Grail - Elizabeth Bear [48]
“Or something,” Caitlin Conn said, shuffling images through the display tanks with flicks of her fingertips. The incoming army was massed in the Broken Holdes, and Tristen thought they would send another expeditionary force through the River, daring its lingering, though reduced, radioactivity in exchange for speed of transit.
“Everybody’s a critic,” Tristen answered, leaning over her in his armor, helmet still unsealed. “They’ve got us on numbers. And they’re Exalt and armed. Nova says they have fléchette weapons.”
“And they are competent fighters.” Captain Perceval spoke through an avatar, like an Angel, which Jordan thought was probably appropriate. “Nova remembers that Rien and I encountered some of their warriors when we escaped from Rule. The colony called Pinion rescued us. I was quite ill at the time, and have no personal recollection.”
Her voice was collected as she spoke of fallen companions and great adventures, and Jordan watched her carefully, seeking a model for her own behavior. Like Rien, the Captain was Jordan’s own age, and if Perceval had been a knight-errant before she was Captain, and Jordan was only raised an Engineer and educated by Engine as an orphan after her mother was mind-killed and body-lost in a hull breach, well, there was something to aspire to.
Jordan was present in this conference as Tristen’s aide—sometimes he called her his conscience, which gave her an uncomfortable frisson of importance and disquiet both—and she knew she was expected to speak if she had questions to ask or points to raise. She’d asked Tristen about it alone, seeking his dispensation to discuss her issues with him in private, but he had been adamant. “Your input is as valuable to Caitlin or Perceval as my own. And it will be broadening for you to interact with them. Challenge builds confidence.”
So now she leaned forward and cleared her throat. “Why don’t we just use the ship to fight them? Nova is all ours, isn’t she? It’s not like the Breaking Times, when the angels were all at odds.”
“They’re a resource,” Tristen said. “They have intrinsic value. To waste them would be a last resort, since we have the resources to support them, however tenuously. There’s knowledge and souls we could never reclaim.”
“Are there reasons not to consume them?”
Caitlin and Tristen shared a glance, her eyebrows elevating. “You’d almost think she was a relative.”
Jordan had looked down at her shoes, glad her fur covered the heat of blood flushing her cheeks. Hastily, she controlled the autonomous response.
“Ethical issues aside,” Tristen said, “there’s a valuable tension in competition. Removing diversity may simplify things in the short run, but in the long term it tends to create bottlenecks—in ideas and cultures as well as in genetic diversity. Those lessen our adaptability.”
Jordan tilted her head. “You want to keep them alive because they want to fight you?”
Tristen smiled his haunting, half-feral smile. “Can you think of a better reason? We may have to kill a few of the leaders to make our point, but diversity—ideological as well as biological—is the name of the game.”
Jordan’s armor was not new then—she had broken it in, and it liked her—but it was not the scarred and war-weary creature it would become. When she slipped into it, the reactive colloidal lining wrapped her like an embrace, cool at first, and warming rapidly as it molded to her body and absorbed and reflected her heat. The armor was a paradox, a cipher; it massed more than twice what Jordan