Grail (24 page)

Here, the atmosphere was warm and thick—a rich mix of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, with trace elements. Some products of decomposition, some by-products of living things metabolizing. He wished he dared breathe it; from the way the mossy soil dented under his feet, he imagined it smelled intensely green.

Danilaw’s own sensors told him that a warm body was approaching through the orchard, and in a few moments a slender figure ducked branches and appeared. He had expected a hierarchal gauntlet, and to be kept waiting and maneuvering through layers of functionaries until he could be brought before the Captain—presented with great solemnity, like the centerpiece of a feast.

But all that arrived now was an androgynous person clad in tight-fitting blacks and oranges, a halo of frizzy dark curls framing an elfin face.
Woman
, Danilaw thought, and then
No, transgendered
. The voice, when it came, was no help at all.

“I’m Mallory,” this person said. “It is a library, and I am its necromancer. The Captain is expecting you. Come in. Oh and—for your own safety—ask before you eat any fruit, please. Some of it is trickier than others.”

Danilaw and Amanda, still accompanied by the semicorporeal Angel, wound among the trees, trying not to jostle ripe fruit from limbs that dripped old Earth delicacies. He recognized oranges and limes—unless those were lemons—persimmons,
pomegranates, and something that might be apples. They weren’t round and red, though, but striped red and green and gold in faint striations. There was a dark, almost black, fruit with a glossy bloom, and there was a small red-gold one that might be a cherry—

He lost track just about the time the necromancer led them into a clearing where white cane chairs sat in a circle around a transparent-topped table. It looked like a garden party, except the two individuals rising to meet them from behind that table were the people to whom Danilaw had been speaking via radio, with ever-decreasing delays, for the better part of two months now.

The First Mate was even more attenuated and strange in person, his white hair sparkling like bleached, unspun wool in the brilliant sunlight. That sunlight—clearer and more stark than what Danilaw was used to seeing warmed by miles of atmosphere—fell through the transparent panels overhead. In this direct light, Tristen’s skin was a translucent blue, as if someone had left inky water in an antique teacup until the pigment stained the porcelain. He wore a hardened pressure suit of cool white, the helm and gauntlets removed. The assemblage taken as a whole resembled a medieval suit of armor. Over it hung a sheathed sword, of all the insane archaic devices.

And the Captain—

Danilaw had somehow thought her apparent gauntness and strange proportions were exaggerated by the effect of transmission. If anything, they had been minimized, flattened. The woman who held out her hand to greet him, as unfazed by his space suit as if it were a formal visiting gown, could never pass for an unmodified human. Stage cosmetics could have hidden her skin tone, but not the depth of her chest nor the articulation of the shoulder joints—not to mention the short, peculiar structures on her upper back that lifted her pale dress across them and sometimes
seemed to move of their own volition, working like the stump of a three-legged quadruped’s missing limb.

“I am Perceval Conn,” she said. “Welcome to my world. You are the first nonnative to set foot on her in seven hundred years.”

Danilaw was far more self-conscious about his pressure suit than she was. Instead, she cocked her head to look at it, and smiled. “Your armor is a different design from what we use,” she said. “Pardon if I stare. I had thought to offer you lemonade, but—” She gestured with self-deprecation. “I suppose Tristen and Mallory and I will have to drink it ourselves. Can you manage to sit, at least? Mallory, would you find our guests a bench, please? I don’t think the lawn furniture is likely to accommodate them.”

Before leaving, Mallory laughed—a charming lilt with an engaging hint of wickedness—and just as androgynous as everything else. Danilaw was beginning to get the idea that it was calculated, a sort of performance.

This person—Mallory—was not what he had expected from what he knew of the transgendered … which was, to be true, mostly derived from popular period music, a notoriously unnuanced and melodramatic means of understanding any given social phenomenon. Danilaw was willing to bet many a C19 romance had ended with neither party shot down dead, but you’d never tell that from the pop songs.

“Thank you,” Danilaw said, to fill the silence. “You have been accommodating. I realize that many of our requests might seem outlandish—”

“You seem reasonably cautious,” Perceval said. “Never fear. We will not judge you based on our deep martial culture.”

Her lips were quirking. Danilaw decided he was being teased. “Do you have a deep martial culture?” He couldn’t help a sideways glance at the First Mate in his Galahad armor, the black sword on his hip.

Captain Perceval turned and regarded him. When he blushed, Danilaw realized, his whole face flushed as blue as a startled dodecapus. “Well, Tristen Tiger,” she said, while Mallory returned with the requested bench, “are you a deep martial culture, Uncle?”

That explained the relationship. Danilaw had wondered if they were lovers—an alien elf-queen and her consort.

First Mate Tristen glanced down. Danilaw watched the flush quell itself in his cheeks as quickly as it had risen. “Once upon a time,” he said, with no apparent irony, “I was for any war I could get. But I got old.”

When he looked up, his transparent eyes were like the first black ice of winter—thin and perilous. Danilaw believed that Captain Perceval had shown him that on purpose, and he made a note.
They will fight if they feel they have to
.

Very well. So would his folk.

Mallory set the bench up, pausing to laugh behind a hand. “Tristen Tiger,” the librarian, or necromancer, said. “And yet you have always been such a pussycat to me.”

This time the blush was controlled more quickly, but Danilaw saw the daggery look the First Mate shot the necromancer—or librarian. So this was a sport with them, baiting the albino. And if the First Mate was not the Captain’s consort, Danilaw would lay pretty good odds that he had some sort of romantic relationship with the necromancer.

Danilaw seated himself with thanks, ignoring the uncomfortable pressure of his posterior anatomy against the inside of his pressure suit. Captain Amanda sat down beside him.

“We are,” Perceval said, “apparently something of a failure on the martial glory front. Rest assured, we do not require posturing and childish proofs of your moral fortitude. We merely wish to arrive—
Oh!
”

In his pressure suit, Danilaw did not feel the shock wave, but he saw the results: the trees knocked into sharp bends, as if by a strong wind; the crack of shattering branches and a few boles. The First Mate’s pressure suit writhed about him like a living thing, extruding gauntlets and a helm as he dove after the Captain. She hadn’t quite been knocked tumbling, as Danilaw would have expected, but she did stagger before the force of the blow until her First Mate steadied her. Mallory went down on one knee and both hands, fingers curling into the dirt as if to cling to the world by main strength.

The angel’s leaf-litter-and-straw outline guttered like a breath-whipped candle flame.

Beside Danilaw, Captain Amanda grabbed his upper arm and latched onto a neighboring citrus tree with her other hand, head ducked as if she anticipated the shock wave might be followed by a massive decompression. Danilaw braced for the same.

But there was nothing. A great stillness followed, making him realize how loud with birds and rustling this orchard library had been. The silence was broken first by Tristen saying “Is anyone badly hurt?” and then by the noises of Captain Perceval pushing his armored body off hers.

“Not here,” Mallory said with a faraway expression. “The library is structurally undamaged.”

“Engine and Rule are fine,” Perceval said, her face crossed by a similar expression. They were checking intra-cerebral data links, Danilaw understood, and spared a shudder for how thoroughly these creatures had compromised themselves before the gods of self-modification. “There was an explosion—Oh.”

She turned her head and tilted it from side to side, examining Danilaw and Amanda. “Suicide bombing? I would not like to think it of you—”

“I beg your pardon.” Amanda released Danilaw’s arm and stepped forward, squaring her shoulders. “My people do not engage in acts of terrorism.”

“I see,” the First Mate said. “Then you will be as surprised as I was to learn that your ship has exploded.”

“Dorcas,”
Samael spat, as Tristen and Mallory righted the overturned table. Tristen jumped and glared, a fist of presumptuous worry clenching around his heart, but the Angel continued. “If not she, then one of her creatures.”

Tristen could not fault him. She was the obvious suspect, she and her Go-Back clansmen. But he bridled at the accusation, and wondered how much of that was a father’s loyalty.

More immediately, there were practical considerations. And, most immediately, political ones. Fortunately, Tristen could address both of those simultaneously.

“Nova,” he said, “can we have an external replay of any monitoring of our guest’s shuttle?”

“First Mate,” she said. An instant later, a three-dimensional representation of the shallow-space lighter and the bay surrounding it resolved before them, so solid you might expect to be able to rap on it. Mallory’s library was bereft of holotanks; this was Nova in her own person, adapting the fogs and colonies that made up her corporeal form to represent the destruction of the shuttle.

“Commencing animation,” Nova said.

For a moment, there was only the silence and the stillness of space. The shuttle was a silver disc without visible means of producing thrust; Tristen suspected its drive worked by gravitational manipulation. It hung lightly in a webwork cradle extruded from the world’s long arms, apparently quiescent until a small shudder shivered the recorded image. A moment later, the shell of the vessel jumped, crazed, and came apart in an expanding dandelion clock of debris, an inertial streamer smearing forward more than back, because the world was still decelerating as she came up to the system’s habitable zone. Now the view shook
hard
—not the ripple of before, but a sharp, teeth-clenching rattle—and when it stabilized the cloud of debris was overrunning the observers.

A younger Tristen would have waited impassively as simulated shrapnel whizzed past and through him, but he was old enough now to allow himself an honest wince. But when the debris collapsed back on the point of origin rather than blowing clear or settling against the bulk of the world, he was startled enough that he felt his face smooth.
Give nothing away
.

The lessons of childhood clung hard.

“Two explosions,” Tristen said, raising his chin to meet the Captain’s eyes over the heads of their visitors. “A small one, and then the one that destroyed the shuttle.”

“A … mine?” asked the alien diplomat, with a weighty pause as if he had to search for the word in long-archived memories.

The alien Captain, Amanda, folded her arms. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Did you see the way the debris imploded?”

Tristen, for one, was still watching. The majority of the wreckage settled again into a lumpy near sphere, shifting against itself as if vibrations through the frame of the world sieved it down. Relative acceleration meant the debris
cloud was gliding out in advance of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, trailing rent cables from the docking cradle that reached after it like hungry tentacles. “I’ve seen something like it before,” he said. “When I was young.”

Perceval stood calmly, frowning, concentration deepening all the creases of her countenance. “The Breaking,” she said, in the tones of one who already knows the answer to her question.

“It’s a typical pattern when a gravity drive explodes due to mechanical failure or sabotage.”

Tristen thought Captain Amanda spoke with fair calm and pragmatism, for somebody who was now—temporarily—stranded on an alien spaceship. The jewel embedded in her forehead flashed through the faceplate of her armor.

Nova said, “It is my estimation that if I had not been able to use colonies to absorb and attenuate the shock wave, that explosion was powerful enough to have rendered the world inoperable.”

“Somebody tried to kill us all,” Tristen said.

Amanda continued, “I can’t be sure of anything until I have the opportunity to take a forensics team through the wreckage, but given the evidence of a smaller shock wave preceding the main explosion, I would lean toward the explanation that an explosive device was concealed in the
Quercus
’s quantum engine core, where it would not be evident to crew inspection while she was under way, and that it was triggered by remote. Not a proximity sensor, or it would have gone off before Danilaw and I were able to disembark.” She wet dry lips with a Mean’s pink tongue. “You know what? It’s stupid of me to waste my resources now. May I unseal, Captain Conn?”

“The offer stands,” Perceval said. In the command space they shared, Tristen was aware of her effortless ownership of the crisis. As Captain—a mature and integrated Captain—her awareness of the world was as preconscious and prescient as her undermind’s awareness of her physical
body. The ship was the Captain, and the Captain the ship. And yet, if he had not been in there with her, he would never have realized her attention was mostly directed away from the alien diplomats.

Administrator Danilaw stared at Captain Amanda, but nodded. “We won’t make it back to Fortune on suit reserve.” He touched both hands to the sides of his helmet, and after a few manipulations lifted it off. Captain Amanda followed, though Tristen watched her throat work under the smooth pink-brown skin before her nostrils flared on the first indrawn breath.