Dust

29 the sun goes down in a cold pale flare

They met the guardian before the door, and joined him there in combat.

If Rien had been a fighter, she might have been able to describe what followed. But she was a passenger, and she experienced what happened in a stunning, stuttering kaleidoscope. Not a blur, because a blur is fluid, and this was staccato, punctuated.

Sequence and order fell away; there was only the struggle to stay soft inside her armor, not to fight its movement, to bite down on the mouthguard and let the gelatinous, body-temperature shock lining press her body into whatever shape it would.

She was not very good at it. Caitlin—or someone—had set her armor for extreme evasion. Her left arm, spine, left leg popped and strained. Her colony rushed to repair the damage, reporting torn tendons and muscles, her own anatomy limned red in her mind's eye.

And she honestly couldn't understand a thing that was going on around her. Her armor was defended by a sym-biont swarm, and what attacked was—she thought— Dust, defending his lair and his hostage. But she couldn't be certain, and whatever Samael was doing, he was no more plain to the eye—or any of her armor's sensors.

Tristen never left her side, not that proximity was any protection against an enemy who surrounded them, who interpermeated their defenses. A hiss and sizzle like static droned in her ears, and from her armor—from her every gesture and from her companions—St. Elmo's fire shredded and spun. Veils of light, green, vermilion, and electric blue, pulled and tore.

Rien had no idea who was winning. She saw Tristen striking out with invisible weapons, his hands crackling with residual ionization. She saw the whole corridor lit flare'white as some attack died on their defenses. She groped, and herself drew Caitlin's terrible black unsword Mercy. The blade was an absence of anything, reflection-less as the face of the Enemy. She swung it wildly.

Where the blade passed, the crackling light was cut, and burned no more.

With it, with Samael and Tristen's assistance, Rien was hewing her way to the door.

She was within a meter of her goal when the deck jumped under Rien's feet, and through the armor she heard first rending metal and then an abrupt absence of transmitted sound.

"Hull breach," Tristen said over his suit mike. "We have to get within."

Within, Perceval was unready. Unready and unarmed, her limbs like puppet sticks, her body awkward, infected, alien, enfolded in a corona of sensation that extended meters in every direction. Pinion stirred around her, a shimmer of light like the shadow of ripples on the bottom of a glass.

Graceless, uncoordinated. New and raw. Unarmored, and with no weapon in her hands. But she was naked to the Enemy, and did not feel its cold.

Ariane needed her armor. She needed her unblade.

She advanced, her angel cloaking her in his glory, Innocence as black in her hand as a hole in the night.

There was too much. Perceval raked herself together, clutched her tattered edges close. In the corridor, Dust was fighting someone. Another angel, people in armor. She'd look in a minute. Too much, from everywhere, and she was trying to see Ariane.

There was no speaking, now, for there was no atmosphere. No click as Ariane's armored foot came down, disturbing cobwebs, breaking the parallel rays of the suns that shone through the rent bulkhead behind her, haloing her in light reflected from disturbed particles.

—Be bold,—Pinion whispered in Perceval's ear. —Be of good courage, Captain. For I am with you.—

As if on marionette strings, Perceval stepped forward to war. And like a gliding cat, Ariane came to meet her.

Asrafil's presence was a void in Perceval's new perceptions, Ariane and Innocence the enigma at its center. Through Pinion, into Dust, she sensed the other angel's fringes, felt them grapple and claw. The rift in the bulkhead webbed over, clotted like a wound, knit like bone.

She saw in cascades of images, from angles and points of view not her own. She whirled in the veil of Pinion's wings, and Pinion itself tore savagely at Asrafil when that angel clutched after her.

But Dust fought his war on two fronts, and Perceval could sense each centimeter of ground he was losing. The angel in the corridor was smaller than Asrafil or than Dust, more coherent, tighter and more defined—

—If Asrafil was here, then who was outside?

Two, in armor. A man and a woman. One with an un-blade. And an angel.

Perceval reached out through Dust again. Since he had released her emotions, she found she could think, process, and consider in absolute clarity, even while her body danced swords with Ariane. She was not, she thought, only thinking with her own brain, and her symbiont, but with some fraction of Dust's processing power as well. And her borrowed capacity was untroubled by the desperation with which Perceval's body fought for life.

—Dust, Open the door.—

She could not permit Ariane to corner her, and there was nothing she could do to parry that blade. Anything living or symbiotic it touched was severed for all time. But if she could not parry, Pinion could riposte, and Perceval could keep them both out of the way.

Perceval spun, dodged a thrust from the enemy angel— a lance of charged particles that seared the decking where she had been—and as she recovered found herself face to mask with Ariane's faceless armor, and almost within the span of her arms. Ariane's blade swerved toward her—a hard reflexive arc—and Perceval sprang upward, Pinion flailing around her.

She could not actually feel the unblade slice under her feet. There was no air for it to stir. But she felt it clip the trailing flight feathers on Pinion's bottom wings, and pass through without resistance.

There was resistance as Perceval somersaulted up and away, Pinion slashing and scissoring. She knew she struck Ariane's armor. She knew she cut it, for those wings were edged like razors where they chose to be. She felt the pulse of blood from the wound—arterial—and saw the cobalt spray across the decking, quickly stopped as Ariane's symbiont attended it.

Ariane shifted her sword to her other hand.

When Perceval landed, crouched, half the bridge away, the cobwebs tore under her feet. And one of Pinion's wings was dragging.

—Dust.— His stubborness was like a wall. He had no intention of permitting Samael or any of her family near her. He had no intention of making alliances, or of sharing power.

And if she was his Captain, what good was it if he did not answer when she spoke to him?

—Dust. Open the corridor door.—

He showed her his war, plunged her into it like a microsecond bath of ice water. He gave her angels fighting, the knife-taloned combat of microscopic machines. The weapons were invisible ... until microwaves sizzled cobwebs, until a wave of massed nanites burned through another like a flaming sword through ice.

—Open the corridor door.—

Chromed armor glittering, Ariane charged. Perceval, coiled for another twisting leap, curled her lip and narrowed her eyes, and waited.

—Samael ... —

A console across the room sparked and exploded.

—You stupid bastard, let them in.—

Ariane lunged, anticipating another leap like before. Perceval threw herself to the side, this time, instead, and felt Innocence bite deep into one wing. Just like before, there would be shocking pain and then—

She fell, sprawling, skidding in cobwebs. She rolled, the remaining wings armoring her as best they could, bruising elbows and toes, smacking her shin hard on the navigator's chair. She scrambled behind a console, Ariane instead grabbing the chair back and bounding over, her guard flawed for a split instant as she leaped and Innocence drifted wide.

One wing was severed above the elbow. But all the others bent forward, flexed at the joint as sharply as a guitarist's fingers, and as Perceval fell backward among the dust and debris they met, and bowed, and slid into Ariane's breast through the armor, until a meter or more of blue-smeared plumage protruded from her back.

Perceval saw her own wide eyes and stubbled scalp reflected in the bright chrome of Ariane's helm—

And then Pinion snapped wide its wings, and the daughter of Alasdair Conn shredded, flesh and bone.

With the hiss of air entering from the now-open corridor door, Perceval heard the pop of dislocating joints and the thick meaty rip of muscle.

Snaps and tatters of static electricity charged in the ionized atmosphere; Ariane might be vanquished, but Asrafil fought still.

And then, as if the fighting has been a hallucination, Rien's armor balanced flat-footed in the corridor, and the door into the bridge stood open. Silence hung over the corridor, dim lights flickering into life, shadows concealing as much as they revealed. Within, though, lightning raced over surfaces, and Rien could see someone slender and bony-tall, shrouded in tattered wings and dripping cobalt blood, rising to her feet.

Tristen cried out and stepped forward, weapon trained on Perceval. No, Rien thought, moving forward in anticipation of the betrayal, aware already that there was nothing she could do to stop him. Perhaps an angel could intervene in time. Perhaps—

"You're alive," he said, and his voice broke, and his gun dropped down beside his thigh. He held out his unarmed hand, offering support or an embrace, and Perceval turned toward him, her eyes wide and wild.

And Rien breathed again, through a pall of sick self-hate for ever doubting him. But then Samael appeared like a star from eclipse, one hand firm upon his arm, and Perceval halted midstep.

—Rien,— said a voice from the air before her. —And Rien only.—

"Dust," Samael said, as if it needed explaining. And Rien nodded.

Somehow, when Rien turned, she found herself meeting Tristen's faceless attention. "You're all idiots," Rien said.

He squared himself. "You have everything you need."

She nodded. And as she stepped over the threshold onto the bridge, toward Perceval, she brushed Samael's naked shoulder with her gauntlet and said inside her helm, "I'm ready, angel. Consent."

She never saw if he responded. She was distracted by the motion in her hand, as something nigh-weightless and of neutral temperature to the armor's sensors. She looked down in surprise, and nearly dropped it.

Mercy.

Rien swallowed and went forward.

Walking across the bridge, she picked her feet up and set them down straight, to try to limit the amount of dust she was disturbing. Perceval, wreathed in wings like an arbor of brazen thorns, held out her hands. As Rien came closer, she saw the severed stump of one wing dripping viscous blue fluid. Perceval's eyes widened when she saw what Rien held, the splinter of absolute blackness in her hand. Perceval dropped to one knee and Rien trotted a step—but then Perceval stood again and Rien realized her sister had only been picking up Innocence.

Which meant that the chunks of armor and blue-dripping meat scattered around the deck were—

"Oh," Rien said, and tried not to gag inside her helmet. "Space it," she said, and opened her faceplate, just in case. The machine-oil stench of Exalt blood didn't help the nausea, but it didn't really hurt it either.

And then she was close enough to Perceval for Perceval to touch her, and Perceval put a hand on her armored shoulder, and Rien leaned into the touch. Although she couldn't feel the touch through ceramic and titanium, she could feel the armor feeling.

"Close your eyes," Perceval said.

Rien closed them. For three minutes, timed on her symbiont. And all the while she waited, she felt Samael working in her, moving through her, changing her. Taking her apart.

Her fringes were unraveling, and she felt how Perceval had come unraveled, too. She sensed what Perceval hadn't wanted her to witness, as Perceval collected Ariane's symbiont, her own symbiont hunting it to every corner of the bridge, and consumed it. And with it, Ariane.

And with Ariane, Alasdair.

"I guess you're really Captain now," Rien said, without opening her eyes. And then the name, one last time. A caress. "Perceval."

Perceval's voice was thick and choked. "I'm not exactly Perceval anymore."

"It's all right," Rien said, as Samael's invisible components converted her, cell by cell. "I still love you."

Perceval touched her armor again. This time, Rien felt it.

Samael was converting the armor, too. Or her own symbiont was, now. Now that the angel had given it instruction.

In Rien's head, Hero Ng was steely in his resolve. The angels must be integrated. Samael was not strong enough to do it on his own. And neither he, nor Dust, nor Asrafil could be trusted.

Rien agreed with him. And she meant to show him that she, too, could be ruthless with herself if it were needful.

"I love you, too," Perceval said. Rien opened her eyes, to look on Perceval's face for one last time, as a human being. "Dust. He made me want him. But it's you I love."

"But not want. You don't want me."

Perceval shrugged, her wings rising and falling. "Oh, sex. So take a lover. Don't be ridiculous. Who wants to marry a martyr?"

"Marry?"

"Marry me," Perceval said. "Rien."

Oh, too good to be true. Too much to hope for. For a cold instant, she let herself hold it close. She thought about Jordan, the wings, the golden fur ... Mallory, who might be Samael's creature or might not, but who had given her Gavin and also, Hero Ng.

She felt the angel working within her. —Give her the plum,—Samael said. —Feed her the virus. Free your love from Dust's chains.—

It was in a pouch at Rien's belt. She slipped her hand inside, and pulled it out. A little thing, bruised, sticky juice dripping over her thumb. Like the blood sticky under her boots.

"I'll marry you," she said. She crushed the plum in her hand and dropped the pit onto the floor. "If you'll kiss me one more time."

The gesture with the fruit, the tone of her voice— whatever it was, something she said alerted Perceval. Rien could tell by the arch of her eyebrow and the tilt of her head. Suspicious. Intrigued.

And concerned.

Princesses and angels and kings, Rien thought. They're all monsters. Even if you need them. Even if they give you wings.

But she'd learned something from Perceval, and from Tristen, and from Conrad Ng. In addition to princesses and monsters and kings, there are knights and heroes also.

And it all came down to dying in the end, and what you chose to do your dying for.

She couldn't have done it on her own. But Tristen stood outside the door. And she had Hero Ng.

The irony, of course, was that Samael had given him to her. And Samael could not defeat Dust. And neither angel was the sort to whom she wanted to trust her life, nor the life of the world.

There was only one possible solution.

She licked the pulp of the plum from her fingers, took firm hold of Samael—with Hero Ng's solid assistance— and tilted her head back to accept Perceval's kiss.

At first, Perceval did not know what she was feeling. It wasn't the kiss, and it wasn't the gut-churning memory of Dust's wanted/unwanted kisses either. Rather, it was a spasm, an uncontrolled flood of everything not into but through her. If joining with Dust, if becoming his Captain, had taken her out of herself, then this scoured her insides out.

Rien was there, inside her, all her quick wits—so smart, so full of thinking—and all her hurts and braveries. And her love, her longing, her stubborn determination: they made Perceval's breath hurt, her eyes sting. And with Rien was Samael, and someone else—Hero Ng, calm and dedicated.

She felt the unpicking, as they tangled inside her, as they unwound Pinion from her soul and stripped it away. She felt them strike Dust, strike against the places where she and he were integrated, and expected them to break against his claim on her like water splashed aside by a hand. But they were all there: Samael and his greed and his green devotion; Hero Ng who mourned the rest he longed for and would never know; Rien, brushing Perceval in passing, shining with love and rich in selfish disappointment. And doing this thing anyway, taking Perceval as she was. And they pushed through her, ran like a river, shoved barriers aside, flooded her with their conjoined strength and scoured clean channels in her mind.

And Dust was beset, still locked in silent combat with Asrafil, constrained to protect those within his bridge, limited by human frailties not his own.

Perceval might have been frightened if Rien had not been with them. Rien, who with Hero Ng's help, used Samael's own virus—and Samael's own knowledge of how to fight angels—to unpick Samael and rework him, make him into something else, and then bootstrapped Samael up through Pinion and through Perceval. Rien, whose guiding touch she could feel as Samael slammed into Dust from a direction the angel never expected: from the inside.

Rien, who used their combined strength and resources not to consume Dust, nor even to reach through him and consume Asrafil. But to revise him. Revise them both, in fact. Infect them. Complexify them, as Pinion scattered into pieces on the deck, shadow-bright crumbling into powder, sifting through the air like sand, converting back to the nanoparticles of its colony, its guiding principle stripped out and subsumed.

1 should not have wanted to change you. You have the right to draw lines. It's not the heroes we need to fix.

It's the monsters.

The gestalt wasn't trying to eat Dust. It meant to taint him. With duty, and affection, and the bitter, soft creak of snow, compressed under struggling wings. To support him, reinforce him, bring Asrafil under his sway.

To taint him, with Pinion, with Samael, with Rien.

Rien, who whispered in Perceval's head—

—You were my knight in shining armor.—

—and who, lost in the angel she'd birthed, fell to ashes in Perceval's hands.

His Captain was a long time crying.

But that was right and fair. Right and fair that she should weep for the dead. Right and fair that she should weep as well, for those not truly alive, who had sacrificed their consciousness to the wholeness of the world.

Right and fair that she should weep for the death of her wife, and for her wings.

And while she wept, the angel was busy. There were ways to be smoothed. Latticeworks to reinforce. The whole world, like a crystal, tuned so that it might resonate at a stroke but not shatter. He reached out through the world, and—in his strength—he found the angels, greater and lesser, and opened himself to them. And they came, mostly willing, for now he was without rival, and even the strongest of the lesser rank could see that it was better to come willing, a voice in the choir, than be consumed and silenced. Even the smallest wills came unto him—Rien's newborn armor, who would never now be named. The un-blades, Innocence and Mercy, and what remained of Charity as well, though its program was decompiled and much had been lost.

There was one exception. When he reached Engine, he found a creature who had never been a fragment of Israfel. A small animal, a small tool. A white falcon with a serpent's tail and lasers for eyes.

It was what remained of an Exalt woman, the rebel Cynric Conn, and in her memory the angel left it discrete.

As for Engine, the angel was busy. He spoke to the Chief Engineer, and to her imparted the news for good and ill. That some had been lost, although there was enough left in him that had been Rien to speak to her softly, and with consolation. And to Benedick Conn as well, on whose stone face the news fell like rain.

For Arianrhod, he had no words, even as she was brought into custody at last, and led to her acceleration tank to await whatever would befall.

There were more important matters at hand.

The angel bade Tristen Conn enter, to care for his Captain. He set about cleaning the bridge, recycling the cobwebs and insect and arachnid husks. There must be repairs, and not just to the interior. His patch job of the rent Ariane—and he, in that part of him that had once been Asrafil—had torn in the hull was crude, but it was strong.

Still, the first thing he made clean was his Captain's chair, so her uncle could place her in it. Tristen lifted her carefully and held her to his armored chest for a long time before he set her down again, though she curled into herself and would not be comforted.

The angel ached to help her.

But then, he thought, Tristen ached as well.

The angel understood it. Rien would have known. So this is love, he thought. This abjection. This helplessness.

It was not merely the chemicals, after all.

Onto the screens, the angels called images of the waystars, of the construction. Of the flocks of resurrectees brought into Engine, imbued with the knowledge of dead Com and Crew and Engineers, preserved all this time by Samael and Mallory in their orchard library. Now that the angel's touch reached everywhere, through all the living portions of the world, he identified its wounds and weaknesses, and where he could not heal himself, he sent the Engineers.

And they went with a will, once Caitlin Conn gave them the word.

And then it was time to awaken his Captain. She slept poorly, her uncle's uniform jacket thrown over her shoulders as a crude blanket, concealing the healed stubs of her wings. Tristen sat beside her, dozing fitfully though he was propped upright.

With sense enough, now, not to whisper endearments in her ear, the angel brushed the fringe of Perceval's awareness and woke her. Though his avatar stood before the screens, he saw her eyes come open. He saw her fingers tighten on the collar of her uncle's coat.

He saw her awakening wince, of pain that was not physical. He wondered what that was like, to wake and remember loss.

He was glad that he would never know.

His Captain slid her feet off her couch. She stood, silently, without rousing her uncle, though she had to slip her shoulder from under his hand to do it. She left behind his coat.

The bridge might be clean, but Perceval was filthy. She should go to her quarters, make herself clean. Rest in comfort.

The angel would find a way to suggest it.

But first he had something to show her.

"Angel?" She stood at his elbow, breathing. Her voice was as cold as the breath of the Enemy.

"I did not mean to hurt you," he said. "When I was Rien—"

"You're not Rien." She would not look at him, and it twisted in his belly. Which was ludicrous, but he felt what Rien would have felt.

And Rien would have felt pain.

Still, if they lived, there was the future.

"I am what is left of Rien," he said, which was as true as anything. He was not not Rien.

She swallowed. "Why did you wake me?"

"It's time," he said, and darkened and polarized all the world's windows, and commandeered all its screens. "You'll want to go to your tank."

She did not move. And the angel would not touch her without invitation.

"What's your name?" she asked. "What do I call you?"

"I don't have a name," he said. If he wasn't Rien, no more so was he Dust, or Inkling, or Pinion, or Metatron, or Susabo, or Samael, or Asrafel. "You will have to give me one."

She held her breath, which she didn't need except for speaking. And the angel waited for her to answer.

But the warning claxon had awakened Tristen, and Tristen came and touched her arm. "Acceleration tank," he said.

The stubs of Perceval's wings raked the inside of her borrowed shirt. She looked up, not at the main screen but at the windows, though the view through the telescope was better.

The angel thought he heard her take a breath.

And then the sky tore wide.

It began as a flare of the primary, an arc-light brightness at the poles, where the curtains of falling matter from the secondary plunged to the white dwarf's surface. It could have been a brightening, of the sort epidemic to a catastrophic variable pair. Of the sort they'd been witnessing with increasing frequency over the past centuries, years, days.

This time, it wasn't.

The white dwarf was undergoing conflagration. In a matter of moments, a great mottled curtain of fire blew away from its surface, an expanding sphere that slammed past the secondary with unimaginable power, shredding the photosphere from the red giant and leaving only a seared cinder in its wake.

Even through the filters, even for Exalted eyes, the light must have been shattering. Perceval's and Tristen's bones shone through their skin. Outside, amid the latticework of the world, the outlines of shadows were scorched into the hide of the Jacob's Ladder, its name and the twisting helix symbol obliterated in an instant by that scouring light.

The suns had been dead for ten and a half minutes by the time their final ecstasy was visible to Perceval and Dust.

The shock front of the explosion traveled at a fraction of lightspeed. There was plenty of time to watch it come. Plenty of time for Tristen to chivvy Perceval to the limited protection of the tanks.

And after a single lingering glance around the bridge, she went. It didn't matter. The angel was always with her.

The nameless angel in the nameless ship filled his empty spaces with himself, all his microscopic bodies cushioning, absorbing where they could. He must be quick. There was so much life within him that could not be moved to a tank, and he was its only protection.

Him, the embrace of his self-stuff, and his delicate manipulations of the artificial gravity.

He cast his nets wide, reached out to the Engineers who still worked feverishly from their tanks. He possessed the monofilaments of his magnetic sails; he spread grasping electromagnetic fingers. The star's magnetosphere had been as shredded as the star itself, broken into fragments and tossed wide on the shock wave of the supernova. He must locate a bubble at the front of the wave, find it and then catch it. And then hold it, without being torn apart himself.

Because if he missed, behind it roared a wall of plasma from one of the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Nothing to it, he told himself. Like surfing the tunnel of the wave.

And then he wondered from which of his component selves he had claimed that metaphor.

The forefront of the wave reached them, and the angel felt it slipping through his webs, slipping, slipping—

Catching.

Caught.

There was no time to brace or consider. He jerked, snapped. Shuddered. Broke, in places. Held, in places. Snapped, and strained, and twisted. Deformed and was crushed.

Was picked up and hurled, stinging, smarting, broken.

Not whole. Shredding, trailing lives and material, bleeding from a thousand wounds.

Not intact.

But alive.

He heard his Captain in her tank. He sensed her pain and disorientation. The tank could not leak. She must be safe. At all costs.

He waited, then.

Until she spoke to him. "Angel?"

"Captain," he answered.

"Status?" She stammered, but she said it.

The angel smiled his snaggled smile. "We are under way."