Chill (31 page)

As shields glided up over the external windows before him, he observed the latticework architecture scrolling past on all sides and the looming wall of their destination before them. It was an old world, scarred and scorched, blasted bright by radiation and by particles in the nebula. Made clean and new. But inside, so much history, so much betrayal, and so many twisted loyalties.

He wondered if Dorcas were the tabula rasa she pretended.

Tristen seemed impassive, leading Gavin to suspect that his internal turmoil mirrored Gavin’s own. Gavin was not prey to the irrational hormonal urges of meat—a kindness for which he thanked his makers—but he was not without feelings. Early researchers had determined that there was no intelligence without desire, and had proven the dispassionate artificial brain to be a wishful construct of twentieth-century myth. Synbiotic emotion might be chilly and distant by human standards, but it existed. Reason was not possible in its absence.

Gavin felt for Tristen, and only part of that was his program for empathy. Because as sequestered memory cascades continued triggering, he remembered what Sparrow had meant to Cynric. Sparrow was not merely the daughter of Cynric’s heart—Cynric, like Perceval, had chosen to remain fallow—but a daughter of her
own creation, as well. There were secrets in Sparrow’s bloodline, data and talents that Cynric the Sorceress had selected for and machined into the genome.

Then she had hidden them from Gavin, choosing to forget, when she had also chosen to die by her brother Benedick’s hand.

Gavin felt her back there now like a shadow over his shoulder, a person he didn’t know but somehow remembered snatches of. He thought she had been a strange and manipulative person, even by the standards of the Conn family, and that she had had agendas and obligations that she had never shared with anyone—not Caithness, not Caitlin, and she certainly had not passed them on to him.

There was no doubt in his mind that the resurrection of Sparrow’s body in service of a slain Engineer was not an accident. And it made him wonder, then, how Sparrow had died that her body was preserved, but there had been no backup of her mind—not even so much as a seed personality—so soon after the Moving Times, when such technology was still common.

Something must have left her damaged enough that her colony’s memory failed. And perhaps she had made a core seed, and it had been purged—either to make a place for some fragment of the world-angel, or in the service of intentional murder.

Despite the value of hindsight—perhaps especially in hindsight—Gavin found he did not much like Cynric. Or even her memory. And yet these were her fond feelings for Sparrow infecting him.

As the exterior air lock cycled, the basilisk hunkered on Mallory’s shoulder and kept his own counsel.

What stood revealed beyond seemed innocuous enough. Gavin identified a garden, chestnut trees made to seem venerable, mossy stones walling a yard. The corner of a building framed one side of the prospect,
and as they emerged cautiously from the air lock, Gavin’s senses informed him that the space was little more than an acre and a half in area, a tiny Heaven if it qualified as a Heaven at all. The trees were still healing, fat cracks twisting along their boles in some places, but there was some damage that would take years to mend. Heavy shelf mushrooms lay crushed at their bases, and once they were clear of the lock it became evident that the stones forming the back side of the building had tumbled into a heap.

The facade still stood on the near side, however, hollow-eyed and showing the foliage behind it through the windows. Around the footings, colored shards sparkled against grass, light reflecting from hard-edged splinters.

Tristen unsealed his helm and jolted forward, nearly running, Samael at his heels. Mallory advanced more cautiously, so Gavin had only to fan his wings for balance.

Gavin said, “It’s a chapel.”

“It’s
mined
stone,” Tristen corrected, dropping to his knees beside it. “Mined stone.”

“From Earth?” Gavin asked. He flapped hard, kicking off Mallory’s shoulder, and flew up to circle the top of the chapel wall. He could see chisel marks, it was true, though it was common enough to fake those—but when he landed and his claws scraped rock, he felt the deadness of it, the internal weight, and knew that no colony had ever touched this stuff. “It came off a
planet?”

“Can you imagine how much energy that cost?” Mallory’s voice had enough awe in it that Gavin snaked his head over the edge to look down, but the necromancer had merely paused beside Tristen and knelt there, running long fingers through the shaggy grass. “Ow!”

“Careful,” Gavin said helpfully. “Broken glass is sharp.”

“I noticed,” Mallory said, frowning at blue-spotted fingers. “What’s glass?”

“Fused silica,” Gavin said. “Very hard. Very brittle.”

“Very heavy,” Samael commented, selecting a piece and running ghostly fingers through it. “The Builders put this here.”

“It certainly got made before the world left the home system.” Tristen reached out to touch the stone, his gauntlet slicking back from his fingers. He stroked the wall of the chapel with a reverential hesitancy, then grimaced at his fingers. “It feels like stone.”

Mallory said, “No
wonder
the Go-backs had a means to get here.”

“Indeed.” His armor would have given him a sensory sphere as complete as Gavin’s, but Tristen nevertheless glanced over his shoulder as if expecting to find somebody watching. He shook his head. “It’s a little piece of what we were. It looks so …”

“Primitive?” Gavin suggested.

“Fragile,” Samael said. “Somebody should see if they can check in with Nova.”

“I already tried,” Tristen answered, as Gavin felt the attention of another colony tickle along the borders of his awareness. “Still no contact. Come on. We’re on the clock.”

“We’re on the clock,” Gavin agreed. “And something’s coming.”

   The something was a familiar shaggy-humped outline bigger than a mastiff dog. As they came up on it, Tristen easily identified the mammoth calf he had insisted they free from its trap among the massive fig tree’s roots. It waited for them by the far air lock, beyond a gap in the garden wall, its trunk raised as if it were scenting the air, its piggish eyes blinking through strands of coat.

“It followed me home,” Samael said. “Can I keep it?”

Tristen shot the angel a scathing glance. “Tell me the truth. You don’t actually know how that got here, how it got ahead of us. Or do you?”

“I don’t,” Samael answered, with every evidence of seriousness and sincerity—though an angel could not lie to his First Mate. Theoretically. “But it’s Exalt—more than Exalt. I can feel the edges of its colony from here.”

“That’s what I sensed back at the chapel,” Gavin agreed. “It’s waiting for us.”

“The world is weird,” Tristen said, a catchphrase his mother had been fond of. “Let’s go see what it wants, shall we?”

They picked their way toward the gap, Tristen in the lead with one hand on Mirth’s hilt. He tried to move with grace, but now that his euphoria was fading he felt the stiffness in every limb, damage from the cobra venom that his colony had not yet restored.

Tristen paused a few steps from the calf and held out his other hand, fingers flattened to present as smooth a target as possible. The calf tapped his palm with its trunk, fingerlike nubbins moving on his palm. Warm, moist air huffed against his skin. “Hello,” Tristen said.

The mammoth calf opened its mouth and said, “—”

Mallory blinked and turned toward it. He held out one hand. “Tristen.”

“What was that sound?”

“A language,” Mallory said. “The Language. Did you not understand it?” Perhaps—

“Yes,” Tristen answered, knowing what it meant. Not knowing how he had understood it. “How do you know that?”

Mallory said, “I am full of dead men.”

Oh
.

The necromancer continued, “Job forty-one. Verses thirty-two and thirty-four. You know them.”

“In my bones,” Tristen agreed.

But he allowed Mallory to recite them.
“He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.”

Samael, who had been standing silent, head cocked and staring, jerked himself upright like a badly managed puppet. “It’s a key. Remember it.”

“A key?” Tristen frowned at the angel, hard enough that his face found it uncomfortable. “A key to
what?”

The angel spread his arms, lank, pale locks stirring as though his gesture made a wind. “That information has not yet been unlocked to my program,” he said. “But I would wager the mammoth knows.”

“Great,” Gavin said. “What the hell are we going to do with a mammoth?”

  The maintenance of her physical form had always been one of life’s chief pleasures for Caitlin Conn. She enjoyed food, exercise, rest, work, self-care, affection—all the capabilities of her flesh and colony. Adventure and accomplishment were her meat and drink.

So it was a great frustration that not only was she obliged to remain behind at the helm of largely autonomous processes while her brothers and Chelsea adventured, but that both Tristen and Benedick had fallen out of contact just as things were getting interesting.

It was a devil’s bargain. She couldn’t relax enough to enjoy a much-needed meal and cleansing, but she hadn’t nearly enough to
do
at this point to keep her occupied beyond worrying. Though she had to be informed and ready to assist the Captain in making policy decisions to contain each crisis—and minor ones were still appearing with disconcerting regularity—everything else taking place in the world was at scales too tiny and speeds too great for even Exalt humans to participate.

Helplessness was not her stock in trade, but despite feeling as if she were drowning in it, she forced herself to step into the scrubber and set the sonics and the steam to
high
. Even if it didn’t relax her brain, it would be good for her muscles, and the human system worked better if everything was maintained. She would have complete contact with Nova, and Jsutien was still shrouded in his nanochains and watching the consoles. A little independence would serve as a test of his loyalties, though Caitlin was not about to let her observation of him lapse simply because she happened to be out of the room.

So even with her eyes closed, her forehead leaned against the scrubber wall, her head was full of images. Steam billowed around her, loosening roughened skin. It weighed down her short curls until they brushed the back of her neck. The sonics stroked her body in waves. Condensation, dead cells, and her own sweat knifed from her to vanish into the recapture, where it would all be returned to the ecosystem.

Maybe her stress could wash down the drain, too, and go find something to fertilize. It certainly wasn’t doing any good where it was.

The timer pinged after three minutes. She straightened up and pushed her fingers through her hair amid vapor rolling back like the fabric of a dream. She kept her eyes closed for a moment longer, anyway, savoring the fantasy of a world in which cleansing lasted as long as you wanted.

This world wasn’t it, though, so she blinked open moisture-stuck lashes, took one last warm breath, and reached outside the door for her robe. Warm cloth wrapped her shoulders as she stepped back out onto the deck, leaving damp footprints in her wake. It felt good to finally be clean of the last sticky residue of synthetic amniotic fluid. It felt better to have had a few instants alone in her head.

Now she could go back, soldier up, and continue to worry about Tristen and Chelsea—and Benedick, too, though she hated to admit it—in the belly of the world.

She felt the absence of her unblade at her hip like—well, like an absence, which struck her as a curious comparison, because when she was carrying it she would have said that it was null space personified. She pulled her hand away from its lack. When she reentered Central Engineering, her robe reshaping itself into trousers and a tunic for authority’s sake, Jsutien looked up.

“Nothing broke,” he said, spreading his arms wide to indicate the colonies whose repairs he had been supervising. “Well, nothing new broken, anyway.”

“That’s good news,” she said. She touched the control box in her pocket—it had remained secure through the transition from clothes to robe and back again—and released his tethers from the floor. “Your turn. Go get cleaned up, and I’ll mind the forum.”

He arched his back and raised his arms, stretching the drape of nanochains like a canopy overhead. When he lowered them again, he said, “Thank you. No word from the prodigals; communication has not been restored. But Nova and I found some things that may be useful to us.”

“Star charts?” She said it with arch amusement, trying to get a smile, but he answered seriously.

“Not that good. But there’s a
bunch
of old astrophysics and astronomy data on primitive optical storage media. Nova can construct readers that can handle it. Some of that might include information on rocky planets. The Builders had very good telescopes. Even some orbital ones. If we can figure out where we are in relation to Earth and how long it’s been since the images were taken, we can use that data to construct our own charts.”

Caitlin felt herself begin to smile. “Astrogation.”

He grinned back before he brushed past her. “After all, it’s what I do.”

While he was gone, she drew rations and arranged a meal: nothing exciting, but a selection of carbohydrates, fats, minerals, and amino acids that would keep two people and their colonies functional and in good repair. When Jsutien reemerged from the locker room, hair still trailing wisps of steam, she tossed him one prewarmed consumable tube of grayish porridge. He caught it, nanochains flaring like a microgravity dancer’s drapes, and bit off the top. The gel crunched audibly between his teeth.