Chill

at his fingers. 'It feels like stone.'

Mallory said, 'No wonder the Go-backs had a means to get here.'

'Indeed.' His armor would have given him a sensory sphere as complete as Gavin's, but Tristen nevertheless glanced over his shoulder as if expecting to find somebody watching. He shook his head. 'It's a little piece of what we were. It looks so ...'

'Primitive?' Gavin suggested.

'Fragile,' Samael said. 'Somebody should see if they can check in with Nova.'

'I already tried,' Tristen answered, as Gavin felt the attention of another colony tickle along the borders of his awareness. 'Still no contact. Come on. We're on the clock.'

'We're on the clock,' Gavin agreed. 'And something's coming.'

The something was a familiar shaggy-humped outline bigger than a mastiff dog. As they came up on it, Tristen easily identified the mammoth calf he had insisted they free from its trap among the massive fig tree's roots. It waited for them by the far air lock, beyond a gap in the garden wall, its trunk raised as if it were scenting the air, its piggish eyes blinking through strands of coat.

'It followed me home,' Samael said. 'Can I keep it?'

Tristen shot the angel a scathing glance. 'Tell me the truth. You don't actually know how that got here, how it got ahead of us. Or do you?'

'I don't,' Samael answered, with every evidence of seriousness and sincerity--though an angel could not lie to his First Mate. Theoretically. 'But it's Exalt--more than Exalt. I can feel the edges of its colony from here.'

'That's what I sensed back at the chapel,' Gavin agreed. 'It's waiting for us.'

'The world is weird,' Tristen said, a catchphrase his mother had been fond of. 'Let's go see what it wants, shall we?'

They picked their way toward the gap, Tristen in the lead with one hand on Mirth's hilt. He tried to move with grace, but now that his euphoria was fading he felt the stiffness in every limb, damage from the cobra venom that his colony had not yet restored.

Tristen paused a few steps from the calf and held out his other hand, fingers flattened to present as smooth a target as possible. The calf tapped his palm with its trunk, fingerlike nubbins moving on his palm. Warm, moist air huffed against his skin. 'Hello,' Tristen said.

The mammoth calf opened its mouth and said, '--'

Mallory blinked and turned toward it. He held out one hand. 'Tristen.'

'What was that sound?'

'A language,' Mallory said. 'The Language. Did you not understand it?' Perhaps--

'Yes,' Tristen answered, knowing what it meant. Not knowing how he had understood it. 'How do you know that?'

Mallory said, 'I am full of dead men.'

Oh.

The necromancer continued, 'Job forty-one. Verses thirty-two and thirty-four. You know them.'

'In my bones,' Tristen agreed.

But he allowed Mallory to recite them. 'He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.'

Samael, who had been standing silent, head cocked and staring, jerked himself upright like a badly managed puppet. 'It's a key. Remember it.'

'A key?' Tristen frowned at the angel, hard enough that his face found it uncomfortable. 'A key to what?'

The angel spread his arms, lank, pale locks stirring as though his gesture made a wind. 'That information has not yet been unlocked to my program,' he said. 'But I would wager the mammoth knows.'

'Great,' Gavin said. 'What the hell are we going to do with a mammoth?'

17 the revelation

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2

The maintenance of her physical form had always been one of life's chief pleasures for Caitlin Conn. She enjoyed food, exercise, rest, work, self-care, affection--all the capabilities of her flesh and colony. Adventure and accomplishment were her meat and drink.

So it was a great frustration that not only was she obliged to remain behind at the helm of largely autonomous processes while her brothers and Chelsea adventured, but that both Tristen and Benedick had fallen out of contact just as things were getting interesting.

It was a devil's bargain. She couldn't relax enough to enjoy a much-needed meal and cleansing, but she hadn't nearly enough to do at this point to keep her occupied beyond worrying. Though she had to be informed and ready to assist the Captain in making policy decisions to contain each crisis--and minor ones were still appearing with disconcerting regularity--everything else taking place in the world was at scales too tiny and speeds too great for even Exalt humans to participate.

Helplessness was not her stock in trade, but despite feeling as if she were drowning in it, she forced herself to step into the scrubber and set the sonics and the steam to high. Even if it didn't relax her brain, it would be good for her muscles, and the human system worked better if everything was maintained. She would have complete contact with Nova, and Jsutien was still shrouded in his nanochains and watching the consoles. A little independence would serve as a test of his loyalties, though Caitlin was not about to let her observation of him lapse simply because she happened to be out of the room.

So even with her eyes closed, her forehead leaned against the scrubber wall, her head was full of images. Steam billowed around her, loosening roughened skin. It weighed down her short curls until they brushed the back of her neck. The sonics stroked her body in waves. Condensation, dead cells, and her own sweat knifed from her to vanish into the recapture, where it would all be returned to the ecosystem.

Maybe her stress could wash down the drain, too, and go find something to fertilize. It certainly wasn't doing any good where it was.

The timer pinged after three minutes. She straightened up and pushed her fingers through her hair amid vapor rolling back like the fabric of a dream. She kept her eyes closed for a moment longer, anyway, savoring the fantasy of a world in which cleansing lasted as long as you wanted.

This world wasn't it, though, so she blinked open moisture-stuck lashes, took one last warm breath, and reached outside the door for her robe. Warm cloth wrapped her shoulders as she stepped back out onto the deck, leaving damp footprints in her wake. It felt good to finally be clean of the last sticky residue of synthetic amniotic fluid. It felt better to have had a few instants alone in her head.

Now she could go back, soldier up, and continue to worry about Tristen and Chelsea--and Benedick, too, though she hated to admit it--in the belly of the world.

She felt the absence of her unblade at her hip like--well, like an absence, which struck her as a curious comparison, because when she was carrying it she would have said that it was null space personified. She pulled her hand away from its lack. When she reentered Central Engineering, her robe reshaping itself into trousers and a tunic for authority's sake, Jsutien looked up.

'Nothing broke,' he said, spreading his arms wide to indicate the colonies whose repairs he had been supervising. 'Well, nothing new broken, anyway.'

'That's good news,' she said. She touched the control box in her pocket--it had remained secure through the