helm and shoulders swept over the irregular spaces between buckled bulkheads and decks, illuminating them with stark shadows that confused the eye. In atmosphere, the armor could have aided its course-plotting by echolocation, creating a sonographic map of the corridor, but the vacuum limited it to other forms of tomography. Still, it was useful to know where potential hazards lay, as all these passages were battered, torn, and open to the void.
The Enemy had long ago claimed and colonized them. Jacob Dust in his wisdom had never seen fit to correct the problem. Vacuum would not serve as a barrier to the Exalt, especially one armored as Tristen was armored now, but it had kept less advanced biota from entering the world's control core during the shipwrecked time.
Tristen thought the time for such measures had ended.
'Angel?'
He felt the angel's awareness settle on him. His armor had had a personality, a name, its own small servitor. Now that being was consumed in the world's guardian, and Tristen found he missed it. He said, 'I almost called you George.'
The angel said, 'Portions of George's data have been preserved in archive. As time passes and I am able to allot more resources to noncritical functions, I will develop subroutines and personalities optimized for interaction with the crew. I am sorry not to be able to offer this service now.'
If tone were any guarantee of sincerity, it was as sorry as it claimed. That humility and joy in service could not have come from Jacob Dust or Samael, and as Tristen picked his route, he tried not to dwell too long on the probable source. 'I can't keep calling you 'the angel.''
'My Captain has not yet seen fit to provide me with a name.'
The naming would be a difficult acknowledgment that what had been lost was never coming back. Tristen shook his head. He didn't envy Perceval the responsibility, or the choice.
'I'll speak to her when I get a chance,' he said, and wondered if the silence that followed was the angel's gratitude, or if he had offended. He interrupted the awkwardness to ask, 'How soon can we make this space viable?'
'We're currently replenishing atmosphere throughout the intact portions of the world,' the angel said. 'Structural repairs are the next priority, and reestablishing communications and telemetry throughout the world. The shipwide biosphere is also critically destabilized, and fermentation and putrefaction products are becoming a significant issue. However, some of them, when filtered off, are useful. Methane more so than cadaverine.'
Tristen snorted. 'You did a nice job on the bridge.'
'It's important to provide a pleasant space for human components,' the angel said primly.
Tristen smiled inside his helm. 'It's all right to admit affection.'
Silence answered, as if the angel were waiting for him to complete the thought. The next piece of corridor was tricky, however, and he needed hands and feet and attention to fend off ragged obstacles he drifted through. Deliberate slowness chafed. Somewhere in the darkness beyond was Arianrhod, and every second he lost was a second that maintained or increased her lead. He fretted his fingers against the insides of his gloves, and forced himself to concentrate. There: a hand on the left, a delicate push. A half rotation would carry him across, and he could drag a boot on the wall to correct his spin. There was nothing behind that patch that should prove hazardous, if his foot broke through the fatigued surface.
He could have used attitude jets or allowed the armor itself to handle the maneuvers. If he had absolutely needed to risk making his way down the corridor at speed, he might have been forced to. Even an Exalt was no match for expert hardware under those conditions. He should have enough air to get him to the far end. That was what mattered. And if the suit heaters whined against the cold, well, there wasn't too much to be done about resources bled off into the Enemy now.
As a younger man, he would have chanced haste. As a younger man, he had more than once gambled speed against certainty. There were occasions upon which the gamble had paid off.
And at least one upon which it had cost him dearly.
So now he chose meticulousness and prayed to the Builders that it was the right choice, after all.
'I'll need to replenish consumables soon,' Tristen said.
In the person of his armor, the angel replied, 'On your left, in seven point five meters, you will find a breach to Outside. You should not proceed past it, as the air lock ahead is damaged, so the bulkhead door between this corridor and the next domaine is deadlocked against decompression. However, if you proceed Outside, it is a relatively easy jump from here to an intact air lock on a lightly damaged holde. From there, you can make your way inside.'
'How far is it to biosystems from here?'
Instantaneously, the angel provided a schematic. 'This may be out of date.'
Colored ribbons suggested travel routes and illustrated times. Tristen, from the bridge, had less far to travel than Arianrhod would, if she were indeed coming this way. He had only to go the length of a spoke from the hub of the world. Then, depending on where he found himself in relation to Rule, he could work his way around the short inside arc. Even traveling fast, it would take Arianrhod several hundred hours to cross the entire width of the world without transport.
The angel continued, 'This area is one of the nexuses that have gone dark within the last twelve hours.'
'Suspicious.'
'Indeed.' The angel paused. 'Of course, we could be being misdirected toward central biosystems, and Arianrhod may have unanticipated plans.'
'I am,' Tristen said, 'counting on it.'
As he caught himself against a curve in the corridor, his armored hand punched through the bulkhead. Tristen plunged into the wall up to his shoulder. When he drew the limb back, a colony haze surrounded it, symbiotes at war like anthills. He could see the external layer of glossy white ceramic ablating.
'Angel?'
'One moment,' the angel said. 'What seems to be the problem, Lord Tristen?'
'My colony is under attack by a rogue symbiote,' he said. 'Can't you see it?'
'I detect a structural weakness in the bulkhead and your armor,' the angel said. 'But no colony, or even individual units.'
'It's eating my armor,' Tristen said. 'I need a solution.'
'My recommendation would be to detach the affected section and run,' the angel said. 'When you're clear, I'll sterilize the area with an EM pulse. If it's a symbiote that's lost its mind, it might just eat anything it touches.'
'Shit,' Tristen said, and complied. His armor could always grow another vambrace the next time he fed it. Still, he felt a little pang as he left it behind, watching it dissolve into a swirl of vapor.
The breach glimmered before him, easily identified by the glow that fell through it to illuminate the nearby wreckage. With a delicate touch he arrested his forward momentum. Some of it converted into spin when a torn bulkhead shifted unexpectedly, but he spread his body as wide as possible in the confined space. Once that slowed his rotation, he was able to bring himself to a halt with brushing fingertips. At last, he rested just inside a ragged two-meter tear in the hull, peering from it in his armored shell like a crab peering from shelter.
His radiation detectors peaked, chittering. The walls of the world offered some protection. Beyond the serrated lip of the breach, the bone-and-knob skeleton of the world rose black and stark against the ghostly silver- green of the newborn nebula--a tombstone for the shipwreck stars that had warded the
Tristen felt the contraction of panic at the base of his spine and let the fear wash through him for a moment.
Unlike in here, where there were rogue colonies and shifting wreckage.
The danger lay in crevices, tight spaces where one could become trapped. If you stayed in a trap long enough, it could come to seem like a shelter.
Ariane had locked him away in a terrible hole, and he had stayed there until Rien, Perceval, and Gavin had rescued him. Even by Conn standards, he had been in his trap a very long time.
But his nervous system didn't understand that. It only knew what it had become acclimated to: the warm dark, the safety of wedging one's self into a den. His responses recognized the yawning emptiness of the Enemy as something to fear.
