Grail - Elizabeth Bear [133]
“That’s not Ariane,” he said. “She wouldn’t destroy the place. She’d conquer it.”
Beside him, Mallory coughed. “Go-Backs. If we’re all dead, we can’t contaminate this pretty planet with our toxic DNA.”
“Space it,” Benedick said. “We’ve got to find the source.”
“I’ve got contact with Nova. She has fallen back,” Samael said, as Benedick lunged forward to pull a bleeding intern under the shelter of his parasol presence. “She’s defending the Captain, planetside.”
“The Captain is under attack?”
“That attack is Ariane,” Samael said. “She’s eaten an Angel. She’s not exactly corporeal anymore. And it looks like whatever is ripping Engine apart is also working on her.”
Benedick knew he had a nasty, suspicious mind. He cultivated it. “You seem to have a lot of unexpected resources.”
He felt the smile in the air that surrounded them.
“I have been hoarding them,” Samael admitted. “Out of Nova’s sight. Did you really expect otherwise?”
“Get Jordan to Central Engineering,” Benedick said, “and her overrides and electromagnetic weapons, so she can fight this war—and all is forgiven, Angel.”
Easier said than done. They fought through Engine one meter at a time as it shattered all around them. Their ragtag collection of rescuees grew, and Benedick had the sense before too long that the space bowered by Samael was shrinking. Hemmed in on all sides, he asked, “Is there a problem?”
“I’m losing,” Samael said simply.
Jordan looked up, her armor clicking as she heaved her shoulders back. “I’m going ahead alone,” she said. “If I get there, I’ll send help.”
She bolted away, leaving Benedick reaching after her, his armored hand closing on thin air.
Samael said, “I could countermand her armor.”
“You could also get her killed,” Mallory said. “Let the girl go. It’s no more dangerous than staying here. And she might win through.”
The world came apart under Dorcas’s fingertips, and though she wept, she kept on shredding. She pulled the Bridge apart, and Engine, knowing that it was a mistake to start at the periphery and work in. When you wanted to kill something, you started with the heart.
The heart. Ariane was a distraction, down there fighting out her hate on the colony world. Dorcas should let her go for now; the world was the first consideration. She could not allow it to contaminate Fortune.
She should let Ariane go. Let her fight it out with Nova and the rest—but they were there, on the innocent world itself, and Dorcas found herself as unable to leave it alone as she could a spot of shit on her shoe. And now Ariane had enfolded the others, and Dorcas was within Ariane, and one of these others was Cynric—the absolute worst of the lot, the Sorceress herself. The manipulator, the twister of every natural order.
And there was the Book, and the strength in Dorcas’s heart, and the ghost of an unblade with which to wreak her will.
Cynric was a better target than Ariane.
An Angel pressing at the boundaries of her flesh was less to Cynric than it might be to most. She had felt the attack, coursing along the freshly reestablished uplink to Nova, and she had not lost control of her body as the others had. But she had allowed herself to fall, for deception and the convenience of a resting position, and now she bided her time.
So she was aware of it when entropy came creeping along her limbs like nibbling mouths, wrapped in the Book’s armor of symbols.
Now that was new and interesting. She tasted an unblade in the hunger of it, but it had a will, and an unblade was only hunger without