Chill (22 page)

Tristen’s smile was not promising. But—somewhat to Gavin’s regret—Samael turned away before Tristen said whatever was on his lips.

   Whatever its earlier panic, the mammoth went very still when the angel crouched beside it and pressed his hands to its trapped ankle. Its trunk snuffled toward him, hesitant, almost thoughtful. For a moment, Tristen thought it might attack—not that he expected any animal, no matter how impressive, to stand a chance against even a diminished angel. But the reaching trunk
simply brushed Samael’s cheek, snuffed deeply, and stroked his grass-fluff hair aside.

Even the beasts of the holde and Heaven, it seemed, could recognize an angel of the lord.

Samael, however reduced his circumstances, was perfectly competent to infiltrate himself between the beast’s foot and the tree roots, and ease the one loose from the other. The foot glided up, Samael stood, and the mammoth backed away, moaning and swaying. The angel regarded it, frowning, wiping his hands on his trousers until the beast whirled and vanished into the leaves and trunks.

Tristen felt Mallory at his elbow, and turned in time to catch the sidelong glance. “Hope it eats figs,” was all Tristen said.

Mallory winked, surprising him, and Tristen winked back. The necromancer’s face lit up around a startled smile. Tristen glanced away, back at the angel, pausing to wonder just for a moment what it was like to be Mallory, with a head even more full of dead people than the Captain—and by choice.

When he was done wondering, he started forward, one hand on Mirth’s hilt to keep it from swinging. A sense of praise and excitement filled him; the sword was pleased.
I didn’t do it for you
, he told it, but that didn’t seem to affect its happiness.

“Push on,” he said, and didn’t turn back to make sure the others had fallen in behind him. They’d follow.

Giving people something to follow was pretty much the only thing Conns were good for.

Arianrhod and her angel strode side by side over warm, shallow water. The sea of the Heaven was illuminated from below, water reflecting rippled light over their clothes, on the undersides of their arms, underneath their chins. The light seemed to catch in the folds of Asrafil’s
coat, to gild the bare skin of his skull and his pale fingers. The water’s surface dimpled under a languid stride that took each wavelet into account without ever seeming discomforted by them.

Arianrhod esteemed his grace even as she hurried to keep up. But his hand was always there when she stumbled, his coat cast around her shoulders when the cold wind whipped steam from the balmy water below. Fish in jeweled colors and vivid patterns flashed beneath the surface, schooling or as individuals. Arianrhod thought she and Asrafil would have been more comfortable like the fish, just swimming. She wondered how she would have managed the waters with the unblade across her back. Probably it wouldn’t impede her at all.

The fish were not only in the waters. Dark, knobby lozenges flitted past the overhead panels, fins and elaborate mouth barbels fanning as they glided on elecromagnetic currents along the walls of the Heaven. Ship cats, synbiotic plecostomi as big as a man, scrubbing the walls of the world. They breathed air and hovered on their own gravity nullifiers. This was their breeding ground, where they returned to spawn.

It was beautiful.

   Arianrhod said the angel’s name. “Wait,” she added, and put her hand on his coat sleeve.

He stopped at once, turned to her, and laid a steadying palm against her elbow when she stumbled on a wavelet.

“Have they found us?” she asked. “Or are they still seeking at random?”

“I have kept us to the places where their angel cannot sense,” Asrafil said. “Its power wanes as other powers wax, and the territory it controls is shrinking. As long as we remain beyond the disputed borders, it can locate us only through extrapolation and guessing.”

He left unsaid that the guesses of an angel were often very good indeed.

“I would like to better understand where you are leading me.” She could defy him. She was a Conn and an Engineer both, and if she ordered him he would have to obey her. But he was also the angel she served, and in many ways she trusted his wisdom as greater than her own.

“To parley with one of those powers,” he said, reluctantly. “I will speak more if you order it, but know that I have promised to hold some information private, and I will be breaking a vow at your command.”

She considered, and wondered if angels could be said to have a sense of honor. Asrafil had never betrayed her trust. Was it fair of her to command him to betray another’s? She dropped her head to stare at the tossing water, her lip caught between her teeth. He shifted restlessly.

“We are pursued,” he said gently. “You know it. How shall we then tarry, beloved? Come with me, and you shall soon see with your own eyes the answer to your questions, and the power that will make you Captain and return me to my rightful place as your servant and master.”

“I tarry because we are pursued,” she answered. She laid a hand over his on her arm, as if he escorted her. “And I know how to further delay our pursuers. Listen, Asrafil. There is a Heaven that Tristen Conn will not easily leave, if he but enters.”

   Tristen kept the lead as his party maintained a steady pace through the next nine hours, passing through a variety of microenvironments in various states of reconstruction. It might have been pointless bravado, but it couldn’t hurt—and while the angel was close to invulnerable, he was also close to immaterial. And it was
to him that Mirth whispered suggestions—not so much words as the vague sense of rightness or wrongness, the chance turn of the world.

The group passed through domaines and anchores, Heavens and corridors—and a holde full of giant, sleeping machines. They hung like strings of beads on racks stretched floor to ceiling, hundreds of meters tall, filling the width of the holde to where it curved from sight. They were yellow and black, green and blue, some marked with checkered livery. In their brilliant colors, with their blades and buckets and manipulators, they looked to Tristen like engines of war. But he could see no means for them to maneuver, unless by friction of the soil under their caterpillar treads. They would be useless in microgravity, worthless in a vacuum.

He said as much: “Are those for fighting planetside?”

“They are for terraforming,” Mallory answered. “You use them to reshape planets. The Builders sent them against the time they foresaw, when we would reach a destination.”

“And cannibalize the world to settle a planet,” Samael said.

Gavin snaked his head from under Mallory’s black mane. “What would you want with a planet?” he asked.

Tristen pursed his lips, craning over his shoulder to glance from angel to necromancer. “He asks a good question. And why this—discrete machinery, Samael? Why not something like you? Or like Gavin? A colony tool. Something with a personality, free will. Multiple uses.”

“The Builders could not have anticipated that your sister the Princess Cynric would develop the colonies,” Samael said. “They sent us prepared with the technology they had available at the time.”

“Huh.” Tristen folded his arms over his breastplate. It
was a thorny thought, that the Builders might not have foreseen what their creation would grow into.

Mallory leaned back, staring up, and said with elaborate casualness, “What a pity they can’t be made to multitask.”

It sparked an idea, as Tristen was sure had been intentional. The necromancer’s sideways glance gave it away, which Tristen presumed was intentional, too.

“So these are scrap,” Tristen said.

“They’re necessary resources!” Samael protested. “When we make planetfall, they will be the primary tools we use to make our new home habitable. They are not essential now, but they will be when the world is no longer our home. They must be conserved and protected. Would you eat your seed corn?”

Tristen felt a pop like a pleasantly stretched spine, except this click was in his mind. It was as if someone had delineated a limit of the angel’s program with bright lines.

He said, “You mean they would be essential supplies. If we had not, in the centuries since they were loaded aboard the world and set in mothballs, developed technology that renders them obsolete.”

“First Mate,” the angel said, very carefully and precisely, “are you ordering that these terraforming engines may be repurposed as salvage?”

“I order and reinforce it,” Tristen said. “And when we have contact again, please pass my instructions to Nova, that it may obtain the Captain’s agreement.”

He was pretty sure that painful-looking curve of Samael’s rose-petal lips, tugging the corners of his nose, was a smile.

   In the shadowy, emergency-lit control center, Caitlin’s hands rested almost motionless on contact pads that detected her involuntary micromovements and converted
them to inputs. Practically telepathic, the interface allowed her to work at the speed of thought. The only drawback was the training and experience required not to wipe out several subsections when Nova pinged in before her, manifesting as a sparkling violet mote.

Across the frost-rimed tangle of wires, panels, and hologram tanks making up their temporary ops center, Jsutien registered the angel with a flick of his eyes but otherwise did not comment. He was awake, but Caitlin was not sure he was aware. At least he was not raving. His breath steamed in intermittent clouds around his face; soon they would need to divert more energy to heating, though it griped Caitlin to admit it. Before her, Nova hung glimmering, turning, awaiting recognition.

“Problem?” Caitlin asked, longing with no particular hope for reassurance.

Nova’s denial still took her by surprise. “No. I have a possible location on one of the pursuit teams.”

“Tristen?” Caitlin asked, because she could not force herself to ask after Benedick.

“Based on proximity and extrapolation, that seems most likely,” the angel said.

Caitlin didn’t wince, but it was only long training as a Conn and as an Engineer that kept her impassive. “You don’t have contact, then.”

Nova continued without hesitation, adapting to the interruption. “No reciprocal contact. But a large quantity of previously interdicted resources have been released to reconstruction applications under crew orders, and the information came encoded in a micropulse that appeared to originate with Samael. The Captain has directed me to refer to you for repurposing instructions.”

Caitlin didn’t need to ask for stats. They were already scrolling through her awareness. Multiton quantities of metal, polymer, ceramic, conductors, fuel cells, and miscellaneous
material had been made available. “The obvious use would be to shore up the unraveling superstructure. Less obviously, we could hold this stuff in reserve for repairs and reconstruction in case we have to cut loose the infected portions of the world. It looks like a lot, but once we start … Using it is a commitment. And until we determine what the cause of the unraveling is, shoring up would more or less amount to tossing it into a disassembly machine.”

Caitlin reached out and swiped a finger through the ice crystals on her console. The remaining ones glittered in the dim lighting. Hoarfrost.

“Sloughing off the damaged portions of the world presents problems,” Nova said. “First, in locating them all. And second, they are not limited to the fringes of the superstructure. The infection has metastasized, and many of the affected sections contain biota.”

“I know,” Caitlin said. She glanced from the angel’s jewel-presence to Jsutien, but he had closed his eyes again, and anyway this was her decision. She swallowed and made it. “Start constructing backup life-support and propulsion systems. Increase the size of the ram-scoop. Be ready to cut core systems free if necessary.”

“But for now?” Nova asked, a nonhuman system seeking unambiguous confirmation.

“For now we hold on.”

   Much of what Tristen and his companions passed was devastation, and much of the devastation was not new. They slithered among wreckage in chambers from which the Enemy had torn all breath and life, ruptured bulkheads frozen in twisted alloy petals like balloons captured at the moment of bursting. The empty sockets of shattered viewports reflected nothing, or—in cases where the panes had webbed but another member failed before the pressure blew them clear—reflected too much,
in awkward fragments that never quite matched at the edges.

Salvage had already begun here: many of the damaged sections were obviously in a state of partial deconstruction, and there were great, smooth-edged gaps in the world’s superstructure where materials must have been repurposed to reinforce what could be saved. But there were no signs of rogue colony activity here—the damaged systems and sections were not merely evaporating into space, and nothing attacked the travelers.

In the blasted sections, some strata had gravity, and more did not. The domaines where one could drift or glide were easier than the ones where one must pick a route across destroyed landscapes and machinery. Tristen had his armor, and Gavin and Samael thought nothing of traversing awkwardly among rent metal, shredded wiring, and the remains of animals and plants frozen brittle at the moment of decompression, though Samael’s tender petals withered and froze bruised-dark, their cell walls shattered. But Mallory suffered in the Enemy’s cold, each such crossing demanding its levy in burst capillaries and lingering shakes.

Tristen had never seen the necromancer so discomfited. Nevertheless, though azure bruises blossomed under pale skin and—each time they returned to the relative warmth of a pressurized section—cerulean blood dripped from Mallory’s nose to splatter the decking or float in eerie globules, there was no complaint.

The pressure doors themselves created another sort of hurdle, as many of them were not actual air locks, just emergency doors intended to maintain the integrity of sections near a damaged module. Mallory knew every code with the certainty of dead men’s memories, and Gavin and Samael between them managed to improvise vacuum seals from their colonies. Through these Mallory and Tristen—with some awkwardness—could pass.