Grail (15 page)

And then she’d been dead, before Jordan ever got a
chance to do more than make her brief acquaintance, and the next thing Jordan knew, she was being awakened from the acceleration tank and told to report to Tristen Conn.

Tristen Conn, another name out of legend.

Jordan now remembered telling herself, then, that she had somehow walked into a story. In the stark light of the destination sun and some five decades later, she had to admit: the glamour wore thin after a while, and stories weren’t usually this messy. They had heroes and villains and clear-cut moralities, which was something she had come to realize was sadly lacking in the life she led under Tristen’s tutelage.

The one thing that never stopped seeming mythic, however, was Tristen himself. There were long passages of time when he might be just a commander, an acquaintance, possibly even a friend of sorts—if you could be friends with somebody who held your life in the palm of his hand. He would be jaded and calm, and Jordan in her role as his aide would find herself running interference, trying to protect him from importuning and unwelcome duties.

Until the times came when all the Chief Engineer’s, and the Captain’s, work at diplomacy would fail, and Tristen would rouse himself like a weary lion to go forth into whatever skirmish demanded his attention this time.

Then he assumed the myth like an old man putting on a stained uniform. The cloak of fable weighed him down and shaped him into Tristen Tiger, the warrior out of legend. Except Jordan would never have imagined from a storybook that a fighter who marshaled his forces with such heaviness of spirit and reluctance of hand could be what Tristen was on the battlefield: an ice-carved demon, without ruth or remorse.

The worst of the fighting had happened early on, and to Jordan’s surprise it wasn’t the radical elements among the Go-Backs who most resisted the re-alliance of Rule and Engine. Instead, a dozen splinter clans—all of which, as near
as Chief Engineer Caitlin could reconstruct, had maintained a loose series of alliances and enmities and intermarriages throughout the Broken Years—had banded together and come through the reconstructed corridors of the world as an army, intent on taking control of their destinies. Jordan was privileged, if that was the right word, to be present in Engine when the heads of Rule and Engine were discussing their strategy.

“Or something,” Caitlin Conn said, shuffling images through the display tanks with flicks of her fingertips. The incoming army was massed in the Broken Holdes, and Tristen thought they would send another expeditionary force through the River, daring its lingering, though reduced, radioactivity in exchange for speed of transit.

“Everybody’s a critic,” Tristen answered, leaning over her in his armor, helmet still unsealed. “They’ve got us on numbers. And they’re Exalt and armed. Nova says they have fléchette weapons.”

“And they are competent fighters.” Captain Perceval spoke through an avatar, like an Angel, which Jordan thought was probably appropriate. “Nova remembers that Rien and I encountered some of their warriors when we escaped from Rule. The colony called Pinion rescued us. I was quite ill at the time, and have no personal recollection.”

Her voice was collected as she spoke of fallen companions and great adventures, and Jordan watched her carefully, seeking a model for her own behavior. Like Rien, the Captain was Jordan’s own age, and if Perceval had been a knight-errant before she was Captain, and Jordan was only raised an Engineer and educated by Engine as an orphan after her mother was mind-killed and body-lost in a hull breach, well, there was something to aspire to.

Jordan was present in this conference as Tristen’s aide—sometimes he called her his conscience, which gave her an uncomfortable frisson of importance and disquiet both—and
she knew she was expected to speak if she had questions to ask or points to raise. She’d asked Tristen about it alone, seeking his dispensation to discuss her issues with him in private, but he had been adamant. “Your input is as valuable to Caitlin or Perceval as my own. And it will be broadening for you to interact with them. Challenge builds confidence.”

So now she leaned forward and cleared her throat. “Why don’t we just use the ship to fight them? Nova is all ours, isn’t she? It’s not like the Breaking Times, when the angels were all at odds.”

“They’re a resource,” Tristen said. “They have intrinsic value. To waste them would be a last resort, since we have the resources to support them, however tenuously. There’s knowledge and souls we could never reclaim.”

“Are there reasons not to consume them?”

Caitlin and Tristen shared a glance, her eyebrows elevating. “You’d almost think she was a relative.”

Jordan had looked down at her shoes, glad her fur covered the heat of blood flushing her cheeks. Hastily, she controlled the autonomous response.

“Ethical issues aside,” Tristen said, “there’s a valuable tension in competition. Removing diversity may simplify things in the short run, but in the long term it tends to create bottlenecks—in ideas and cultures as well as in genetic diversity. Those lessen our adaptability.”

   Jordan tilted her head. “You want to keep them alive
because
they want to fight you?”

Tristen smiled his haunting, half-feral smile. “Can you think of a better reason? We may have to kill a few of the leaders to make our point, but diversity—ideological as well as biological—is the name of the game.”

Jordan’s armor was not new then—she had broken it in, and it liked her—but it was not the scarred and war-weary creature it would become. When she slipped into it, the reactive
colloidal lining wrapped her like an embrace, cool at first, and warming rapidly as it molded to her body and absorbed and reflected her heat. The armor was a paradox, a cipher; it massed more than twice what Jordan did, and it made her feel strong and supported—but also light, friable, adrift, as if the strength of the machine could peel her out of her body and make her fly. Logically, she knew that some of it was the feeling of invulnerability, and some of it was the biochemical support.

It didn’t change the sensation.

She stroked a gauntleted hand down the vambrace and felt the armor purr at her attention. Inanimate objects could be so needy. She turned to Tristen with a spring in her step—and that of the armor, too, as it was excited by the prospect of an outing, though it was naïve and not as apprehensive as Jordan at the equally imminent prospect of a fight.

Tristen had come to the meeting in his own pristine white suit of mail—a clear message to anyone with eyes that his understanding of the situation implied a martial solution. But he still stayed to watch Jordan kit herself with an impassive eye, suggesting one adjustment to her armor’s program. That done and all the checks completed to his satisfaction, he allowed her to help him seat Mirth’s sheath in its clasps across his back, adjusting the angle of the blade with great solemnity. He carried an array of nonlethal ordnance—flashbangs, stickies, a sonic stun unit, and extra power cells augmented the armor’s intrinsic microwave projectors until they could be considered weaponry. Additionally, he placed a holstered pistol on each thigh, the magazines full of tightly controlled explosive rounds.

Jordan regarded him dubiously. Nanobullets, needle rounds, hard plastic cartridges—those were all reasonable options for use inside the walls of the world. Explosives—

But Tristen smiled at her, showing teeth the color of skimmed milk behind the cat blue lips. “I won’t miss.”

“All right, then,” she said, and loaded an extra oxygen canister anyway. Just in case.

They crossed gazes, and Tristen sealed his helm. “Let’s go find our army.”

Army
was a strong term for the array of war-kitted Engineers awaiting them inside Engine’s main meeting hall, but Jordan had to admit they looked impressive, garbed in armor and draped with weapons some of them probably even knew how to use. More, she suspected, understood the drones and toolkits that bobbed and hummed and sidled among them, eagerly waiting to be put to whatever design their masters saw fit.

In the shadowed doorway leading to the lectern, Tristen took a moment to pause and scan the crowd before entering the room. If what he saw pleased or satisfied him, his armor hid all sign.

Still, he drew a deep breath before he said, “We’re on.”

He led the way out into the front of the room, conversation stilling as they entered, and turned and paused, Jordan at heel. She had the uneasy sense of being something less than actually present; invisible, an accessory, Tristen Conn’s aide rather than her own person. It was as reassuring as it was irritating. Whatever happened today, responsibility would not rest on her.

Tristen smoothed his helm back, revealing his face. Now a true silence swept the lingering murmurs from the room, and every eye fastened on him. Engineers in armor creaked, hardly breathing; drones bobbled on their wheels or armatures. Tristen gazed back, seeming to catch each person’s attention in turn, saying nothing. And then he did nod, visibly, as if his assessment of what he noticed pleased him.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s give them hell.”

When he sealed his helm and turned, Jordan
felt
the wave of excitement that gathered the army up and moved it into a column behind him.
This is going to be easy
, she thought, and knew she wasn’t alone.

*   *   *

She was both right—and wrong.

The army of Engine lay in wait for the invaders at the mouth of the River, and through the Broken Holdes, which were not so broken as they had once been. Slowly, as materials and resources became available, Nova was repairing the world. Jordan stayed by Tristen, observing how he orchestrated the defense—layered positions designed to collapse into one another; flanks supported by mobile task forces; bulwarks of drones before the human resources. It was like watching a juggler at work, weaving an infinitely flexible and stunning but ephemeral pattern in midair, and Jordan despaired of understanding half of it. Each individual piece of the pattern was simple, like a chip in a mosaic, but she had a sense that if you could get far enough back you could see the whole thing as a kind of pattern, a sort of art.

The whole made her brain itch as if it were stretching.

She saw its effectiveness in action, however, though she never saw combat herself. However girded for war he went, Tristen stayed well back from the action, trusting his troops to interpret their orders and handle their parts of the fight without undue interference. He and Jordan set up a command center in a ruined garden, nothing now but frozen soil open to space and the shattered stems of flowers, ice crystals grown about them in sparkling, angry collars and halos of spikes from within. Jordan watched on her helmet feeds as the opposing group—larger by three or four than the Engineers—pushed through defense after defense, accelerating and gaining confidence, until they suddenly found themselves bottlenecked, sniped upon, surrounded, and disarmed. Jordan held her breath over the feed when the drones stood up over the attackers, looming at them from every direction, armed and armored Engineers among them. There was a long moment when she was sure the lightly armed and spacesuited attackers would
stand on their superior numbers and fight to the miserable, inevitable end.

But then Tristen gave a soft command into his armor pickups, and around the circle fifteen men and women died. The drones and toolkits massed their fire on selected targets, and those targets jerked and geysered blood and fell.

Jordan jerked much as the bodies had, shocked, but Tristen’s face showed nothing when she glanced over. Expressionless, and so he remained as the leaders of the insurrection—or their chief field agents—laid down their weapons and put up their hands.

It had been quick and nearly bloodless—and from all Jordan could see, positively elegant. She could not understand why it was that Tristen sighed and frowned and had to straighten his shoulders and pull his head up so selfconsciously when he finally went down to take their surrender.

She could not understand why it was that she herself felt so cold at her heart, and why her hands shook inside the armor as she accompanied him into the anchore where they would meet the rebel leaders.

The enemy had brought war. Tristen had done what he had done to save as many lives as he could save.

It was an act of mercy. What about this should seem terrible?

   She remembered that now, however, as he summoned her to his offices, and it filled her with fresh unease. He had never behaved to her with the least impropriety, and she had no hesitation in going because of any worries that he might enforce a sexual advantage. Besides, she suspected he had some quiet and unadvertised relationship with Mallory, though it had never seemed proper to investigate.

No, her discomfort was not on her own behalf.

But nor was it for any other reason easy to identify, until she considered that when Tristen summoned her, inevitably, a way of life seemed to come to an end.

That he waited for her standing by the small real window—not a screen—that pierced one bulkhead of his office was no reassurance. For a routine meeting, he would sit at ease, and ask her to sit as well. Now he turned, his hair drifting like frost-feathers in the wind of his movement, and forced a smile. “Jordan.”

“You wanted me, First Mate?”

The silence dragged.

When she widened her eyes to meet his gaze, he let his shoulders settle and said, “You are Chief Engineer of the world now. By order of the Captain—”

“But—” she interrupted, or would have interrupted if he had not silenced her with an upraised palm.

“Benedick Conn recommended you,” he said. “And I seconded it. Do you argue with his judgment, or mine?”

“Chief Engineer,” she said, tasting it. Then she shook her head and smiled ruefully. “For the next thirty days.”

“The last Engineer of the world,” he said, and held out a closed hand. She raised hers under his; gently he laid something on her palm. She closed her fingers over it.

When she uncurled them, she saw what she had expected—and never before, honestly, expected to hold. The sunburst of Engine, with a real, dark, flawed ruby—mined on Earth—set in hammered gold.