Grail - Elizabeth Bear [128]
Nova had not merely withdrawn. She’d shut down all the cognitive and communications responses of the Exalts’ colonies. Benedick understood that she might have done this to protect them—either from an external virus, or some contaminant in her own system—but it was a desperation measure, and one that left all Nova’s allies more vulnerable than they had been within the range of whatever memory he had left.
Across the table, Jordan abruptly dropped her feet to the floor and sat forward, fingertips pressed to her forehead as if it hurt. “I feel as if my brain is shrinking away from the inside of my skull,” she said, frowning. Her face seemed naked, old, through the fur without the bioluminescence of her colony informing it. Her wings drooped from her shoulders as if she abruptly found them dragged down by gravity.
“Nova.” Mallory rose, scooting a chair back with a scrape, and moved toward the front of the room, where there was an old-fashioned hardwired com link, useful—like a speaking tube—in emergencies.
It was Samael who answered. “We are under attack. Another Angel or djinn has infiltrated Nova and is attempting to rewrite and exploit her. In defense of the rest of us, she has shut down all contact-related functions.”
“Oh, suck it,” Jordan said, ripe with disgust. “It’s like the game with the worms and the mallets.”
Benedick, rising from his chair, could not prevent a flicker of smile. “Whack-an-Angel?”
“Yeah.” She turned in circles, scanning the edges of the room. “What do we do now?”
“I would suggest suiting up. Meanwhile, I shall forge a perimeter.”
Samael had always been prone to dramatic gestures. He spread his arms and seemed to stretch, the spaces between his colorful flakes and gleanings expanding like the skin between the scales of a swallowing snake. Scraps of husk and petal that made him visible shivered from their invisible supports. Each pattered or drifted floorward according to their nature, leaving not even an outline in the air.
His voice now resonated all around them, as if the very air spoke from their own lungs and ears and the space between them. “Your armor will be awkward, but it will be airtight. And the suits have their own colony defenses, independent of Nova.”
Benedick, colony-naked, paused for a moment to consider. If his colony, his machine memories, failed with the absence of the integrated and distributed Angel, did that mean those parts of him were only a subroutine in her virtual universe? Had she really assimilated so much?
What was identity in the machine?
While he thought, he also moved. Jordan, for all her awkwardness when unsupported by her symbiont, reached the armor locker first. She heaved the grate open, struggling, and Benedick’s heart sank. They’d have to seal into the armor the old-fashioned way, by stepping inside its opened shell. And they’d packed their suits side by side, which meant dragging them out of the locker one by one.
“Sealing the room,” Samael said. No visible change followed the words. Benedick would have to take his word for it.
Benedick drew a deep breath while he assessed. First things first. “Chief Engineer,” he said crisply, “I recommend we pull your armor out first, as—given you are a flyer—it will take you the longest to suit up under these conditions.”
Jordan frowned at him, but nodded. “And I’ll be stronger in the armor. All right. Come on.”
She started forward into the cupboard, Benedick hot on her heels.
* * *
Since she touched her dead self’s blade at Tristen’s insistence, Dorcas had been unable to ignore the whispering. She knew what she heard—the voice of Mirth, the voice of Sparrow. The echo through her bones of two things so allied they might as well be one.
She had heard it, and she had turned it away. Because she was not Sparrow; she was no Conn whelp, no woman who believed the world could be bettered by bullet and blade.
She heard it now, swelling in her. She might have turned it aside again, but this time was different than the others.
This time she stood before the