Grail

26 for my sister

Nova might have turned her away, and the treacherous Go-Back might gnaw her innards now, but Ariane-Dust was far from finished. She was older than this Angel-child, she was forged now into what she had always been meant to be, and she was not a thing to be casually spurned.

But Nova’s armor was good, better than expected, and when Ariane turned to savage her she curled aside, so that Dust’s barbed dragon claws slid down her scales and left no harm but bright scratches. The Book’s full potency still pulsed through her—a weapon black and deep. She could feel the way the words wrapped Dorcas, too, and bound them together.

Either Ariane-Dust or Dorcas would have to die if either were to be free.

A splinter of unblade ate at Ariane’s core, slashing away at her like a swallowed razor blade. It would have been fatal not so long ago, but Ariane was something more now, something new. An unblade in an enemy’s hand was an inconvenience only.

Very well, then. Dust knew how to fight in these circumstances. The Go-Back did not have an Angel of her own, or an Angel’s experience. Nova was the chief threat.

Though Dorcas gnawed like a worm in her gut, though Nova met her with flashing claws of code and killer aps, Ariane reached through the web of words. She girded herself in the Book’s ancient syntax and, though blows rained down upon her armored surface, Dust pulled herself along Nova’s scaled conduit to the planet surface, where Nova’s Conn pets stood in tranced communion with their Angel.

Dust sneered. If they had the courage to truly merge, to make themselves whole—Nova and her pathetic puppets, trapped in their meat—then they would not be so vulnerable. And she would not be able to do this—

Danilaw Bakare sat up in a room full of aliens and rubbed his hands over his hair. “You’re right,” he said. “Cynric. The dodecapodes—Amanda?”

She looked up. She knelt beside him, but her medical focus was no longer trained so unrelentingly on him. “Danilaw,” she said. “Help. All three of the Jacobeans just fell over.”

When Ariane-Dust swarmed down her link, Nova turned on her with everything, fighting a desperate, hissing-cat battle to stop her. She barely even slowed her down. Ariane charged past, barreled through her, and slammed herself into Perceval, Cynric, and Tristen like a blade coming home in a sheath. Nova lunged after, trailing a cometary stream of packets, but the hybrid thing was too armored under the slick, spiky wall of new code.

Ariane eluded her claws and crouched, laughing, interlaced with the prostrate bodies of her friends.

Nova could see the worm inside her, still working, shredding Ariane’s innards faster than Ariane could repair them. The damage was substantial, but it was going to be too slow.

Ariane spread herself thin, enticing Nova to lance into her and try to rescue one or another of her clan. YOU CAN’T SAVE THEM ALL, she taunted. YOU CAN’T ACCOMPLISH EVERYTHING.

“Maybe not,” Nova said. Inside Ariane, that sharp-edged thing was thrashing like a caterpillar in its pupa. “But the work that comes before my hand, that part I can do.”

Benedick, Mallory, and Jordan moved through destruction, with Samael sweeping the rubble into his wings of scything energy and leaving cowering Engineers intact and shrouded under the nuclear blue arc of his protective shield. He blossomed; he grew; he swept up struggling animals and uprooted plants and a carnivorous orchid that Benedick thought he recognized. He could tell which parts of Engine fell within Samael’s sphere of influence, because beyond it towers cracked and bulkheads split open, streaming life into the Enemy’s greedy hands. Benedick kept his head down and kept moving; when he looked up, he saw the swarms of symbols gnawing away the structure of the world.

“That’s not Ariane,” he said. “She wouldn’t destroy the place. She’d conquer it.”

Beside him, Mallory coughed. “Go-Backs. If we’re all dead, we can’t contaminate this pretty planet with our toxic DNA.”

“Space it,” Benedick said. “We’ve got to find the source.”

“I’ve got contact with Nova. She has fallen back,” Samael said, as Benedick lunged forward to pull a bleeding intern under the shelter of his parasol presence. “She’s defending the Captain, planetside.”

“The Captain is under attack?”

“That attack is Ariane,” Samael said. “She’s eaten an Angel. She’s not exactly corporeal anymore. And it looks like whatever is ripping Engine apart is also working on her.”

Benedick knew he had a nasty, suspicious mind. He cultivated it. “You seem to have a lot of unexpected resources.”

He felt the smile in the air that surrounded them.

“I have been hoarding them,” Samael admitted. “Out of Nova’s sight. Did you really expect otherwise?”

“Get Jordan to Central Engineering,” Benedick said, “and her overrides and electromagnetic weapons, so she can fight this war—and all is forgiven, Angel.”

Easier said than done. They fought through Engine one meter at a time as it shattered all around them. Their ragtag collection of rescuees grew, and Benedick had the sense before too long that the space bowered by Samael was shrinking. Hemmed in on all sides, he asked, “Is there a problem?”

“I’m losing,” Samael said simply.

Jordan looked up, her armor clicking as she heaved her shoulders back. “I’m going ahead alone,” she said. “If I get there, I’ll send help.”

She bolted away, leaving Benedick reaching after her, his armored hand closing on thin air.

Samael said, “I could countermand her armor.”

“You could also get her killed,” Mallory said. “Let the girl go. It’s no more dangerous than staying here. And she might win through.”

The world came apart under Dorcas’s fingertips, and though she wept, she kept on shredding. She pulled the Bridge apart, and Engine, knowing that it was a mistake to start at the periphery and work in. When you wanted to kill something, you started with the heart.

The heart. Ariane was a distraction, down there fighting out her hate on the colony world. Dorcas should let her go for now; the world was the first consideration. She could not allow it to contaminate Fortune.

She should let Ariane go. Let her fight it out with Nova and the rest—but they were there, on the innocent world itself, and Dorcas found herself as unable to leave it alone as she could a spot of shit on her shoe. And now Ariane had enfolded the others, and Dorcas was within Ariane, and one of these others was Cynric—the absolute worst of the lot, the Sorceress herself. The manipulator, the twister of every natural order.

And there was the Book, and the strength in Dorcas’s heart, and the ghost of an unblade with which to wreak her will.

Cynric was a better target than Ariane.

An Angel pressing at the boundaries of her flesh was less to Cynric than it might be to most. She had felt the attack, coursing along the freshly reestablished uplink to Nova, and she had not lost control of her body as the others had. But she had allowed herself to fall, for deception and the convenience of a resting position, and now she bided her time.

So she was aware of it when entropy came creeping along her limbs like nibbling mouths, wrapped in the Book’s armor of symbols.

Now that was new and interesting. She tasted an unblade in the hunger of it, but it had a will, and an unblade was only hunger without direction.

Cynric opened her boundaries and let the chaos in, meaning to subvert it—and found within it a mind. An unexpected mind—the Go-Back Engineer Dorcas, with shatterings of Tristen’s lost daughter larded through her. Creeping, chewing, pulling the Angel Ariane-Dust apart from within. A mind that was inexperienced in such things, and so utterly transparent to Cynric, who had in a very real way invented the tactics of managing one’s persona with one’s colony.

Cynric was unsurprised to learn that Dorcas meant to destroy her, and with her the Jacob’s Ladder and all that dwelled there, in order to preserve this alien colony from contamination.

Cynric had neither the resources of an Angel nor the armor of the Book. She had only her small colony and the meat she wore like a veil. All she had was argument.

“The world wants to live,” she said, as Dorcas took her by the virtual throat and began to pull her molecules asunder. “They all want to live. Who are you to decide otherwise?”

“They do not have the right to live at the expense of others,” Dorcas answered.

It was a fanatic perspective. But Cynric had never really understood the Go-Backs, with their ideas of genetic purity and limited lives. It was only fitting, she supposed, that never having understood them, she now must bargain with one for the life of the world.

“Everything is at the expense of others,” Cynric said. “The honest predator acknowledges the system what it owes.”

“No one in your family has ever been an honest predator,” Dorcas said, bearing down.

Perceval was fighting, too, but her war was waged inside her own mind. It was not her first battle with Ariane, and she carried the memory that she had won the others. But somehow—sprawled incapacitated on an alien floor—that did not give her the strength she thought it should. And Ariane did not come alone this time, but wrapped in strange armor and wielding strange weapons.

Perceval saw her like a dragon, like an Angel in black armor, spanning wide the nine black iron wings of a seraphim. There was a tang around her, a cast Perceval recognized, and she only had to taste it once to identify it.

Dust.

MY NAME, Ariane said inside her. FOR I STAND IN MY PLACE OF POWER; I TAKE UP MY ASPECT. I AM THE NAME OF THE WORLD.

Inside Perceval’s mind, she extended a hand. Inside Perceval’s mind, Perceval refused to cringe from her.

She’s done what Rien did, and merged with an Angel. But unlike Rien, she stayed herself. Mostly herself. More than herself.

In the guise Ariane wore, in what had become of Rien, in Mallory full to brimming with the intellect of dead men—Perceval glimpsed a solution. Nova, she thought desperately. Nova, you have to hear me.

“Still here,” Nova whispered inside her. The momentary lag told Perceval that she answered from orbit. That lag was killing them.

It would have to be Tristen. And even as she knew he would do what she bid, she was sorry.

Danilaw and Amanda rolled the Jacobeans onto their sides, checked their airways, and propped them as comfortably as was possible. There was nothing wrong with them—nothing visibly wrong. Elevated heart rates, the quick breathing of stress, but no reaction to pain or conversation or physical contact or cold towels.

Danilaw had left a q-set with Benedick, a direct link, if necessary. He tried it now.

No one answered.

Amanda glanced at him. Wordless, he shook his head.

Against the porthole glass, the scarred dodecapus writhed its silent hieroglyphs.

“The Captain commands it,” Nova said into Tristen’s mind, and outlined Perceval’s plan.

Mad, risky, painful.

All right then, Tristen said, silently, because his body would not obey him.

Perhaps that was for the best in the long run, because it rendered him unable to run or scream when Nova took his body down to the component atoms. First, she pulled him from his body. He watched from her perspective as his corporeal form evaporated, felt the strength the stuff of which his body had been made loaned to Nova. She surrounded him, encapsulated him, and then he was discrete again, standing on his own two feet, there in the Heaven of Dorcas’s devising.

He felt crisp, razor-fine. Almost no time had elapsed; only long enough for Nova to transmit the data of his personality from one place to another.

That was all he was now.

Data.

Machine memories contained in a machine, all the meat and chemicals stripped away. Mirth was in his hand—a pattern conjured from available materials. His armor rippled about him, flowed and fell, replaced by a shirt and trousers that would serve him just as well against Ariane and her unblade.

He felt the earth spring under his feet as he stepped forward. There was a tent, a Go-Back pavilion. Around it, the Go-Backs arrayed themselves three-deep, their cobras twining their ankles.

Tristen did not have time to fight them. Midstep, he vanished; midstep, he reappeared, inside the pavilion now and still moving. In a glance, he took in the scene; Dorcas doubled over the table, Ariane bending her back, the unblade trapped between them with its blade through Ariane’s un-bleeding body.

Both women were wrapped in a shroud of black language, which clung to their skin and armored them. A broken-spined book lay under Dorcas. Blood dripped into it, filtering between the swirling words to stain the depths of the pages cerulean. Ariane was smiling.

So this, Tristen thought as he stepped to her, was what it felt like to be an Angel.

She lifted Dorcas up and hurled her at him. Dorcas clung to her wrists, trying to control the fight, but Ariane shook her loose. The web of black words stretched between them, separating only reluctantly.

Ariane pulled the unblade from its sheath in her own body. A spill of symbols followed it, blue with blood, but she stopped them effortlessly. Healing the damage done by an unblade. Quite impossible.

Tristen let himself come apart and reform when the body of his daughter had passed through where he was standing. He swung Mirth to and fro with a sound like silk sliced by a razor. When Ariane responded in kind, Charity made no sound at all.

“Remember last time?” Ariane said.

Tristen could have edited the memory as he moved forward, sealing it away. But whatever fear was in it was a friend, for he could use the information on how Ariane had fought before to fight her again.

And this time, he would not be defeated.

Tristen fell apart into ashes, and it was nothing Perceval had not seen before.

She heard Amanda curse and Danilaw gasp, though, and felt their hands on her own limp body, as if by holding her close they could somehow protect her. It was futile and gallant and quintessentially Mean, and she wished for a moment that she could tell them of Rien, whom she had loved—and how desperately just then they reminded her of Rien.

Then, an instant later, she could. Ariane’s attack snapped and faded, whipped back like an electrocuted tentacle, and Perceval raised one hand and put it over Danilaw’s on her shoulder. “I’m all right now,” she said. Tell Tristen his distraction is working.

“Yes and no,” Nova said inside her. “I’m falling apart even faster now. It’s Dorcas, not Ariane, that’s doing it.”

Ariane fought him, and she had strength he did not. But he was Tristen Tiger, and the weightless, soundless clash of Mirth and Charity filled him with the cold and ancient joy of battle. He was not afraid of Ariane Conn.

He would have his payment of her.

The black armor of the Book girding her might have been a defense, but behind him Dorcas rose up and took the pall in her own fists and twisted, hauling. So Ariane fought against her, too, and her arm was impeded.

Tristen found himself stalking her, toying with her. Walking her around the room. He batted Charity aside with the forte of Mirth’s blade and caught her by the throat, full of a cold and potent glee.

An Angel’s wrath, he thought. Or his father’s.

That blunted the edge of his joy. He paused, the blade edge to Ariane’s throat, her arms bound to her sides by Dorcas wrenching on the shroud of writhing symbols. He remembered blindness and pain, and a stinking hole where he had lost himself in the dark. Vengeance, he thought.

It satisfied him.

And then, like a small voice calling up from the bottom of a well, he remembered something else.

Chelsea.

“This is for my sister, bitch,” he whispered. And when he kissed Ariane-Dust on the eyelids, he pulled her and what was left of Dust, root and stock, out of Chelsea’s body. Through the eyeholes.

And then he fed the guts to Nova, satisfied and smiling.

* * *

“Shit,” Perceval said, out loud, even though Danilaw and Amanda would hear her. “Patch me through to her, would you?”

Nova’s doubt eddied about her, but though she could not avoid Perceval knowing, the Angel chose not to speak it.

“Tristen is there,” Nova said, leaving unexpressed the implications. If he could bring himself to do it, he could end the threat once and for all.

“Patch me through,” Perceval said again. “That is an order.”

Nova argued no more. A moment later, and Perceval felt Nova’s awareness of the room in which Tristen had fought. He now crouched over Chelsea’s still form, as if guarding it from Dorcas. Dorcas sat against the tent wall, arms folded as if casually, but Perceval could see the decompiler she wore like couture. And if her eyes were closed, it was because she was dreaming Perceval’s family out of existence.

“Avatar,” Perceval said, and Nova put her image before the Go-Back leader.

Dorcas opened her eyes. She looked infinitely weary, the furrows of her forehead so dark they could have been drawn in the same ink she wore like a dress.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I think I can finish this before you stop me.”

“A compromise,” Perceval said. “Don’t kill the world, Dorcas. Just wait a moment and hear me out. I know you don’t crave all that blood for its own sake. Only to protect Grail—Fortune—right? To keep us from corrupting it. That’s your goal?”

Dorcas let her head fall back. “Talk fast, Captain.”

“We don’t have to stay here,” Perceval said.

“So it’s better to rip off the resources for repair and suffer through another thousand years creeping through the belly of the Enemy until we find another world to poison?”

“No,” Perceval said. “It’s better to convert every life-form on the ship into something that can survive on nothing but clean, sunlight energy. Everything. Every soul—woman and worm, man and mallow. Turn us into Angels, Dorcas, and let us live.”

“You’d have me make the same sick choice you made when we were broken. You’d have me force a transformation on all of them?”

Perceval took a breath, pulled all her hope and passion together, and tried to put them in her voice. Dorcas was not a killer, never had been. She’d let Tristen earn his life when another would have killed him.

All Perceval could hope was that she did not really want to ruin the world.

She said, “It is better to evolve than die.”

Dorcas turned to face her fully, mouth hanging open. “How like a Conn.”

“How like a reactionary,” Perceval answered softly, “to destroy what you can amend.”

Dorcas paused. “You have me there,” she whispered. She lifted her arms as if her hands were unbelievably heavy, and flung them wide.

Danilaw heard the scraping as Cynric dragged herself across the floor, and went to help her to her knees. But as he crouched beside her, she looked past him, an expression on her ancient face as full of wonderment and awe as any child witnessing a sunrise.

And there was Amanda, her mouth hanging open, her skin gilded by some source of light that should not exist, and if it did, should not glow that sunlight golden.

Almost reluctantly, Danilaw turned.

Perceval stood like a goddess in an aura of bright light, and golden prismed jewels hung weightless all around her. They caught the light, reflected and refracted it, passed it from lens to lens to make a webwork around her, all of bright and brighter. Swarms of them hovered in a geometric pattern, caging her in lasers.

Danilaw raised a hand to shield himself from the brilliance. His other found Amanda’s.

“What’s that?”

“The library,” Cynric said. “It’s come down to her. Jordan sent it down to her.”

“I don’t understand,” said Amanda.

“Everything we know,” said Cynric. “Our Chief Engineer saved it all for you.”

“For them,” Perceval said, her voice passing strange, a thing made of echoes. “And for me.” In the center of her veil of diamonds, she turned to them. Her hands by her sides, she smiled at Cynric directly. “Have you told them yet that you’re staying?”

“Staying?” Danilaw should not have startled from the Sorceress as if from a darthfish, but there she was, huge as life and even more peculiar.

“I’d like to liaise with your aliens,” she said. “I think I’d be good at it. I accept the terms of surgery and so forth, of course.” She waved a queenly hand. “I don’t think you’ll get much argument that my personality could use amending.”

On every side of Perceval, chiming gently, the library crystals drifted to the floor.