Grail (12 page)

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.