Grail - Elizabeth Bear [105]
Dust was bigger now. Not much bigger, not too much, and he took good care not to stray outside the physical confines of the construct body he inhabited. It was safer in here, masquerading as a small, unremarked semi-intelligence. Out there, free-floating, in a colony with real access to the world—out there he would have access to more information, more sensory input, more of the world. And in the process, he would eventually—inevitably—run afoul of Nova.
Who would eat him again, this time as surely as the last time.
So for now he stayed small and stayed with his secret ally, who did not even know herself an ally most of the time. They had goals in common.
His people were being misguided. The people he had been charged to advance, to defend, to force against the lathe of evolution and edge fine were in grave danger. They might make landfall, sell all their majesty and progress for the promise of safety, disassemble the world that had been his body for material and energy, and destroy the ecosystem that had endured greater stress and evolutionary pressures than any mere dirtside ecology—
—and here, on the very verge of triumph, of fulfilling his ancient charge, he could fail.
He would not allow himself to fail. He would not allow his Builders, his angels, and most importantly his mortal (or demimortal) charges to fail so close to completion, to transcendence.
No.
They would not be allowed to fail.
He crouched on his patron’s mule’s shoulder and let her carry him along as she escorted the Astrogator through the halls of Engine, flanked by the new Chief Engineer and the venerable Benedick Conn. This fast-moving squad swept past lesser Exalts and Engineers and construct creatures that flattened themselves against corridor walls and ceilings, as far out of the way as they could manage. Some of them reached out to let the hem of a Conn garment brush them. The old ways—the old respect—might no longer be enforced with terror, but enough of it lingered that Dust was not entirely bereft of hope for the future of Engine and the Conn family. They might have grown soft, but they had not entirely fallen apart.
Central Engineering was an unassuming control booth inside a mighty tower in Engine. The structure was one of dozens that grew from all sides of the world’s greatest Heaven—a vast semispherical cargo hold converted into a city. Flyers blurred from one spire to another across the open space between them. Jordan, this untested Chief Engineer, let her wings feather wide and glanced across Dust’s insignificant pointed nose to Chelsea.
“Nova says the Captain has come to review the questioning,” she said.
Dust’s sensitive toolkit nose lifted the taste of Benedick’s discomfort from the air. Benedick’s child might be Captain now, and grown, but Dust imagined there were things he’d prefer she not witness. The elder Conn looked away, though, and Dust had no illusions that he could count this emotional attachment as a weakness, a chink in Benedick’s armor.
He had known too many Conns.
Chelsea’s voice vibrated her throat against Dust’s side. “Do we want the Captain present?” She bent close, as if examining Oliver’s eyes. She lifted the lid with a thumb.
“Hey,” he said.
Dust reached across the gap and sniffed his ear. This close to his patron, he felt the moment when daemon touched daemon, and data bridged. Oliver’s eyes might have flashed, but a moment later, they only looked confused.
“Ow,” he said. “Seriously, stop it.”
Inside Oliver’s colony, the subcolony that had housed Ariane was now dying, consuming itself, contracting into a singularity and vanishing. Oliver knew as little of it as he knew of the tumors and viruses his colony excised from his body every day. The data it had stored was in Dust now, awaiting a moment when he could transfer it to Ariane’s other host.
“The Captain,” Benedick said. “Are you going to try to stop her?”
Though he spoke, Benedick still didn’t look