Chill (6 page)

“And the Builders were monsters,” Caitlin said, to validate him. “There’s one benefit in that possibility, though. Israfel should know our destination.”

“I know our destination,” the angel said. “From Dust and Samael. But the destination Dust provided is nonsensical;
it’s an empty sector. There is nothing awaiting where we were sent.”

“So Dust was corrupt or misinformed?” Benedick asked.

“Or intentionally misprogrammed,” Tristen said. His voice was level, light, matter-of-fact. As she often had in the long-ago, Caitlin thought that she would like it better if he were ranting. “Remember with whom we are dealing, here. The Builders were an apocalyptic cult. I’ve read that book in the case outside the bridge: it would not be beyond them to send a million life-forms on a one-way journey if they believed it would force us to evolve. The rest of you may not remember, but our father was but a pale reflection of what spawned him.”

“I remember,” Caitlin said. Gerald Conn, the last Captain of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, had raised his heir a patricide—founding a family tradition, it seemed. And nobody had really blamed Alasdair for killing the old man.

Tristen fell silent. She could hear his light, quick breaths. This was no easier for him than for any of them, and perhaps worse. Arianrhod might be Benedick’s ex-lover, if you could use such an affectionate term for an arrangement of political expedience. But she was Tristen’s granddaughter, and
those
were not bonds that dissolved so easily.

Breaking the silence, Benedick said, “There also might have been a trigger protocol meant to provide a real destination when certain conditions were fulfilled.”

“There still might,” Caitlin said, and did not fill in the obvious corollary. If Israfel had, in fact, respawned and recompiled himself, it was possible that the situation Tristen was describing was exactly what had triggered the event.

“As an alternate possibility,” Benedick added, “our angel has breadth of experience on its side. And it
should in large part be aware of its progenitors’ plans. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” the angel said. Caitlin bit her cheek, trying not to hear familiar overtones. “However, data was lost in the collectivization. We
were
all attempting to eat one another. Further data had already been lost when the world shattered, and in the intervening centuries. And it would be well within parameters for Dust or Asrafil or Samael to institute some complex machination, then wipe and overwrite his own memory of the event. In which case, I would have no way of knowing. Conceivably, any of them could have programmed a respawn. Indeed, I should be surprised if each of them had not. And if it is Israfel …”

Caitlin would have reached to rub her neck, if not for the gauntlets. She touched her wrist, retracting the glove into the armor, and pressed at the base of her skull. Interpreting the motion, the gelatinous lining of the armor rippled soothingly down the length of her back. “We are not what the Builders would have had us become. And based on the evidence of the dead in the holdes, Israfel would be designed to implement their plan over as many corpses as necessary.”

Tristen said, “We don’t need another war of the angels. Or a purge of the unbelievers.”

“Sir Perceval is the Captain,” the angel said. “If there are angels, if they are not significantly different in program from my progenitors, they will obey her if they can be made to hear. Except—”

“Bound demons,” Caitlin said. “Loopholes in contracts. Things that serve unwillingly are tricky as hell to control.”

“Yes,” the angel said. “And first they must be made to hear.”

Tristen’s exhaled breath was loud enough to transmit.

“Benedick, when are you leaving? And how do you plan to track Arianrhod?”

Benedick paused, his helm in one hand. “Now. And with any means at my disposal.”

The angel said, “She may be coming toward Rule. We must assume that her plans to wrest control of the ship have not changed, and we’ve all experienced firsthand the ruthlessness she’s willing to bring to bear to implement those plans, up to and including a successful genocide. Central biosystems would be the logical choice for a beachhead, assuming some complex of our suppositions is correct, and some agency—potentially a respawned Asrafil—to which she owed fealty is what sent for her. It would explain why the Chief Engineer and I lost our feeds from the tank.

“Based on my schematics, which are somewhat incomplete, someone departing from the bridge could easily beat her there. Emergency reconfigurations have changed the plan of the world, but central biosystems is not far from Rule, and the bridge was designed to be accessible from Rule. Even without transport, the journey should take less than twenty hours.”

Tristen cleared his throat. “It’s just a guess that Arianrhod is coming this way.”

“A hypothesis,” the angel said. “But not one upon which we should gamble everything. Prince Benedick—”

“I’ll follow Arianrhod, no matter what the decision. I can track her.” He met Caitlin’s eyes when he said it.

She believed him, which was most of the problem. “The last thing we need to add to an equation that’s already this fucked is a mutiny. And Arianrhod is unlikely to abandon her ambitions simply because she got caught. We don’t know what her resources are, or if somewhere she has followers.”

“It would mean leaving Perceval on her own,” Tristen said.

Caitlin tried to stop herself. She had no doubt in her daughter. Only doubt in the strength of any soul in the face of the weight of all the world. But the words escaped anyway: “Can she manage?”

“She’s a Conn,” Tristen said.

Caitlin swallowed. “Be there when you wake her, Brother. Please.”

  When Tristen returned to the tank farm, he strode without limping, a robe draped over his arm. Healing bone latticed by his symbiont pained him, but the hurt had subsided to the point where discipline and technology rendered it bearable. Pride kept him upright, though he wondered what he had left to sustain his pride on behalf of.

His steps thumped on the crosshatched grating that had earlier scored his hands when he fell against it. In their haste, before the shock wave hit, he had bundled Perceval into the nearest available tank and dived into the neighboring one. It had sealed before he realized he should have taken one on a different circuit to safeguard against failure that might kill them both.

He stopped before Perceval’s tank and drew a breath. Sometimes, maybe you got lucky.

The status lights shone steady blue and green, as he had known they would. He had put this off longer than strictly necessary, but it did not seem unfit to him that Perceval should have whatever fragile respite he might win for her.

“I’m ready, angel.”

The tank bubbled as it began to drain. The cover slid aside, spilling syrupy liquid through the grate. Within, Perceval slumped forward against her restraints, bones starvation-plain through scarred skin. Tristen held his arms out to support her as the gelatinous webbing slid away. He thought she would crumple and was ready to assist with her slight weight, but as her feet settled to the floor she lifted her chin instead. She raised one hand to the lip of the pod, steadying herself, and blinked open lashes that spiked and stuck.

“Uncle Tristen,” she said.

She tilted her head to one side, a silent question. The muscles of his mouth twitched with repressed words. She was the Captain now. The angel would already have told her everything he might impart, faster and more efficiently. So Tristen just nodded and offered his hand as a brace when she stepped down over the lip of the pod.

She managed without it. “You’re leaving,” she said.

“I am going to intercept Arianrhod.” Which Perceval knew, but it meant something to say it.

She looked up at him, blinking thoughtfully, arms wrapped tight over her chest. Belatedly, he recalled the robe and draped it around her, tugging it closed across her chest until its radiant chemical warmth began to unhunch her shoulders. If she had hair longer than a prickle of stubble across her scalp, he would have lifted it from the collar.

Instead, helpless, he stepped back and offered what he could: “I cared for her, too.”

“Of course you did. There was never any question about that, and I’m not going to tell you your grief is nothing on mine. That would be childish and without compassion.”

She straightened her arms, struggling into oversized sleeves, and sealed the front of the robe with a touch.

He watched her chest expand and contract as she breathed deeply, hard: steeling herself, or the arrested preliminary to a sob. He put his hand on her shoulder, all the comfort he could offer.

She raised her eyes to his again and presented him with a sort of a gift that was also a burden. “Kill Arianrhod for me, Uncle.”

She could have no idea what she was asking of him, and it would be cruel to tell her, who needed no further cruelty now. She must have meant it as a kindness, dispensation and vengeance in one bequest. He couldn’t make words happen. He pressed her cheek with the back of his hand.

   Benedick broke a stimulant capsule under the unconscious resurrected’s nose, resting his other hand on the uninjured side of the boy’s head to restrain it. The boy jerked back nonetheless, but Benedick’s grip kept him from further damaging himself. The resurrected grasped his wrist with a fish-cold hand. “Jsutien,” Benedick said.

A familiar face but a foreign name.

Jsutien’s eyes opened, nonetheless. Conn eyes, the stamp of Alasdair’s paternity, with the faint drooping fold at the corner, but no Conn chill behind them. Not that Oliver had ever been as hard as his elders.

If it were not for Rien, this would be the loss Benedick would feel most deeply. And that was why, when he needed a helper, this had been the resurrected he chose. What must be done was best done without hesitation. The best way to learn to endure a pain was to experience it.

He drew back his hand, disengaging gently from the one Oliver still gripped him with. “Tell me everything that happened.”

“Arianrhod,” Jsutien said. He blinked and felt the nanobandage on his head with tentative fingers.

Benedick smoothed his expression. Give nothing of use to the subject of the interrogation. “Tell me everything you remember.”

“The Engineer left me on watch.” He began to sit; Benedick pressed a fingertip to his chest to keep him supine on the stretcher. Fur stirred softly against Benedick’s throat as the toolkit peered between strands of his hair, but Jsutien’s eyes only flickered to the little construct and dismissed it. “The Engineer had terminated service to the tank,” he continued, “and wished me to observe the shutdown protocol so there would be no mishaps.” He paused, again pressing his temple. “There’s nothing after.”

“Do you remember the blow?”

“Blow.” His fingers still on the bandage, he frowned. “No. Nothing between watching the lights turn red, and now. Not even a timescroll. It’s as if purged.”

He must have pushed too hard, because he winced and blinked hazel eyes under ridiculous black ringlets—the perfect kid brother. Except he wasn’t, anymore.

Resurrected and mute was one thing; Benedick had seen friends come back as the speechless dead all his life, and he was accustomed. The body was not the mind. This new thing—resurrected and bearing someone else’s experiences, or at least the simplified, digitized version—unsettled him. Because the face was not blank as the face of a resurrected ought to be, and so he found himself responding to this young man as he would have responded to Oliver.

But Jsutien was not Oliver. He was constructed from the repaired body of a dead Conn and the electrical impulses salvaged from the mind of a dead Engineer. And while neither of those things was a person, what resulted when such a textureless recording infiltrated and grew into such a still mind was a human being not entirely like either of the components that had constructed it.

Benedick could think of it as a kind of reproduction, if he tried. Two parents united in a child both like and unlike each.

But ordinary reproduction did not result in the destruction of the originators.

“Caitlin will need to scan,” Benedick said. “You’re aware.”

Jsutien frowned for a few moments, and then nodded. “The incursion—if there was an incursion—might have left something in my head.”

It was a positive sign. Rather than asking ignorant questions, Jsutien took a moment to assess the information he had and draw conclusions.

“Yes,” Benedick said. He reached beneath the stretcher and produced a draped silver-stain swag of nanochain. “Until then, I must restrain you.”

Silently, Jsutien held forth his hands.

   The access tunnels Tristen navigated as he left the bridge were cold, unlit, weightless, and unpressurized, and after several hours his oxygen reserves were becoming a concern. High-intensity microlamps on his armor’s helm and shoulders swept over the irregular spaces between buckled bulkheads and decks, illuminating them with stark shadows that confused the eye. In atmosphere, the armor could have aided its course-plotting by echolocation, creating a sonographic map of the corridor, but the vacuum limited it to other forms of tomography. Still, it was useful to know where potential hazards lay, as all these passages were battered, torn, and open to the void.

The Enemy had long ago claimed and colonized them. Jacob Dust in his wisdom had never seen fit to correct the problem. Vacuum would not serve as a barrier to the Exalt, especially one armored as Tristen was armored now, but it had kept less advanced biota from entering the world’s control core during the shipwrecked time.

Tristen thought the time for such measures had ended.

“Angel?”

He felt the angel’s awareness settle on him. His armor had had a personality, a name, its own small servitor. Now that being was consumed in the world’s guardian, and Tristen found he missed it. He said, “I almost called you George.”