1.Havaer
“That,” Havaer Mundy said to himself, “is the Vulture God.”
There were a good seventy ships and more docked at Drill 17 on Hismin’s Moon; standard procedure to run a scan of them all as his craft, the Griper, came in. The onboard computers were still complaining from being bootstrapped back to functionality after exiting unspace, so Havaer had taken on the scanning work himself, letting his team stretch their legs and get their heads together. They were all outfitted as the rougher sort of spacers: half-sleeved long-fit tunics, trousers that always seemed too short to someone used to core-world suits, and of course the omnipresent sacred toolbelt, and the plastic sandals. All printed on-ship and scratchy with poor fabric. Just another crew of reprobates out on the razzle on this bleak satellite.
They had taxied over the docking field, liaising with the drill rig’s kybernet about the required approach and landing fees. Out here everything was cheap, life included, but nothing was free. Havaer had the ship check off each and every other visitor, finding that no fewer than nine vessels were on the Mordant House watch list. If he’d been here just on a bit of a career-building jolly, he’d have had quite the choice of whom to go after. Although, given spacer solidarity, a heavy hand might have set him against the entire populace of the rig. Which was about ten times the number actually needed to do any drilling, because this little den of iniquity had become quite the fashionable dive since the destruction of Nillitik.
The Architects had returned. As though trying to erase the history of their previous failure, they’d been busy. First they had descended upon Far Lux where, half a century before, three Intermediaries had met with them and ended the first war. This time, almost nobody had got off-planet before the end.
Over the next months, they had appeared in the skies of a handful of other planets, without pattern, without warning: jagged crystal moons emerging from unspace. They’d been turned away from the Colonial heart of Berlenhof but nowhere else had been as lucky. The war was back on, and everyone had got out of the habits that had saved lives back in the first war. As many lives as had been saved, amidst the colossal death toll. The whole of humanity had to relearn sleeping with a go-bag and always knowing the fastest route to the nearest port. And not just humanity, this time.
Amongst the Architects’ recent victims, the least regarded had been Nillitik. It was within a string of connected systems that the Hanni and Earth’s explorers had discovered in the early days of their meeting. For a while they had been thought of as a kind of border-space between the two species. Except every discovery of a new Throughway radically rewrote the map, and drawing neat borders between space empires was seldom a fruitful exercise. Diplomatic treaties between governments preserved a handful of barren, meagre planets as a no-man’s-land claimed by both and neither. Nillitik had been one. Had been, past tense.
Nillitik hadn’t had a biosphere, or even an atmosphere. There’d been just enough mineral wealth to make the place viable for independent operations, but the main activity for the majority of the planet’s small population had been to evade scrutiny when meeting and trading. Cartels, smugglers and spies had all marked the place on their maps with approval. And then an Architect had turned up and twisted the planet into a spiral. Slightly under a hundred people had died, out of the ten thousand present when the vast entity had arrived in-system. Unique amongst the targets of the Architects, almost everyone on Nillitik had transport ready to get them off-planet in a hurry, though they’d mostly been worrying about Hugh, or their rivals. The event had been so bloodless that history books would probably not even remember to include Nillitik on the rolls of the lost.
Of course, just because so few actually died didn’t mean there were no ripples from the planet’s destruction. A lot of deals went south, a lot of partnerships dissolved, a lot of goods ended up without buyers, or buyers without goods. The destruction of Nillitik was like poking a muddy pond with a stick. All sorts of things were suddenly roiled into unexpected view. As a lot of suspicious people were forced to rebuild their lives, things were held up for a quick sale that might otherwise have remained safely out of sight. Including information.
Two worlds along from lost Nillitik on the alleged border chain was Hismin’s Moon, the sole habitable body of a spectacularly unlovely star system, and that was where the majority of trade had gone. Right now the moon was enjoying a prodigious visitor boom as what seemed like twenty planets’ worth of criminals and speculators descended on it to see what could be scavenged. And where there was something to scavenge, you found vultures. Specifically, the ship the Vulture God, captain one Olian Timo, familiarly known as Olli. And though there were plenty of legitimate reasons for the God to be conducting business out of Hismin’s Moon, Havaer happened to know that right now they were on the payroll for the Aspirat—the Parthenon’s intelligence division and his opposite numbers in the spy game. Which meant they were all here for the same thing.
Havaer had Kenyon, his second in command, wrangle a landing pad not too far from the God, and when they disembarked he wandered over to eyeball the ruinous old craft. It was the poster child for unlovely but, apart from vessels fitted out by the big core-world companies, that was practically standard Colonial aesthetic. Even Hugh’s own warships came out of the Borutheda yards looking like they’d lost a battle. Because, back in the first war, that had been humanity’s lot: always fleeing, always patching, never able to stop and build something new. Looking bright and clean and fancy would have felt like turning your back on everything your ancestors had gone through to get you this far.
The God was a salvager, meaning much of its shape was dictated by the oversized gravitic drive bulking out its mid-to-back, enabling it to seize a far larger vessel, haul it about and carry it through unspace if need be. And they’d done good business due to their unusual navigator, Idris Telemmier the Int, who’d been able to reach those wrecks that had fallen off the Throughways, out in the deep void of unspace. Except these days, as Havaer knew all too well, Telemmier was off doing something of considerably more concern to Mordant House.
Unless he’s here. A thread of excitement ran through Havaer as he turned the idea over. Hugh had no overt standing orders about the turncoat Int, because there was a war on and that kind of thing wasn’t going to help anyone. On a more covert level, if he could grab Telemmier without leaving fingerprints all about the place then his next review meeting would look decidedly sunnier. Make up for him letting the man get away the last time.
He paid the Hismin’s Moon kybernet for access to Drill 17’s public cameras and ran facial-recognition routines until he picked them up. There was Olian Timo. Not hard to spot with her truncated amputee form in that huge Castigar-built Scorpion frame she was so proud of, and everyone was giving her plenty of room. There was their Hannilambra factor, Kittering, who’d doubtless have all kinds of home-ground advantages to call on right now. There was Solace, their Partheni handler, without her powered armour but with a goddamn accelerator slung over her shoulder, as though that wouldn’t leave holes from here to the horizon through Drill 17’s thin walls. No sign of the prize, Idris Telemmier, though. Nor Kris Almier the lawyer, who was the smartest one of the crew in Havaer’s book.
“Mundy? Sir?” Kenyon prompted him. He and the other two in the team were strung out towards Drill 17’s airlock, waiting for him. Havaer nodded, feeling the tension rise inside him. He guessed he would end up head to head with one or other of the God crew at some point soon. Either against Kittering in a bidding war, or against Olli and Solace in a more traditional sort of conflict.
Not one he could lose, either. Not and keep his record clean and sparkly for the dreaded review. Mordant House—formally known as the Intervention Board, Hugh’s investigative and counter-espionage body—had a deep and abiding interest in this business. Someone was selling their secrets.
Chief Laery hadn’t looked well for half of Havaer’s life, but when he’d gone into her office for briefing before this latest mission, she’d looked mostly dead. She was an emaciated creature, reclining in an automatic chair with a dozen screens unrolled around her, nearly all blank now. He reckoned she’d just finished some multi-party conference, which was good grounds for looking exhausted and sour. With Laery, though, that was just her regular demeanour. She’d spent too long in deep-space listening stations in her youth, often without reliable a-grav. Her bones and body had never properly recovered and she needed a support frame to walk. Her mind was like a razor, though, and she’d headed up the department Havaer was in for all his professional life. She wasn’t a pleasant superior, not even one you could uniformly call “harsh but fair,” and on bad days her temper could overflow into malice quickly enough. She got things done, however, and she didn’t throw away tools she could still use. Which was why Havaer hadn’t quite been slapped over the whole freeing of Telemmier business. Simply arranging to save Hugh’s most precious world from the Architects wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to preserve him from her wrath, otherwise.
“We had a leak,” she told him, straight up. “Some fucking clerk on the political side. Not actually Mordant House but one with access through the Deputy-Attaché of you-don’t-need-to-know-which-goddamn-office. Whose own chief was decidedly lax about who got to see the transcripts of behind-closed-doors forward-planning meetings.”
“Leaked where?” The Parthenon hung between them, because that sounded exactly the sort of spycraft they were good at. Not the actual dirty-handed stuff, but ideological subversion. There was always some quiet intellectual who secretly fancied herself in a grey Partheni uniform and doing away with Colonial graft and inefficiency.
Laery had her chair shift its angle, hissing in pain until she’d found a better posture. There were a couple of tubes in her arm, feeding her meds. If it was supposed to take the edge off, then she needed to get a new prescription.
“To a creditor, if you can believe it. The same old. Speculation gone sour, money owed, money borrowed, respectable lenders to shabby spacer banks to something entirely more disreputable. When they came to call, some transcripts were put up as collateral. All of which is out now, and there’s someone else dealing with the up-front of it. But the transcripts made it onto a packet ship heading into the shadow border. Nillitik.”
Havaer blinked. “Nillitik is gone.”
“Yes. And a great deal of stock-in-trade that might have remained decently buried is now being flogged off cheap to make good on those losses. So our dirty laundry is on the market, sources say. Go gather it in. And if you can identify any other buyers, even bring them in or neutralize them, then that’s a bonus.”
Havaer nodded, already thinking forwards. He’d run missions along the Hanni shadow border plenty of times before, even set foot on lost Nillitik once or twice. All well within his competence.
Still… “This is where you ask, why you,” Laery prompted him.
“It’s got to be someone,” Havaer noted mildly.
“Intel suggests word has got to the Parthenon and they’re the frontline buyers. Now we can always outbid the Pathos, but we can’t necessarily out-punch them if they decided to kick off. And even though everyone’s tiptoeing around the war we’re supposedly no longer on course for, a major action out in the shadow border might just be something they think they can get away with. And you, Menheer Mundy, have had some recent dealings involving the Parthenon, so your record says. Not entirely creditable ones. So perhaps you would relish the opportunity to make good on that.”
Havaer felt his internal dispenser feed him some heart meds like a steadying hand on his shoulder. Might be about to walk into a shooting war.
“A team’s been assigned to you. Be diplomatic. Be firm. I’d rather you didn’t have to kill anyone but sometimes you can’t mine without explosives. Above all, retrieve the data, preferably still sealed.” Laery fixed him with her skewer gaze. “Questions?”
“Can I ask what intel got leaked? How desperate are they going to be, to get hold of it?”
She stared at him for a few long moments. “Above your pay grade,” he was told. “Or it better be, because apparently it’s above mine.”
Drill 17’s public spaces were thronging, meaning those areas set above the actual mining work that was the place’s ostensible raison d’être. Every little alcove and shoebox of a space was filled with people doing some kind of business. Hannilambra were everywhere, very much running the show. Havaer observed the characteristic slightly strained look of humans trying to follow what their earpieces were telling them, or fighting to separate the audio of their translator’s voice from everyone else’s. A big Castigar, war caste, wound its serpentine way through the bustle, shoving smaller species aside with a sinuous surge, its crown of eye-tipped tentacles weaving around.
Kenyon deposited the rig’s floorplans into their shared e-space, marking out the place their factor could be found, along with a few other sites of interest. Lombard, their technical specialist, was a hypochondriac of the first order and his attention had been snagged by a travelling Med-al-hambra booth. The Colonial charity was supposed to bring Hugh-guaranteed meds to spacers at the fringes of the human sphere, but Havaer wouldn’t have trusted anything on sale here.
Reams, the last member of the team, stopped abruptly. Havaer had detailed her to link with the kybernet and get them up to speed with any local developments. It would have been awkward to ask for their factor and find out that he’d been knifed the day before, for example.
“Architects,” she said on their encrypted channel. And, realizing that sounded unduly alarming, “Not here. They’ve wrecked Cirixia.”
Since reworking the world of Far Lux and then being deflected from Berlenhof—an event all four of them had disturbing personal recollections of—the Architects hadn’t been idle. They’d taken out Ossa and Nillitik, and pitched up above a world that was still just a string of numbers because the joint Colonial–Castigar colonizing effort hadn’t agreed a name yet. There hadn’t been Earth-level losses, but at the same time the pace of their activity was decidedly brisker than in the first war. And now Cirixia.
“Where the fuck,” asked Lombard, “is Cirixia? I never heard of it.”
Reams forwarded the newstype to everyone and they all slowed their progress to digest exactly what it meant. It was months-old news, apparently, only reaching the Colonial Sphere now because reliable info was always slow to crawl out of the Hegemony, where the planet was.
“Huh,” Havaer said. “There’s a thing.” They’d had Hegemonic artefacts at Berlenhof, still preserved in the inexplicable magic that enabled their transport from planet to planet. When the Architect had turned up over that world again, the Partheni had taken out those artefacts to protect their lead warship, the one carrying Telemmier and the other Ints. And this time it hadn’t worked. A straight-up guarantee about what the Architects would and wouldn’t do had turned out to not be worth the paper it wasn’t written on. In fact, so he’d heard, the Architect had sent… things aboard the Partheni vessel with extreme prejudice, confiscated the damn artefacts, and then proceeded to trash the ship. The Architects weren’t only back, they were making up for lost time, losing patience with the universe.
And now a whole Hegemonic world, with who knew how many humans and others living on it, was gone. During the first war, it had been humanity in the spotlight. Other species had pitched in to help but the Architects had definitely been concentrating on human worlds. This time, it appeared they weren’t discriminating.
Makes you wonder just whose backyard they were redecorating in the fifty years we didn’t hear from them. Nobody doubted there were species out there that humans had never met and which the Architects had picked on, likely causing many of them to now be entirely extinct. The enigmatic Harbinger Ash claimed to be the last of one such lost race. The Naeromathi and their Locust Arks were a spacefaring remnant whose worlds had been utterly reworked.
“One less problem for us to worry about,” Kenyon suggested darkly, as they crossed into a larger space given over to a bar. The Skaggerak was probably the nastiest R&R at Drill 17, thronging with human and Hanni and a handful of Castigar. Rotary drones wobbled overhead delivering drinks that they only spilled half of. You could get quite drunk in the Skaggerak just sitting around with your head tilted up and your mouth open.
Havaer directed Reams to get a round in, and then Lombard to make sufficient mundane enquiries of the kybernet and local businesses to establish their cover as itinerant spacers. His eyes swept the room even as he cocked a brow Kenyon’s way.
“Nobody’s going to be in a hurry to join them now the cultists can’t promise protection anymore.” And that was Kenyon’s obituary for however many thousands or millions had died, on wherever the hell Cirixia had been. From a strictly departmental point of view, it was a fair assessment. A number of human worlds had taken up the Hegemony’s offer of protection, during the war and after, the price of which was always complete subservience to the bafflingly ritualistic Essiel. Becoming a clam-worshipper was probably less attractive if you didn’t have their shell to hide behind, though. The Originator tech that the Hegemonics had formerly used as a magic talisman against Architect attack was now only a speedbump since the monsters had returned.
It wasn’t hard to miss the big old frame that Olian Timo used. Everyone moved out of the way when she came in and headed across the room. She passed close enough for Havaer to touch her, and he just eddied aside with the crowd. In the bubble of the hulking Scorpion she was a diminutive figure, with stumps for both arms and one leg, the other missing entirely, but her pugnacious attitude more than made up for it. She didn’t notice him as she stomped over to rejoin her two confederates, Kit and Solace. All three were very much on edge and Olli looked particularly punchy.
The opposition. The professional part of his brain was brewing plans and counterplans: what to do if they ended up going head to head? How much of a threat was that monster of a workframe? Was there a pack of Partheni battle-sisters ready to rush in at Solace’s word? He checked with his team. Kenyon had made contact with the broker and was negotiating for access to the seller, Reams backing him up. Lombard was fishing to intercept comms from Timo and the others, but getting nothing of use. Havaer suddenly had a strong desire to just walk over there and take a seat, chew the fat, talk over old times. With that mob it might actually work, but from a tradecraft point of view it would likely look bad on his record.
He had a few brief heartbeats in which to hope they were merely adrift here, but he’d let Timo’s sullen expression fool him. He should have remembered she always looked like that. Without warning, the three of them were on their feet and moving off purposefully, and he realized they’d used their head start well. They were already ahead of him.
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