Grail

8 where they ought stand

Perceval, still pacing the Bridge in her armor, the cowl stripped back but the seals intact otherwise, knew there was news because Tristen came in person. It being Tristen, she didn’t know if the news was good or bad until he spoke. And, it being Tristen, he did not draw out the suspense.

“I do not believe Dorcas is behind the raid,” he said. “But she knows or suspects who the culprit is, though she is withholding that information for now. Did you have any luck with the bodies?”

“Mercenaries, most likely.” Because it was Tristen, Perceval allowed him to see her twisting her hands in frustration. “Mallory performed the autopsies while you were with Dorcas. Their colonies wiped on their deaths. They were AE-deckers born, both of them.”

Tristen’s expression drifted from neutral to disapproving—or perhaps disappointed. It was not precisely a dead end, but after the Breaking of the world, the AE decks had been wild and isolated places. Cut off from the rest of the vessel, their Mean inhabitants had developed a tightly controlled martial society, defending their limited resources from all comers and forbidding overpopulation to the point of exposing both unplanned and malformed infants, and the unproductive old, to the Enemy—on tethers, because the quick-frozen bodies were a resource too rich in proteins and amino acids to be easily discarded.

They were clannish and xenophobic and fought among themselves as frequently and ferociously as they fought against outsiders. Along with the Go-Backs, they had been the chief of Tristen’s problems since the waystars went supernova.

Perceval didn’t need the roll of Tristen’s eyes to tell her the process of interviewing the Deckers would be complicated and likely unproductive—she and Rien had had an encounter with them when escaping Rule, shortly after they first met—but that didn’t stop her from being grateful when he said, “I’ll go after we eat.”

“Eat?”

Nova’s voice chimed from everywhere and nowhere. “Samael is en route with a picnic, compliments of Head. He should arrive in thirty seconds.”

“Thank you,” Perceval said, reflexively. “Picnic?”

“You can linger here fretting,” Tristen said, with all the soothing ice of his imperturbable calm. As if to create an ironic contrast, he threw himself backward on the grass like a boy, spreading his arms until she heard his spine crackle with release. “Or you can come with me, clear your head, and have some time to think while we wait for the Fisher King to answer.”

Of course the leader of the people of Grail would be the Fisher King. Perceval’s mouth bowed, despite herself, into her first real smile since the hideous events of the morning. As soon as she remembered why that was, it fell off her lips again—but for a moment there was a drift of relief.

Whether he’d learned it supporting his father or his wife, Tristen was very good at taking care of people. And she couldn’t fault the wisdom of experience when it came to dealing with grief. “So how did Head get involved?”

Head was the chatelaine of Rule—Cook, Butler, Housekeeper, and petty household god. Cynric had built hir to the task more than five hundred years previous, and sie was still at it. Sie had no equals.

“I petitioned hir for some snacks,” Tristen admitted. “Head’s idea of what constitutes a snack—”

Perceval snorted. “I can imagine.” She wondered if there was any kind of message in it that Head sent the food to the Bridge care of Samael, a small but independent and self-aware remnant of the Angel of Biosystems, also called the Angel of Poisons for his association with mutagens.

Samael knocked on the thick Bridge door, polite as a golem, the acorns and beetle shells of his knuckles rattle-rasping. Nova amplified the sound and transmitted it inside, leaving Perceval to wonder at the ancient mores imbedded in Angel code.

Once upon a time, it had made sense to knock on almost any door, because the people inside could simply hear it. Now, though, it was a kind of elaborate politeness, a formality with no social purpose. She knew who it was and what he carried—oat cakes, cashew butter, noodles in a salty savory sauce with garlic and ginger, sliced treecarrots and peaches, olives and oysters in brine, mushrooms and eggplants sliced thick and fried, and all tucked into a cleverly folded paper basket. Nova would not conceal such information from her, even if Tristen had asked, especially when the arrival was an angel.

Perceval summoned him with a gesture. When Samael stepped over the threshold to the Bridge, Tristen went to meet him, rising from that sprawled, languid pose to a standing position with a fluid strength that Perceval found heartening.

He was better. It had taken years of recovery and reconstruction, but in recent years he had begun to move as if he were comfortable in his body. Perceval wanted to say again, but the truth was she didn’t know. He’d been crippled when she rescued him; she hadn’t known him unwounded. And from everything she had heard, she might not have wanted to know him unwounded.

The most he’d confessed on the subject was “It was beneficial to me, in the long run, to spend some time alone with my sins,” pronounced with a wry sideways twist of his lips that could have been mistaken for a smile.

Time was the great closer of wounds, so even a maiming of the soul could heal over and quit seeping if you lived long enough. Although (thinking of Rien) Perceval wasn’t sure if the amputated bits ever grew back again, or even truly stopped aching. Perhaps they just became more impervious to careless blows.

She wasn’t sure she wanted them to harden off. Letting go of that loss meant letting go of Rien, and Perceval found the prospect more painful than recollecting the amputation of her wings. Better to lose a piece of your body than a piece of your soul, she thought.

And now there was Caitlin—a loss still too raw to do more than whisper past. If she looked at it too long, too directly, her eyes stung and her throat closed, and then she was no use to anyone.

She watched from her chair while Samael and Tristen conferred, heads bent, speaking via vibration in low tones she could easily have analyzed, if she chose. But it was impolite to eavesdrop, and if anyone had earned her trust, Tristen had. He wanted to surprise her? Well and good.

When he came back, the folded paper basket rested in his hand. Samael waited inside the door—a homunculus whose outline was dictated by the eddies of organic detritus caught up in his energy field. There was something doll-like about him, although the mosaic detail of the shape described by bits of straw and petal and translucent insect wing was quite fine. He had managed to survive Nova’s assimilation of the angels in this diminished form. Nova and Perceval allowed his unique existence to persist so long as he claimed no additional resources—beyond waste and scrap, if waste and scrap could be said to exist in the closed ecosystem of the Jacob’s Ladder—and so long as he comported himself as an ally.

Perceval watched Nova’s avatar rez in beside Samael’s—politeness when dealing with non-Engineer humans, but when confronted with another angel, a bit of rank-pulling. By resolving herself for him, she said in essence, you are not angel enough to meet me on my own terms.

That Samael did not protest, and had never protested, was either a sign of submission or of incalculable patience. Given her knowledge of his past, of his prior and more powerful self, Perceval was inclined to believe the latter.

When he got close enough, Tristen shoved the picnic meal into Perceval’s arms and grinned wolfishly. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going outside.”

In under ten minutes, Perceval was walking with him across the hull of the world, toting the paper basket (now wrapped in a thermal shield), while she herself was still wrapped in her suit of armor, well wrought against the depredations of the Enemy. Nova had access to detailed sensory and proprioceptive information from her hull. Those data were far more nuanced than anything Perceval and Tristen could glean from simply stomping heavy-booted across the surface of the world, trusting electromagnets to bind them where they ought stand, and trusting their own honed skills and trained reflexes to slip them through the very fingers of the Enemy should their grip be somehow broken. But the incident with Leviathan in which the Jacob’s Ladder had nearly been destroyed had taught them that Nova’s senses were not unimpeachable, and eyes-on inspection was a valuable protocol.

And now there was the question of how the mercenaries had penetrated their defenses. And of what they had wanted with the Bible. And of what had become of Charity.

Still, what they did was useful work, and it kept her mind off lightspeed lag and grief and her worries regarding what they would do should the denizens of Grail turn them away.

Usually it was carried out by junior Engineers. Perceval’s armor was also richly bedecked with sensors, and it and her eyes showed her a few of those on the hull this hour, quartering slowly across their assigned patrols, gazes trained a few feet in front of their boot steps. Their armor was marked by color. The russet and orange of Engine said they had reported to Perceval’s mother, Caitlin Conn, Chief Engineer. Each wore rank sigils on their shoulders and across the breadth of their back.

Perceval could feel their attention on herself and Tristen. His white armor and height were unmistakable, and she imagined she was unmistakable, too. Her armor was also white, stark and plain, but that was not because she had chosen the presence of all colors as a personal badge. She had never customized this suit, but rather wore it as it had walked to her out of the storage module.

She wondered if the crew members saw that as humility or hubris. Most probably, some of each.

However they interpreted her presence, though, it did not hurt the Captain’s popularity or authority to be seen doing the work of walking the hull. Perceval hoped it showed she did not set herself above the common folk, which was doubtless a part of Tristen’s intent in bringing her out here.

He was by far the better politician.

Side by side in their armor, a few meters apart, they quartered the skin of the world. Most of Perceval’s conscious attention remained on the hull, but between her own senses and those of the armor, she could hardly have pretended to be unaware of the vast sweep of the Enemy around her. Chilly stars lay scattered like dust across its velvet, all surpassed by the brighter pinpoint of the destination star.

It glowed an intense white-gold, brilliant enough to cast shadows that lay black against the gray-white, radiation-marked skin of the world. The contrast was sharp enough that when Perceval and Tristen turned away from the destination sun and their shadows stretched before them, Perceval had to shade even her Exalt eyes with her visor to see clearly into the blackness.

All around, the great scaffolded architecture of the world turned, rotating lazily before its center of thrust. To Perceval it did not seem as if the world wheeled around its axis. She knew how it worked, but when she looked up, Perceval’s imagination told her the stars wheeled around the world. Her armor and her Exalt senses would quickly put the illusion to rest if she checked their inputs, but she found she rather enjoyed it.

When it had been stationary—or only falling in orbit around the shipwreck stars—the world had rotated around itself with a grandeur Perceval well remembered. The world was so vast that even when it whipped about its center of gravity with great speed, the view across the gulf suggested a stately pace—an impression only made more inescapable by its space-stained, dust-scoured, radiation-pitted surface.

In pattern—and a bit in color—the surface under Perceval’s feet reminded her of the fur of a tortoiseshell cat. There had been time and materials since Acceleration for the crew to effect some repairs in the world, but cosmetic damage had been a low priority. While shipshape and spaceworthy, the Jacob’s Ladder still bore the wounds of her age—another factor that made the walking inspections so essential. These young Engineers were getting to know the face of the world—every wrinkle and every blemish. And new injuries would show up either as structural weaknesses or metal fatigue—visible to toolkits, armor, or Exalt senses—or as bright scars in the burned and mottled hulk they walked upon.

Logically, Perceval knew it would have taken thirty-nine minutes for their transmission to reach Grail, as they were not approaching its orbit from the near side of the sun. They planned to use the gravity well of one of the system’s gas giants—a violet monster of a planet, decked in rings and moons and captured asteroids like so much glistening gaudery—as a slingshot to curve their trajectory and boost them toward Grail.

So that was approximately thirty-nine minutes one way, and then whatever time it took for the people of Grail to realize they had received a message, decode it, translate it, hold whatever conferences needed holding, argue, politick, and fire it back. They would not, she thought, be sending their message of permission or denial tonight. At best she could hope for a preliminary contact—a feeler.

She still wanted to sit in her Captain’s chair—more like a throne than a chair, no matter what she told Nova to do with it aesthetically—and chew on her thumbnails until they called.

Instead, she looked up, startled from her reverie by the staccato vibration of Tristen patting a long, curved cable as thick around as four men holding hands.

“Sit here,” he said. “We’ll have lunch now.”

“Outside?” she said, startled, imagining unsealing her helmet and crunching ice-hard, space-frozen vegetables. It didn’t present a lot of appealing aspects, even without considering the effect of the Enemy on her tender face. She’d survive it. She was Exalt and the Captain, and the aura of her Angel always surrounded her. But it didn’t sound like fun.

She heard him chuckle over the com, knowing she blushed as he began unfolding a transparent geodesic blister. “It’s not a picnic if it happens inside.”

At least the armor hid her face. She stuck the basket down in the middle of the blister with a dab of adhesive and went to help him anchor the edges. It was restful work, repetitive and fiddly, requiring concentration to do well. They worked in silence, shoulder to shoulder, stretching and adhering. Perceval could tell when the seal was complete, because Tristen set his armor to heat and vented oxygen. Alien sunlight and Tristen’s suit heater were enough to keep the thin air from freezing. The triangular panels tautened under slight, sudden atmospheric pressure, but the blister held.

“Go on,” he said, unsealing his helm. “We can hold our breaths on the way back. Let’s eat.”

Perceval burst out laughing with enough force to spatter the inside of her faceplate with spittle. It was irresponsible and goofy and exactly what she needed. She retracted her helmet and faceplate, taking a deep breath of the thin, chill air. The oxygen environment was low-molar, but within Exalt tolerances, and the whole setup was so madly perfect that she didn’t care.

She plunked herself down and stuck herself to the hull beside the picnic basket to watch while Tristen unfolded the paper and insulation. Nothing inside was exactly hot anymore, but some of it must have been when it was packed, because there was enough residual heat to encourage a faint dragon-tail of steam. In its turn, the water vapor thickened the atmosphere, as did every warm, wet breath Perceval and Tristen gave up to it.

Everything is an ecology, she thought, and dearly hoped that she did not live to regret the extravagance of this meal. With a potential end to the aggressive maintenance of environmental balance in sight, it was too easy to spend resources profligately, to make up for long hardship and privation. Too easy, and too dangerous.

While Tristen was sorting out utensils, she found two packets of noodles and handed him one. They were designed so you could hold them open one-handed by pressing at diagonally opposite corners and dip chopsticks in and out at will. Clever and convenient both, for situations with erratic or micro gravity.

She tilted her head back for the first mouthful, watching the world turn against the stars, and wondered how she would pay Tristen back for this.

He let her eat in peace, and she was grateful. Gratitude toward Tristen was one of her more basic emotions. She knew they would have to talk more soon, but for now he had bought her this moment of peace, and he was waiting for her to reopen the pressing subjects at hand. The gratitude toward Tristen was multiplied by her gratitude toward Head, who had outdone hirself. Perceval almost imagined she could taste the nurturing in each delicately flavored bite.

Since she actually felt like eating for a change, she waited until her belly was full. She then waited a few moments more, savoring the peace and the view and the company, until even Tristen—who could eat like an adolescent boy—was slowing.

“If we find Charity,” Perceval said, “and we find the paper Bible, we find the culprits.”

Tristen rubbed his chin. The faint bristle of his beard hairs caught the light, silvery-bright, as if the cold glazed his face. “Yes. Whoever has it, though, can hide it. As well as they hid themselves when they came to take it.”

“Themselves? You don’t think they were all Deckers? Mercenaries? Deckers have a martial culture. Now that they’re Exalt, I would expect good fighters among them.”

“You killed two,” Tristen said. “If Caitlin inflicted any casualties, they took their dead and wounded with them. Now, I knew my sister well—”

He smiled mirthlessly, and she echoed him, feeling the reflex stretch her face across bared teeth. “You’re right. What I fought would not have killed her. Not as she died, with one clean thrust. Not armed with an unblade that could cut any weapon it came against. The ones I fought were using dart throwers and extruded monoblades.”

Perceval fished out the half-eaten noodle packet she’d stowed back in the basket, for something to do with her hands. She should have seen it. Too much grief—

Nova interrupted, only hesitantly. “Captain?”

Nova was kind, and permitted Perceval to swallow her moment of sorrow before continuing.

“Oh, dear.” She stuck her chopsticks through the safety loop and allowed the packet to snap closed.

Tristen sighed and set his food back inside the picnic basket.

Nova said, “It’s not a crisis, but I did want to alert you that we’ve received a return transmission from the leader of the people of Grail.” The Angel paused. “It’s … friendly, as far as it goes.”

“But it doesn’t go far—? No, never mind, Nova. Play it, please,” Tristen said. “What does the Fisher King have to say for himself?” Tristen glanced at Perceval for her permission, but it was strictly a formality. She hadn’t yet had a need to gainsay him. All evidence suggested that he had no ambition beyond being the perfect first lieutenant, confidant, and friend—and, if that was his ambition, he fulfilled it.

“Play it,” she confirmed.

Nova resolved an image against the blank wall of the tent opposite. The man who appeared was the color of burnt sienna, one of the brown rainbow tints of corroded metal, his skin darker than any Perceval had ever seen with her own eyes. Perceval at first tried not to stare out of politeness, until she was reminded by Tristen’s fixed gaze that the object of their attention could not witness her rudeness.

His skin was healthy, glossy, almost gleaming. The whites of his eyes were ivory, with a warm undercast from a Mean’s red blood. The irises were a brown so dark it was difficult to see the details and variances of pigmentation.

Besides the color of his skin, he had a broad face, well-fleshed, with a low-bridged nose and high forehead. His black-brown hair, receding like any older male Mean’s, was kept short, and from the texture it looked like it curled in tight spirals that gave it a plush appearance. And he was big, big and broad, with thick fingers and wrists, and heavy bones and muscles that spoke of a life lived under oppressive gravity.

His shoulders must be as wide as Head’s.

“Is that from the sun?” Perceval asked, wondering.

“Hello,” he said, his words halting and strangely accented but understandable. “I am Administrator Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing on the independent and Earth-allied world of Fortune. It is my surprised delight to greet you, and to assure you that you are welcome in our system.”

He took a breath and glanced down. Scanning notes, Perceval realized with a painful shortness of breath that wasn’t just due to the lack of oxygen. That, more than anything, brought home to her what she had known intellectually: this alien man was a Mean.

She was still shocked at her own egocentrism that she found herself surprised to be treating with a Mean. Cynric had not developed the symbiont until long after the world left Earth behind, and she had cannibalized an alien life-form to do it. So why had Perceval expected that Earth would have produced the same technology?

She stilled herself, and paid attention to what followed. It was elaborate in the extreme, leading her to wonder if the diplomatic protocols of these alien beings were more focused on ritual and poetry than those to which she was accustomed.

“When humans first took to the sea,” Danilaw said, “they crept around the edges of the land masses. They clung to the shallows and sailed within sight of the coasts. But a few adventurers were more daring. In longboats, on rafts, in outrigger canoes, and in lashed reed boats they braved the deep ocean, navigating through storm and peril to find new lands. Many—perhaps most—did not survive the journey.

“When humans first entered space, it was the same way. We dabbled in the gentle currents around our homeworld. We sowed bottle messages upon the deep, sending out drone explorers, and never dared hope that anyone would find them and follow their messages to where we languished, cast away. Some few brave or foolhardy adventurers followed, in vessels hopelessly inadequate for the perils they would face.

“We had numbered you among them. We counted you as heroes lost to the emptiness of space. Today is a day of rejoicing, for we have been proved wrong.”

He paused, letting her see him take a deep breath, and checked his notes again.

“There will be some quarantine protocols to get out of the way, and I’m sure we each have a great deal of news and history to exchange that will interest the other. We will send trade and cultural negotiators. But in the meantime, we would request permission to send a small vessel to dock with your ship. In addition, in the metadata of this transmission, you will find a document containing a list of questions regarding the census of your vessel. Any information you can provide as to the demographics and ideologies of your population would help us greatly in preparing to arrange your reception.”

He smiled—a big, human grin that Perceval found reassuring despite the alien architecture of his features. “We’re looking forward to meeting you.”