Chill (19 page)

“Right,” she said, and restructured her to-do list. “Give me back to Nova, please.”

Samael’s confident, glowing polyhedral winked out, to be replaced by Nova’s silver-haired avatar. Whether the young angel thought her crew would be more comforted by a face to respond to or whether she sought the reassurance of a human seeming for herself, Caitlin did not know. She was simply grateful that Nova had chosen a form so unlike any of her component parts. It broke her heart enough to look in the angel’s alien eyes and catch a fleeting expression that reminded her of Rien. She did not care to imagine how she would have borne it if the features that wore that manner resembled her adopted daughter’s. Better for Nova to be as different as she could.

Then she wondered when she had begun thinking of the angel as a
she
. There was nothing about Nova to indicate or imply a sex, and as Caitlin knew them, the vast majority of angels had always been
he
by courtesy, much as ships were
she
.

Focus, Chief Engineer
, she reprimanded herself. Funny how the alienation of a title could make you hold yourself together in the face of the impossible.

Caitlin said, “Thank you, Nova. I’m going to list off our immediate complex of problems as I understand it, and I’d appreciate it if you’d check my logic and see if I’ve missed anything.”

Frowning, the angel nodded. “Carry on.”

Verbalization was a slow and monodimensional means of exchanging information, but it demanded linearity and precision, so Caitlin chose to speak out loud rather than to transmit a problem matrix. In a measured fashion, she listed everything she’d previously considered, added Samael’s intelligence on the
Jacob’s Ladder
’s biosphere reboot process as an immediate concern, mentioned the pursuit of Arianrhod and Asrafil, and finished, “And there are the other denizens of the world to consider. Not everyone and everything who didn’t make it into tanks will have died. The biosphere—especially the synbiotic and Exalt biosphere—is proving to possess remarkable resilience. Perceval needs to understand that there are probably people out there who have no understanding of their environment or the realities of the situation. People who will, unfortunately, need to be … educated. And then governed.”

The euphemisms felt gritty on her tongue. She worked her mouth around where they’d passed as if to rid herself of the taste.

“Disaster mitigation is an ongoing process,” Nova said blandly, leading Caitlin to wonder (again) exactly what the angel’s facade concealed. When she had time,
she was going to procure the Captain’s approval to pin Nova into a corner and do some serious spelunking around the inside of her program.

It was possible that the angel might even approve of her interference. If Caitlin had enough unassimilated bits of other people kicking around the inside of her skull, she’d be crying for a competent code intervention.

The angel said, “It’s a problem of management as much as anything. The pendulum could still tip us into catastrophic collapse.”

The angel’s words conjured an image of the world as a ghost world, burning lifeless between the stars, bored and aimless angels at play among its silent struts and habitats.

Caitlin said, “You’d survive it.”

“I would be lonely.”

Whether she had timed it to make Caitlin laugh or not, it worked, and the break in tension allowed Caitlin to turn her attention back to the problem at hand.

“Right. We’re not out of the event horizon, as it were,” Caitlin said. “And we can’t afford to work on these problems in isolation. Any functional solution will be a systemic one. Can you maintain the current level of habitability? If necessary, what if we pull back to the core and allow individual anchores, holdes, and domaines to maintain for themselves as they can?”

It was what the world had been built for, and that ability to compartmentalize was what had allowed it to remain a viable organism through the past five hundred years, despite crippling trauma. The world was modeled on a living thing—and life was stubborn.

But that compartmentalization was also what had led to so many of their current problems.

“I can fall back into myself as necessary,” the angel agreed. “However, that leaves many a beachhead for the power or powers behind the null zones. We still haven’t managed to obtain any evidence one way or the other
about the possibility that if the world’s idiot systems are attempting to reboot the biospheres, they may also have available backup versions of the original angel. We need to determine if the null zones are areas where Israfel is attempting to respawn from backup. None of that, however, explains the disassembly incidents.”

“Given how far our goals, and your program, have diverged from the Builders’ intent, that’s not a reassuring scenario.”

The angel skinned lips back from imaginary teeth. “He would eat me in a heartbeat. We are not without advantages, however. The houses of Rule and Engine are unified at last.”

Caitlin snorted. “Because the houses of Rule and Engine are
decimated
. No, Nova, I’m sorry. You’re right. It is an advantage.” She rubbed her armored wrist with her armored palm. “If we can find a way to work together. And trust each other.”

“You are thinking of my Captain’s father.”

Caitlin’s smile felt thin and stretched across her skull. “Of course I’m thinking of Benedick. I’ve sent him out there alone, hunting a woman who was his ally in a scheme to keep Rule and Engine from each other’s throats. A woman who was his friend and lover.” She stopped herself before she said:
But not his partner
. There was nothing uglier than a self-justification.

Instead, she continued, “She is my great-grandniece, and also the mother and ally of the woman who is responsible for the decimation of Rule. His daughter with
her
has died and metamorphosed into a fragment of you, my dear Nova. His daughter and mine is your Captain. Are you still human enough, a little, to understand why I am worried what he’ll do?”

“You must,” said the angel, “reach out to him.”

“You’re a fine one to give relationship advice,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. She turned away.

She was old enough to know it for a useless display even as she did so, but it made her feel better.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “What else?” she asked, when her eyes had stopped stinging.

The angel’s avatar reappeared before her, shifting orientation to match her. “Chief Engineer—” The angel lifted her chin, folded her arms, and spat the words out as if she expected Caitlin to argue. “My Captain is not emotionally well.”

“I know,” Caitlin said. The angel’s tone made her want to reach out and lay a hand on its immaterial nape, pull its face into her neck, and stroke it down the spine. As she would have done for her daughter, once. “We shall carry on for her as we can, and buy her time to heal enough to shoulder the burdens she must bear.”

“Is that the mother talking, or the Chief Engineer?”

“What can we do about the null zones, if we’re not surrendering them?” Caitlin said, as if it were an answer. Perhaps it was, of sorts.

“Prince Benedick and Princess Chelsea are approaching the largest one,” Nova said, “in the far south of the world. It is where Arianrhod—and Asrafil, if Samael can be believed—have taken shelter. Benedick and Chelsea have the toolkit, their armor, and their own colonies; odds are good I will be able to remain in contact. I will ask them to reconnoiter. Perhaps they will provide us with some intelligence on what, exactly, is blocking my access to the area.”

“If it doesn’t eat them.”

“Or—perhaps more likely—subvert their colonies.”

“Belly of the beast,” Caitlin said, and bit the back of her hand.

   Without your mate, your fathers, your brothers, your sons, you are as nothing. You are as a calf, all but blinded.

But you are not without resources.

Ironically, the vermin’s machine viruses are the first of those resources to which you turn. They penetrate your organs, infect your instincts, confuse your intellect. But they have done that for so long now that you have had time to habituate to them, to grow accustomed and adapt. And to modify them in turn as they have modified you. To guide their evolution and make them your own.

Having done so, you feed them back into the slaver spikes, an upstream trickle of Trojan horses disguised in the empty shells of gutted nanotech. They spread, connect, convert others. Become a network of their own—an island galaxy in the information universe of the vermin-world.

And when you have made
that
, you can make the next thing. Because there is material here, vermin-life, planetcrawlers. Parasites, things that infect a world, devour its substance, spawn in hives and cast off to the next innocent victim. But you can use the vermin’s machine viruses, alter that life, repurpose it. Consume it as the vermin consumed your mate, so as to remake something more to your liking.

You have no freedom. You have no pod. You have no sons, no legacy. You have no offspring born of the bodies of yourself and your mate. But you have designs that could amend those lacks.

For now, you shall make do with monsters.

   Arianrhod made the angel put her down so she could walk into her daughter’s house on her own feet, as befitted an Engineer. Ariane’s domaine was small and defensible, an ant-warren of tunnels and rooms that twisted back on itself to form a three-dimensional labyrinth. It was full of dead ends and deadfalls, and Arianrhod herself did not know them all. What she did know was the path to the heart of the place.

When last she came here, every wall had pulsed with life, twining veins of blue and green algae filtering the light of the waystars and turning it to sugar and oxygen. Now the tubes were shattered, the sludge within frozen into coils and sprays she must break off or edge past.

She feared that what she’d come for was lost to the Enemy, but at the heart of her daughter’s holdfast she found the small room as she remembered it, a cozy weightless sphere with a console and a vault. The vault was DNA-locked, but that was less problem than it might have been: Arianrhod carried a stasis phial of her daughter’s cultured heart cells as a memento, and it was the work of a moment to retrieve it from where it lay cradled in the flesh of her own bosom. Having plucked the phial from the pucker of skin that pushed it free, she unlocked it and let it open on her palm like the petals of a crystal flower. Drifting, her hair alive around her like the tentacles of a curious octopus, she bent to inspect it.

Awakened, the fragment of tissue managed two or three reflexive contractions before the breath of the Enemy froze it. Arianrhod winced in sympathy; returned to her breast, it would thaw fast enough and her symbiont could heal it, but at the moment she felt for its pain.

A scraping gave her what she needed, and she folded the rest away inside her again. A smear of cells across her thumb, frozen, clinging to her own frosting skin, and she laid the pad against the reader. In the emptiness, she could not speak the access codes, but the lock accepted a data pulse and she felt the transmitted tremor as bolts slipped free.

The apparatus had been twisted in acceleration, and she had to grow flat blades of claws and pry to help the drawer slide free, but what lay inside was intact. Black as a splinter of the Enemy’s teeth, sharp as a laser, flat and unreflective as a hole in the universe, more than a
meter of hiltless blade rested like a naked singularity cradled in the crumbled monofilament silk of engineered moths.

“They were consumed,” Asrafil said inside her mind, leaning over her shoulder. “All the unblades went into the consuming angel.”

Not this one
, Arianrhod answered.
The angel only got the other half. Half-compiled, virulent, fragmentary. But this is what remains of Tristen’s Charity
.

This is the last unblade in the world. And you’re going to make me a scabbard and a hilt for it, angel
.

   Perceval said, “I do not mind the cold.”

She must admit to having heard Nova’s protest, but the angel’s words were wasted. They might as well have been the crying of birds, the creak of old metal contracting in the Enemy’s deep chill.

“I don’t mind it,” she repeated. She rested her palms on the newly reconstructed portals. Beyond them, the Enemy waited, green with the death of the waystars, their final light occluding the suns beyond. She could make out a few, the hottest or closest, veil-swathed and dim. “Do not waste your warmth on me.”

Dust and Pinion had changed her, before she changed them in return. She was the Captain of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, and barely meat anymore. The Enemy could no more harm her than it could harm an angel. If she, Perceval, did not deserve to suffer for the comfort and well-being of others, then the dead men and women she harbored most certainly did.

Speaking of angels, hers stood behind her still as if he—as if
she
—had not heard her answer. Perceval might be tempted to say she hovered, but though she wore gray wings, dove-soft and warm-looking as a cloak, she stood on her feet like anyone.

“Captain,” she said, a soft protest she could not
exactly call an argument, “you may not need the warmth. But anyone who might come to visit you—”

“Is it not my bridge?” She turned her head to see the angel with her own eyes, though that had become another conceit that did not matter. Her colony told her where Nova was; she knew her shape and colors and stance as if she looked upon her, no matter whether she bothered with an avatar or no. She felt her movements as her own, but that wasn’t what she wanted. For the moment, she wanted plain human vision, with all its limits and inadequacies. She wanted to see with her own eyes, though they showed her less reality than could adapted ones.

Perceval’s slow, blink-punctuated stare didn’t seem to concern Nova. The angel said, “Would you have your crew come before you only if they are armor-clad?”

She did not answer.

Nova swept a wing across the floor. “Are you so much a Princess after all that you’d sacrifice this grass, these flowers, these gardens of your bridge, to feed your own selfish grief?”