Chill

secured regions, colonies arcing and flashing as they exploded one against the others.

Something caught Tristen's wrist. He jerked inside the armor, swinging hard enough to wobble Gavin's stability. The basilisk squawked protest over his intercom, but Tristen didn't relax until he saw it was Chelsea, with Benedick just beyond her stabilizing Mallory. The necromancer did not seem at home in the absence of gravity. Behind them, Samael had faded into near invisibility, evident only as a shadow against green fog.

'I think it's pissed,' the angel said.

'Of course it's pissed,' Mallory answered. 'We killed and ate its girlfriend.'

Samael smiled benevolently through cold-withered lips. 'The Captain and Nova are under attack on the bridge, Prince Tristen. We should return the engagement and draw its attention if we would protect them.'

The man-thick cables that had bound Leviathan's cage were evaporating--faster than the superstructure of the world, for there was nothing close to defend them--and the cage itself had begun to exfoliate in layers, like peeling bark.

Malignant colonies. Ones Leviathan had either subverted or generated. The war was on the nano level now, if it had ever left it. A war that Gavin and Samael could help fight, and so could the knights-errant, as long as their armor remained uncorrupted.

'Tristen,' Benedick said, faceless behind the mirrored gold of his faceplate. 'You have the sword.'

Unbidden, Tristen's hand stole to Mirth's hilt. 'Yes,' he said.

Without another word needed, the plan was formed. Tristen turned from his brother, the mesh of Gavin's wings de-adhering to neatly release him. He let Mirth slide into his hand, for a moment missing Charity. An unblade would serve him better, now. It would part the Leviathan's flesh like pulp, find its own way to basal nuclei or central circulatory cores like the tool for fatal surgery that it had been.

Mirth was as sharp, but whatever will it cradled was not the will of a scalpel. Tristen would have to find its targets on his own.

Or maybe not.

'Gavin,' he said, as the basilisk collapsed itself from a net to a cord, binding Mallory to Chelsea for now. 'Or Samael. Which one of you knows the anatomy of that thing over there?'

'Key,' Samael said, leaving Tristen to roll his eyes in exasperation. But he recited it again and felt the angel stretch through the colony contact like a man popping his spine.

'Schematic,' Samael said, and the pattern of the Leviathan's body lit up Tristen's heads-up display.

'Great. Where's it keep its brain?'

'That,' Samael said, 'would appear to be the problem.'

When Perceval opened her eyes again, it was five hundred years before. She stood under olive trees, on a lawn mown plush as velvet, and a woman draped in white robes and swagged with chains was being led before her.

Perceval smiled inside, but she would not let her lips curve. No one must see her mirth at an execution--no one except the executed, who would know it without being shown.

The woman knelt, her straight brown hair slipping apart to bare her nape as her head was lowered. A man came up behind her. Benedick, a naked unblade in his hand.

'Last words?' Perceval said to her daughter. As if in a dream, she knew what she would see--

No. Not Perceval. Perceval had never stood on this condensation-damp grass and watched her child be led out to slaughter.

Cynric lifted her chin for the last time. 'May you have what peace you earn, Father.'

Alasdair who had been Perceval would not let the pressure of Cynric's gaze force her back. She hooked a hand, and Benedick stepped up alongside her. He closed his eyes and opened them again when he lifted the unblade. Of course. Benedick would not spare himself the sight; he would rather make the blow true.

How perfectly like him. Alasdair who had been Perceval had raised him well.

Cynric rested her forehead upon the ground. Benedict passed the blade through her neck without seeming to exert any force at all. Blood fountained, and Alasdair who had been Perceval was splashed, because he would not step back from that either.

No, Perceval said to Alasdair, who stretched inside her, wrestling for the memories first Ariane and now Perceval had eaten. Wrestling for control. This is not me. This is not something I would have chosen.

That was not my father, not really. That was somebody he was before. That was not my father, and this is not me.

Cynric's blood tasted like the sea. Perceval only realized when she licked her lips what she was savoring, and that she had never, in her own self, tasted of the sea.

The taste of it brought her home again, but it could not put her in control.

Nova fought, and in this field of combat Perceval could do nothing but observe. Alienated from her own body, which slumped in the Captain's chair all but untenanted, Perceval watched the angel's drive and dance, the way Nova warded her resources and protected herself like a fighter born. But it was secondhand, too fast and too sharp for even Exalt reflexes to follow. This was a war of angels, limited only by the speed of light, in which mere augmented flesh and mind could not compete.

Still, Perceval's focus lay with Nova: elsewhere, externalized. Into the silence of that concentration, unbidden, Perceval's brain offered the thought: The last Captain is the one who put us here. On purpose.

This was planned.

Unfair. Perceval didn't know it was the Captain who made that decision. And she was not ready to dive back into her morass of clinging memories to see if she could find out. Had he known what the astrogators knew, that there was no destination? That the whole world was just a blind hand groping in the dark?

She didn't know it hadn't been the Captain, either. And it had been he who authorized Cynric's brutalization of the Leviathan.

Just like a Conn, she thought. Eating everything in sight.

But she was a Conn. She was a Conn who had consumed Conns, who had eaten the remains of Commodores and Captains before her. Before it was inhabited by others, Perceval Conn had known her own mind. And that thought ... did not feel like hers.

Nor did it feel like it came from any of the clamoring presences with her--Ariane, Alasdair, Gerald, and behind them the elder ancestors whose memories were not preserved in the colony. Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel Conn: Conns back to when the family had held another name, when human life was brief and frail, and human memory subject to the shifts and winds of neurochemistry. How subjective the world must have been, then, when no one could remember the same events, and nobody would remember them for long.

It was not Ariane's thought. It was not Alasdair's or--Perceval would guess, strictly on the basis of history-- Gerald's. But she thought she knew that tone, the arch sarcasm, the lilting intelligence. She could almost hear the voice in her ear, a real voice--

Far to ship-south, Nova whirled and twisted, warred against the Leviathan. She had long since abandoned all semblance of an avatar and now reserved her energy for things more important than appearances. Perceval could just about image her fight, pull it up from the microscopic scale. Nova was a hive of bees beset by a swarm of wasps, and the wasps were driving her back, pushing her from her boundaries, and disassembling the world as they forced its angel to withdraw.

Just like a Conn. Eating everything in sight.

A voice Perceval knew. Oh, no. Rien.

She realized she'd said the name out loud only when she heard it in her own voice. She choked it back, though her lips shaped it a second time, disoriented and startled to find herself in her body, bound to the slow, helpless meat that would not let her save her ship, her angel, or her love.

Nova, she thought, then silenced that as well. The angel did not need her distractions.

She needed her help. And Perceval had to figure out how to get it to her. Perceval stood, suddenly, knees wobbly. Blood stung in her feet and calves, circulation returning. She'd been still too long. It felt good to stretch into her neglected meat--good, and painful.