Chill

He steeled himself and said, 'Does Caitlin know?'

'She's been informed,' Nova answered. 'Am I to understand that you share her suspicions as to the source of the infection?'

Dry-mouthed but holding his face impassive, Benedick nodded.

Chelsea brushed his elbow with the back of her fingers. 'And how about those of us who didn't pay attention to our tutors?'

'I very much expect your tutors were under strict instructions not to discuss any of this with you,' Benedick said. 'You know those portraits Dad had nailed to the wall?'

She looked up at him, sister to brother, but without the trust he'd seen time and again among the members of Mean families--or even those of Engine. If she watched him like an attentive puppy, it was a puppy with every expectation of being kicked.

Do better.

He still had one daughter left. And this sister, too. He said, 'Those were the older sisters, Cecelia's daughters. The girls between Tristen and me.'

'They were executed.'

'So you have heard a little.'

'Cautionary tales.'

Benedick chuckled without humor. 'Father believed in making examples.'

She nodded, encouraging him to continue. 'Only two of them were executed,' he clarified. 'The youngest lived. She is Chief Engineer, and the mother of my daughter Perceval. But of the two who did die, the eldest was Caithness, who would have been Captain. And the middle daughter was Cynric the Sorceress.'

Benedick's hands wanted to twitch defensively, as if to cover his breast, but with an effort of will he held them relaxed at his sides. Chelsea watched attentively, but he did not think she had registered his discomfort. If he could hide his thoughts and weaknesses from Alasdair Conn, he figured he could hide them from anyone. 'Colorful nickname.'

'Colorless woman,' Benedick said. 'And I do not mean in terms of her personality, but she had a gift for making herself unnoticed, for going unremarked. For being--not at the heart of every conspiracy, because she was the center of none--but rather for being aware of things that rightfully nobody should have known. She was Alasdair Conn's daughter; we all had the sense to make sure we had resources no one else knew the existence of. But more than that, she was a bioengineer. The head of biosystems. A good deal of the ship's ecology grew out of her experiment--as did the colonies. Or rather, she created the first generation of the self-evolving form in which we recognize them today. When I was young, we did not have such things. Life was bounded in ways that would seem inconceivable to you now.'

'I have heard from Dad, when he deigned to notice my existence, what lives of toil and hardship you all endured,' Chelsea said, her mockery light enough not to sting.

Benedick allowed himself a laugh. 'Truly, our privation was terrible. But listen. The colonies were not all Cynric brought us. She personally engineered the ship-fish and the ship cats and a hundred other useful species-- parrotlets, the vesper weaving-spiders, egglings. But her greatest accomplishment was to capture two creatures of alien origin. One was dissected and examined, the waste material'--the corpse--'recycled, and some of its adaptations incorporated into the world's genomes. She used information from its necropsy to create the inducer viruses, and the colonies themselves.'

Chelsea swallowed. 'Was it sentient?'

'Assuredly. As for your inevitable next question--as to whether it was sapient, I cannot be certain that anyone chose to inquire.'

'I see,' she said.

He could see her thoughts cross her face as plainly as if she spoke them, read her confusion of questions as they tried to press all at once onto her tongue.

He took pity, and answered what he would have asked first. 'It was deemed scientific research. No one was permitted to interfere.' Whatever was in his smile, it made Chelsea glance down. 'I hope Dad regretted that decision in the end.'

'And what became of the second alien?'

Benedick licked his lips. 'The second Leviathan was infected with an inducer virus--a slaver colony designed from its dead mate's body. Paralyzed, as a wasp paralyzes a spider. Then--against future need--it was placed in tow. I believe now that Cynric intended to use it as a last-ditch weapon against our father, but it's possible she ran out of time, or even that her control was incomplete. Cynric told me this before she died.' When she asked me to be her executioner.

'That's where Arianrhod is going.'

'I believe so.'

'And that's where the nullities are coming from,' Nova said, with a widening gesture of her avatar's hands. 'They're caused by the inducer virus. Repurposed and remade. Which is why I can't see them.'

'Nova?' Benedick said. 'Tell Caitlin I agree with her judgment, please.'

'I have not told you her judgment.'

'I anticipate it,' he said. Across from him, Chelsea folded her arms and leaned back against the hatchway door, frowning thoughtfully. He saw the shiver engendered by the contact crawl up her neck into her hair and die there. Holding her gaze through that of the immaterial angel, he finished, 'Whether Leviathan has awakened fortuitously, or due to the supernova, or whether Cynric had something to do with it, it has become a factor again. And if it is sapient ... then I imagine it has been planning its vengeance for rather a long time.'

'We should hurry,' Chelsea said.

Benedick was already turning down the corridor that would lead them to the Broken Holdes. 'Never fear,' he said. 'We are.'

The mammoth advanced before them, its broad, soft feet all but noiseless on the decking. Tristen was more aware of the whisking of its hair, the rub of strand over coarse strand, than any sound from its footfalls. Amazing that something that must mass a quarter ton could move like a cloud.

It led them down corridors as barren as if they had been sterilized, metal floors and bulkheads eerily without life--even plant life. Or any sign that anything had ever grown here.

Tristen eyed the barren space with jaundiced discomfort. 'What purpose could this have served? It's just wasted space. There's nothing here.'

'It's a clean zone,' Samael said. 'A buffer.'

Mallory made a throat-clearing noise that Tristen suspected was largely symbolic. 'What needs a buffer of lifeless sterility?'

'Well, that's easy.' Gavin flapped once for emphasis. 'Something inimical to life. How far do we trust that mammoth?'

'Funny you should be the one asking,' Tristen said, which earned him a gesture of irritation that would have been an eye roll if the basilisk's eyes weren't concealed behind sealed lids.

'You know what I mean.'

The mammoth paused at the end of the corridor, trunk extended tentatively toward an interior lock. It stroked the handle. When Tristen and the rest hesitated ten steps back, the trunk hooked in an irritable beckoning gesture.

Apparently, 'go first' fell among a First Mate's duties. Tristen stepped up beside the mammoth. It brushed his gauntlet with its trunk, so the sensors reported leathery warmth, whiskery breath across the back of his hand.

In tones of exasperation, the mammoth calf said, '--'

'It wants me to open the lock,' Tristen said.

'I heard it,' Mallory answered. 'Are you going to do what it tells you?'

Tristen glanced at Gavin. The basilisk sat, contrite and collected, seemingly unaffected by any concern. Grand sacrifices were not beyond Cynric.

She was the one sibling Tristen could make no claims to ever having understood. Ruthless with herself and others, prescient, chill, and alien--and yet she had always seemed possessed of great compassion. A compassion that never stopped her from making terrible choices when she deemed them necessary.