Chill. Part 12

Negligently, Samael raised one hand and made a scooping gesture. Tristen knew it was the colony, but there was still something unsettling about dozens of ripe, velvety fruits gliding through the air to hover before him.

Tristen also knew better than to let the angel see he was disconcerted. He just produced a mesh from his armor, bundled the figs-except a slightly crushed one-into it, and handed them back to Mallory, who accepted without comment.

Tristen was contemplating splitting that last bruised fruit with the necromancer when a shrill, panicked sound cut the green chatter. A long trumpeting, harsh and hollow, echoed to a sharp fall.

The jungle was far too dense for running. With a glance at the others, Tristen tossed the fig away and broke into a careful canter, bouncing from foothold to foothold, twisting between trunks. Sound echoed confusingly in the confines of the Heaven, bouncing back from a ceiling invisible through the canopy overhead, m.u.f.fled and refracted by verdant greenery and the hard shapes of tree trunks. He cupped his hands to his ears as it faded, hoping to hear enough that his colony could help triangulate location and distance for the source.

"Fan out," Tristen said, as Samael's avatar vanished in a swirl that glittered like sun-struck dust, leaves and bits of insect carapace bouncing gently off the turf.

If this were a lure to ambush, it was hard to say if staying together or parting company would be safer-but it was definitely the more effective means by which to search.

Tristen hoped the angel was already doing what he ordered. For himself, he moved light-footed in the direction from which he estimated the cry had come. It repeated; this time he was closer, he thought, and he got a better fix.

"Here," Samael said in his ear.

He turned, and found himself looking through a curtain of leaves at the back of Mallory's head. Vigilant, he moved toward it, his nostrils full of the steam of the jungle and some ranker scent. Heavy, musty. Musky.

"d.a.m.n," he said, as he came up beside the necromancer, and the object of Mallory's attention cried again in obvious fear and distress.

The quadruped was the largest animal Tristen had ever seen. He estimated the weight at over two hundred kilograms, though it was hard to tell precisely because its body was covered with a coa.r.s.e, grizzled coat of strands as long as Tristen's forearm. It stood approximately chest height, its high, double-domed head decorated with two small, flapping ears and a prehensile appendage that groped frantically toward the nearest fig tree.

Its broad, splay-toed, hind foot, Tristen saw, was jammed between two angled, overgrowing roots, and in its panic it was only wedging itself further.

"What in the world is that?"

"A baby wooly mammoth," Samael said, coalescing beside him. "If it were to become full-grown, it might weigh in excess of fifteen tons." The angel shook his head.

"But where did it come from?"

Samael glanced at him, long, droopy face rearranging itself in surprise. "Biosystems failure," he said. "It's an emergency option."

"You're responsible for this?"

"Oh, no," Samael said. "It's autonomous. When the world is so damaged that its habitats are in danger of collapse, it is programmed to go into a recovery mode that includes releasing a selection of random cloned species, to see which become established." He gestured to the mammoth. "Apparently, some of them are truly random."

Tristen stared at the mammoth. Confronted with the apparent intractability of its situation, it had quieted, but he did not think that quiet in this case equated with calm. Instead, it cringed back against its tethering foot, trunk coiling and uncoiling nervously as it watched them through its fringe.

"A mammoth," he said, glancing to the silent Mallory for confirmation, as if repeating it would help him concretize. "A mammoth."

Samael nodded. "There's no way to support her, of course. She'll have to be sacrificed."

The sword on Tristen's hip murmured, Save her.

11.

aimless angels

Shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? Or his head with fish spears?

-Job 41: 6a7, King James Bible

Caitlin would have far rather returned Jsutien to an acceleration bay or, failing that, a hospital tank, but he was awake now and she was stuck with him. Well, technically the hospital tank was still an option, but an Exalt didn't need that much resource support for a simple skull fracture, and Caitlin thought Jsutien would require little attention while sleeping off his injury.

Also, she needed him and she didn't trust him, and she didn't really want him out of her sight. So she left him tucked in a corner of Central Engineering, one arm nanoshackled to the magnetized leg of his cot. While he snored she directed survey operations and created prioritized lists of existing damage, impending damage, and available consumables for Nova's convenience.

Status one was to repair, patch, or at least seal off catastrophic injury to the world-anything that represented an immediate danger to integrity, biosystems, or consumable or static resources. The irony being that many of those consumable resources would be consumed in the process of effecting the necessary repairs.

A quandary, but if G.o.d had made the world perfect, there would be no need for evolution.

Pursuant to those goals, Caitlin inst.i.tuted protocols geared toward halting the expansion of null zones and the establishment of new ones, diagnosing the source, and regaining control of existing ones as rapidly as possible. Reinforcing the superstructure, collecting raw material, and choosing an immediate harvestable destination were also driving priorities.

Further down the list fell niceties such as stabilizing the world's biosystems. Caitlin ranked crew comfort close to last. They could stay in the acceleration pods.

And if it came to pa.s.s that she needed to sacrifice some percentage of them to keep the rest alive-an eventuality she was not yet prepared to face as anything but a hypothetical-it would be easier to make the decision if they were still in suspension.

Seated at the console Bened.i.c.k had repaired, Caitlin rested her forehead against the backs of her fingers and sighed in exhaustion.

"We're still bleeding atmosphere and water?" She rubbed her aching hands. Her overstressed colony wasn't managing much damage control against the small aches and agonies of life. For a moment Caitlin thought of Bened.i.c.k, the strength of his hands and how they could ease the ache. She bit her cheek and swept memories aside.

The angel's voice was soothing and neutral. "Faster than we can replenish them, Chief Engineer. At this point, we are mostly losing consumables by capillary bleed, though the Captain has caught two more catastrophic unmakings, though only by having the Captain review feeds from external video motes. Generally a tiny leak is harder to locate and seal than a vast one, but-"

"You're still having problems seeing things?"

"It is a concern," the angel admitted.

Caitlin was already learning to determine the new angel's moods, despite its tendency to sound more methodical than personable. A matter of integration, she thought. As it brought its shattered personalities closer to consensus, it might find more range and depth of response. In the meantime, much of the processing power that could otherwise have gone to independent action and autonomous thought was bound up merely continuing the process of integration. And Perceval was a relatively inexperienced Captain, which meant that much of the executive guidance and disaster response had to come from Caitlin, the Chief Engineer.

A Chief Engineer who right this instant bitterly missed Susabo, the former Angel of Propulsion. Or even Inkling, who would not have had to be so carefully led. The most frustrating part was that she knew Susabo and Inkling were both present there inside Nova, somewhere-just not yet entirely compiled into the whole. Caitlin itched to pound her fists on the console and scream "Integrate faster!"

But such additional pressure was unlikely to net her good results.

She took a deep breath and said, "Nova, at this point would it be more efficient to allocate those resources to increasing our speed, thus feeding the ramscoop faster? If we can counterbalance the lossage with increased input-"

"My calculations indicate that that is a viable option," the angel agreed. "We will still be limping, and eventually we will outstrip the blown-off gas coc.o.o.n of the supernova, at which point collectable resources will become more spa.r.s.e. We will need to be ready with other options. Chief Engineer, not to interrupt myself, but-"

A hesitating angel was never a good sign. "Spit it out."

"Samael wishes to speak to you."

Caitlin wondered if her symbiont couldn't at least do a little something about the headache. She set her armor to provide more back and neck support, and said, "Put him on."

Because he was communicating with a high-ranking Engineer, Samael did her the courtesy of generating only a partial avatar-a gleaming focal point that materialized with a polite chirp. Quickly and efficiently, he explained that the world appeared to have reset in some fas.h.i.+on, and as part of its last-ditch effort at survival, it was not only releasing life-forms selected at random from its genetic banks, but altering them.

"The biosphere is mutating under stress," Caitlin restated, to be sure she understood.

"That appears to have been what the Builders intended."

If he were material, or possibly just present, she would have thrown something at him. "Well, stop it, Samael."

"I haven't the strength anymore for ventures such as that." When Caitlin glared at Samael's avatar, he added, "I am not equipped to lie to you."

"Right," she said, and restructured her to-do list. "Give me back to Nova, please."

Samael's confident, glowing polyhedral winked out, to be replaced by Nova's silver-haired avatar. Whether the young angel thought her crew would be more comforted by a face to respond to or whether she sought the rea.s.surance of a human seeming for herself, Caitlin did not know. She was simply grateful that Nova had chosen a form so unlike any of her component parts. It broke her heart enough to look in the angel's alien eyes and catch a fleeting expression that reminded her of Rien. She did not care to imagine how she would have borne it if the features that wore that manner resembled her adopted daughter's. Better for Nova to be as different as she could.

Then she wondered when she had begun thinking of the angel as a she. There was nothing about Nova to indicate or imply a s.e.x, and as Caitlin knew them, the vast majority of angels had always been he by courtesy, much as s.h.i.+ps were she.

Focus, Chief Engineer, she reprimanded herself. Funny how the alienation of a t.i.tle could make you hold yourself together in the face of the impossible.

Caitlin said, "Thank you, Nova. I'm going to list off our immediate complex of problems as I understand it, and I'd appreciate it if you'd check my logic and see if I've missed anything."

Frowning, the angel nodded. "Carry on."

Verbalization was a slow and monodimensional means of exchanging information, but it demanded linearity and precision, so Caitlin chose to speak out loud rather than to transmit a problem matrix. In a measured fas.h.i.+on, she listed everything she'd previously considered, added Samael's intelligence on the Jacob's Ladder's biosphere reboot process as an immediate concern, mentioned the pursuit of Arianrhod and Asrafil, and finished, "And there are the other denizens of the world to consider. Not everyone and everything who didn't make it into tanks will have died. The biosphere-especially the synbiotic and Exalt biosphere-is proving to possess remarkable resilience. Perceval needs to understand that there are probably people out there who have no understanding of their environment or the realities of the situation. People who will, unfortunately, need to be ... educated. And then governed."

The euphemisms felt gritty on her tongue. She worked her mouth around where they'd pa.s.sed as if to rid herself of the taste.

"Disaster mitigation is an ongoing process," Nova said blandly, leading Caitlin to wonder (again) exactly what the angel's facade concealed. When she had time, she was going to procure the Captain's approval to pin Nova into a corner and do some serious spelunking around the inside of her program.

It was possible that the angel might even approve of her interference. If Caitlin had enough una.s.similated bits of other people kicking around the inside of her skull, she'd be crying for a competent code intervention.

The angel said, "It's a problem of management as much as anything. The pendulum could still tip us into catastrophic collapse."

The angel's words conjured an image of the world as a ghost world, burning lifeless between the stars, bored and aimless angels at play among its silent struts and habitats.

Caitlin said, "You'd survive it."

"I would be lonely."

Whether she had timed it to make Caitlin laugh or not, it worked, and the break in tension allowed Caitlin to turn her attention back to the problem at hand.

"Right. We're not out of the event horizon, as it were," Caitlin said. "And we can't afford to work on these problems in isolation. Any functional solution will be a systemic one. Can you maintain the current level of habitability? If necessary, what if we pull back to the core and allow individual anch.o.r.es, holdes, and domaines to maintain for themselves as they can?"

It was what the world had been built for, and that ability to compartmentalize was what had allowed it to remain a viable organism through the past five hundred years, despite crippling trauma. The world was modeled on a living thing-and life was stubborn.

But that compartmentalization was also what had led to so many of their current problems.

"I can fall back into myself as necessary," the angel agreed. "However, that leaves many a beachhead for the power or powers behind the null zones. We still haven't managed to obtain any evidence one way or the other about the possibility that if the world's idiot systems are attempting to reboot the biospheres, they may also have available backup versions of the original angel. We need to determine if the null zones are areas where Israfel is attempting to resp.a.w.n from backup. None of that, however, explains the disa.s.sembly incidents."

"Given how far our goals, and your program, have diverged from the Builders' intent, that's not a rea.s.suring scenario."

The angel skinned lips back from imaginary teeth. "He would eat me in a heartbeat. We are not without advantages, however. The houses of Rule and Engine are unified at last."

Caitlin snorted. "Because the houses of Rule and Engine are decimated. No, Nova, I'm sorry. You're right. It is an advantage." She rubbed her armored wrist with her armored palm. "If we can find a way to work together. And trust each other."

"You are thinking of my Captain's father."

Caitlin's smile felt thin and stretched across her skull. "Of course I'm thinking of Bened.i.c.k. I've sent him out there alone, hunting a woman who was his ally in a scheme to keep Rule and Engine from each other's throats. A woman who was his friend and lover." She stopped herself before she said: But not his partner. There was nothing uglier than a self-justification.

Instead, she continued, "She is my great-grandniece, and also the mother and ally of the woman who is responsible for the decimation of Rule. His daughter with her has died and metamorphosed into a fragment of you, my dear Nova. His daughter and mine is your Captain. Are you still human enough, a little, to understand why I am worried what he'll do?"

"You must," said the angel, "reach out to him."

"You're a fine one to give relations.h.i.+p advice," she said, folding her arms over her chest. She turned away.

She was old enough to know it for a useless display even as she did so, but it made her feel better.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "What else?" she asked, when her eyes had stopped stinging.

The angel's avatar reappeared before her, s.h.i.+fting orientation to match her. "Chief Engineer-" The angel lifted her chin, folded her arms, and spat the words out as if she expected Caitlin to argue. "My Captain is not emotionally well."

"I know," Caitlin said. The angel's tone made her want to reach out and lay a hand on its immaterial nape, pull its face into her neck, and stroke it down the spine. As she would have done for her daughter, once. "We shall carry on for her as we can, and buy her time to heal enough to shoulder the burdens she must bear."

"Is that the mother talking, or the Chief Engineer?"

"What can we do about the null zones, if we're not surrendering them?" Caitlin said, as if it were an answer. Perhaps it was, of sorts.

"Prince Bened.i.c.k and Princess Chelsea are approaching the largest one," Nova said, "in the far south of the world. It is where Arianrhod-and Asrafil, if Samael can be believed-have taken shelter. Bened.i.c.k and Chelsea have the toolkit, their armor, and their own colonies; odds are good I will be able to remain in contact. I will ask them to reconnoiter. Perhaps they will provide us with some intelligence on what, exactly, is blocking my access to the area."

"If it doesn't eat them."

"Or-perhaps more likely-subvert their colonies."

"Belly of the beast," Caitlin said, and bit the back of her hand.

Without your mate, your fathers, your brothers, your sons, you are as nothing. You are as a calf, all but blinded.