Chill (20 page)

The voice pushed her a step back as surely as a hand. She recognized the tone, the fleeting brow-furrowed expression. She spun away before her face could break and said between her teeth, “Don’t be her with me.”

She expected a protest.

Instead, the angel just said, “What parts of me are her? You’ll have to tell me. There is so much within me, Captain. So much that argues, and does not agree.” Nova extended a hand. “I will listen to you. I
must
listen to you. But you must speak to me, for only you can make my heart quiet.”

Perceval breathed in so deeply it made her chest ache like a distended balloon, and held it.

Softer, and not in any voice Perceval recognized, Nova said, “I cannot be her with you. I cannot be Dust.

You would not like me any better as Samael or Asrafil or Inkling. I am only the angel they have wrought me, Captain, though I am as yet a thing mosaic-made from chips. But all those shards serve you, and you alone.” The angel paused, as if groping after words. As if settling an argument that Perceval could not overhear. “And serve you I must.”

Nova’s warm-looking wing encompassed her, covered her shoulders, and proved not warm at all but nearly weightless. The voices inside Perceval yammered responses, pushing, arguing with each other and herself.
Silence them
, she told herself, but it was an order easier issued than obeyed.

“As I must serve the world,” Perceval said. She wanted nothing more than to shrug away the angel’s embrace, but somehow restrained herself. “We are bound to it.”

“We are but familiar demons,” the angel agreed. “Forgive me.”

Perceval closed her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I’m trying. And it’s not your fault that I hate you.”

   Asrafil enfolded Arianrhod in the borders of his colony, and they fell into the bosom of the Enemy again. Charity, its shortened blade more suited to her height now, lay across her back in the fittings Asrafil had constructed for it. It felt strange there—unpresent, empty, neutral, still, and waiting to be filled.

Hungry, if she allowed herself to anthropomorphize so far. She kept wanting to touch it to reassure herself it was really there, or really gone.

“We are still followed,” Asrafil said softly, inside her as if reluctant to disturb her train of thought.

“From Engineering?” Arianrhod asked. “Our path should lead them down through the lift to the Broken Holdes.”

“It is as you arranged,” he agreed. “Benedick is determined, and he has found an ally. Young Chelsea Conn is with him on the hunt.”

Arianrhod grimaced, feeling her frozen cheeks crack in the cold. Chelsea should have died usefully in the plague, and having survived that, it seemed a shame to kill her now.

But pity had no place in the world Arianrhod had been raised to. “If they’re in the shaft,” she said, “I left them an enemy there.”

   Below the halfway point, Benedick and Chelsea rested again, this time on a shelf fungus broad as a dining table. They slept in shifts, and—having tested the environment and found it within the tolerances of their colonies—opened their helms and breathed the spore-sweet air while they dined on a variety of nutritious fungi and eyeless shaft-dwelling insects. When they resumed descending, Benedick took point.

He was still in the lead when light began to glimmer through the caps beneath his feet. He notified Chelsea and slowed his descent. Transition zones were often most dangerous—the haunt of predators lying in wait for something that had blundered out of its usual range, something that might be confused, disoriented, or ill.

Nothing attacked him when he lowered himself into the gap that permitted access to the next stratum, but only the armor’s filters saved him from bedazzlement when he found himself encircled by a beaded curtain of falling water refracting brightness. The mushroom forest, it seemed, could not retain every drop lost by the long-cracked irrigation system.

Benedick shook his head and spun himself on the cable for a 360-degree view, watching rainbows, their polarized light intensified by his filters, skip across his armor.

“I’m down,” he said to Chelsea, and with minimal exertion swung himself up to the lip of the shaft. The swifts darted about, screaming and buzzing his head and hands, but even if they had dared come close enough to strike, their talons would have proved ineffectual. He clipped in to a convenient knobby growth of woody fungus and settled himself. “Ready to belay.”

He had time to observe the shaft below while waiting for her. The mimosa wood at its lip grew particularly verdant, and like the one above was shrieking with parrotlets. The shaft was lushly forested from this point to the south as far as he could see. He could make out the glow of lights through an extravagance of leaves.

Chelsea was with him in less than ten minutes, and he was amused to note that she duplicated his admiring spin. “Hang on,” she said and, with a series of contractions and extensions of her body, swung pendulum-fashion toward the nearest cable. She stretched, spun, and plunged a hand through encrusting swifts’ nests to catch on and cling tight.

Benedick watched her knife flash in the other hand, and the grace with which she intercepted the falling material. When she released the cable, she had a meshed bundle of the cleanest nests and a few dozen tiny eggs, to add to the chunks of tested-safe mushroom that made up their foraged rations.

“Break for dinner?” Chelsea said, when she swung close to him again.

Once she was safely latched in, Benedick unclipped himself. “All you think of is food.”

“Bird’s nest soup,” she tempted, and lowered him before he asked. He had to swing a little to make contact with the rim of the shaft. But once his feet struck the deck the mimosas drew back to make a protected glade, and he brought Chelsea down to it with no trouble.

The easiest method for cooking the soup involved
painstaking deployment of the microwave projectors in their toolkit. The toolkit curled around the collapsible bowl, and Benedick and Chelsea cupped their shielded gauntlets around it, careful lest stray radiation should cook their eyeballs, their internal organs, or any passing birds. Soon they were sharing a steaming, pleasantly mucilaginous bowl of bird’s nest soup studded with chunks of mushroom and soft-poached swift eggs.

“This is awfully idyllic for a high-speed chase,” Chelsea said as Benedick wiped out the dinner dishes. He was worried about the toolkit’s charge, though he could replenish it from his armor if need be.

The toolkit itself was almost underfoot, seeming determined to maintain a wide berth from the mimosa. Benedick couldn’t say he blamed it. He clucked, and the toolkit got a running start, leaped to his extended hand, and scampered up his arm.

“There’s little to be gained by catching her if we’re too exhausted to do anything about it,” Benedick said mildly. He folded the bowl away and tucked it into his pack.

“That also sounds like something Father would have said.”

Benedick set his cable, ignoring the irrational twinge of irritation. He was not his father, and Chelsea was not Tristen. “One time or another, I’m certain he did. Do you wish to lead the first descent?”

From the examining glance Chelsea cast across Benedick’s face as she fixed their lines together, she knew perfectly well that he was holding back. She might even know
what;
he was always surprised by the gaps and bridges in the younger siblings’ knowledge of family history.

No blame on them for that. It wasn’t as if he or Tristen had gone out of their way to make themselves available to teach. The fact that their father had disallowed
such knowledge only increased their onus to have passed it along. Maybe their reasons were different—Benedick, as far as he knew, had far more to be ashamed of than Tristen, and he would have been happy to let his many failings remain private history—but the truth was, both of them were complicit in Alasdair Conn’s conspiracy of lies.

So in the light of everything else, perhaps it was an insignificant failure. Nonetheless, it remained one that griped at Benedick, as further evidence of his own moral cowardice—something he thought he’d already established to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Right,” Chelsea said. “See you at the bottom of the rope.” She swung a leg over the lip, and was gone.

   For a time, they progressed as before, leapfrogging one another down the shaft. In this section, lighting and terraces were intact, cane-thin rods vining between the trees to provide illumination. Benedick’s suit prickled to warn him of unfiltered ultraviolet. He sealed his helm in response. He’d had enough of radiation burns.

As he slid down the cable, the overall effect was of gliding spider-silent through a cool, dappled tunnel. The vegetation, while lush, was climax growth, full of open spaces and long, clear lines of sight. After the cramped overgrowth of the previous shaft, the spacious bowers of this vertical forest soothed him. It would be harder for an enemy to ambush them here.

The life here was more familiar, though the oxygen levels remained high enough that he still saw insects of unusual size. In this microenvironment, those included flying forms: a dragonfly whose jeweled purple-blue body hung between wings of a half-meter span; a ladybug as big as a dinner plate.

Benedick wondered what such large arthropods consumed, and resolved to keep an eye out for predatory
insect nymphs the size of his thigh. The stealthy manner of his descent—the only sound he made was in the brush of leaves against his armor and the whir of cable through the winch—meant that he passed within touching distance of many animals before they were even aware of his existence. A half-meter spotted cat hissed and vanished; a green-tinged sloth reached with dreamy control from one branch to another and swung away.

He grinned behind his helm—an expression that would have shocked most of his siblings. This was serious business. And he had a reputation for mirthlessness that he thought was as much the result of conditioned anhedonia as anything intrinsic to his character.

But the oxygen levels could make you giddy, and it was hard not to cheer up when you saw a sloth.

Mind on your work, Ben
, he thought, in Caitlin’s phrasing, and tried not to be too distracted by the wildlife.

Besides the high oxygen, one thing this shaft had in common with the one above was that it was
cold
. He couldn’t feel it through the armor, but the sloth’s long, coarse coat shone at the tips with frost, and frost also rimed the edges of the broad tree leaves. That had to be new, or transitory, because the trees themselves were hale, their foliage not yet curling.

That told him the system was continuing to lose heat, and heat was a thing not easily replaced unless they could find a way to generate energy—or tap the radiant heat of the expanding core of the supernova behind them, but that presented its own complex of problems.

He wondered how the trees had stayed intact through the acceleration. Perhaps—even broken and locked to a single setting—the gravity controls of the old commuter shaft were strong enough that they had locally compensated. It was an interesting hypothesis, because it carried the implication that, throughout the world, there
might be other similarly protected spaces that could have sheltered anything within them. When they emerged from blackout, he would contact the angel and Caitlin with the suggestion.

A large trunk blocked his descent immediately below. He flexed knees to land lightly on it, stood, checked the cable with a quick glance up, and hopped over the side just as he heard Chelsea yelp through the comm.

“Benedick!”

Caitlin was the only person left alive who called him Ben. When she was speaking with him to call him anything.

“Here,” he answered, one hand on the cable brake. He didn’t trigger it yet, though—until you understand the situation, or you understand that halting will do less damage than pushing on, don’t provide the enemy with intelligence.

“I’m under attack,” she said. “Ambu—” Half the word, until her comm cut out.

Well, I guess that’s a hint that we’re on the right path
. He slowed his descent, fighting the urge to rush. Charging to the rescue was one thing, so long as one was certain that one
was
charging to the rescue and not barreling into a trap. Silently, his black and bronze-brown armor blending into the dappled shadows of the leaves, he rotated himself so as to descend headfirst, and slipped lower.

The comm stayed dead, but before long his armor brought him the ambient sounds of combat. Crashing, a heavy thump, the splinter of green wood. No sound of weapons fire, which was suggestive.

The toolkit said “Brrt?” against his cheek.

“Shh,” he answered. He swung in close to the nearest trunk and anchored the cable, in case Chelsea was still using it; he could sense weight on the opposite end. Then he disconnected himself and began the painstaking
process of pressing close against the trunk and circling it.

Like a squirrel, he thought, as something liver red and about as large as his outstretched hand crashed through leaves nearby and bounced hard off the trunk of an age-gnarled sycamore as big around as an air lock door. Whatever it was, it left a trail of sparks, and a meat-colored smear on the tree’s patchy green-and-silver trunk before arcing away through the canopy. Benedick sank spiked gauntlet-tips into the trunk of his own tree—branches to break the fall or not, it was a long way down—and continued his careful circumnavigation.
Fight on, Sister. I’m coming
.

Head-down around the curve of the trunk, he caught sight of her. She was indeed fighting, though her form was almost completely obscured by the lumpy, humping shapes of more of the hand-sized attackers. They shoved and jostled over the surface of her armor, as—blindly, with groping hands, because they occluded her faceplate as well—she clutched at them, grabbed and peeled, hurled them aside in a mess of bridging sparks. More dropped from the branches around her, however; the undersides of nearby trees writhed with the things, and for every one she got off, two more attached themselves.

Benedick hooked his knees over a thick, bent limb, having checked the underside for attackers, and—hanging like a sloth—stretched out both hands. The microwave projectors that had so successfully heated his supper had other uses now. While he didn’t dare point them directly at Chelsea, even within the protection of her armor, the first step in getting her free was stopping the reinforcements. He couldn’t do much about the ones humping down the cable toward her, like malevolent drops of molasses slipping along a string. But the dozens clustered on the undersides of the tree trunks, waiting their opening—those were fair game.