Chill

11 aimless angels

Caitlin would have far rather returned Jsutien to an acceleration bay or, failing that, a hospital tank, but he was awake now and she was stuck with him. Well, technically the hospital tank was still an option, but an Exalt didn't need that much resource support for a simple skull fracture, and Caitlin thought Jsutien would require little attention while sleeping off his injury.

Also, she needed him and she didn't trust him, and she didn't really want him out of her sight. So she left him tucked in a corner of Central Engineering, one arm nanoshackled to the magnetized leg of his cot. While he snored she directed survey operations and created prioritized lists of existing damage, impending damage, and available consumables for Nova's convenience.

Status one was to repair, patch, or at least seal off catastrophic injury to the world--anything that represented an immediate danger to integrity, biosystems, or consumable or static resources. The irony being that many of those consumable resources would be consumed in the process of effecting the necessary repairs.

A quandary, but if God had made the world perfect, there would be no need for evolution.

Pursuant to those goals, Caitlin instituted protocols geared toward halting the expansion of null zones and the establishment of new ones, diagnosing the source, and regaining control of existing ones as rapidly as possible. Reinforcing the superstructure, collecting raw material, and choosing an immediate harvestable destination were also driving priorities.

Further down the list fell niceties such as stabilizing the world's biosystems. Caitlin ranked crew comfort close to last. They could stay in the acceleration pods.

And if it came to pass that she needed to sacrifice some percentage of them to keep the rest alive--an eventuality she was not yet prepared to face as anything but a hypothetical--it would be easier to make the decision if they were still in suspension.

Seated at the console Benedick had repaired, Caitlin rested her forehead against the backs of her fingers and sighed in exhaustion.

"We're still bleeding atmosphere and water?" She rubbed her aching hands. Her overstressed colony wasn't managing much damage control against the small aches and agonies of life. For a moment Caitlin thought of Benedick, the strength of his hands and how they could ease the ache. She bit her cheek and swept memories aside.

The angel's voice was soothing and neutral. "Faster than we can replenish them, Chief Engineer. At this point, we are mostly losing consumables by capillary bleed, though the Captain has caught two more catastrophic unmakings, though only by having the Captain review feeds from external video motes. Generally a tiny leak is harder to locate and seal than a vast one, but--"

"You're still having problems seeing things?"

"It is a concern," the angel admitted.

Caitlin was already learning to determine the new angel's moods, despite its tendency to sound more methodical than personable. A matter of integration, she thought. As it brought its shattered personalities closer to consensus, it might find more range and depth of response. In the meantime, much of the processing power that could otherwise have gone to independent action and autonomous thought was bound up merely continuing the process of integration. And Perceval was a relatively inexperienced Captain, which meant that much of the executive guidance and disaster response had to come from Caitlin, the Chief Engineer.

A Chief Engineer who right this instant bitterly missed Susabo, the former Angel of Propulsion. Or even Inkling, who would not have had to be so carefully led. The most frustrating part was that she knew Susabo and Inkling were both present there inside Nova, somewhere--just not yet entirely compiled into the whole. Caitlin itched to pound her fists on the console and scream "Integrate faster!"

But such additional pressure was unlikely to net her good results.

She took a deep breath and said, "Nova, at this point would it be more efficient to allocate those resources to increasing our speed, thus feeding the ramscoop faster? If we can counterbalance the lossage with increased input--"

"My calculations indicate that that is a viable option," the angel agreed. "We will still be limping, and eventually we will outstrip the blown-off gas cocoon of the supernova, at which point collectable resources will become more sparse. We will need to be ready with other options. Chief Engineer, not to interrupt myself, but--"

A hesitating angel was never a good sign. "Spit it out."

"Samael wishes to speak to you."

Caitlin wondered if her symbiont couldn't at least do a little something about the headache. She set her armor to provide more back and neck support, and said, "Put him on."

Because he was communicating with a high-ranking Engineer, Samael did her the courtesy of generating only a partial avatar--a gleaming focal point that materialized with a polite chirp. Quickly and efficiently, he explained that the world appeared to have reset in some fashion, and as part of its last-ditch effort at survival, it was not only releasing life-forms selected at random from its genetic banks, but altering them.

"The biosphere is mutating under stress," Caitlin restated, to be sure she understood.

"That appears to have been what the Builders intended."

If he were material, or possibly just present, she would have thrown something at him. "Well, stop it, Samael."

"I haven't the strength anymore for ventures such as that." When Caitlin glared at Samael's avatar, he added, "I am not equipped to lie to you."

"Right," she said, and restructured her to-do list. "Give me back to Nova, please."

Samael's confident, glowing polyhedral winked out, to be replaced by Nova's silver-haired avatar. Whether the young angel thought her crew would be more comforted by a face to respond to or whether she sought the reassurance of a human seeming for herself, Caitlin did not know. She was simply grateful that Nova had chosen a form so unlike any of her component parts. It broke her heart enough to look in the angel's alien eyes and catch a fleeting expression that reminded her of Rien. She did not care to imagine how she would have borne it if the features that wore that manner resembled her adopted daughter's. Better for Nova to be as different as she could.

Then she wondered when she had begun thinking of the angel as a she. There was nothing about Nova to indicate or imply a sex, and as Caitlin knew them, the vast majority of angels had always been he by courtesy, much as ships were she.

Focus, Chief Engineer, she reprimanded herself. Funny how the alienation of a title could make you hold yourself together in the face of the impossible.

Caitlin said, "Thank you, Nova. I'm going to list off our immediate complex of problems as I understand it, and I'd appreciate it if you'd check my logic and see if I've missed anything."

Frowning, the angel nodded. "Carry on."

Verbalization was a slow and monodimensional means of exchanging information, but it demanded linearity and precision, so Caitlin chose to speak out loud rather than to transmit a problem matrix. In a measured fashion, she listed everything she'd previously considered, added Samael's intelligence on the Jacob's Ladder's biosphere reboot process as an immediate concern, mentioned the pursuit of Arianrhod and Asrafil, and finished, "And there are the other denizens of the world to consider. Not everyone and everything who didn't make it into tanks will have died. The biosphere--especially the synbiotic and Exalt biosphere--is proving to possess remarkable resilience. Perceval needs to understand that there are probably people out there who have no understanding of their environment or the realities of the situation. People who will, unfortunately, need to be ... educated. And then governed."

The euphemisms felt gritty on her tongue. She worked her mouth around where they'd passed as if to rid herself of the taste.

"Disaster mitigation is an ongoing process," Nova said blandly, leading Caitlin to wonder (again) exactly what the angel's facade concealed. When she had time, she was going to procure the Captain's approval to pin Nova into a corner and do some serious spelunking around the inside of her program.

It was possible that the angel might even approve of her interference. If Caitlin had enough unassimilated bits of other people kicking around the inside of her skull, she'd be crying for a competent code intervention.

The angel said, "It's a problem of management as much as anything. The pendulum could still tip us into catastrophic collapse."

The angel's words conjured an image of the world as a ghost world, burning lifeless between the stars, bored and aimless angels at play among its silent struts and habitats.

Caitlin said, "You'd survive it."

"I would be lonely."

Whether she had timed it to make Caitlin laugh or not, it worked, and the break in tension allowed Caitlin to turn her attention back to the problem at hand.

"Right. We're not out of the event horizon, as it were," Caitlin said. "And we can't afford to work on these problems in isolation. Any functional solution will be a systemic one. Can you maintain the current level of habitability? If necessary, what if we pull back to the core and allow individual anchores, holdes, and domaines to maintain for themselves as they can?"

It was what the world had been built for, and that ability to compartmentalize was what had allowed it to remain a viable organism through the past five hundred years, despite crippling trauma. The world was modeled on a living thing--and life was stubborn.

But that compartmentalization was also what had led to so many of their current problems.

"I can fall back into myself as necessary," the angel agreed. "However, that leaves many a beachhead for the power or powers behind the null zones. We still haven't managed to obtain any evidence one way or the other about the possibility that if the world's idiot systems are attempting to reboot the biospheres, they may also have available backup versions of the original angel. We need to determine if the null zones are areas where Israfel is attempting to respawn from backup. None of that, however, explains the disassembly incidents."

"Given how far our goals, and your program, have diverged from the Builders' intent, that's not a reassuring scenario."

The angel skinned lips back from imaginary teeth. "He would eat me in a heartbeat. We are not without advantages, however. The houses of Rule and Engine are unified at last."

Caitlin snorted. "Because the houses of Rule and Engine are decimated. No, Nova, I'm sorry. You're right. It is an advantage." She rubbed her armored wrist with her armored palm. "If we can find a way to work together. And trust each other."

"You are thinking of my Captain's father."

Caitlin's smile felt thin and stretched across her skull. "Of course I'm thinking of Benedick. I've sent him out there alone, hunting a woman who was his ally in a scheme to keep Rule and Engine from each other's throats. A woman who was his friend and lover." She stopped herself before she said: But not his partner. There was nothing uglier than a self-justification.

Instead, she continued, "She is my great-grandniece, and also the mother and ally of the woman who is responsible for the decimation of Rule. His daughter with her has died and metamorphosed into a fragment of you, my dear Nova. His daughter and mine is your Captain. Are you still human enough, a little, to understand why I am worried what he'll do?"

"You must," said the angel, "reach out to him."

"You're a fine one to give relationship advice," she said, folding her arms over her chest. She turned away.

She was old enough to know it for a useless display even as she did so, but it made her feel better.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "What else?" she asked, when her eyes had stopped stinging.

The angel's avatar reappeared before her, shifting orientation to match her. "Chief Engineer--" The angel lifted her chin, folded her arms, and spat the words out as if she expected Caitlin to argue. "My Captain is not emotionally well."

"I know," Caitlin said. The angel's tone made her want to reach out and lay a hand on its immaterial nape, pull its face into her neck, and stroke it down the spine. As she would have done for her daughter, once. "We shall carry on for her as we can, and buy her time to heal enough to shoulder the burdens she must bear."

"Is that the mother talking, or the Chief Engineer?"

"What can we do about the null zones, if we're not surrendering them?" Caitlin said, as if it were an answer. Perhaps it was, of sorts.

"Prince Benedick and Princess Chelsea are approaching the largest one," Nova said, "in the far south of the world. It is where Arianrhod--and Asrafil, if Samael can be believed--have taken shelter. Benedick and Chelsea have the toolkit, their armor, and their own colonies; odds are good I will be able to remain in contact. I will ask them to reconnoiter. Perhaps they will provide us with some intelligence on what, exactly, is blocking my access to the area."

"If it doesn't eat them."

"Or--perhaps more likely--subvert their colonies."

"Belly of the beast," Caitlin said, and bit the back of her hand.

Without your mate, your fathers, your brothers, your sons, you are as nothing. You are as a calf, all but blinded.

But you are not without resources.

Ironically, the vermin's machine viruses are the first of those resources to which you turn. They penetrate your organs, infect your instincts, confuse your intellect. But they have done that for so long now that you have had time to habituate to them, to grow accustomed and adapt. And to modify them in turn as they have modified you. To guide their evolution and make them your own.

Having done so, you feed them back into the slaver spikes, an upstream trickle of Trojan horses disguised in the empty shells of gutted nanotech. They spread, connect, convert others. Become a network of their own--an island galaxy in the information universe of the vermin-world.

And when you have made that, you can make the next thing. Because there is material here, vermin-life, planetcrawlers. Parasites, things that infect a world, devour its substance, spawn in hives and cast off to the next innocent victim. But you can use the vermin's machine viruses, alter that life, repurpose it. Consume it as the vermin consumed your mate, so as to remake something more to your liking.

You have no freedom. You have no pod. You have no sons, no legacy. You have no offspring born of the bodies of yourself and your mate. But you have designs that could amend those lacks.

For now, you shall make do with monsters.

Arianrhod made the angel put her down so she could walk into her daughter's house on her own feet, as befitted an Engineer. Ariane's domaine was small and defensible, an ant-warren of tunnels and rooms that twisted back on itself to form a three-dimensional labyrinth. It was full of dead ends and deadfalls, and Arianrhod herself did not know them all. What she did know was the path to the heart of the place.

When last she came here, every wall had pulsed with life, twining veins of blue and green algae filtering the light of the waystars and turning it to sugar and oxygen. Now the tubes were shattered, the sludge within frozen into coils and sprays she must break off or edge past.

She feared that what she'd come for was lost to the Enemy, but at the heart of her daughter's holdfast she found the small room as she remembered it, a cozy weightless sphere with a console and a vault. The vault was DNA-locked, but that was less problem than it might have been: Arianrhod carried a stasis phial of her daughter's cultured heart cells as a memento, and it was the work of a moment to retrieve it from where it lay cradled in the flesh of her own bosom. Having plucked the phial from the pucker of skin that pushed it free, she unlocked it and let it open on her palm like the petals of a crystal flower. Drifting, her hair alive around her like the tentacles of a curious octopus, she bent to inspect it.

Awakened, the fragment of tissue managed two or three reflexive contractions before the breath of the Enemy froze it. Arianrhod winced in sympathy; returned to her breast, it would thaw fast enough and her symbiont could heal it, but at the moment she felt for its pain.

A scraping gave her what she needed, and she folded the rest away inside her again. A smear of cells across her thumb, frozen, clinging to her own frosting skin, and she laid the pad against the reader. In the emptiness, she could not speak the access codes, but the lock accepted a data pulse and she felt the transmitted tremor as bolts slipped free.

The apparatus had been twisted in acceleration, and she had to grow flat blades of claws and pry to help the drawer slide free, but what lay inside was intact. Black as a splinter of the Enemy's teeth, sharp as a laser, flat and unreflective as a hole in the universe, more than a meter of hiltless blade rested like a naked singularity cradled in the crumbled monofilament silk of engineered moths.

"They were consumed," Asrafil said inside her mind, leaning over her shoulder. "All the unblades went into the consuming angel."

Not this one, Arianrhod answered. The angel only got the other half. Half-compiled, virulent, fragmentary. But this is what remains of Tristen's Charity.

This is the last unblade in the world. And you're going to make me a scabbard and a hilt for it, angel.

Perceval said, "I do not mind the cold."

She must admit to having heard Nova's protest, but the angel's words were wasted. They might as well have been the crying of birds, the creak of old metal contracting in the Enemy's deep chill.

"I don't mind it," she repeated. She rested her palms on the newly reconstructed portals. Beyond them, the Enemy waited, green with the death of the waystars, their final light occluding the suns beyond. She could make out a few, the hottest or closest, veil-swathed and dim. "Do not waste your warmth on me."

Dust and Pinion had changed her, before she changed them in return. She was the Captain of the Jacob's Ladder, and barely meat anymore. The Enemy could no more harm her than it could harm an angel. If she, Perceval, did not deserve to suffer for the comfort and well-being of others, then the dead men and women she harbored most certainly did.

Speaking of angels, hers stood behind her still as if he--as if she--had not heard her answer. Perceval might be tempted to say she hovered, but though she wore gray wings, dove-soft and warm-looking as a cloak, she stood on her feet like anyone.

"Captain," she said, a soft protest she could not exactly call an argument, "you may not need the warmth. But anyone who might come to visit you--"

"Is it not my bridge?" She turned her head to see the angel with her own eyes, though that had become another conceit that did not matter. Her colony told her where Nova was; she knew her shape and colors and stance as if she looked upon her, no matter whether she bothered with an avatar or no. She felt her movements as her own, but that wasn't what she wanted. For the moment, she wanted plain human vision, with all its limits and inadequacies. She wanted to see with her own eyes, though they showed her less reality than could adapted ones.

Perceval's slow, blink-punctuated stare didn't seem to concern Nova. The angel said, "Would you have your crew come before you only if they are armor-clad?"

She did not answer.

Nova swept a wing across the floor. "Are you so much a Princess after all that you'd sacrifice this grass, these flowers, these gardens of your bridge, to feed your own selfish grief?"

The voice pushed her a step back as surely as a hand. She recognized the tone, the fleeting brow-furrowed expression. She spun away before her face could break and said between her teeth, "Don't be her with me."

She expected a protest.

Instead, the angel just said, "What parts of me are her? You'll have to tell me. There is so much within me, Captain. So much that argues, and does not agree." Nova extended a hand. "I will listen to you. I must listen to you. But you must speak to me, for only you can make my heart quiet."

Perceval breathed in so deeply it made her chest ache like a distended balloon, and held it.

Softer, and not in any voice Perceval recognized, Nova said, "I cannot be her with you. I cannot be Dust.

You would not like me any better as Samael or Asrafil or Inkling. I am only the angel they have wrought me, Captain, though I am as yet a thing mosaic-made from chips. But all those shards serve you, and you alone." The angel paused, as if groping after words. As if settling an argument that Perceval could not overhear. "And serve you I must."

Nova's warm-looking wing encompassed her, covered her shoulders, and proved not warm at all but nearly weightless. The voices inside Perceval yammered responses, pushing, arguing with each other and herself. Silence them, she told herself, but it was an order easier issued than obeyed.

"As I must serve the world," Perceval said. She wanted nothing more than to shrug away the angel's embrace, but somehow restrained herself. "We are bound to it."

"We are but familiar demons," the angel agreed. "Forgive me."

Perceval closed her eyes. "Sweetheart," she said, "I'm trying. And it's not your fault that I hate you."

Asrafil enfolded Arianrhod in the borders of his colony, and they fell into the bosom of the Enemy again. Charity, its shortened blade more suited to her height now, lay across her back in the fittings Asrafil had constructed for it. It felt strange there--unpresent, empty, neutral, still, and waiting to be filled.

Hungry, if she allowed herself to anthropomorphize so far. She kept wanting to touch it to reassure herself it was really there, or really gone.

"We are still followed," Asrafil said softly, inside her as if reluctant to disturb her train of thought.

"From Engineering?" Arianrhod asked. "Our path should lead them down through the lift to the Broken Holdes."

"It is as you arranged," he agreed. "Benedick is determined, and he has found an ally. Young Chelsea Conn is with him on the hunt."

Arianrhod grimaced, feeling her frozen cheeks crack in the cold. Chelsea should have died usefully in the plague, and having survived that, it seemed a shame to kill her now.

But pity had no place in the world Arianrhod had been raised to. "If they're in the shaft," she said, "I left them an enemy there."

Below the halfway point, Benedick and Chelsea rested again, this time on a shelf fungus broad as a dining table. They slept in shifts, and--having tested the environment and found it within the tolerances of their colonies--opened their helms and breathed the spore-sweet air while they dined on a variety of nutritious fungi and eyeless shaft-dwelling insects. When they resumed descending, Benedick took point.

He was still in the lead when light began to glimmer through the caps beneath his feet. He notified Chelsea and slowed his descent. Transition zones were often most dangerous--the haunt of predators lying in wait for something that had blundered out of its usual range, something that might be confused, disoriented, or ill.

Nothing attacked him when he lowered himself into the gap that permitted access to the next stratum, but only the armor's filters saved him from bedazzlement when he found himself encircled by a beaded curtain of falling water refracting brightness. The mushroom forest, it seemed, could not retain every drop lost by the long-cracked irrigation system.

Benedick shook his head and spun himself on the cable for a 360-degree view, watching rainbows, their polarized light intensified by his filters, skip across his armor.

"I'm down," he said to Chelsea, and with minimal exertion swung himself up to the lip of the shaft. The swifts darted about, screaming and buzzing his head and hands, but even if they had dared come close enough to strike, their talons would have proved ineffectual. He clipped in to a convenient knobby growth of woody fungus and settled himself. "Ready to belay."

He had time to observe the shaft below while waiting for her. The mimosa wood at its lip grew particularly verdant, and like the one above was shrieking with parrotlets. The shaft was lushly forested from this point to the south as far as he could see. He could make out the glow of lights through an extravagance of leaves.

Chelsea was with him in less than ten minutes, and he was amused to note that she duplicated his admiring spin. "Hang on," she said and, with a series of contractions and extensions of her body, swung pendulum-fashion toward the nearest cable. She stretched, spun, and plunged a hand through encrusting swifts' nests to catch on and cling tight.

Benedick watched her knife flash in the other hand, and the grace with which she intercepted the falling material. When she released the cable, she had a meshed bundle of the cleanest nests and a few dozen tiny eggs, to add to the chunks of tested-safe mushroom that made up their foraged rations.

"Break for dinner?" Chelsea said, when she swung close to him again.

Once she was safely latched in, Benedick unclipped himself. "All you think of is food."

"Bird's nest soup," she tempted, and lowered him before he asked. He had to swing a little to make contact with the rim of the shaft. But once his feet struck the deck the mimosas drew back to make a protected glade, and he brought Chelsea down to it with no trouble.

The easiest method for cooking the soup involved painstaking deployment of the microwave projectors in their toolkit. The toolkit curled around the collapsible bowl, and Benedick and Chelsea cupped their shielded gauntlets around it, careful lest stray radiation should cook their eyeballs, their internal organs, or any passing birds. Soon they were sharing a steaming, pleasantly mucilaginous bowl of bird's nest soup studded with chunks of mushroom and soft-poached swift eggs.

"This is awfully idyllic for a high-speed chase," Chelsea said as Benedick wiped out the dinner dishes. He was worried about the toolkit's charge, though he could replenish it from his armor if need be.

The toolkit itself was almost underfoot, seeming determined to maintain a wide berth from the mimosa. Benedick couldn't say he blamed it. He clucked, and the toolkit got a running start, leaped to his extended hand, and scampered up his arm.

"There's little to be gained by catching her if we're too exhausted to do anything about it," Benedick said mildly. He folded the bowl away and tucked it into his pack.

"That also sounds like something Father would have said."

Benedick set his cable, ignoring the irrational twinge of irritation. He was not his father, and Chelsea was not Tristen. "One time or another, I'm certain he did. Do you wish to lead the first descent?"

From the examining glance Chelsea cast across Benedick's face as she fixed their lines together, she knew perfectly well that he was holding back. She might even know what; he was always surprised by the gaps and bridges in the younger siblings' knowledge of family history.

No blame on them for that. It wasn't as if he or Tristen had gone out of their way to make themselves available to teach. The fact that their father had disallowed such knowledge only increased their onus to have passed it along. Maybe their reasons were different--Benedick, as far as he knew, had far more to be ashamed of than Tristen, and he would have been happy to let his many failings remain private history--but the truth was, both of them were complicit in Alasdair Conn's conspiracy of lies.

So in the light of everything else, perhaps it was an insignificant failure. Nonetheless, it remained one that griped at Benedick, as further evidence of his own moral cowardice--something he thought he'd already established to everyone's satisfaction.

"Right," Chelsea said. "See you at the bottom of the rope." She swung a leg over the lip, and was gone.

For a time, they progressed as before, leapfrogging one another down the shaft. In this section, lighting and terraces were intact, cane-thin rods vining between the trees to provide illumination. Benedick's suit prickled to warn him of unfiltered ultraviolet. He sealed his helm in response. He'd had enough of radiation burns.

As he slid down the cable, the overall effect was of gliding spider-silent through a cool, dappled tunnel. The vegetation, while lush, was climax growth, full of open spaces and long, clear lines of sight. After the cramped overgrowth of the previous shaft, the spacious bowers of this vertical forest soothed him. It would be harder for an enemy to ambush them here.

The life here was more familiar, though the oxygen levels remained high enough that he still saw insects of unusual size. In this microenvironment, those included flying forms: a dragonfly whose jeweled purple-blue body hung between wings of a half-meter span; a ladybug as big as a dinner plate.

Benedick wondered what such large arthropods consumed, and resolved to keep an eye out for predatory insect nymphs the size of his thigh. The stealthy manner of his descent--the only sound he made was in the brush of leaves against his armor and the whir of cable through the winch--meant that he passed within touching distance of many animals before they were even aware of his existence. A half-meter spotted cat hissed and vanished; a green-tinged sloth reached with dreamy control from one branch to another and swung away.

He grinned behind his helm--an expression that would have shocked most of his siblings. This was serious business. And he had a reputation for mirthlessness that he thought was as much the result of conditioned anhedonia as anything intrinsic to his character.

But the oxygen levels could make you giddy, and it was hard not to cheer up when you saw a sloth.

Mind on your work, Ben, he thought, in Caitlin's phrasing, and tried not to be too distracted by the wildlife.

Besides the high oxygen, one thing this shaft had in common with the one above was that it was cold. He couldn't feel it through the armor, but the sloth's long, coarse coat shone at the tips with frost, and frost also rimed the edges of the broad tree leaves. That had to be new, or transitory, because the trees themselves were hale, their foliage not yet curling.

That told him the system was continuing to lose heat, and heat was a thing not easily replaced unless they could find a way to generate energy--or tap the radiant heat of the expanding core of the supernova behind them, but that presented its own complex of problems.

He wondered how the trees had stayed intact through the acceleration. Perhaps--even broken and locked to a single setting--the gravity controls of the old commuter shaft were strong enough that they had locally compensated. It was an interesting hypothesis, because it carried the implication that, throughout the world, there might be other similarly protected spaces that could have sheltered anything within them. When they emerged from blackout, he would contact the angel and Caitlin with the suggestion.

A large trunk blocked his descent immediately below. He flexed knees to land lightly on it, stood, checked the cable with a quick glance up, and hopped over the side just as he heard Chelsea yelp through the comm.

"Benedick!"

Caitlin was the only person left alive who called him Ben. When she was speaking with him to call him anything.

"Here," he answered, one hand on the cable brake. He didn't trigger it yet, though--until you understand the situation, or you understand that halting will do less damage than pushing on, don't provide the enemy with intelligence.

"I'm under attack," she said. "Ambu--" Half the word, until her comm cut out.

Well, I guess that's a hint that we're on the right path. He slowed his descent, fighting the urge to rush. Charging to the rescue was one thing, so long as one was certain that one was charging to the rescue and not barreling into a trap. Silently, his black and bronze-brown armor blending into the dappled shadows of the leaves, he rotated himself so as to descend headfirst, and slipped lower.

The comm stayed dead, but before long his armor brought him the ambient sounds of combat. Crashing, a heavy thump, the splinter of green wood. No sound of weapons fire, which was suggestive.

The toolkit said "Brrt?" against his cheek.

"Shh," he answered. He swung in close to the nearest trunk and anchored the cable, in case Chelsea was still using it; he could sense weight on the opposite end. Then he disconnected himself and began the painstaking process of pressing close against the trunk and circling it.

Like a squirrel, he thought, as something liver red and about as large as his outstretched hand crashed through leaves nearby and bounced hard off the trunk of an age-gnarled sycamore as big around as an air lock door. Whatever it was, it left a trail of sparks, and a meat-colored smear on the tree's patchy green-and-silver trunk before arcing away through the canopy. Benedick sank spiked gauntlet-tips into the trunk of his own tree--branches to break the fall or not, it was a long way down--and continued his careful circumnavigation. Fight on, Sister. I'm coming.

Head-down around the curve of the trunk, he caught sight of her. She was indeed fighting, though her form was almost completely obscured by the lumpy, humping shapes of more of the hand-sized attackers. They shoved and jostled over the surface of her armor, as--blindly, with groping hands, because they occluded her faceplate as well--she clutched at them, grabbed and peeled, hurled them aside in a mess of bridging sparks. More dropped from the branches around her, however; the undersides of nearby trees writhed with the things, and for every one she got off, two more attached themselves.

Benedick hooked his knees over a thick, bent limb, having checked the underside for attackers, and--hanging like a sloth--stretched out both hands. The microwave projectors that had so successfully heated his supper had other uses now. While he didn't dare point them directly at Chelsea, even within the protection of her armor, the first step in getting her free was stopping the reinforcements. He couldn't do much about the ones humping down the cable toward her, like malevolent drops of molasses slipping along a string. But the dozens clustered on the undersides of the tree trunks, waiting their opening--those were fair game.

"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."