Chill (5 page)

“Somebody,” she answered, as they came up to the chamber housing the acceleration pods, “sent me a message. And I left a guard. The resurrected you sent me.” Her sideways glance said,
If you considered him trustworthy enough to bear your message, I considered him trustworthy enough to stand over a deathbed
. She slowed, one arm canted out from the elbow to indicate a stop, then reached to her hip and unclipped her sidearm. She sighted along it before raising the weapon to high ready.

Benedick echoed her gesture. He swung across the door and flattened himself against the bulkhead on the opposite side. Whatever difficulties the last fifteen years had brought to their relationship, in this they were still machined smooth.

Caitlin spun into the chamber and Benedick covered her. He entered the room low, with a quick snap to the side, disguising his silhouette against the wall. There was too much cover in here, too much visual and auditory clutter—the cables, the pods, the sound and smell of dripping fluid and torn flesh from the ruptured ones. Benedick widened his awareness, tuned his senses to—perhaps—the scuff of a bare foot on decking. The armor covered his skin, but it was richly endowed with
sensors. He might sense the displacement of air. If Arianrhod were still here, she was still naked. He had sealed her into the tank after her capture himself, and he had not left her gear in the netting. He might be able to smell warm, wet skin.

It was no mysterious power, but rather a developed awareness to everything his own senses, the symbiont, and the armor could tell him. There was the fine edge of training, which was about developing trustworthy perceptions, learning to rely on them, and acting on them without thought or hesitation. The body knows the knife is coming, as surely as a fly senses a falling blow and drops into flight to elude it.

For now, Benedick’s body told him there was no knife. But though he trusted it, he also believed in caution.

Right-handed, he tapped the ceramic on his thigh. Caitlin glanced at him. He sealed his faceplate, and she mimicked him.

Benedick gestured left. She nodded and went, slipping between pods, using their bulk to break her silhouette and disguise the motion. Benedick followed on a staggered angle, inching along the rows as silently as possible in his clicking ceramic suit.

Together, they moved toward Arianrhod’s tank, keeping as much cover between them and it as possible. At thirty meters, Caitlin drew up, beckoning him closer. She caught his eye through twinned faceplates; neither of them needed to ask if the other was ready.

The count was all internal. She stepped out. He waited at the ready for her signal. “Wounded,” she said, and he snapped around the corner to cover her as she moved forward.

The resurrected he’d sent with the message lay on the floor, an azure puddle cradling his head. He’d sustained a savage blow. From here, Benedick could not see if
there were other wounds. Anything the resurrected might have sustained would be unlikely to kill an Exalt, since Benedick could tell there had not been any dismembering injuries.

“He’s alive.” Caitlin dropped a knee beside him. Benedick kept her in his peripheral vision, but his job now was not to watch her. It was to watch for anyone who might threaten her. She glanced up. “The tank’s unsealed.”

“She’s gone?”

“Poof.” Caitlin stood. “Shit.” She turned, scanning the chamber as if she might see something.

“Whoever came to collect her has a three-minute start.” But Benedick did not holster his weapon. The tank farm was large, and whoever had managed to shut off the motes on Arianrhod’s pod had also managed to move through the chamber unmonitored, which suggested a high level of access to the world’s systems. He didn’t need to say so. Caitlin would know this, and know also that the ability to do so suggested some instability in—or compromise of—the newly reconstructed angel. Arianrhod and her rescuer could still be close.

“If I leave now—”

Benedick did not look at Caitlin, but she looked at him. She shook her head. “We have to warn Tristen. And you shouldn’t go without supplies.”

Because three minutes was a long time, and the chase could stretch on. And whoever had come for Arianrhod would be well provided.

“There are stretchers in the locker,” Benedick said. “Let’s see if any more of the sleepers are ready to awaken, and then we’ll call the bridge and evac the casualty.”

She stopped him. “Ben. I need to know I can trust you on this.”

If it were a melodrama, he would have unsealed his faceplate to look her in the eyes. But she was Caitlin Conn; he did not delude himself. If she chose, she could read his breathing, pulse rate, skin conductivity through the sensors built into his armor. In return, his symbiont could control those things, but it was at its essence an arms race.

“Because Arianrhod was the mother of my youngest child?” He hit the word
was
a little harder than the others. Rien was dead, and he had barely known her. The knowing was his own fault; the death …

He would hang that gladly on Arianrhod. And on Ariane,
her
elder daughter, who was also his half sister—and Caitlin’s. Relations in the Conn family were nothing if not convoluted.

Caitlin stared through a transparent mask. Benedick turned to search a nearby locker for a collapsible stretcher. He pulled the hand-sized oval from a rack that had once held ten, oriented it properly, and triggered it. The webbed hammock unfolded, supported at each corner by an artificial gravity neutralizer. He guided it to the floor beside the unconscious resurrected and moved to the man’s head. Without being asked, Caitlin stepped to his feet and crouched down.

Their eyes met and they lifted, stepped sideways, and shifted the man onto the stretcher. Caitlin triggered the neutralizers and the stretcher rose softly into the air.

Benedick said, “We have a daughter, too.”

Perceval, now Captain, who had been the one to finally manage the death of Ariane. Caitlin had already started to turn away. The sensors on her armor meant she would not need to look back to see him, but she did anyway, a lingering glance over her shoulder. It was a human moment. “I thought sentiment was beneath you.”

He touched the mobility control on the stretcher. The red-gold hemisphere flushed green and it started forward. It would glide smoothly in whatever direction he indicated, as long as his hand remained on the control.

“Our daughter is still alive,” he said.

If she had an answer, she kept it to herself.

   “Prince Tristen,” the angel said, “there are complications.”

Tristen lifted his head from his arms. He must have slumped across the controls, claimed by healing sleep. He could feel the dents in his cheek and forehead left by details on the panel, and a crease marked by a metal edge.

The angel’s avatar stood before the patched bulkhead. Its appearance had changed. Now light refracted from silver hair as if through the facets of a diamond. It folded hands before its breast as if in supplication.

“We can dispense with the prince stuff,” Tristen said. He pressed hard on his eyes, rubbing grit from the corners. His beard prickled with unwashed sweat. “Where’s the breach?”

He regretted the idiom as soon as he uttered it—there was no telling how literal-minded a young artificial intelligence might be—but the angel seemed to take it in stride. And without offense.

It said, “Progress in restoring structural integrity is adequate. However, proprioceptive data is still erratic. I have deployed motes to collect electromagnetic-spectrum telemetry about the integrity of the world, and if they are not destroyed by debris, we should have a schematic soon, at least—”

There was a pause, as if it waited for new data before it continued. “I have a message from the Chief Engineer, Prince Tristen. She wishes to warn you that Arianrhod
has escaped, and asks that you return her call in haste. Also, an additional difficulty has presented itself. It appears the damage to the world and attendant loss of life has been extreme enough to trigger certain fail-safes.”

Did angels hesitate uncomfortably, or was that a concession to human frailty? A moment for him to organize his thoughts and prepare himself? Or perhaps a moment in which the angel could explore his response? Tristen didn’t know. “How bad is it?”

“Indeterminate,” the angel said.
“Bad
is a value judgment. It is an evolving situation that may become problematic.”

“Specify.”

“The
Jacob’s Ladder’s
base program contains a number of fail-safe routines, which are triggered in a case where the world sustains certain catastrophic damage. One such was the splintering of the ur-angel Israfel.”

After five centuries, Tristen still could not summon up a scrap of grief for the memory of Israfel. If the modern angels were autocratic, arrogant, and monomaniacal, they came by it honestly—and at least they had not also been omnipotent. Israfel had been all those things
and
utterly committed to the Builders’ program. Tristen had no doubt at all that Israfel had been fully informed about the hundreds of thousands of frozen dead stored in the world’s holdes, raw material for whatever might be needed.

When first the world was ruined, when the first Exalt were infected with their new symbiotic colonies, systems had been unable to maintain integrity in the original artificial intelligence of the Builders’ design. In self-preservation, Israfel had shattered into smaller, more specialized entities. So Israfel had begotten Dust, the Angel of Memory; and Samael, the Angel of Mutagens
and of Life Support; and Susabo, the Angel of Propulsion; and Asrafil, the Angel of Weapons Systems—and other, lesser beasts as well.

Predictably, defensive of their individuality, those angels had warred for which would control their reunited self. None of them had won, exactly, and all had been consumed. The nameless angel to whom Tristen now spoke was the result of that conflict, and it was the sacrifice of young Rien, Perceval’s sister and beloved, that had given it an identity of its own.

An identity that continued, “The
current
issue is a protocol that is triggered when viable biologicals aboard fall below a critical volume. Which is to say, in the wake of concussive and radiation damage sustained from the supernova, the world has begun repopulating its biosphere.”

Tristen pressed the palms of his hands flat to the panel. “So what’s out there?”

The angel folded its arms. “That’s an interesting question. And unfortunately, as my lack of proprioceptive data is progressive, I do not entirely know.”

“Progressive? You’re losing more sections?”

“Yes.”

“How is that possible?”

“Causes as yet undetermined,” the angel said. “The cause may be cascading colony failures. Or, and possibly more problematic, it is possible that this reset, if I may use the term, came complete with its own guardian angel.”

“Israfel might be back,” Tristen clarified. “Back,” the angel agreed. “And ready to institute the Builders’ plan.”

   Tristen’s voice rang as clear in Caitlin’s ear as if he murmured into it. “We seem to have inherited a complex of additional problems.”

“Thrill me,” she said, watching Benedick—still armored but unhelmed—pack concentrated rations and bottled water into a carryall. She triggered broadcast mode. “You’re on speaker.”

Tristen said, “The world is attempting to repopulate. There’s no telling what might be coming out of the cloning tanks. The program is for maximum biological diversity to be restored in the aftermath of catastrophe, on the theory that competition is the manner in which a balanced ecosystem is likely to reestablish itself.”

“Wasteful,” she said.

“That’s the Builders for you. Maximum carnage as a tenet of religious faith.”

The amplified voice seemed to be reaching the resurrected Jsutien. At least he stirred, one hand coming up to press the nanobandaged scalp wound, though his eyes stayed shut. Caitlin wished he’d hurry up and heal. The memory-set that inhabited him—the skills of a Moving Times astrogator, for which Benedick had reawakened him—would be extraordinarily useful in the near future.

“Wasteful,” Caitlin said. She knew how much external management was necessary to keep most Heavens functional.

Benedick sealed his carryall with a touch. He clipped it to the shoulder of his armor and snapped his fingers for the toolkit. It had been grooming the claws of one hind foot in the corner, enormous lambent eyes half closed in pleasure, fluffy tail flipped over the opposite toes. At his summons, it scampered squirrel-light across the rubble of ruined equipment, leaped to his outreached gauntlet, and swarmed up his arm to the shoulder, where it curled itself under the edge of his hair. It peeked between strands, blinking.

Caitlin could not believe anyone had ever gone out of their way to design anything quite so offensively cute.

Benedick said, “The Builders believed in competition.”

“Just to complete your morning,” Tristen added, “the angel informs me that it has lost contact with certain areas of the world. It believes that it’s possible the original Israfel has respawned an intact instance.”

Benedick splayed his fingers inside their gauntlets. Caitlin watched furtively. She had been right to create distance between them. It was too hard to stay angry with him when he was close, and in pain, but she didn’t dare let go of that anger. Looking at him now, she nursed her outrage, fed it scraps of bitter memory, and still she felt it gutter. No memory of betrayal could stand up to the presence of the man.

He said, “But the renewed world angel
is
Israfel—”

“It is an evolved Israfel,” Caitlin corrected. “Pieces were lost in the shipwrecked time. Pieces evolved. Pardon me, angel, for speaking of you as if you were not here.”

“Fear not,” the angel said. “I take no offense.”

“New pieces were added,” Tristen said, when neither she nor Benedick could bring themselves to say it. “The problem is that the angel is not the only thing that’s evolved. We have, too. And the original Israfel would have the Builders’ unmodified plan at heart.”

Tristen’s tone carried a world of implications as to what he thought of the Builders, their plan, and their general Godlike disregard for the health or well-being of any individual creature. The God of the Builders was a harsh god, with no concern in Him for any given sparrow’s fall.