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.

  18

  the broken holdes

  Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

  --Job 41:1-4, King James Bible

  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.

  "You're shedding DNA everywhere," the angel observed.

  "Cost of doing business," Chelsea said with a shrug. She wiped her hand on the trousers the carnivorous plants had provided. "It's on file."

  Benedick shifted restlessly. "We have been proceeding south. I obtained a fix on Arianrhod's previous location, and we have been tracking that, but more recent information would be welcome. The source of the nullities, if pleasantries are satisfied?"

  "Not in the south of the world, as previously surmised, but south of its structure entirely," Nova said. "Beyond the Broken Holdes, and outside the span of the world."

  Benedick's heart had already begun to ache, sickened by awakening knowledge. He glanced at Chelsea for support or confirmation, but his sister frowned blankly. Of course; Benedick's own fault for permitting it. Their father had been a secret-keeper, and she was far too young for the early days after the catastrophe to be anything to her but received history.

  He steeled himself and said, "Does Caitlin know?"

  "She's been informed," Nova answered. "Am I to understand that you share her suspicions as to the source of the infection?"

  Dry-mouthed but holding his face impassive, Benedick nodded.

  Chelsea brushed his elbow with the back of her fingers. "And how about those of us who didn't pay attention to our tutors?"

  "I very much expect your tutors were under strict instructions not to discuss any of this with you," Benedick said. "You know those portraits Dad had nailed to the wall?"

  She looked up at him, sister to brother, but without the trust he'd seen time and again among the members of Mean families--or even those of Engine. If she watched him like an attentive puppy, it was a puppy with every expectation of being kicked.

  Do better.

  He still had one daughter left. And this sister, too. He said, "Those were the older sisters, Cecelia's daughters. The girls between Tristen and me."

  "They were executed."

  "So you have heard a little."

  "Cautionary tales."

  Benedick chuckled without humor. "Father believed in making examples."

  She nodded, encouraging him to continue. "Only two of them were executed," he clarified. "The youngest lived. She is Chief Engineer, and the mother of my daughter Perceval. But of the two who did die, the eldest was Caithness, who would have been Captain. And the middle daughter was Cynric the Sorceress."

  Benedick's hands wanted to twitch defensively, as if to cover his breast, but with an effort of will he held them relaxed at his sides. Chelsea watched attentively, but he did not think she had registered his discomfort. If he could hide his thoughts and weaknesses from Alasdair Conn, he figured he could hide them from anyone. "Colorful nickname."

  "Colorless woman," Benedick said. "And I do not mean in terms of her personality, but she had a gift for making herself unnoticed, for going unremarked. For being--not at the heart of every conspiracy, because she was the center of none--but rather for being aware of things that rightfully nobody should have known. She was Alasdair Conn's daughter; we all had the sense to make sure we had resources no one else knew the existence of. But more than that, she was a bioengineer. The head of biosystems. A good deal of the ship's ecology grew out of her experiment--as did the colonies. Or rather, she created the first generation of the self-evolving form in which we recognize them today. When I was young, we did not have such things. Life was bounded in ways that would seem inconceivable to you now."

  "I have heard from Dad, when he deigned to notice my existence, what lives of toil and hardship you all endured," Chelsea said, her mockery light enough not to sting.

  Benedick allowed himself a laugh. "Truly, our privation was terrible. But listen. The colonies were not all Cynric brought us. She personally engineered the ship-fish and the ship cats and a hundred other useful species--parrotlets, the vesper weaving-spiders, egglings. But her greatest accomplishment was to capture two creatures of alien origin. One was dissected and examined, the waste material"--the corpse--"recycled, and some of its adaptations incorporated into the world's genomes. She used information from its necropsy to create the inducer viruses, and the colonies themselves."

  Chelsea swallowed. "Was it sentient?"

  "Assuredly. As for your inevitable next question--as to whether it was sapient, I cannot be certain that anyone chose to inquire."

  "I see," she said.

  He could see her thoughts cross her face as plainly as if she spoke them, read her confusion of questions as they tried to press all at once onto her tongue.

  He took pity, and answered what he would have asked first. "It was deemed scientific research. No one was permitted to interfere." Whatever was in his smile, it made Chelsea glance down. "I hope Dad regretted that decision in the end."

  "And what became of the second alien?"

  Benedick licked his lips. "The second Leviathan was infected with an inducer virus--a slaver colony designed from its dead mate's body. Paralyzed, as a wasp paralyzes a spider. Then--against future need--it was placed in tow. I believe now that Cynric intended to use it as a last-ditch weapon against our father, but it's possible she ran out of time, or even that her control was incomplete. Cynric told me this before she died." When she asked me to be her executioner.

  "That's where Arianrhod is going."

  "I believe so."

  "And that's where the nullities are coming from," Nova said, with a widening gesture of her avatar's hands. "They're caused by the inducer virus. Repurposed and remade. Which is why I can't see them."

  "Nova?" Benedick said. "Tell Caitlin I agree with her judgment, please."

  "I have not told you her judgment."

  "I anticipate it," he said. Across from him, Chelsea folded her arms and leaned back against the hatchway door, frowning thoughtfully. He saw the shiver engendered by the contact crawl up her neck into her hair and die there. Holding her gaze through that of the immaterial angel, he finished, "Whether Leviathan has awakened fortuitously, or due to the supernova, or whether Cynric had something to do with it, it has become a factor again. And if it is sapient ... then I imagine it has been planning its vengeance for rather a long time."

  "We should hurry," Chelsea said.

  Benedick was already turning down the corridor that would lead them to the Broken Holdes. "Never fear," he said. "We are."

  The mammoth advanced before them, its broad, soft feet all but noiseless on the decking. Tristen was more aware of the whisking of its hair, the rub of strand over coarse strand, than any sound from its footfalls. Amazing that something that must mass a quarter ton could move like a cloud.

  It led them down corridors as barren as if they had been sterilized, metal floors and bulkheads eerily without life--even plant life. Or any sign that anything had ever grown here.

  Tristen eyed the barren space with jaundiced discomfort. "What purpose could this have served? It's just wasted space. There's nothing here."

  "It's a clean zone," Samael said. "A buffer."

  Mallory made a throat-clearing noise that Tristen suspected was largely symbolic. "What needs a buffer of lifeless sterility?"

  "Well, that's easy." Gavin flapped once for emphasis. "Something inimical to life. How far do we trust that mammoth?"

  "Funny you should be the one asking," Tristen said, which earned him a gesture of irritation that would have been an eye roll if the basilisk's eyes weren't concealed behind sealed lids.

  "You know what I mean."

  The mammoth paused at the end of the corridor, trunk extended tentatively toward an interior lock. It stroked the handle. When Tristen and the rest hesitated ten steps back, the trunk hooked in an irritable beckoning gesture.

  Apparently, "go first" fell among a First Mate's duties. Tristen stepped up beside the mammoth. It brushed his gauntlet with its trunk, so the sensors reported leathery warmth, whiskery breath across the back of his hand.

 

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