'Inducer viruses,' Caitlin said, with a glance at Jsutien. She had exchanged his simple shackle for a silvery drape of nanotech chain that permitted him the freedom to work while allowing her to retain control. He'd accepted it with grace. Understanding that her distrust was provoked by the circumstances of Arianrhod's disappearance, he had claimed to find the precaution reasonable.
'And it's not,' he had said, 'as if I have anywhere to go.'
Now, he met her gaze and nodded. 'An inducer virus, sure. Or a plain, old-fashioned virus. Not engineered. Your angel interface really can't even sense the presence of these things?'
Perceval's avatar shook her head. 'She can
Caitlin frowned. She did, and she understood what it implied, too. Something in the angel's inherited programming forced it to overlook this particular colony structure and the individual motes that composed it. 'Nova's been instructed to ignore the infestation.'
'Yes,' Perceval said. 'And instructed to forget why she was instructed to ignore it.'
'That seems like something of a radical operational choice,' Caitlin said mildly, because Benedick was not there to say it for her. Her crossed arms were in danger of becoming a straitjacket. She forced them down to her sides. 'So if you're programming an angel, why do you force it to ignore an ... infestation of alien nanotech?'
'Sabotage,' Perceval said, promptly.
But Jsutien shook his head. 'Immunosuppression.' When the women--present and projected--turned to stare at him, he said, 'It's how you get a transplant to take. First, you have to stop the host body from attacking it.'
'I see. And do you know something about what might have been ... transplanted ... into my world, Jsutien?'
He flushed cobalt. 'Not specifically. But--' The swags of nanochain rustled as he shifted uncomfortably behind his console.
'Spit it out.'
The look he gave her was all startled prey, but she didn't think he was intentionally evasive. 'It's about your sister, Chief Engineer.'
'Of course it is,' Caitlin said, rolling her eyes until she felt the muscles stretch. 'Which one, I'm horrified to ask?'
'Cynric,' he said. He turned to Perceval, and Caitlin grimaced at a premonition. 'Captain, Princess Cynric was the director of biosystems, and bioengineering, and chief synbiotician. The original colonies were her design. As were a lot of the first-generation synbiotes and engineered fauna. Shipfish, parrotlets ... some Means.'
'And the inducer viruses,' Perceval said, with the air of someone who has just achieved a satisfying synthesis of incomplete information.
'And the inducer viruses,' Jsutien confirmed. 'Yes. So I would bet that whatever's out there is something she was working on. Possibly a weapon she meant to use against Alasdair Conn. When the three of you--' He paused delicately.
'Attempted to overthrow our father,' Caitlin finished for him. 'Don't worry, you can say it.'
'They called her Cynric the Sorceress,' he said, apologetically. 'Before you were born.'
'After, too.' Caitlin smiled. 'But if she had a weapon like that, Astrogator, she never revealed its existence to me.'
'Maybe it wasn't cooked yet,' Jsutien said, with a wave at the monitor tank. 'Maybe it needed time to evolve.'
Perceval rubbed her mouth. 'Well, they're sure as hell cooked now. They're
Which led Caitlin to another problem that it was the Chief Engineer's duty to bring to the attention of the Captain. Fortunately, this issue was a little more tractable. She coughed into her hand and said, 'Have you noticed that you can't settle on a pronoun?'
'Mom?' Lashes meshed over hazel eyes made to seem enormous by Perceval's denuded scalp.
'Nova,' Caitlin clarified. 'You call it he or she, but the gendering of the pronoun changes from conversation to conversation.'
Perceval's brow furrowed in confusion or concentration. 'Is that bad?'
'It's diagnostic,' Caitlin said, dodging the question. 'It tells me Nova is still integrating, and the distinct personalities are generating confusion, crossed signals, and hesitancy, which it may not be aware of. And that's bleeding through its link to you. It's your responsibility as her director to assist in the integration process.'
'Right,' said Perceval, rubbing her arms. 'What does that mean, exactly?'
Caitlin lifted her chin. 'Captain, it means you have to decide who you want her to be.'
15
the bottomless dark in its person
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
'Bring me the corpse of a cyberleech,' Benedick commanded, and so by his will it was done. He also asked the orchids to search for the remains of his toolkit--dead or alive--but they found no trace of it beyond a fluff of coat and DNA, the smear of impact. Something in the lift shaft had most likely eaten it, as the orchids had consumed most of the cyberleech casualties.
Benedick mourned its loss. It had been a fluffy idiot thing, but friendly, and he could have used its delicacy of touch and instrumentation for the necropsy once the orchids found a nearly intact cyberleech for his dissection. They brought it before him while Chelsea took her healing rest in a sheltered corner of the transfer station, and Benedick assembled such primitive tools as they had available and cleared a space to work. The data core was unlikely to be intact in a dead leech, but somewhere within it--he prayed--there must be a radio control chip.
He missed his armor in the process, because it came equipped with scalpels, pliers, and retractors, but he managed. The cyberleech was heavy meat without, knotted muscle, and within its body cavity the circuit-twined organs popped and squished, inelastic as liver. But fifteen messy minutes later, he had it. His sleeves were caked to the elbows with iron-stinking matter, and the flat, glass-transparent chip lay on his acid-burned palm, irregular as a leaf.
In this fragile flake of crystal lay a record of the frequency and signature of the device Arianrhod had used to activate the leeches. As long as she was still carrying the transmitter and it wasn't entirely deactivated--or, better yet, if she'd used her own colony as the carrier--he could find her now. It was an ancient and crude method of location, one that didn't rely on angels or motes or the awareness of colonies.
It was the work of another half hour to improvise a scanner from salvaged materials, and a few moments later he was sure. He could not obtain her present position, but the tightband cast by which she had tuned the cyberleeches originated from the south. It was good to have confirmation they were headed the right way, at least.
Benedick's own domaine lay not far from there, at the rim of everything. And he would worry about that, he told himself firmly, when there was something he could do about it.
'Got it,' he said aloud, to hear the conviction in his own voice. Because if he listened to that, he wouldn't listen to the voice of all his own regrets and fears.
Arianrhod stopped at the edge of the world and pressed her hands against the glass. The angel's wing braced her shoulder, though when she craned her neck all she could see of it was shadows, like gauze curtains blowing from a window, twisting layers of varying opacity. It warmed her, though, and filled her with enough strength that she thought that perhaps in a moment or two she'd have the courage to step forward. It would not be the first leap of faith she had ever taken for her angel.
It probably wasn't the first time he'd given her time to stall, either. She'd come with him across the Broken
