Frye smiled. Idris, who’d faced Architects on several occasions, trembled before that smile. It was a bland, keen thing. It could make all his achievements and accomplishments delusions. It could see Ravin’s mad ark fleet as the future, and cast anyone who wouldn’t skin their own grandmother for it as a species traitor. It was a smile that could beam down on lesser people as they were tortured and carved into compliant, useful navigators for a fleet that would go from nowhere to nowhere forever. Or at least until something broke down that couldn’t be fixed.
