Dust

24 Vessel

Samael waited while the resurrectee brought Rien clothing, in which she dressed as quickly as she could, even to the paper shoes. Then the resurrectee took her wrist again and led her to a door. From the silence of the medical bay, Rien emerged into soft-spoken chaos.

She had known Engine was a city, but a glimpse of its vast spaces while being borne in on a stretcher was profoundly different from stepping out the hatchway, flanked by a resurrectee on one side and the Angel of Death on the other, and being confronted by the sweep of unfettered space. Her earlier head-spinning glimpses could not prepare her for this.

The holde might have rivaled a small city on Earth, she thought, though neither she nor Ng had personal experience to compare. Still, she felt she stood at the bottom of a bowl—but she would have felt that no matter where she stood. The space was a bubble, and the gravity must be directional, because she could see the structures rising from the walls as if from solid deck, all of them shining in pearlescent pastels, each tapered and prickling toward the center, so the whole bore a resemblance to a pin cushion turned inside-out.

And the streets, and the space between the walls, were filled with traffic. For the first time, the existence of Perceval's wings made logical sense to Rien; she watched Engineer after Engineer flit from one side of the void to the other, and thought how long it would take to walk around.

There were spanning cables as well, and cars moving along them, but why walk (or drive) if you could fly?

She would have expected noise, echoes filling the cavernous space, but the structures must have been designed to absorb sound. If anything, the street was hushed, voices falling off within a few steps, footsteps inaudible. It made the bustle eerie, like watching vids with the sound turned down to a whisper.

The resurrectee tugged her wrist gently, and Rien realized she was stuck in the doorway. Stepping away from the shelter of the wall made her knees tremble, but she was too shamed by her fear to show it. Especially in front of Samael.

She walked into the traffic and after a few steps it grew easier. The way was crowded, but in that crowding lay anonymity, and in that anonymity, Rien found security. She walked among the weirdly modified: angels and devils and someone who looked rather like a pagoda. There were persons who were chromed to quicksilver mirrors, or whose skins reflected the iridescent colors of the city. There were persons with eight limbs, scurrying along walls, and there were tiger-striped persons with wings and lush pelts.

When she had been Mean, Rien could vanish into any crowd.

She relished being able to do it again.

She was still relieved to come to the end of the walk. They stepped through a sliding door into a cool, dim room, and Rien bit back a sigh. She stepped to one side, not wanting to stay silhouetted against the light while Samael followed, amused by her own paranoia but not amused enough to stop herself. Once she was within, her augmented eyes adjusted.

The first person she saw was Benedick, Gavin on his shoulder, and she could have sagged against the wall in relief. Instead, she made herself step forward, freeing her wrist from the resurrectee's grasp, and went to her father.

He touched her shoulder lightly. She leaned into it, just enough to let him know she appreciated the gesture, not enough to admit she needed it.

"Where's Tristen?" she asked.

. "Still in the tank," he said, with a wince that made Rien feel guilty for letting Samael make her doubt her uncle. "He was worst off. I'm here to feed you and lead you to our improvisational council of war."

"Perceval," Rien said.

He nodded. "I will make her a priority. Come and meet your mother, Rien." He looked over her shoulder at Samael. "Nothing is decided."

Samael said, "May I accompany you?"

Benedick had a steady gaze, when he wanted it. "Could I stop you?"

Samael's shrug was oddly self-effacing, for an angel.

Gavin hopped onto Rien's shoulder. He didn't say anything, so neither did she. But she leaned her cheek against his wing, and he huddled into the curve of her neck, warm and feathery, smelling of sunlight and dust.

Benedick turned away, and Rien followed. The resurrectee was left behind, as unregarded as an old shoe, and Rien gave her a regretful glance.

The place he brought them to, finally, suited Rien's perception of what Engine should be. It was a long wide room, divided into near-corridors by rows of pillars and banks of interfaces. Engineers sat, sprawled, or curled in bowl-shaped chairs, some with eyes closed and fingers twitching in concentration, others in hushed conversation with their neighbors.

Despite this, Rien's attention was drawn inexorably to the image in a central hologram tank. The waystars shone and twisted at its center, illuminated in gradations of color invisible to the naked eye, and Rien realized that in the tank, she could see pressure and temperature readings, maps of convection currents, real-time diagrams of changing stellar structures, and estimates of the time remaining before the system collapsed into supernova. She realized also that she could read those numbers and gradients, by the courtesy of Hero Ng.

Arianrhod stood beyond the tank, her white hair shining in the light of the conjured stars.

Rien could not walk forward, as if maintaining her distance from the information in the tank could protect her from the reality of their danger.

"Days," Rien said. "That's just days."

Benedick touched her elbow. He was tall; she tipped her head back to look up at him. "It could be instants," he said. "Or a month. We won't have much warning, once the conflagration starts."

Rien shook her head. "We can't survive that."

"Not without a unified A.I.," Samael said quite calmly. "And a captain. And a mobile ship. And a crew that can fly her."

"None of which we have."

"All of which we can get," Rien said—or her voice said for her, though the intonation and the words were not her own. She pressed her fingertips over her mouth; her lips kept moving. "If you will trust me."

"Rien?" Benedick, staring at her as if he expected a possessing demon to rise up from her.

"I was Conrad Ng," she said. "Chief Engineer. Your daughter consumed me. She is my vessel."

When Perceval returned to her body, and Dust reclaimed his avatar, Perceval asked to talk to Rien. She expected a negative answer, some temporization.

She didn't expect Dust to spread his made-up hands helplessly and say, "I am sorry, beloved. Engine is beyond

my grasp." But he did, and—perhaps foolishly—she believed his admission of defeat.

And then he tilted his head and said, "But with your assistance, I hope my reach may soon exceed." "It's all you think of," she said. "Seducing me." "Your acquiescence," he said plainly, "is my survival." And then he dusted his hands against his waistcoat and finished, "But if you prefer to wait for Ariane, or for a supernova, that is the lady's privilege."

Rien understood everything Hero Ng was saying, which surprised her either more or less than it should have. The knowledge was there, deep knowledge, divorced of his personality. As if she had once upon a time studied and learned it herself.

There were other things as well, memories she would rather not pursue—a wife and children and all the bits and bobs a life was made of. Ac least he was a good man, she thought. A decent man. And a brave one.

She would have hated to share her head with someone like Alasdair or Ariane, no matter how wickedly smart they made her.

Maybe it took a monster to run things. Maybe you could only be a princess until you were in charge.

She could believe that. But she didn't want to think about it. Instead, she listened to Hero Ng explain his plan.

There was a good deal of the world, in his estimation, that was dead or damaged beyond repair. There was a good deal of raw material in the holdes. The world now had stored energy it had not contained when it limped into orbit around the waystars.

And there were the library trees, and the resurrectees.

If he could take hold in Rien, he reasoned, then his fellow crew members, preserved in the library, could inhabit the resurrected. "Ethically, we might quail at this necessity, but we have come down to a matter of life or death. There is a vast body of knowledge preserved there, and it is useless to the ship while maintained in stasis, unaccessed."

Rien stole a glance at Benedick. He did not appear to be quailing, and neither did her mother. Instead, Arianrhod had come around the hologram tank and now leaned against its corner, ankles crossed and arms folded, listening.

"We have a pair of immediate problems," Hero Ng said. "One is surviving an impending stellar death. The other is getting the Jacob's Ladder under way again, sustainably. It seems to me that the solutions to these problems must be linked. It will require a good deal of nerve, however, and will not be without risk. And we must begin at once, for we have no idea how long we have for preparations."

And while they waited, he explained.

Simply put, Chief Engineer Ng proposed that the Jacob's Ladder wait until the waystar went supernova, then catch a ride on the magnetized wave front of the exploding debris.

Theoretically (Ng said), embedded among the debris would be bubbles of magnetic field, created in the death throes of the star during the process of reconnection, the melding of opposing magnetic fields into a single line. It was possible—if the unused stores and the damaged ship itself could be spun into carbon monofilament tubes and computronium and symbiote colonies, if the repurposing of the ship's artificial gravity worked—that the world could net one of those bubbles and surf the cresting wave.

And maybe not be crushed. As long as they caught the leading edge. As long as they accelerated fast enough to stay with it. As long as they could reinforce the world, and locate enough acceleration tanks that the augmented crew stood a chance of survival. "There's no hope for the Mean," Ng said. "They will have to be Exalted immediately; there's no point in maintaining controls only to see them perish."

It was possible, as long as the world did not tear itself apart at the seams from the strain. The whole ship would have to accelerate evenly. The whole ship would have to stay ahead of the line of debris. Or they would be reduced to a smudge along the edge of the newly forming planetary nebula.

"And then what?" Arianrhod said, the first words Rien had heard her speak since fainting on the stretcher. "We fly blindly into darkness until we freeze? That seems to be a jump from the fire into the icebox, if I may stretch a metaphor."

Rien felt her lips stretch around Ng's smile. It was a nice smile, she judged, if a little smug. "If we live that long? When we're up to speed, we deploy a ramscoop. We find a better star, one that looks to have habitable worlds. And we steer for it."

"Simple," Arianrhod said, unfolding her arms. She glanced over her shoulder at the auburn-haired, snub' nosed woman who had been at her side now both times Rien had seen her. "Chief Engineer?"

She didn't mean Ng.

Which meant that was Caitlin Conn. Perceval's mother. Who was looking at Rien with far more concentration than was Arianrhod, though perhaps that was self-protection or embarrassment on Arianrhod's part.

"I think it could work," Caitlin said, without shifting her gaze. Maybe she was looking at—assessing—Hero Ng. He was the one wearing Rien's face, just now. "If it doesn't kill us. Of course, sitting here waiting for the boom will kill us, too. There's just one problem ..."

Rien found control of her own voice, or Ng relinquished it to her. She stepped away from Samael and, incidentally, Benedick. Gavin fanned his wings on her shoulder, for balance, and she remembered that he was Samael's creature.

And so was Mallory.

Which meant, so was Ng.

There was no one to trust. Except Perceval. Because if she didn't trust Perceval, there was nothing worth fighting for.

"What's the problem?" Benedick asked.

Rien knew the answer. "We'd have to unify the world's A.I. to do it. The angels don't work together without a guiding intelligence."

She would not look at Samael.

She couldn't bear to watch him preening.

At least, she thought, he wouldn't consume Hero Ng, and all his fellows from the moving times. No: they could be rehomed in the resurrected. Whose persons had been devoured by other Exalt, in the present day.

It all comes around again, Hero Ng whispered. Be of good heart and good patience, brave Rien.