Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2023-02-06T17:00:00+00:00

Idris

He could feel the other Ints, strung out there across the face of the Host, little points of light. He was connected to them by comms too, of course. Him to the Machine, to the Eye, to the individual shards. But he could feel them, their own individual footprints in unspace. They were waiting for him. We have to go.

And then Kris was in his ear, shouting loud enough to cut through everything else that was going on, saying, ‘We have to wait!’

But he was finding his path out. He was doing his job. Navigating unspace, even though that normally meant finding a trajectory across unfathomable distances rather than this inching through the close walls of a maze. Through the illusory crowd that Aklu was still adding to, creating a mob whose mental pressure weighed down on the surface of unspace. A clarion call. A challenge. Impossible to ignore.

‘I don’t think I can.’ Because if he found any way out, then surely they’d have to go. The simple act of finding that exit would propel them. Idris to the Machine, to the Eye, to the other Ints all waiting. The Host’s distributed gravitic system would spit them out from the heart of nightmare into clear space, freedom, into—

‘Idris, Olli’s coming. We can’t go without her. She’s coming in to dock right now, in the God. Olli and Kit, Idris. We have to wait.’

He could even feel the infinitesimal displacement of the Vulture God as it limped and spun and shuddered its way to the Host, on a collision course with the Eye. It was damaged enough that they probably wouldn’t even be able to brake before they plastered themselves against its broken rock.

‘Kris,’ he told her, because otherwise he’d just go. Complete the equation, solve it for freedom, and they’d be posting themselves through the crack in existence, the last closing doorway before Estoc met its doom. ‘Kris, it’s bait.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Listen to me, it’s bait. What Aklu’s doing. It’s minds. That’s always been the problem. It’s why they’re only sent after us. Not rocks. Not suns. Not dead matter. Us. Thinking us. We spoil the surface. We confuse things. And it’s tiny, but if there’s enough, it must . . . We’re the problem they need to solve. Aklu’s just faked the universe’s biggest problem. It’s not a weapon, it’s a lure. They can’t ignore it. And they’re already on their way.’

‘Idris, you are making so little sense—’

Then the God was hurtling in towards the surface of the Eye, having made it within the Host’s envelope. He could now reach out with the Originator facility’s absurdly precise gravitic field, just as he had done to rip the installation from the surface of its native world. He could increase the distance between the incoming ship and rock, stretching and stretching space until the God’s abused drives slowed it enough to survive impact. And then they were off, fleeing, solving the equation, escaping through the maze of unspace. Andecka and all the other Ints working in concert with him, in pain, in terror.

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