’s Sword, all the other lucky ones who’d managed to escape with injuries rather than obliteration. Between the fight and its explosive end, half the fleet and a dozen orbitals had been crippled.
Idris had squeezed her hand, and she’d hugged him impulsively, just as she would have hugged a sister. There was more fighting to come, but right then they were just two comrades in arms. A pair who’d stood before the inevitable and still turned it aside, and the war owed them time to heal.
Six years later, the Intermediaries would finally end the war, though not by destroying or even defeating the enemy. The Architects, after almost a century of hounding humanity from world to world, would simply not be seen any more, vanished off into the endless space of the galaxy. Nobody could say where they had gone. And nobody knew when or if they might return.
Thirty-nine years after that, they woke Solace from cold storage one more time and said her warrior skills were needed. Not because the Architects were back, but because the Parthenon and the Colonies were on the brink of war.
PART 1
ROSHU
1.
Solace
Solace had thought her squad would assemble in the shuttle bay, all military precision and gleaming armour as befitted a Monitor Superior’s formal escort. But instead, the Monitor called them to the Grand Carrier’s main viewport first.
‘What you are about to see is an object lesson,’ she told them. ‘I am aware that Myrmidon Executor Solace has seen this already, but for the rest of you, this is where you came from. We all came from Earth originally, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.’
It had been a long time. Over a decade of Solace’s personal history, in and out of suspension; forty years of objective time, whatever that meant. Nothing had changed. Earth would always be the same now.
Earth was like a flower, forever turned towards the sun. An alien flower whose exemplar might grow in some fecund jungle on a distant world. A thing of creepers and reaching shoots, something more than vegetable, less than animal.
Earth’s mantle and crust had been peeled back, like petals whose tips formed spiralling tendrils a thousand kilometres long. The planet’s core had gouted forth into yearning, reaching shapes, formed into rings and whorls, arches, curved arms . . . A hundred separate processes shaped from the living core of the planet as it writhed and twisted, then was left to cool. A flower twenty thousand kilometres across, splayed forever in full bloom; a memorial to ten billion people who hadn’t made it to the ships in time.
That had been all Solace had been able to think about, the first time she saw the lost home of her species. She remembered there had been parties, speeches and celebrations that the war was finally over, that they’d, what, won? Perhaps it was survival rather than victory, but sometimes just surviving was your definition of a win. And she’d gone to another big room then, the place where the real diplomats would be talking it out soon enough. She’d stood with a handful of other veterans, looked down on Earth and thought about how many lives had been snuffed out.
It was beautiful, in a horrible way. You couldn’t look at that intricately crafted floriform sculpture and not appreciate just how magnificent, how perfect it was. Not mindless chaos unleashed upon the planet. In the sculpture’s exacting workmanship, its eye-leading symmetries, there was a plan. Even to human eyes, the glorious, lethal artwork that Earth had become was intentional and organized, all the way down to the atomic level. That was why the things that had come to Earth – and to so many other planets – were not known as Destroyers or Unmakers. The traumatized survivors of humanity had named them Architects. This was what they did – they rebuilt. Nobody knew why, but very plainly there was a reason, because they were exacting and careful in their work. They had stringent criteria. Most particularly, the worlds they made into their art or machines or messages had all been inhabited. As though the final artistic flourish involved something on the surface looking into the stars and knowing its own doom.