Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Kittering’s focal point was a fork-shaped prong jutting from under the butterfly-wing curve of his shell.

Physically, they were two-valved shells, some three metres tall when stood upright. Where the shell halves diverged at the top end, a clutch of stalked eyes and articulated limbs projected. The alien overlords of the greatest known polity in the galaxy looked more like barnacles than anything else.

To his mind, inventing a religion venerating extraterrestrial barnacles was a ludicrous response to meeting an alien species.

Spacers died; they died hard and they still died often.

Ordinarily, she’d have been overdoing it, but right now she was in the asylum of aggrandizement and no praise could be too much.

The enemy. He had an enemy again. He didn’t like it. Loathed it, in fact. Yet an ugly little part of him was awake now, like a cold arrowhead buried deep inside his mind.

lel

Mesmon had fallen, landing on his ass without dignity, then looking up to see the Angel of the Parthenon descending on him with righteous fury.

lel

A survey team exploring a dead-end Throughway burst into a virgin system. 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!