Grail - Elizabeth Bear [134]
Cynric opened her boundaries and let the chaos in, meaning to subvert it—and found within it a mind. An unexpected mind—the Go-Back Engineer Dorcas, with shatterings of Tristen’s lost daughter larded through her. Creeping, chewing, pulling the Angel Ariane-Dust apart from within. A mind that was inexperienced in such things, and so utterly transparent to Cynric, who had in a very real way invented the tactics of managing one’s persona with one’s colony.
Cynric was unsurprised to learn that Dorcas meant to destroy her, and with her the Jacob’s Ladder and all that dwelled there, in order to preserve this alien colony from contamination.
Cynric had neither the resources of an Angel nor the armor of the Book. She had only her small colony and the meat she wore like a veil. All she had was argument.
“The world wants to live,” she said, as Dorcas took her by the virtual throat and began to pull her molecules asunder. “They all want to live. Who are you to decide otherwise?”
“They do not have the right to live at the expense of others,” Dorcas answered.
It was a fanatic perspective. But Cynric had never really understood the Go-Backs, with their ideas of genetic purity and limited lives. It was only fitting, she supposed, that never having understood them, she now must bargain with one for the life of the world.
“Everything is at the expense of others,” Cynric said. “The honest predator acknowledges the system what it owes.”
“No one in your family has ever been an honest predator,” Dorcas said, bearing down.
Perceval was fighting, too, but her war was waged inside her own mind. It was not her first battle with Ariane, and she carried the memory that she had won the others. But somehow—sprawled incapacitated on an alien floor—that did not give her the strength she thought it should. And Ariane did not come alone this time, but wrapped in strange armor and wielding strange weapons.
Perceval saw her like a dragon, like an Angel in black armor, spanning wide the nine black iron wings of a seraphim. There was a tang around her, a cast Perceval recognized, and she only had to taste it once to identify it.
Dust.
MY NAME, Ariane said inside her. FOR I STAND IN MY PLACE OF POWER; I TAKE UP MY ASPECT. I AM THE NAME OF THE WORLD.
Inside Perceval’s mind, she extended a hand. Inside Perceval’s mind, Perceval refused to cringe from her.
She’s done what Rien did, and merged with an Angel. But unlike Rien, she stayed herself. Mostly herself. More than herself.
In the guise Ariane wore, in what had become of Rien, in Mallory full to brimming with the intellect of dead men—Perceval glimpsed a solution. Nova, she thought desperately. Nova, you have to hear me.
“Still here,” Nova whispered inside her. The momentary lag told Perceval that she answered from orbit. That lag was killing them.
It would have to be Tristen. And even as she knew he would do what she bid, she was sorry.
Danilaw and Amanda rolled the Jacobeans onto their sides, checked their airways, and propped them as comfortably as was possible. There was nothing wrong with them—nothing visibly wrong. Elevated heart rates, the quick breathing of stress, but no reaction to pain or conversation or physical contact or cold towels.
Danilaw had left a q-set with Benedick, a direct link, if necessary. He tried it now.
No one answered.
Amanda glanced at him. Wordless, he shook his head.
Against the porthole glass, the scarred dodecapus writhed its silent hieroglyphs.
“The Captain commands it,” Nova said into Tristen’s mind, and outlined Perceval’s plan.
Mad, risky, painful.
All right then, Tristen said, silently, because his body would not obey him.
Perhaps that was for the best in the long run, because it rendered him unable to run or scream when Nova took his body down to the component atoms. First, she pulled him from his body. He watched from her perspective as his corporeal form evaporated, felt the strength the stuff of which his body had been made loaned to Nova. She surrounded him, encapsulated him, and then he was discrete again, standing on his