Chill (7 page)

The angel said, “Portions of George’s data have been preserved in archive. As time passes and I am able to allot more resources to noncritical functions, I will develop subroutines and personalities optimized for interaction with the crew. I am sorry not to be able to offer this service now.”

If tone were any guarantee of sincerity, it was as sorry as it claimed. That humility and joy in service could not have come from Jacob Dust or Samael, and as Tristen picked his route, he tried not to dwell too long on the probable source. “I can’t keep calling you ‘the angel.’”

“My Captain has not yet seen fit to provide me with a name.”

The naming would be a difficult acknowledgment that what had been lost was never coming back. Tristen shook his head. He didn’t envy Perceval the responsibility, or the choice.

“I’ll speak to her when I get a chance,” he said, and wondered if the silence that followed was the angel’s gratitude, or if he had offended. He interrupted the awkwardness to ask, “How soon can we make this space viable?”

“We’re currently replenishing atmosphere throughout the intact portions of the world,” the angel said. “Structural repairs are the next priority, and reestablishing communications and telemetry throughout the world. The shipwide biosphere is also critically destabilized, and fermentation and putrefaction products are becoming a significant issue. However, some of them, when
filtered off, are useful. Methane more so than cadaverine.”

Tristen snorted. “You did a nice job on the bridge.”

“It’s important to provide a pleasant space for human components,” the angel said primly.

Tristen smiled inside his helm. “It’s all right to admit affection.”

Silence answered, as if the angel were waiting for him to complete the thought. The next piece of corridor was tricky, however, and he needed hands and feet and attention to fend off ragged obstacles he drifted through. Deliberate slowness chafed. Somewhere in the darkness beyond was Arianrhod, and every second he lost was a second that maintained or increased her lead. He fretted his fingers against the insides of his gloves, and forced himself to concentrate. There: a hand on the left, a delicate push. A half rotation would carry him across, and he could drag a boot on the wall to correct his spin. There was nothing behind that patch that should prove hazardous, if his foot broke through the fatigued surface.

He could have used attitude jets or allowed the armor itself to handle the maneuvers. If he had absolutely needed to risk making his way down the corridor at speed, he might have been forced to. Even an Exalt was no match for expert hardware under those conditions. He should have enough air to get him to the far end. That was what mattered. And if the suit heaters whined against the cold, well, there wasn’t too much to be done about resources bled off into the Enemy now.

As a younger man, he would have chanced haste. As a younger man, he had more than once gambled speed against certainty. There were occasions upon which the gamble had paid off.

And at least one upon which it had cost him dearly.

So now he chose meticulousness and prayed to the Builders that it was the right choice, after all.

“I’ll need to replenish consumables soon,” Tristen said.

In the person of his armor, the angel replied, “On your left, in seven point five meters, you will find a breach to Outside. You should not proceed past it, as the air lock ahead is damaged, so the bulkhead door between this corridor and the next domaine is deadlocked against decompression. However, if you proceed Outside, it is a relatively easy jump from here to an intact air lock on a lightly damaged holde. From there, you can make your way inside.”

“How far is it to biosystems from here?”

Instantaneously, the angel provided a schematic. “This may be out of date.”

Colored ribbons suggested travel routes and illustrated times. Tristen, from the bridge, had less far to travel than Arianrhod would, if she were indeed coming this way. He had only to go the length of a spoke from the hub of the world. Then, depending on where he found himself in relation to Rule, he could work his way around the short inside arc. Even traveling fast, it would take Arianrhod several hundred hours to cross the entire width of the world without transport.

The angel continued, “This area is one of the nexuses that have gone dark within the last twelve hours.”

“Suspicious.”

“Indeed.” The angel paused. “Of course, we could be being misdirected toward central biosystems, and Arianrhod may have unanticipated plans.”

“I am,” Tristen said, “counting on it.”

As he caught himself against a curve in the corridor, his armored hand punched through the bulkhead. Tristen plunged into the wall up to his shoulder. When he drew the limb back, a colony haze surrounded it, symbiotes
at war like anthills. He could see the external layer of glossy white ceramic ablating.

“Angel?”

“One moment,” the angel said. “What seems to be the problem, Lord Tristen?”

“My colony is under attack by a rogue symbiote,” he said. “Can’t you see it?”

“I detect a structural weakness in the bulkhead and your armor,” the angel said. “But no colony, or even individual units.”

“It’s eating my armor,” Tristen said. “I need a solution.”

“My recommendation would be to detach the affected section and run,” the angel said. “When you’re clear, I’ll sterilize the area with an EM pulse. If it’s a symbiote that’s lost its mind, it might just eat anything it touches.”

“Shit,” Tristen said, and complied. His armor could always grow another vambrace the next time he fed it. Still, he felt a little pang as he left it behind, watching it dissolve into a swirl of vapor.

The breach glimmered before him, easily identified by the glow that fell through it to illuminate the nearby wreckage. With a delicate touch he arrested his forward momentum. Some of it converted into spin when a torn bulkhead shifted unexpectedly, but he spread his body as wide as possible in the confined space. Once that slowed his rotation, he was able to bring himself to a halt with brushing fingertips. At last, he rested just inside a ragged two-meter tear in the hull, peering from it in his armored shell like a crab peering from shelter.

His radiation detectors peaked, chittering. The walls of the world offered some protection. Beyond the serrated lip of the breach, the bone-and-knob skeleton of the world rose black and stark against the ghostly silver-green of the newborn nebula—a tombstone for
the shipwreck stars that had warded the
Jacob’s Ladder
so long.

Tristen felt the contraction of panic at the base of his spine and let the fear wash through him for a moment.
Open space
, he told himself.
It’s nothing to fear. There is nothing out there that can hurt you
.

Unlike in here, where there were rogue colonies and shifting wreckage.

The danger lay in crevices, tight spaces where one could become trapped. If you stayed in a trap long enough, it could come to seem like a shelter.

Ariane had locked him away in a terrible hole, and he had stayed there until Rien, Perceval, and Gavin had rescued him. Even by Conn standards, he had been in his trap a very long time.

But his nervous system didn’t understand that. It only knew what it had become acclimated to: the warm dark, the safety of wedging one’s self into a den. His responses recognized the yawning emptiness of the Enemy as something to fear.

Funny to think that the world, and he, and everything else in it, were rushing through the void on the brink of a shock wave, moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And all of that meant nothing. It was relative velocity that mattered. Once Tristen left the hull, he would be sailing along with it—but it would continue to turn without him.

In Tristen’s youth, Com and Engineer alike had considered it something of a point of pride to reach the far side at the appointed place without the use of attitude jets.

“There?” Tristen asked, marking a likely air lock on his display.

The angel agreed. “It will not be too challenging a trajectory.”

Tristen, careful of his armor as he slipped between shredded lips of metal, chuckled. “Easy for you to say.”

He drew his legs clear of the rift and balanced for a moment against the skin of the world. All that nothing wheeled before him, sickly under a veil of irradiated gas. His stomach clenched; bile stung his nose. It was the most basic, the most primitive of instincts.
Don’t fall
.

Pushing against it was like pushing against a wall. He’d never been afraid of the deeps before—properly wary, sure, but this was different.

How broken am I?
he wondered, sparing a wrathful moment of bitterness for Ariane Conn, who had made it so. He closed his eyes and adjusted his chemistry, flooding his neural receptors with soothing molecules—a trick he hated, but if he couldn’t find his native courage, he’d have to borrow some.

With a mighty kick, Tristen leapt into the cold.

  At first, the trail was plain. Benedick went armored, careful, skirting the edge of a vast causeway that connected Engine to the world at large. This was not how he, Tristen, and Rien had entered the Heaven at the end of the world. They had come to Engine running flat-out, along the bank of a poisoned river inhabited by—possessed of—Caitlin’s helpful familiar demon, a djinn named Inkling. But the river was dead now, Inkling consumed like all his brethren into the new angel of the world.

Benedick found he missed Inkling, even if the river had nearly killed his daughter, his brother, and himself. It wasn’t a reactor-coolant leak’s fault that it was poisonous, any more than a snake was to blame for being a snake—or the Enemy for being the Enemy. One did not have to blame or fear a thing to treat it with respect.

He tried to remember that he could feel the same about the angel. It was not the angel’s fault that Rien had died to make it real. And now—with the angel’s intervention, with the controlled release of radiation-isolating
microbes—the poisoned river could be made clean, even this water reclaimed.

It would be good to reclaim something.

But this was not the time to be concerned about such things. Now, he had the arch of metal sky overhead. Some of the shielding panels were closed against the cold of the Enemy beyond, some jammed open so the chilly green light of the shipwreck nebula shone through, a few of the brightest stars visible beyond. He had the turf underfoot, thickly planted in dandelions and clover, still healing from the trauma of acceleration, the stems of grass here and there bent by a careless foot. He had the chill, thin air, not properly circulated, and so potentially still holding a scent.

He had the spotted-and-striped, inquisitive toolkit, its fluffy tail jerking like a carelessly cracked whip as it sniffed delicately between blades of grass, bending them aside with fragile-seeming hands, tremulous fingers cast from high-impact ceramic for strength. Carbon monofilament tendons moved beneath the little animal’s skin.

Benedick kept half his attention on his sensors and all his armor’s weapons online. Occasionally, the toolkit turned to him and made a soft
prrt
, as if to assure itself that he was following close and paying heed.

This was not its primary function, but its sensitive olfactory, tactile, and visual receptors—optimized for locating tiny malfunctions in elaborate machinery—were adequate to the task. It was needed; whosoever had taken Arianrhod had left little trace of their passage. Benedick knew Arianrhod’s knightly skills—the equal of his own—and if she were moving under her own power the trail indicated no diminishment.

So whoever had released her was her equal, and either armored or using some other countermeasure, because the toolkit could not trace that individual’s scent. Benedick trailed on—watchful, speculating. The farther
he traveled, the worse the environmental damage became. When they came to a point where there was no egress from the causeway, he lifted the toolkit off the ravaged turf and let it snuggle against his neck. Here he broke into a distance-eating jog that was as fast as he could move while remaining observant to tripbeams and traps. Eventually, the causeway separated into five great branch tunnels joined like the fingers of a hand.

Benedick knew from experience that once one traveled a step or two into any given path, relative gravity was established. Each causeway then curved to follow a divergent path: one overhead, one branching each left and right, one leading toward his feet, and one that would continue directly forward. But he paused before entering the lobby where they connected, cautious. All the Conns in the world were not dead, and Arianrhod’s history of alliances with his family was … complex and multigenerational. And his family were nothing if not dangerous.

Benedick pinched his lower lip, considering. The broad lobby before him was designed neither for defense nor stealth, but rather for ceremony. Once-stately palms, shattered now, strained at their root-cables. The soil they’d helped stabilize lay in clods and heaps, torn vegetation raising the scent of rot. But though the fronds of the palms curled and crisped at the tips, a haze of green so pale it was almost silver already covered the harrowed mounds, hair-fine blades of grass seeking the light.

There had been waterfalls here once, pools beneath the palms, a branch of the River that ran clean and fresh to welcome visitors to Engine. Benedick suspected the outflow was pooling now, undercutting the soil, unless the hull had been ruptured somewhere beneath the dirt and precious water was sublimating into space. Or unless the angel had already managed to allocate resources to begin repairs. Sealing the hull would be its first priority.

He scanned the space, checking for heartbeat and machinery noises as well as body heat. There were insects, birds—such as a flock of gray-cheeked parrotlets, their green wings flurrying as they darted from broken tree to broken tree. Strident cries evoked a memory of ancient speech; some of the tiny birds were long-Exalted, and so old their mimicked language was the language of the Builders.