Chill (18 page)

Immediately upon the breeze came a flutter of fairy-bright objects that Tristen at first thought were leaves, until by their beat and settle he knew them to be wings. Butterflies, a half dozen, flitting in vortex swirls around each of the travelers. Mallory waved them away with an airy gesture, caught Tristen’s eye when he turned, and smiled.

Despite himself, Tristen returned the smile. He reoriented himself, laid a hand on his weapon, and stepped forward into the Heaven.

It was green, lushly so, and the first thing he noticed was that the trees here had not failed during acceleration. The deck underfoot was one fibrous gnarl—the roots of a feral tangle of fig trees, or perhaps just one giant, ancient tree gone wild with suckers and overgrowth. Whichever it was, multifarious smooth-boled trunks competed for space to lift their parasol canopies
to the light, and no earth showed between matted roots. The branches were heavy with fruit and bloom at once, the air redolent of fermentation. From the valleys between gray-barked, ridge-backed roots, clouds of bright butterflies arose at every gesture, startled from feeding on burst and rotten fruit. Overhead and alongside darted minute jeweled birds with sewing-needle beaks, whirring like soft-spoken insects.

On Mallory’s shoulder, Gavin swung his head to track an iridescent blue-violet bird, abruptly snakelike until the necromancer flicked his tail tip sharply. “Behave.”

Sulkily, the basilisk pulled his neck between his shoulders and rocked between his feet. “I wasn’t going to zap it.”

Tristen might have laughed, but the closeness of the trunks raised his concerns of ambush and he bit it back. There was motion everywhere—darting things, the slender green coil of a snake as long as his arm and no thicker than his pinky gliding between branches overhead. The plop as a heavy, tender fruit fell set his heart racing. From Samael’s raised eyebrow, he knew his startle had been visible through the armor.

Well, he was entitled.

“Single file,” he said. He glanced at Samael, shook his head, and said, “Behind me, everybody but the angel.”

Samael laughed—or gave the illusion of it. The sound bubbled on the air, anyway, and Tristen saw the dust-mote-and-dry-grass muscles of his avatar’s belly shake. “Shall I make myself solid enough to spring a trap?”

“Kindly,” Tristen said, and though it was not necessary, he deemed it polite to stand aside so the angel might pass. Samael’s tipped head of acknowledgment was nothing but blue-eyed mockery through the strings of his hair. The casualness with which Tristen unsealed his helm and faceplate, and allowed the armor to retract played to the same pretense and bravado.

Moving like a stag, Samael slipped sideways between buttressed trunks. Now moss yielded under his bare feet, pale brown moisture puddling in the gap beside his great toe with each step, dripping away again when the construct foot was lifted. Each drop fell silently, absorbed again without a trace.

Tristen followed. Mallory walked a few steps behind, lithe as if dancing.

“It’s a big Heaven,” Samael said, when they had been picking their way for fifteen minutes through forest so dense that even the two meters between them often meant that Tristen could glimpse the angel only as a gleam of pale skin, pale hair, fluid motion behind leafy concealment.

Tristen pushed between clustered trunks—some mere slips, some bigger than the span of three men’s arms. Orchids and bromeliads dripped amazing sprays of bloom from head height and higher. The air droned and sang with the vocalizations of tiny animals. Tristen ducked a scentless, vivid, fuchsia-and-lemon
Cattleya
only to find himself face-to-wing with a pair of black-and-green butterflies engaged in a savage territorial dispute. A matter of life and death to them; to him, an amusing minor spectacle.
And that’s what you look like to an angel
.

“Is this all one tree?” Tristen laid his hand on the bark of the nearest trunk.

Samael nodded. “It’s choked out everything else that grew here,” he said. His feet might be material, but the fat ant-crawling fig that detached from a branch over his head fell through his outline to explode against a root, spattering Tristen’s boots with pulp.

Tristen wrinkled his nose at the reek of sugar. “We should collect some of those.”

Negligently, Samael raised one hand and made a scooping gesture. Tristen knew it was the colony, but
there was still something unsettling about dozens of ripe, velvety fruits gliding through the air to hover before him.

Tristen also knew better than to let the angel see he was disconcerted. He just produced a mesh from his armor, bundled the figs—except a slightly crushed one—into it, and handed them back to Mallory, who accepted without comment.

Tristen was contemplating splitting that last bruised fruit with the necromancer when a shrill, panicked sound cut the green chatter. A long trumpeting, harsh and hollow, echoed to a sharp fall.

The jungle was far too dense for running. With a glance at the others, Tristen tossed the fig away and broke into a careful canter, bouncing from foothold to foothold, twisting between trunks. Sound echoed confusingly in the confines of the Heaven, bouncing back from a ceiling invisible through the canopy overhead, muffled and refracted by verdant greenery and the hard shapes of tree trunks. He cupped his hands to his ears as it faded, hoping to hear enough that his colony could help triangulate location and distance for the source.

“Fan out,” Tristen said, as Samael’s avatar vanished in a swirl that glittered like sun-struck dust, leaves and bits of insect carapace bouncing gently off the turf.

If this were a lure to ambush, it was hard to say if staying together or parting company would be safer—but it was definitely the more effective means by which to search.

Tristen hoped the angel was already doing what he ordered. For himself, he moved light-footed in the direction from which he estimated the cry had come. It repeated; this time he was closer, he thought, and he got a better fix.

“Here,” Samael said in his ear.

He turned, and found himself looking through a
curtain of leaves at the back of Mallory’s head. Vigilant, he moved toward it, his nostrils full of the steam of the jungle and some ranker scent. Heavy, musty. Musky.

“Damn,” he said, as he came up beside the necromancer, and the object of Mallory’s attention cried again in obvious fear and distress.

The quadruped was the largest animal Tristen had ever seen. He estimated the weight at over two hundred kilograms, though it was hard to tell precisely because its body was covered with a coarse, grizzled coat of strands as long as Tristen’s forearm. It stood approximately chest height, its high, double-domed head decorated with two small, flapping ears and a prehensile appendage that groped frantically toward the nearest fig tree.

Its broad, splay-toed, hind foot, Tristen saw, was jammed between two angled, overgrowing roots, and in its panic it was only wedging itself further.

“What in the world is that?”

“A baby wooly mammoth,” Samael said, coalescing beside him. “If it were to become full-grown, it might weigh in excess of fifteen tons.” The angel shook his head.

“But where did it come from?”

Samael glanced at him, long, droopy face rearranging itself in surprise. “Biosystems failure,” he said. “It’s an emergency option.”

“You’re responsible for this?”

“Oh, no,” Samael said. “It’s autonomous. When the world is so damaged that its habitats are in danger of collapse, it is programmed to go into a recovery mode that includes releasing a selection of random cloned species, to see which become established.” He gestured to the mammoth. “Apparently, some of them are
truly
random.”

Tristen stared at the mammoth. Confronted with the
apparent intractability of its situation, it had quieted, but he did not think that quiet in this case equated with calm. Instead, it cringed back against its tethering foot, trunk coiling and uncoiling nervously as it watched them through its fringe.

“A mammoth,” he said, glancing to the silent Mallory for confirmation, as if repeating it would help him concretize. “A
mammoth.”

Samael nodded. “There’s no way to support her, of course. She’ll have to be sacrificed.”

The sword on Tristen’s hip murmured,
Save her
.

  Caitlin would have far rather returned Jsutien to an acceleration bay or, failing that, a hospital tank, but he was awake now and she was stuck with him. Well, technically the hospital tank was still an option, but an Exalt didn’t need that much resource support for a simple skull fracture, and Caitlin thought Jsutien would require little attention while sleeping off his injury.

Also, she needed him and she didn’t trust him, and she didn’t really want him out of her sight. So she left him tucked in a corner of Central Engineering, one arm nanoshackled to the magnetized leg of his cot. While he snored she directed survey operations and created prioritized lists of existing damage, impending damage, and available consumables for Nova’s convenience.

Status one was to repair, patch, or at least seal off catastrophic injury to the world—anything that represented an immediate danger to integrity, biosystems, or consumable or static resources. The irony being that many of those consumable resources would
be
consumed in the process of effecting the necessary repairs.

A quandary, but if God had made the world perfect, there would be no need for evolution.

Pursuant to those goals, Caitlin instituted protocols geared toward halting the expansion of null zones and the establishment of new ones, diagnosing the source, and regaining control of existing ones as rapidly as possible. Reinforcing the superstructure, collecting raw material, and choosing an immediate harvestable destination were also driving priorities.

Further down the list fell niceties such as stabilizing the world’s biosystems. Caitlin ranked crew comfort close to last. They could stay in the acceleration pods.

And if it came to pass that she needed to sacrifice some percentage of them to keep the rest alive—an eventuality she was not yet prepared to face as anything but a hypothetical—it would be easier to make the decision if they were still in suspension.

Seated at the console Benedick had repaired, Caitlin rested her forehead against the backs of her fingers and sighed in exhaustion.

“We’re still bleeding atmosphere and water?” She rubbed her aching hands. Her overstressed colony wasn’t managing much damage control against the small aches and agonies of life. For a moment Caitlin thought of Benedick, the strength of his hands and how they could ease the ache. She bit her cheek and swept memories aside.

The angel’s voice was soothing and neutral. “Faster than we can replenish them, Chief Engineer. At this point, we are mostly losing consumables by capillary bleed, though the Captain has caught two more catastrophic unmakings, though only by having the Captain review feeds from external video motes. Generally a tiny leak is harder to locate and seal than a vast one, but—”

“You’re still having problems seeing things?”

“It is a concern,” the angel admitted.

Caitlin was already learning to determine the new angel’s moods, despite its tendency to sound more methodical than personable. A matter of integration, she thought. As it brought its shattered personalities closer to consensus, it might find more range and depth of response. In the meantime, much of the processing power that could otherwise have gone to independent action and autonomous thought was bound up merely continuing the process of integration. And Perceval was a relatively inexperienced Captain, which meant that much of the executive guidance and disaster response had to come from Caitlin, the Chief Engineer.

A Chief Engineer who right this instant bitterly missed Susabo, the former Angel of Propulsion. Or even Inkling, who would not have had to be so carefully led. The most frustrating part was that she knew Susabo and Inkling were both present there inside Nova, somewhere—just not yet entirely compiled into the whole. Caitlin itched to pound her fists on the console and scream “Integrate faster!”

But such additional pressure was unlikely to net her good results.

She took a deep breath and said, “Nova, at this point would it be more efficient to allocate those resources to increasing our speed, thus feeding the ramscoop faster? If we can counterbalance the lossage with increased input—”

“My calculations indicate that that is a viable option,” the angel agreed. “We will still be limping, and eventually we will outstrip the blown-off gas cocoon of the supernova, at which point collectable resources will become more sparse. We will need to be ready with other options. Chief Engineer, not to interrupt myself, but—”

A hesitating angel was never a good sign. “Spit it out.”

“Samael wishes to speak to you.”

Caitlin wondered if her symbiont couldn’t at least do a little something about the headache. She set her armor to provide more back and neck support, and said, “Put him on.”

Because he was communicating with a high-ranking Engineer, Samael did her the courtesy of generating only a partial avatar—a gleaming focal point that materialized with a polite chirp. Quickly and efficiently, he explained that the world appeared to have reset in some fashion, and as part of its last-ditch effort at survival, it was not only releasing life-forms selected at random from its genetic banks, but altering them.

“The biosphere is mutating under stress,” Caitlin restated, to be sure she understood.

“That appears to have been what the Builders intended.”

If he were material, or possibly just present, she would have thrown something at him. “Well,
stop
it, Samael.”

“I haven’t the strength anymore for ventures such as that.” When Caitlin glared at Samael’s avatar, he added, “I am not equipped to lie to you.”