Chill (35 page)

Apparently, neither did any of the others, because when Tristen laid a hand on the wall and asked via radio, “What’s that?” the only answers to return were hesitant suggestions.

“I don’t like it,” Chelsea said, with just the fingertips of her gloves resting on the ice. She knew how to handle herself in the absence of gravity; that slight contact stabilized her rather than sending her into a spin. “I have a bad feeling, you know?”

Gavin knew.

It was a seemingly bottomless trek, but before too much longer he was sure the angel was leading them in the right direction. The spaces opened out and the rents gaped wide, some showing glimpses of superstructure or swatches of sky beyond. Here, any atmosphere not frozen directly to the bulkheads had long since been lost into unsounded deeps. They were crossing into the bosom of the Enemy now, even as the world still offered what frail shelter it was able.

When they came at last to the edge of the Broken Holdes, he spread his wings into a spiderweb net, to keep the humans at least temporarily safe within the hull of the world. There was no fanfare, no sense of demarcation. Rather, the corridor they traveled simply ended, abruptly, sheared off in ragged petals that curved out like a trumpet flower’s bloom. Beyond, Gavin was aware of an elegant line of long cables, running whip-straight into the darkness, shuddering with each turn of the enormous winches that were taking them up. Lights burned out at their terminus, blurred and clouded by the nebula.

Samael stepped through Gavin’s elaborated body, but the humans paused just within, drifting an easy arm’s
length from one another. One of them—Benedick—reached out and laced the fingers of his glove through Gavin’s mesh.

“Shit,” Benedick said, in a flat and agonized voice such as Gavin had never imagined from him. Mallory grunted unhappy agreement.

“We can get there from here,” Tristen said. “It’s in a cage. Or we can wait. Judging by the action, it’ll come to us.”

“Look at the
damage,”
Mallory said.

Tristen must have looked, though it was hard to tell through the armor what he might be observing at any given time. But he stilled like a corpse, and whispered, “Oh.”

“I don’t understand,” Chelsea said.

Gavin did not observe the signal that must have flown between the brothers, but he knew it had occurred, because it was Tristen who answered her as smoothly as if it had been prearranged. “See the way that edge is blown outward?”

“Of course.”

“That’s not an asteroid strike,” he said. “It’s conceivable, I guess, that an explosion in the engines could rip the metal back that way. But if it were, how in the world could an asteroid simultaneously destroy the engines and the main reactor, all the way down here,
and
critically damage the secondary reactor back in Engineering? That’s some pretty good bowling, even on the part of God.”

“Freak accident,” Samael said, without looking back over his shoulder. “The will of God.”

Gavin was beginning to get a feel for when Samael meant what he said, and when he was mouthing lines fed him by his program. Judging by the tone in Tristen’s voice, he was, also.

Mallory countered, “This blast came from within the world.”

Chelsea jerked hard enough to send her drifting. It didn’t take her long to correct attitude, though, and when she did, she came back with a question. “Sabotage?”

When it returned, Benedick’s voice was dry again, so soft and assured that if Gavin hadn’t been able to play back the recording, he could have believed he’d imagined the earlier stress and dismay.

“We were marooned out here on purpose, friends.”

“Great,” Mallory said. “Who’s going to tell Caitlin?”

  Tristen wedged his gauntlet into a broken crevice of the nitrogen rock and let it support his weight. It held him in the truncated end of the corridor, even if the contact transmitted the grinding of the winches into his armor and from there to his bones.

His native senses weren’t enough to pierce the nebula, even with the assistance of his symbiont, but the armor managed better, providing heat signatures and a schematic drawn from the pattern of the running lights. Though he’d never seen it with his own eyes, he knew what he was looking for. There had been diagrams, holograms, extensive discussions. Out there, steadily being drawn closer, was an enormous, almost incomprehensibly complex cage and, pinned in its center like a spider immobilized by a paralytic wasp, was the surviving member of the only alien species the Conn family had ever encountered that was not of their own creation.

Over his comm, he heard Mallory whisper—with patent awe, not the affected nonchalance Tristen would
have expected—“
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

The deeps stretched out before him, chilling his soul and leaving him quailing and courageless in their regard. Despite everything he knew about the darkness, Tristen could not prevent himself from straining his eyes, and eventually a shape loomed through the smoke, as he had known it would—a teardrop trelliswork of incomprehensible size, picked out like a tree wrapped in festival lights. And at the heart of the cage, spiked through with impaling bars, a lumpy crater-pocked oblong as mottled and dark as if its surface had been daubed and smeared by ashy paws.

If the flawed ice palace of the outer Broken Holdes had awed Tristen, the Leviathan was sheerly bewildering. He felt his lips move, but whatever prayer he mouthed never passed them, and he had no objective idea what he had meant to say. He licked his lips inside his helm, where no one could see, and steeled himself to go down and meet the devil in the dark.

The others arranged themselves against Gavin’s netting around him, fingers linked through mesh, all peering into the darkness. Tristen didn’t turn his head to regard them: his sensors told him everything he needed to know.

The Enemy was bottomless, and infinite, and he—Tristen Conn—was very small, and every sense and instinct told him he should stay safe in his cage.

This time when he spoke, it was loud enough for his own ears to hear, for the suit mikes to amplify and broadcast. “Benedick, Chelsea, Gavin. You’ll engage the defenses and distract it. Mallory, I know this isn’t your kind of fight. I trust you’ll do what you can, and otherwise stay out of the way.”

“And me?” said Samael.

“With me.”

Beside Tristen, Mallory made a throat-clearing noise. “So now that we’ve enslaved this thing, mutilated it, and killed its family, we’re going to kill it, too?”

Benedick looked over his armored shoulder at Mallory. “We’re Conns,” he said. “It’s what we’re good for.”

Tristen winced, but the armor hid it.

“Gavin.” Tristen wished he could somehow dry his sweating palms. The armor was slow in absorbing the moisture. “It’s time to let us pass.”

   Jsutien seemed essentially unsurprised when Caitlin rounded on him. His chin came up, but his hands stayed relaxed on the console. She tried to bridle her anger, bring her frustration to manageable levels, but despite her best attempts to control it with her colony and will, the fury rose up like a standing interference pattern, a mass of static that threatened to drown out rational thought. She opened her mouth to speak, choked on her first sentence, and had to resort to her symbiont for additional chemical calm before she managed to get out a one-word accusation.

“Sabotage?”

Jsutien laced his fingers together and leaned back in his chair, but held her gaze shamelessly.

Caitlin advanced a step and tried again. “Sabotage, Astrogator? Is that what crippled my ship? My grandfather marooned us on
purpose?”

Five hundred years ago
, she soothed herself, but it was still her ship, and the outrage flared bright.

Finally, he lowered his eyes. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he said. “But I have no personal knowledge that it was so.”

She stared hard, but all his tells—respiration, perspiration, pulse—hinted that he was telling the truth. “It’s ridiculous,” she said, dropping into her own chair.

“It’s fanatic,” he replied. “It’s an experiment in forced adaptation.”

“The
cost,”
she said, with a gesture that swept her battered engineering deck but extended, in intention, far beyond. Lives, material, effort. “What could be worth that? It’s not rational.”

The shake of Jsutien’s head, the way he laced his fingers tiredly through Oliver’s hair, made her think of when she had been a young woman and asked her father some question he found painfully naive. Jsutien wasn’t dismissive and condescending as Alasdair had been, however; he just seemed weary and ill. “Faith is not rational. Do you know what a cathedral is, Chief Engineer?”

“A kind of church,” she said. “A big church.”

“A church that took centuries to build,” he clarified. “And could cost hundreds of lives in the building. A church that represented an absolutely absurd investment for a medieval lord. And yet they got built anyway. For the glory of God.”

“That’s sick,” she said.

The astrogator pressed the heels of both hands to his temples and squeezed, as if to press the ache back inside. He jerked his head to the tanks full of schematics lining the bulkhead. “So is this.”

   Perceval looked up from her study to find Nova standing before her. The angel could not have been there long, because Perceval had not been so far away as that—or had she? In any case, the angel did not appear impatient, and she had not yet made a gesture for Perceval’s attention.

“Speak,” Perceval said, smoothing her hands over the prickles on her scalp.

But the angel did not answer. She reached out as if to lay her hand against Perceval’s, fingers overlapping and
cradling her scalp, and then froze there, avatar rippling with waves of interference. “Nova?” Perceval said, rising.

Nova’s eyes gaped blank and wide. “Run,” she grated. But before Perceval could so much as step away from her chair, a wall of static—voices, cries, interference—crashed into her head.

As the cables draw you to the hive, at first you think to consume the creature who has come to you, and with her the splinter of enslaved entropy contained and strapped across her back. She is vermin, nothing more, and vermin are for destruction. She is frail and half dead already, a life-form so fragile she can’t even survive the benign environment of the nebula. The sons you should have had would have been stronger even as kittens; this tiny creature could never even endure the benevolent winds of a balmy gas giant. It’s an obscenity, the final degradation, that you have been infested by the spoor of such fragile parasites.

You would crush her—you are already opening yourself to destroy her—when something whispers to you,
Stop
.

Think, Leviathan
.

She could be useful
.

And though the hesitation comes from the infection that riddles you, you know that what it speaks makes sense.

You have been alone, purposeless, too long. But in your dreams you hold the power to change that. You will remake her, claim her. Rework her into something you can in truth call part of your pod.

It will be another vengeance on the vermin who have so wounded you.

   As will their destruction.

You reach out, into the microbes you have made your
own, so long, with such patience. They are poised there, usefully, having infiltrated the superstructure of the vermin’s hive, having infected it as they infected you. You have bided so long, so patiently. Maneuvering by inches. The time for waiting is passed. Now, you will take their world apart.

   Tristen dropped into emptiness as the world unraveled around him. He tumbled helplessly for an instant before he recovered his wits, tucked, controlled the spin, and emerged oriented enough to burn reaction mass and take command of his movements again. As he whirled to face the world and the others, a yielding and resilient mesh brushed him, snagged his armor, and stabilized him. It was the webwork extension of Gavin’s wing, and it held Tristen steady as he watched the Broken Holdes recede, unweaving themselves before his eyes.

“Nova!” he said, but—as evidenced by a flare of gold-white light and the rapid slowing of the deconstruction, the angel was already present, and already at war. There was no subtlety now, no infiltration or counterinfiltration. Instead, bright arcs and spikes of material slammed around the horizon of the world, peeled away from more secured regions, colonies arcing and flashing as they exploded one against the others.

Something caught Tristen’s wrist. He jerked inside the armor, swinging hard enough to wobble Gavin’s stability. The basilisk squawked protest over his intercom, but Tristen didn’t relax until he saw it was Chelsea, with Benedick just beyond her stabilizing Mallory. The necromancer did not seem at home in the absence of gravity. Behind them, Samael had faded into near invisibility, evident only as a shadow against green fog.

“I think it’s pissed,” the angel said.

“Of course it’s pissed,” Mallory answered. “We killed and ate its girlfriend.”

Samael smiled benevolently through cold-withered lips. “The Captain and Nova are under attack on the bridge, Prince Tristen. We should return the engagement and draw its attention if we would protect them.”

The man-thick cables that had bound Leviathan’s cage were evaporating—faster than the superstructure of the world, for there was nothing close to defend them—and the cage itself had begun to exfoliate in layers, like peeling bark.

Malignant colonies. Ones Leviathan had either subverted or generated. The war was on the nano level now, if it had ever left it. A war that Gavin and Samael could help fight, and so could the knights-errant, as long as their armor remained uncorrupted.

“Tristen,” Benedick said, faceless behind the mirrored gold of his faceplate. “You have the sword.”

Unbidden, Tristen’s hand stole to Mirth’s hilt. “Yes,” he said.

Without another word needed, the plan was formed. Tristen turned from his brother, the mesh of Gavin’s wings de-adhering to neatly release him. He let Mirth slide into his hand, for a moment missing Charity. An unblade would serve him better, now. It would part the Leviathan’s flesh like pulp, find its own way to basal nuclei or central circulatory cores like the tool for fatal surgery that it had been.