Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Fuck all paymasters,” he said, less a specific jibe at Uskaro so much as a familiar spacer oath.

“Better get yourself under. We’re going into unspace the moment we’re clear of traffic.” “Into the deep void.” “The abyss that gazes also,” he agreed. “You’ve done that before, have you—stayed awake on a Throughway journey?”

“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.”

Before Intermediaries, humanity could only navigate the Throughways—paths through space that the vanished Originators had left behind long ago, along with their enigmatic ruins. The Throughways connected populated star systems, which were populated precisely because the Throughways led there. Easy enough for a regular pilot to set their ship to travel a Throughway. It was like positioning a paper boat in a stream, knowing that soon enough it would beach at a particular turn. Not so the deep void.

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.

Idris settled deeper in his chair, letting his unique senses unfold. His mind’s eye began to draw unhelpful images of benthic abysses, slimy tresses of seaweed, chasms within chasms where lurked… something. Amidst all this distraction he was listening, reaching out. Mind’s ear attuned, mind’s fingers deft, testing the tautness of unspace as a spider plucks its web.

The Oumaru was there, but there would be no tearfully grateful crew. The ship had been peeled, flayed and reshaped into an elegant sculpture of trailing metal, like a flower.

Human researchers’ best guess was that the Essiel had evolved from some kind of sedentary exoparasite that attached itself to more mobile animals, and eventually began to manipulate their rides. 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. Idris tuned out most of the ceremony, although Barney and Kittering followed every move. Kowtowing to a shellfish seemed a small price for lasting security, given recent circumstances.

“Not our fleas, not our circus,” Solace added. Which, from their expressions, wasn’t a saying that had travelled outside the Parthenon.

“Musoku Barnier,” Rollo said sombrely. They’d muscled everyone else out of an alcove in the nearest bar and now he stood while they sat. Even Solace, who’d never been at a spacer’s wake before. “Born 92 After,” he declared to them, “on Tsiolkovsky Orbital over Lumbali.” “Complaining son of a bitch,” Olli put in promptly. “Bad sore loser,” Kittering’s translator declared. “Drank too much,” Kris added. “Couldn’t keep money,” Idris rounded up. Rollo nodded, satisfied conventions were being followed. “My son, he was, my brother. Loyal to his ship and safe hands. Died in orbit—who should have died in space where he belonged. One of ours, he was.”

“My children, they were, and comrades,” Rollo said. “Good company and safe hands. Died amongst us, who should have gone back to their own, but they were ours.” “They were ours,” the chorus came back to Rollo, and Kris saw tears making their tortuous way down the creases on his face.

Safe hands. For Colonial spacers, whose lives were strung from one mechanical failure to the next, for whom there would never be enough replacement parts and every little thing might be made to serve as something else just to get them into port, it was the greatest valediction.

“The absence of knowledge is a wound that will not heal.” This Hiver’s designation was Yuri, just another random label plucked from a list somewhere. “Of course I am not permitted to provide you with confidential station records, under the terms of my contract.” Their voice vibrated reedily from the cage of their body. She could see a host of little insects within, whose constant communion produced the conscious entity that called itself Yuri.

We have looked you up on the Tally. Your Asset spoke highly of you.” Kris went still, parsing that. Yes, Hivers kept a record of who did right by them and who did not. She hadn’t ever thought of Medvig doing that. But that was because, to her, Medvig had been people.

Everyone carried news, after all. That was how word travelled from one planet to another through unspace. Everyone made a little money on the side by downloading encrypted communications to deliver at their destination. But to do so, you had to say where you were going.

as they ordered a cup of the Caffenado that humans drank in the Hegemony. It tasted like the best parts of coffee, lemon and almonds.

The Dark Joan slipped from Lung-Crow Orbital like the dreams of a fish, as the saying went. It was swift and subtle, its departure cloaked by whatever standing arrangement the Parthenon had with the kybernet.

“I know that in the Colonies they say a lot of things about my people. I’ve seen the Hugh propaganda too. We’re warmongers, we’re man-haters, we’re unnatural, born in a lab, indoctrinated, Programmed like machines. All that, I’ve heard. And nobody remembers we died for the Colonies, above a hundred worlds, during the war. We were the line.”

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.

He’d roared in: hating, angry, terrified. He’d driven into the Architect’s mind on a flame of negative emotions, knowing only that it was the executioner of worlds. And now he touched the truth of it. He understood that until now no human—perhaps no denizen of any planet it had ruined, in its millennia of life—had ever existed for it. At his/its back was the world of Far Lux. 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.

“At the good myrmidon’s request, I donated three of my units to act as a pacemaker. She used them to restart and manage your cardiac functions. They remain inside you, so I suppose this makes us family or something? Personally, I feel a grand swell of sibling feeling somewhere within me. I’m sure you do too.”

“Telling people to go to hell in such a way that they enjoy the trip,” the Hiver supplied. “It’s been a privilege having you on the diplomatic staff.”