The Raptorid danced round them as they came on. Olli tracked the spiral shifting of their course as Kittering did his best to get close, but the Magdan yacht kept space effortlessly between them. They were far enough out in the void that the human eye would have seen only a glint. It was trying to put distance between itself and the Partheni too, and the pair of them were drifting out of the fray as the Intrepid took up the invaders’ attention.
Then, just as she was about to tear her hair out in frustration at how they were being played, the Raptorid’s next course correction didn’t happen. They just continued coasting on a predictable line and the distance between her and the Vulture God was being eaten up second by second. Kittering opened the claws in readiness to latch on.
Havaer gave a little grunt of satisfaction.
‘That your pal again, huh?’ Olli asked him. ‘Colbert?’
‘Colvari,’ he confirmed. ‘Says they’ve locked the Magdans out of their brachator drive but not for long. Uskaro has override keys they won’t be able to get past. They’re trying to box off the main hatch so they can open up for us when we’re on it. After that, they’ll only have access to a few trivial systems and it’ll be as much as they can do to turn a few lights off and on.’
‘It’s enough,’ Olli decided. She was tracking Kit’s approach, because he wasn’t the greatest pilot in the galaxy, but right now the Raptorid was a sitting duck. ‘You got a gun, Mordant man?’
He did, a little magnetic piece he’d been keeping who knew where. Hopefully it packed a bigger punch than its size suggested. The Voyenni would have some decent kit, she was sure, but they’d also be aboard their own ship, so probably wouldn’t be breaking out the accelerators if they had any worries about hull integrity. Similarly, unless she was banking on Kris being able to hold her breath really well, she didn’t want to go wild with the heavy armaments herself.
Also, Havaer just had a standard suit on and, though it was puncture resistant and rugged, it wouldn’t keep out a determined knife thrust, let alone a bullet. And it wasn’t as if they’d be making much of a sneaky entrance. The Voyenni would be ready for them when they broke in.
‘Okay,’ Olli decided. ‘This is how we do it.’
*
Far too many slow minutes later, she saw the energy flare in the other ship’s systems as they got their drives back online. This meant Colvari was now locked out of anything that would be really useful to them. By then it was too late for the Raptorid, though. The God was right on them. The one accelerator cannon the Magdans could bring around in time, now they had weapons control again, chewed a nasty scar along the salvage vessel’s hull. Damage control said it was all cosmetic, and they’d given up winning beauty contests a long time ago. Olli sent a message to Havaer, checking he was ready at the umbilical.
The God landed, Kit erring on the side of enthusiasm so that the impact shuddered through the ship. Olli’s display showed her twenty new red lights, which meant twenty brand-new jobs to go onto the maintenance to-do list. No time to chew Kit out for clumsy flying, though. He had the docking claws latched onto the Raptorid, and that meant the only way the ships would be going their separate ways was by means of the God’s control pod, or after a hell of a lot of cutting work. Kit hadn’t exactly positioned them bang on the Magdan ship’s own hatch, but the umbilical was flexible. Havaer jockeyed it in a series of scraping lurches along the other ship’s hull, until its low-grade AI recognized a door and it locked on.
‘Your friend still has the door?’ Olli asked him, alone down there.
She took his tense grunt as confirmation.
‘Get me eyes in there?’
The image feed flashed up on her display a moment later. She saw three Voyenni, all in light armour, waiting in the cover of the hatch bulkheads. They had chemical propellant pistols, low power enough not to damage the hull but they would put holes in Havaer easily enough. They each had an axe in their off-hand too, which was a nasty little trick. The weapons had beak-like heads, and Olli reckoned they had some kind of explosive kick to them as well, to punch through inconvenient obstacles like people.
The third Voyenni had taken a whole panel off the wall and was going at it with a toolkit and extreme prejudice. They knew they’d lost the door control but they’d have it back shortly. Until then, they were ready for whatever came out of the God at them.
‘Hey, Mordant,’ she signalled down to Havaer. ‘Have your Hiver fight them over control of the door. Make it loud. Strip the servos. Whatever you can to distract them.’
‘You had better be able to pull this off, Timo,’ he told her flatly. He could see the same images, of course, and he didn’t fancy his chances. A contested entry of one against three.
She had wasted a couple of moments considering whether to let that happen, maybe being late to the party for her part of the plan. He was a spook after all and not to be trusted, and they were going to have to fight over Idris at some point. But she reckoned right now a live Mundy was more use than a corpse, and she didn’t fancy his Hiver spook pal hacking her ass in revenge. So much for that.
The door started to open, and Olli saw the two gunmen tense, ready to shoot or just pile in with axes as the situation warranted. The hatch was shuddering and sparking, though, and she could see the Voyenni tech frowning, because it wasn’t down to anything he’d done. Colvari was making a big show of fighting their own efforts to access the doorway, with all the showmanship Olli could have asked for.
Olli herself was outside. She’d moved out onto the God’s hull during the approach, and now had herself positioned right above the hatch. The Scorpion was basically a fancy cutting tool with attitude, and so she cut. The Raptorid was just a yacht too. No armour plate or explosive hull sections. Olli had been carving her way into ships for years, and this one folded like tinfoil.
There was a momentary rush of atmosphere from below, but the yacht’s gravitic field caught that soon enough, sealing over the breach to prevent explosive decompression. The turbulence shook the Voyenni about, though, and Olli managed to peel back enough hull to drop down in the middle of them. She had a number of limbs tipped with drills, saws and pincers, and even more deconstruction implements on the suit’s whipping tail. She didn’t hold back. She’d been angry and frustrated about a number of things for quite some time, ever since losing Idris on Arc Pallator. Or ever since she’d ended up in bed with the fucking Partheni, for that matter. Or possibly ever since she’d been born. Despite the alleged rough and tumble of a spacer’s life, it wasn’t often she got to express to the universe just how pissed off she was at how shit most of it was.
When the hatch through to the umbilical did actually open, Havaer stepped gingerly out onto a deck that was slippery with stuff that had formerly been inside Voyenni. He glanced from Olli to the hole above that she’d made. He’d probably seen some things, being who he was and who he worked for, but she reckoned she’d just added something new and nasty to his portfolio of professional experiences.
‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘Lead on.’
‘Your boy got anything else for us?’ she asked him.
‘Locked out of anything but the small stuff,’ he confirmed. ‘Unless you can think of some combat use for a hairdryer or something, we’re on our own.’ His eyes, behind the visor of his helmet, kept wandering over the mess she’d made.
‘Good,’ Olli decided and set the Scorpion lumbering to the next door, her saws and torches already firing up.
The Originator architecture wasn’t the half of it, and the displays they’d captured didn’t really reflect the current layout of this place. The vast riveted sections of floor and far-too-big hatchways were striking uneasy feelings in Solace’s gut regarding who or what exactly had made a home here. At the same time, there was a lot of extra scaffolding and ladderwork fit for her own scale, so maybe Emmaneth was big on home improvements.
She’d tried hailing Idris, but whatever was happening to the place around them was fritzing their comms as well. The channels were filled with screaming ghost voices that she connected with the deadly glass flowers outside, as though they were howling to get in. Maybe Idris wouldn’t respond anyway, given the conversations they’d had with him from the Vulture God. He sounded like he’d gone native the worst way.
They were ambushed by the Voyenni just once. They dropped down into a vast metal-lined space, a layer between floors that seemed untenanted, held up by metre-thick struts leaning at crazy angles. These were shuddering too. The air between the iron resounded as though someone was panel-beating the whole place. Ever since the glare had driven them inside, everything had felt as though it was under attack. Dust sifted from every rivet and join, where the different technologies met. Then it just spun in the air in serpents of glittering motes, as though gravity wasn’t sure what to do about it. Solace could feel the gravity shift as well – its hold lessening as they descended towards whatever the power signatures were below them.
Then out across this slice of space, the Voyenni appeared and opened fire on them, getting the same treatment right back. Both sides dived for whatever cover the struts could give against the scythe of accelerator shot. Solace wondered if they were about to just cut to pieces all the supports for the upper floors. She braced for the colossal weight of metal ceiling to come down on them like a factory press.
After a protracted few seconds when the singing sounds of the weapons on both sides echoed eerily down the canted space, Solace realized they weren’t being hit, and nor were the enemy. The nearest pillars were practically fuzzy with accelerator shot, the little pellets clustering about them. Their own had been similarly caught. She could feel no magnetic pull on her suit or any other part of her, and her instruments showed no active fields. And yet they, and the Voyenni, had just burned through half their ammunition to absolutely no avail.
For a moment the Partheni and the Magdans just stared dumbly at each other. Then the Voyenni were moving, descending hurriedly to the next level and leaving this witchcraft behind them. Solace didn’t fancy using the same hatch, in case the anti-acceleration field abruptly shut off on the next level. ‘Find a way down,’ she ordered, and one of the Myrmidons had already identified a likely hatch, five metres across, dropping into an uncertain abyss.
There were lights down there. And walls: rings and circles and whole orreries of walls. It twisted her eyes to look at it. The lights were in a constellation connected by a webwork of wires, clearly old-fashioned spacer tech. Everything just stapled together all anyhow to the ancient Originator construction. Walls and rings and deconstructed spheres, none of it seemed to be supported by much of anything, and the darkness was impenetrable beyond. Gravity was playing hob with everything too. Solace really didn’t fancy the descent, right then. If it was vertigo, it was vertigo of the soul. There was something about the dimensions and proportions and sheer physics of this place that her mind revolted at.
And yet it was all leading somewhere. The arrangement drew the eye. It had a centre, and once she’d realized that, it was hard not to think of the whole static assembly as orbiting it. That matched up with where the power all led. With where the activity was.
If I’m making the wrong call, we might be rushing into a power core gone critical or a bomb or something.
‘Prêt à combattre?’ she asked her Myrmidons, because she sure as hell didn’t feel she was.
But, ‘Prêt, Mother,’ they answered, and then she was looking to find a path that would let them intercept the hurrying band.
Kris was aware they’d been in a fight for some time. She’d heard the odd alarm and had the impression the yacht had taken a couple of trivial hits. With the high-class and reliable artificial gravity, she had no sense of what manoeuvres the vessel was being put through. This was in contrast to the old Vulture God, where she always felt there was a bit of a lurch in her gut whenever Idris or Olli slung them around. The screens and consoles wouldn’t respond to her touch or queries. She was discovering that captivity could go from life-threatening to simply frustrating very quickly.
Admittedly she was still in a small stateroom, so it wasn’t as though her circumstances were excruciatingly uncomfortable. The room’s little printer had a limited repertoire but she’d managed to get some little cakes out of it, and a glass of decent heated wine. Not the sort of glass she could smash and thereafter threaten people with, however. It just crumpled when she tried it.
Then Piter Tchever Uskaro turned up, looking as though he’d been eating lemons. He had added a holstered pistol and a scabbarded knife to his ensemble, and a pair of Voyenni were at his back.
Kris made her expression one of innocent enquiry.
The Boyarin stared at her suspiciously, and then one of his men went all over the room, checking every possible point where she could have interacted with the ship. Kris watched this blankly, moving about the room to stay clear of whatever they were doing. It all seemed very thorough, and Uskaro was twitchy, glowering at her. Looking for an excuse.
‘Your Elegance, if I knew what you were looking for, perhaps I could help,’ she suggested, then took two rapid steps back as he practically lunged at her. He caught her wrist and yanked her close, snarling.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing—’ he began, but then his man started reporting.
‘Nothing, sir. No systems access. I can see she’s tried, but there’s nothing here.’
‘Then she’s covering her tracks.’ Still holding her wrist, he straight-armed her down onto the bed, about to accuse her of who knew what. She waited, because if he actually accused her of it, then she’d at least know what it was she was supposed to have done. He saw in her face too that she was less worried about him than she was curious. For a moment she thought he would hit her out of sheer aggravation, a man used to getting his own way, and for whom the universe was not behaving properly. If he did, she’d go at him right back, she decided, surprised at how clear her head was. She’d go tooth and nail, try to get his knife out of that fiddly buttoned-down scabbard, bite his nose off, something. Because she reckoned he was the sort of man who enjoyed beating people who couldn’t fight back, and she wanted to make it clear she wasn’t in that category.
He’d have had the Voyenni hold her down while he went to get the whip, no doubt, but something in her face dissuaded him from starting down that road. He stepped back, face twitching with anger, and then the three of them stormed out.
She checked the door, just in case, but Uskaro’s annoyance hadn’t led to him overlooking the lock.
So what was all that? They’d thought she was getting into the ship’s systems, which meant that someone had been. She’d have loved to claim the credit, but that kind of monkeying wasn’t her forte. It must have been the little voice that had come to her before. An associate of Mundy, the Mordant House man, it had claimed, and she’d given it some level of access to the ship. After all Mundy was, at least for now and however nominally, her ally.
A little while later, a colossal shudder ran through the hull of the Raptorid. She recognized it from being on the other end of it. The sort of gung-ho docking the Vulture God made with ships that were, usually, unoccupied and ripe for salvage. If she was lucky, they were here to salvage her.
Which was all very well, but the Raptorid was packed with thugs, as far as Kris knew. Should Olli and the others make any headway then, unless Mundy’s friend had some fairly spectacular control over ship’s systems, this was going to put her in a tricky position. Her role could go from prisoner to hostage very quickly and she reckoned Piter Uskaro was exactly the man to take that option.
A series of distant shocks went through the hull that could have been anything from explosions to enthusiastic engineering. Her initial bad feeling, as to the odds of her crewmates pulling anything useful off, started to lift, or at least turn into other kinds of bad feelings. There were more vibrations, the whole of the ship a telltale informing her that, whatever was going on, it hadn’t just been put down with extreme prejudice by the Voyenni.
The door slid open again a moment later and Piter Uskaro’s unwelcome face hooked round it, staring at her with far more venom than their respective positions would normally have inspired. He seemed about to say something, and she saw he had his pistol in his hand. Then his features clenched and he withdrew. She checked the door. Locked once more. Was it too much to expect a little slipshod practice from her enemies in her time of need?
She reckoned the clock was fast moving towards hostage hour, and that was unlikely to go well for her. A couple of burly Voyenni would probably end any effective chance she had of changing her role to one more empowered.
Something suddenly bleeped at her. She scanned the stateroom quickly. A message? The room was overdressed rather than being spacer-functional, and she took too long to realize the printer was blinking its lights in a little pattern.
It wasn’t built to be communicative, but she found a concealed maintenance flap in its side and uncovered a little diagnostics panel. The simple screen there started scrolling letters the moment she exposed it.
Reduced to trivial systems, it read. Our only input to your location. Please hold.
She had no idea if she might be heard, but there was a receiver on the diagnostics panel that looked calibrated for verbal commands. ‘I don’t suppose the door counts as trivial?’
They’ve locked us out of the doors already. We had fun with them, but – there was no more to the sentence, and she thought she must have lost even that little thread of hope, but then the letters started up again. We are very busy with somewhat more pressing negotiations right now, Mm. Almier. Probably we should leave you to your fate.
‘Thanks.’
However, as a sop to our contract with Mh. Mundy we will attempt to do right by you. The printer was now busy making, its internal shuttles passing back and forth furiously as they built something up from component molecules.
‘You’re giving me a last meal?’ she asked it drily.
No, came the little string of text. Cutlery, though.
The printer finished up, and a little silvered tray extended. On it was a knife, Scintilla duelling standard, made out of hard plastic.
Kris picked it up and slipped it into her sleeve, feeling disproportionate comfort from its slight weight.
She then heard running feet and shouting voices, not too many doors away from hers.
Bring it, she thought. Things were about to get litigious.
Idris was most of the way to the Machine when Emmaneth’s head jerked up.
‘They’re coming right after us,’ she hissed.
‘Who are?’ Jaine asked. ‘How could they even?’
‘Whoever came down the well. They got inside in time.’ The Tothiat had stopped, staring up through the hatch they’d just used. ‘And how? Jaine, you rigged this place so everything points at the Machine.’
‘Because everything does point at the Machine. It’s the only reason you clowns are all here! You wanted it that way!’ Jaine shouted at her. Idris recalled she’d been a resident before Ahab, and wondered what on Earth she’d been doing on Criccieth’s Hell prior to being co-opted for the Naeromathi’s single-minded purpose.
‘I’m going to sort them out,’ Emmaneth decided.
‘No,’ Idris heard himself say, and forced himself not to flinch back when she rounded on him. ‘They’re my friends,’ he explained.
‘Caught sight of a pack of combat armour way up there,’ Emmaneth accused. ‘That’s some punchy friends you’ve got. I reckon that’s Mordant House here for me. Or worse.’
‘It’s my friends. That’s their ship. I’m going.’
‘But, Menheer Telemmier, we do rather need you in the hotseat.’ Doctor Shinandri was already halfway through the next hatch, one of the yawning gaps built to fit Ahab.
‘Get the Machine ready for me,’ Idris told them. ‘I’m not skipping out on you. But my friends are no pushovers. If they turn up and Emmaneth starts throwing punches while I’m under, then a lot of complicated things we need working are going to get wrecked.’ He glowered at Emmaneth, armoured in a sense of his own usefulness, until she actually scowled and looked away.
‘I’m going with you,’ she told him.
‘Not like you’d be much use throwing switches,’ jabbed Jaine.
Idris just shrugged and started climbing back up.
‘I’m really not sure—’ Shinandri started again, but Idris kept going, rung after rung, feeling the infinitesimal weight of thickening gravity piling on his shoulders as he ascended, the weird inverse field that meant he was near-weightless in the Machine’s seat but would be under one G and more up on the outermost levels.
Emmaneth was doggedly at his heels. Her face, when he glanced back, was thunder, but she kept her mouth shut at least.
‘Why?’ he asked suddenly, not breaking the rhythm of his hands and feet.
‘What?’
‘You keep saying what a bad person you are. You killed people for Mordant House, and then you killed people for Broken Harvest after they did the Tothiat thing to you. It hurts so bad, you tried to get yourself killed and . . . then you come here to incinerate yourself and suddenly you’re best pals with the universe and want to help fight the Architects.’
She’d stopped climbing, and he gained a whole ladder on her before she scrambled to catch up.
‘Jaine explained to me what they were doing here. What Ahab was seeking. What Shinandri wanted,’ she said. ‘Then she showed me where I could just walk out into the light and die. I stood there for a long time, believe me. And I’ll go back there, probably, to take that last step. But for now . . . I thought I could do something to help.’
‘Help Ahab?’
‘Help the universe. Because nothing I ever did for Hugh or the Broken Harvest ever did. And that was what I wanted to get away from. Government wetwork or just murdering people for some crazy gangster. But here I could—’
‘You never understood!’ A new voice burst out. Idris skittered aside as someone descended on them much faster than was wise. Emmaneth had a gun out now but she didn’t bother to shoot. It wouldn’t have done any good. There was more movement much higher up, more people coming down, but leading the charge was a woman he didn’t know – no suit, not even a weapon drawn – and she looked furious.
‘You had everything,’ the woman spat at Emmaneth. ‘He took you from the herd and he remade you. We are the chosen, Em. We live forever. And you came here to die?’
Belatedly Idris noticed the articulated symbiote bulking out the newcomer’s spine. Another Tothiat.
‘Heremon,’ Emmaneth named her. ‘You dragged your feet tracking me down, didn’t you?’ She cocked an eye up at the squad of Myrmidons that were making their descent. Idris was trying to see if any of them was Solace, but in their armour they were even more similar than when out of it.
‘Every time I killed for Mordant House, I thought about ending it,’ Emmaneth said softly. ‘A day, give or take, each time, when I couldn’t live with myself. Then I signed the devil’s pact with the Unspeakable, and I realized I’d never have that option again. Pain all the time, but my life wasn’t my own to take any more. In the end I found something better than death, a purpose worth staying alive just a little longer for. But I’d rather death than to live forever as a gangster’s pet monster.’
‘You never understood,’ and Heremon was genuinely, inexplicably upset at her, as though Emmaneth’s betrayal threatened her entire worldview. ‘The Razor is not a criminal. It’s an angel. A fallen angel cast down from Heaven to do the things that the Essiel are forbidden to do.’
‘You make it sound like what Mordant House is to Hugh,’ Emmaneth said derisively. ‘Just someone to do the dirty work.’
‘We’ll make you understand,’ Heremon told her hotly. ‘You’ll come back to us. By the time Aklu finishes with you . . .’
‘You won’t make me go back to it,’ Emmaneth promised her. ‘How long do you think you can even hold onto me?’
Then Myrmidons were dropping down from above, weapons levelled at Emmaneth, who yanked Idris behind her.
‘We might not be able to kill you,’ one stated flatly, ‘but we can beat you down to the point you can’t stop us.’
‘Solace?’ Idris asked, and was suddenly worried in case Solace wasn’t actually among them. Where precisely did he stand with her sisters in her absence? Then another Myrmidon had dropped down. This one had her weapon slung rather than levelled, and she stood there for a moment, just staring.
‘Idris?’ Even through the suit’s speakers he knew the voice.
He ducked under Emmaneth’s arm to close the distance halfway. ‘Look—’ he said, and then she lunged forwards. He flinched, and he felt Emmaneth grab for him too, but Solace got there first. Not a grapple, nor an attempt to secure control of an asset. Just sweeping him into her arms for a hug that bruised his ribs and drove the breath out of him. A moment later she’d stepped hurriedly back, and he had the impression she hadn’t meant to do that at all. Her cohorts seemed to be giving her some very unmilitary looks.
‘Come on,’ she told him.
‘I can’t,’ he replied. At least this part of their meeting was going to plan.
‘Idris, we need to get out of here, right now. This place, it’s coming apart.’
‘Yes, yes it is,’ he agreed. ‘And until it stops doing that, nobody’s leaving.’
‘There must be ships here we can leave on.’
‘There is no way out of the atmosphere right now that any ship could survive. The Machine is active, so the shielding is down. The planet is trying to take this place apart, and there’s no corridor into space,’ he told her, getting it all out as hurriedly as possible. ‘So come with me. I can fix this. I just need to go back under.’
‘Under what?’ she demanded. The hug had been nice but would she just stop asking questions now?
‘Come on, tell you on the way. Solace, it’s, this, we’re really,’ tugging at her, tugging at Emmaneth, trying to get everyone moving, like herding heavily armed and pugnacious cats.
*
Shinandri and Jaine were waiting below, the former suited up and the latter with Idris’s own suit ready for him. They were decidedly leery when the Myrmidons trooped down and held them at gunpoint, but at least neither was the fight-starting type. Then Idris was in the midst of them, already struggling into the encounter suit, getting his fingers and toes snagged in the thick rubbery fabric.
‘Why the suits?’ Solace asked, mystified. ‘I mean, we’re short on gravity here, but the atmosphere’s fine.’
‘I’m going somewhere. I’m travelling.’ Even as he said it, he was articulating a truth he’d never quite put together before. ‘I’m going to sit at the very border of unspace.’ He had a sudden vertiginous feeling, lurching into Jaine as she connected his hoses. A sense of the Machine’s original purpose came to him – not the gubbins Ahab had put in or the human-scale additions of Jaine, but the Originators’ real intent for it. All this engine, this insane physics-bending tech, just for some kind of reverse telescope into nowhere? Of course there was more it could do. What Shinandri and Ahab were using it for was just a sideshow some unintended offshoot of the complex’s true purpose. ‘Even though I’m still here, I’m exposed. The suit protects me. A little. All that it can.’
‘Idris, what is this?’
He squared up to her, suit to armoured suit. ‘The only working Originator base we’ve ever found. And we are looking into unspace. We’re finding out what’s sending the Architects after us, me and Ahab. Because Ahab wants revenge. He wants to hunt them down and destroy them. This is it, Solace. This is where we learn how to strike back.’
He sounded ridiculous to his own ears, but Solace and the Myrmidons went quiet and still. He caught Heremon nodding slightly. Not impressed? Not even surprised? Are Tothiat just really hard to shock, or . . .?
‘Most of all right now, though, I need to connect to Ahab and talk him into coming out, because he’s hunting down there alone, and while the Machine’s on, the shield’s off. Nobody fight anyone until I’m out again.’
There was a sudden clatter from above, as of someone slipping down a ladder too quickly.
‘No promises,’ Solace said. ‘There are a pack of Voyenni out there, and they’ll be in here soon enough, if they can navigate worth a damn.’
‘Why did you bring Voyenni?’ Idris demanded.
‘Believe me, we did our very best to bring as few of them as possible.’ Her Myrmidons were now spreading out, guns levelled upwards. Then there was a colossal retort that shook all the walls around them and seemed to go on forever, echoing into the cavernous depths.
Jaine swore. ‘I think that was something structural. Go get Ahab, Telemmier. I can’t patch this place until he’s out. If it’s even possible.’
Then he was in the chair, and in the Machine, and nothing else mattered. There was a second, perhaps, when the presence of Solace snagged at his conscience, but unspace beckoned, and in this seat he had a leverage over it that a spaceship never gave him. In the lion’s den, but he had a whip.
Ahab, already sunk deep, called to him. ‘Come! We must understand!’ In the heart of that cluster of organization and energy that they’d found and which had so baffled them both. Right then, Idris had no thought for the installation or its longevity, for Jaine’s repairs, the Vulture God, any of it. He needed to know. He had to discover the truth behind the Architects and their masters. Though he’d tell himself it was to save the universe from them, in reality he just wanted to know.
He joined Ahab and the assemblage of activity and motion deep in unspace. Abruptly they were there: the Architects, their intelligences. They brushed against the pair of explorers, flinching away, and were already in motion, he realized. They were coming for Criccieth’s Hell, to test themselves against the planet’s fires. They would burn up their crystal soldiers in an attempt to excise the installation. Anything to prevent Idris and Ahab from making their discovery. He had moments of connection, like needles in his brain. They were terrified of him, in that moment. They were terrified of Ahab too. They, who could reshape planets.
Data shuttled back and forth, Idris to Ahab and back. The Naeromathi’s long life, experience and driving purpose, Idris’s Intermediary perspective that unpacked unspace like an opening flower.
Then he knew. And it wasn’t what he’d thought. He felt leaden and bitter, even as Ahab exulted that the universe had finally given up its secrets.