Chill

Samael at the head of the group. Gavin was more material than the angel's makeshift avatar, so if there were traps, he would be more likely to trigger them. Moreover, Gavin wasn't so trusting as to leave the angel unsupervised to choose their path through such treacherous terrain.

Gavin flew close-winged, using atmosphere where it was available, surfing the edges of dangerous gravity surges and slick-sloped mass tunnels. This was a sport played by the winged youth of Engine, a chance to demonstrate prowess and an adolescent status game. But now, for him, with four wingless Exalt in tow, it proved nothing but an annoyance. The humans slowed him. Armor and symbionts or not, it was too easy to imagine them ruptured and twisted, oozing precious bodily fluids into the cold vacancy that surrounded them.

But his urge to caution was mitigated by the need for haste, the sense that, after days of pursuit, Arianrhod was almost within reach. Gavin was flogged onward not only by Tristen and Benedick's palpable desire for vengeance, but by the undeviating conviction that, if they did not catch Arianrhod now, everything would be lost. This was a woman to whom the murder of hundreds, Exalt and Mean, was an acceptable loss.

Surely, Gavin thought, in that choice she was very like the Builders.

This entire portion of the structure was acrawl with radiation--another legacy of the Breaking and the wreck of the world's mighty engines. It was why the material of the Broken Holdes had never been salvaged for use elsewhere, and why they remained here, a shattered memorial to the dead, isolated at the bottom of the world.

As Gavin and his companions moved into the outskirts of the holdes, they came to the fringes of the world, where the atmosphere had frozen in fabulous hexagonal spires and feathers along the bulkheads. No matter how many times Gavin witnessed the phenomenon, he never failed to be awed. Now, as the lamps of his companions lit the rimed warrens stretching before them, he extended his colony and looked. Not with his eyes, which were only weapons, but with the other senses, more delicate and more elaborate.

What they faced was an ice cave, a hoarfrost mansion. Crystals of oxygen and water vapor and nitrogen feathered from every surface until the whole holde stretched before them, refracting and reflecting the visible spectrum like the interior of a vast and labyrinthine geode.

A temple that had been cracked and shattered, rattled by unimaginable stresses. Broken loose, some of the shimmering spears and needles of nitrogen rock had settled against the trailing bulkheads; elsewhere their truncated stumps glittered glassily in the armorlight.

Gavin's wings did not rely on atmosphere. He could surf the electromagnetic spectrum just as easily. Samael strode through broken crystals and nitrogen snow without disturbing them at all except for what he twisted up, sparkling, into his whirlwind outline, and without any sign of being discommoded by the lack of gravity--or the moments when it reasserted itself. The brush of Gavin's wingtips, by contrast, stirred the crystals from where they had settled. He moved among frozen sprays, blue as blood, that skipped along his feathers soundlessly, for the atmosphere that could have carried the sounds was frozen.

But now, something else was shivering and scaling the nitrogen crystals. A vibration ran through the hulk of the world--a silent grinding whose source Gavin did not know.

Apparently, neither did any of the others, because when Tristen laid a hand on the wall and asked via radio, 'What's that?' the only answers to return were hesitant suggestions.

'I don't like it,' Chelsea said, with just the fingertips of her gloves resting on the ice. She knew how to handle herself in the absence of gravity; that slight contact stabilized her rather than sending her into a spin. 'I have a bad feeling, you know?'

Gavin knew.

It was a seemingly bottomless trek, but before too much longer he was sure the angel was leading them in the right direction. The spaces opened out and the rents gaped wide, some showing glimpses of superstructure or swatches of sky beyond. Here, any atmosphere not frozen directly to the bulkheads had long since been lost into unsounded deeps. They were crossing into the bosom of the Enemy now, even as the world still offered what frail shelter it was able.

When they came at last to the edge of the Broken Holdes, he spread his wings into a spiderweb net, to keep the humans at least temporarily safe within the hull of the world. There was no fanfare, no sense of demarcation. Rather, the corridor they traveled simply ended, abruptly, sheared off in ragged petals that curved out like a trumpet flower's bloom. Beyond, Gavin was aware of an elegant line of long cables, running whip-straight into the darkness, shuddering with each turn of the enormous winches that were taking them up. Lights burned out at their terminus, blurred and clouded by the nebula.

Samael stepped through Gavin's elaborated body, but the humans paused just within, drifting an easy arm's length from one another. One of them--Benedick--reached out and laced the fingers of his glove through Gavin's mesh.

'Shit,' Benedick said, in a flat and agonized voice such as Gavin had never imagined from him. Mallory grunted unhappy agreement.

'We can get there from here,' Tristen said. 'It's in a cage. Or we can wait. Judging by the action, it'll come to us.'

'Look at the damage,' Mallory said.

Tristen must have looked, though it was hard to tell through the armor what he might be observing at any given time. But he stilled like a corpse, and whispered, 'Oh.'

'I don't understand,' Chelsea said.

Gavin did not observe the signal that must have flown between the brothers, but he knew it had occurred, because it was Tristen who answered her as smoothly as if it had been prearranged. 'See the way that edge is blown outward?'

'Of course.'

'That's not an asteroid strike,' he said. 'It's conceivable, I guess, that an explosion in the engines could rip the metal back that way. But if it were, how in the world could an asteroid simultaneously destroy the engines and the main reactor, all the way down here, and critically damage the secondary reactor back in Engineering? That's some pretty good bowling, even on the part of God.'

'Freak accident,' Samael said, without looking back over his shoulder. 'The will of God.'

Gavin was beginning to get a feel for when Samael meant what he said, and when he was mouthing lines fed him by his program. Judging by the tone in Tristen's voice, he was, also.

Mallory countered, 'This blast came from within the world.'

Chelsea jerked hard enough to send her drifting. It didn't take her long to correct attitude, though, and when she did, she came back with a question. 'Sabotage?'

When it returned, Benedick's voice was dry again, so soft and assured that if Gavin hadn't been able to play back the recording, he could have believed he'd imagined the earlier stress and dismay.

'We were marooned out here on purpose, friends.'

'Great,' Mallory said. 'Who's going to tell Caitlin?'

19 take the world apart

Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

--Job 41:8, King James Bible

Tristen wedged his gauntlet into a broken crevice of the nitrogen rock and let it support his weight. It held him in the truncated end of the corridor, even if the contact transmitted the grinding of the winches into his armor and from there to his bones.

His native senses weren't enough to pierce the nebula, even with the assistance of his symbiont, but the armor managed better, providing heat signatures and a schematic drawn from the pattern of the running lights. Though he'd never seen it with his own eyes, he knew what he was looking for. There had been diagrams, holograms, extensive discussions. Out there, steadily being drawn closer, was an enormous, almost