Dust

—This unit is unnamed.—

—Oh.— She waited, as if it might somehow proactively fill the gap. But there were only echoes of her own silent voice in her head. —Would you like a name?—

Of course she couldn't feel it hesitate as it processed the question. Even Exalted reflexes could never be fast enough. Perhaps it was simply focused on a tricky bit of following the others through the gloom. Tristen's chalky armor glimmered on ultraviolet. Rien wondered if he had chosen that whiteness for dramatic reasons, or so as to draw fire.

Or possibly so as to be the first to come to Ariane's notice, if—when—they should reach her.

The scabbard of the unblade clasped across her back protruded at hip level. She touched it nervously.

—Yes.— the armor said, when she had grown resigned to a lack of answer.

She nodded, its collar rubbing her throat, and said, —I'll think on it.—

She wondered at the bounce she thought she sensed in its step, for minutes after.

It was easy to tell which door led to the bridge, even in the blackness. Rien could clearly make out the stand beside it, the glass dome and what rested within.

Hero Ng knew what the case held.

A paper New Evolutionist Bible. With leather covers, and pages pressed from wood and cotton fibers grown in the soul of ancient Earth.

Rien could barely breathe as they came forward.

Piece by piece, particle by particle, Dust collected his Captain. He'd known it would come to this; he'd known she'd fall into his vastness. They lived so bounded, these small intelligences.

But he could get her back.

Fragment by fragment he redeemed her, brought her together, showed her how to integrate herself. As for maintaining the connections between the particles of her consciousness and the meat that Dust believed housed her soul... they learned that together.

Dust worked feverishly. Taught, feverishly. Learned in a frenzy. Because Ariane was there, and Dust could feel Asrafil pressing at his fringes. They were coming.

They were nearly here.

Alasdair Conn hadn't been a real Captain. Just a Commodore. In charge, but not in command.

He had never surrendered himself to his ship.

To his angels.

As Perceval surrendered now. Surrendered, and possessed.

And stood again, dripping stormlight, wreathed in her dozen shining wings, just as the forward bulkhead blew wide open on the Enemy, and Ariane and her angel came within.

29 the sun goes down in a cold pale flare

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, 'Conscientious Objector'

They met the guardian before the door, and joined him there in combat.

If Rien had been a fighter, she might have been able to describe what followed. But she was a passenger, and she experienced what happened in a stunning, stuttering kaleidoscope. Not a blur, because a blur is fluid, and this was staccato, punctuated.

Sequence and order fell away; there was only the struggle to stay soft inside her armor, not to fight its movement, to bite down on the mouthguard and let the gelatinous, body-temperature shock lining press her body into whatever shape it would.

She was not very good at it. Caitlin—or someone—had set her armor for extreme evasion. Her left arm, spine, left leg popped and strained. Her colony rushed to repair the damage, reporting torn tendons and muscles, her own anatomy limned red in her mind's eye.

And she honestly couldn't understand a thing that was going on around her. Her armor was defended by a sym-biont swarm, and what attacked was—she thought— Dust, defending his lair and his hostage. But she couldn't be certain, and whatever Samael was doing, he was no more plain to the eye—or any of her armor's sensors.

Tristen never left her side, not that proximity was any protection against an enemy who surrounded them, who interpermeated their defenses. A hiss and sizzle like static droned in her ears, and from her armor—from her every gesture and from her companions—St. Elmo's fire shredded and spun. Veils of light, green, vermilion, and electric blue, pulled and tore.

Rien had no idea who was winning. She saw Tristen striking out with invisible weapons, his hands crackling with residual ionization. She saw the whole corridor lit flare'white as some attack died on their defenses. She groped, and herself drew Caitlin's terrible black unsword Mercy. The blade was an absence of anything, reflection- less as the face of the Enemy. She swung it wildly.

Where the blade passed, the crackling light was cut, and burned no more.

With it, with Samael and Tristen's assistance, Rien was hewing her way to the door.

She was within a meter of her goal when the deck jumped under Rien's feet, and through the armor she heard first rending metal and then an abrupt absence of transmitted sound.

'Hull breach,' Tristen said over his suit mike. 'We have to get within.'

Within, Perceval was unready. Unready and unarmed, her limbs like puppet sticks, her body awkward, infected, alien, enfolded in a corona of sensation that extended meters in every direction. Pinion stirred around her, a shimmer of light like the shadow of ripples on the bottom of a glass.

Graceless, uncoordinated. New and raw. Unarmored, and with no weapon in her hands. But she was naked to the Enemy, and did not feel its cold.

Ariane needed her armor. She needed her unblade.

She advanced, her angel cloaking her in his glory, Innocence as black in her hand as a hole in the night.

There was too much. Perceval raked herself together, clutched her tattered edges close. In the corridor, Dust was fighting someone. Another angel, people in armor. She'd look in a minute. Too much, from everywhere, and she was trying to see Ariane.

There was no speaking, now, for there was no atmosphere. No click as Ariane's armored foot came down, disturbing cobwebs, breaking the parallel rays of the suns that shone through the rent bulkhead behind her, haloing her in light reflected from disturbed particles.

—Be bold,—Pinion whispered in Perceval's ear. —Be of good courage, Captain. For I am with you.—

As if on marionette strings, Perceval stepped forward to war. And like a gliding cat, Ariane came to meet her.

Asrafil's presence was a void in Perceval's new perceptions, Ariane and Innocence the enigma at its center. Through Pinion, into Dust, she sensed the other angel's fringes, felt them grapple and claw. The rift in the bulkhead webbed over, clotted like a wound, knit like bone.

She saw in cascades of images, from angles and points of view not her own. She whirled in the veil of Pinion's wings, and Pinion itself tore savagely at Asrafil when that angel clutched after her.

But Dust fought his war on two fronts, and Perceval could sense each centimeter of ground he was losing. The angel in the corridor was smaller than Asrafil or than Dust, more coherent, tighter and more defined—

—If Asrafil was here, then who was outside?

Two, in armor. A man and a woman. One with an un-blade. And an angel.