Havaer Mundy wasn’t the type to get invited to diplomatic soirées. As Mordant House’s man assigned to the Arc Pallator mission, the first he heard of events was at his breakfast with the ambassador and Professor Storquel the next morning.
‘I didn’t know where to put myself,’ Karl Mannec confessed. His hands shook slightly around his cup of kaffe, although Havaer wasn’t entirely sure the movement wasn’t an affectation put on to demonstrate just how mortifying the business had been. ‘Just whipped the man, in front of everyone.’
‘Is the Morzarin not under your authority?’ he asked, sipping at his own. The ambassador had admirable galley printers, and Havaer was happy to put off Hegemonic food for as long as possible. Making a sullen, inward-turned third, Professor Storquel slurped his cup dry and waved an irritable hand at Mannec’s assistant.
Mannec grimaced. ‘Nominally. But he’s a big noise back on Berlenhof, the whole Uskaro clan are. Almost half our presence here is his retinue, including armed forces. And the Ints are his, of course. Nobody else had a team of them used to working together. Given the short notice, we had to let him set a lot of the terms of his presence here.’
Havaer frowned, something about that sticking in his mind. His train of thought was derailed by Storquel’s loud mutter of ‘Unacceptable. The oaf.’ Havaer had the impression the academic was not against disproportionate influence per se, reserving his opposition for when such power wasn’t under his own control.
‘So . . .?’ he prompted.
‘So,’ Mannec agreed. ‘Possibly the Partheni are now suitably cowed by how very strong and tough Ravin’s people are, which was very much the intent. My guess is they don’t cow that easily, though, and now they’re going to be extra-twitchy, which will lead to further incidents. It’s not as though they’re actual angels themselves, despite the nickname. Plenty of hot tempers on their side of the line, too.’
‘Given what you’ve got floating above you, it seems a bad time for sabre rattling.’
‘Well yes, I know. Which was why I was hoping the intervention of Mordant House might—’
‘Hold on.’ Havaer frowned. ‘Why does he have a team of Ints used to working together?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The whole point of being an Int is . . . solitary. Everyone’s alone in unspace. It’s just about the only thing anyone off any world could tell you about it. You can’t coordinate your Ints, unless they’re all on one ship, in which case, what’s the point?’
Mannec went through a mummery of eye-rolling and shrugs, to indicate who knew why the Magdans did anything. ‘It has been of considerable value here, though I agree they could hardly have had this scenario in mind back during the training.’
‘So where are we, Professor?’ Finally deigning to let Storquel into the conversation. Tiber Storquel was a Berlenhof man, old enough that he’d lived out his childhood in the shadow of the Architects. He’d given his life to the study of the Originators, very much with an eye to their relationship with the world-destroyers. At his seniority, he seldom saw the inside of a dig site anymore, but this was a special case, a unique opportunity.
‘The information we are getting,’ Storquel said ponderously, ‘is very good.’ He had a silvery beard which he tugged at as a kind of personal punctuation. His clothes were expensive Berlenhof casual, but the body underneath them had the narrow shoulders and hollow chest of wartime shortages, for all his waistband had filled out a bit since. ‘But we’re not getting all the information. I’m having to work with half the pieces missing. The Magdans are cheese-paring, picking over everything behind closed doors before passing it on. And what the Partheni brought! I was not told I would have to work alongside . . . that.’
Havaer had done his reading on Storquel. ‘It is what it is,’ he tried, but he was a fresh audience as far as the professor was concerned, someone to vent to.
‘It walks in here and contests my analyses and my conclusions at every turn,’ Storquel bemoaned. ‘A thing that built its scrapheap career off my leavings. Everything it is, it owes to me, and now it has the temerity to argue.’
‘Professor, our hosts extended the invitation . . .’ Mannec said, with the weary air of someone who had been butting at that wall for a while.
‘Menheer Mundy,’ Storquel said hotly. ‘I bought that unit from the war office. It was nothing but a repository of data. And for years, it was my assistant. It did not complain. It did not demand its rights. It was a tool, a machine. That’s what they are. Except, owing to some catastrophic misjudging on the part of your people,’ a finger jabbed at Mannec, ‘someone decided the things were people, and it waltzed off with decades of my research and now has the gall to claim itself an equal.’ His beard actually bristled, visibly. ‘And it was only with the help of those women that the things broke away. Just before they abandoned us themselves. We’re supposed to just accept that—’
‘Yes, Professor, I’m well aware,’ Havaer broke in. ‘Just as you are aware that, right now, cooperation with Delegate Trine and their Partheni allies is in all our best interests.’
‘I would have thought,’ the academic replied sourly, ‘that Mordant House of all institutions would be more patriotic.’ Havaer fixed the man with an exceptionally cold look until Storquel found something of interest in his kaffe.
Havaer sighed. ‘The Intervention Board’s stance on all these things is fluid, at the moment,’ he admitted to Mannec. ‘Certainly I can pass on your request for censure, but it seems unlikely they’ll take any action against the Uskaros, given the Liaison Board’s primary Int-training facility is on a Magdan orbital, and right now we need all the Ints we can get as a matter of vital planetary security.’ Although, his traitor mind pointed out, according to Telemmier it won’t matter because leashed Ints can’t help us against the Architects. The Liaison Board were bearing that in mind, he’d heard, with their new class, but that new class wouldn’t be ready for a while. Given the rate of Architect attack, dozens of worlds didn’t have that long.
Mannec gave him a bright smile and said he knew Menheer Mundy would do what he could, and welcome to Arc Pallator, all of that. Then Havaer went to sweep his new quarters for bugs and to patch in the standard Mordant hacks and tweaks that would ensure his privacy.
There was a packet ship in orbit just waiting for his word. He included Mannec’s request and his own brief first impressions, including that the Vulture God was here like a bad penny, not unexpected given Telemmier was more than half of what the Partheni were contributing to the research effort. He requested orders, and he had a bad feeling he wouldn’t like them when they came. Then he turned to what the packet vessel had brought him. Not Agent Havaer Mundy of the Intervention Board, but him as a private citizen. He had a parcel, mail order, special delivery.
It unpacked itself when he gave it the codes. Or, rather, they did. They wore a small frame, a cylindrical can on four props that were incongruously moulded like eagle’s legs, including the clawed feet. The top of their body came a little past Havaer’s waist, with any arms invisibly retracted. No head, but a panel tilted up from their top edge, revealing a cluster of lenses and lights for him to focus on.
‘Asset Colvari 88205,’ he addressed them.
‘Asset Colvari 88205 instanced out of Peace Hive Seven in 118 After, provided under a short-term leash contract to Menheer Havaer Mundy,’ they confirmed, setting out precisely when and where this particular individual had been separated from the Hiver Assembly. Their voice was as plain as their body and the boilerplate terms of their contract. Only those unlikely legs suggested a colourful history.
‘Accredited for data analysis?’ There was no point going further if he’d been sent someone actually new from the factory.
‘Previous instantiation history is available,’ Colvari told him. ‘We proffer our wartime logistical work and subsequent intelligence analysis for Mordant House. Although we note that you are employing us in your personal capacity, whilst retaining us under the usual non-disclosure clauses.’
Havaer sat on his bunk, staring at the Hiver, on the edge of changing his mind and not trusting the work to it. But Hivers were discreet. Mordant House used them, and so did plenty of private interests, and he’d never heard of a Hiver, or a Hive Assembly, breaking a contract or disclosing secrets. And he had a lot of data.
The sealed stick he’d practically pulled from Kenyon’s dead fingers had not had some piece of incriminating scandal sitting on a plain field, ready for enquiring eyes. Instead, it contained hours and hours of memos, meeting transcripts, reports and specifications. Havaer only had so much time to wade through it, because he wasn’t supposed to have it, hadn’t told his bosses he’d recovered it, and had an actual job to do here on Arc Pallator. In circumstances like these, an agent called in specialist help. He could have just run the contents through a computer, but even kybernet-level AIs weren’t good at picking out human-level significance from that kind of morass. A Hiver was the best of both worlds, a computer’s speed and ability to fine-grind the details, a sentient mind’s eye for what actually mattered.
‘I’m going to be vague, to start with,’ he told Colvari. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just know there’s something in this data set that is severely incriminating, so much so that all manner of people want to get their hands on it.’ Unless there isn’t, and everyone just heard everyone else wanted it and assumed . . . But he couldn’t go ahead on that basis. He had to fall into the same assumption and hope he didn’t look like an ass at the end of it. ‘I want you to tell me what’s in here and who it compromises. Standard terms. You self-edit before you return to the Assembly, unless I instruct you otherwise. That’s not a problem?’ A Hiver could indeed delete parts of its own memories, but these days they at least had to consent to it.
And there were more than a few Mordant House operatives who muttered that they never did. That the Assemblies had the galaxy’s greatest trove of sensitive data stored somewhere, and one day they’d flex their espionage muscles and use it. But even those operatives still hired the semi-machines, because they were just so good at the job.
‘That is agreeable,’ Colvari said blandly. Havaer looked at those ornate legs and wondered just what stories they might have told, about previous instantiations. War stories, spy stories, escapades and danger. Except the entity reciting them would be doing no more than that. They would have the memories, but only as if they had read them in a report. Since returning to the Assembly, and then instancing out again, the underlying personality wouldn’t be the same. The memories weren’t theirs.
He handed over the data, the physical stick, taken from his fingers by a handful of segmented tendrils that seethed out from beneath the Hiver’s eyes.
‘The only copy?’ they asked, and he confirmed it was. Not something he felt confident duplicating, given he had to keep it secure from his own people.
‘Working, then. We’ll update you, Menheer Mundy.’
And that, for the moment, would be that. Time for him to go for a stroll and see just how tight the tensions were wound on-site.
Olli made no secret of her general dislike of the Parthenon, but she disliked going stir crazy even more. When Myrmidon Lightly came to her to ask for a loan of the Vulture, an outing had seemed better than sitting amongst the flower-children cultists, listening to them explain how the star-god Essiel would always take care of them. The Partheni had made a lot of fuss about the Vulture’s superior sensor suite, and for survey work that was probably true. What was truer was they didn’t want to leave their sisters lacking the Nereid’s speed and guns if things went sour.
Lightly was partnered up with a non-fighting Partheni, Cognosciente Dil. This turned out to be short for Diligent, the first time Olli had come across a nickname or abbreviation amongst any of them. The pair of them looked almost identical in the face, Lightly in combat armour like Solace’s, Dil in just a plain grey uniform. Olli was about to make some jibe about Dil’s mother saddling her with a name nobody could be bothered to say properly, then remembered that the only mother the woman would have known would be the formal title they gave their superior officers. Poured out of a vat, just like all of them. And that was usually just one of the things she’d have griped about, regarding the unnatural warrior angels. Except listening to the pair of them chatter, let off the leash for a bit of a jolly around the planet, the thought came out reflective and a bit sad. She supposed they hadn’t asked to be not-born, so to speak. And they were fangirling about some mediotype she’d never heard of that seemed to have a thousand different characters, each of which had a constantly shifting relationship with all of the others. They were, Olli realized, very young.
Solace had worked really hard to talk her round, on the subject of the Parthenon. First because it was her duty, then because she needed Idris, and Olli came as part of the package. Finally, it was maybe because Solace ended up thinking of her as a comrade in arms, after they’d fought that Tothiat together, and thus craved her good opinion. Which she sure as hell wasn’t getting, but Olli had just about been worked around to a neutral opinion and that was as far as she got with most people. Solace had been big on how the Parthenon had faced its demons and turned away from the sort of genocidal path the Nativists accused them of. There had been a big covert showdown within the Parthenon, she’d said, and those who wanted a war of superior genetics had been shouted down or, in some cases, quietly murdered. All without ever letting up on the outer show of unity they gave to the rest of the universe. Olli had, quite reasonably, pointed out that no genocide today didn’t preclude genocide tomorrow, and Solace hadn’t had much to say to that.
Still, it meant she could pilot the Vulture God for these two vat-kids and not want to dump them in a volcanic fault, which was something Arc Pallator was abundantly supplied with.
That was the morning’s work, cruising over a web of lowlands and canyons, all of it hot and caustic enough to make a more personal visit a fatal error. This was also where Arc Pallator’s native biology lurked, in yellowish crusts and frothy red scum on chemical pools. Olli couldn’t really spare a tear for it, but Dil wanted to know if the Hegemonics were preserving any of it, because it was a whole planetary ecosystem and the Architects would kill it off just as easily as the people.
Then they went to look at the people.
Olli was sick of the cultists around the Originator city, who were basically living lives of virtuous squalor, all smiles and clapping. She was vaguely aware they didn’t constitute the majority of Hegemonic subjects on the planet. Apparently part of Dil and Lightly’s brief was to go scout the others out.
It took them a long time of cruising through low atmosphere over the forests before Olli, and Lightly for that matter, realized they weren’t seeing the wood for the trees. It took Dil to remind them that the local biology had never colonized the highlands of the world. The forests were imported life. More than that, they were the Hegemonics.
‘They’re called something like Athamirs,’ the Cognosciente explained. ‘Plenty of them in the Hegemony, Essiel subjects since anyone can remember. Given the Essiel don’t really keep histories and seem to think they can just declare “forever” at a moment’s notice. Favourable colonists for harsh planets, given they evolve-adapt to their environment.’
‘I still don’t know what I’m looking at,’ Lightly complained. ‘Can you just hover us over them? The ship’s movement’s messing with my eyes.’ The pair of them were in the Vulture’s control pod, while Olli was at her usual station in the drone bay, keeping an eye on them through the internal cameras and letting the ship’s haptics replace her own limited sense of her body.
She let the vessel slew into something approximating geostationary, jockeying the gravity drives to stave off the ground. Below them, some of the things that had looked like plants seemed to notice them. And maybe they were plants. Or maybe that distinction didn’t make much odds for the product of an alien world.
The Athamir were mostly giant puffball brains, to Olli’s eyes, bone-coloured and propped on a host of spindly white legs. Many of them seemed rooted in the ground, while others stilted about on incomprehensible errands. They were clustered around larger plants, which looked like distressingly phallic mushrooms ten metres tall and up. Sometimes there were several of these, leaning together, merged at the tips to form a kind of building. Lightly explained she’d seen them grown. They weren’t plants, apparently, but inorganic. Athamir tech was based on violent, instant chemical reactions. The creatures secreted some compounds and then put them together and stood back. The towers grew within seconds, made of aerated fibres that weighed almost nothing but were remarkably strong. The process had been incorporated in Hegemonic architecture and shipbuilding, apparently.
‘But what do they do?’ Olli demanded. ‘I mean . . . I don’t see a bar down there. Or any damn thing. They’re just sitting around in the dirt like butt-naked mushrooms. Okay, so the human cultists were dull as shit too, but at least they had fancy clothes.’
‘They do . . . Athamir things,’ Dil said uncertainly. ‘I mean there are billions of them, literally, on this world. They do . . . this is what they do. What you see. They have a culture not based on material creation.’
‘Maybe they’re telling each other stories,’ Lightly suggested doubtfully.
‘Not long ones, hopefully,’ Olli said sourly, as the ship’s cameras tracked to the gleaming crystal moon clipping the horizon. Then the Vulture’s systems nagged her with an alarm and she noted, ‘Got another ship, near-surface, about three hundred klicks.’
‘Let’s go see,’ Lightly decided.
The Hegemonic vessel was a jagged rose hanging like art over the dry landscape. It had left quite a trail behind it. By the time the Vulture God drew near, Olli and the two Partheni had gone very quiet.
A swarm of lesser craft – smaller than a human being – were shuttling back and forth between ship and surface. Lightly identified them as Tymeree in single-occupant flight suits. They were . . .
Olli felt ill, even though it was an interaction between two groups of aliens she could barely recognize as sentient creatures.
They were harvesting. The swathe left by the ship was one of their dead. They saw thousands of Athamir, still standing straight on their twig-thin legs, but their brains or fruiting bodies or mushroom caps exploded open, hollowed out. The Tymeree swarmed down on them and they went very still. Some signal or chemical or suicidal ideation reached them, and then they began venting something. A smoke, brownish, heavy, that the Tymeree dived through and vacuumed up, though most of it was still lost to the atmosphere. Olli thought about the constant hot haze of the air, and wondered how much of it wasn’t just water vapour and volcanic fug, but the last breaths of dead Athamir.
By that time, Dil had linked with the Grendel’s Mother for planet-wide data. Now they had a basis for comparison, and the ship’s main surveys showed whole stretches of the planet with the telltale shift in colour, from Athamir habitation to Athamir graveyard. A subtle shading from yellowish to orange-ish, but it was there once you knew to look. Dil’s scratch calculation suggested that the planet’s population of three billion was down by at least a third already, and there were thousands of Tymeree harvesting operations ongoing.
‘They’re not waiting for the Architect,’ Lightly said. ‘They’re doing it themselves. The Essiel are committing genocide on their own subjects.’ Olli found she wasn’t even remotely tempted to throw out a barb about the Parthenon. Yes, the Athamir were strange, daft-looking mushroom creatures that looked closer to a pot plant than a person, but she realized she did care, despite that. And there was nothing any of them could do about it, here in the heart of the Hegemony. Aside from make recordings and carry the truth out to Hugh and the Parthenon.
‘Maybe this will put a few people off joining the cult,’ she said.
‘You think they know you can’t harvest humans like this?’ Dil asked.
After that cheery thought, they had to go look at the Temple. Or the two Partheni did. Olli felt she’d seen enough shit for one day, but then the abiding lesson of the universe was there was always more shit.
She clawed back into orbit to hop across the planet, over to where the Originator city was. The Temple was on a neighbouring piece of high ground across one of the steaming chasms. The bridge linking the two was gleaming, pearlescent, made in one piece without seams. The people trudging across it, hordes of them in a steady, uncomplaining stream, were dusty and pushing handcarts or else carrying their lives on their backs. Olli decided that she just didn’t get the Hegemony, and maybe it wasn’t humanly possible. Maybe every detail of this was the exacting plan of the Divine Essiel, and it just wouldn’t ever be comprehensible to poor Olian Timo of the Vulture God.
The Temple was a vast cleared space, ringed with pillars of what looked like lead. There was no roof, and the refugees had set up camp all over it by whatever means they had. They all seemed well fed, and plenty had set up little kitchens to pool their resources. They all seemed happy that the Essiel had provided this patch of bare ground for them to live on, now the Architect had torn up their homes.
The Temple was new, of course. Before, there had just been a handful of blocky buildings and a landing site. For a moment they took the activity there for an actual evacuation effort, even a small one. As they watched, a transport ship touched down, the sort of robust, ugly model that was familiar throughout the Colonies. People were getting off it, though. There was no great rush ship-ward from the Temple. Olli looked at the newcomers, seeing the flash of their fancy robes, seeing the luggage gliding after them as they headed for the buildings.
‘Pilgrims,’ she identified, and then, with more venom, ‘Tourists. Here to see it before it’s all gone. Fuck me.’
‘This . . .’ Dil said quietly, ‘this is depressing. This isn’t what I imagined. I mean, the Hegemony . . . I thought . . .’
Olli’s attention was elsewhere, though. Because where there were tourists there were things for tourists to spend their money on. And the Hegemony might be a great alien state, but the cultists were humans and she was willing to bet they couldn’t all be as devout as all that.
‘I have a personal survey to do,’ she told the Partheni. ‘Specifically, I want to survey if there’s a bar in that hotel or whatever it is over there.’
Olli’s discovery of a bar was possibly the best thing to happen to Idris all day.
The confrontation of the previous evening meant that, when the sun had finally dragged its bulk over the horizon, everyone had turned up to work with a gun. Or not everyone, but the Colonials had brought twice the usual number of both Voyenni and soldiers, all with accelerators. Not to be outdone, the smaller complement of Partheni were all in full armour and just as nastily armed. The Ints and researchers crept about their business worried that dropping a slate or kicking a loose stone would see the whole area erupt into a cross-borders slaughter of twitchy trigger fingers. It was all a solid dose of mental stress to add to the distant throb of his healing hand. Partheni medicine was good but their painkillers never banished the pain, simply transmuted it to something more bearable, so the patient never forgot about the injury so much as to exacerbate it. Admirable medical thinking but the sensation of knitting bones and bruises was like sandpaper quietly rubbing away at the back of Idris’s brain.
The blazing row that erupted between Trine and Storquel a few hours later looked, on that basis, like a deliberate attempt to get everyone killed. Idris couldn’t even say what started it, but both of them had been spoiling for a fight since the beginning, and it was about time they got it out of their systems. Only, if they’d done it the day before, when it wasn’t five minutes to midnight on the firefight clock, that might have been preferable. Some trifling difference of opinion on interpretation turned into accusations on both sides of not disclosing data, and thence to personal observations, claims of stolen research going back decades and straight-up abuse. Trine’s artificial voice just got louder and louder, matching sarcasm to volume. Storquel, for his part, ended up shrieking, ‘Nothing you have is yours! I owned you!’ far too loud in an awkward gap in Trine’s own diatribe. After that, the pair of them took a few steps back from each other and came to the understanding that the guns of both sides were directed at their opposite numbers, and the pair of them were right in the middle.
Work stopped around then, or at least any pretence of a coordinated effort, leaving him frustrated, the hooks of the site still tugging at his mind. Idris understood that Keen and Mannec were trying to draw up a partitioned plan of the site so both teams could continue working separately. Neither Trine nor Storquel would agree to any proposed division, though, so right now the only entity actually getting on with things was the Architect above.
This nearly got everyone shot again because, after another two twitchy hours of nobody getting on with things and the guns not really wavering, three new salvos of spines lanced down from the crystal moon into fresh parts of the city. The seismic tremble of impact set dust sifting from everywhere, and one of the Partheni sent an accelerator round into a wall not a hundred miles away from Professor Storquel. The diplomatic world held its breath, but the clock had been wound back far enough that it wasn’t war just yet. After the initial shock, the Architect’s intervention actually mended some fences. Everyone was suddenly reminded why they were there and what the real enemy was. There were now three separate groups of crystalline servitors tearing up the ruins, and that hadn’t happened before. Everyone’s estimates of how much time they had went up in smoke.
Idris was called over and asked to go back to work. The Colonial Ints were being marched out by their Voyenni handlers. He saw Demi Ulo out there, her walker making heavy going of the uneven ground. It was time for everyone to throw open their minds and sense the alien. Feel out the geometry of the Originator structures that extended beneath them and how that stub of a ruin interacted with the Architect above. He chose a part of the ruin as far from her as possible.
He ended up working alongside one of the crystalforms, which did little to assuage the nerves of his own escort. It was a four-legged thing, no arms but horns, or possibly mouthparts, like a great arching pair of tongs. He couldn’t quite imagine the living original. Had it even been intelligent? How had it built, or done anything Idris might associate with civilization? Now it was nothing but a template within the mind of an Architect. And yet all the Ints had reported that their impressions and data came most readily where the crystalforms were working, rather than in quieter parts of the city. There was a channel to the entity above that they could tap into.
In that moment of reflection, in that company, his awareness of the universe slipped past the walls and barriers of the real and he had one of those moments of perfect clarity, usually such a pain but right now what he was being employed for. The boundary of unspace was beneath him like the skin of a balloon his feet didn’t even dent. He could feel it deform under the pressure of the Architect’s attention, though. His understanding was that the crystalforms weren’t independent entities; they weren’t even remotes like Olli’s drones. They were literally blocks of inorganic matter reshaped and puppeteered around by the Architect’s complete mastery of gravitational force, applied with the same pinpoint accuracy with which it would reshape Arc Pallator.
Except there was something more. There was a knot of resonance within the form that seemed to persist, moment to moment. At first he took it for a separate mind, and wondered if, in replicating the shape of its long-dead prey, the Architect had somehow conjured its consciousness. Then he understood. It wasn’t separate, but separated by real space. Not a knot, but a window. An opening connecting the crystalform to the heart of the Architect, so that its unimaginable intellect was present within every one of its servants, to look out and exert precise control.
Perhaps a link that could be used against it? Idris had no idea, but the next moment the crystal entity had stopped whatever it was doing. He’d say it turned to look at him, but it had no eyes and it didn’t even turn, exactly. Its faceted shape simply flowed and remoulded itself until the arching prongs were directed towards him.
The Partheni shouted at him to get back from it, levelling accelerators that would do precisely nothing to the thing’s malleable shape. Idris was frozen. It could have leant in and clipped his head off neatly, with very little effort. He was staring into the heart of it, looking the Architect in the eye, while it was trying to work out what he was and why he’d snagged its colossal attention.
Then it was back about its work again, and he had the fleeting sense of a weariness as great as the universe, of work that went on forever and must be done. Unsleeping, unwilling, unable to stop. And it was tearing up the planet three times as fast, of course, so overall a bad time to feel sympathy for it, but he found he could empathize nonetheless.
By the time Olli arrived, there had been enough gun-pointing and false alarms and general workplace stress that Idris was more than ready for her to declare that the Vulture God crew was going on a bender at the local spaceport dive, and the Partheni could stay or come along as they pleased.