‘Where’s that, exactly?’
‘The Parthenon seeks Intermediaries.’ Ash pronounced the words carefully.
‘And you care about that why?’
‘You know why,’ it rumbled, cocking its false head at an unnatural angle. ‘The Partheni navy is humanity’s preeminent military force. Lacking Intermediary navigators impacts your ability to travel between stars. Their lack also strips you of a key weapon against the enemy.’
‘The Architects?’
‘Even so.’
‘And if the Architects are never coming back? It’s been forty years, right?’
‘They are always coming back,’ Ash said.
For a moment Solace felt a chill, presumably as intended. What does it know? Then she thought of a smaller, sadder truth. Ash claimed it was the last of its kind, sole survivor of a species destroyed by the Architects long ago. For Ash, the Architects were always coming. That was why it had devoted its life to warning others.
‘There aren’t many Intermediaries,’ it observed. ‘Fewer than you’d think. Most human brains can’t take the conditioning. The old ones don’t last and the new ones are fragile. The transformation is hard for them.’
Solace stared at it, meeting those glowing pits with a shock of contact, just like eyes.
‘You recall Idris Telemmier?’
Solace blinked. ‘Dead, surely.’ He must be ancient. He was always so frail.
‘Alive. Alive and free. Not bound to Hugh or its Liaison Board. Free to make his own choices regarding his allies. If you can win his trust. Again.’
Somehow the damnable alien injected something salacious into its phrasing. Solace felt herself colouring. And yes, after Berlenhof, the two of them had been together – for a while. Many of her sisters had experimented. And he’d been so vulnerable and alone. To someone brought up within a culture of self-sufficiency and unity, this had exerted a strange fascination.
I wonder if he remembers me. Because if Ash could be believed, this was what her superiors needed. An Int who could be bought or talked into coming over to the Partheni. A way of combating the Architects should they return. Or a way of cancelling out the Colonies’ one advantage . . .
Her implant offered up data as it spoke, somehow routed to avoid Lune Station’s own channels. A ship’s name, a location – out on the fringes of human space, where the rule of law ran thin.
‘Thank you.’ She wanted to ask questions, but didn’t want to hear the answers. A creature like Ash . . . maybe it would pronounce her own death, the death of her ship, her fleet, everything. It had been the voice in the night foretelling the fall of Earth. There was no kind of doom that might not follow in its shuffling footsteps.
On the way back to the docking bay, she reported to Tact, who showed no surprise. By the time she rejoined her squad, Tact had already made arrangements. Solace was leaving her own kind to take on yet another new role. She was to play spy amongst the refugia – the human stock her people had left behind. And all I ever wanted was to be a soldier.
2.
Idris
In the year ‘51 After’ as Colonial reckoning went, in the thick of the war, an Architect had exited unspace above the colony world of Amraji.
The colonists had begun to evacuate immediately, having seen what happened to Earth fifty-one years before. By this point, practically every human community across the galaxy was living with flight plans under its collective pillow, a bag packed and everyone ready to go.
On the ground, everyone who’d been able to had boarded every ship there was. Then those ships got the hell off the planet as quickly as possible, fleeing even as the Architect’s bulk eclipsed half the sky. Some arrived at the nearest colonies, half their passengers traumatized, deranged, even catatonic, because there hadn’t been enough suspension beds to put everyone under before entering unspace. Some arrived with parts of their hull twisted into elaborate streamers and filigree, because they’d come too close to the Architect at work. Some never arrived. Every evacuation had its tally of lost vessels. Hurry, panic, untrained navigators, badly repaired gravitic drives, there were so many reasons why.
The Gamin had been a mid-sized freighter, fitted out to ship live bodies for the evacuation. Not well enough, as it turned out. It had left Amraji with a crew of four and over seven hundred passengers, headed for the colony of Roshu. It never arrived.
A year ago – over seventy years since the Gamin was lost – a Cartography Corps expedition discovered the vessel. Some error in its course had taken it off the known Throughways of unspace, and it had come out into the real so far from home its weak distress beacon had gone unheard for decades. The Cartography expedition that discovered it reported the find, then continued to reach out into unmapped unspace, seeking new Throughways that less adventurous ships might be able to use to reach unknown stars. An antiquated freighter wasn’t much use in itself, but it was an important historical artefact. Eventually the Colonial Heritage Foundation commissioned one of the few independent salvagers with the means to navigate out to where the Gamin could be found. And while the benevolent mission was talked about on all the fashionable mediotypes, the Foundation somehow never got around to mentioning that the name of the salvage craft was the Vulture God, because that might be seen as bad taste.