Chill

4 balanced against the skin of the world

When Tristen returned to the tank farm, he strode without limping, a robe draped over his arm. Healing bone latticed by his symbiont pained him, but the hurt had subsided to the point where discipline and technology rendered it bearable. Pride kept him upright, though he wondered what he had left to sustain his pride on behalf of.

His steps thumped on the crosshatched grating that had earlier scored his hands when he fell against it. In their haste, before the shock wave hit, he had bundled Perceval into the nearest available tank and dived into the neighboring one. It had sealed before he realized he should have taken one on a different circuit to safeguard against failure that might kill them both.

He stopped before Perceval's tank and drew a breath. Sometimes, maybe you got lucky.

The status lights shone steady blue and green, as he had known they would. He had put this off longer than strictly necessary, but it did not seem unfit to him that Perceval should have whatever fragile respite he might win for her.

"I'm ready, angel."

The tank bubbled as it began to drain. The cover slid aside, spilling syrupy liquid through the grate. Within, Perceval slumped forward against her restraints, bones starvation-plain through scarred skin. Tristen held his arms out to support her as the gelatinous webbing slid away. He thought she would crumple and was ready to assist with her slight weight, but as her feet settled to the floor she lifted her chin instead. She raised one hand to the lip of the pod, steadying herself, and blinked open lashes that spiked and stuck.

"Uncle Tristen," she said.

She tilted her head to one side, a silent question. The muscles of his mouth twitched with repressed words. She was the Captain now. The angel would already have told her everything he might impart, faster and more efficiently. So Tristen just nodded and offered his hand as a brace when she stepped down over the lip of the pod.

She managed without it. "You're leaving," she said.

"I am going to intercept Arianrhod." Which Perceval knew, but it meant something to say it.

She looked up at him, blinking thoughtfully, arms wrapped tight over her chest. Belatedly, he recalled the robe and draped it around her, tugging it closed across her chest until its radiant chemical warmth began to unhunch her shoulders. If she had hair longer than a prickle of stubble across her scalp, he would have lifted it from the collar.

Instead, helpless, he stepped back and offered what he could: "I cared for her, too."

"Of course you did. There was never any question about that, and I'm not going to tell you your grief is nothing on mine. That would be childish and without compassion."

She straightened her arms, struggling into oversized sleeves, and sealed the front of the robe with a touch.

He watched her chest expand and contract as she breathed deeply, hard: steeling herself, or the arrested preliminary to a sob. He put his hand on her shoulder, all the comfort he could offer.

She raised her eyes to his again and presented him with a sort of a gift that was also a burden. "Kill Arianrhod for me, Uncle."

She could have no idea what she was asking of him, and it would be cruel to tell her, who needed no further cruelty now. She must have meant it as a kindness, dispensation and vengeance in one bequest. He couldn't make words happen. He pressed her cheek with the back of his hand.

Benedick broke a stimulant capsule under the unconscious resurrected's nose, resting his other hand on the uninjured side of the boy's head to restrain it. The boy jerked back nonetheless, but Benedick's grip kept him from further damaging himself. The resurrected grasped his wrist with a fish-cold hand. "Jsutien," Benedick said.

A familiar face but a foreign name.

Jsutien's eyes opened, nonetheless. Conn eyes, the stamp of Alasdair's paternity, with the faint drooping fold at the corner, but no Conn chill behind them. Not that Oliver had ever been as hard as his elders.

If it were not for Rien, this would be the loss Benedick would feel most deeply. And that was why, when he needed a helper, this had been the resurrected he chose. What must be done was best done without hesitation. The best way to learn to endure a pain was to experience it.

He drew back his hand, disengaging gently from the one Oliver still gripped him with. "Tell me everything that happened."

"Arianrhod," Jsutien said. He blinked and felt the nanobandage on his head with tentative fingers.

Benedick smoothed his expression. Give nothing of use to the subject of the interrogation. "Tell me everything you remember."

"The Engineer left me on watch." He began to sit; Benedick pressed a fingertip to his chest to keep him supine on the stretcher. Fur stirred softly against Benedick's throat as the toolkit peered between strands of his hair, but Jsutien's eyes only flickered to the little construct and dismissed it. "The Engineer had terminated service to the tank," he continued, "and wished me to observe the shutdown protocol so there would be no mishaps." He paused, again pressing his temple. "There's nothing after."

"Do you remember the blow?"

"Blow." His fingers still on the bandage, he frowned. "No. Nothing between watching the lights turn red, and now. Not even a timescroll. It's as if purged."

He must have pushed too hard, because he winced and blinked hazel eyes under ridiculous black ringlets--the perfect kid brother. Except he wasn't, anymore.

Resurrected and mute was one thing; Benedick had seen friends come back as the speechless dead all his life, and he was accustomed. The body was not the mind. This new thing--resurrected and bearing someone else's experiences, or at least the simplified, digitized version--unsettled him. Because the face was not blank as the face of a resurrected ought to be, and so he found himself responding to this young man as he would have responded to Oliver.

But Jsutien was not Oliver. He was constructed from the repaired body of a dead Conn and the electrical impulses salvaged from the mind of a dead Engineer. And while neither of those things was a person, what resulted when such a textureless recording infiltrated and grew into such a still mind was a human being not entirely like either of the components that had constructed it.

Benedick could think of it as a kind of reproduction, if he tried. Two parents united in a child both like and unlike each.

But ordinary reproduction did not result in the destruction of the originators.

"Caitlin will need to scan," Benedick said. "You're aware."

Jsutien frowned for a few moments, and then nodded. "The incursion--if there was an incursion--might have left something in my head."

It was a positive sign. Rather than asking ignorant questions, Jsutien took a moment to assess the information he had and draw conclusions.

"Yes," Benedick said. He reached beneath the stretcher and produced a draped silver-stain swag of nanochain. "Until then, I must restrain you."

Silently, Jsutien held forth his hands.

The access tunnels Tristen navigated as he left the bridge were cold, unlit, weightless, and unpressurized, and after several hours his oxygen reserves were becoming a concern. High-intensity microlamps on his armor's helm and shoulders swept over the irregular spaces between buckled bulkheads and decks, illuminating them with stark shadows that confused the eye. In atmosphere, the armor could have aided its course-plotting by echolocation, creating a sonographic map of the corridor, but the vacuum limited it to other forms of tomography. Still, it was useful to know where potential hazards lay, as all these passages were battered, torn, and open to the void.

The Enemy had long ago claimed and colonized them. Jacob Dust in his wisdom had never seen fit to correct the problem. Vacuum would not serve as a barrier to the Exalt, especially one armored as Tristen was armored now, but it had kept less advanced biota from entering the world's control core during the shipwrecked time.

Tristen thought the time for such measures had ended.

"Angel?"

He felt the angel's awareness settle on him. His armor had had a personality, a name, its own small servitor. Now that being was consumed in the world's guardian, and Tristen found he missed it. He said, "I almost called you George."

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.