Chill

refer to you for repurposing instructions.'

Caitlin didn't need to ask for stats. They were already scrolling through her awareness. Multiton quantities of metal, polymer, ceramic, conductors, fuel cells, and miscellaneous material had been made available. 'The obvious use would be to shore up the unraveling superstructure. Less obviously, we could hold this stuff in reserve for repairs and reconstruction in case we have to cut loose the infected portions of the world. It looks like a lot, but once we start ... Using it is a commitment. And until we determine what the cause of the unraveling is, shoring up would more or less amount to tossing it into a disassembly machine.'

Caitlin reached out and swiped a finger through the ice crystals on her console. The remaining ones glittered in the dim lighting. Hoarfrost.

'Sloughing off the damaged portions of the world presents problems,' Nova said. 'First, in locating them all. And second, they are not limited to the fringes of the superstructure. The infection has metastasized, and many of the affected sections contain biota.'

'I know,' Caitlin said. She glanced from the angel's jewel-presence to Jsutien, but he had closed his eyes again, and anyway this was her decision. She swallowed and made it. 'Start constructing backup life-support and propulsion systems. Increase the size of the ram-scoop. Be ready to cut core systems free if necessary.'

'But for now?' Nova asked, a nonhuman system seeking unambiguous confirmation.

'For now we hold on.'

Much of what Tristen and his companions passed was devastation, and much of the devastation was not new. They slithered among wreckage in chambers from which the Enemy had torn all breath and life, ruptured bulkheads frozen in twisted alloy petals like balloons captured at the moment of bursting. The empty sockets of shattered viewports reflected nothing, or--in cases where the panes had webbed but another member failed before the pressure blew them clear--reflected too much, in awkward fragments that never quite matched at the edges.

Salvage had already begun here: many of the damaged sections were obviously in a state of partial deconstruction, and there were great, smooth-edged gaps in the world's superstructure where materials must have been repurposed to reinforce what could be saved. But there were no signs of rogue colony activity here--the damaged systems and sections were not merely evaporating into space, and nothing attacked the travelers.

In the blasted sections, some strata had gravity, and more did not. The domaines where one could drift or glide were easier than the ones where one must pick a route across destroyed landscapes and machinery. Tristen had his armor, and Gavin and Samael thought nothing of traversing awkwardly among rent metal, shredded wiring, and the remains of animals and plants frozen brittle at the moment of decompression, though Samael's tender petals withered and froze bruised-dark, their cell walls shattered. But Mallory suffered in the Enemy's cold, each such crossing demanding its levy in burst capillaries and lingering shakes.

Tristen had never seen the necromancer so discomfited. Nevertheless, though azure bruises blossomed under pale skin and--each time they returned to the relative warmth of a pressurized section--cerulean blood dripped from Mallory's nose to splatter the decking or float in eerie globules, there was no complaint.

The pressure doors themselves created another sort of hurdle, as many of them were not actual air locks, just emergency doors intended to maintain the integrity of sections near a damaged module. Mallory knew every code with the certainty of dead men's memories, and Gavin and Samael between them managed to improvise vacuum seals from their colonies. Through these Mallory and Tristen--with some awkwardness--could pass.

Mallory and Tristen differed on details of navigation. When they paused in pressurized corridors, twice Mallory suggested a route that would take them ship-east. The necromancer believed this route would allow them to leapfrog through a potentially more intact series of domaines and Heavens, but a combination of half-forgotten organic memory and the urgent opinion of the sword Mirth had Tristen tending more to true south.

After traversing a string of particularly devastated anchores, they passed through a battered hatchway into warmth. 'More salvage,' Tristen said, trying to keep from his voice the bitter awareness of how much of what lay behind them had been lost to the Enemy. The saddest module had contained rank after rank of apparently unused acceleration pods, open to space, their interiors boiled dry.

Samael, handing Mallory a white handkerchief of dandelion clocks with which to mop the blood, said, 'We shall have a far smaller world when we are done.'

Mallory's hand folded around the scrap of cloth, but all the necromancer's attention was bent on the pressure door beyond the small antechamber in which they stood. Samael tapped the hesitant fingers, reminding Mallory to absently press handkerchief to nose.

'Grease,' Mallory said, and started forward, feet picking their way unerringly across the buckled but clean- swept floor despite patent inattention. The necromancer bent down, blinking eyes splotched cobalt with petechiae all through the sclera. 'This door's in use.'

Tristen found his palm on Mirth's hilt. He turned slowly, scanning other potential entrances to the chamber. There was only the door through which they had entered. He licked his lips and looked again at the floor. Buckled, as he had noticed, with the force of the impact that had sheared through the corridor and the anchores beyond. Scraped, too, in long parallel lines that led toward the pressure door. But the floor was very clean.

'Trash,' he said, with a particular nauseated horror. 'Someone is using this chamber to discard trash. And recently.' Recently, because not even the world's ubiquitous dust and scruff had had time to settle on surfaces.

Samael, if he were human, might have blanched. Instead, he raked back his hair with twig-straw hands and tilted his head as if weighing any number of scathing responses--though Tristen did not think himself the one slated for scathing. The head-tilt was curiously like Gavin's, which was in its own turn curiously like one Tristen remembered with clear perfection through his colony, though the head-tilter was long lost. When you get old, everyone starts to look like somebody else. And the more important that person was to you, the more people look like them.

Cynric had been ... important, yes. To a lot of people.

After a brief pause, the angel said, 'So who throws things away?'

'Children,' Mallory answered. 'Cultists. Uneducated Means, but all the Means are meant to have been Exalted.'

'And all the angels were meant to have been subsumed in the angel,' Gavin said, from among Mallory's hair. Wings made for an expressive shrug, when he chose to use it. He pointed at Samael with his beak.

Samael bowed with a vestigial flourish. 'At your service,' he said. 'I hope you'll forgive me for ruining the symmetry of your genocide. I was invested in remaining discrete.'

There were times to rise to the bait, and times not to. 'So what's beyond the door?' Tristen asked.

'Let's see,' Samael said, and--laying his mosaic hands flat against the alloy hatch--thrust his head through the door to the shoulders. Bits of fluff and leaf, as always, scraped from his field and slid to the floor, left behind.

Tristen thought he heard Gavin snort. Or perhaps he was himself projecting. Angels.

But a moment later, Samael was back, in all his slight translucence, glowering and crossing his arms. 'The Heaven beyond the portal looks exactly as it should,' he said. 'There are signs of habitation, flora and fauna, a well- trammeled path to the pressure door. It seems they're using this chamber as an improvised air lock.'

Mallory echoed the arm-folding gesture. 'They who?'

Samael pushed out his lower lip and dropped his chin, frowning up at them past bushy eyebrows. 'Go-backs,' he said. 'I think.'

Mallory and Tristen shared a glance. Tristen thought of the open acceleration pods, their fluids boiled away on the Enemy's empty breath.

'Exalt Go-backs,' Mallory said. Then said it again, with a headshake, as if that would help to settle the idea. 'Go-backs. For real.'

'You can see the dome of the shrine from the pressure door,' Samael said.

Gavin flipped his wings and said, with a negligent tail flick, 'We could--go back--the way we came.'

Tristen shook his head and licked his lips. He tasted the bitter grease of blood and only then realized he'd bitten down.

'Religious fanatics,' he said. Then with all the cascading irony of his personal history, though he knew nobody