Then the hatch was fully open and Olli went through.
Solace had been thinking of this development as another attack by Broken Harvest people. Perhaps another troop of suited goons were coming up from the wreck? But Olli had control of the drone bay and she was going to do for Mesmon one way or another. Clinging to the rim of the open hatch with the Scorpion’s four feet, she thrust him out into vacuum.
Solace stared, waiting, seeing ice form in the Tothiat’s eyes and at the corners of his mouth, as well as across the cracks in Olli’s capsule. He wasn’t dying, though. He deliberately wrenched one of his arms free of the clamp that held it, leaving plenty of suit and flesh behind. In vacuum his substance flared out in a mess of sticky strings before knitting back together.
Olli shook him, holding him with just one claw now. Staring at her through the ice, Mesmon dug his fingers into the metal of her arm, twisting it. He wasn’t going anywhere, Solace thought. Then he was crawling up Olli’s arm towards her, tearing himself from her pincer grip an inch at a time.
‘I’m coming!’ Solace shouted into the comm, but Olli snapped back, ‘No need,’ and detonated something at the Scorpion’s shoulder joint, shooting the arm and its burden outwards, away, into the void.
Solace lost sight of Mesmon’s face very quickly but she hoped he was fucking livid about this. Olli stayed at the hatch, watching to make sure he wasn’t able to snag any part of the Oumaru. From her satisfied look, apparently he wasn’t.
Then she drew back in and shut the hatch, and the Vulture God’s much-abused atmosphere processors began to take up the slack. Wordlessly, she stomped over to Rollo’s body, her frame sparking and shuddering with the damage it had taken. Soon after, Kittering came pattering in, stopping dead when he saw his captain.
A little after that, Solace caught Idris’s signal. The Harvest’s interceptor was out of the fight. By then Kit had secured the Oumaru to the Vulture – and made space for Idris to dock the Joan and come aboard with Kris. So he could get both ships out of there; so he could hear the bad news.
As Idris ran through a scatter of hurried system checks, Solace handed the little box over to Olli so she could prise it open. She had a burning need to know what was inside. It had cost them enough.
It’ll be nothing, she thought. It’ll be drugs, gems . . . some stupid thing a crime lord would sacrifice his minions to secure – and get good people killed in the bargain. It’ll do nothing but highlight our pointless losses.
Then Olli tripped the mechanism at last and they all stared down at the contents. They really weren’t drugs or gems or any other stupid things. They were either fakes – or they were holding the fate of worlds in their hands.
14.
A tale of two colonies
The colony at Lycos had been no more than a knot of hardy ecologists and xeno-agriculturalists before the waves of refugees arrived. Life on Lycos was hard, the struggle to tame enough land to support people constant, starvation an ever-present shadow. And then, in the year 48 After, the Architect came.
It had burst from unspace without warning – back then, before the Intermediary Program, it was always without warning – and descended on the planet with unmistakable intent. Lycos had few ships. Those that had dropped off the refugees had already been deployed elsewhere. Evacuating the colony was simply impossible. The people planetside had plenty of time to understand what was about to happen to them. The Architect turned from a point of light, to a dot, to a fist, to a second satellite . . . whose thousand mountain-sized spines stabbed accusingly down at the planet.
And hung there. And hung there.
The science station at the heart of the colony had turned every appropriate instrument on the Architect, determined to gather and transmit what data it could before the end.
And then the Architect departed, leaving Lycos somehow whole and unmolested. For the first time in humanity’s experience, the great gods of change and destruction had stayed their hand.
The scanner records showed a signal emanating from the Architect, solitary and singular as whalesong, directed at a very specific point on-planet. A flyer expedition, hastily mounted, discovered . . . something. Later researchers would characterize it as an outpost. There was little of it left, and what was there was buried twenty metres down in Lycos’s acidic soil. The remains of three chambers, interconnected, spherical, partly flattened by long millennia of compression. Certain artefacts of uncertain purpose – rods, crooks and key-like objects, all small enough to be held in a human hand. Analysis of both ruin and rods failed to reveal how they were made, which in itself taught more than anything else. The fine structure of the materials did not conform to the rules of atomic bonds and molecular chemistry that applied to all ‘matter’ discovered so far. Its substance was written in a language unrelated to the periodic table. Exact dating was similarly frustrated and the site interacted with the geology of Lycos in inexplicable ways.