Chill

Asrafil, and finished, 'And there are the other denizens of the world to consider. Not everyone and everything who didn't make it into tanks will have died. The biosphere--especially the synbiotic and Exalt biosphere--is proving to possess remarkable resilience. Perceval needs to understand that there are probably people out there who have no understanding of their environment or the realities of the situation. People who will, unfortunately, need to be ... educated. And then governed.'

The euphemisms felt gritty on her tongue. She worked her mouth around where they'd passed as if to rid herself of the taste.

'Disaster mitigation is an ongoing process,' Nova said blandly, leading Caitlin to wonder (again) exactly what the angel's facade concealed. When she had time, she was going to procure the Captain's approval to pin Nova into a corner and do some serious spelunking around the inside of her program.

It was possible that the angel might even approve of her interference. If Caitlin had enough unassimilated bits of other people kicking around the inside of her skull, she'd be crying for a competent code intervention.

The angel said, 'It's a problem of management as much as anything. The pendulum could still tip us into catastrophic collapse.'

The angel's words conjured an image of the world as a ghost world, burning lifeless between the stars, bored and aimless angels at play among its silent struts and habitats.

Caitlin said, 'You'd survive it.'

'I would be lonely.'

Whether she had timed it to make Caitlin laugh or not, it worked, and the break in tension allowed Caitlin to turn her attention back to the problem at hand.

'Right. We're not out of the event horizon, as it were,' Caitlin said. 'And we can't afford to work on these problems in isolation. Any functional solution will be a systemic one. Can you maintain the current level of habitability? If necessary, what if we pull back to the core and allow individual anchores, holdes, and domaines to maintain for themselves as they can?'

It was what the world had been built for, and that ability to compartmentalize was what had allowed it to remain a viable organism through the past five hundred years, despite crippling trauma. The world was modeled on a living thing--and life was stubborn.

But that compartmentalization was also what had led to so many of their current problems.

'I can fall back into myself as necessary,' the angel agreed. 'However, that leaves many a beachhead for the power or powers behind the null zones. We still haven't managed to obtain any evidence one way or the other about the possibility that if the world's idiot systems are attempting to reboot the biospheres, they may also have available backup versions of the original angel. We need to determine if the null zones are areas where Israfel is attempting to respawn from backup. None of that, however, explains the disassembly incidents.'

'Given how far our goals, and your program, have diverged from the Builders' intent, that's not a reassuring scenario.'

The angel skinned lips back from imaginary teeth. 'He would eat me in a heartbeat. We are not without advantages, however. The houses of Rule and Engine are unified at last.'

Caitlin snorted. 'Because the houses of Rule and Engine are decimated. No, Nova, I'm sorry. You're right. It is an advantage.' She rubbed her armored wrist with her armored palm. 'If we can find a way to work together. And trust each other.'

'You are thinking of my Captain's father.'

Caitlin's smile felt thin and stretched across her skull. 'Of course I'm thinking of Benedick. I've sent him out there alone, hunting a woman who was his ally in a scheme to keep Rule and Engine from each other's throats. A woman who was his friend and lover.' She stopped herself before she said: But not his partner. There was nothing uglier than a self-justification.

Instead, she continued, 'She is my great-grandniece, and also the mother and ally of the woman who is responsible for the decimation of Rule. His daughter with her has died and metamorphosed into a fragment of you, my dear Nova. His daughter and mine is your Captain. Are you still human enough, a little, to understand why I am worried what he'll do?'

'You must,' said the angel, 'reach out to him.'

'You're a fine one to give relationship advice,' she said, folding her arms over her chest. She turned away.

She was old enough to know it for a useless display even as she did so, but it made her feel better.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. 'What else?' she asked, when her eyes had stopped stinging.

The angel's avatar reappeared before her, shifting orientation to match her. 'Chief Engineer--' The angel lifted her chin, folded her arms, and spat the words out as if she expected Caitlin to argue. 'My Captain is not emotionally well.'

'I know,' Caitlin said. The angel's tone made her want to reach out and lay a hand on its immaterial nape, pull its face into her neck, and stroke it down the spine. As she would have done for her daughter, once. 'We shall carry on for her as we can, and buy her time to heal enough to shoulder the burdens she must bear.'

'Is that the mother talking, or the Chief Engineer?'

'What can we do about the null zones, if we're not surrendering them?' Caitlin said, as if it were an answer. Perhaps it was, of sorts.

'Prince Benedick and Princess Chelsea are approaching the largest one,' Nova said, 'in the far south of the world. It is where Arianrhod--and Asrafil, if Samael can be believed--have taken shelter. Benedick and Chelsea have the toolkit, their armor, and their own colonies; odds are good I will be able to remain in contact. I will ask them to reconnoiter. Perhaps they will provide us with some intelligence on what, exactly, is blocking my access to the area.'

'If it doesn't eat them.'

'Or--perhaps more likely--subvert their colonies.'

'Belly of the beast,' Caitlin said, and bit the back of her hand.

Without your mate, your fathers, your brothers, your sons, you are as nothing. You are as a calf, all but blinded.

But you are not without resources.

Ironically, the vermin's machine viruses are the first of those resources to which you turn. They penetrate your organs, infect your instincts, confuse your intellect. But they have done that for so long now that you have had time to habituate to them, to grow accustomed and adapt. And to modify them in turn as they have modified you. To guide their evolution and make them your own.

Having done so, you feed them back into the slaver spikes, an upstream trickle of Trojan horses disguised in the empty shells of gutted nanotech. They spread, connect, convert others. Become a network of their own--an island galaxy in the information universe of the vermin-world.

And when you have made that, you can make the next thing. Because there is material here, vermin-life, planetcrawlers. Parasites, things that infect a world, devour its substance, spawn in hives and cast off to the next innocent victim. But you can use the vermin's machine viruses, alter that life, repurpose it. Consume it as the vermin consumed your mate, so as to remake something more to your liking.

You have no freedom. You have no pod. You have no sons, no legacy. You have no offspring born of the bodies of yourself and your mate. But you have designs that could amend those lacks.

For now, you shall make do with monsters.

Arianrhod made the angel put her down so she could walk into her daughter's house on her own feet, as befitted an Engineer. Ariane's domaine was small and defensible, an ant-warren of tunnels and rooms that twisted back on itself to form a three-dimensional labyrinth. It was full of dead ends and deadfalls, and Arianrhod herself did not know them all. What she did know was the path to the heart of the place.

When last she came here, every wall had pulsed with life, twining veins of blue and green algae filtering the light of the waystars and turning it to sugar and oxygen. Now the tubes were shattered, the sludge within frozen into coils and sprays she must break off or edge past.

She feared that what she'd come for was lost to the Enemy, but at the heart of her daughter's holdfast she found the small room as she remembered it, a cozy weightless sphere with a console and a vault. The vault was DNA-locked, but that was less problem than it might have been: Arianrhod carried a stasis phial of her daughter's cultured heart cells as a memento, and it was the work of a moment to retrieve it from where it lay cradled in the