Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

As the main fleet readied itself to defend Berlenhof, a handful of small ships were already carrying these “weapons” towards the Architect in the hope that this new trick would somehow postpone the inevitable. Useless, surely. Might as well rely on thoughts and prayers.

Solace felt her eyes strain, trying to wring more information from what she was seeing, to peer all the way in until she had an eye inside the ships themselves.

They had stringent criteria. Most particularly, the worlds they made into their art or machines or messages had all been inhabited. As though the final artistic flourish involved something on the surface looking into the stars and knowing its own doom.

“Executor Solace, prêt à combattre?” “Pret, Mother.” Ready for combat, ready for anything. An exchange that had so infused Partheni culture that it now covered any confirmation between superior and inferior. Child Solace had responded to her teachers the same way every morning, long before anyone put a gun in her hand.

It was never quite slavery under Hugh definitions, but then Magda was one of the big dogs of Hugh. Remarkable how the authorities there could end up “not quite” any number of bad things.

The “pro-humanity” Nativists had a strong foothold on Magda and they talked a great deal about betrayal. By the Parthenon, by aliens, by Intermediaries somehow in league with Architects. Anything to explain why humans didn’t run the universe.

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.

“They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”

The Parthenon had saved three Colonial scientists from paranoid Nativists with a gripe.

The Betrayed went a step further, preaching that humanity would have been the galaxy’s dominant species, if allowed to fight the Architects “properly.” But Intermediaries had made some sort of sham peace, they claimed, part of a grand conspiracy to keep humans down.

Havaer could look into those too-young features and see the extra decades lurking beneath the surface like a rot.

He could be a vengeful man. Dangerous waters, Idris knew. Am I getting cold feet? Icy cold. But he couldn’t abandon his crewmates.

Kris had seen business deals concluded over wrestling matches, impenetrable puzzles and even dance-offs. The Hanni didn’t wage war, funnelling all their disagreements into a myriad of contests.

people. You stole my ship.” Kris felt all possible chance of salvaging the situation falling out of the world’s ass, as the saying went.

Kris mumbled the last few words along with her, adding this grief to the others stored up inside her, the way spacers did. 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.

But we Colonials, we’re awkward buggers, we won’t just behave ourselves. So you’ll have to make us better people, won’t you? Just like your Parthenon is full of better people than us. And you know what better people means? It means that people who aren’t like you don’t have a future, if you win. So the Parthenon doesn’t get this box.” Solace took a deep breath. “That wouldn’t happen. We don’t want to change people.” “You said yourself, we hate you,” Olli told her quietly. “That’s a real grand high horse. You can look down from on high, knowing that you’re hated by dumb, regular, inferior humans. Gives you the moral right to do all sorts of things for the greater good. You going to straight up swear to me that there’s no chance, none at all, it’d go like that?”

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.

Do your job, man. No place for a soft heart in Mordant House. But he’d always fought against becoming the sort of man who reached for extreme measures as a matter of course. Which means maybe I’m not the right man for the job anymore.

The soft touch first, he told himself. Time later for the rest. If it’s necessary. He had done it before, when he had to. He had never liked it. It was the crumbling cliff-edge of decency he clung to.

The ship around him seemed to exist in five or six different slightly out-of-phase versions. And he thought: We’re lost, we’re coming apart. He felt they were suffering a loss of integrity, not physically but philosophically. Perhaps only his own waning belief was holding the ship to this side of existence.

He faced this doubt by screaming at it, there in unspace where nobody would ever hear. Just a mad animal bellow of I am here! The ship shuddered around him, then came sharply back together in a way that owed nothing to material sensation.

As Kris crept through the vacant chambers of the Vulture God she felt it closing on her, matching her step for step. But its paces were longer, so it grew fractionally closer every time she moved. It was every shame, nightmare and rejection she’d ever had. It was all these things given teeth and claws, weaponized to be her ultimate nemesis.

“The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”

And Idris could see through its senses that the planet was mottled with a kind of rot, a disfiguring decay that the Architect needed to clear away. That rot was thought, the collected minds of all the people living there. They exerted a pressure on the fabric of space that the Architect, for reasons Idris had never grasped, felt the need to release.