Chill (15 page)

“Nova?” he asked. “Obvious flaws in the plan?”

“Hazards of the climb,” the angel answered. “None that appear unavoidable in the early stages, as I should be able to guide you for perhaps the first half of the descent. Then, however, you will leave my sphere of influence, and Tristen’s experience with a rogue colony suggests there may be dangers. A more obvious issue is that we are uncertain of Arianrhod’s actual destination, and whether this is a feint.”

“And that last is a risk we have no option but to accept,” Benedick said. He opened a hand past Chelsea, a gesture meant to sweep her on. “Lead me, My Lady.”

Now Chelsea ran without hesitation, without stopping, without saving herself. Benedick followed after,
limiting his longer stride so as not to overrun her. His armor jarred his bones. He thought of cautioning her. Her headlong rush telegraphed all her youth and incaution. She was burning energy not easily replaced on the trail for little gain, and she might be coursing heedlessly into a trap.

But instead he let her run. The truth was, it felt good. It felt like action. So he dogged her heels and stayed alert for dangers. The transparent panels overhead drew some of his attention, no matter how careful he was to divide it. Some things he had never managed to become jaded to, and the tenuous beauty of the world was chief among those.

The structure of the world loomed in partial visibility overhead, a lattice skeleton swathed erratically with light and darkness, further structures gleaming dully through translucent gas until depth of field rendered it opaque. Benedick thought of his dark orchards in dormancy, the pruned branches crisscrossed and wet-black until they vanished in mist.

As he and Chelsea ran, the panels revealed the seemingly tremulous spire of the shaft they moved through lifting to connect to the next level. Before them, small animals scattered from the regrown grass—quail, rabbits, a long weasel-bodied predator after which the toolkit sent angry chittering. As they crested a hill—actually a bend in the tunnel and, as such, a rise that left them with no sense of ascending, because the orientation of the gravity simulators followed that of the corridor—pillars hove up, stretching from deck to ceiling, their ivory, fluted lengths discolored by foamy, grayish masses where they rose above the fronds of some thorned, twining plant.

Behind the feathery leaves, a shadow lay across the deck, and a darkness penetrated the ceiling forty meters overhead. As they drew closer, both gained depth of
field, so Benedick could see it was a great oval shaft, thirty meters across the large diameter, leading into untrammeled darkness above and below. He felt each footstep falling more heavily on the deck despite the assistance of his armor. At least the increase of gravity was incremental, rather than stair-step. Or worse, one abrupt transition.

Once upon a time, the shaft before them had been a major thoroughfare connecting the most populous regions of the world. Now it was a one-directional pit, a death fall for anything that might stumble into it.

Benedick wondered how many strata it plummeted, and how many times you would strike the wall, should you tumble down. And what the odds were of a falling body bursting through the bottom of the shaft and punching into the bosom of the Enemy? Unlikely, that last. If it had been going to happen, it would have by now. Many things must have tumbled to their deaths over the centuries.

Chelsea slowed to a trot as they arrived, and Benedick also allowed his pace to slack. He strained his sensory resources as well as those of his armor, alert to any potential ambush or unforeseen threat. More gray-cheeked parrotlets—an entire flock of twelve-centimeter birds darting through the branches of the feathery warden trees—cried shrill alarm at their approach. Wings as green as radioactive glass flashed as they mocked each other from perch to perch, yelling their nearly comprehensible imprecations. They had powder blue caps and silvery cheeks, the leading edges of their wings blurring his vision with the sharpness of lime-and-cobalt biomechanical luminescence. When they tumbled in flocks, it was impossible to track one cleanly; he thought the glow of their wings must be designed to confuse predators when they schooled, like the dazzle of shipfish and neon tetras.

Above the range of the parrotlets and the tops of the fluffy green cloud of trees, long-winged swifts swooped from nests on the pillars. They might have been darting after tiny insects—even with the armor’s telescopic vision, at this range Benedick could not be sure.

“I don’t anticipate getting past that thornbrake without harming the trees,” Benedick said doubtfully.

In answer, Chelsea stepped forward and lifted her hand. Her armor stayed dormant, but as it brushed downy fronds they first lunged, tapping her fingers. Then as if in surprise or discouragement the leaves folded tight and drew aside like a potentate lifting the skirts of hir robe. When the bough folded, a scatter of fragile bones—tiny rodents or marsupials—were revealed around the base of the trunk.

“Mimosa,” she said. “We’re too big for it.”

Benedick glanced from the folded-up leaves lying flat between two-inch thorns and allowed himself a tiny smile. “How come it doesn’t eat the parrotlets?”

“Symbiosis?” she guessed. She pulled back her gauntlet and tucked hair behind her ears on both sides. “Maybe they were engineered to live together. The mimosa keeps the rodents from eating the birds’ eggs, and the existence of birds’ nests in the mimosa lures the rodents into giving it a try?”

Something slender and green whipped from under his foot as he came forward to stand beside her. Because he did not care to touch the trees, much less trust his weight to them, he balanced with one hand against one of the four pillars that delineated the transit shaft and leaned over the abyss. It was not quite the bottomless pit he had anticipated—or rather, it was, but the walls were tapestried with enormous mushrooms, their caps forming a deceptive broad patchwork that began only a few meters below. The native color of the fungus was
impossible to discern; the top layer was encrusted with a ragged gray-white camouflage of guano. “Benedick!” Chelsea yelped.

He stepped back, into the embrace of a feathery carnivorous tree that withdrew to frame his body rather than suffering his touch. “Are there these on every level?” he asked, gesturing to a branch that swept aside from his hand.

She shrugged. “I’ve only been two up and one down. They were on all three strata I checked.” She swept an arm across the open space before them. “Aren’t they beautiful? And the swifts’ nests are edible. When we reach the next stratum down, we should collect some.”

“Saliva nests,” he said. “Those are the ones you make soup from?”

“The same.” She beamed, obviously pleased to have known something useful and lovely that her older brother didn’t for the second time in a single day. “We should tether to each other for the climb.”

“And take turns anchoring,” he agreed.

He produced a cable from the beltline of his armor and clipped it into her matching utility. A sharp tug proved the connection secure.

“I’ll climb first,” he said, but she was already swinging a leg over the edge.

“I’ve done it before. And I’m lighter,” she said. “And in my armor, just as strong. I’ll break trail.”

He stopped the cable paying out. She leaned her weight on it, shifting her hips back to tug, but he had grounded himself and was immovable.

“Benedick.”

“Until the halfway point,” he said. “Then I climb first.”

She stared for a moment, until with a wink she tapped her faceplate closed. “That’s only fair,” her speaker agreed. As he released the lock on the cable she was
over the edge and gone, her suit lights gleaming brighter and brighter in the gathering gloom.

   Downclimbing was harder, not easier, than climbing up—cautious and unpredictable work on a slick, finicky surface, with overset gravity increasing the risk. It might have been easier to rappel by turns, but while Benedick was willing to trust the topmost sibling to belay the other, and thus bear some of the weight (with the armor assisting the rest), neither he nor Chelsea were willing to rest their entire faith on one spider-strand. And so the second climber must follow under native power and skill, augmented by capable armor.

It wasn’t the strength of the monofilament cable that Benedick distrusted. It was the anchor points, which involved either the decaying gardens behind the frozen waterfall of fungus, or the fungi themselves. They were strong enough to bear their own weight—strong enough even to bear his and the armor’s, in addition, though sometimes the slenderer stalks squished or swayed unnervingly. But he thought the cable might slice through the trunks. Nowhere would the descent be a straight rappel, because six-meter mushrooms curved out from the walls like dancers’ upraised arms, their caps great round mattresses clogging the center of the shaft.

Benedick and Chelsea could not see below themselves except in glimpses, and after five minutes of climbing they also could not see above. What light fell was cut in shafts, progressively vanishing, and it wasn’t long before only the sweep of their armor lamps revealed surroundings grown eerie and strange.

The walls had never been smooth. Designed as hanging gardens, in the darkness their honeycomb terraces were home to amazing things, such as woody, pale fungi tall as trees, which bled faint, contagious, greenish light where his gauntlets broke their surfaces. His handprints
glowed for seconds afterward, until the sap wore away. Other mushrooms flourished in crevices—some pinhead-tiny, brilliant futile purples and golds on thread-fine stems revealed in Benedick’s helmet light; others broad and shelf-level, hard as tabletops, ledges you could sleep on. Chelsea and he used those to belay each other, anchoring around slippery-skinned, porous, but unyielding trunks.

The ghostly forest teemed with tiny, eyeless, pale animals, insensible to the glare of Benedick’s lights. Spiders translucent as window polymer, the joints of their articulated exoskeletons wraithlike around the shadowy organs within. Sticky-footed salamanders that flicked away from the air pressure of a descending gauntlet. Crickets spun of crystal.

Endless water dripped behind it all. The irrigation system must have broken centuries ago, along with the illumination, and in the humid darkness this was what had grown. Benedick was conscious of the wet, the ice that rimed the back corners of the terraces where even the heat of decomposition could not entirely stave off the chill of the Enemy behind. Still rotting, five hundred years later, and some of that ice must be nearly as old.

The smell tempted him to order his armor to filter—but odors could transmit vital information, and with the helmet sealed the toolkit huddled against his neck like a warm fur collar, whiskers tickling his cheek with every hesitant sniff.

He swung himself around a delicate-seeming fungus that he trusted with his weight only because his armor’s scanners told him it was reinforced with biomechanicals—internal carbon monofilament cables leveraging its grip on the nearest terrace—and caught sight of Chelsea’s lights and her sap-daubed armor below. She was paying out cable attentively, one hand on the winch, providing sufficient slack but ready to stop his
descent at any sign he was in trouble. He touched down to the main trunk of the fleshy, branching mushroom she’d chosen to ground herself on and squatted deeply to make a little extra slack. When he stood again, he unlocked the cable release and began cautiously to reclaim his side of the line. Chelsea moved away to perform the same maneuver.

“Break,” she said, and lowered herself to the trunk. Benedick, after a glance around, stretched out beside her. They could not afford to pause for long, but they would lose more time to a fall and recovery than to a few minutes spent letting their heartbeats slow and their colonies repair damage to their muscle tissue.

They rested on their backs, lights illuminating the delicate moth gray gills that formed their temporary sky. Benedick thought of feathers, of filters, of narrow leaves of ceramic seen edge-on. A haze of spores drifted over them, graying their faceplates. If they were to lie here long enough, the spores would blanket them over like snowdrifts until the filaments of rooting fungus enveloped their armored shells. They would lie entombed, encapsulated, beneath the lofty white pillars and the parasol caps. People-cysts, like frogs in mud turned to stone, like parasites burrowed into muscle tissue.

With a stretch of his hand against the sensors in his gauntlet, Benedick shut down his helmet floods, imaging, sonar. Incautious, but he wanted to feel the space they had entered for itself, and if anything attacked, he trusted his armor. His lights died abruptly, with none of the flare and fade of cooling incandescents. After a moment, without being told, Chelsea did the same. Now she was a ghost in the darkness, like the spiders, luminescent in pale smeared patches that seemed to grow brighter as his eyes adapted. Blackness settled around them, as bottomless as the Enemy. There were even stars: tiny sparks of life scurried along the walls,
moved through the miniature forests around the bases of the tree-fungi.

Through the armor, Benedick could not hear Chelsea breathing, though other things moved in the dark.

Did you help to kill them?
He wondered.
What is it you plan to do with me?

He was giving her the opportunity. It only remained to be seen if she tried to take it. If she didn’t, it would prove something. If she did, he would be anticipating the attack. He’d have to place his trust in that, and in the hopeful truth of all those old expressions about the superiority of age and treachery.

“When you did this by yourself,” he asked, “how did you manage?”

“I free climbed.”

He imagined her here in the darkness, the flash of her lights, nothing between her and the fall but her skill and strength and balance—and the technology on her back. Age and treachery, all right. In that she made him feel old.

“I’m impressed.”

She stirred, just a little, but he heard her armor scrape. He waited for her to find what she was groping after, to see if she would fill the silence with it. He breathed as he waited, and as he listened to the slow hiss in and out, it struck him that he
was
old. And that it was no use to pretend he could somehow redeem the void he’d left in the lives of two daughters by praising a sister.