Chill. Part 18

"Tristen Conn," she said. "Come forth."

Tristen stepped forward, away from the others, but not too close to Dorcas-or her serpents. His armor might be a match for the Enemy's chill, but he was not sure he cared to test it against engineered cobra fangs. He paused some meters short of the dais.

On his shoulder, he felt Gavin spread white wings for balance, the brush of pinions across Tristen's scalp as they bowered him. He rested his hand on Mirth's hilt. The sword's longing to go to Dorcas could almost have pulled him forward. He tightened his gauntlet over the pommel, wondering if, in some atavistic part of her brain, Dorcas remembered it as the one that she had carried once when she had been Sparrow.

Neural pathways became worn in with use. If she folded her hand around it, would the part of her that had been his daughter-the physical part, the part where the unconscious lived and struggled-remember the feel of the blade? Would her body recollect its use, she who had been a swordswoman without equal, trained by her mother's hand until she had exceeded even her mother?

He wondered if he wished more that the answer was yes, or no. He wondered also if Dorcas expected him to speak. But if she did, he had no idea what he should say.

Scales sc.r.a.ped across carpet behind him. The armor told him what he already knew: the cobras were cutting him off from the others. They could not harm Samael, and Mallory was not without defenses, but that was carrion comfort.

Dorcas still regarded him, letting the silence stretch, her face a mask as serene as a priestess's. Tristen tilted his face up to her as if to the light of the s.h.i.+pwreck stars.

She wore only a loose smock and mud-daubed work pants, the cuffs rolled up to show her bare, bony ankles.

The sight of her pained him as deeply as if he looked upon the Queen of Heaven. Still he waited, holding to a taken breath and the soothing mental construct of a pale green light as if they could defend him. But nothing could make this right.

The breath Dorcas drew seemed to enlarge her. Silence spread from her like a ripple across a pool, even the serpents seeming to rustle more quietly. Just when that quiet had reached oppressive proportions, when everyone else was holding their breaths with her, her voice rolled forth in a preacher's or stateswoman's ringing tones.

"Tristen Conn," she repeated. "How do you plead?"

It was no other than he had expected, but he could play out the game. "What is the charge?"

"Treachery," she said. "Collusion. And blackest kinslaughter."

He would not grant her the victory of a nod or wince. This is not Sparrow. Easy enough to change that perception, to edit his symbiont so he saw her-really saw her-as someone new and foreign. But to do so would mean giving up on ever seeing Sparrow again.

Mallory started forward; Tristen would have known even if his armor had not told him, because he heard the answering choir of hisses. Tristen extended his left hand, leaving the right on Mirth's hilt, and gestured the necromancer back.

"Tristen," Mallory said.

He shot a quelling glance over his shoulder. "Not guilty. By what right do you level charges?"

"By right of survivors.h.i.+p," she said. "Lay down your weapon, Sir Tristen, and leave behind your familiar beast. If he acts on your behalf, know we will destroy him and your traveling companions, too."

"This was your mother's blade," Tristen said. "And yours, when you were who you were before. a.s.suming I recognized your right to bring me to judgment, would you have me cast it down like trash?"

"Give it to your leman, then." An imperious jerk of her head indicated Mallory. Tristen wasn't sure if Mallory's snort of amus.e.m.e.nt or Samael's was more dramatic. Merely by virtue of proximity, Gavin's was loudest.

Tristen did not remove his hand from the blade, nor did he nudge the basilisk from his shoulder. They could fight, if they had to, but he would prefer to talk his way out. The risk of fighting was the risk of losing, and the whole world rode on the success of his mission. And if he read Dorcas's body language correctly, she was quite confident in her threats.

Tristen said, "We are on Errantry, and the Captain's business. You will let us pa.s.s."

"What care we for Captains?" Her smile was bitter. "Less even, I trust you understand, than we do for Commodores. We follow the divine will."

Given his experience of Commodores, Tristen didn't fancy the morality of his position. And yet it was the one he had. He said, "But for those of us who do care for Captains-or for Commodores, if you prefer-the treason would lie in disobeying their legal orders." His teeth began to grind. He made a point of slackening his jaw. "No matter how little to our taste those orders were."

"So a good soldier follows bad orders? Every criminal prefers to go free."

"It is unwise to hold me. The fate of the very world itself rests on our pa.s.sage, Lady of the Edenites."

She tilted her head and shrugged. "I care very little for the fate of this s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p," she said. "It is not a world, and to call it a world offends the spirit of real worlds-living worlds-everywhere. Would you call a tin box your mother?"

Tristen suspected that the only reason he didn't catch himself rubbing his temples in frustration was because the gauntlets would have gotten in the way. "I insist you release my companions."

"Are there no higher powers than rulers?" she asked. "Are there no moral authorities greater than a bad king?"

Mallory s.h.i.+fted among the serpents, provoking another susurrus of warnings. Samael brushed halfmaterial hair behind his shoulders, shreds of dry gra.s.s making a whisking sound.

Tristen said, "If there are higher moral powers, My Lady, you will forgive me if I admit that I do not know you as such. A man must keep his conscience."

She flinched, so that he wondered what he had said to wound her so sharply. But she extended a hand before her, a gesture that brought the snakes rising between them. Her voice was level when she said, "And have you kept your conscience, Sir Tristen?"

Tristen looked into his daughter's dead, alien, animated face, and shook his head. "The state of my conscience is my own concern. I do not accept your authority. I will not stand your trial."

She pursed her lips. Her face, he thought, was sadder than not. She said, "Would that you had a choice, good sir knight. Fear not. Your companions will not be harmed."

He touched the hilt of Mirth, where it still swung at his hip. The serpents swayed forward, but he did not withdraw his hand. It wasn't a threat; it was an offering. Whoever lived in her now, he knew the face, the steady gaze. He did not think he could fight her. "You heard me say this blade was yours."

"Not mine." Was there a little sorrow behind the dismissal in her headshake? Hard to tell, when you had so much invested in believing there was.

"A bargain," Tristen said. "I will submit to your trial if you will accept this object from my hand."

"Tristen!" interjected Mallory. Tristen let the protest roll down his armor and away, holding Dorcas's gaze the whole while.

"We could fight," Tristen said. "Whatever your resources, Lady of the Edenites, it would not go easy for you."

Of course it was a trap, and she knew it. Her eyebrows lifted, her pupils contracted. But it was a trap for him as well.

Slowly, she nodded.

Tristen turned his head, to where Mallory and Samael stood side by side. Gavin rocked on his shoulder, a big bird hunching itself and shuffling from foot to foot.

"Don't fight them," Tristen said, holding Mallory's gaze. He suspected Gavin was his real worry, so he raised one gauntlet and touched the basilisk's wing. "Do not fight them. Do not kill her. I will handle this myself."

Mallory, grim-jawed, nodded.

Tristen turned back to the woman who wore his daughter's skin. "Do your worst." When her hand fell, the snakes struck.

Perceval buried her feet in violets, leaning back in her Captain's chair, and stared up at the sky as if she could see through it to the night beyond.

Not as if. She could see through it to the night beyond if she chose.

She needed merely to extend her sight beyond the range of her physical eyes, into the web of the angel's awareness. The angel's slowly receding awareness, which Perceval knew was being worn back by the tide of the expanding nullities.

She would rather have waded through a sewer. Not because of what that web contained, but who. Hard enough to allow that intimacy with a stranger, a machine. But to do so with a machine that contained the desires and memories of someone to whom she had been as close as she was to Rien- Every reach into the matrix was a monstrous effort of will, the sort of exertion she could manage only in surges. She'd never wanted a lover. She'd never cared to allow anyone within the borders of herself, not since she was a child, and too small and dependent to enforce her will.

Perceval had chosen to relax those limits for Rien because Rien had proven that she would honor whatever boundaries Perceval needed to establish. But this was an abrogation of them, a violation sharp enough to make her wish she could peel her skin back with her nails and wriggle out of it.

Actually, given what she'd become, she probably could do that. And survive it. Shed my skin. And if skinshedding could make it better, Perceval would choose that in a nanosecond. But this violation came from within, and it was something she'd chosen, out of duty, on her own.

So many voices, inside her, clamoring. Wrestling to speak with her mouth, to move with her limbs.

She hoped it would get easier with practice. That she would stop caring about privacy, boundaries, the integrity of her self. She didn't think she could live with it, otherwise.

Perceval drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reached outside her skin.

Nova was there, waiting, silent and aware as any colonized atmosphere. Perceval breathed deep, pulse accelerating, a tingling spreading the length of her arms to her fingertips. It was psychosomatic, she knew-and so she shut it down, not caring for the distraction, or the reminder that she had any physical body, because that reminder was too much temptation to return there and remain.

No wonder Captains go strange.

"Show me our boundaries, Nova."

Nova opened the pathways and Perceval entered them as easily as spreading her lost wings would have been. She infiltrated the angel, stretched to the edges of its span of control, and felt there the p.r.i.c.kly, eroding sensation of something nibbling. A war, a death struggle, taking place on the micro scale. Different from the one she'd lived through when angel fought angel, though. This was a battle of attrition.

"Those aren't ours," she said, and wondered why the angel hadn't seen it.

-Those aren't our whats?- "Our colonies," she said. "Those aren't you. They aren't remotely like you. And they're not reprogramming your colony, Nova. They're penetrating each mote so it reproduces more motes like theirs, not like ours. They're viral."

"The thing is, I'm pretty sure they're not ... native to our world. And Nova can't tell," Perceval said, gesturing to a monitor tank in which a schematic in blue and orange hovered, writhing uncertainly.

Caitlin folded her arms and frowned, considering her daughter the Captain's words with a mix of unease and pride.

Perceval continued, "She can't even tell they exist. It's a very familiar-sounding model, if you think about it for a minute."

"Inducer viruses," Caitlin said, with a glance at Jsutien. She had exchanged his simple shackle for a silvery drape of nanotech chain that permitted him the freedom to work while allowing her to retain control. He'd accepted it with grace. Understanding that her distrust was provoked by the circ.u.mstances of Arianrhod's disappearance, he had claimed to find the precaution reasonable.

"And it's not," he had said, "as if I have anywhere to go."

Now, he met her gaze and nodded. "An inducer virus, sure. Or a plain, old-fas.h.i.+oned virus. Not engineered. Your angel interface really can't even sense the presence of these things?"

Perceval's avatar shook her head. "She can sense them just fine. But she doesn't seem able to notice she's sensing them, if you know what I mean."

Caitlin frowned. She did, and she understood what it implied, too. Something in the angel's inherited programming forced it to overlook this particular colony structure and the individual motes that composed it. "Nova's been instructed to ignore the infestation."

"Yes," Perceval said. "And instructed to forget why she was instructed to ignore it."

"That seems like something of a radical operational choice," Caitlin said mildly, because Bened.i.c.k was not there to say it for her. Her crossed arms were in danger of becoming a straitjacket. She forced them down to her sides. "So if you're programming an angel, why do you force it to ignore an ... infestation of alien nanotech?"

"Sabotage," Perceval said, promptly.

But Jsutien shook his head. "Immunosuppression." When the women-present and projected-turned to stare at him, he said, "It's how you get a transplant to take. First, you have to stop the host body from attacking it."

"I see. And do you know something about what might have been ... transplanted ... into my world, Jsutien?"

He flushed cobalt. "Not specifically. But-" The swags of nanochain rustled as he s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably behind his console.

"Spit it out."

The look he gave her was all startled prey, but she didn't think he was intentionally evasive. "It's about your sister, Chief Engineer."

"Of course it is," Caitlin said, rolling her eyes until she felt the muscles stretch. "Which one, I'm horrified to ask?"

"Cynric," he said. He turned to Perceval, and Caitlin grimaced at a premonition. "Captain, Princess Cynric was the director of biosystems, and bioengineering, and chief synbiotician. The original colonies were her design. As were a lot of the first-generation synbiotes and engineered fauna. s.h.i.+pfish, parrotlets ... some Means."

"And the inducer viruses," Perceval said, with the air of someone who has just achieved a satisfying synthesis of incomplete information.

"And the inducer viruses," Jsutien confirmed. "Yes. So I would bet that whatever's out there is something she was working on. Possibly a weapon she meant to use against Alasdair Conn. When the three of you-" He paused delicately.

"Attempted to overthrow our father," Caitlin finished for him. "Don't worry, you can say it."

"They called her Cynric the Sorceress," he said, apologetically. "Before you were born."

"After, too." Caitlin smiled. "But if she had a weapon like that, Astrogator, she never revealed its existence to me."

"Maybe it wasn't cooked yet," Jsutien said, with a wave at the monitor tank. "Maybe it needed time to evolve."

Perceval rubbed her mouth. "Well, they're sure as h.e.l.l cooked now. They're eating my s.h.i.+p. And she's pretty unhappy about it."

Which led Caitlin to another problem that it was the Chief Engineer's duty to bring to the attention of the Captain. Fortunately, this issue was a little more tractable. She coughed into her hand and said, "Have you noticed that you can't settle on a p.r.o.noun?"

"Mom?" Lashes meshed over hazel eyes made to seem enormous by Perceval's denuded scalp.

"Nova," Caitlin clarified. "You call it he or she, but the gendering of the p.r.o.noun changes from conversation to conversation."

Perceval's brow furrowed in confusion or concentration. "Is that bad?"

"It's diagnostic," Caitlin said, dodging the question. "It tells me Nova is still integrating, and the distinct personalities are generating confusion, crossed signals, and hesitancy, which it may not be aware of. And that's bleeding through its link to you. It's your responsibility as her director to a.s.sist in the integration process."

"Right," said Perceval, rubbing her arms. "What does that mean, exactly?"

Caitlin lifted her chin. "Captain, it means you have to decide who you want her to be."

15.

the bottomless dark in its person