‘Myrmidon Executor.’ The technician came out of the Dark Joan. ‘Prêt à combattre.’ She cast what Idris could only characterize as a scandalized look towards Rollo and the crew.
Solace nodded, which turned out to be a dismissal because the younger woman left the bay immediately, ceding the field.
‘It’s time.’ Myrmidon Executor Solace turned to the crew. ‘Everyone on board and in the . . .’ She stopped herself and visibly reconsidered her approach. ‘Captain Rostand. Your ship is ready.’
Rollo’s truculent expression softened by a hair. ‘Thank you, my good benefactor.’ He put his nose through the hatch, clucked at the cramped conditions. ‘Get yourselves to bed, my children. Not much else for it.’
They filed aboard, and Kris stopped to put a strengthening hand on Idris’s arm. He found a smile for her, from somewhere, and watched her pull herself up into the Joan’s confines.
‘You and her?’ Solace asked him. Idris felt his expression turn wary again, but there didn’t seem any hidden rocks to the question. Seeing his look, she waved away an answer. ‘Just thinking you’d be lucky. Definitely outranks you, that one.’ Her grin was natural, far too young for her – the way she’d smile with her Partheni comrades perhaps. Then she’d taken his elbow and boosted him up. He took the aid automatically, without flinching, but once in the pilot’s seat a moment later, he wondered What just happened? Solace was already behind him, getting into one of the top pods. Then she paused and leaned over:
‘You remember how it all . . .?’ Sudden chagrin showed on her face. ‘Do you need me to take you through . . .’
‘I recognize most of this from the Pythoness.’ The Partheni console had a dozen small screens, each devoted to separate metrics, and he looked them over one by one. Two were military enough that he felt he didn’t need to worry about them.
‘You didn’t fly the Pythoness.’
‘Who do you think got her back to Heaven’s Sword at Berlenhof?’ He felt his hands shake a little with the thought.
Solace must have seen it. ‘You’re good, Idris?’
He was silent, staring at the controls. They were a clear evolution from those he remembered from the war, but he could do this. Eventually he said, in a small voice, ‘I’ll be fine.’
The Dark Joan slipped from Lung-Crow Orbital like the dreams of a fish, as the saying went. It was swift and subtle, its departure cloaked by whatever standing arrangement the Parthenon had with the kybernet. Idris checked the sleep pods’ vitals and threw the gravitic drive into a low activity cycle, extending its shadow into unspace to plot out the conditions. From there, he could calculate their departure from real space.
He glanced back at the neat rack of suspension pods behind him. Four occupied, two empty, plus the incompatible aesthetics of Kit’s garish red globe sticking out like a sore thumb. Then he had committed them, and the Dark Joan fell into the liminal void beyond the real.
It hadn’t been like this on the Pythoness. He’d been surrounded by motion: running women performing desperate triage on the vessel’s abused systems. There’d been blaring alarms and rapid orders-and-confirmations in Parsef – all as the vessel unleashed its weapons against the unthinkably vast face of the Architect. The pilot’s chair had been sunk partway into the floor there too, because even a Parthenon warship held space at a premium. The body of the original Partheni pilot, and a good dozen other casualties, had been hauled away with grim efficiency. Idris had dropped into the vacant seat as though this was some bizarre dream. His elbows had been tucked in, his shoulders hunched forwards to avoid the women’s booted feet. He’d been glad that he was smaller even than the average Colonial starveling. All around him the injured vessel lurched and bucked, its brachator drive clutching at the gravitic substructure of real space for purchase. And beyond their hull the colossal, invisible hand of the Architect was reaching – deforming space as it tried to remake its enemy.
The Dark Joan was not the Pythoness, of course, but her controls and the cramped pilot’s seat recalled the old wartime vessel to him; the appalling chaos of their flight from the Architect, after the ship was crippled and half her crew killed. And then he was in unspace, strapped down tight and utterly alone with all those bad memories. The remembered Architect to one side, and to the other, patiently biding its time, the Presence had been waiting for him.
It was going to be a long trip through the deep void.