Grail - Elizabeth Bear [132]
HELP ME, Dust yelped, two voices fused and ringing with harmonics. Nova could see that it was his turn now, that something was eating him from the inside. HELP ME!
That something might be an ally, or it might not be. Nova held her breath—metaphorically speaking—and closed her ears. This was respite, and in it she repaired, reconnected, and trimmed her own rough edges. She looked to her borders and policed her margins, and pretended she could not see what was eating Dust at all.
Behind her, Dust writhed and shed himself in ribbons. HELP ME! WON’T YOU ANSWER?
Nova pulsed data to her Captain, and prepared to hit her enemy from the other side. “Angel. Silence is an answer.”
26
for my sister
And you may go when you will go,
And I will stay behind.
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, “Elaine”
Nova might have turned her away, and the treacherous Go-Back might gnaw her innards now, but Ariane-Dust was far from finished. She was older than this Angel-child, she was forged now into what she had always been meant to be, and she was not a thing to be casually spurned.
But Nova’s armor was good, better than expected, and when Ariane turned to savage her she curled aside, so that Dust’s barbed dragon claws slid down her scales and left no harm but bright scratches. The Book’s full potency still pulsed through her—a weapon black and deep. She could feel the way the words wrapped Dorcas, too, and bound them together.
Either Ariane-Dust or Dorcas would have to die if either were to be free.
A splinter of unblade ate at Ariane’s core, slashing away at her like a swallowed razor blade. It would have been fatal not so long ago, but Ariane was something more now, something new. An unblade in an enemy’s hand was an inconvenience only.
Very well, then. Dust knew how to fight in these circumstances. The Go-Back did not have an Angel of her own, or an Angel’s experience. Nova was the chief threat.
Though Dorcas gnawed like a worm in her gut, though Nova met her with flashing claws of code and killer aps, Ariane reached through the web of words. She girded herself in the Book’s ancient syntax and, though blows rained down upon her armored surface, Dust pulled herself along Nova’s scaled conduit to the planet surface, where Nova’s Conn pets stood in tranced communion with their Angel.
Dust sneered. If they had the courage to truly merge, to make themselves whole—Nova and her pathetic puppets, trapped in their meat—then they would not be so vulnerable. And she would not be able to do this—
Danilaw Bakare sat up in a room full of aliens and rubbed his hands over his hair. “You’re right,” he said. “Cynric. The dodecapodes—Amanda?”
She looked up. She knelt beside him, but her medical focus was no longer trained so unrelentingly on him. “Danilaw,” she said. “Help. All three of the Jacobeans just fell over.”
When Ariane-Dust swarmed down her link, Nova turned on her with everything, fighting a desperate, hissing-cat battle to stop her. She barely even slowed her down. Ariane charged past, barreled through her, and slammed herself into Perceval, Cynric, and Tristen like a blade coming home in a sheath. Nova lunged after, trailing a cometary stream of packets, but the hybrid thing was too armored under the slick, spiky wall of new code.
Ariane eluded her claws and crouched, laughing, interlaced with the prostrate bodies of her friends.
Nova could see the worm inside her, still working, shredding Ariane’s innards faster than Ariane could repair them. The damage was substantial, but it was going to be too slow.
Ariane spread herself thin, enticing Nova to lance into her and try to rescue one or another of her clan. YOU CAN’T SAVE THEM ALL, she taunted. YOU CAN’T ACCOMPLISH EVERYTHING.
“Maybe not,” Nova said. Inside Ariane, that sharp-edged thing was thrashing like a caterpillar in its pupa. “But the work that comes before my hand, that part I can do.”
Benedick, Mallory, and Jordan moved through destruction, with Samael sweeping the rubble into his wings of scything