Chill

all the while. 'You are my Captain. My thoughts are yours, to implement as you see fit.'

His thoughts--surely far too simple a word for the braided flood of data coursing along the edge of Perceval's awareness: the world's functions, memories, the echo of words spoken by voices now silenced--made her cringe. There was too much there. Too much she'd loved and lost, or feared and had forced upon her. She knotted her fists in the fall of the nanocolony dress that hung from a halter about her neck, leaving her sore wing-stubs free to move in the bitter air. She knew the bridge was cold, but she did not feel the chill.

'Captain,' the angel said, so desperate that she turned and looked into his eyes. 'Only let me know your desire, and I shall fetch it for you. Only give me a name, and I will answer to it whenever it crosses your thoughts.'

Dust never would have let himself sound so desperate. Nor Samael. Angels did not plead.

Rien would have pleaded.

Perceval tasted machine oil and sulfur when she bit down on that thought. A tooth cracked under the weight. No matter. It would heal.

'I have no right to name you,' she said.

'You have the only right,' he insisted. 'I need a name, Captain. I need to become what you wish.'

What she wished was her life back, Rien her sister-wife, the quiet of her soul. To be a knight again, on Errantry, and not a Queen in a tower. She wished the angel silenced, the world as it had been, familiar and stable and safe, spinning in the orbit she knew. She wished her mother's busy house, and her father's silent strength.

When she accepted her role as Captain, she had thought she would have Rien beside her, a comfort and strength. She had not realized she would be both alone and beset by voices.

She wished anything but the responsibility she found mantling her shoulders, the weight of the angel's regard. His need for her gnawed the margins of her soul, a hunger she could feel as her own. A hunger that scoured the hollow places where her own losses lived, eroding them more deeply. She wished that gone as well.

None of this was, in the final analysis, an option. But though she knew herself childish for wishing it, and she meant to act as if she had never wanted anything but what she had, the wishing would not stop for the knowledge.

What she wanted she could not have. And it would only injure the angel to share that--although if he knew her as she knew him, there was no hiding it. It didn't matter. There was work at hand, and Perceval was Captain.

She would force herself to do it, and eventually it would come easy--or at least less bitterly. That was the way of the world.

Perceval lifted her chin. 'You need a name,' she said.

'Rien promised me one.' It hesitated over the name as Perceval herself might have, as if it hurt too much to want to say it at all, but there was too much to savor in the memories it raised to be able to say it quickly.

In the braided web of the angel's consciousness, Perceval saw that what it said was a simplification. Because the angel was Rien as well. And what Rien had promised to name was a new suit of armor, freshly wrought, an unmapped personality.

And there it was, innocent and bright, like a thread of silver in a tapestry braid. One note drawn long in the symphony. It was not the angel's fault he existed any more than it was Perceval's. Perceval could give him something he needed, and it would be an act of compassion. The world needed compassion so badly--

Perceval thought of names, angel names, and did not like any of them.

'What would you like to be called?'

The angel shook his head. 'We are not in agreement.'

Perceval sensed the truth of it, and the understatement. She sucked her sore, mending tooth again. She said, 'Nova.'

The angel bowed his head. 'That is my name.'

You lie pinioned in terrible darkness in the train of this tinsel construction which vermin call the world. Slaver spikes pierce your immaculate flanks. The vermin have infiltrated your neural clusters, infected you with machine viruses. For more than the time it would take a calf to grow to maturity you have hung here in the darkness-- blinded, deafened, senseless. In aware suspension.

You do not sleep, not as the vermin regard it, though portions of your nervous system take rest by turns, coolly dreaming. You have not been sleeping. You have been thinking, plotting, imagining. Remembering when they took you, when they murdered and consumed your mate. You have been visualizing your revenge. Dreaming it.

Dreaming it real. Making the shape of the world-to-come, strengthening it, bending it wide. Shaping the future like the long gravity slide to an event horizon.

As you imagine, it becomes.

You are made still, who was meant never to stop moving.

You are made alone, who should have never been alone.

They have names for you, who never needed a name. Names, as if you were an object, an unsapient animal. For you, who should have been son, mate, sibling, father, pod-father. A web of relationships. A pattern of family.

They call you Demon. Behemoth. Devil. Leviathan.

They try to bend you to their metaphor. But your real-dreaming is powerful. And so you know, having dreamed it--aware, frozen, fed on wrath and anguish--that this is what is coming. Your dream makes it inevitable. In your deep paralysis, you will be shaken. The slaver spikes will shatter, cracked by a wall of fire. The paralyzed neural pathways will awaken--slowly, agonizingly. You will flex. You will twist. Your captors will suffer.

The time is now.

The blow has fallen.

The cracks begin.

6 a gallery of portals

They hatch cockatrice's eggs, and weave the spider's web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper

--Isaiah 59:5, King James Bible

Arianrhod had known from the first that she could lose Benedick. But running barefoot through the springy grass of the causeway, she also knew that overconfidence would not reward her. She would be cautious. Minutes before, awake in her tank, she had bent her skills to slowing her heartbeat and respiration so Caitlin would not know she was aware and in possession of assistance. She had measured her oxygen levels and hoarded her strength. Aware, she could trigger hibernation. Aware, she could red-light the tank, and no one would question her death. It was only a short step from there to escape. Caitlin would assume that she had had help, but the fact was, Arianrhod had planned for this. She had always known her plan to support Asrafil, to become the one who held the strings and the power behind Captain Ariane, might fail.

She had not anticipated that failure, but she had planned for it.

She must live. It was not only a matter of her own survival, but of a sacred trust. Her lord Asrafil now depended on her. She had had her own way out.

That wasn't the way it had worked out, exactly. She had not realized how many allies she had remaining. But she was adaptable, and an escape that began with her released from her tank by an outside agency merely meant the advantage of a few extra minutes of lead time, and the luxury of not having to fight and sabotage her way past Caitlin and the machines of Engine.

Now the hoarded energy was hers to spend, and perhaps she had a knife at Caitlin's throat in the long term.