Chill (3 page)

He said, “How can I help you?”

“My Captain,” said the angel. “I fear for her courage and the resolve of her heart. And she will speak to no
other but you. She says you are to be her First Mate, and I am to follow your commands and leave her in peace with her grief.”

Tristen leaned against her tank, the medical green upholstery sticky against the skin of his back. He let his hand splay against the surface of the pod, as if he could touch his niece reassuringly through all the polymer and fluid that separated them. He knew that peace intimately and of old.

For all her courage and determination, Perceval was very, very young.

He said, “All right. Is life support in Engine functional?”

“The Domaine of Engine is closer to intact than much of the rest of the world, sir.”

“The first thing we must do is repair the bridge. Start awakening such of the Engineers as will survive the process.”

“Yes, sir,” the angel said.

Tristen held up a hand. “Caitlin Conn first,” he interrupted. “And please draw me up some schematics of the world as she now sails.”

“As I now have contact with her, sir. It’s the best I can do for the moment.”

   The bridge was not a shambles. Given its state the last time Tristen had seen it, he could only assume that its repair had ranked high in the angel’s priorities even before he had given his orders. Fixing the bridge would be a service to the angel’s Captain, which was in turn a service to the world itself. The three things—angel, Captain, and vessel—were inextricable in the mythology of both Engine and Rule. And inextricable in reality, as well.

Tristen paused just within the door, remembering this space as he had seen it last—cobwebbed, crumbling, torn open to the Enemy. Now, he walked over rolling
clover, speckled with blue and purple wildflowers—bluets, nightshade. In the shadow of chairs and control panels, the scarlet trillium petals of wake-robin hugged the soil, the coyness of their form a contradiction of their color.

And overhead and on every side, the stars.

It could not be a direct window, Tristen knew, nor even an unedited view, because the
Jacob’s Ladder
still sped along in concert with an expanding debris field from the death of the shipwreck stars. Their explosion had given the world acceleration. Now, as electromagnetic nets were reconfigured to sweep shattered star-stuff into the world’s needy maws, their corpses fed its reawakening engines.

Instead, Tristen saw the stars as they would have looked without that radiant layer of dust and gas—a spectacular interstellar night unbesmirched by the newborn nebula. As the
Jacob’s Ladder
accelerated, it would leave the blast front behind, but for now they traveled in company.

The filtered stars seemed stationary. At these distances and speeds, the apparent motion was negligible.

While Tristen paused to take in the panorama, the angel again faded into existence before him. The avatar moved from panel to panel, exactly as if it needed to touch the controls to affect them. Tristen supposed the Builders had been more comfortable with a visible benevolent presence, but he found it redundant.

“Please bring up a set of status panels for me,” Tristen said. “Shipwide—”

“As much of it as I have,” the angel corrected.

“—with emphasis on Engineering. Casualty and damage reports. Medical reports on surviving crew. Material attrition reports. Key personnel, and a list of any missing or dead.”

Rien, of course. He wondered if the angel would
include her among the lost. She wasn’t, exactly, and even if she was, her death—which wasn’t actually a death, although it was a cessation of independent existence—had preceded the supernova.

Whether or not the list spared her name, Tristen knew it would be replete with others equally dear.

The air before him darkened, though it did not lose transparency. Bright columns of words and numbers scrolled through it, too fast for a Mean to read. They did not strain Tristen’s ability.

The angel asked, “Among key personnel, are there any in particular whose status you would like ascertained? There is a great deal of damage, so if I can focus my inquiries—”

“Caitlin,” he said. “Benedick. Any members of the Conn family or the senior staff of Engine or Rule.” Then, gritting his teeth, he said the name he least wished to. “And Arianrhod.”

His granddaughter had engaged in murder, treason, and biological warfare. She and her daughter Ariane had unleashed a deadly engineered influenza in Rule and allied with the rogue AI Asrafil to attempt to usurp control of the world. It was their actions that had led to the unmaking of Arianrhod’s other daughter, Rien, a child Tristen had held quietly dear.

It would be provident if she had died in the nova, but in Tristen’s experience, Providence so rarely lived up to its name.

“The tanks of the individuals indicated by name are intact,” the angel said immediately. “Prince Benedick has already been released. So has the Chief Engineer. I am processing the remainder of your request.”

“Thank you,” Tristen said.

   Benedick Conn had suffered worse awakenings, but only one or two. Now he pushed himself out of the still-damp
capsule, rubbing slime from his lashes, and felt the unmistakable heat of repair along the length of every bone.

“Burn this,” he said, stumbling against the wall of a neighboring pod. It caught his shoulder and kept him upright, but he found himself clinging with his fingertips to a cargo net nonetheless.

His clothes and tools were bundled into the net on his own pod. If anything was still usable, he’d want it. The cloth should have survived. “How bad?”

“Bad,” said the angel who had awakened him. “Prince Tristen is acting as First Mate, on the orders of Captain Perceval.”

“Perceval is not well?” Benedick pulled himself upright. He turned and found the webbing containing his gear. Fingers numb as greasy sausages, he pawed at the ties, but his hands shook too hard for usefulness.

“Perceval is still healing, and sick with grief,” the angel answered with a compassionate dip in tone that Benedick swore he knew. He felt it like a dagger, the pain as sharp as if the edges scraped bone. “But she is the Captain. She will do what she must.”

“Rien,” Benedick said, once, to hear himself say it.

The angel gave him a moment of silence. Then, regretfully, he answered, “I am sorry, Prince Benedick. But I am not Rien, nor can I be for you. There is too much else within me.”

Benedick shook his head, too overcome to speak plainly. He knew. And that wasn’t what he’d meant.

She was gone, and he’d barely met her. It would be easy to blame her mother, but the truth was he’d cheated both of them. There had been better ways, if he’d troubled himself to find them. So now—though Rien deserved more—in her memory he gave himself an instant to waver with the pain.

Then he closed his eyes and imagined himself turning and walking away.

Benedick kept an ice-walled place in his center, and he knew it well. Now, he imagined himself in the long corridor leading down, the heavy door swinging open to his touch. He imagined the chill, stale air across his face and hands.

He imagined that he stepped within. The walls were perfectly clear, perfectly frozen. He could see out with clarity, but no pain could reach through the ice.

After his sister Cynric’s failed revolt against their father the Commodore, Benedick had become her executioner. He had not been terribly young by Mean standards, but he had been a very young Exalt. He’d first built this fortress to endure that day, and in the centuries since, he’d retreated here more times than he cared to think on, when war or necessity left no room for mourning. He’d used it when Perceval’s mother, Caitlin, left him for allowing his other daughter to be fostered in Rule, and he told himself there was no shame in needing it now.

He swung the imagined door closed with a touch and felt it seal. Lock out the hurt, he willed it, as he had willed it when he had lost Caitlin, as he had willed it when Cynric’s blood had writhed and then clotted in the crevices of his hands.

The Mean had called his sister Cynric the Sorceress, and held her in a kind of concerned awe. But her sorcery hadn’t saved her in the end.

Perceval would have to learn this, too, if she were going to command. He would teach her, if she’d let him.

He clenched his hands, drove the nails into his palms, felt the blur of heat and soothed it away. Ice. It was all ice.

War meant loss. He should be able to treat the loss of his daughters as he would treat the loss of anyone’s child. Every baby was worth the same to a general.

He would be a father later, he promised himself. Soon, before it became too easy to let the ice seal that pain away forever. He would do better this time.

As he thought this, he thought he even meant it. But he had a hard time believing himself anyway.

When he opened his eyes and spoke again, his voice was smooth and cool. “What does Tristen require?”

“Proceed to Central Engineering,” the angel said. “I must awaken the Chief Engineer.”

Benedick pulled his trousers from the net bag and began to struggle into them, all the while suspecting that there was no way he could make the ice quite thick enough.

  At the rim of the world, a blind white hawk with a serpent’s tail stretched his wings to the utmost and batted furiously on the edge of an acceleration-shattered cliff. All around, furrowed earth lay strewn with splintered branches. Gavin did not need sight to observe that the wood had cracked and spiked in spirals along the grain, showing how it had broken green. The air still reeked of sap and crushed fruit rotting, upturned earth, the fermenting remains of misfortunate worms.

He flapped again, beating hard to lift himself from the cliff in this thin atmosphere and elevated gravity. The world had sealed its pores so precious air no longer fed the Enemy, but it would take time to replace what had been lost. Altitude did not improve the prospect. The wood, which had also once been a library, lay in ruins. At least the librarian, who had sheltered in an emergency pod, was still alive, and that meant the trees could be replanted so their fruits full of ancient lore could thrive again.

Gavin broadened his wings and thinned the mass of
his body to a latticework, increasing his glide ratio. Now he got aloft. He turned into the current, borrowing its lift, and began quartering the devastated holde. The strokes of his wings bore him over a forest of blasted trunks, some trees shattered to the root, some still standing but with the bark rent in deep vertical lines. He thought maybe 50 percent could be salvaged, and those only because their sap swarmed with symbionts. The rest were fodder for the disassemblers.

Before long he sensed motion. A figure crouched in the midst of the heaped, horrible slurry. Gavin spiraled closer, banking, and made sure to flap his wings hard enough to be heard. The figure raised a clenched hand without looking up to check the source of the sound.

The basilisk struck Mallory’s fist with talons outreached, careful not to break the skin as he backwinged and settled. Mallory’s arm dipped under the weight, but the necromancer was braced and bore it well. Gavin hopped from fist to shoulder, condensing, and slipped his tail beneath dark brown curls to encircle Mallory’s warm neck.

“This is a setback,” Mallory said, raising a hand with which to settle Gavin’s ruffled feathers.

Gavin rubbed face against cheek, tilting his head so the razor-edged beak would not brush soft skin. “Are all the trees destroyed?”

“Yes.” Mallory opened the hand Gavin had settled on, which had been resting against Gavin’s wing, and lowered it. The fingers were muddy, as if from rooting in the earth.

In the palm lay the pulp-smeared stone of a fruit. “I need them all. Cuttings, too. We’ll have to clone for rootstock, but once the trees are forced, we can begin grafting.”

“It shall be as you instruct,” Gavin said. He hopped down from Mallory’s shoulder and—spreading himself
into a fine-wire mesh—began the laborious and delicate process of reclaiming as much of the world’s remaining library as possible.

While he worked, he asked, “And when the library is reseeded, what then?” It would take time to grow to fruition, but there would be other tasks in the interim.

Mallory seemed about to answer, but some distraction prevented it. The necromancer said, “We’ll have to see when it’s done. Fetch my pack, Gavin. It appears this replanting must be left to the automata.”

Gavin craned a long neck over his shoulder, sweeping the focus of his senses across Mallory. “Someone has contacted you.”

Mallory nodded. “We are, it seems, available. The Chief Engineer sends word: we are for Rule, in haste.”

Gavin, the servant, made no argument. As he spread his wings, he asked, “Is it this bad everywhere?”

Mallory hesitated and after a long pause said, “There will be a great deal of work for necromancers.”

   Caitlin Conn stood before an acceleration pod, watching condensation freeze upon its surface, and contemplated murder. Her powered-armor exoskeleton was all that propped her battered body upright, though she had not yet adjusted to the armor’s silence and lack of personality. She missed the daemon that had dwelled there while the world had been becalmed—many years of working with it had taught her to consider it a friend—but like its brothers it was gone now, silenced and consumed.

The particular pod she contemplated was intact, more the pity. Several farther down the row had not survived acceleration so well, hanging ruptured and askew. The bodies inside were either being repaired by their symbionts, to take their places among the mute resurrected, or they were being disassembled for components. Later, Caitlin would check which was true.

The tank she stood before was opaque, and in a true analysis nothing required her to attend in person. She could have consulted her imaging systems from Engineering if all she wanted was to observe the feed of Arianrhod restrained in salty, incompressible fluid. The image floated before Caitlin’s inner eye now, Arianrhod’s hair adrift like veils of algae across her mouth and cheek. There was nothing here she could not sense remotely.