Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

But she’d been around for long enough to know that putting an accelerated projectile into someone wasn’t always the best way to defend the interests of the Parthenon.

She looked suddenly uncertain, a crack in that Partheni facade. Idris, who sometimes felt he was built entirely out of competing vulnerabilities, valued them in other people.

Or you stayed and something went wrong in your head. Then one day you took your ship somewhere and never returned. Perhaps you finally understood what was behind that brooding sense of presence, and you went to the court of the abyss, to dance with its god-king forever and ever.

And some time in the future there’d be somewhere to drink, some place that didn’t need clear minds and constant maintenance to keep it together, and then the grief would get a round bought for it, and more than one, and have its edges dulled.

That was the problem with associating with criminals. It led to Newtonian espionage. Each action produced an equal and opposite reaction and you couldn’t use without being used in turn.

They found a planet a little closer than Earth to a sun a little cooler than Earth’s. Then they found a biosphere crammed full of riotous life whose biochemistry overlapped with Earth by at least forty per cent. An Eden! surveyors crowed. Then the planet’s biochemistry ate two of the landing party and they quickly revised their estimate to A monstrous death world!

The Presence was looming behind him and to both sides, far too close. And now it was shorn of personality again, no T’Sanko, no Rollo, no Ash. Just that incredible hunger, that distant curiosity. What is this human mind and how can I break it? Idris wasn’t breathing, wasn’t even able to blink as he fed the computations in. Gave the ship a course, a direction, a vector back to reality. “You’re not real,” he whispered to the universe. It laid a hand on his shoulder and he screamed and passed out.