Chill (32 page)

“Nature-identical grape,” he said, with a wrinkled nose. “Boy, this takes me back. And not in an entirely pleasant fashion.”

Caitlin grinned between slurps of porridge. The taste was too sweet, harshly artificial, without the nuance or subtlety of real fruit. “What’s it like?”

“Being back?”

She tossed him a pod of water, too, and watched Oliver’s body snag it by reflex at the top of its trajectory. “Being in the future. If that’s not a cruel question.”

He bit open the water, too—stale, if Caitlin’s was anything to go on—and sucked it dry, throat and jaw working as he washed down sticky porridge. Then he crumpled up the pod, which crackled in his fist, and shoved it into his mouth. Buying time, Caitlin thought. The contemplative thoroughness of his chewing did nothing to disabuse her of the notion.

Seconds later, he swallowed and said, “It’s a lot like the porridge.”

Under Caitlin’s fingertips, readouts tracked, averaged, and streamlined billions of processes, keeping her apprised of repair and defense trends worldwide. There was no need for her to look at the external display,
which was only a fail-safe. All the information she needed was right there in her hands. “I beg your pardon?”

“The porridge,” he said, patting Oliver’s stomach. “Or maybe I should say,
I’m
a lot like the porridge. Nature-identical. Which is to say, flattened out. The most interesting part is knowing stuff—pieces of me—are missing, but not knowing what they are. I can feel where they should go, but … It’s like reading a novel in translation. You can tell you’re missing stuff, like all the jokes, but what it is exactly that you’re missing is hard to say.”

A novel was a kind of static entertainment in the written word. Like a story, but fixed as it was written rather than interactive. Immutable. A historical document.

Caitlin thought she was coming to understand Damian Jsutien. Like him, she finished the last of her rations, then said, “I am given to understand that you weren’t faithful, then.”

He dropped back onto his cot, raking both hands through Oliver’s tousled curls, which were still flattened here and there from sleeping. “What’s faith? I was an astrogator. It was my business to lie, not to believe.”

“So why did you come along, if you knew it was a lie?”

“If I knew it was a journey without a destination?” The thing he did with his mouth hurt her, just watching it. “Better ask why my grandmother came. Why did she take that leap of faith? She wasn’t a believer either, not when I knew her. But I imagine whatever she left behind must have been worse than the prospect of death in the cold, for her and her descendants.”

“Were there a lot like her?”

He scratched the side of his chin, fingernails burring against stubble. “Enough. More than a few. I hope it does not horrify you, the revelation that some of the Builders were cynical.”

Cynical. What a comforting euphemism to mean deception, betrayal, the treacherous use of the faith of hundreds of thousands to lure them to their deaths. “I know about the bodies in the holdes,” Caitlin said, the most neutral answer she could manage.

“Without data,” he said, “we always assumed that if the Builders were not simply evil—and that’s a lot of pointless work, for evil—they must have been driven by desperation, and the threat of consequences so dire that sending thousands to die in the embrace of the Enemy seemed like a sensible use of resources.” Jsutien waved grandly to Central Engineering, a gesture that encompassed not only the space he and Caitlin inhabited, but all the wrecked world beyond. “On the other hand, it’s also possible that some of them were possessed of a pioneering spirit.”

“People are fundamentally lazy,” she agreed, “but it’s true. Historically speaking—things get colonized somehow. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake you over the coals for your dead grandmother’s choices.”

“The way you’ve been raked over the coals of your father’s choices, all these years?”

Tentative camaraderie cracked as Caitlin’s hand closed convulsively on the nanochain control key in her pocket. “How do you know that?” she asked, then pinched her lower lip between her teeth to keep from grinding them.

Jsutien, frowning at an image tank, seemed oblivious to her dismay. He had one finger extended as he traced something of interest through the bewildering partial schematic that hung before him, his tongue protruding like a child’s in concentration. She imagined young Oliver had never looked so patient, so stern, and it crossed Caitlin’s mind to wonder how old Jsutien had been when he died. Old, she’d guess, by Mean standards.

Old and treacherous. She would have to remember that, however fresh and felicitous the face he wore.

“Your brother,” he said. “You. The obvious family tension between the two of you. The way you avoid eye contact with him. The fact that, except for Tristen, none of the Conns I remember seem to be alive anymore.”

“It’s been a long time,” Caitlin said, trying to make it sound like she was only returning his volley. She chafed her cold hands together, trying to restore sensation. Flakes of hoarfrost broke from her shirt cuffs and drifted down. “Almost nobody you remember is alive anymore, Damian Jsutien.”

That got him to glance away from his tank and crinkle the corners of his eyes in a grin like a lynx’s. “Conns are dangerous. That, I’m pretty sure, will never change.”

   Although she was never in solitude, the Captain dined alone. Her meal was rice, greens, yams, and textured vegetable protein, which she shoveled down like sawdust. She ate from a bowl that did not exist with a spoon conjured of primal forces, her eating so mechanical that she’d half finished the food before she paused to marvel at the tools in her hands. “What a strange old world,” she said.

Across the green field of the bridge, Nova looked up from her work, and Perceval noticed that her effort to define their relationship seemed to be helping the angel’s avatar set into a definable shape. Brown skin and silver hair, yes. Nothing like Rien. But female, and soft-eyed, and so nothing like Samael either. Or Dust.

There was no need for the angel’s avatar to pretend to be hard at work, or even to make itself apparent when it was not interacting with meat-and-bone crew, but Perceval found herself more comfortable with the illusion that she knew where the angel was and what she was doing—though as an Engineer she also found this a shameful anthropocentrism. Still, she was also more comfortable
with its avatar’s pretense of being engaged in some vital business. Intellectually, she knew that it was nothing but an animation. Emotionally, instinctively, however, for her to see Nova from the corner of her eye, hands moving and head bowed over a set of displays, helped her accept the angel as a team member and an ally.

She needed that. She needed, she thought dismally, all the help she could get. Because her first response was to recoil from Nova, from the connection she could always feel at her edges, as if Nova were an invader rather than an invited guest. She did not want the angel in her head. She did not want the angel so sharp, and so near.

She’d never expressed those preferences to Nova. But Nova had guessed, or had read them in her subconscious.

She scraped the last rice from the bowl and swallowed it. She set spoon in bowl, and bowl aside on an edge of her work surface. Since it was empty it vanished back into the ether, becoming but a swirl of possibilities once more.

“Still no contact,” Nova said, as if noticing that Perceval had finished her meal.

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Perceval said. She stood, feeling the grass brush the arches of her feet, the spring of substrate beneath it. “You don’t have to update me unless there’s a change.”

“There is a change.” The angel folded her hands before her, pale yellow skirts falling in painterly pleats. Perceval wondered if there were even the semblance of a body behind the robes, or if she were as hollow as a statuette. “The nullities continue expanding, but now they are also beginning to link. I now have enough data to triangulate an epicenter.”

A Captain should be stern, impassive. Magisterial. Despite herself, Perceval felt her lips curve in a bitter grin. “If we were to ram a probe through the nullities,
armor it up with several layers of data-stripped colonies, could we get someone in there?”

“It’s an unacceptable risk for the ship’s Captain,” Nova said, after a pause long enough to allow Perceval to work out the angel’s disapproval in advance.

“Sure,” Perceval said. She drew a breath, and felt it fill her chest the way she’d forgotten breath could. She swept the back of her hand across her view of sealed ports and dark screens. “Let’s see the sky, Nova.”

The screens brightened. The shutters scrolled wide. Green swirls filled her vision, cut by the sweeps and cones of ship’s lights. Perceval let out that first good breath and took another one, even better.

“How about for the ship’s angel?”

   They come.

The lure is planted. The bait is set. The first of them arrives in your embrace half dead already, starving for resources in a rich environment. Fragile, laughable creatures, these vermin. Ridiculous that they should enslave something as ancient as you, but they are crafty, and you had no need to study craft before them.

Ahh, but now. You dreamed her here, and so she came. And you dreamed the ones who follow behind her, also. You dreamed them as you dreamed the dead goddess who sent them, your first ally among the vermin—if such as this could ally you. Your first tool, perhaps you should call her, though you are equally certain she regarded you as a tool as well. A weapon against her sire, and is that not an indication of how ill-made these creatures are, that they seek weapons against their children, their siblings, their forebears? For are not the members of one’s pod the only true allies, the ones who can be trusted in the bottomless dark?

She comes, the way-opener, the one who was promised. Sparrow’s daughter, come as you dreamed it,
as the dead goddess offered. The vermin who waits beyond your hull is cold, losing thermal energy fast, freezing from the edges. Dying, exhausted, present—in the company of her slave and master angel.

You can save her, after a fashion. It’s simple enough. If she is desperate for want of breath, she will be easy to manage. And this time, you understand the vermin well enough that there will be no unexpected repercussions.

You open wide your petals, and reveal your welcoming heart to the fading, shivering life-form who will be your salvation, if your dreams come true.

  Benedick had not anticipated how badly it would affect him to see his home in ruins. When he and Chelsea left the transfer station, minimally equipped by the carnivorous orchids—clothing and a little food, at least, and ill-fitting boots that must have been salvaged from some storage locker undisturbed since the Moving Times, as they were primitive and immutable—he understood intellectually what he might find.

But to see a raveled hollow, the edges still decaying, scooped from the side of the world where there had been apple trees and hills and water, a manor house, and the world’s best approximation of winter—that struck through him like an impaling blade, so he struggled to breathe around it. And it was not just his Heaven that lay destroyed. The unraveling extended wide and deep through the levels of the world.

Benedick stood stunned for a moment and watched reality unwind itself into coils of smoke and nothing. After the first gasp, he drew himself up, away from the arched, transparent wall of the inspection tube, and
tried to make himself stern for Chelsea. His weakness over so petty and personal a loss would lend her no steel, and he thought she needed whatever he could give her.

Still, he almost snapped at her when she disturbed the silence to ask, “Which way from here?”

“Further down,” he said, and as he turned to lead her, an angel exploded into his perception.

   When contact with Nova resumed, it pushed home with such force that it left Benedick dizzy. The angel snapped into place like a tool into a socket, the world behind her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she emerged from the world, for it seemed as if each strand of her hair, each branching of her circuitry, each blue-green strand and sheet like dripping strings of algae, leading back and down and away, receded into a complexity beyond what Benedick could parse even with the assistance of his symbiont. Elsewhere in the continuum of Nova’s attention, he spotted the jewel-like nodes of Caitlin and Perceval—and felt the moment when their awarenesses registered him.

Deus ex machina
, he thought, allowing a moment’s amusement before making sure his mask of severity was in place. Perhaps it was just his exhaustion, the weariness of the chase and the preceding adventures, but the fantasy comforted him more than he would have expected. He glanced over his shoulder at Chelsea, still silhouetted against the hatchway, her hair stirring with the change of air pressure, and said, “We’re online.”

She grinned at him. “Sweet connectivity. Hello, angel. What have you got for us?”

When Nova’s avatar shook her head, the strands of hair—or algae, or circuitry—rippled like a curtain of flame.

“We’ve got you back,” she said, with an artificial life-form’s
propensity for stating the obvious, “but we haven’t located the First Mate yet. However, the Captain and I are fairly certain we have identified the source of the nullities, and that it’s linked to Arianrhod’s destination. We therefore conjecture that we also know where Tristen is, or at least where he’s going to wind up, if he hasn’t lost her trail. Are you and Prince Benedick well enough to continue the hunt, Princess Chelsea?”

“No crippling injuries,” she responded, briefly touching the burned side of her face. It was healing well, curls of dead flesh sloughing in shaggy leaves from the new, blue-flushed skin revealed underneath. Bits of dead membrane clung to her fingertips when she drew back her hand. “Yuck,” she said.