She would have to learn to use those. Pushing them away meant denying a great resource, and--no matter how insipid she found their morality, no matter how filthy touching their thoughts made her feel--Perceval was a child of Engine. She could stop breathing with more ease than she could discard something with a potential use.
Samael, as if noticing that she had been staring at Nova in speculation for rather a long time, cleared his throat. 'Captain?'
Perceval shook her head, pushing aside the fog of other commanders' ideas. 'No. I think not. We've already ruled out resorting to cannibalism to solve a bigger problem.'
Caitlin, without shifting her eyes from her own image of Samael, said once more, 'The Builders would have cannibalized.'
Perceval folded her arms. 'Mom. You're repeating yourself. And I don't for a minute believe you think that's the best answer. So take it as read into the argument for now, and we'll consider it as an absolute last resort. If we have to. Nova. Do you trust him?'
Nova, who had until then waited motionless as if suspended, staring at Samael like a cat before a mouse hole, said, 'I contain enough of him to know better.'
Perceval, with a certain degree of distaste, reached down through the layers of filters she was slowly amassing between her present self and the library of her ancestral memories, looking for specific information. Someday, when she had leisure--and could bear the sense of dragging her fingers through swamp and slime to tickle out a handful of pearls--she would find the time to examine it all and see what was useful. For now, her memory would remain banked full of the Captains and Commodores who had come before her, and she would just have to know she would get around to it someday. Ariane, though, was close and current, and not too hard to get to. Perceval just did not much like touching her.
'I contain enough of Ariane to remember her scorn for Arianrhod's devotion to Asrafil,' she confirmed. 'I doubt Ariane was ever devoted much to anything, outside of herself. But she believed that Arianrhod is.'
Caitlin said, 'I contain nothing of Samael. But I, too, know him well enough to know better than to trust him.' She glared, then surprised Perceval by asking, 'But do we need to trust him? We were going after Arianrhod anyway, weren't we?'
'Yes,' Perceval said. 'We are. Or Tristen and Mallory are, in any case. And Gavin, of course.' She turned back to Samael. 'And so are you.'
Benedick had never known Chelsea well. The gap between their ages was two or three lifetimes of Means run back to back. He'd only met her mother twice; after the tenth or fourteenth, his father's women ran together like lifetimes. The war with Cecelia's daughters had taught Alasdair Conn to never again confuse the question of who held power in the house of Rule by choosing an Exalt paramour--or by Exalting the Means, once their few brief years of beauty had faded. Benedick had almost no organic memory of his own mother. It had passed with the centuries, leaving behind a sort of abstract sentiment and the crystalline images preserved by his symbiont.
But he did remember his anger and disbelief when he had, at long last, come on Errantry to Engine and not only found Caitlin there, but also that everything their father had told them, about only the blood of the house of Conn being fit to survive Exaltation, had been a blatant, baseless lie.
Shortly afterward, Benedick had begun spending less and less time in his father's house. His father had not seemed much concerned by his absence, or to much regret it.
These were things Benedick suspected Chelsea had not yet learned about their family. Perhaps the unforeseen benefit of Ariane's attempt at genocide was that now she never need learn them. So he was at peace with the idea that they should walk companionably side by side, two knights-errant alert to the dangers of the wilderness.
He did not expect much strangeness so close to Engine; the knights and Engineers had civilized everything within a day's travel. This area had been thickly settled and largely given over to agriculture before the nova. There were good maps, and Benedick's colony carried copies of each.
Their progress at first was painstaking. Having eliminated one of the five potential paths--Chelsea could be lying about having seen Arianrhod, but there were resources in place in Rule to cover that eventuality--it remained to determine which of the following four options Arianrhod had actually chosen. Because her trail was hidden well enough that a cursory examination did not suffice, Benedick resorted to the toolkit's enhanced senses.
However, after ninety minutes of sniffing and scurrying, he was forced to admit the strategy was to no avail. The toolkit whiffled disconsolately around the borders of the last corridor, ears slicked back and whiskers quivering. Benedick knew they could become discouraged when set impossible tasks. Consequently, he crouched down and let it run up his arm, the armor transmitting every scratch of its delicate claws as though they prickled on his skin.
He lifted the toolkit to his face and let it rub its pointed muzzle along his chin while Chelsea smiled out of the corner of her mouth.
'The softer side of Benedick Conn,' she said, and chuckled when he rolled his eyes.
'Sibling disrespect,' he answered. 'Everything performs better when praised.'
'You didn't learn that from Dad.'
'No.' Not even a real test of his resolve not to speak ill of the dead. His right hand clenched, remembering the hilt of a blade, the way flesh had offered no resistance to the unblade's blow.
He hadn't carried one since.
He wouldn't have done it for Alasdair, he thought. He hoped. He had done it because Cynric asked. That offered less in the way of absolution than he might have preferred.
He indicated the tunnels with a sweep of his gaze. 'Which do you like?'
She squatted, resting her elbows on her armored knees, and chewed her upper lip. 'If I were a rogue Engineer,' she said, with thoughtful deliberation, 'wanted for genocide, and a fugitive from everyone in Rule and Engine both, where would I go? What would I think was my best chance of survival?'
'Before the nova?' He shrugged, and his armor shrugged with him. The toolkit on his shoulder registered a protest, fluffy tail thumping his back. 'I would have lit out for the hinterlands. The Broken Holdes, maybe. Cannibal country. Now? If the world is coming back under hegemony, the situation gets stickier. You'd need to do one of four things. One, find a place where Nova can't reach--which might mean fostering a breakaway intelligence of your own. Two, reinvent yourself as something Nova could not recognize. Three, escape the world entirely--and falling off the face of the world is unlikely without a planetfall nearby--or--'
'Four, stage a takeover.'
'No doubt,' Benedick agreed, 'the eventual plan.'
'Indeed.' Chelsea had pulled the braids from her hair. Now she flipped it back again. Benedick resisted the urge to recommend she cut it. 'So logically--'
'She's headed for a null zone.' He reached out a hand to pull her to her feet.
She accepted it and stood.
'Nova,' he said, and waited for the sense of attention, of connection. 'Where is the nearest large null?'
'They're propagating,' the angel said in its tone without tone. Not affectless, but serene. He wondered how long it would take for it to develop a personality, or if this were a temporary effect of integrating so many diverse individuals. 'However, they are clustering in the area of the largest holdes, at the south pole of the world.'
'Near my domaine, you mean.'
'On the bottom of the world.
Easier and faster than speech, to allow the angel to simply inject the knowledge into his head. Riskier, too-- all sorts of things could come concealed in such code.
Benedick nodded nevertheless, choosing to trust. Trust the angel, trust the Captain his daughter. Trust the world that cradled his bones.
'Send,' he said, and felt data spill into his mind. Arianrhod, Samael, Tristen, Asrafil, Mallory. 'Head's alive?' he said aloud, one salient fact crystalline among the flood.
Chelsea, beside him, looked up. 'How?' she said. 'I was in Rule. No survivors.'
'Sie barricaded hirself into the kitchens with all the servants sie could find,' Benedick said.
Chelsea's smile looked like it might bend her cheeks permanently.
