Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.
-Job 41:8, King James Bible
Tristen wedged his gauntlet into a broken crevice of the nitrogen rock and let it support his weight. It held him in the truncated end of the corridor, even if the contact transmitted the grinding of the winches into his armor and from there to his bones.
His native senses weren"t enough to pierce the nebula, even with the a.s.sistance of his symbiont, but the armor managed better, providing heat signatures and a schematic drawn from the pattern of the running lights. Though he"d never seen it with his own eyes, he knew what he was looking for. There had been diagrams, holograms, extensive discussions. Out there, steadily being drawn closer, was an enormous, almost incomprehensibly complex cage and, pinned in its center like a spider immobilized by a paralytic wasp, was the surviving member of the only alien species the Conn family had ever encountered that was not of their own creation.
Over his comm, he heard Mallory whisper-with patent awe, not the affected nonchalance Tristen would have expected-"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."
The deeps stretched out before him, chilling his soul and leaving him quailing and courageless in their regard. Despite everything he knew about the darkness, Tristen could not prevent himself from straining his eyes, and eventually a shape loomed through the smoke, as he had known it would-a teardrop trelliswork of incomprehensible size, picked out like a tree wrapped in festival lights. And at the heart of the cage, spiked through with impaling bars, a lumpy crater-pocked oblong as mottled and dark as if its surface had been daubed and smeared by ashy paws.
If the flawed ice palace of the outer Broken Holdes had awed Tristen, the Leviathan was sheerly bewildering. He felt his lips move, but whatever prayer he mouthed never pa.s.sed them, and he had no objective idea what he had meant to say. He licked his lips inside his helm, where no one could see, and steeled himself to go down and meet the devil in the dark.
The others arranged themselves against Gavin"s netting around him, fingers linked through mesh, all peering into the darkness. Tristen didn"t turn his head to regard them: his sensors told him everything he needed to know.
The Enemy was bottomless, and infinite, and he-Tristen Conn-was very small, and every sense and instinct told him he should stay safe in his cage.
This time when he spoke, it was loud enough for his own ears to hear, for the suit mikes to amplify and broadcast. "Bened.i.c.k, Chelsea, Gavin. You"ll engage the defenses and distract it. Mallory, I know this isn"t your kind of fight. I trust you"ll do what you can, and otherwise stay out of the way."
"And me?" said Samael.
"With me."
Beside Tristen, Mallory made a throat-clearing noise. "So now that we"ve enslaved this thing, mutilated it, and killed its family, we"re going to kill it, too?"
Bened.i.c.k looked over his armored shoulder at Mallory. "We"re Conns," he said. "It"s what we"re good for."
Tristen winced, but the armor hid it.
"Gavin." Tristen wished he could somehow dry his sweating palms. The armor was slow in absorbing the moisture. "It"s time to let us pa.s.s."
Jsutien seemed essentially unsurprised when Caitlin rounded on him. His chin came up, but his hands stayed relaxed on the console. She tried to bridle her anger, bring her frustration to manageable levels, but despite her best attempts to control it with her colony and will, the fury rose up like a standing interference pattern, a ma.s.s of static that threatened to drown out rational thought. She opened her mouth to speak, choked on her first sentence, and had to resort to her symbiont for additional chemical calm before she managed to get out a one-word accusation.
"Sabotage?"
Jsutien laced his fingers together and leaned back in his chair, but held her gaze shamelessly.
Caitlin advanced a step and tried again. "Sabotage, Astrogator? Is that what crippled my ship? My grandfather marooned us on purpose?"
Five hundred years ago, she soothed herself, but it was still her ship, and the outrage flared bright.
Finally, he lowered his eyes. "It wouldn"t surprise me," he said. "But I have no personal knowledge that it was so."
She stared hard, but all his tells-respiration, perspiration, pulse-hinted that he was telling the truth. "It"s ridiculous," she said, dropping into her own chair.
"It"s fanatic," he replied. "It"s an experiment in forced adaptation."
"The cost," she said, with a gesture that swept her battered engineering deck but extended, in intention, far beyond. Lives, material, effort. "What could be worth that? It"s not rational."
The shake of Jsutien"s head, the way he laced his fingers tiredly through Oliver"s hair, made her think of when she had been a young woman and asked her father some question he found painfully naive. Jsutien wasn"t dismissive and condescending as Alasdair had been, however; he just seemed weary and ill. "Faith is not rational. Do you know what a cathedral is, Chief Engineer?"
"A kind of church," she said. "A big church."
"A church that took centuries to build," he clarified. "And could cost hundreds of lives in the building. A church that represented an absolutely absurd investment for a medieval lord. And yet they got built anyway. For the glory of G.o.d."
"That"s sick," she said.
The astrogator pressed the heels of both hands to his temples and squeezed, as if to press the ache back inside. He jerked his head to the tanks full of schematics lining the bulkhead. "So is this."
Perceval looked up from her study to find Nova standing before her. The angel could not have been there long, because Perceval had not been so far away as that-or had she? In any case, the angel did not appear impatient, and she had not yet made a gesture for Perceval"s attention.
"Speak," Perceval said, smoothing her hands over the p.r.i.c.kles on her scalp.
But the angel did not answer. She reached out as if to lay her hand against Perceval"s, fingers overlapping and cradling her scalp, and then froze there, avatar rippling with waves of interference. "Nova?" Perceval said, rising.
Nova"s eyes gaped blank and wide. "Run," she grated. But before Perceval could so much as step away from her chair, a wall of static-voices, cries, interference-crashed into her head.
As the cables draw you to the hive, at first you think to consume the creature who has come to you, and with her the splinter of enslaved entropy contained and strapped across her back. She is vermin, nothing more, and vermin are for destruction. She is frail and half dead already, a life-form so fragile she can"t even survive the benign environment of the nebula. The sons you should have had would have been stronger even as kittens; this tiny creature could never even endure the benevolent winds of a balmy gas giant. It"s an obscenity, the final degradation, that you have been infested by the spoor of such fragile parasites.
You would crush her-you are already opening yourself to destroy her-when something whispers to you, Stop.
Think, Leviathan.
She could be useful.
And though the hesitation comes from the infection that riddles you, you know that what it speaks makes sense.
You have been alone, purposeless, too long. But in your dreams you hold the power to change that. You will remake her, claim her. Rework her into something you can in truth call part of your pod.
It will be another vengeance on the vermin who have so wounded you.
As will their destruction.
You reach out, into the microbes you have made your own, so long, with such patience. They are poised there, usefully, having infiltrated the superstructure of the vermin"s hive, having infected it as they infected you. You have bided so long, so patiently. Maneuvering by inches. The time for waiting is pa.s.sed. Now, you will take their world apart.
Tristen dropped into emptiness as the world unraveled around him. He tumbled helplessly for an instant before he recovered his wits, tucked, controlled the spin, and emerged oriented enough to burn reaction ma.s.s and take command of his movements again. As he whirled to face the world and the others, a yielding and resilient mesh brushed him, snagged his armor, and stabilized him. It was the webwork extension of Gavin"s wing, and it held Tristen steady as he watched the Broken Holdes recede, unweaving themselves before his eyes.
"Nova!" he said, but-as evidenced by a flare of gold-white light and the rapid slowing of the deconstruction, the angel was already present, and already at war. There was no subtlety now, no infiltration or counterinfiltration. Instead, bright arcs and spikes of material slammed around the horizon of the world, peeled away from more secured regions, colonies arcing and flashing as they exploded one against the others.
Something caught Tristen"s wrist. He jerked inside the armor, swinging hard enough to wobble Gavin"s stability. The basilisk squawked protest over his intercom, but Tristen didn"t relax until he saw it was Chelsea, with Bened.i.c.k just beyond her stabilizing Mallory. The necromancer did not seem at home in the absence of gravity. Behind them, Samael had faded into near invisibility, evident only as a shadow against green fog.
"I think it"s p.i.s.sed," the angel said.
"Of course it"s p.i.s.sed," Mallory answered. "We killed and ate its girlfriend."
Samael smiled benevolently through cold-withered lips. "The Captain and Nova are under attack on the bridge, Prince Tristen. We should return the engagement and draw its attention if we would protect them."
The man-thick cables that had bound Leviathan"s cage were evaporating-faster than the superstructure of the world, for there was nothing close to defend them-and the cage itself had begun to exfoliate in layers, like peeling bark.
Malignant colonies. Ones Leviathan had either subverted or generated. The war was on the nano level now, if it had ever left it. A war that Gavin and Samael could help fight, and so could the knights-errant, as long as their armor remained uncorrupted.
"Tristen," Bened.i.c.k said, faceless behind the mirrored gold of his faceplate. "You have the sword."
Unbidden, Tristen"s hand stole to Mirth"s hilt. "Yes," he said.
Without another word needed, the plan was formed. Tristen turned from his brother, the mesh of Gavin"s wings de-adhering to neatly release him. He let Mirth slide into his hand, for a moment missing Charity. An unblade would serve him better, now. It would part the Leviathan"s flesh like pulp, find its own way to basal nuclei or central circulatory cores like the tool for fatal surgery that it had been.
Mirth was as sharp, but whatever will it cradled was not the will of a scalpel. Tristen would have to find its targets on his own.
Or maybe not.
"Gavin," he said, as the basilisk collapsed itself from a net to a cord, binding Mallory to Chelsea for now. "Or Samael. Which one of you knows the anatomy of that thing over there?"
"Key," Samael said, leaving Tristen to roll his eyes in exasperation. But he recited it again and felt the angel stretch through the colony contact like a man popping his spine.
"Schematic," Samael said, and the pattern of the Leviathan"s body lit up Tristen"s heads-up display.
"Great. Where"s it keep its brain?"
"That," Samael said, "would appear to be the problem."
When Perceval opened her eyes again, it was five hundred years before. She stood under olive trees, on a lawn mown plush as velvet, and a woman draped in white robes and swagged with chains was being led before her.
Perceval smiled inside, but she would not let her lips curve. No one must see her mirth at an execution-no one except the executed, who would know it without being shown.
The woman knelt, her straight brown hair slipping apart to bare her nape as her head was lowered. A man came up behind her. Bened.i.c.k, a naked unblade in his hand.
"Last words?" Perceval said to her daughter. As if in a dream, she knew what she would see- No. Not Perceval. Perceval had never stood on this condensation-damp gra.s.s and watched her child be led out to slaughter.
Cynric lifted her chin for the last time. "May you have what peace you earn, Father."
Alasdair who had been Perceval would not let the pressure of Cynric"s gaze force her back. She hooked a hand, and Bened.i.c.k stepped up alongside her. He closed his eyes and opened them again when he lifted the unblade. Of course. Bened.i.c.k would not spare himself the sight; he would rather make the blow true.
How perfectly like him. Alasdair who had been Perceval had raised him well.
Cynric rested her forehead upon the ground. Benedict pa.s.sed the blade through her neck without seeming to exert any force at all. Blood fountained, and Alasdair who had been Perceval was splashed, because he would not step back from that either.
No, Perceval said to Alasdair, who stretched inside her, wrestling for the memories first Ariane and now Perceval had eaten. Wrestling for control. This is not me. This is not something I would have chosen.
That was not my father, not really. That was somebody he was before. That was not my father, and this is not me.
Cynric"s blood tasted like the sea. Perceval only realized when she licked her lips what she was savoring, and that she had never, in her own self, tasted of the sea.
The taste of it brought her home again, but it could not put her in control.
Nova fought, and in this field of combat Perceval could do nothing but observe. Alienated from her own body, which slumped in the Captain"s chair all but untenanted, Perceval watched the angel"s drive and dance, the way Nova warded her resources and protected herself like a fighter born. But it was secondhand, too fast and too sharp for even Exalt reflexes to follow. This was a war of angels, limited only by the speed of light, in which mere augmented flesh and mind could not compete.
Still, Perceval"s focus lay with Nova: elsewhere, externalized. Into the silence of that concentration, unbidden, Perceval"s brain offered the thought: The last Captain is the one who put us here. On purpose.
This was planned.
Unfair. Perceval didn"t know it was the Captain who made that decision. And she was not ready to dive back into her mora.s.s of clinging memories to see if she could find out. Had he known what the astrogators knew, that there was no destination? That the whole world was just a blind hand groping in the dark?
She didn"t know it hadn"t been the Captain, either. And it had been he who authorized Cynric"s brutalization of the Leviathan.
Just like a Conn, she thought. Eating everything in sight.
But she was a Conn. She was a Conn who had consumed Conns, who had eaten the remains of Commodores and Captains before her. Before it was inhabited by others, Perceval Conn had known her own mind. And that thought ... did not feel like hers.
Nor did it feel like it came from any of the clamoring presences with her-Ariane, Alasdair, Gerald, and behind them the elder ancestors whose memories were not preserved in the colony. Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel Conn: Conns back to when the family had held another name, when human life was brief and frail, and human memory subject to the shifts and winds of neurochemistry. How subjective the world must have been, then, when no one could remember the same events, and n.o.body would remember them for long.
It was not Ariane"s thought. It was not Alasdair"s or-Perceval would guess, strictly on the basis of history-Gerald"s. But she thought she knew that tone, the arch sarcasm, the lilting intelligence. She could almost hear the voice in her ear, a real voice- Far to ship-south, Nova whirled and twisted, warred against the Leviathan. She had long since abandoned all semblance of an avatar and now reserved her energy for things more important than appearances. Perceval could just about image her fight, pull it up from the microscopic scale. Nova was a hive of bees beset by a swarm of wasps, and the wasps were driving her back, pushing her from her boundaries, and disa.s.sembling the world as they forced its angel to withdraw.
Just like a Conn. Eating everything in sight.
A voice Perceval knew. Oh, no. Rien.
She realized she"d said the name out loud only when she heard it in her own voice. She choked it back, though her lips shaped it a second time, disoriented and startled to find herself in her body, bound to the slow, helpless meat that would not let her save her ship, her angel, or her love.
Nova, she thought, then silenced that as well. The angel did not need her distractions.
She needed her help. And Perceval had to figure out how to get it to her. Perceval stood, suddenly, knees wobbly. Blood stung in her feet and calves, circulation returning. She"d been still too long. It felt good to stretch into her neglected meat-good, and painful.
"Samael," she said aloud to the still air of the bridge. "Make current your archives, angel. Back yourself up and make ready for combat. It is time for you to become useful."
Gavin made a bower of his wings, and folded the humans within, the angel without. They fell together, a dagger plunged across the bosom of the Enemy, aimed straight for the unraveling cage beyond. Tristen moved forward in his embrace, foremost of the incarnate intelligences he protected, suspended like a figurehead at the expanded basilisk"s prow. Gavin felt the p.r.i.c.kle of Mirth"s presence, the blade naked and aware in Tristen"s gauntlet, and drew himself gently further from its slicing edge.
Not an unblade, no, but sufficient to the day.
The other humans huddled in silence within Gavin-Mallory bloodless and chill inside unfamiliar armor; Chelsea vibrating with excitement and youth; Bened.i.c.k still and calm, collected within himself like a tree. Ahead, Samael broke trail, making of himself a thin wedge ablating in rainbow tatters of light as the Leviathan"s forces wore away at his boundaries. Gavin gave the angel what he could-resources, cycles, material-but he was a small torch, and he didn"t have much to spare.
"Weary," Bened.i.c.k said, inside his armor, as if he had read Gavin"s thoughts. "We are weary. It"s the nature of war."
"The war"s only begun," Chelsea said.
"This war is as old as I am, child. This is just an installment." Tristen sounded not scornful, but exhausted. "You"ll be tired of it soon."
"Brace for impact," Gavin said. "I can only do this once."