Grail - Elizabeth Bear [130]
He would never be alone again.
The warmth of the dodecapus’s approval washed through him until he felt himself falling and it was gone.
Samael bought them the time to armor themselves. By the time Benedick was sealing his helm and gloves, a fox fire of Cherenkov radiation crawled the walls and ceiling in moth-eaten loops and frontiers like the outlines of magnetic storms seen from space. It was the visible result of the battle lines drawn between Samael and Ariane’s colonies, as were the bright flashes that more and more regularly sparked in every corner of Benedick’s vision.
The battling colonies threw off charged particles; the flashes were caused by them passing through the vitreous humor of his eye. All around the room, furniture and other things were disassembling themselves, raw material for Samael to throw into the fray. Benedick suspected that he, Jordan, and Mallory might be more useful to the Angel as raw materials than as self-willed firepower, in the long run, but it wasn’t an option he was ready to put on the table.
Yet.
“Samael,” Benedick said into his armor pickup.
“She’s not alone,” Samael said. There was no strain in Angel voices; they sounded serene until they chose not to, but Benedick could impute his own panic to the tone. “A revenant of Dust is with her. They have some kind of decompiler weapon—”
Fuck. “Make a hole. We’re coming. If we can win through to Central Engineering, we can make a stand there.”
It wasn’t a hole, exactly, but Samael was an old Angel and canny. What he did instead was collapse, shrinking around his allies until his protective field just covered them. He did not recoalesce; he made no avatar. That concession to the prejudices of meat intelligence was energy he could not afford to waste.
But he guided them, and he girded them. And as Benedick bounced on his toes, hearing his armor creak with his breathing, he reached out wild spans and lashings of colony like bowering wings and broke the walls of Engine wide.
In the black, razor-edged heart of the storm of words that surrounded Dorcas and Ariane, Ariane opened her dark, mad eyes and threw back her head and laughed. I NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D HAVE THE GUTS TO COME IN AFTER ME, LITTLE MOUSE.
Dorcas smiled. “I promised to do this beside you.”
Words whirled close—so sharp, so near, so swift they drew blood without Dorcas ever feeling the cut until seconds later, when each one beaded in thready lines of blue and began to throb and burn. Ariane, scaled all over in words black and slick, breathing like live things between the translucent layers of her skin, went unharmed. Dorcas was caressed by deadly poetry.
Dorcas firmed her grip on the hilt of the unblade. “And I will.”
In her hole in the center of the world, Nova fought for her existence, and for the continuity of consciousnesses of her senior crew. Though, in that first salvo, Dust and Ariane had managed to numb her outliers and launch a devastating attack, Nova responded by severing the infiltrated extremities, closing off communications with any scrap of herself she was not sure of, and releasing her limbs to fight on their own. She lost communication, but she retained integrity, and that let her maintain the cohesion to fight on.
And though armed with mighty compilers and code weapons such as Nova had never before experienced, Dust was still small. He chipped some bits of the world away from her; he swayed some borderline fragments to his side, and he came back at her as a spearhead and then a sweeping wall, like a Roman legion—a crash of barrier that was also battering ram.
She firmed herself to meet it, formed a wedge, waited for the frontal attack to break itself upon her implacable immovability. But it was a feint, and when the wave broke against her defenses it left behind something she had not known before—Code, terrible and devouring, eating like acid at the margins of herself and writing its own instructions in the lacework that remained.
She fell back and fell back again, abandoning the infected beachheads, severing ties