Chill

'Samael,' she said aloud to the still air of the bridge. 'Make current your archives, angel. Back yourself up and make ready for combat. It is time for you to become useful.'

Gavin made a bower of his wings, and folded the humans within, the angel without. They fell together, a dagger plunged across the bosom of the Enemy, aimed straight for the unraveling cage beyond. Tristen moved forward in his embrace, foremost of the incarnate intelligences he protected, suspended like a figurehead at the expanded basilisk's prow. Gavin felt the prickle of Mirth's presence, the blade naked and aware in Tristen's gauntlet, and drew himself gently further from its slicing edge.

Not an unblade, no, but sufficient to the day.

The other humans huddled in silence within Gavin--Mallory bloodless and chill inside unfamiliar armor; Chelsea vibrating with excitement and youth; Benedick still and calm, collected within himself like a tree. Ahead, Samael broke trail, making of himself a thin wedge ablating in rainbow tatters of light as the Leviathan's forces wore away at his boundaries. Gavin gave the angel what he could--resources, cycles, material--but he was a small torch, and he didn't have much to spare.

'Weary,' Benedick said, inside his armor, as if he had read Gavin's thoughts. 'We are weary. It's the nature of war.'

'The war's only begun,' Chelsea said.

'This war is as old as I am, child. This is just an installment.' Tristen sounded not scornful, but exhausted. 'You'll be tired of it soon.'

'Brace for impact,' Gavin said. 'I can only do this once.'

He opened his wings, releasing the humans to their trajectory. Chelsea, Benedick, and Mallory initiated burns, curving in flanking arcs, while Tristen huddled small, bent into himself, silent and still and undeviating from the course Gavin had set.

Steeling himself against the energy drain, Gavin opened and focused his eyes.

The savage light of the basilisk's gaze sliced through the disintegrating cage surrounding Leviathan, struck the beast's mottled hide, and left a cloud of dust and vaporized stone to sublimate on the empty breath of the Enemy. Tristen plunged through it, an abrasive hiss caressing the skin of his armor, the roughness transmitted as a prickling scrape. He resisted the urge to block his face with his arm to protect it--the armor was perfectly capable of keeping him safe, but all those animal reflexes didn't know any better--and instead extended both hands before him, left fist clenched on Mirth's hilt and right palm bracing the pommel. He made himself a blade, a living spear, a mass driven behind an infinitely fine point.

Around him, colonies sparked and glittered, his allies and family risking themselves to shape a distraction. Tristen allowed them only the peripheries of his attention. He knew where he was aiming, and his aim must be perfectly true. Something shattered, spinning, on his left. He feared it was armor; he feared more it was flesh.

He did not glance aside.

One thousand meters. Seven fifty. Five hundred. Trajectory confirmed, Tristen commenced his burn.

Benedick had never expected to find himself defending an angel. But here he was, fighting at Samael's side-- fighting as Samael's vanguard!--when Samael was far more adapted to this particular conflict than Benedick himself. The angel had to stay safe a little longer, though, and so he huddled inside Mallory, and Benedick defended two intelligences in one form. As Benedick groped through the swirling clouds of dust and nanotech, he had no difficulty losing himself in the rhythm and savagery of conflict. It was his grace and shame, he thought, that he could always find peace and clarity in the midst of ruin.

'I see him!' Gavin said sharply, in Benedick's ear and for Samael's hearing. Benedick held his concentration, turned, and parried the foray of a voracious colony with an arm of his own symbiote. It tore at him, but Benedick reinforced, surrounded, and a moment later Chelsea was there to back him up, her colony a formless destroying presence amid the raging, invisible skirmishes that surrounded them.

Further back, a twist of energy glittered, elusive in the light-wreathed textures of the nebula. Driving for them, identifiable by the taste of its energy signature as the wreck of an angel. Also, it was careful to stay well back from the front where Nova and the alien colonies battled, as marked by sparks and dazzling scars. Benedick understood that it didn't dare touch an angel who could relay direct instructions from the Captain.

But it could come and fight them--or so it was meant to think.

'Asrafil,' Mallory said. As the angel closed the distance, the necromancer's armor began to vomit forth Samael, in the form of ropes of savage light.

Gavin threw himself into the fray, linked with Samael's colony, driving as much of himself into the battered angel as he dared. I am behind you, Angel. Take what you will. Drive through.

Samael's acceptance flowed back down the connection, his determination and the flare of outrage as Asrafil spotted him and began to withdraw. Spurn your Captain, construct?

But challenged, Asrafil only fled faster. For a moment, Gavin pitied him--wouldn't everyone prefer freedom of choice?--but then something rose up in him, a long-concealed subroutine of betrayal, and he leapt forward into Samael, through him, pushing forward though hostile colonies frayed his edges and gnawed his wings to electronic marrow.

It didn't hurt, not as Gavin understood and half remembered human hurting. But it felt strange, and his reflex was to withdraw, defend himself, pull close. Instead he made himself the head of an arrow, with Samael the shaft behind.

He'll take us apart, Gavin said, just to hear Samael's mocking laugh. Within him, he felt something ticking. Sizzling. As if the touch of Samael's colony under these conditions of war had activated a long-quiescent program, and now they were conjoined--partnered--in ways Gavin had never anticipated.

Then he'll get what he deserves, the angel answered. Gavin felt Samael's long- archived memories flaring bright. A plan, something held in abeyance and secret, seared through their conjoined identity.

Together, they gathered themselves and plunged into Asrafil's sphere of control. Asrafil fled, drawing up his skirts, but he could not run fast nor far enough. They burned into him, broke through his wards, and ... ... detonated.

Asrafil screamed as the virus downloaded into his core.

Leviathan was hot at his heart, a simmering heat from which Tristen's armor offered only partial protection. The heat was an aid as much as a torment, though, for Tristen let his armor boots adhere to stone, and it gave him the leverage to hew at Leviathan's core as if he hacked with an ax. Chunks of stone shining with a blue foxlight sprayed out of the hole he chopped, came apart into swirls of matter as the battling colonies appropriated and consumed them.

Through those same soles of his boots, Tristen heard Leviathan screaming. And something else, like a shard of something deadly and foreign lodged in the flesh of the beast. He could feel Arianrhod in there, feel how Leviathan had surrounded and subsumed her. And more, he felt her moving now, coming to the surface, sent for him full of the alien poison that, in altered form, touched his blood as well.

He raised Mirth once more, and the rock before him splintered out, spinning away in cascades and shards, scattering off the faceplate of his helm and chipping the reflective surface of his armor. A swath of ebony cut free of the Leviathan's hide--an unblade truncated but still painfully familiar--and a woman stood free behind it, dragging herself up in the hole he had made. Someone caught his wrist in a grip harder than the stone he swung against.

--Grandfather,--Arianrhod said.--Enough. I speak for the beast.--

Perceval's awareness flinched back, confused, withdrawing. If she were wearing her body, she would have windmilled her arms, but as it was she merely tumbled in confusion, out of control, disoriented, seeking something on which to focus her stumbling mind. She slammed up against something hollow and malevolent, circling the confines of her body, her own mind. Walling her out of her own senses and awareness.

She looked up in that unspace and saw the shadow of Ariane Conn smiling down on her again.

Her features had changed, but Tristen knew her. He knew the way she moved, and even if the skin and bones were different, he knew the way the bones of her face lay under the skin.

Something else enfolded her as Tristen turned. She was naked to the Enemy, blue and ablaze, but there was more to it than just her energy, or her colony, or the Leviathan's contamination. She was wrapped in white light, a cowl like a raptor's beak, a cloak like the mantle of wings, old Charity a painful dark rip in all that brightness. It