It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. Whatever Trine felt they were entitled to swan in and demand, the Parthenon were initially unwilling to just conjure up a warship to place at the Hiver’s disposal. Moreover, they were even less willing to simply hand over Idris to the enterprise.
Idris himself got to sit in on a surprising amount of the argument. It was, he felt, something of a test case for the theoretical time when he himself would try to take his leave. Certainly Monitor Felicity, his handler, was strenuously opposed to him heading off into Hegemonic space, where anything might happen to him. Especially sharing a system with a Colonial team and its own escort, not to mention whatever horrors the Hegemony itself might suddenly conjure up.
If it had just been Trine on their own, that would likely have been it, but Idris worked out soon enough that the archaeologist obviously brought some real diplomatic credentials to the table this time. The Hiver Assembly in Aggregate – the cumulative repository of minds not currently separated out into individual bodies – was behind the venture, and that counted for a lot. The Parthenon and the Hivers went way back as political allies.
Still, it seemed that nobody was going anywhere, even with some Partheni taking Trine’s side, until one day Idris turned up for another wrangling match and found a single woman waiting for him.
He knew her: Monitor Superior Tact, Solace’s direct superior in the Aspirat, the Parthenon’s intelligence service.
‘Menheer Telemmier,’ she said. ‘Take a seat.’ She was a neat, compact woman, hard lines of experience on the stock Partheni features. She was, he guessed, about to lay down the law. Sitting with her, he couldn’t escape the certainty that he’d been discovered doing something wrong, even though he hadn’t. If she’d suddenly demanded he confess, he’d have invented some crime just to get her off his back.
‘Monitor Felicity is concerned about the Int Program, understandably so,’ she said, regarding him doubtfully. As though she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe he was worth all the fuss, despite having sent Solace to recruit him. He fully understood, even agreed with her. And yet here they were.
‘It is the case that, now you have aided us in identifying a viable germ-line, there is a certain amount of work that could go on in your absence, Menheer,’ she observed. ‘We have sufficient material from the original Colonial research to begin work on our own first class of subjects,’ and, before he could even make the objection, ‘of volunteers.’ Making clear Solace had reported his ongoing qualms to her.
‘Tell me about Jericho,’ she said, leaning forwards intently, and he blinked.
Jericho had been a nasty jungle world with a big Originator site – big meaning only a fraction of what Arc Pallator apparently held. Visiting Trine there, Idris’s eyes had been opened to the interaction between those ruins and unspace, detectable to his modified Intermediary brain. It had been a revelation. Even on that brief visit with a remarkable number of distractions, he’d learned so much.
Tact listened to all of this, and he could imagine her shunting pieces of plan around in her head like puzzle blocks. He had become a source of potential intelligence against the Architects, ergo very much within the Aspirat’s aegis. And he felt his future on a knife edge: would Felicity succeed in keeping him here, whether he wanted it or not; would Tact end up dispatching him on Trine’s team, whether he wanted that or not? Which Partheni faction would prevail?
Instead, at last, she just said, ‘And you, Menheer?’
He stared at her.
‘We have an opportunity, here. To win credit with the Hegemony, to have a seat at a table otherwise only available to my opposite numbers in Hugh. To find a crack in the armour of the Architects, if one exists. We could just give Delegate Trine their escort and trust to their mundane means, but right now we have something different. We have you. An Intermediary who will speak to us here in the Parthenon, and give us the weapons we need to defend our species from the enemy. But unless you are willing to do the job, there’s no point risking you. And it will be a risk. While we now have the possibility of an Intermediary Program here, even without your continued assistance, my colleague Felicity would vastly prefer your return to aid in the refinement of that process and the training of her wards. Or that you never leave in the first place. So it comes down to this, Menheer. What do you want?’
His stare intensified. ‘You’re giving me the choice?’
‘Let us say we are at least allowing your preference to influence our decision.’
He hadn’t properly asked himself what he would prefer to do. The idea that it would be relevant had never occurred to him. When he opened his mouth, he genuinely wasn’t sure what words might come out.
‘I want to go. With Trine,’ he said, and then had to stop and consider that, to work out why. It would take him away from the uncertainties of Felicity’s Int Program, of course. It would put some layers of distance between him and that source of guilt. But that wasn’t it. He remembered Jericho. Mostly he remembered running for his life and being terrified of everything. Then he remembered that contact, mind to world, mind to biosphere, mind to the echo of the Originators.
‘I want to learn,’ he said.
Tact regarded him, waiting for the rest of the words.
‘I don’t want to learn,’ he corrected himself. ‘I mean, if I could just be blissfully ignorant about the whole business, then, then that would be, I mean, would be grand but it’s too late, too late for that. And the more I learn, the more . . . there’s something. There’s something I can find out that will end the war. There’s something behind the Architects. There’s . . . It doesn’t have to be this way, with them killing us, and us killing us to make weapons to fight them. And maybe . . . maybe Arc Pallator will be . . .’ Wrestling for what he meant, his eyes begged Tact to understand.
‘Menheer, I know,’ she told him frankly. ‘With the way things stand between us and Hugh, the return of the Architects couldn’t have come at a worse time.’ That hadn’t been what he meant, but it worked for her.
‘I’ll give you all the protection the Hegemony will allow us to send into their space,’ Tact told him. ‘I’ll also ensure that Felicity has everything she needs to continue the work in your, hopefully brief, absence. But go find the Architects’ weak point, Menheer. Find out what strings there are, that their masters pull.’
*
It was a short step from there to loading up the Vulture God with everything Olli could scrounge from the Ceres. There might well be a Parthenon warship accompanying them, but they were damned if it wouldn’t have a beat-up old salvage craft in its belly for emergencies. Idris had expected an audience with Felicity any moment, to try and change his mind, and in truth there was a fair chunk of his mind that would prefer to be changed. He didn’t want to go to Arc Pallator. He didn’t want to share a system with an Architect or go before the alien Essiel that ruled the Hegemony. He had none of Trine’s ebullience about the whole business.
It felt exactly like back when he’d been little more than a kid, putting his name down for the Intermediary Program. Back in the first war, when the Architects had been twisting human worlds one at a time, with a lazy indifference to how many millions were still on them. Back when nobody had any hope and every mad plan was worth a try. Idris had already heard that they were wrecking people’s brains in an attempt to replicate whatever it was that made Saint Xavienne special. He hadn’t wanted to have his own mind destroyed, of course he hadn’t. But he’d signed up because you had to do that thing, sometimes, that was bigger than what you wanted.
He didn’t want to be the centre of the universe’s attention. He wanted it to all be over. And maybe Arc Pallator held the key to that. This was enough to tip the scales and get him on board.
‘Oi!’ Olli’s shout broke him from his reverie. ‘Visitor for you!’
‘Who is it?’ He looked around, expecting Felicity, or perhaps just a squad of Myrmidons to march him off somewhere.
‘Who can tell, they all look the fucking same.’ Olian Timo, not winning any prizes for diplomacy. And there she was, just one young Partheni in a Cognosciente’s uniform. She flinched back from the loud Colonial sitting in her walker with a fleet of drones flying around her; from Kittering arguing over the manifest with Kris; from everything, really. He recognized that, even if it took him a moment to recognize her. He flinched like that too.
‘Grave,’ he named her. The top-of-the-class Int candidate, the one whose brush with death had opened her mind up. The woman, he considered glumly, who might have condemned all her germ-line sisters to agony and torment.
‘Menheer.’ She was wringing her hands, leaning away from the ugly bulk of the Vulture God as though the ship was about to fall on them. ‘I wanted to . . . They said I could speak to you.’
‘I’m here. I’m not doing anything.’
‘That’s fucking true, you slacker!’ Olli shouted at him, because her drones had good audio receptors. He turned his back on her.
‘I was talking to Myrmidon Executor Solace,’ Grave said, as though Idris’s friend was a godlike figure and such speech was borderline blasphemy. ‘She said I should tell you . . . that I said yes.’
He frowned. Grave looked so alone there, so small and damaged, that he wanted to reach out to her. Yet he was smaller and more damaged still. What could he do? ‘Yes to what?’
‘To the Program. And Myrm— and Solace said I should tell you, so you know I had the chance.’
He regarded her bleakly. ‘You want to become an Int. After we put you through unspace all those times.’
She nodded, too quickly, too forcefully, and he could see her eyes saying No. But despite this he believed her, because that duality was familiar to him. No, we never want to go, but we do it anyway. He’d wanted to make sure this was her decision, no matter how conflicted, rather than a Partheni order. Maybe she would live. Maybe she would learn to see the universe like he did, and God help her if so.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and then Kris was calling for him to get aboard.
*
Idris waking from suspension should have been a welcome relief: another journey when he wasn’t required to man the helm through the long torture of unspace. Except the general screwedness of his brain extended to his reaction to being put on ice as well. In his mind was the sense that he’d been lying helplessly awake in some vast silver place, denied movement or senses, in another kind of void.
Yes, yes, he told himself irritably, and then, quoting an old spacer song half the Colonial Sphere knew the words to, We’re all acquainted with the tragedy of being you. At least the couches in the Grendel’s Mother were more comfortable than those of the Vulture God.
He sat up just as a Partheni dashed in, calling, ‘Delegate Trine, you are needed at command.’ Around Idris, the rest of the Vulture crew were grumpily sitting up too. Olli tilted the angle of her bed so she could wriggle into her walker frame, scowling at the indignity.
Trine was not in a suspension pod. Instead, they had protocols to shut down their higher functioning while in unspace. Idris had a nasty turn when he saw the Hiver had decided to do so hanging from the room’s toprail by their prehensile toes, like a huge metal bat. That was Trine’s sense of humour, though, and an example of why individual Hiver instances weren’t generally allowed to run as long as they had.
Trine’s face appeared in the bowl of their head, right way up for their interlocutor, meaning upside down relative to their actual body. ‘Why is my self-bootstrapping being hurried, may I ask?’
‘Delegate, the Hegemonic authorities in-system will only speak to you.’
‘Ah.’ Trine reached down with one leg, an improbable feat of gymnastics, and then dropped, balancing with a wobble. ‘Take me to your leader, Myrmidon.’ They stalked out of the room, the Myrmidon following.
Kris propped herself on one elbow and yawned sleepily.
‘That bug-farm needs an off switch,’ Olli grumbled.
‘Would you not,’ Kris asked her plaintively. ‘Quite aside from the entire bad taste aspect, we are literally here on their ticket.’
‘And why? I never wanted to go to the Hegemony.’ Olli saw the eye-roll that passed between Idris and Kris. ‘All right, maybe I did want to see the Hegemony a little. So long as that Hook-razor bastard isn’t around. I mean, he’s an outlaw, a criminal, right? Not likely he’ll be hanging about where the cops actually are.’
‘It’s—’ Kris started.
‘Yeah, complicated, I know.’ Because, just as with everything else, the Divine Essiel’s attitude to crime was opaque and not immediately comprehensible to humans.
Kittering, emerging from a custom spherical pod bolted awkwardly into the corner of the room, waved his mouthparts at them. ‘Look out the window,’ his translator suggested. Of course there was no window, but Olli patched into the Partheni system and showed them the world they were approaching.
Arc Pallator looked unfriendly. It was yellow and red, mostly, with no seas or bodies of water of any kind. The variegation of its surface was topological, plateaus and vast dry basins. It was an old world, Idris felt, and looked as though it was dying. The little scroll of Parsef alongside the image was the usual survey data, and he did his best to disentangle it. Kris had done better with the language over the last months, though, and she swore.
‘Population of three billion, it says. Estimated.’
That prompted a thoughtful silence. Then: ‘Where’s the, the thing?’ from Olli.
‘Patience,’ Kittering told her. He was crouched at the rim of his pod, five amber eyes fixed on the screen. There was an odd tension to him, readable to human eyes because Hanni body language tended to be writ large. They didn’t do religion, Idris thought, but Kit seemed almost reverent. Or frightened. Awestruck was perhaps the best compromise term.
Then it appeared. Their angled approach to the planet slung them around just enough, and the Architect came about the edge of Arc Pallator like a moon. It fell into the harsh white light of the system’s sun and, in that moment, a million rainbows shattered from its jagged crystal face. A miser’s hoard of jewels; a murderous dragon that was its own treasure.
‘Oh,’ Kris said. Just that one word. As though she’d somehow forgotten why they had come.
‘Fuck,’ Olli agreed. Kit was silent, still, staring.
‘I don’t know if I can . . .’ Kris went on quietly. ‘I think this was a mistake.’
‘Always,’ Olli agreed again, all the punch gone out of her voice. ‘Twice I’ve been in the same system with one. Two times too many.’
Idris, the veteran, forbore to comment.
They couldn’t not watch the approach, the angle of their view tilting until they were viewing the Architect side-on. The faceted curve of its back became clear, like a compound eye where each lens was ten kilometres across, while its front was a forest of translucent mountains directed at the planet it intended to destroy.
Or not destroy, even. That would have been more comprehensible. Rework, transfigure into a shape more acceptable to its exacting alien mind. Or to the minds that directed its actions, Idris reminded himself. The one piece of information he’d carried away from Berlenhof. It wasn’t exactly useful, right at this moment, but it was the only crowbar he had to prise open the question of Why?
‘Where’s the fleet?’ Kris asked quietly. She’d been making her own enquiries of the Grendel’s Mother, borrowing its sensor data.
‘What fleet? The Hegemony are fighting?’ Olli wanted to know.
‘The evacuation fleet,’ Kris said quietly. ‘For the three billion people or . . . or whatever actually lives on Pallator. The fleet. To get them off.’
Idris queried for the same data. There were, of course, ships in orbit, docked at stations or just on their own recognizance. Quite a lot of ships in the Essiel’s radially symmetrical geometry plus a variety of other designs. Not what you’d need to evacuate billions, though.
‘Maybe they already did it,’ he suggested wanly. ‘It’s been here a while already, they said.’
Olli brought up another view, the Mother’s readings of heat and power and comms across the planet’s surface. It was hard to read, given Hegemonic tech remained a baffling mystery to outsiders, but clear in one particular. ‘If everyone’s gone, they left all the lights on.’
‘It’s the Hegemony,’ Kris said slowly. ‘They aren’t just going to abandon their people.’
‘Nobody knows what they’ll do, because they’ve not been in this position before,’ Idris said hollowly. ‘They were always safe, they thought.’
‘And the fucking Essiel, I mean, who knows what they think?’ Olli pointed out. ‘Maybe this is fate to them. Maybe it’s just a done deal, as far as they care.’
Then Solace appeared in the doorway, in crisp uniform. She’d gone into suspension with her sisters rather than her crewmates, and Idris had tried not to feel slighted.
‘You’re needed,’ she announced, and then corrected it to, ‘We’re needed.’
‘You could just send orders over the comms,’ Olli said sourly. ‘Didn’t have to actually put your face around the door.’
‘Who would you have to complain to, then?’ Solace shot back, matching her tone for tone.
Olli tapped forwards on the walker’s plastic feet. ‘Careful, you’re sounding like one of us. Don’t let your sisters hear.’
*
Idris hadn’t wanted to be part of a diplomatic reception, but Trine seemed to think that their hosts required it. Or at least the human cultists interpreting for their hosts did, because so far the Essiel themselves hadn’t put in an appearance. Possibly he was about to see one. Trine was rattling on about how it was an honour and their hosts wanted to meet with them, until Exemplar Keen just about told them to shut up right to their face. The commander of the Grendel’s Mother was wound tight, right then. She didn’t want to be part of a diplomatic reception either, or even off her ship. The Hegemony had technology that could put the Mother out like a candle, and without warning. Then there was the handful of Colonial ships also in orbit around Arc Pallator. With this sort of tension as a baseline, the only thing keeping Idris in his right wits was the presence of Kris, who had a hand on his arm as they left the Partheni shuttle, radiating sanity through the touch of her fingers.
The Hegemonic orbital was like an abstract piece of origami made of opal. At its heart was a spindle-shaped chamber, where the gravity was ‘down’ no matter what part of the wall you were standing on. In the centre, the ‘up’ for every varied down, was a single ball of light, shifting through a bruise-coloured spectrum of purple, red and blue-grey. It also moved into a seemingly flat and dead state, yet somehow still gave out radiance at a frequency the human eye could not perceive. The floor, which was like mother-of-pearl, took all these colours and subtly changed them, before refracting them sideways across the room. Idris’s head hurt. Around him the Partheni delegation were doing their level best to appear entirely unconcerned, while Trine was apparently genuinely unconcerned, making delighted remarks about how splendidly everything was going. No Divine Essiel made an appearance. Every so often a robed human crossed eye-twistingly from one part of the room to another and then exited, on occult cult business.
Then the Colonials arrived.
They looked slightly dishevelled and hurried, which told an eloquent tale of how recently they had docked, and then been told the Partheni were already here. There was a fair number of diplomatic staff, all wearing the sort of elegant, cloth-heavy suits one saw in the upper echelons of the core settled worlds – lots of folds and drapes that an honest spacer would boggle at. To be fair, Kris was wearing something of the same in Partheni grey, given she loved to dress up on the rare occasions the life permitted it. There were a couple of service officers in blue as well, giving the Partheni the side-eye. And there was an elegant silver-haired man, old without being elderly, wearing a loose-sleeved copper shirt with a long strip of decorations trailing from his chest. Idris didn’t know him, but something was familiar there. He glanced at Kris, and saw her attention fixed on the same man, then looking down to a little slate she’d palmed.
Trine had gone very still.
This was plainly a meeting neither group had looked for, and Idris could only guess how the Hegemonic invitation had been badly mangled by the human minds and mouths it had passed through. Nobody was meeting their host; they were only meeting each other. For a long moment everyone just stared.
Then a pair of cultists turned up, wearing about two hundredweight of red velvet and gold ornaments apiece. They played a little flourish of cymbals and bells and crystal chimes, all with monstrously straight faces. And waited.
Everyone might have continued to stand there until the Architect actually ate the planet below them, except Exemplar Keen’s perfect Partheni impassivity twitched, despite all her resolve. The musical interlude was slightly too much for her. Taking that as a hopeful cue, a trio of the Colonials carefully stepped forwards around the planes of the floor. The first was a tall, severe man with a shock of white hair, followed by a very old man with an explosion of wiry grey beard. The last was the owner of the heavily decorated copper shirt and Idris already had a bad feeling about him.
‘You must be Exemplar Keen and Delegate Trine,’ the lead diplomat said. ‘I’m Karl Mannec, Diplomatic Corps, this is Professor Tiber Storquel, heading our research team, and this is—’
‘Morzarin Ravin Okosh Uskaro.’ The Magdan with the fancy shirt tapped his heels together and gave a stiff little bow that made Kris twitch. ‘It is an honour, of course.’ The words fooled nobody. You could have cut the hostility in the room with a knife. The Vulture God crew had had some recent run-ins with that particular branch of the Magdan nobility, mostly in the fields of Nativist violence and an attempt to forcibly conscript Idris’s Intermediary talents into their service. This wasn’t the same man, but Magdan families were clannish as hell. Piss off one member and you collected the set as enemies.
Mannec’s eyes strayed briefly to Idris and then snapped back to Keen. ‘The Morzarin has provided a whole study team to gather data here, at our host’s invitation.’
‘We are all, of course, very grateful for their munificence.’ Trine had an artificial voice which shouldn’t really have been able to express so many complex shades of snark, but they’d also had many decades to work on it. Idris guessed that the Uskaro study team were the new class of Ints, the criminals who had survived the Board’s brutal process, held under leash contracts that made them little more than property.
‘We note your own contribution,’ Ravin Uskaro added after a pointed pause, looking through Idris as though he wasn’t even there. ‘No doubt we will compare what data our tools generate, even as our academics liaise with the Delegate.’ And he mostly looked through Trine too, speaking to the human face of Keen. Ravin, Idris suspected, was an old-school Boyarin.
The old man, Storquel, made a sound. It was hard to characterize, save that there was a lot of contempt in it. His eyes were fixed on Trine, and Trine’s artificial gaze returned the favour for a moment with utterly cold loathing, his whole avuncular expression reworked for the occasion. Idris, expecting to be the most despised person in the room, looked from one to the other, mystified.
Karl Mannec coughed ostentatiously and did his diplomatic best to reanimate some semblance of polite talk. Still more Colonial staff were turning up, now seriously outnumbering the Partheni, all straightening their formal clothes and trying to look at their ease. Somehow nobody was pointing at Idris and screaming Traitor! and perhaps he was going to get away with nothing more than a headache.
Then he saw her.
‘I need to get out of here,’ he told Kris. ‘Never should have come. Not a diplomat.’
‘I think we’re stuck here for the duration.’ Then she glanced at him and saw how rigid he was.
Across from them, just joining the Colonial delegation, was a woman, low down in a walker frame more delicate and less jury-rigged than Olli’s. She was old now, but nowhere near as old as she should have been. A touch of Idris’s own condition that had shrugged off all the years since he emerged alive from the Intermediary process. Her flesh sat heavy on her, and her hands, resting on the frame, trembled. Her name was Demi Ulo and he hadn’t seen her for decades, nor had ever expected to again. She’d gone out with the Cartography Corps just as he had, but she’d stuck with it, vanishing again and again into the deep void to look for new worlds and new Throughways. For Ints, that usually only ended one way. One trip or another, the void took its due and they didn’t come back. Except here she was, another war veteran, another Int of the first class, his comrade and contemporary. And she was over there with the Colonials, where she was supposed to be. He on the other hand was with the Partheni, and was suddenly horrified at himself, unwilling to be seen by those old, familiar eyes.
‘Get me out of here,’ he hissed to Kris, and she nodded immediately. Then she murmured to Keen, explaining that he was ill, had to go lie down, Intermediaries, temperamental don’t you know, so if you could just . . .
And even as they ducked out, he knew it was too late. Those eyes had lit on him. He felt it through his skin, with no need to turn around.
For a moment he was going to slip from Kris’s hand, just go over there, in front of all those Hugh magnates, in front of Ravin Uskaro and his medals and his stable of tame Ints. Go unload it all onto poor Demi Ulo, explain why he’d done what he’d done, decry the Liaison Board and their bloody-handed methods, fuck over Colonial-Partheni diplomacy for the next generation. But all it would have taken was one word, one look from her to shut him up and shut him down. I stayed loyal, the very presence of Ulo would have said to him. I could handle it. Why not you?
And so he went back on board the Grendel’s Mother, and burrowed deeper inside to go aboard the Vulture God. There he sat on his hard, unused bed in the barren little nook that was his cabin, and thought about all the mistakes he’d made.