Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

She preferred ships where flicking the wrong switch wouldn’t turn the hull off.

In retrospect, Olli wondered if part of her had anticipated the plan would crash to a halt at the first hurdle. After all, she was only taking a priceless asset out of the hands of a godlike and criminally insane alien, by walking into the centre of its power, surrounded by the murderous cultists who obeyed its every whim.

They had worked with a feverish haste, each pumped up on species-appropriate stimulants because going to sleep on a dying ship was a good recipe for not waking up.

“This is fucked up,” Olli sent to Kit. “There is no further up to which it might be fucked,” was his considered reply.

She lamped the crystalform with half her tentacles. Live by the fucking sword. It exploded. Actually shattered into fragments. Some of those fragments tried to come back together, but most of it just went everywhere, spanging off the God’s hull and the walls, or just hurtling out into space. Olli stared. For a moment the crystalforms were still too, and it was as though she and the Architect were sharing one long what-the-fuck moment about what had just happened.

But the Essiel didn’t do this. It wasn’t their style, according to all the well-paid theorists whose job it was to scrute the inscrutable.

What came through first was something like a woodlouse, its raised underside all gleaming killer cutlery. Behind it stalked an absurdly delicate thing on spindly gazelle legs, its head like a flower of teeth.

But Idris hadn’t asked her to clear the area. Idris had asked her to hold. Just being here, second to second, was her win condition.