Chill (27 page)

“A bargain,” Tristen said. “I will submit to your trial if you will accept this object from my hand.”

“Tristen!” interjected Mallory. Tristen let the protest roll down his armor and away, holding Dorcas’s gaze the whole while.

“We could fight,” Tristen said. “Whatever your resources, Lady of the Edenites, it would not go easy for you.”

Of course it was a trap, and she knew it. Her eyebrows lifted, her pupils contracted. But it was a trap for him as well.

Slowly, she nodded.

Tristen turned his head, to where Mallory and Samael stood side by side. Gavin rocked on his shoulder, a big bird hunching itself and shuffling from foot to foot.

“Don’t fight them,” Tristen said, holding Mallory’s gaze. He suspected Gavin was his real worry, so he raised one gauntlet and touched the basilisk’s wing. “Do not fight them. Do not kill her. I will handle this myself.”

Mallory, grim-jawed, nodded.

Tristen turned back to the woman who wore his daughter’s skin. “Do your worst.” When her hand fell, the snakes struck.

   Perceval buried her feet in violets, leaning back in her Captain’s chair, and stared up at the sky as if she could see through it to the night beyond.

Not
as if
. She
could
see through it to the night beyond if she chose.

She needed merely to extend her sight beyond the range of her physical eyes, into the web of the angel’s awareness. The angel’s slowly receding awareness, which Perceval knew was being worn back by the tide of the expanding nullities.

She would rather have waded through a sewer. Not because of what that web contained, but who. Hard enough to allow that intimacy with a stranger, a machine. But to do so with a machine that contained the desires and memories of someone to whom she had been as close as she was to Rien—

Every reach into the matrix was a monstrous effort of will, the sort of exertion she could manage only in surges. She’d never wanted a lover. She’d never cared to allow anyone within the borders of herself, not since she was a child, and too small and dependent to enforce her will.

Perceval had chosen to relax those limits for Rien because Rien had proven that she would honor whatever boundaries Perceval needed to establish. But this was an abrogation of them, a violation sharp enough to make her wish she could peel her skin back with her nails and wriggle out of it.

Actually, given what she’d become, she probably could do that. And survive it.
Shed my skin
. And if skinshedding could make it better, Perceval would choose that in a nanosecond. But this violation came from within, and it was something she’d chosen, out of duty, on her own.

So many voices, inside her, clamoring. Wrestling to speak with her mouth, to move with her limbs.

She hoped it would get easier with practice. That she would stop caring about privacy, boundaries, the integrity of her self. She didn’t think she could live with it, otherwise.

Perceval drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reached outside her skin.

Nova was there, waiting, silent and aware as any colonized atmosphere. Perceval breathed deep, pulse accelerating, a tingling spreading the length of her arms to her fingertips. It was psychosomatic, she knew—and so
she shut it down, not caring for the distraction, or the reminder that she had any physical body, because that reminder was too much temptation to return there and remain.

No wonder Captains go strange
.

“Show me our boundaries, Nova.”

Nova opened the pathways and Perceval entered them as easily as spreading her lost wings would have been. She infiltrated the angel, stretched to the edges of its span of control, and felt there the prickly, eroding sensation of something nibbling. A war, a death struggle, taking place on the micro scale. Different from the one she’d lived through when angel fought angel, though. This was a battle of attrition.

“Those aren’t ours,” she said, and wondered why the angel hadn’t seen it.

—Those aren’t our whats?—

“Our colonies,” she said. “Those aren’t you. They aren’t remotely like you. And they’re not reprogramming your colony, Nova. They’re penetrating each mote so it reproduces more motes like theirs, not like ours. They’re
viral.”

   “The thing is, I’m pretty sure they’re not … native to our world. And Nova can’t tell,” Perceval said, gesturing to a monitor tank in which a schematic in blue and orange hovered, writhing uncertainly.

Caitlin folded her arms and frowned, considering her daughter the Captain’s words with a mix of unease and pride.

Perceval continued, “She can’t even tell they exist. It’s a very familiar-sounding model, if you think about it for a minute.”

“Inducer viruses,” Caitlin said, with a glance at Jsutien. She had exchanged his simple shackle for a silvery drape of nanotech chain that permitted him the freedom
to work while allowing her to retain control. He’d accepted it with grace. Understanding that her distrust was provoked by the circumstances of Arianrhod’s disappearance, he had claimed to find the precaution reasonable.

“And it’s not,” he had said, “as if I have anywhere to go.”

Now, he met her gaze and nodded. “An inducer virus, sure. Or a plain, old-fashioned virus. Not engineered. Your angel interface really can’t even sense the presence of these things?”

Perceval’s avatar shook her head. “She can
sense
them just fine. But she doesn’t seem able to notice she’s sensing them, if you know what I mean.”

Caitlin frowned. She did, and she understood what it implied, too. Something in the angel’s inherited programming forced it to overlook this particular colony structure and the individual motes that composed it. “Nova’s been instructed to ignore the infestation.”

“Yes,” Perceval said. “And instructed to forget why she was instructed to ignore it.”

“That seems like something of a radical operational choice,” Caitlin said mildly, because Benedick was not there to say it for her. Her crossed arms were in danger of becoming a straitjacket. She forced them down to her sides. “So if you’re programming an angel, why do you force it to ignore an … infestation of alien nanotech?”

“Sabotage,” Perceval said, promptly.

But Jsutien shook his head. “Immunosuppression.” When the women—present and projected—turned to stare at him, he said, “It’s how you get a transplant to take. First, you have to stop the host body from attacking it.”

“I see. And do you know something about what might have been … transplanted … into my world, Jsutien?”

He flushed cobalt. “Not specifically. But—” The swags of nanochain rustled as he shifted uncomfortably behind his console.

“Spit it out.”

The look he gave her was all startled prey, but she didn’t think he was intentionally evasive. “It’s about your sister, Chief Engineer.”

“Of course it is,” Caitlin said, rolling her eyes until she felt the muscles stretch. “Which one, I’m horrified to ask?”

“Cynric,” he said. He turned to Perceval, and Caitlin grimaced at a premonition. “Captain, Princess Cynric was the director of biosystems, and bioengineering, and chief synbiotician. The original colonies were her design. As were a lot of the first-generation synbiotes and engineered fauna. Shipfish, parrotlets … some Means.”

“And the inducer viruses,” Perceval said, with the air of someone who has just achieved a satisfying synthesis of incomplete information.

“And the inducer viruses,” Jsutien confirmed. “Yes. So I would bet that whatever’s out there is something she was working on. Possibly a weapon she meant to use against Alasdair Conn. When the three of you—” He paused delicately.

“Attempted to overthrow our father,” Caitlin finished for him. “Don’t worry, you can say it.”

“They called her Cynric the Sorceress,” he said, apologetically. “Before you were born.”

“After, too.” Caitlin smiled. “But if she had a weapon like that, Astrogator, she never revealed its existence to me.”

“Maybe it wasn’t cooked yet,” Jsutien said, with a wave at the monitor tank. “Maybe it needed time to evolve.”

Perceval rubbed her mouth. “Well, they’re sure as hell
cooked now. They’re
eating my ship
. And she’s pretty unhappy about it.”

Which led Caitlin to another problem that it was the Chief Engineer’s duty to bring to the attention of the Captain. Fortunately, this issue was a little more tractable. She coughed into her hand and said, “Have you noticed that you can’t settle on a pronoun?”

“Mom?” Lashes meshed over hazel eyes made to seem enormous by Perceval’s denuded scalp.

“Nova,” Caitlin clarified. “You call it he or she, but the gendering of the pronoun changes from conversation to conversation.”

Perceval’s brow furrowed in confusion or concentration. “Is that bad?”

“It’s diagnostic,” Caitlin said, dodging the question. “It tells me Nova is still integrating, and the distinct personalities are generating confusion, crossed signals, and hesitancy, which it may not be aware of. And that’s bleeding through its link to you. It’s your responsibility as her director to assist in the integration process.”

“Right,” said Perceval, rubbing her arms. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Caitlin lifted her chin. “Captain, it means you have to decide who you want her to be.”

  “Bring me the corpse of a cyberleech,” Benedick commanded, and so by his will it was done. He also asked the orchids to search for the remains of his toolkit—dead or alive—but they found no trace of it beyond a fluff of coat and DNA, the smear of impact. Something in the lift shaft had most likely eaten it, as the orchids had consumed most of the cyberleech casualties.

Benedick mourned its loss. It had been a fluffy idiot thing, but friendly, and he could have used its delicacy of touch and instrumentation for the necropsy once the orchids found a nearly intact cyberleech for his dissection. They brought it before him while Chelsea took her healing rest in a sheltered corner of the transfer station, and Benedick assembled such primitive tools as they had available and cleared a space to work. The data core was unlikely to be intact in a dead leech, but somewhere within it—he prayed—there must be a radio control chip.

He missed his armor in the process, because it came equipped with scalpels, pliers, and retractors, but he
managed. The cyberleech was heavy meat without, knotted muscle, and within its body cavity the circuit-twined organs popped and squished, inelastic as liver. But fifteen messy minutes later, he had it. His sleeves were caked to the elbows with iron-stinking matter, and the flat, glass-transparent chip lay on his acid-burned palm, irregular as a leaf.

In this fragile flake of crystal lay a record of the frequency and signature of the device Arianrhod had used to activate the leeches. As long as she was still carrying the transmitter and it wasn’t entirely deactivated—or, better yet, if she’d used her own colony as the carrier—he could find her now. It was an ancient and crude method of location, one that didn’t rely on angels or motes or the awareness of colonies.

It was the work of another half hour to improvise a scanner from salvaged materials, and a few moments later he was sure. He could not obtain her present position, but the tightband cast by which she had tuned the cyberleeches originated from the south. It was good to have confirmation they were headed the right way, at least.

Benedick’s own domaine lay not far from there, at the rim of everything. And he would worry about that, he told himself firmly, when there was something he could do about it.

“Got it,” he said aloud, to hear the conviction in his own voice. Because if he listened to that, he wouldn’t listen to the voice of all his own regrets and fears.

Arianrhod stopped at the edge of the world and pressed her hands against the glass. The angel’s wing braced her shoulder, though when she craned her neck all she could see of it was shadows, like gauze curtains blowing from a window, twisting layers of varying opacity. It warmed her, though, and filled her with enough strength that she
thought that perhaps in a moment or two she’d have the courage to step forward. It would not be the first leap of faith she had ever taken for her angel.

It probably wasn’t the first time he’d given her time to stall, either. She’d come with him across the Broken Holdes, through the belly of the world, braving long-abandoned spaces. She’d trusted him in habitats she had no names for, in domaines so empty they held no atmosphere through which sounds could echo. And now she looked out into the breast of the Enemy, the bottomless dark made radiant in its evanescent mourning veils.

The skeleton wheel of the world rolled on, stripping through the ghosts of dead stars, but that wasn’t what drew Arianrhod’s attention uneasily into the depths. Beyond the portal she stood within, taut dark cables of bundled monofilament stretched into darkness. Non-reflective, they would have been completely invisible had not some cautious engineer of ancient times webbed each cable with tiny lights—a few of which still burned. If Arianrhod let her colony do the math, she could reconstruct what the pattern once had been. A few calculations allowed her to superimpose an image over the existing remnant, but it seemed like a simple warning device rather than an elaborately coded message.

She stepped back from the port. “What’s on the other side, Asrafil? Why do we have to go there?”

He stirred, his wings silent when she thought they should rustle.

“This is as far as I can see,” he said. “This is as much as I know.”

“You don’t know why you brought me here?” That was more interesting than the Enemy, certainly. She turned to face him, though it gave her a chill to turn her back so blatantly to what lay outside. Asrafil stared back at her, intentionally impassive, but she could imagine from his hooded gaze and the way he glowered that
he was hiding what passed for intense emotional upheaval in an angel.