Chill (21 page)

“Toolkit,” he said. As his helm unsealed, he felt its silken fur uncoil from around his neck. A second later, it slithered the length of his arms. It plugged itself into a wrist outlet and reared up, spreading its fragile-seeming arms wide.

The liver-colored things sizzled but made no other sound. Like insects frying in the concentrated rays of the sun, they writhed, convulsed, and scaled from the trunk in showers, tumbling away below. Some, he heard hit solidly—a meaty thump as they smacked into a trunk or a limb. Some just brushed the leaves aside and vanished into the depths.

It didn’t take long, which was a godsend. Microwaving burned stored power, and unless he was moving the armor couldn’t use his own kinetic energy to recharge its batteries. Unassisted, the power cells wouldn’t support this kind of expenditure long—and the toolkit couldn’t have handled that sort of burn without his armor’s help at all. But after less than ninety seconds, the only attackers remaining were the ones clinging to Chelsea and a few others too close to her to burn.

Benedick missed his anchor cable now. As the toolkit scampered back inside the safety of his helm, he grabbed the limb supporting his weight—and the equal weight of his armor—freed his legs, and pumped twice hard to make the swing-and-grab to Chelsea’s side. He couldn’t hear her, but it was possible that the fleshy, leechlike attackers were blocking her comm out but not in.

“It’s me,” he said reassuringly, as she got her gauntlets under the edge of a leech-thing on her faceplate, peeled it off, and cast it aside.

Like the others, it made no noise as it fell. He could see that the clear panel of her faceplate was etched where the thing had gripped her; he might have improved her vision slightly, but only just.

“We’ll get those off you,” Benedick continued, and reached for one that was humped up, prying at the join of her chest plate and helm.

It took doing. The ones next to it grabbed at his fingers with toothed, suckery margins. The one he meant to dislodge was strong, slick with mucus that scarred the fingertips of his gauntlets, and prone to firing off blue sparks when touched. Benedick’s armor handled the electricity well, but when he finally got the little bastard off Chelsea’s neck, it writhed in his fist and wrapped his gauntlet. His armor reported a sharp and immediate drop in power.

“Leeches,” Benedick said, disgustedly, and slammed his hand against the branch he was hanging from to crush it.

At least that worked, resoundingly. The creature sparked and went limp. As he threw it away he caught a glimpse of ripped muscle, a translucent slime of blood, and through that, the dulled gleam of circuitry.

Chelsea’s armor arced, her struggles weakening. She still fought, but sluggishly; all her strength was devoted to moving the armor, which now impeded rather than assisted her. Benedick hooked his legs around another nearby bough to free both hands. Now that he had a better idea of the enemy, he didn’t bother peeling them away. He just pressed paired thumbs into the center of each, feeling for a power source or heart. The muscle was tough, resilient. Fibers mushed unpleasantly aside until he felt things crunch.

He had gotten three of them off her—and could make out the shadow of her conscious face and open eyes behind the milky, etched faceplate—when the second wave arrived, dropping through the leaves above with a patter like falling rain. He swung his hands up, summoned the toolkit, and opened fire without concerning himself with whatever might be behind them. There
were times to worry about collateral damage. This was not one.

The first group died as they fell, sizzling and smoking. Behind them came more, though, in such numbers that he couldn’t kill them all. The dead ones knocked his arms aside, then living ones struck and clung. He lost the toolkit when they knocked it from his wrist. He heard it shriek as it fell, and flinched from the sound.

Bioweapon
. Quite obviously, because nothing would evolve to keep attacking when it was being so decimated.

Through the armor he felt no pain, but he heard the hiss of the ablative coating being eaten away, and the armor transmitted the hump and suck of the leeches’ suckered bellies all too well. Power levels spiraled; the biomechanicals swarmed across his visor, obscuring vision with their flat, fleshy bellies, as if someone had thrown handfuls of organ meats across his face. He scraped his fingers across the helm, squeezing, and felt the muscle and fluids of the one he gripped pulp and ooze around its internal core of electronics and wires. Whatever scraps were left, he cast aside, and reached for the next leech, only to halt as something whipped softly around his wrist, restraining him. He pulled, feeling elasticity but no give. Something in them blocked all the armor’s extended senses. Chelsea was somewhere to his left, still hanging from the cable, her armor powered down and incapacitating, but he couldn’t feel her. If he could reach—

But now something tangled the other arm as well, and stretched against his waist. More and more, but whatever entangled him was also dragging the leeches off. He caught flashes of bright gold and fuchsia movement beyond his scarred, milky faceplate. Through an unscarred corner he thought he saw a beribboned, crested head like that of a fanciful dragon toss one leech
up and gulp it down like a pelican gulping a fish. Then he felt pain, the burn of something along his left arm, and would have struggled as tendrils infiltrated the crushed, eroded elbow joint and pried the vambrace loose.

It slithered away. He would have snatched after it, but something held his wrist. Gently. More gently than he would have expected.

“Who are you?” he said, as the faceplate opened, too, and he became conscious of another burning on his face. The digestive fluid of the leeches, which he was feeling now as adrenaline ebbed. “Who are you? What are you? What do you want?”

Pain faded. Something sticky and cool bathed his arm; tender fingers—or something—picked around the edges of his wound, debriding. He blinked, saw bright silken fabric ripple before his eyes, and bent to peer around it to look for Chelsea.

She slumped two meters off, armor cracked open and bright swaths of green gel decorating her face, her shoulders, and a portion of her chest and collarbone that was marked with the angry red of acid burns. Petals hung all around her face and head like halos—a spray of enormous orchids, white harlequined with thick, wet-looking crimson—and something had disconnected her cable and hauled her to firm footing on a broad limb. That seemed friendly, but Benedick was not comforted by the green coils at her wrists, waist, and about her throat.

Green coils that matched the tendrils restraining him.

“Hello?” he said, as he was lifted to his feet. “Hello, who are you?”

“Be still,” said a voice, awkward and breathy. Not human, and more like the sounds of silk rubbing silk than those produced by vibrating vocal chords with air pushing through them. “Don’t struggle, mammal.”

“Who are you?” As Benedick lifted his face to return what
felt
like a stare, all he saw was a cluster of stems decked with five giant blossoms, mackerel-striped in violet and yellow, each of which bore a suspicious resemblance to a crested, patterned head with eyespots, frills, and a sharp-toothed, undershot, bulldog jaw. All five bent around him, turning like mirrors focusing light, and their fringes of ruffled petals lifted and flattened like the crests of a quintet of harpy eagles.

Behind the blooms, he had the impression of an asymmetrical body assembled of fat, irregular tubers and bladelike leaves as wide as his torso. They lay flat against the tubers now, like the plates of a spiny echidna, but he had reason to suspect that if the orchid was unhappy, they might not always look so sleek.

“We’re the carnivorous plants,” the voice said, words made of a sound like the rubbing together of hands. “Now be
still
, mammal. You’re heavy. And you would not like the drop.”

  The mammoth was still screaming.

Gavin, perched on Mallory’s shoulder, hid his head under his wing as Prince Tristen and the angel Samael discussed options in low tones. Gavin would have imagined Tristen ruthless, but the First Mate had made it flatly obvious that he had no intention of slaughtering the infant mammoth unless no other humane option remained.

Unlike Tristen, the basilisk wasn’t distressed by the uncertain fate of the mammoth, but rather the recurrence of what was becoming a chronic sense of déjà vu. He’d been here before; he had seen this before—the broad strokes, if not the particulars. It shouldn’t have left a worm of unease gnawing his complacency, but there was something about the mammoth, in particular, that came with a kaleidoscope of unresolving images.

Gavin had never suffered disorientation or the impermanence of memory before the last few days, and the experience was one he would have gladly forgone. Meat people lived with this all the time. It was no wonder every last one of them was clinically insane.

Mallory withdrew a step or two, head tilted, unwilling to intrude into this argument. Gavin, forcing his filters to process the overload of fragmentary remembrances, pulled his head from under his wing.

Whatever Tristen had just said, Samael protested. “Sentiment has no place when it comes to the engineering of biospheres.”

Tristen had folded his arms. “Give the mammoth its chance.”

“Because there’s a place for an elephant on a spaceship?”

“The Builders made one,” Tristen said. “They brought it here and ordained its birth in this time of trial and desperation. Who are we to gainsay their insight?”

Gavin forgave Tristen that last, because he said it with a mocking lilt, but he didn’t blame Samael for his flinch, the contraction of all his motes and scraps as if around a blow—or the headshake that followed.

“Besides”—Tristen paused, his hand curling restlessly around the pommel of his sword as if to give the speaking weight—“are we not on Errantry?”

Samael looked away, unable to deny the truth of Tristen’s statement. Instead, he fell back on the practical. “It won’t reproduce.”

Tristen’s voice went wry, even muffled through Gavin’s feathers. “How do you know? Maybe somewhere out there is its perfect complement, already bumbling through some Heaven on broad calf feet.”

“We must consider lifeboat rules, My Prince. It will die,” Samael said. “And whatever resources it consumes along the way to starvation may result in the deaths of other life-forms, ones with a better chance of long-term survival. It will starve, and perish in great travail and suffering.”

“That is,” said Tristen, in a voice so strange that Gavin stretched his head forward on its long neck, the better to listen, “the purpose and privilege of life, my
dear Angel of Poison. And as your First Mate, I command you to respect it.”

The angel made a small noise—perhaps of protest, perhaps of acquiescence. Gavin supposed that in the final analysis, the two were not mutually exclusive.

Tristen continued, “But surely I don’t need to remind you of that. The mammoth gets its chance.”

Mallory stepped forward, startling Gavin, who remembered not to clench his talons only when he felt the necromancer wince. Mallory had lived and prospered by staying aloof from conflicts between the powerful and by serving Samael quietly and well, so even Gavin was startled by what was said. “At the Breaking of the world, Samael, there were creatures such as this brought forth. Some lived and evolved, and some fell to the inevitable. If we could predict which species would survive and flourish, would we not be like unto gods?”

Mallory spoke with the conviction of experience, leading Samael to sigh and let his shoulders drop. “And its competitors?”

That was the glint of light off a toothy grin. Perhaps Tristen was ruthless after all. “Then they shall by the hand of God learn to adapt, won’t they, angel?”

Mallory tensed beneath Gavin’s feet, but Gavin did not need the unconscious warning. Gavin knew Tristen’s expression of old: the Conn look of eagles, of certainty and command. They might be wrong, the family. They might even understand, in a sort of hypothetical, abstract fashion, that it was
possible
for them to be wrong. But neither before Rien nor since had Gavin met one who acted, even occasionally, as if she believed the possibility could apply to her.

It was a failing with which he had a sense he once had understood—in a sort of hypothetical, abstract fashion. As something that was possible. As something that could happen
—had happened
—to somebody else.

Now, staring through closed eyes at the improbable mammoth, comparing its massive, present reality with the fragmentary oneiric memories that harassed him, he understood much better the hazards of grandiose plans.

But the principles of inertia did not permit what had been set in motion to be casually set aside. Whatever the Builders had intended, they had been earthbound souls, of limited vision. They had been less than what they spawned, constrained by assumptions and fanaticisms, their creativity rooted fast. The Conns had grown beyond their progenitors. And whatever their failings, their delusions, their tendency to overreach, the tragedies they might inflict upon those who looked to them for guidance—

—the Conn family was not earthbound.

It seemed Samael knew the stare as well as he did, because the angel folded his leaf-litter arms over his scarred leaf-litter chest, grimaced, and shook his hair over his eyes. The argument was ended.

Samael said, “What would you have of us, First Mate?”

Tristen nodded a small acknowledgment and replied, “Free the mammoth, angel.”

“And once I’ve freed it, First Mate? What would you have me do with it then?”