Chill

3 the strength of any soul

Caitlin's eyes went wide; Benedick began moving. Even as she turned for the door, her armor rattling, he placed a hand on the console between them and vaulted it. His feet struck the deck where hers had been only an instant before, the old instincts of teamwork unaffected.

Caitlin crouched. The armor assisted her leap, but Benedick heard her grunt of pain. The sympathetic twinge lay beyond the ice, so he observed it rather than feeling it, for which he was grateful.

Caitlin gripped the edge of the broken hatchway and swung herself through. Benedick followed. His legs were healing, and he was much taller than Caitlin. With the support of his armor, he leaped, caught the lip of the hatch, and arced into microgravity on the heels of the Chief Engineer.

She was already sailing across the cluttered Heaven. Benedick kicked off, gliding in pursuit, hesitant to use his attitude jets for a boost until necessary. He reached the far wall a few meters behind her, copying her elegant swing into the corridor. The thump of her boots against the decking rang sharply. On foot, he could catch her.

He pulled up abreast and between breaths panted, "Why are we running?"

"I lost the feed from Arianrhod's tank." Her words were crisp between controlled breaths. A little sound greeted each stride, too small to be called a grunt. A sound of pain. He winced silently, gritting his own teeth as if he could help her bear it.

But she didn't need his help.

And she was right. He reached into the network, feeling for the location of Arianrhod's coffin, and found only empty space. He didn't have a Chief Engineer's connection with the world, but he could pull up a remote. He asked, between controlled breaths, "Did the mote fail? No, it's the whole sector. What happened?"

A shake of her head inside the helm sent curls escaping around the open faceplate. "I killed her," she said. "I overrode life support on the tank."

Her stride lengthened, but he paced her easily. He could condemn her decision, confront her on it. Suspect that it was based in the lust for revenge she accused him of. But that would be pointless and unfair and unlike Caitlin. No one could cling to a grudge like Caitlin Conn, but that did not abrogate her knighthood, and Benedick had never questioned her integrity.

It was that integrity that had made her so outraged with his choices, with what she saw as selling out. She had forgiven him his role as their sister's killer, perhaps because he had performed the task at Cynric's request. But the liaison and alliance with Arianrhod, that she found unconscionable, though he had thought he had his reasons at the time.

He had to admit that experience seemed to be bearing her opinions out. And he understood the root of her ethics. As far as he knew, in all her life the only person Caitlin Conn had ever betrayed was their father. If you could be said to have betrayed someone who never deserved loyalty or duty in the first place. Whatever the family betrayals, they had started with Alasdair Conn.

"Conserving resources," he said. She glanced sideways at him, eyebrows rising. Did she think he'd changed so drastically? Or did she think she'd never known him?

"You should have stayed to see it through," he qualified. Never leave the helpless victim to expire in a death trap. Make sure.

"Somebody," she answered, as they came up to the chamber housing the acceleration pods, "sent me a message. And I left a guard. The resurrected you sent me." Her sideways glance said, If you considered him trustworthy enough to bear your message, I considered him trustworthy enough to stand over a deathbed. She slowed, one arm canted out from the elbow to indicate a stop, then reached to her hip and unclipped her sidearm. She sighted along it before raising the weapon to high ready.

Benedick echoed her gesture. He swung across the door and flattened himself against the bulkhead on the opposite side. Whatever difficulties the last fifteen years had brought to their relationship, in this they were still machined smooth.

Caitlin spun into the chamber and Benedick covered her. He entered the room low, with a quick snap to the side, disguising his silhouette against the wall. There was too much cover in here, too much visual and auditory clutter--the cables, the pods, the sound and smell of dripping fluid and torn flesh from the ruptured ones. Benedick widened his awareness, tuned his senses to--perhaps--the scuff of a bare foot on decking. The armor covered his skin, but it was richly endowed with sensors. He might sense the displacement of air. If Arianrhod were still here, she was still naked. He had sealed her into the tank after her capture himself, and he had not left her gear in the netting. He might be able to smell warm, wet skin.

It was no mysterious power, but rather a developed awareness to everything his own senses, the symbiont, and the armor could tell him. There was the fine edge of training, which was about developing trustworthy perceptions, learning to rely on them, and acting on them without thought or hesitation. The body knows the knife is coming, as surely as a fly senses a falling blow and drops into flight to elude it.

For now, Benedick's body told him there was no knife. But though he trusted it, he also believed in caution.

Right-handed, he tapped the ceramic on his thigh. Caitlin glanced at him. He sealed his faceplate, and she mimicked him.

Benedick gestured left. She nodded and went, slipping between pods, using their bulk to break her silhouette and disguise the motion. Benedick followed on a staggered angle, inching along the rows as silently as possible in his clicking ceramic suit.

Together, they moved toward Arianrhod's tank, keeping as much cover between them and it as possible. At thirty meters, Caitlin drew up, beckoning him closer. She caught his eye through twinned faceplates; neither of them needed to ask if the other was ready.

The count was all internal. She stepped out. He waited at the ready for her signal. "Wounded," she said, and he snapped around the corner to cover her as she moved forward.

The resurrected he'd sent with the message lay on the floor, an azure puddle cradling his head. He'd sustained a savage blow. From here, Benedick could not see if there were other wounds. Anything the resurrected might have sustained would be unlikely to kill an Exalt, since Benedick could tell there had not been any dismembering injuries.

"He's alive." Caitlin dropped a knee beside him. Benedick kept her in his peripheral vision, but his job now was not to watch her. It was to watch for anyone who might threaten her. She glanced up. "The tank's unsealed."

"She's gone?"

"Poof." Caitlin stood. "Shit." She turned, scanning the chamber as if she might see something.

"Whoever came to collect her has a three-minute start." But Benedick did not holster his weapon. The tank farm was large, and whoever had managed to shut off the motes on Arianrhod's pod had also managed to move through the chamber unmonitored, which suggested a high level of access to the world's systems. He didn't need to say so. Caitlin would know this, and know also that the ability to do so suggested some instability in--or compromise of--the newly reconstructed angel. Arianrhod and her rescuer could still be close.

"If I leave now--"

Benedick did not look at Caitlin, but she looked at him. She shook her head. "We have to warn Tristen. And you shouldn't go without supplies."

Because three minutes was a long time, and the chase could stretch on. And whoever had come for Arianrhod would be well provided.

"There are stretchers in the locker," Benedick said. "Let's see if any more of the sleepers are ready to awaken, and then we'll call the bridge and evac the casualty."

She stopped him. "Ben. I need to know I can trust you on this."

If it were a melodrama, he would have unsealed his faceplate to look her in the eyes. But she was Caitlin Conn; he did not delude himself. If she chose, she could read his breathing, pulse rate, skin conductivity through the sensors built into his armor. In return, his symbiont could control those things, but it was at its essence an arms race.

"Because Arianrhod was the mother of my youngest child?" He hit the word was a little harder than the others. Rien was dead, and he had barely known her. The knowing was his own fault; the death ...

He would hang that gladly on Arianrhod. And on Ariane, her elder daughter, who was also his half sister--and Caitlin's. Relations in the Conn family were nothing if not convoluted.

Caitlin stared through a transparent mask. Benedick turned to search a nearby locker for a collapsible stretcher. He pulled the hand-sized oval from a rack that had once held ten, oriented it properly, and triggered it. The webbed hammock unfolded, supported at each corner by an artificial gravity neutralizer. He guided it to the floor beside the unconscious resurrected and moved to the man's head. Without being asked, Caitlin stepped to his feet and crouched down.

Their eyes met and they lifted, stepped sideways, and shifted the man onto the stretcher. Caitlin triggered the neutralizers and the stretcher rose softly into the air.

Benedick said, "We have a daughter, too."

Perceval, now Captain, who had been the one to finally manage the death of Ariane. Caitlin had already started to turn away. The sensors on her armor meant she would not need to look back to see him, but she did anyway, a lingering glance over her shoulder. It was a human moment. "I thought sentiment was beneath you."

He touched the mobility control on the stretcher. The red-gold hemisphere flushed green and it started forward. It would glide smoothly in whatever direction he indicated, as long as his hand remained on the control.

"Our daughter is still alive," he said.

If she had an answer, she kept it to herself.

"Prince Tristen," the angel said, "there are complications."

Tristen lifted his head from his arms. He must have slumped across the controls, claimed by healing sleep. He could feel the dents in his cheek and forehead left by details on the panel, and a crease marked by a metal edge.

The angel's avatar stood before the patched bulkhead. Its appearance had changed. Now light refracted from silver hair as if through the facets of a diamond. It folded hands before its breast as if in supplication.

"We can dispense with the prince stuff," Tristen said. He pressed hard on his eyes, rubbing grit from the corners. His beard prickled with unwashed sweat. "Where's the breach?"

He regretted the idiom as soon as he uttered it--there was no telling how literal-minded a young artificial intelligence might be--but the angel seemed to take it in stride. And without offense.

It said, "Progress in restoring structural integrity is adequate. However, proprioceptive data is still erratic. I have deployed motes to collect electromagnetic-spectrum telemetry about the integrity of the world, and if they are not destroyed by debris, we should have a schematic soon, at least--"

There was a pause, as if it waited for new data before it continued. "I have a message from the Chief Engineer, Prince Tristen. She wishes to warn you that Arianrhod has escaped, and asks that you return her call in haste. Also, an additional difficulty has presented itself. It appears the damage to the world and attendant loss of life has been extreme enough to trigger certain fail-safes."

Did angels hesitate uncomfortably, or was that a concession to human frailty? A moment for him to organize his thoughts and prepare himself? Or perhaps a moment in which the angel could explore his response? Tristen didn't know. "How bad is it?"

"Indeterminate," the angel said. "Bad is a value judgment. It is an evolving situation that may become problematic."

"Specify."

"The Jacob's Ladder's base program contains a number of fail-safe routines, which are triggered in a case where the world sustains certain catastrophic damage. One such was the splintering of the ur-angel Israfel."

After five centuries, Tristen still could not summon up a scrap of grief for the memory of Israfel. If the modern angels were autocratic, arrogant, and monomaniacal, they came by it honestly--and at least they had not also been omnipotent. Israfel had been all those things and utterly committed to the Builders' program. Tristen had no doubt at all that Israfel had been fully informed about the hundreds of thousands of frozen dead stored in the world's holdes, raw material for whatever might be needed.

When first the world was ruined, when the first Exalt were infected with their new symbiotic colonies, systems had been unable to maintain integrity in the original artificial intelligence of the Builders' design. In self-preservation, Israfel had shattered into smaller, more specialized entities. So Israfel had begotten Dust, the Angel of Memory; and Samael, the Angel of Mutagens and of Life Support; and Susabo, the Angel of Propulsion; and Asrafil, the Angel of Weapons Systems--and other, lesser beasts as well.

Predictably, defensive of their individuality, those angels had warred for which would control their reunited self. None of them had won, exactly, and all had been consumed. The nameless angel to whom Tristen now spoke was the result of that conflict, and it was the sacrifice of young Rien, Perceval's sister and beloved, that had given it an identity of its own.

An identity that continued, "The current issue is a protocol that is triggered when viable biologicals aboard fall below a critical volume. Which is to say, in the wake of concussive and radiation damage sustained from the supernova, the world has begun repopulating its biosphere."

Tristen pressed the palms of his hands flat to the panel. "So what's out there?"

The angel folded its arms. "That's an interesting question. And unfortunately, as my lack of proprioceptive data is progressive, I do not entirely know."

"Progressive? You're losing more sections?"

"Yes."

"How is that possible?"

"Causes as yet undetermined," the angel said. "The cause may be cascading colony failures. Or, and possibly more problematic, it is possible that this reset, if I may use the term, came complete with its own guardian angel."

"Israfel might be back," Tristen clarified. "Back," the angel agreed. "And ready to institute the Builders' plan."

Tristen's voice rang as clear in Caitlin's ear as if he murmured into it. "We seem to have inherited a complex of additional problems."

"Thrill me," she said, watching Benedick--still armored but unhelmed--pack concentrated rations and bottled water into a carryall. She triggered broadcast mode. "You're on speaker."

Tristen said, "The world is attempting to repopulate. There's no telling what might be coming out of the cloning tanks. The program is for maximum biological diversity to be restored in the aftermath of catastrophe, on the theory that competition is the manner in which a balanced ecosystem is likely to reestablish itself."

"Wasteful," she said.

"That's the Builders for you. Maximum carnage as a tenet of religious faith."

The amplified voice seemed to be reaching the resurrected Jsutien. At least he stirred, one hand coming up to press the nanobandaged scalp wound, though his eyes stayed shut. Caitlin wished he'd hurry up and heal. The memory-set that inhabited him--the skills of a Moving Times astrogator, for which Benedick had reawakened him--would be extraordinarily useful in the near future.

"Wasteful," Caitlin said. She knew how much external management was necessary to keep most Heavens functional.

Benedick sealed his carryall with a touch. He clipped it to the shoulder of his armor and snapped his fingers for the toolkit. It had been grooming the claws of one hind foot in the corner, enormous lambent eyes half closed in pleasure, fluffy tail flipped over the opposite toes. At his summons, it scampered squirrel-light across the rubble of ruined equipment, leaped to his outreached gauntlet, and swarmed up his arm to the shoulder, where it curled itself under the edge of his hair. It peeked between strands, blinking.

Caitlin could not believe anyone had ever gone out of their way to design anything quite so offensively cute.

Benedick said, "The Builders believed in competition."

"Just to complete your morning," Tristen added, "the angel informs me that it has lost contact with certain areas of the world. It believes that it's possible the original Israfel has respawned an intact instance."

Benedick splayed his fingers inside their gauntlets. Caitlin watched furtively. She had been right to create distance between them. It was too hard to stay angry with him when he was close, and in pain, but she didn't dare let go of that anger. Looking at him now, she nursed her outrage, fed it scraps of bitter memory, and still she felt it gutter. No memory of betrayal could stand up to the presence of the man.

He said, "But the renewed world angel is Israfel--"

"It is an evolved Israfel," Caitlin corrected. "Pieces were lost in the shipwrecked time. Pieces evolved. Pardon me, angel, for speaking of you as if you were not here."

"Fear not," the angel said. "I take no offense."

"New pieces were added," Tristen said, when neither she nor Benedick could bring themselves to say it. "The problem is that the angel is not the only thing that's evolved. We have, too. And the original Israfel would have the Builders' unmodified plan at heart."

Tristen's tone carried a world of implications as to what he thought of the Builders, their plan, and their general Godlike disregard for the health or well-being of any individual creature. The God of the Builders was a harsh god, with no concern in Him for any given sparrow's fall.

"And the Builders were monsters," Caitlin said, to validate him. "There's one benefit in that possibility, though. Israfel should know our destination."

"I know our destination," the angel said. "From Dust and Samael. But the destination Dust provided is nonsensical; it's an empty sector. There is nothing awaiting where we were sent."

"So Dust was corrupt or misinformed?" Benedick asked.

"Or intentionally misprogrammed," Tristen said. His voice was level, light, matter-of-fact. As she often had in the long-ago, Caitlin thought that she would like it better if he were ranting. "Remember with whom we are dealing, here. The Builders were an apocalyptic cult. I've read that book in the case outside the bridge: it would not be beyond them to send a million life-forms on a one-way journey if they believed it would force us to evolve. The rest of you may not remember, but our father was but a pale reflection of what spawned him."

"I remember," Caitlin said. Gerald Conn, the last Captain of the Jacob's Ladder, had raised his heir a patricide--founding a family tradition, it seemed. And nobody had really blamed Alasdair for killing the old man.

Tristen fell silent. She could hear his light, quick breaths. This was no easier for him than for any of them, and perhaps worse. Arianrhod might be Benedick's ex-lover, if you could use such an affectionate term for an arrangement of political expedience. But she was Tristen's granddaughter, and those were not bonds that dissolved so easily.

Breaking the silence, Benedick said, "There also might have been a trigger protocol meant to provide a real destination when certain conditions were fulfilled."

"There still might," Caitlin said, and did not fill in the obvious corollary. If Israfel had, in fact, respawned and recompiled himself, it was possible that the situation Tristen was describing was exactly what had triggered the event.

"As an alternate possibility," Benedick added, "our angel has breadth of experience on its side. And it should in large part be aware of its progenitors' plans. Am I correct?"

"Yes," the angel said. Caitlin bit her cheek, trying not to hear familiar overtones. "However, data was lost in the collectivization. We were all attempting to eat one another. Further data had already been lost when the world shattered, and in the intervening centuries. And it would be well within parameters for Dust or Asrafil or Samael to institute some complex machination, then wipe and overwrite his own memory of the event. In which case, I would have no way of knowing. Conceivably, any of them could have programmed a respawn. Indeed, I should be surprised if each of them had not. And if it is Israfel ..."

Caitlin would have reached to rub her neck, if not for the gauntlets. She touched her wrist, retracting the glove into the armor, and pressed at the base of her skull. Interpreting the motion, the gelatinous lining of the armor rippled soothingly down the length of her back. "We are not what the Builders would have had us become. And based on the evidence of the dead in the holdes, Israfel would be designed to implement their plan over as many corpses as necessary."

Tristen said, "We don't need another war of the angels. Or a purge of the unbelievers."

"Sir Perceval is the Captain," the angel said. "If there are angels, if they are not significantly different in program from my progenitors, they will obey her if they can be made to hear. Except--"

"Bound demons," Caitlin said. "Loopholes in contracts. Things that serve unwillingly are tricky as hell to control."

"Yes," the angel said. "And first they must be made to hear."

Tristen's exhaled breath was loud enough to transmit.

"Benedick, when are you leaving? And how do you plan to track Arianrhod?"

Benedick paused, his helm in one hand. "Now. And with any means at my disposal."

The angel said, "She may be coming toward Rule. We must assume that her plans to wrest control of the ship have not changed, and we've all experienced firsthand the ruthlessness she's willing to bring to bear to implement those plans, up to and including a successful genocide. Central biosystems would be the logical choice for a beachhead, assuming some complex of our suppositions is correct, and some agency--potentially a respawned Asrafil--to which she owed fealty is what sent for her. It would explain why the Chief Engineer and I lost our feeds from the tank.

"Based on my schematics, which are somewhat incomplete, someone departing from the bridge could easily beat her there. Emergency reconfigurations have changed the plan of the world, but central biosystems is not far from Rule, and the bridge was designed to be accessible from Rule. Even without transport, the journey should take less than twenty hours."

Tristen cleared his throat. "It's just a guess that Arianrhod is coming this way."

"A hypothesis," the angel said. "But not one upon which we should gamble everything. Prince Benedick--"

"I'll follow Arianrhod, no matter what the decision. I can track her." He met Caitlin's eyes when he said it.

She believed him, which was most of the problem. "The last thing we need to add to an equation that's already this fucked is a mutiny. And Arianrhod is unlikely to abandon her ambitions simply because she got caught. We don't know what her resources are, or if somewhere she has followers."

"It would mean leaving Perceval on her own," Tristen said.

Caitlin tried to stop herself. She had no doubt in her daughter. Only doubt in the strength of any soul in the face of the weight of all the world. But the words escaped anyway: "Can she manage?"

"She's a Conn," Tristen said.

Caitlin swallowed. "Be there when you wake her, Brother. Please."