What are my orders, Mother? Solace pictured breaking into Hugh data stores, kidnapping officials and punching information out of them. All for the good of the Parthenon, which was the prime good of the universe, but still . . . I do not want to be the name children learn when they’re taught how the next war started.
I’m sending you coordinates instation. Go there. Someone wants to meet you. Bon chance. Tact was being uncharacteristically cryptic.
This someone. They want to meet me in particular? Solace was puzzled as she was neither spy nor diplomat. Not yet anyway. After waking her, they’d rushed her through basic training. But up to this point, her whole adult life had been spent working behind some sort of gun, whether on a personal or starship scale.
That is correct. Maximum diplomacy, est-ce compris? Meaning no weapons or armour.
Compris, Mother. And she was shrugging into a belted tunic in the Colonial style, the sleeves to mid-bicep and the hem down past her hips. All in Partheni blue-grey with her company badges left of her heart. She reckoned turning up in nothing but her under-armour body sleeve would be more provocation than the staid Colonials could take.
Her destination was in the station’s underside, the part turned away from the sun where the work was done. Here were docking bays, machine rooms, the cramped quarters of the staff. She ended up on a gantry overlooking a dry-dock where a lander was being outfitted. The domed, six-footed ship was mostly complete, with waldo-wearing engineers and the scarecrow shape of a Hive frame moving the final pieces into place. They’d be taking it down to Earth’s tortured surface, maintaining a token presence so that some politician somewhere could claim the homeworld wasn’t completely abandoned.
‘Myrmidon Executor Solace,’ said a voice close by on the gantry, and she started out of her reverie, cursing herself. The newcomer had arrived without warning. He – it – was just there.
Seeing it, recognizing it, she stood very still and waited to see what it would do. They called it Ash, and ‘the Harbinger’。 It had come to Earth on a trading ship, immediately before the war and told everyone that a colossal alien entity was about to reshape the planet. The Castigar crew that had brought it were as ignorant of its meaning as the humans of Earth.
What would happen later would be as much a harsh revelation to the Castigar as to humans. Ash told people that the end was nigh, and although almost nobody believed it, that ‘almost’ gave just enough leeway so that, when the Architect did arrive and begin its terrible magnum opus, some vessels were ready. They took on passengers and headed out for Earth’s colonies. The Harbinger’s warning saved millions, even if billions more were lost.
After that, Ash had turned up here and there across the breadth of the human Polyaspora – respected, revered, feared. And now it was standing next to her on a gantry at Lune Station.
Ash wore a human-type robe, draped oddly across its peculiar physiology. There was a writhing nest of pseudopod feet at its base and two tree-like branches at its apex. One of these supported Ash’s head, or at least its sense organs: a handful of reddish orbs that guttered dimly with their own light. Beneath them, set into Ash’s leathery grey-black skin, were a series of vertical slits – function unknown. Ash was the only one of its kind anyone had ever met and nobody had been given the opportunity to study its physiology. The other branch was contorted into one sleeve of the robe, a rubbery knot of tendrils projecting from the opening in a creditable mockery of a hand. The other sleeve was empty, pinned across the robe’s chest. All in all, not a very good impersonation of a human being, and that head was a good half-metre taller than most humans. Yet it was just humanoid enough that one could stand there and talk to it and pretend there was something similar to you talking back.
Some worshipped it, God’s messenger who had saved so many. Others called it a devil, part of the Architects’ schemes. Not that anybody knew what those were.
‘You again,’ said Solace, because it wasn’t her first encounter with this damned alien. Last time had been at Berlenhof, just before the battle. Popping up like the spectre of death.
‘Me,’ it said, ‘again.’ Ash’s rich, deep voice came from its body, nothing to do with its pseudo-head. It had always conversed in whatever language it chose, and now it spoke perfect Colvul, the stitched-together tongue of the Colonies.
‘At least speak something civilized,’ she grumbled in Parsef – a blend of three Earth languages, with added French for formalities.
‘You’ll need your Colvul where you’re going,’ Ash said conversationally. She’d heard the damn thing give rousing speeches, pronouncements, mystic warnings. It had even stolen the punchline of someone’s joke.