Grail

4 a library once

Benedick watched the recording of the captured probe twice, leaning over Caitlin’s shoulder, trying not to think about the smell of her hair. So many mistakes; so many regrettable events in an existence measured in centuries. You never stopped wondering what might have been different.

Even now, with incontrovertible evidence of aliens—human aliens, admittedly, and not so alien as Leviathan, but almost certain to prove weirder than all the nonhuman intelligences that filled up the walls of the world—Benedick found Cat’s presence a reminder of all the errors of a long life. The years and the work had eased things between them, and they were friends again, which was good, because they needed to be able to work together.

But he missed her, as simply as that. And he had never quite stopped wanting her back.

Still, he’d settled for what he could earn, and reconstructing the friendship had also served to reconstruct the trust. He didn’t think there were many people she’d allow to stand over her like this so calmly, invading her personal space while she worked.

He straightened up and came around the display tank to face her. “We can’t assume their intentions,” he said quietly, when he knew he had her attention. It was just a shift of the eyes, but it was enough. They were still a team.

“You’re worried about what will happen when we start exchanging diplomats.”

He shrugged, brushing his hair behind his shoulders. “Nanotechnology, inducer viruses—or whatever they have that’s similar—bacterial agents, engineered or accidental. There’s no telling what could come in on their shoes. And we can’t assume, after centuries of isolation, that we have any reciprocal immunities.”

“And they’re very likely to be Means,” Caitlin said. “Our bugs might just kill them—not to mention the colonies. Are they going to want to become Exalt?”

“It’s something we can bargain with,” Benedick said. “It’s an advantage and possibly a trade good.”

“But it’s combat you’re worried about.”

He felt himself smile. As well as he knew her, it was reciprocated. “Combat. Or treachery.”

She had a peculiar gesture of rubbing her nose that was all hers. “Well, you are our father’s son.”

Benedick folded his hands under his arms. Don’t remind me. “Yes, he would have assumed the worst. But that does not universally indicate that he would have been wrong.”

Her mouth worked around whatever she was thinking of saying. Because it was Caitlin, he would never know how many options she chewed over and discarded before she settled. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was trying to provoke you.”

That he could smile for. “Cheap sport,” he said. “I’d have thought such an easy opponent beneath you.”

She stood and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ve got to keep in trim for the aliens. So what do we recommend to the Captain?”

The Captain, their daughter. “We’re going to have to meet with them,” Benedick said. “Especially when we’re asking to share a planet, because I don’t think they’ll cede either of those two potentially habitable worlds to us entirely. It’s not human nature.”

“So even if they are inhumanly gracious, we’re going to have to live with them.”

“And when we do, we need to be aware of and guarded against all the possibilities for disaster.”

Caitlin turned her head, glancing over her shoulder at the system diagrams spinning with stately indifference in the big image tank. “I hope we’re aware of that,” she said. “I hate to think we’re underselling it to ourselves.”

Very little in the world knows more about keeping quiet than does a library.

Dust, who had been a library once, huddled in his ringspotted fur coat, paws dry-washing, all the active senses that might have told him enough about his environment to move in safety drawn inward, turned passive, locked down. He felt the new Angel all around, the web of her presence a veil made of trip wires and snares. If she found him she would eat him, as she had eaten most of him already. As she had eaten every other angel and remnants of angels she had found. If she found him, she would devour him whole. So, with perfect logic, he decided she would not find him at all.

The world had changed from what he knew. While he died, slept, and grew back from a spark, it had evolved from a hulk to a haven, from a shell to a ship.

Who had preserved the spark of him? And who had caused it to awaken here, into the helpful-animal consciousness of this furry toolkit with its deft hands and keen, twitching nose?

And who had thought that this, the eve of landfall, would be an opportune time to return him from the quiet cold of storage?

It seemed to Dust that, first, he must learn who had preserved him, and what that person or those persons intended. And then, having done that, he must decide how he was going to use those intentions to suit his own designs.

Dust was small now. Dust scurried. Dust moved without notice through the channels in the walls of the world. Dust only half recollected himself, but from what he remembered of the angel he had been, he would have left himself resources. Resources baled, blindered, and buried against future need. He had always been a hoarder—that was also after the nature of libraries.

His spotted pink and brown nose twitched. He sniffed, careful of whose spores he brought into the lungs of his insufficient, temporary form. If he could not extend his senses out into the world for fear of drawing the new Angel’s attention, he’d bring the world into himself and parse it that way. Primitive, but it should be effective enough if he were painstaking and meticulous.

He’d find the resources. He’d answer the questions. He’d learn who had brought him back.

He’d reclaim his ship, and he’d win his freedom again.

Dust filtered mouse-soft into the cracks in the walls and was gone.

Caitlin Conn did not have to travel from Engine to the Bridge to speak to, or even to see, her daughter. But she often did, walking down the long corridor past the venerable New Evolutionist Bible and climbing through the irising door to the Bridge before it was entirely open, and for this Perceval was grateful. The loneliness of command was one thing, and the loneliness of missing your family quite another. And seeing and speaking weren’t the same thing as physical contact, oxytocin, pheromones—the bonding chemicals that managed stress and settled cortisol levels.

Perceval managed her own neurochemistry through her symbiont, but manual manipulation of any system so complex, nuanced, and responsive was inevitably cruder and more granular than what the healthy brain managed on its own, with the proper stimulus.

And sometimes it was nice to see her mother and collect a hug.

Caitlin arrived dressed for off-duty, which was another endocrine signal Perceval didn’t get enough of. When the Bridge door dilated to reveal Caitlin’s broad-hipped, broad-shouldered form in blousing trousers and barefoot, it was as if somebody had pulled a plug in Perceval’s spine and let all the stress run out.

To puddle on the floor, she thought, with a grimace. Where you will have to mop it up later.

The Captain kept the cynicism out of her voice as she said, “Hey, Mom.”

She hadn’t thought she was trying to sound particularly nonchalant, but if the words had come out that way, Caitlin wasn’t buying it. She cleared the doorway quickly and stood just inside while it sealed, hands on her hips and head cocked appraisingly. Caitlin still wore her black unblade, Charity—but there was off-duty, and there was stupidity.

Although Perceval stood still to greet her, her white trousers and shift falling about her with folds unstirred even by the movement of air, Caitlin huffed and glanced around the Bridge as if she could see every moment of Perceval’s last hour.

And perhaps she could, if she were checking in the infrared. The cold Captain’s chair, and the warmth of footsteps sprinkled over the grass and meadow flowers of the Bridge decking. The evidence of Perceval’s tight-reined distress lay everywhere.

“Wearing a groove in the planking?” Caitlin said. Grass whisked between her toes as she came to her daughter. Perceval might be taller, but Caitlin still outmassed her by half. She hunched herself down to accept her mother’s hug, wishing to feel enfolded in it, protected. Nobody could be impervious all the time. Except, Perceval thought ruefully as she straightened, possibly Benedick.

“Pacing the Bridge is the Captain’s prerogative,” Perceval said.

In old days, the Bridge would have been a gathering place for senior crew. But the Jacob’s Ladder was alive now, and the world’s control center could be wherever Perceval went. The Bridge was now her retreat, her hermitage.

And like all such places, it could be painfully lonely.

“And provoking the Captain is the Chief Engineer’s,” Caitlin replied. She plunked herself unceremoniously on the grass and stretched out. “Nova, amplified sunlight, please.”

Perceval’s pupils contracted, cones swelling to replace rods in her eyes as the wide windows arching across the surface of the sky paled and depolarized, screens sliding back to widen the apertures. Elements of the world’s halo of symbiotic nanocolonies—which also, along with its ramscoop and other electromagnetic fields, served to insulate it from space debris—became reflective and refractive. Biomimetic sensors in the ship’s colony cloud, and on her hull, helped the prisms and mirrors train themselves on the distant star, gathering its light. Like a sunflower, the Jacob’s Ladder focused itself on distant warmth.

The Bridge shivered with radiation—alien comfort after so many years in the dark.

Perceval was also still getting used to living in a world where more things worked than didn’t.

Caitlin patted the gentle swell of the bank beside her. “Sit, child. Enjoy the light.”

Perceval sat. She composed herself and reclined beside her mother, closing her eyes. But she did not close off the datastreams that painted the inside of her head with a constant flow of information, making her eyes largely extraneous for most purposes more complex than—well—navigating around a room.

She sighed, knowing Caitlin would read the complex of emotions in it—contentment, distress—and also knowing that Caitlin, being a mother, would ask.

Predictability in a parent was a good thing.

“Out with it,” Caitlin said. “What troubles you? Our journey is at an end, our rest in sight. Or rather, different work confronts us, but with luck and the cooperation or capitulation of the current residents, we can fold this world up and live someplace a little easier to maintain.”

“A planet is a closed ecology, too, Mother,” Perceval said. “Do you really think it will be easier to maintain? We know how the world works. We have no idea how we’ll interact with a planet.”

Natural ecologies were famously fragile, easy to overset—as Earth’s had been.

“We’ll do the best we can,” Caitlin said. “But is that really what’s bothering you? A question of environmental ethics?”

Perceval sighed, though this time it was to buy time, not to invite her mother in. The radiation on her face did feel good. She could feel the ancient evolved systems of her body responding, producing melanin and vitamin D, her muscles relaxing in the heat, her digestion becoming more efficient. Her stomach grumbled quietly and she smiled.

“No,” she said. “I miss Rien. Right now—” She stretched her back against the grass, the smell of chlorophyll and bruised flower petals rising around her. “I wish Rien were here to see this.”

Caitlin’s hand stole out to brush Perceval’s, first back to back and then clasping fingers. “You are not alone.”

Perceval sat up, hunching forward over her hollow belly, and disentangled her fingers from her mother’s. She hugged her knees tight and pulled her forehead almost down to her shins. “Sometimes I wish I were.”

She wasn’t expecting Caitlin’s bark of laughter. One of the joys of adulthood was dealing with her mother as a peer, as an ally and a friend.

“Sir Perceval,” Caitlin said, invoking a title Perceval had not heard often since she first sat in the Captain’s chair. From the change in her voice and the rustle of grass, Perceval knew that Caitlin sat up, too. “You have never stopped being a knight-errant, my dear. Did you go looking for her?”

Did you go looking for Rien’s remains in Nova? was what Caitlin meant. Had Perceval sieved through the Angel’s personality for the fragments that had once been Rien, to reassemble them into some parody of her beloved, much as Cynric was—according to Tristen—a sort of parody of what she once had been?

Perceval wasn’t sure if she shook her head slightly or if it was a pressure change that ruffled her hair. She tossed it back, swinging herself again into a sitting position, and shook the brown locks down her shoulders like a snapped-out banner. “I would not have liked what I found.”

“Wise child,” Caitlin said, and kissed her on the top of the head.

Perceval exhaled a breath she did not remember holding. But before she could take in another, Nova’s voice broke the stillness and insect-drone of the meadow. The words sounded to Perceval’s inner and outer ears simultaneously.

“Captain, Chief Engineer. Five intruders have accessed the Bridge corridor. I have called for support and await your recommendation.”

Perceval found herself on her feet, her mother beside her. “How did intruders penetrate this far? Nova, the approaches are full of your colony corona.”

“Unknown,” Nova said.

Caitlin drew out her unblade. In the loudness of Perceval’s heart, it made no sound at all. Her voice rang clean across the Bridge, however, just as if more than one ear must hear her commands. “For any defensive technology, there is an equal and opposite countermeasure.”

“Great,” Perceval said. “They’ve hacked through it somehow. Nova, my armor please?”

The suit was in the Bridge closet. It was a trivial matter for Nova to disassemble it there and reassemble the component molecules in their proper configurations around Perceval while Perceval held her breath and stilled her movements. Caitlin’s was a little more complex, as she’d left the physical suit in Engineering, so the Angel must pattern it and reconstitute it from available materials here.

“Are they attempting to broach the Bridge?” Perceval asked, as Caitlin’s vermilion-and-gold armor began to take shape around her.

“Negative,” Nova answered. “They are trying to break into the case containing the relic Bible in the corridor. Tristen is inbound with security. He estimates he will be able to relieve your position in under ninety seconds, and advises you to ‘sit tight and not take any chances.’ ”

Through both faceplates, Caitlin’s gaze caught on Perceval’s. Caitlin said, “Who the hell wants to steal an old book?”

“It’s more than an old book, Mother.” Perceval knew how feral the grin that curved her lips must appear, and reveled in it. “Are we listening to Tristen?”

Caitlin grinned back. “Do we ever?”

They burst through the Bridge door like eager angels, emerging into a functional vacuum. Tristen’s once-weapon Charity was brandished high in Caitlin’s hand. Perceval—out of respect for the unblade—ran three steps behind, firing darts that could pierce even armor if they struck a joint or soft spot squarely. Two of the invaders—gray-armored, their colors blanked and their visors fogged to hide their features—spun to return fire. The other three slipped aside, muscling the ancient Bible’s nitrogen-filled case through a fuse-edged hole in the bulkhead that led straight into the embrace of the Enemy.

Perceval went right; Caitlin went left. Perceval lunged into the niche where the Bible’s case had until so recently been set, hopping up on its barren stand like a crouched gargoyle. Caitlin flattened herself behind a bulge in the bulkhead through which environmental pipes ran.

Perceval hoped that the raiders were using ammunition that would not punch holes in her ship—or more and worse holes than they had already punched.

Well, Perceval thought, that explains the vacuum. It doesn’t explain how they got past Nova, though.

There had been problems with the Angels and their areas of awareness before, but those difficulties were long in the past, and Perceval was meant to have complete command of her ship. That anyone could work this—under her very nose—was unsettling.

Though not as unsettling as the darts whizzing past Perceval’s faceplate. Something was going to have to be done about that.

Perceval might be Captain now, but she had been raised a knight. Nobody wandered into her bridge and made off with a priceless relic.

She slapped one hand against the top of the niche, armored fingers curling into the bulkhead, denting metal and cracking carbon. “Three,” she said into her com, certain Caitlin would count and move with her.

And move they did. Perceval came around the corner on the tether of her arm, a spray of smart darts from her gun hand leading. At the top of her swing she released her hold on the bulkhead and arced into the air. She landed in a crouch, stuck it—or her armor stuck it for her—and came up pelting forward, whooping inside her helmet until she made her own ears ring. Caitlin’s footsteps banged through the deck behind her—soundless in vacuum, but Perceval could feel each impact through the plating, and she let the shock waves lift her up and hurl her forward, adding impetus to her own charge.

They were two, and Nova was with them. Tristen and his troops were coming. But they were Conns, and nothing was going to stand before them.

Perceval felt the impacts on her armor as it deflected the intruders’ darts from its corona and its carbon-ceramic surface. None struck where they could harm her, though; her armor was as state-of-the-art as these people’s countermeasures. They’d have to hit square to hurt, and every ounce of her armor’s tech and ability were devoted to making sure that did not happen.

The gray-suited five already had the Bible and its case through the rent they’d ripped in the corridor wall; Perceval could see it being hauled away with cables and tug drones. Only two were firing at her and Caitlin, crouched behind EM shields that offered a modicum of soft cover. The other three, engaged in moving their prize, did not even glance over their shoulders.

Perceval came in among them not so much like a fox among the chickens as like a wolf among enemy wolves. Her armor’s corona—as much an extension of Nova as not—struck the EM shields and sparked, raining dead nanotech in a velvety dust. Perceval leaned forward, knowing she was a target and hoping the crackle of crisping electronics was sufficient protection from more darts. Her armor traded dart launchers for ceramic blades.

“Shifting resources,” Nova said. “One moment more—”

And then Perceval’s mother came up behind her and pushed.

With the addition of Caitlin’s mass and armor to her own, they were through. Perceval’s blades sliced the first intruder’s armor deftly—two incapacitating cuts and a coup de grâce between the eyes and out the back of the helm. This one might come back as the silent dead, if her colony were up to regenerating the damage, but she would never inhabit herself again.

Caitlin did not engage the second rearguard. Nor had Perceval expected her to. While Perceval spun back to catch a blow meant to decapitate—she felt it ring through her armor to the shoulder, despite the reactive colloidal padding—Caitlin unshipped herself and her unblade, diving into the bosom of the Enemy after the ones who had fled.

What happened next, Perceval did not see, but she could hear her mother’s harsh breathing over the thumps and shudders of her own combat. The gray knight—and Perceval had no doubt after one passage of arms that this one was indeed a knight—rained blows down upon her with the will of an Angel, until Perceval was fighting for her life. She let herself be beaten back, step by step, taking her opponent’s measure and letting her armor have the rearguard.

The one she fought was good, but Perceval thought she was better—though there was only one way to be absolutely sure.

“Captain,” Nova said in tones of urgency. “Your mother requires assistance.”

By the strength of her arm and the strength of her armor, Perceval swung and feinted high. She let momentum turn her, bringing that arm down for a parry that let the enemy’s left-hand blade slide past her midriff so close it left a bright span on her armor. The spin extended Perceval’s left arm, and while the blade on her gauntlet was not so sharp as an unblade, it cracked the enemy’s armor and sternum with a moment’s resistance.

A jerk, one good shake, and monofilament parted ceramic and carbon and titanium like so much doped fabric pulled down a razor blade. Blood spurted only briefly; the heart squeezed once, frantically, as Perceval’s blade passed through it, then no more. A fine blue snow brushed her helm; the blood froze and crazed from her vambrace and blade.

Perceval turned from the dead to see where Caitlin and the other three gray knights were. Only when she came up to the edge of the rent in the world did she realize her com was silent. She could not hear her mother breathing.