Grail

19 the lathe of evolution

When Benedick came with Chelsea and Jordan to arrest Damian Jsutien, they found the Astrogator in his quarters, as Nova had reported. The door stood open, welcoming company, though Benedick did not think Jsutien often entertained.

Jsutien’s room was spare, by Engine standards. The lushness of the corridor vegetation ended at the threshold. Rather than garish colors and a verdancy of symbiotic plants and animals, Jsutien affected surroundings imbued with simple serenity. Stripped of plants, the walls of his chamber revealed convoluted surfaces of piping and ductwork, painted in shades of sand and eggshell-white, eggshell-brown. On the floor, a pallet lay rolled aside and in use as a bolster upon which Jsutien had propped his back. A tray across his lap held hair-fine manipulators and a partially disassembled toolkit. The toolkit, under anesthesia, breathed calmly in and out through a mask.

Draped sheets and ultraviolet established a sterile operating field, and Jsutien’s fingers—Oliver’s fingers, Benedick reminded himself for the first time in years—were coated in a layer of plum-colored surgical spray.

“Just a moment,” Jsutien said. He wiggled a chip into a socket until it emitted a satisfying click. The toolkit, even under sedation, stretched against its restraints and made a small pleased noise.

Jsutien closed it up with surgical glue and speedheal, turning off the anesthesia before releasing its restraints. By the time he’d unfastened the last delicate limb, the faneared device was sitting up and grooming between the toes on the opposite foot. It looked familiar to Benedick; the pattern of spots and stripes reminded him of one he’d destroyed in service, and he felt a momentary pang for the gallant little artifice.

Jsutien wadded up his surgical drapes and peeled the purple down his fingers in wormy inside-out tubes. “There,” he said. “That’s a stopping point. How can I be of service?”

Jordan looked at Benedick, engendering a pang of sympathy he would never demonstrate. It was a difficult time and situation under which to find oneself thrust into a position of authority. Battlefield promotions generally were, and Benedick had endured his share. But that did not dim his fellow feeling for the new and inexperienced Chief Engineer.

He was about to take pity on her when Chelsea, on her left hand, stepped forward. She straightened her back and cleared her throat, leaving Benedick wondering why excellent posture was never a good sign. “Damian Jsutien,” she said. “You are under arrest on suspicion of harboring an unknown daemon, and suspicion of complicity aware or unaware in the murder of Caitlin Conn.”

He stopped, half standing, not yet quite having risen from his crouch. Benedick tensed, a hand on the hilt of his sword, but Jsutien only tilted his head up and blinked at her. “I see,” he said. “I’ll get my shirt. By the way, the extra memory you wanted installed in your toolkit is done.”

Chelsea crouched down and clucked. The fuzzy beast scampered to her, hesitating infinitesimally to sniff her outstretched fingers before swarming up her arm. Under the sweep of her long hair, it quickly made itself into a fur collar.

“Thanks,” she said. She stood, tilting her chin up to look Jsutien in the eye.

“Check that for sabotage,” Benedick said.

She nodded. “Damian, you know we’ll take the best possible care of you, even if you’ve got somebody else in your head.”

He pulled a dress shirt on over his head and tugged the collar laces. When it was settled to his satisfaction, he ran a hand through his tight, dark curls and said, “By the fact that I am coming quietly, you may assume I believe you to have my best interests at heart.”

Dust was bigger now. Not much bigger, not too much, and he took good care not to stray outside the physical confines of the construct body he inhabited. It was safer in here, masquerading as a small, unremarked semi-intelligence. Out there, free-floating, in a colony with real access to the world—out there he would have access to more information, more sensory input, more of the world. And in the process, he would eventually—inevitably—run afoul of Nova.

Who would eat him again, this time as surely as the last time.

So for now he stayed small and stayed with his secret ally, who did not even know herself an ally most of the time. They had goals in common.

His people were being misguided. The people he had been charged to advance, to defend, to force against the lathe of evolution and edge fine were in grave danger. They might make landfall, sell all their majesty and progress for the promise of safety, disassemble the world that had been his body for material and energy, and destroy the ecosystem that had endured greater stress and evolutionary pressures than any mere dirtside ecology—

—and here, on the very verge of triumph, of fulfilling his ancient charge, he could fail.

He would not allow himself to fail. He would not allow his Builders, his angels, and most importantly his mortal (or demimortal) charges to fail so close to completion, to transcendence.

No.

They would not be allowed to fail.

He crouched on his patron’s mule’s shoulder and let her carry him along as she escorted the Astrogator through the halls of Engine, flanked by the new Chief Engineer and the venerable Benedick Conn. This fast-moving squad swept past lesser Exalts and Engineers and construct creatures that flattened themselves against corridor walls and ceilings, as far out of the way as they could manage. Some of them reached out to let the hem of a Conn garment brush them. The old ways—the old respect—might no longer be enforced with terror, but enough of it lingered that Dust was not entirely bereft of hope for the future of Engine and the Conn family. They might have grown soft, but they had not entirely fallen apart.

Central Engineering was an unassuming control booth inside a mighty tower in Engine. The structure was one of dozens that grew from all sides of the world’s greatest Heaven—a vast semispherical cargo hold converted into a city. Flyers blurred from one spire to another across the open space between them. Jordan, this untested Chief Engineer, let her wings feather wide and glanced across Dust’s insignificant pointed nose to Chelsea.

“Nova says the Captain has come to review the questioning,” she said.

Dust’s sensitive toolkit nose lifted the taste of Benedick’s discomfort from the air. Benedick’s child might be Captain now, and grown, but Dust imagined there were things he’d prefer she not witness. The elder Conn looked away, though, and Dust had no illusions that he could count this emotional attachment as a weakness, a chink in Benedick’s armor.

He had known too many Conns.

Chelsea’s voice vibrated her throat against Dust’s side. “Do we want the Captain present?” She bent close, as if examining Oliver’s eyes. She lifted the lid with a thumb.

“Hey,” he said.

Dust reached across the gap and sniffed his ear. This close to his patron, he felt the moment when daemon touched daemon, and data bridged. Oliver’s eyes might have flashed, but a moment later, they only looked confused.

“Ow,” he said. “Seriously, stop it.”

Inside Oliver’s colony, the subcolony that had housed Ariane was now dying, consuming itself, contracting into a singularity and vanishing. Oliver knew as little of it as he knew of the tumors and viruses his colony excised from his body every day. The data it had stored was in Dust now, awaiting a moment when he could transfer it to Ariane’s other host.

“The Captain,” Benedick said. “Are you going to try to stop her?”

Though he spoke, Benedick still didn’t look back. Beside them, the Astrogator in Oliver Conn’s body had dropped into silence. He expressed no bravado; he made no effort to appear amused. Instead, he went to judgment as a man without defenses, but also without fear. Though he was pale and his forehead dewed with sweat, he smelled only of discomfort. Perhaps he felt unwell. Perhaps he felt the Ariane-seed’s suicide, on some subconscious level.

Whatever he experienced, he met it with dignity.

And as it was true courage, and not the storybook kind, Dust found that he admired that. Admired it, and had no understanding of how to define it. Storybooks were what he was created for. And from what he had created himself, and this entire society that surrounded him. Princes and knights-errant and all.

Rightly considered, histories, too, were storybooks. Of a sort.

“You go on ahead, Chief Engineer,” Benedick said. “Make sure all is in readiness for us. Chelsea and I will have no problems with the prisoner.”

Nova could have done the same, but he must have been counting on Jordan’s physical presence having an effect on the Captain. Jordan’s wings unfurled the rest of the way; her eyes tilted upward and her arms streamlined along her body. A kick, a flick of pinions in the lessened gravity, and the tiger-colored Engineer was gone.

It was a sign of her youth that she accepted an order—however politely phrased—from a Conn she outranked, without question or modification. At least she hadn’t called him sir.

If I were her Angel, there would be none of that. If I were her Angel, she would not bow so willingly to any Conn who ordered it. She would be a power, a force to be reckoned with. I would give her wings in metaphor as well as truth.

Dust almost crooned after her, but that would be unwise.

Chelsea made a noise as if she wished she could turn her head and spit. “There won’t be any of that on a heavy body.”

“Wings,” Jsutien said. “One more thing we won’t need where we’re going.”

Chelsea took his elbow. “Come on,” she said. “The sooner we get the inside of your head looked at, the sooner we can all get lunch.”

* * *

Once Danilaw had reclaimed his pressure suit and gotten Samael to explain to him how to patch into the Jacob’s Ladder’s systems for a power boost, he called Fortune. The modifications required a little soldering but, unsurprisingly, it turned out Captain Amanda knew her way around a standard-issue pressure suit repair kit pretty well.

Administrator Jesse was on hand to take his call—fortuitously, it turned out, because the motes and probes Amanda and Danilaw had deployed from the Quercus had reported the explosion. Combined with the cessation of telemetry from the space suits, it had seemed a logical supposition that Danilaw and Amanda were dead, casualties of a treacherous attack by the crew of the derelict generation ship.

“Gain has been declared Acting Premier,” Jesse said, in that precise and mannerly way of his. “She is placing the colony on a war footing.”

Danilaw wondered what exactly that meant, and furthermore what exactly Gain thought she could accomplish against people who knew how to fight and had centuries of practice in doing it.

“Planetary defenses are engaged to prevent you from approaching the orbit of Fortune,” Jesse said. “A broadcast is being prepared warning the Jacob’s Ladder away on pain of destruction. Public opinion is running high against the aliens, Premier.”

“Our evidence suggests the explosion was caused by sabotage committed on Fortune itself,” Danilaw said. “It was an attack by us against them. The Quercus’s drive detonated.”

He paused and glanced at Amanda, who had waited just out of pickup range. She leaned forward into reception. “So Gain stepped right into the power vacuum, did she?”

Jesse’s eyes widened. “She ordered an inquest begun at once. Decisively. She stepped up the assemblage of a defense cordon, too. By last night, there was a popular vote to confirm her as Acting Premier in your absence and … presumed death.”

“Well, I’m not absent anymore,” Danilaw said. “Patch me through to the media center, would you? I can see I have an announcement to make. And some orders to countermand. And an inquest of my own to put into motion.”

“You’re not going to call off the defensive cordon?” Amanda said.

Danilaw shook his head. “I am going to countermand any shoot-on-sight orders they may have received, however. Jesse—”

“Right here.”

“Watch your back. Also, keep an eye on Gain. And any contacts she may have should be logged.”

Jesse looked more greenish than ochre, but he nodded. “I will.”

“Good job,” Danilaw said, wishing he felt more confident in it. “You’ll do great. Just stay cool, Administrator.”