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Regular navigators retired to their suspension beds after setting a course along the Throughways, and their ships woke them when they were ready to exit unspace at their destination. It was only when you went off the beaten track that someone had to keep the lamps burning, gazing into the abyss and having it gaze right back. That was what Intermediaries did. That was the invaluable service people like Idris provided to the post-war world, for as long as their minds held together.
Kris said the true root of Barney’s ill temper was that the grafted side looked better than the original.
The Architects had discovered that humans existed. The war, which had raged for eighty years and cost billions of lives, had been fought without the knowledge of one of its parties. And on becoming aware of humanity, the Architects had simply vanished. Nobody knew where they went. Nobody knew where they had come from or why they’d done what they did. They had never been seen again.
The Colonies, having created the Hivers during the war, remained leery of the distributed intelligence now it had declared independence.
Idris, who sometimes felt he was built entirely out of competing vulnerabilities, valued them in other people.
When you’ve built the latest in superior military hammers, surely all your problems start looking like inferior Colonial nails.
“They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”
Everyone was alone in unspace, even on the Throughways. But, if you stepped away from them into the deep void, you were as alone as any sentient creature had ever been. Except not quite, not entirely alone.
This was the truth of the void, the thing that had driven the passengers of the Gamin mad. After you’d finished wishing you weren’t alone, you realized you weren’t, and then you really wished you were.
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.
The colony planet itself should have been the crew’s main priority, but the Vulture God crew’s attention was caught by one of the outer planets. It was being pulverized into an asteroid field, and its debris trailed along the curve of its old orbit for over a hundred thousand kilometres. Idris brought up images: the planet was swarming with vast factory-machines like city-sized flatworms. Past the ravaged curve of its horizon loomed a great bristling lump of mutilated-looking technology. This was a Naeromathi Locust Ark, the Jericho system’s very unwelcome visitor.
And like any unknowable demon power, it was best not to ask for too much. Be careful what you wish for.
“I’m Myrmidon Executor Solace, Heaven’s Sword Sorority, Basilisk Company.”
He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.
Idris felt the Architect know death and trembled in anticipation of the rage and grief that must surely attend that thought. Yet it was not so. What it felt was mostly nothing a human mind could comprehend. But when others demanded he put a word to it later, he would say acceptance.
“The problem with judgement calls is that they’re only ever good or bad in retrospect.”
We are here. Stop killing us. We are here.
The choices were between Idris punishing himself, or the Architect meeting the wrath of… who? What possible power could compel them? But there was something there—that was what he had learned. There was an intent behind the Architects. A purpose that was not native to them. A hand that brandished the whip. Please… And it left, the whole immensity of it falling away into unspace from the real. It abandoned the Berlenhof system, leaving a scattering of ships and filigreed debris spinning in its wake.
“Oh wow,” Olli observed. “You look really, really ill.” “Thanks,” Idris said sourly, then blinked. “You look ropey yourself.”
“Telling people to go to hell in such a way that they enjoy the trip,”
