Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Death; destroyer of worlds. Except it wasn’t even something as comprehensible as that. Remaker, artist, artisan.

All they had was begging. Their only weapon was empathy. While extreme military resistance had, on two known occasions, resulted in an Architect’s physical destruction, empathy had saved more worlds by far.

Andecka knew she wasn’t dead enough to be taken out of active rotation yet.

It was the great truth of law that the more savage things got, the more you needed a lawyer to dig you out.

But nobody had offered to graft an alien lobster-wasp onto her to make her immortal, and she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted by that.

There’s a monster in unspace, Olli, and I think there’s something behind it.” “Or just… there,” Olli countered. “I mean, why does it have to be things behind things behind things? Why not just the monster at the centre of everything? Given how fucked the universe is, that would actually make sense, you know?”

If she decided to make a run for it and sell her ill-gotten gains to Hugh or the Hanni or something, then she would probably become very rich and then very dead in that order. Life goals…

“We can’t just let the Parthenon walk in,” she said. “We need these fuckers to deal with their fuckers. It’s just… zero-sum fuckery. Or something.

And, yes, the nest of bugs had won some sort of political independence, but Ravin had always felt this was on the strict assumption they wouldn’t do anything untoward with it.

Her torso was carved up, a Rorschach spray of blood wet across the black stone like an art installation.

The impression, to a fallible human mind, was that something had risen up impossibly beneath the ship—meaning out of the underlying structure of the universe, out of unspace. As though a gaping maw was drawing all of space down into itself. Monsters and nightmares.

“It is the penance of the fallen god to stare into the void and there to strive with all the horrors of the vasty deep,”

Olli didn’t like feeling humbled. She resented the implication that there were things in the universe she couldn’t just throw her weight and her Scorpion at, and make them get out of her way.

Of course that was impossible, but Olli wasn’t entirely sure she’d been using the word correctly in her life to date.

They weren’t like the Magdan Voyenni or some other Colonial thugs’ club, where the new recruits were beaten, brutalized and isolated until they clung to the jackboot that stomped on them as though it was their mother’s teat.

Through the hairline crack in her composure, Solace saw a real loathing. A woman who’d jumped ship to the new order of things, and must hate everyone who wouldn’t make the same leap, to stop being drowned in cognitive dissonance.

There would be a time, later, when the fate of humanity was determined by the elegant and the educated, people of proper breeding and social graces. But sometimes you needed a thug to do a thug’s job.

You had to take a lot of civilized things for granted before wheels were the answer.

Betray and abandon all the worlds of humanity, all the worlds of every sentient species. Become just one more sled-dog hauling the future of humanity through the wastes, for ever and for ever.

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.

“We don’t have to butcher their children. I mean, if one of the options on the table is ‘butcher their children’ then there really should be another way, don’t you think?”

“You’d challenge an entity that literally exists at the centre of the universe?” Ash asked him. “I mean, not by choice,” Idris said. “But if the other option is butcher children, then sure.”

“Because it’s wrong to strive against the way the universe is made. The Essiel do not prey upon the lesser, nor rebel against the great. They know their place, as masters of those things they hold to, and that act on their behalf.

If railing against fate is wrong, let us do wrong. Let us do all the acts unspeakable. Break all the laws. Fight that which must be borne. Be wicked, know no grace. Refuse all walls. And so, though we be cursed, reviled, denied, so we yet serve the way that we have left behind. When comes the threat the shell cannot resist, there shall it find us, waiting.”

Be wicked, know no grace. Because sometimes even the Hegemony needs a bastard to fuck things up for them.

“This is the Devil turning up at Heaven with a list of complaints. How did you think it was going to go?”

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

The Razor seeks an edge to carve this hubris from the universe.”

It was something he’d seen plenty of times in his job, the way that kind of mindset worked, spiralling inwards into itself. Until at some point, the necessity of doing bad things for a good cause became, by the inexorable ratchet of cognitive dissonance, the insistence that doing things the bad way was a virtue in itself. Because otherwise how could one justify all the bad things already done?

“Our challenge that shall sound unto the infinite, and call leviathan out from its lair.”

An idiot mass of babble and gibbering, shrieking and weeping. He put his hands over his ears and killed comms but the sounds were already inside his head, breeding there, multiplying into infinity. An unspeakable regiment of damned souls.

She went down. The frame’s medical systems actually worked this time, plugging the wounds and injecting her with a spacer’s cocktail of anti-shock meds. She was going to regret the hell out of it later, but if you were a spacer and it was an emergency you couldn’t be sentimental about pumping yourself full of stay-the-fuck-awake juice.

Orders were the structure which gave their lives shape. Even the jagged, ruined shape that ended them.

The woman had been dangerous enough before. Now she had a nest of Essiel-tech tentacles to move her around, and was plainly itching to turn them on anyone she didn’t like.

A murky business, and was wiping it from the record really the best way? Nonetheless, it was what they did.

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.

Too much going on in his head. Too many cosmic calculations. He goggled at her and flapped his lips as his mind just stalled.

Havaer found himself considering numbly that here was a thing which had destroyed planets for its own mad reasons, reworking matter from atoms up, and it had a front and a back. How weirdly trivial of it.

“Well, this is probably it,” he said. “The Hanni was really telling the truth, do you think?” Diljat asked him. “Saving the universe?” He met her gaze, wondering what reassurance she was looking for. That we, the shadowy agents of misrule, did the right thing at the last. “Yes,” he told her. “Absolutely.”

The scientist’s grin was like a crescent-bladed knife.

The Presence, the inhabitant of unspace, was real, real, real, no matter what they said. The Intermediaries’ constant companion as they crossed the solitary spaces between star systems. The monster you’d get if you boiled down the nightmares of every sentient species and gave the resulting protean mass a will and a hunger.

Everyone was trying to work out which the right side of history was, so they could pretend to have been on it all along.

But she said nothing, just kept her hand on the thin fabric of his tunic until a little comfort began to leach in with the warmth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Not enough to do anything.” “We do terrible things,” Solace told him. “That’s what people do, to survive. It’s like during the war, people having to work out how best to evacuate a world. Having to decide who’s allowed to go and who stays to die.

“That logic,” he said, “leads to the Uskaro ark fleet. It leads to your Exemplar Mercy and her coup. Because once you start doing terrible things because you had no choice, then next time round you do terrible things because you want to, and the precedent is set. This is a terrible thing we are doing through choice.”

They were saved. Havaer was left alone in the suddenly vacant space within the Gadfly. Alone to consider where he stood in relation to the rest of the universe, and especially to his employer, who didn’t even trust him to lie for them any more. When he felt the Thing that lived in unspace move far below, and start to wind the crank of his dread with its slow approach, he expected that if he saw it now, it would be wearing a Mordant House uniform.

“Wait,” he said, speaking out of turn and earning enough officious glares that if retrospective demotion was a thing, he’d have been mopping floors since he first signed up. “Back up.”

“What if we just… didn’t? What if we instead look at how these exact people have acted under the hammer before? Which way they’ve jumped. They’re not saints. I don’t believe anyone is. Not me, not anyone in this hearing, and damn me, most certainly not Timo and Kittering, pair of mercenary bastards that they are. But when it’s last call, and all the money’s down on the table, they do the right thing. So what if, stay with me, we did the right thing too? Rather than shooting them up, just because it’s always about controlling and preventing with us, and that’s the way Hugh prefers to treat anyone out on the fringes these days.

He stopped, then. There were no more words except for, What if we just did the right thing, just this once? and he couldn’t exactly say that quiet thing out loud.

I tried. But that was a lousy epitaph for the tombstone of his career. A bitter revelation too that sometimes the only way to be Good Cop was not to be a cop at all.

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. You went to the Essiel, they didn’t come to you. Except now apparently they had. An actual Essiel, one of the god-clams themselves, and its retinue of a dozen different species, a couple of whom had previously been completely unknown to Hugh xenoanthropologists.