Chill

2 on fragile bone

At the rim of the world, a blind white hawk with a serpent's tail stretched his wings to the utmost and batted furiously on the edge of an acceleration-shattered cliff. All around, furrowed earth lay strewn with splintered branches. Gavin did not need sight to observe that the wood had cracked and spiked in spirals along the grain, showing how it had broken green. The air still reeked of sap and crushed fruit rotting, upturned earth, the fermenting remains of misfortunate worms.

He flapped again, beating hard to lift himself from the cliff in this thin atmosphere and elevated gravity. The world had sealed its pores so precious air no longer fed the Enemy, but it would take time to replace what had been lost. Altitude did not improve the prospect. The wood, which had also once been a library, lay in ruins. At least the librarian, who had sheltered in an emergency pod, was still alive, and that meant the trees could be replanted so their fruits full of ancient lore could thrive again.

Gavin broadened his wings and thinned the mass of his body to a latticework, increasing his glide ratio. Now he got aloft. He turned into the current, borrowing its lift, and began quartering the devastated holde. The strokes of his wings bore him over a forest of blasted trunks, some trees shattered to the root, some still standing but with the bark rent in deep vertical lines. He thought maybe 50 percent could be salvaged, and those only because their sap swarmed with symbionts. The rest were fodder for the disassemblers.

Before long he sensed motion. A figure crouched in the midst of the heaped, horrible slurry. Gavin spiraled closer, banking, and made sure to flap his wings hard enough to be heard. The figure raised a clenched hand without looking up to check the source of the sound.

The basilisk struck Mallory's fist with talons outreached, careful not to break the skin as he backwinged and settled. Mallory's arm dipped under the weight, but the necromancer was braced and bore it well. Gavin hopped from fist to shoulder, condensing, and slipped his tail beneath dark brown curls to encircle Mallory's warm neck.

"This is a setback," Mallory said, raising a hand with which to settle Gavin's ruffled feathers.

Gavin rubbed face against cheek, tilting his head so the razor-edged beak would not brush soft skin. "Are all the trees destroyed?"

"Yes." Mallory opened the hand Gavin had settled on, which had been resting against Gavin's wing, and lowered it. The fingers were muddy, as if from rooting in the earth.

In the palm lay the pulp-smeared stone of a fruit. "I need them all. Cuttings, too. We'll have to clone for rootstock, but once the trees are forced, we can begin grafting."

"It shall be as you instruct," Gavin said. He hopped down from Mallory's shoulder and--spreading himself into a fine-wire mesh--began the laborious and delicate process of reclaiming as much of the world's remaining library as possible.

While he worked, he asked, "And when the library is reseeded, what then?" It would take time to grow to fruition, but there would be other tasks in the interim.

Mallory seemed about to answer, but some distraction prevented it. The necromancer said, "We'll have to see when it's done. Fetch my pack, Gavin. It appears this replanting must be left to the automata."

Gavin craned a long neck over his shoulder, sweeping the focus of his senses across Mallory. "Someone has contacted you."

Mallory nodded. "We are, it seems, available. The Chief Engineer sends word: we are for Rule, in haste."

Gavin, the servant, made no argument. As he spread his wings, he asked, "Is it this bad everywhere?"

Mallory hesitated and after a long pause said, "There will be a great deal of work for necromancers."

Caitlin Conn stood before an acceleration pod, watching condensation freeze upon its surface, and contemplated murder. Her powered-armor exoskeleton was all that propped her battered body upright, though she had not yet adjusted to the armor's silence and lack of personality. She missed the daemon that had dwelled there while the world had been becalmed--many years of working with it had taught her to consider it a friend--but like its brothers it was gone now, silenced and consumed.

The particular pod she contemplated was intact, more the pity. Several farther down the row had not survived acceleration so well, hanging ruptured and askew. The bodies inside were either being repaired by their symbionts, to take their places among the mute resurrected, or they were being disassembled for components. Later, Caitlin would check which was true.

The tank she stood before was opaque, and in a true analysis nothing required her to attend in person. She could have consulted her imaging systems from Engineering if all she wanted was to observe the feed of Arianrhod restrained in salty, incompressible fluid. The image floated before Caitlin's inner eye now, Arianrhod's hair adrift like veils of algae across her mouth and cheek. There was nothing here she could not sense remotely.

But the emotional weight of her decision had brought Caitlin here, as if to stand face-to-face with Arianrhod. Some things you did in person because that was the way they were done. She needed to be close to make this choice. She needed to be able to reach out and lay the weight of her own heavy gauntlet against the manual override, if that was what she chose. She needed to be able to tell herself it was not vengeance that brought her here, but simple math. Arianrhod's life used resources better reserved for others whose simple existence was not a threat.

Caitlin took a breath of dusty-smelling filtered air, and thought about the irrevocability of her decision. It still didn't seem slight, even when balanced against the limited and irretrievable resources of her world. But everything was in her head--atmospheric pressure and composition, wildly fluctuating heat in the habitats where the air wasn't simply frozen in plate-fragile shingles to the bulkheads--and the simple fact that Arianrhod had tried to kill Caitlin's daughter. The world--the corners of it she could reach--stretched into her, gave up its information as the ghosts of sensations laid over her own. She wore it as an armature over the mind-wiped armor. This was new and alien, this sense of her world present and immanent. Implied.

She felt the gaps in the awareness as well, the broken and simply missing bits of the world, the ones with which all contact had been severed. They ached strangely, a numb kind of pins-and-needles emptiness that unsettled her to the core.

So this was what it meant to be the Chief Engineer of a restored world. Restored and crippled in the same blow, and Caitlin was old enough to find the irony bitterly amusing.

The price--in lives, in materials, in the integrity of the world--had been too high. But it had been paid nonetheless, and now the debt must be serviced.

Inside this pod slept a woman Caitlin had known for centuries, beside whom Caitlin had worked, whose child Caitlin had adopted as her own before that child gave up her life and her existence to stop Arianrhod's plan. Merely by living, the woman in this pod consumed resources better put to use by those who had not betrayed Engine, and Caitlin, and Samael, and the very iron world that cupped them in its warm embrace, holding the Enemy at bay. A woman whose body contained carbon and salt and organic compounds. She could be useful, repurposed as part of the air they breathed, the walls that kept them.

Caitlin didn't need her hands to change the tank settings any more than she needed her eyes to see inside. But there was a certain dignity imparted by being physically present when she made this choice. An acknowledgment that it was momentous.

And that, she hoped, was the difference between herself and her father.

She rested her fingertips on the override.

"Chief Engineer?"

A familiar voice, but full of unfamiliar inflections. She jerked her hand to her side, torn muscle and stressed bone protesting, and turned on the balls of her feet. Beneath her opened visor, she looked out at the dark curls and arched brows that had once belonged to her half brother.

But Oliver Conn was dead, and the person who wore his resurrected body now was someone from the Moving Times. She had never known Oliver: he was a Conn, but he was a young Conn, and Caitlin had been dead to her family for three or four times his life span. Still, he bore the family stamp, so for a moment Caitlin wondered why it was that all her siblings had chosen to look so like Alasdair their father, the dead Commodore.

Whatever evils Arianrhod and her daughter Ariane had accomplished, they had at least succeeded in destroying Alasdair. The act might have bought them more sympathy from Caitlin if they had not tortured, crippled, and nearly killed Perceval to do so.

"Chief Engineer?" the young man who had been Oliver Conn said again.

Caitlin realized she had been staring. "Yes?"

The resurrectee swallowed, eyes wide. Did she awe him? Was it cruel of her to find it funny if she did? "Prince Benedick sent me with a message. He asks that you return to Central Engineering as soon as possible."

Not as soon as is convenient, which is what Benedick would say if it truly were not urgent. He would send a messenger rather than calling her directly. Coward.

"What is your name?" Caitlin said.

"Jsutien," he answered, with a stammer. "Damian Jsutien. I was an astrogator."

"Jsutien," she echoed, to fix the sound of it in her symbiont's memory. "It's good you brought the message in person."

He nodded.

She pressed the override shutdown on Arianrhod's tank. It depressed with a solid click. With her code key, she locked it out. "Watch this," she said, as status lights began to blink from green and yellow to orange and red. "When the tank is quiescent, give it thirty minutes and mark the contents for recycling. Do you understand?"

"Thirty minutes after shutdown, mark the contents," he repeated.

"Report to me when it's done." She smiled and patted his shoulder before she turned away. Though she left, still she carried the feed in her head: Arianrhod drifting in her acceleration tank, eyes closed, skin pale and blue-gray. One by one, the lights cycled to red.

The short return walk through battered corridors disheartened her. Shredded vegetation browned underfoot and hung ragged from rent bulkheads. Insects scurried in advance of her steps, racing from leaf to leaf, seeking cover. A darter flashed from the tangled vines on the wall to snatch up a wriggling centipede, then vanished again in a flash of indigo feathers. So some of the world's ecosystem had survived the transition, even unprotected. A little encouragement among the ruins.

And there were materials for cloning. The world could be rejuvenated. The work was daunting, but it could be done.

When she emerged into the great Heaven of Engine, she tried to focus her gaze directly forward. The city surrounded her--a great hollow sphere with every surface knobbled with shattered structures. Debris drifted freely and the air was thin and cold. Gravity was a lower priority than oxygen, so even where she floated, the atmosphere was sufficient to sustain Exalted life. The unsecured debris was a threat, but she had no resources now that could be detailed to secure it.

Caitlin did not regret the decision to Exalt every living thing in the world. Nothing Mean would have survived the acceleration--or the radiation of the supernova that had boosted the world back into flight. Infecting them with symbionts--even new and fragile symbionts that must struggle to become established even as they struggled with the damaged bodies of their hosts--was preferable to watching them all die.

It had been a fighting chance.

Failed gravity made it easier to reach Central Engineering. Caitlin spread her hands, sealed her helm, and used the attitude jets to nudge herself gently across the cavernous space, fending off debris with a raised and armored hand. Catch bars on the far side eased her touchdown. She swung her feet through a hatch that opened to her nonverbal command. When the gravity on the far side caught her, she twisted to drop into a crouch.

Central Engineering was a shambles of broken panels and shattered furniture. In the midst of it stood Benedick Conn, alone, wearing his armor against the potential of a hull breach. He bent over the main navigation tank, hands gliding with assembly-robot grace as he effected repairs. He was assisted by a quiet-eyed toolkit that looked something like a cat and something like a lemur with enormously elongated forelimbs. Its ringed tail twitched; its focus was total. Spotted gold-black fur rippled over its flanks as it reached deep into the guts of the tank.

Once it, too, had had a name and a personality. It had been a small independent life. Now it was but a thing--obedient, versatile, and consumed in the greater awareness of the world's new angel.

Caitlin unsealed her faceplate, thought of Rien, and chose not to wince in front of Benedick. When she stood, pain shot up both legs to the hip, but she would not permit that to show in her face either. She pushed to her feet on fragile bone, half healed, the persistence of her symbiont maintaining its integrity. If she kept dealing it setbacks, it would only take that much longer to repair her. She needed to discipline herself--not to push through the pain, but to sit still for it.

As still as Arianrhod, still drifting--and dying--in her tank. It would be better this way. It would be better still if Tristen thought she had died in the acceleration, when he came to find out.

"I have contact with Tristen on the bridge," Benedick said in as much of a greeting as she was likely to get.

She stepped forward, armor clicking on the deck, the bones of her left foot crunching with every stride. She paused at her brother's elbow, craning her neck back to examine his profile. Dull black hair framed a long, square face, making it seem longer. His eyes didn't flicker from the display tank; if he had not spoken, if he were not Benedick, and Exalt, and more aware than any man she knew, she would only have known that he recognized her presence because he had spoken.

"Perceval?" she asked.

His lips compressed. "Grieving."

"She's young," Caitlin said. "She'll do her duty as it needs doing."

Still he would not turn and look at her, though she knew his symbiont showed him everything that crossed her face. "I know she will," he said. And then, reluctantly: "One of us could go to her."

The pang under Caitlin's breastbone took her breath away. He might not look at her, but she could study him. Her fingers twitched, and she wasn't sure if the suppressed desire was to tug his sleeve or strike him. "Tristen is with her. He'll suffice."

"He's not--" Now he looked, head snapping around as if he had been resisting the motion with all his might, and his strength had finally failed him.

"No," she said. "You're her father. But you are here, and these are lifeboat rules. Do the work under your hand, Ben."

Another man--especially another Conn--would have said something cruel in reply. But Benedick only pressed his mouth thin and, without dropping his gaze, nodded once.

She understood. It was the decision he had already accepted as inevitable and steeled himself for, but he had wished for her to make it. As he had over time made similar unpleasant choices for her. When they had still been a team.

Caitlin also would not look down. She was still considering what to say next, whether to disengage from the conversation or to press him to the next level of honesty, when her half-attended feed from Arianrhod's pod forced itself to the center of her attention--by failing like a snapped thread.