Chill

south as far as he could see. He could make out the glow of lights through an extravagance of leaves.

Chelsea was with him in less than ten minutes, and he was amused to note that she duplicated his admiring spin. 'Hang on,' she said and, with a series of contractions and extensions of her body, swung pendulum-fashion toward the nearest cable. She stretched, spun, and plunged a hand through encrusting swifts' nests to catch on and cling tight.

Benedick watched her knife flash in the other hand, and the grace with which she intercepted the falling material. When she released the cable, she had a meshed bundle of the cleanest nests and a few dozen tiny eggs, to add to the chunks of tested-safe mushroom that made up their foraged rations.

'Break for dinner?' Chelsea said, when she swung close to him again.

Once she was safely latched in, Benedick unclipped himself. 'All you think of is food.'

'Bird's nest soup,' she tempted, and lowered him before he asked. He had to swing a little to make contact with the rim of the shaft. But once his feet struck the deck the mimosas drew back to make a protected glade, and he brought Chelsea down to it with no trouble.

The easiest method for cooking the soup involved painstaking deployment of the microwave projectors in their toolkit. The toolkit curled around the collapsible bowl, and Benedick and Chelsea cupped their shielded gauntlets around it, careful lest stray radiation should cook their eyeballs, their internal organs, or any passing birds. Soon they were sharing a steaming, pleasantly mucilaginous bowl of bird's nest soup studded with chunks of mushroom and soft-poached swift eggs.

'This is awfully idyllic for a high-speed chase,' Chelsea said as Benedick wiped out the dinner dishes. He was worried about the toolkit's charge, though he could replenish it from his armor if need be.

The toolkit itself was almost underfoot, seeming determined to maintain a wide berth from the mimosa. Benedick couldn't say he blamed it. He clucked, and the toolkit got a running start, leaped to his extended hand, and scampered up his arm.

'There's little to be gained by catching her if we're too exhausted to do anything about it,' Benedick said mildly. He folded the bowl away and tucked it into his pack.

'That also sounds like something Father would have said.'

Benedick set his cable, ignoring the irrational twinge of irritation. He was not his father, and Chelsea was not Tristen. 'One time or another, I'm certain he did. Do you wish to lead the first descent?'

From the examining glance Chelsea cast across Benedick's face as she fixed their lines together, she knew perfectly well that he was holding back. She might even know what; he was always surprised by the gaps and bridges in the younger siblings' knowledge of family history.

No blame on them for that. It wasn't as if he or Tristen had gone out of their way to make themselves available to teach. The fact that their father had disallowed such knowledge only increased their onus to have passed it along. Maybe their reasons were different--Benedick, as far as he knew, had far more to be ashamed of than Tristen, and he would have been happy to let his many failings remain private history--but the truth was, both of them were complicit in Alasdair Conn's conspiracy of lies.

So in the light of everything else, perhaps it was an insignificant failure. Nonetheless, it remained one that griped at Benedick, as further evidence of his own moral cowardice--something he thought he'd already established to everyone's satisfaction.

'Right,' Chelsea said. 'See you at the bottom of the rope.' She swung a leg over the lip, and was gone.

For a time, they progressed as before, leapfrogging one another down the shaft. In this section, lighting and terraces were intact, cane-thin rods vining between the trees to provide illumination. Benedick's suit prickled to warn him of unfiltered ultraviolet. He sealed his helm in response. He'd had enough of radiation burns.

As he slid down the cable, the overall effect was of gliding spider-silent through a cool, dappled tunnel. The vegetation, while lush, was climax growth, full of open spaces and long, clear lines of sight. After the cramped overgrowth of the previous shaft, the spacious bowers of this vertical forest soothed him. It would be harder for an enemy to ambush them here.

The life here was more familiar, though the oxygen levels remained high enough that he still saw insects of unusual size. In this microenvironment, those included flying forms: a dragonfly whose jeweled purple-blue body hung between wings of a half-meter span; a ladybug as big as a dinner plate.

Benedick wondered what such large arthropods consumed, and resolved to keep an eye out for predatory insect nymphs the size of his thigh. The stealthy manner of his descent--the only sound he made was in the brush of leaves against his armor and the whir of cable through the winch--meant that he passed within touching distance of many animals before they were even aware of his existence. A half-meter spotted cat hissed and vanished; a green-tinged sloth reached with dreamy control from one branch to another and swung away.

He grinned behind his helm--an expression that would have shocked most of his siblings. This was serious business. And he had a reputation for mirthlessness that he thought was as much the result of conditioned anhedonia as anything intrinsic to his character.

But the oxygen levels could make you giddy, and it was hard not to cheer up when you saw a sloth.

Mind on your work, Ben, he thought, in Caitlin's phrasing, and tried not to be too distracted by the wildlife.

Besides the high oxygen, one thing this shaft had in common with the one above was that it was cold. He couldn't feel it through the armor, but the sloth's long, coarse coat shone at the tips with frost, and frost also rimed the edges of the broad tree leaves. That had to be new, or transitory, because the trees themselves were hale, their foliage not yet curling.

That told him the system was continuing to lose heat, and heat was a thing not easily replaced unless they could find a way to generate energy--or tap the radiant heat of the expanding core of the supernova behind them, but that presented its own complex of problems.

He wondered how the trees had stayed intact through the acceleration. Perhaps--even broken and locked to a single setting--the gravity controls of the old commuter shaft were strong enough that they had locally compensated. It was an interesting hypothesis, because it carried the implication that, throughout the world, there might be other similarly protected spaces that could have sheltered anything within them. When they emerged from blackout, he would contact the angel and Caitlin with the suggestion.

A large trunk blocked his descent immediately below. He flexed knees to land lightly on it, stood, checked the cable with a quick glance up, and hopped over the side just as he heard Chelsea yelp through the comm.

'Benedick!'

Caitlin was the only person left alive who called him Ben. When she was speaking with him to call him anything.

'Here,' he answered, one hand on the cable brake. He didn't trigger it yet, though--until you understand the situation, or you understand that halting will do less damage than pushing on, don't provide the enemy with intelligence.

'I'm under attack,' she said. 'Ambu--' Half the word, until her comm cut out.

Well, I guess that's a hint that we're on the right path. He slowed his descent, fighting the urge to rush. Charging to the rescue was one thing, so long as one was certain that one was charging to the rescue and not barreling into a trap. Silently, his black and bronze- brown armor blending into the dappled shadows of the leaves, he rotated himself so as to descend headfirst, and slipped lower.

The comm stayed dead, but before long his armor brought him the ambient sounds of combat. Crashing, a heavy thump, the splinter of green wood. No sound of weapons fire, which was suggestive.

The toolkit said 'Brrt?' against his cheek.

'Shh,' he answered. He swung in close to the nearest trunk and anchored the cable, in case Chelsea was still using it; he could sense weight on the opposite end. Then he disconnected himself and began the painstaking process of pressing close against the trunk and circling it.

Like a squirrel, he thought, as something liver red and about as large as his outstretched hand crashed through leaves nearby and bounced hard off the trunk of an age-gnarled sycamore as big around as an air lock door. Whatever it was, it left a trail of sparks, and a meat-colored smear on the tree's patchy green-and-silver trunk before arcing away through the canopy. Benedick sank spiked gauntlet-tips into the trunk of his own tree--branches to break the fall or not, it was a long way down--and continued his careful circumnavigation. Fight on, Sister. I'm coming.