Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A victory against an Architect was when you made yourself enough of a nuisance that they had to swat you before they could murder the planet.

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.

I do not want to be the name children learn when they’re taught how the next war started.

While her superiors had discussed hard tactics with their opposite numbers, she’d sat with her fellow soldiers and just talked. This was back in the day when the Parthenon was humanity’s great hope. The angels with their martial resolve and top-of-the-range technology. Their mission: to hold back the inevitable.

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.

She glanced at the approaching Solace briefly, then fixed on her. After all, Solace did have the distinctive Partheni face. It was inevitable when you grew your people out of vats from a carefully curated gene-line.

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 future of humanity, Captain! Fresh colonies, perhaps even new Originator sites. Treasures beyond imagining!” His teeth were blinding white and perfectly even when he smiled. Idris squinted into the sun of that expression and wasn’t fooled. His fight-or-flight response was screwing his body into overdrive. Awkward, given he could do neither.

“You’d think you didn’t want to serve humanity. You don’t want people to take you for a betrayer, do you?” Idris noted that the word was given a particular spin and he suppressed a shudder. 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.

“Your Elegance, let it be known that—should you make me your navigator—I vow to guide that ship into the deep void where monsters dwell. I will wake everyone aboard, so your people may experience the nightmares of unspace. Once they’ve gone mad, torn out each other’s throats and driven their own thumbs into their eyes, I will paint on the walls with their blood. Salvagers will find these words: ‘the Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro did this, who is no respecter of human freedoms.’”

“Now let’s walk proudly out of Roshu Admin like free citizens of the Colonies,” Kris said quietly. “Then let’s get the fuck to the ship as quick as we can.” She glanced back, and Idris did too—meeting Uskaro’s bleak, hungry gaze. “I don’t think the Boyarin will restrict himself to legal measures.”

“Are we fighting now?” came Barney’s incredulous reply. “I mean, already?” “No, my son, we are flying ahead of the shitstorm, like always,”

Kris stabbed him. She looked ice cold for the three heartbeats it took to drive her duelling knife into his ribs four times, then horrified as the man toppled away.

He set the Vulture’s drive against the gravity of the planet below, sending them leaping into the sky—if not like an eagle, then at least like an old bird that would live to see another day.

“My children, let us not do that again. I, for one, am too old for shit even vaguely related to that.”

“I guess they train you not to feel things, the scars left behind. In the Parthenon. Rock-hard warrior angels, all that.” He sounded wistful. “They train us to talk about it. They train us to heal, and not to deny we’re in pain. Rock-hard is brittle.”

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.

But… I’m not going to just stuff him in a sack and run off. I have an offer for him, when he’s ready to hear it.” “And if he says no?” “Then it’s no, of course.” Until I get an order that it has to be “yes.”

“I appreciate it, though,” he said implacably. “Helping us. Ship-family matters out here. More than cults, governments and what planet you come from. It’s only when you spend your life planetside that people lose their minds over that sort of thing.”

“Anyone wants out, then get out, no hard feelings. For I am in a mood to do some truly stupid things.”

And while he was thinking that, all the maths came together, perfect as a gemstone. Yes, that will do nicely. Except “nicely” was absolutely not the right word.

“We were never going to get our ship back without lives on our conscience, my daughter. And these murderers have signed the contract for what happens to them.”

Mesmon was already on his feet. She could barely believe it. She could also barely believe that the Hegemony hadn’t just put twenty Tothiat together and taken over the goddamn universe by now.

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.

“A war,” she repeated. “And you’ll win, probably. You have the best ships. 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.

“Officer, these are my new clients, representing the Broken Harvest Society. They share your interest in my earlier visitors. And in anyone asking questions about them.” “And the currency your new clients are paying you in is…?” “Not skinning me and wearing me like a cloak, yes,”

His gun was directed right at her chest, but Heremon didn’t seem to care. Her own weapon just dangled loose in her hand. Of course, the Hiver’s piece was basically light artillery that would turn the whole office into an exercise in Brownian motion if it spun up, so maybe she felt she didn’t need to ram a pistol up his nose to make the point.

“Anything intelligent here?” Idris asked faintly. “Official answer?” Robellin queried. “Fuck knows, mate.”

Kris caught sight of it first and recoiled from the opening. Later she’d tell Idris about something with a sack of a body suspended on too many tall skeletal legs, stilting along as though jerked with strings. It was high up in the canopy, its leg-span stretching between the trees. And it was plucking up human shapes and shearing them apart, then picking over what was left as though trying to read a future in the entrails.

he was, as a rule, averse to death by friendly fire. It’s never that friendly, let’s face it.

Something’s changed. Maybe they are back. Maybe they’re practising on the small things before they take on a planet again. Maybe they’re rusty.”

He felt that familiar, baseline unhappiness of someone who would be judged entirely according to moral decisions made by others.

Human myth was full of creatures that were anathema to the sane mind. Look upon them and you’d die, meet their gaze and be turned to stone. Had some ancient sage somehow touched unspace, in an age before humans had ever climbed up out of the gravity well? Because that was the Presence in a nutshell.

Something roared through the warship’s hull like angelic voices declaiming the end of the universe.

Half-naked, she looked like someone who’d died of starvation a week before.

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

They shall give up the one who knows, and know that if they fail then we shall start with toes, with fingers, faces, eyes and all the parts a man may part with long before he dies.”

“You, we will save till last,” the major-domo said softly, barely audible to Kris. “For we approve of those born bound who yet refuse to be.”

Everyone was so reliant on the wonders of gravitic sensor arrays. People forgot there were old-fashioned ways to do things.

“I will be made to suffer, for my failures. The Razor will cut me for how I’ve handled things. But I will remember then how I made you two bitches suffer, and that will warm me when my guts are out on wires again.”

“They don’t tell you about the pain,” he explained conversationally, incrementally tightening his fingers. “When the blessing comes to live within your flesh, you know you’ll live forever, but they don’t tell you how these cuts and bruises still hurt. But the Unspeakable understands. He hurts you until nothing hurts anymore. Then you can really reach your full potential.”

“Oh,” said Mesmon, and more stuff was seeping from his mouth, nose and eyes. “Oh. Oh no.” Then he jack-knifed forwards, vomiting. What came out looked a lot like the sort of anatomical details people preferred to keep inside. That done, he stared down at what he’d voided, then fell onto his face and was still.

They could navigate the void, but it didn’t make it any less monstrous to them. It just condemned them to face it.

“Tell the executioner we’re on our way to the scaffold.” Solace wanted to correct her: Executor, one who does. It’s not about killing people. But “does” implied a wide remit, and killing was in there somewhere. Olli wasn’t going to let her off that hook so easily.

It had singled out the system’s inhabited world, as Architects always did. Because they must have their art, and their art demanded death.

It was pumping out such blistering salvos of accelerator shot that even the Architect could not catch every falling sparrow of it. And it was still not enough. It was not even a hundredth of enough. They were flies in the face of God. They were just powerful enough to be worth obliterating.

And Solace turned smartly on her heel and marched out. There was a future out there, and it was a terrible one.