Chill

6 a gallery of portals

Arianrhod had known from the first that she could lose Benedick. But running barefoot through the springy grass of the causeway, she also knew that overconfidence would not reward her. She would be cautious. Minutes before, awake in her tank, she had bent her skills to slowing her heartbeat and respiration so Caitlin would not know she was aware and in possession of assistance. She had measured her oxygen levels and hoarded her strength. Aware, she could trigger hibernation. Aware, she could red-light the tank, and no one would question her death. It was only a short step from there to escape. Caitlin would assume that she had had help, but the fact was, Arianrhod had planned for this. She had always known her plan to support Asrafil, to become the one who held the strings and the power behind Captain Ariane, might fail.

She had not anticipated that failure, but she had planned for it.

She must live. It was not only a matter of her own survival, but of a sacred trust. Her lord Asrafil now depended on her. She had had her own way out.

That wasn't the way it had worked out, exactly. She had not realized how many allies she had remaining. But she was adaptable, and an escape that began with her released from her tank by an outside agency merely meant the advantage of a few extra minutes of lead time, and the luxury of not having to fight and sabotage her way past Caitlin and the machines of Engine.

Now the hoarded energy was hers to spend, and perhaps she had a knife at Caitlin's throat in the long term.

Benedick was good, but she understood him. His political and martial acumen were unmatched, but Arianrhod knew how things were built. And also how to take them apart again. She was older than Benedick, as clever and--because he thought like a Conn, not like an Engineer--she was also far more comfortable in her colony, its abilities, and their uses.

The Conns were corporeocentric as a culture, identified with their physical forms, unwilling to modify. Engineers were more comfortable with constant transition and evolution. They more perfectly expressed the will of the Builders, adaptation itself having become the end state. For was not the world a wheel, eternally in motion? So while Arianrhod had spent a great deal of time perfecting her shape--mature, attractive, carefully balanced to be enough like a Conn to be comforting while still evidently that of an Engineer--she now began to shed it.

A loss, but losses were also a mere challenge to adaptation. She could have shifted herself faster and more completely--and with less risk--in a medical tank, but pheromones and biochemistry and a few chromatic and cosmetic alterations would do for a beginning. She felt the tingle in the bones of her face, the burn and spark of lightning against her long bones as they awakened to growth long suspended.

The change would take time, and there were sacrifices she was not yet prepared to make that could reveal her. Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.

Another loss. A necessary one. She would be prepared to make sacrifices.

Despite the discomfort--not yet pain, though it would be, which was another reason to wish for a medical tank--she ran on, covering ground lightly, leaving as little trail as conveniently possible until she came to the parting of the ways. Five possible trails. This was where she would lose Benedick.

"Asrafil," she murmured, and felt something larger and more alien tear inside her. Her enemies might think her ambitious, ruthless, but she comforted herself with the truth: that she was given in service, and sometimes that service demanded great sacrifice. She had given up so much already. So many lives. So much material. A little merely physical agony was nothing to spare herself.

Her symbiont pinched, pulled, separated, and Arianrhod gasped in pain as half her colony peeled free of her cells to flood from her mouth, her ears, the pores of her skin. Blue tendrils groped from every orifice, glossy with off-tints in the nebula's cankerous light. The symbiont seethed forth until it wreathed the air around her like smoke threading from a burned-out motor.

It wavered in coils. Then it dissipated, as if a breeze had spread it wide.

Arianrhod, hands on her knees, pressed her spinning head lower and gasped. Saliva flooded her mouth; she gulped and it stung her raw throat going down. Releasing a portion of her colony had cost her. The result was inflammation, ruptured cells, internal bleeding. Her remaining, weakened symbiont could replenish itself--and repair her body--but the process would take time.

Pride forced her to brace her palms against her kneecaps, push herself upright, and stand tall. She tossed loose strands of hair--storm-colored now, like the images of light-torn clouds from the old world, a gradient of silver through pewter to coal--behind her shoulder, shook it out, and breathed deeply enough to feel her ribs crack. Please, she thought, pushing down firmly on an upwelling of relief.

She repeated, "Asrafil."

Like a fan, the angel unfolded beside her. Familiar, in his black coat and boots, arms crossed, stern over the almost-feminine bones of his face. He raised his arms and stretched, as if settling new flesh over new bones--although he had neither--and smiled at her.

"Well done," he said. "Well done, indeed. How may I reward your service, my brave one?"

Arianrhod stretched out her hands to him like a plaintive child. She said, "Carry me."

The angel lifted her into his arms. With a sweep of his hand, he smoothed the grass where she had stood, erasing the evidence of her distress. Then, they rose with the flaring of his coat and ascended into the air. "I know where to go," he said.

"That's as may be," Arianrhod answered, letting her head relax against his shoulder. "But first we must make a side trip. I have something to collect."

"What is it?" She felt their bodies rising and falling between the wings he constructed from stolen threads ripped from passing colonies.

"Something my daughter Ariane concealed decades ago," Arianrhod said.

Asrafil clucked his tongue. He knew she was teasing him.

She still waited a few moments before she relented. "A weapon," she said. "It's a weapon."

Because it was easier to lead than follow, Gavin preceded his necromancer up the spiral stair to Rule, bobbing between heavy wingbeats as he rose through a central shaft twined past bubbling algae tanks. He paused at the landing, tail twisted through the balustrade, and waited for Mallory to catch up.

The space at the top of the stair was vaulted and oddly proportioned, higher at one end than the other. Waste space, moist and dark, with walls composed of long bales of compost held in place by netting. Smelling of clean, sour earth, edible mushrooms festooned every bale in fans, spikes, and streamers. Some were broken, their thick stems weeping fluid, but enough remained intact to give Gavin hope for the survival of anyone left within Rule.

Engine lay at the outskirts of the world, isolated for the protection of everything that would have been threatened by its reactors. Rule lay cupped inside the arch of the wheel, protected by the world's many struts and habitats and active defenses, armored like a heart inside a rib cage. The only place more sheltered was the bridge, at its hub.

Safety lamps still burned dim behind translucent panels by the door, illuminating the landing. The hallway--or mushroom farm--tapered down to the far end. A great double portal loomed in the shadows, lit only by bioluminescence and the filtered light from outside. It was the external aperture of the air lock into Rule.

They had climbed a long tunnel of a spoke to end here, but despite the stairs Mallory's breath still came easy when at last they were side by side at the top. Gavin stretched his neck to slide his beak along the satiny skin of a lightly flushed cheek. Mallory responded by gliding fingers under Gavin's blue-tinged crest, rubbing until the basilisk twisted this way and that to maneuver the scratch to all the itchy spots. Gavin replied with grooming in kind, pulling mahogany ringlets taut and letting them slide through his beak like disordered feathers.

Mallory cast about, frowning. "There should be a guard upon the stair. Why have we not been stopped? Or if they died at their posts"--as they should have, Mallory's tone implied--"where are the bodies? I'd like the answer."

"Well, you know. I'd also like a shuttlecraft," Gavin answered. "A rasher of bacon, and a mined-stone brooch. But you don't hear me complaining."

Mallory offered him a mocking head-tilt. "What's a rasher of bacon?"

"A strip of cured animal flesh," he said. "Meant for eating."

The necromancer made a face like a nauseated cat. "What would you want that for?"

Gavin could not answer. Instead, he turned to groom the feathers on one wing into alignment. While so diverted, he asked, "What shall we examine first?"

"Is there no one to greet us?" Mallory craned stagily from left to right. "Can it be that the Chief Engineer is correct and all Rule has perished? Familiar spirit, what do you sense in this place?"

Gavin fanned his wings to stir the air, hoping there might be lingering scent in some still corner. But the breeze he generated brought only cold traces. "Not a damned thing," he said. "Shall we travel into Rule?"

Flourishing, Mallory bowed and swept Gavin forward with a gesture. He arrowed past, tail and neck extended, and circled twice before the great doors into Rule, buying time until his patron should catch up.

Radio echoes told him the shape of the space, and that the portal before them was shielded. He could have cut his way in, but there was no benefit in destroying the air lock.

Mallory had ways of opening doors when it was needful.

The necromancer drew up and consulted the controls beside the gate. "Thumb lock, code lock, DNA lock. Ancient tech."

"From the Builders," Gavin replied, circling again.

"Light," Mallory said, without looking up from intent consideration of the lock. Gavin dropped to a forward-bent shoulder. "Ooof," Mallory said. "That's not light."

"This is." A moment's intention, and a fine azure glow, crisp and bright, radiated from Gavin's breast and wings. He focused the light on the lock, so Mallory could lean back a little. Exalt eyes were fine in dimness, but detail work in the dark could challenge even a Conn. "How will you win past?"

"Dead men's memories," Mallory answered, and pressed a thumb to the lock. What would happen now, Gavin knew, was that thumb skin would shape itself into the patterns of some long-dead Conn's print. Mallory's symbiont would manufacture a synthetic approximation of the relevant sections of the dead man's DNA. And finally, the necromancer would reach into the racked archives of untold partial memories and draw up the appropriate response to the blinking challenge lights.

A moment, no more, and the massive, well-maintained doors glided whispering into their housings. Gavin fanned his wings for balance as Mallory stepped forward, saying absently, "Watch the claws."

"I never crush anything I don't mean to."

A pass of the necromancer's hand, and the outer air lock closed behind them. There was no second lock inside. All Mallory needed to do was cycle the lock--a manual command again, crude and robust--wait for the hiss of exchanged air as the inner doors slid wide, and step forward into Rule.

Here, the air was full of information. Without the light of the waystars, the cavernous lobby blazed with full-spectrum lamps that illuminated the repair of ravaged fruit trees. As they paused inside the air lock to orient themselves, a shattered olive humped itself and heaved, straightening a trunk that had twisted when it fell. With a vast creaking and splintering, the rustling of unfolding branches, its colony drew it upright. Gavin thought perhaps the world itself colluded in the righting, because the limbs sprung and swayed as if gravity luffed for a moment in the vicinity, and when they sagged again a patter of unripe olives struck the earthen deck.

"The lights are wasteful," Mallory said. "We'll need to check the resource load and what our intake is. And perhaps advise the Captain to dial them back."

"The trees need them," Gavin said.

"The trees need not to freeze on the Enemy's breath," Mallory rebutted. "We haven't a waystar to mine for energy now. Consumables are consumed." A pause, a listening flick of eyes, and Mallory continued. "The Chief Engineer has heard from Prince Benedick. He no longer believes the fugitive is coming here."

"A pity," Gavin said, "when we invested so much in arranging a reception."

Mallory's shoulder moved under his talons, rise and fall of a shrug. "At least we heard before we fetched the party favors."

"And the snacks."

Somewhere a bird sang, and Gavin detected the heavy aroma of blossoming jasmine. He could smell people, too, and death, but those scents were cold. Arianrhod and Ariane's engineered disease had done its work; there was no sign of living habitation--or even the bodies of the dead.

Mallory walked forward through air scented with the musky green sap of olive trees. "What good is an apocalypse without snacks?"

Gavin resettled his wings. "Does that mean Tristen won't be meeting us here after all?"

"No. Caitlin says his ETA is only a few hours now. It will be easier to connect here."

Gavin bobbed his head at the end of his neck like the ball at the end of a flexible rod. "We'll have to work fast, then."

The necromancer only kicked a clod of earth, gesturing at the empty orchards. "I could have saved these people."

"As you did Perceval and Rien. If you had been here, the flu might not have killed so many."

An angry nod moved curls against Gavin's wing. He cupped it wide, as if to shelter Mallory's head, angry in his own turn that all he had to offer was a useless protective gesture. "They were Conns. Would they have accepted your help?"

"It's not the Conns. It's the servants." A declaration Gavin met with silence, until Mallory added, "We should examine the house before deciding everyone is dead." That last was said desultorily, as if Mallory assumed already what they would find.

Still, they found the direction and went, coming at last through orchards and gardens--all busy with the task of healing themselves for a harvest that might never happen--to the great house of Rule. It was not an imposing edifice, being built simply into the bulkheads of the Heaven, so the effect was rather of a castle around a courtyard. Once they emerged from the passageway that led them in, walls pocked with openings rose on every side toward a sky full of windows.

"If you were central biosystems, where would you be?" Gavin asked. A richly oleaginous scent drew his attention. In addition, he could just make out a faint, mechanical whine.

"Some expert system you turned out to be."

"I'm a power tool. You're the one with a head full of dead Conn. You tell me."

Mallory snorted. "If you were the last small band of desperate survivors, where would you be?"

"In the kitchens," Gavin answered. With one wing, he pointed to the turning exhaust fan set low in the wall before them. "In the kitchens."

Mallory could move fast, given the right provocation. Gavin allowed the wind of the necromancer's passage to lift him from his perch, beating heavily in pursuit. Mallory ducked into the main entrance of the house, an arched tunnel whose curved walls echoed back the thumping of Gavin's wings. They ran through hallways, pelted down a flight of stairs, charged unwavering past a long gallery of portraits. Together they descended, Mallory choosing stairwells over corridors and left turns over right, until they leveled out in a corridor flanked by open chambers. The unsealed doors revealed coffin sleepers four to a room, racked in vertical sets of two against each wall. Servants' quarters.

Gavin--who had never been here before--remembered. Remembered the shape of the space, the doors, the cubicles. The irising spiral leading to food services, beyond. He backwinged, but there was no place to land and consider. He knew this place, knew it in every shred of metal and polymer that made up his form.

On the right, there would be a passageway, concealed by doors that might seem--to the casual eye--merely a part of the corridor wall. Beyond that, Gavin remembered, were the elevators that led to the laboratories and workstations of central biosystems.

The memory unsettled him. It itched, so he wished he could claw at it.

"The bio labs are that way," he said, with a lash of his tail.

"I thought you didn't know the layout."

"I don't. But that doesn't change the fact that the bio labs are that way."

"Correct," said Mallory, still trotting. "We'll check that after we're done in the kitchen. Which should be right about--"

The door was unmistakable, a heavy affair sealed tight, with its air lock lights burning green for a good seal. Mallory leaned a shoulder against it and cupped a hand between one ear and the portal.

Gavin looped to pass Mallory's other ear. "If everybody in Rule died of an engineered influenza, there could be contaminated bodies inside. Is it safe to open that?"

"Is anything?"

"I'm immune," the basilisk said. "I was only concerned for you."

"I promise not to die on you."

A child's answer--but that was Mallory. Sulking, Gavin settled to a rail against the wall and watched while the necromancer examined the door and the space before it.

Gavin's beak was not made for frowning. He converted the urge to a head bob instead. "How do you mean to get the door open?"

With a sidelong glance, Mallory said, "Technology."

Magic, rather. Which was to say, the layers and layers of abstract knowledge that came as the arcane cost of being a necromancer. Whatever the necromancer did to subvert the locks, in only seconds the portal irised wide.

Gavin flapped up to perch beside it. "Charming," he said.

A complicated rearrangement of forehead muscles indicated that perhaps Mallory could have cared less, but it would have taken an effort. "It's what we do. Gavin, break this open."

Behind the irising door was another panel, one that looked as if it had been set in place with great haste. Sealed from within, Gavin now saw. Wedged shut, and there were dents and scratches--signs someone had tried to break through it without success.

Mallory turned, an eyebrow raised, and said singsong, "Oh, familiar demon?"

Whatever the construction, Gavin's eyebeams illuminated all: the secondary decompression door, the obvious air seal, the bright marks of welding where the panel met the bulkhead. If you meant to conceal your presence from an aware and seeking enemy, it was worth nothing at all. But if your goal was isolation from a spreading contagion, this was exactly the thing.

"Here," Gavin said, settling with flipped wings on the necromancer's shoulder. He breathed deep--a lungful of air he did not need and would not use, except to speak.

"Will it open?"

Mallory, trying remembered codes, made a dismissive gesture. "The comm is smashed, the door is welded to the bulkhead, and the old codes I have are not bypassing the lock."

They would have been changed. Which meant anything Gavin remembered, in that fragmentary manner that Gavin sometimes seemed to be remembering things, would be of very little use. But memories were not his only skill.

"So did they smash the comm before they entered, so they would not have to hear the plaints of the dying?" he asked. "Or was it broken by the same desperate outsider who left the dents, in frustration or revenge when they would not open the door?"

"When we get in, we can talk to any survivors and find out." Mallory thumped a fist on the door in irritation. Its mass was such that it muffled the sound dramatically.

"The new angel?" Gavin suggested. He hopped closer to the controls, tracing the wiring by feel. "If whoever is in there is alive and aware--"

"The Captain says Nova cannot reach inside the door." Another thump, this one sharper, as if Mallory hoped that pounding on the door would draw out any denizens. "It's sealed against unincorporated colonies. There's an electrostatic boundary field."

"I think breaking the comm was punitive," Gavin confirmed, "because the door has been shatterbolted as well as welded. Whoever is in there is sealed in. They can't come out. They can't change their minds. You would have to cut through."

"Ariane." Mallory shoved a fistful of hair out of narrowed eyes, voice dripping loathing. With one crooked thumb, the necromancer traced a bright scar on the door. "Her hatchetwork, maybe. Then nothing works."

"Lasers work," Gavin corrected. "Shall I?"

Recollecting dignity, the necromancer stepped nonchalantly aside. "Go to it."

There might be living people on the other side of the door. Gavin aimed his gaze high and unsealed his eyes. The light sprang forth, cutting-bright, and metal sizzled where it fell. It would be safest to burn through the shatterbolts and the welds; the door should swing on its hinges, then. And if it failed to swing, he could burn through the hinges, too.

It was a heavy door--and heavily armored--and the burning took time. By the scorch marks around the perimeter, Mallory and Gavin were not the first to try, but whoever had come before them had been devoid of the assistance of a basilisk.

The last shatterbolt failed with a crack like one of those tree limbs untwisting, and the door sagged. Gavin backwinged, hopping away from the area where it might fall if the hinges snapped. But other than an unnerving creak, there was nothing.

"Ready," Mallory said. The necromancer had assumed a defensive, nonthreatening posture--relaxed but balanced, hands held low. Gavin extended one wing, hair-fine tendrils gliding from the feathertips, and from a distance of four meters hooked the edge of the door and levered it open. The hinges were not so damaged that it dragged against the floor, which was good, because while Gavin had the strength to support it, the mass was another question.

He had been half expecting the charge and so was ready for it when it came. Three running footsteps warned them before a stout green-coated person barreled through the door, waving a sizzling, quarter-meter mono-knife like a child slashing at stick-swords. That tool would sever even Gavin's wings, and as he stretched them into filamentous nets and flipped them around the released attacker, he was careful to avoid the edge. Fortunately, the lunging individual had been a Mean until recently, and sie had not yet made sense of hir new body. The nets enmeshed hir, tangled hir wrists and forearms, bound hir hands tight against the hilt of the knife, and slowly dragged them down, however sie might strain.

Muscle and bone were no match for Gavin's strength. Before Mallory stepped forward, he had the prisoner pressed against the wall, bracing himself with stiff filaments to prevent hir from simply dragging or shoving him. Sie outmassed him exponentially, but when he could wedge himself, leverage won.

Deftly, Mallory moved forward and relieved the prisoner of hir weapon. As the necromancer stroked the control in the blade's hilt, the sizzle of air against the blade abated. Mallory tucked it through a clothing loop and sighed, pressing fingers to forehead as if in pain.

Mallory said, "Who are you?"

The servant, or former servant--by the cluster on hir collar, a chief of household--squared hir shoulders. Hir eventual words confirmed Gavin's deduction. "I am Head."

Hir jaw quivered when sie spoke, as if in naming hirself sie were struck by the weight of implications that the name no longer carried. "You might kill me now, if that's your intending. I won't serve Lady Ariane. But spare the others. They only did as I ordered. I am responsible. The treason is mine."

"Ariane is dead," Mallory said.

Gavin watched the emotions contort Head's expression: relief, disbelief, apprehension. Fingers shaking, sie reached to hir collar, touched the cluster there, moved as if to uncatch it, then hesitated. "Then who is Commodore?"

"There is no Commodore," Mallory said. "Perceval Conn is Captain."

Head's eyes closed. "She escaped." Then opened, intent and worried. "Rien?"

Gavin did not envy Mallory the moment of thought before the hesitant headshake that followed. Nor did he envy Head the moment of anticipation, the potential for hope.

"I'm sorry," Mallory said. "She saved the world. Not that that makes it better." Head's body jerked sharply, as if with an arrested shudder, but sie made no sound. Someone's eyes appeared briefly around the rim of the broken door, fingers enfolding the edge. Whoever they belonged to, they vanished back into the kitchen behind Head's slashing gesture. Yes. Whoever sie had saved, sie had saved because they had obeyed hir without question.

Head said, "A real Captain?"

"Sealed and confirmed."

"If Perceval is Captain, who leads the house of Conn?" A businessy question.

Mallory seemed uncertain of how to answer, glancing at Gavin with a questioning head-tilt.

"Tristen is eldest," Gavin said.

This time, Head put a hand flat against the bulkhead behind hir, as if hir knees felt too unsteady to take hir weight. "Tristen lives." So flatly that Gavin could not read pleasure or dismay in the tone. "In truth?"

"Tristen lives," Mallory confirmed. "As does Benedick Conn, and Caitlin, who is the Chief Engineer. Tristen is on his way here now, and will be in Rule within a few hours. We come in advance of him."

Head smiled, broad and certain, and shoved the cluster on hir collar hard against hir throat, as if to seat it there more firmly. "Then we have work to be getting on with."