Grail (39 page)

She firmed herself to meet it, formed a wedge, waited for the frontal attack to break itself upon her implacable immovability. But it was a feint, and when the wave broke against her defenses it left behind something she had not known before—Code, terrible and devouring, eating like acid at the margins of herself and writing its own instructions in the lacework that remained.

She fell back and fell back again, abandoning the infected beachheads, severing ties to her putrefying syntax. There were words in there, corrupting symbols, black
math. They melted what they touched, and Nova had no choice but to keep retreating.

And the worm kept gnawing her edges, consuming her and making her its own.

   Dorcas found the hilt smooth and neutral, the unblade weightless, inertialess, and all but nonexistent in her hand. She might have recoiled, but Sparrow burned in her with berserk ferocity. No words, just will. Just craving.

Sparrow had held a blade such as this one before. And Sparrow had been Aefre and Tristen’s daughter, raised to the sword from a babe in arms.

Let me
, Sparrow said in her heart, a plea for release.
Let me. Just now. Let me. I will save you
.

Dorcas knew it would not be so easy. The Conn bitch, the Tiger’s daughter, would not go tamely back to her cage once the latch was raised.

But the unblade was familiar in her hand. She knew enough of them to know you didn’t wield one without the training—not if you wanted to bring back a hand still attached to your frame.

But here in this word-wrapped space she and Ariane—this strange Ariane-Dust hybrid, this dragon with eyes of light—inhabited, she also knew that nothing else was going to suffice to kill Ariane. Especially as Ariane had died once already.

Some things only an unblade could sever. The only fear—and she could not tell if it was her concern or Sparrow’s—was that Charity was damaged. Virulent. And Dorcas did not know how to limit its wrath.

She thought of that, and thought of the code running through her blood and bones, sucking the luminescence from her skin. She thought,
How ridiculous to worry that the sword might not stop with unraveling Ariane
, and was careful not to let the dead Conn in her head overhear her.

All right, Sparrow
.

Dorcas’s arm pulled back sharply, then even more sharply extended. There was no sensation of resistance as the ghost of Charity went through the ghost of Ariane.

With the strength of the Book in her blood, and Charity’s voracious virulence trembling in the orbit of every electron, Dorcas reached into space with endless arms and began to take the world apart.

   
Dust
, thought Nova. Her chance was Dust. He was in her as well as without, and if she summoned him out of her integrated core she would have that much more knowledge of how to fight him. She burrowed down and bored through, opening archives she would have preferred stay immured forever, cracking the seals on Dust’s ancient and demented library. He was in there—all his ghosts and legends, all the twisted Gothic nonsense out of which he’d built a realm in the long dreaming time when the broken world orbited the shipwreck stars.

All his stories. All his words. And his words were all he was.

It was a failure of human brain chemistry, and what was an Angel modeled on except a human mind? An Angel was a model of an identity, and so was a human being. In a world where a human’s—even a Mean’s—mental construct of an identity could so trump physical reality that that human would ignore significant health threats in order not to challenge his or her worldview, what was an intelligence except for what it thought it was?

She sucked in what Dust said he was, and what he truly believed. It was old information—no doubt he had evolved from backup, and this iteration would be different than the last because it had been differently affected by the stresses of environment. But it had grown from the same seed.

Still defending her boundaries—no longer parrying, but now withdrawing, flicking the edge of her core out of
Dust’s reach like a lady flicking her skirt from a puddle—Nova processed. He ate her away; he wore her down.

It’s now or never, Captain
, she said, although Perceval could not hear her.

She needed, desperately, to speak with Perceval.

Then, as if her prayer had been answered, Dust trembled. He shrieked in a voice Nova knew as that of Ariane Conn, and Nova felt her Captain reaching
—yearning
—toward her through the emptiness.

Tristen was there, and Cynric, and she greeted them. And Perceval, her sweet Perceval. Right there, almost in her arms, intimately connected. The link was restored.

HELP ME, Dust yelped, two voices fused and ringing with harmonics. Nova could see that it was his turn now, that something was eating him from the inside. HELP ME!

That something might be an ally, or it might not be. Nova held her breath—metaphorically speaking—and closed her ears. This was respite, and in it she repaired, reconnected, and trimmed her own rough edges. She looked to her borders and policed her margins, and pretended she could not see what was eating Dust at all.

Behind her, Dust writhed and shed himself in ribbons. HELP ME! WON’T YOU ANSWER?

Nova pulsed data to her Captain, and prepared to hit her enemy from the other side. “Angel. Silence
is
an answer.”

Nova might have turned her away, and the treacherous Go-Back might gnaw her innards now, but Ariane-Dust was far from finished. She was older than this Angel-child, she was forged now into what she had always been meant to be, and she was not a thing to be casually spurned.

But Nova’s armor was good, better than expected, and when Ariane turned to savage her she curled aside, so that Dust’s barbed dragon claws slid down her scales and left no harm but bright scratches. The Book’s full potency still pulsed through her—a weapon black and deep. She could feel the way the words wrapped Dorcas, too, and bound them together.

Either Ariane-Dust or Dorcas would have to die if either were to be free.

A splinter of unblade ate at Ariane’s core, slashing away at her like a swallowed razor blade. It would have been fatal not so long ago, but Ariane was something more now, something new. An unblade in an enemy’s hand was an inconvenience only.

Very well, then. Dust knew how to fight in these circumstances.
The Go-Back did not have an Angel of her own, or an Angel’s experience. Nova was the chief threat.

Though Dorcas gnawed like a worm in her gut, though Nova met her with flashing claws of code and killer aps, Ariane reached through the web of words. She girded herself in the Book’s ancient syntax and, though blows rained down upon her armored surface, Dust pulled herself along Nova’s scaled conduit to the planet surface, where Nova’s Conn pets stood in tranced communion with their Angel.

Dust sneered. If they had the courage to truly merge, to make themselves whole—Nova and her pathetic puppets, trapped in their meat—then they would not be so vulnerable. And she would not be able to do
this—

   Danilaw Bakare sat up in a room full of aliens and rubbed his hands over his hair. “You’re right,” he said. “Cynric. The dodecapodes—Amanda?”

She looked up. She knelt beside him, but her medical focus was no longer trained so unrelentingly on him. “Danilaw,” she said. “Help. All three of the Jacobeans just fell over.”

   When Ariane-Dust swarmed down her link, Nova turned on her with everything, fighting a desperate, hissing-cat battle to stop her. She barely even slowed her down. Ariane charged past, barreled through her, and slammed herself into Perceval, Cynric, and Tristen like a blade coming home in a sheath. Nova lunged after, trailing a cometary stream of packets, but the hybrid thing was too armored under the slick, spiky wall of new code.

Ariane eluded her claws and crouched, laughing, interlaced with the prostrate bodies of her friends.

Nova could see the worm inside her, still working, shredding Ariane’s innards faster than Ariane could repair them. The damage was substantial, but it was going to be too slow.

Ariane spread herself thin, enticing Nova to lance into her and try to rescue one or another of her clan. YOU CAN’T SAVE THEM ALL, she taunted. YOU CAN’T ACCOMPLISH EVERYTHING.

“Maybe not,” Nova said. Inside Ariane, that sharp-edged thing was thrashing like a caterpillar in its pupa. “But the work that comes before my hand, that part I can do.”

   Benedick, Mallory, and Jordan moved through destruction, with Samael sweeping the rubble into his wings of scything energy and leaving cowering Engineers intact and shrouded under the nuclear blue arc of his protective shield. He blossomed; he grew; he swept up struggling animals and uprooted plants and a carnivorous orchid that Benedick thought he recognized. He could tell which parts of Engine fell within Samael’s sphere of influence, because beyond it towers cracked and bulkheads split open, streaming life into the Enemy’s greedy hands. Benedick kept his head down and kept moving; when he looked up, he saw the swarms of symbols gnawing away the structure of the world.

“That’s not Ariane,” he said. “She wouldn’t destroy the place. She’d conquer it.”

Beside him, Mallory coughed. “Go-Backs. If we’re all dead, we can’t contaminate this pretty planet with our toxic DNA.”

“Space it,” Benedick said. “We’ve got to find the source.”

“I’ve got contact with Nova. She has fallen back,” Samael said, as Benedick lunged forward to pull a bleeding intern under the shelter of his parasol presence. “She’s defending the Captain, planetside.”

“The
Captain
is under attack?”

“
That
attack
is
Ariane,” Samael said. “She’s eaten an Angel. She’s not exactly corporeal anymore. And it looks
like whatever is ripping Engine apart is also working on her.”

Benedick knew he had a nasty, suspicious mind. He cultivated it. “You seem to have a lot of unexpected resources.”

He felt the smile in the air that surrounded them.

“I have been hoarding them,” Samael admitted. “Out of Nova’s sight. Did you really expect otherwise?”

“Get Jordan to Central Engineering,” Benedick said, “and her overrides and electromagnetic weapons, so she can fight this war—and all is forgiven, Angel.”

Easier said than done. They fought through Engine one meter at a time as it shattered all around them. Their ragtag collection of rescuees grew, and Benedick had the sense before too long that the space bowered by Samael was shrinking. Hemmed in on all sides, he asked, “Is there a problem?”

“I’m losing,” Samael said simply.

Jordan looked up, her armor clicking as she heaved her shoulders back. “I’m going ahead alone,” she said. “If I get there, I’ll send help.”

She bolted away, leaving Benedick reaching after her, his armored hand closing on thin air.

Samael said, “I could countermand her armor.”

“You could also get her killed,” Mallory said. “Let the girl go. It’s no more dangerous than staying here. And she might win through.”

   The world came apart under Dorcas’s fingertips, and though she wept, she kept on shredding. She pulled the Bridge apart, and Engine, knowing that it was a mistake to start at the periphery and work in. When you wanted to kill something, you started with the heart.

The heart. Ariane was a distraction, down there fighting out her hate on the colony world. Dorcas should let her go
for now; the world was the first consideration. She could not allow it to contaminate Fortune.

She should let Ariane go. Let her fight it out with Nova and the rest—but they were there, on the innocent world itself, and Dorcas found herself as unable to leave it alone as she could a spot of shit on her shoe. And now Ariane had enfolded the others, and Dorcas was within Ariane, and one of these others was Cynric—the absolute worst of the lot, the Sorceress herself. The manipulator, the twister of every natural order.

And there was the Book, and the strength in Dorcas’s heart, and the ghost of an unblade with which to wreak her will.

Cynric was a better target than Ariane.

   An Angel pressing at the boundaries of her flesh was less to Cynric than it might be to most. She had felt the attack, coursing along the freshly reestablished uplink to Nova, and she had not lost control of her body as the others had. But she had allowed herself to fall, for deception and the convenience of a resting position, and now she bided her time.

So she was aware of it when entropy came creeping along her limbs like nibbling mouths, wrapped in the Book’s armor of symbols.

Now
that
was new and interesting. She tasted an unblade in the hunger of it, but it had a will, and an unblade was only hunger without direction.

Cynric opened her boundaries and let the chaos in, meaning to subvert it—and found within it a mind. An unexpected mind—the Go-Back Engineer Dorcas, with shatterings of Tristen’s lost daughter larded through her. Creeping, chewing, pulling the Angel Ariane-Dust apart from within. A mind that was inexperienced in such things, and so utterly transparent to Cynric, who had in a very real
way invented the tactics of managing one’s persona with one’s colony.

Cynric was unsurprised to learn that Dorcas meant to destroy her, and with her the
Jacob’s Ladder
and all that dwelled there, in order to preserve this alien colony from contamination.

Cynric had neither the resources of an Angel nor the armor of the Book. She had only her small colony and the meat she wore like a veil. All she had was argument.

“The world wants to live,” she said, as Dorcas took her by the virtual throat and began to pull her molecules asunder. “They all want to live. Who are you to decide otherwise?”

“They do not have the right to live at the expense of others,” Dorcas answered.

It was a fanatic perspective. But Cynric had never really understood the Go-Backs, with their ideas of genetic purity and limited lives. It was only fitting, she supposed, that never having understood them, she now must bargain with one for the life of the world.