Grail - Elizabeth Bear [23]
With the addition of Caitlin’s mass and armor to her own, they were through. Perceval’s blades sliced the first intruder’s armor deftly—two incapacitating cuts and a coup de grâce between the eyes and out the back of the helm. This one might come back as the silent dead, if her colony were up to regenerating the damage, but she would never inhabit herself again.
Caitlin did not engage the second rearguard. Nor had Perceval expected her to. While Perceval spun back to catch a blow meant to decapitate—she felt it ring through her armor to the shoulder, despite the reactive colloidal padding—Caitlin unshipped herself and her unblade, diving into the bosom of the Enemy after the ones who had fled.
What happened next, Perceval did not see, but she could hear her mother’s harsh breathing over the thumps and shudders of her own combat. The gray knight—and Perceval had no doubt after one passage of arms that this one was indeed a knight—rained blows down upon her with the will of an Angel, until Perceval was fighting for her life. She let herself be beaten back, step by step, taking her opponent’s measure and letting her armor have the rearguard.
The one she fought was good, but Perceval thought she was better—though there was only one way to be absolutely sure.
“Captain,” Nova said in tones of urgency. “Your mother requires assistance.”
By the strength of her arm and the strength of her armor, Perceval swung and feinted high. She let momentum turn her, bringing that arm down for a parry that let the enemy’s left-hand blade slide past her midriff so close it left a bright span on her armor. The spin extended Perceval’s left arm, and while the blade on her gauntlet was not so sharp as an unblade, it cracked the enemy’s armor and sternum with a moment’s resistance.
A jerk, one good shake, and monofilament parted ceramic and carbon and titanium like so much doped fabric pulled down a razor blade. Blood spurted only briefly; the heart squeezed once, frantically, as Perceval’s blade passed through it, then no more. A fine blue snow brushed her helm; the blood froze and crazed from her vambrace and blade.
Perceval turned from the dead to see where Caitlin and the other three gray knights were. Only when she came up to the edge of the rent in the world did she realize her com was silent. She could not hear her mother breathing.
5
harder things, and worse
The Queen earnestly begged that the blood of her brother might be
atoned for by the death of his murderer
—LEWIS PORNEY, The Prose Tristen
Nova called out, and Tristen came. At a dead run, his armor assembling around him as his boots hammered the decking. It was dangerous to move—let alone violently—while the shell constructed itself, but the urgency in the Angel’s call left no time to dally. And Tristen knew that no matter how he taxed them to wait for assistance, the odds of Caitlin and Perceval doing so were slim to the point of vanishing.
So he hustled. He was careful, and he got lucky, and his armor drew only a little blood. The gauntlets sealed themselves across his palms, and he dragged Mirth from its scabbard with a rasp in the last of the outside air.
The air locks and pressure doors sealing the segments of corridor he reached next slowed him, but they were also advance warning that something had gone terribly wrong—if he needed anything more than the Angel’s status reports and information feed. After her first call for help, Nova did not urge him to hurry; there would have been no purpose to it. He passed through the gates and Nova sealed them again behind, and then he found himself beside only two unmoving bodies—the blue blood frozen onto unfamiliar gray armor—in a corridor open to the Enemy. Over the com, Perceval shouted for her mother.
“Caitlin,” Nova said in his ear.
From her tone, he knew the news was bad. Her virtual overlay urged him along the accessway to the breach. He laid a gauntlet on the blown-in edge, the world’s curled shell already furling back into place as Nova worked her repairs.
He nerved