She slapped one hand against the top of the niche, armored fingers curling into the bulkhead, denting metal and cracking carbon. “Three,” she said into her com, certain Caitlin would count and move with her.
And move they did. Perceval came around the corner on the tether of her arm, a spray of smart darts from her gun hand leading. At the top of her swing she released her hold on the bulkhead and arced into the air. She landed in a crouch, stuck it—or her armor stuck it for her—and came up pelting forward, whooping inside her helmet until she made her own ears ring. Caitlin’s footsteps banged through the deck behind her—soundless in vacuum, but Perceval could feel each impact through the plating, and she let the shock waves lift her up and hurl her forward, adding impetus to her own charge.
They were two, and Nova was with them. Tristen and his troops were coming. But they were Conns, and nothing was going to stand before them.
Perceval felt the impacts on her armor as it deflected the intruders’ darts from its corona and its carbon- ceramic surface. None struck where they could harm her, though; her armor was as state-of-the-art as these people’s countermeasures. They’d have to hit square to hurt, and every ounce of her armor’s tech and ability were devoted to making sure that did not happen.
The gray-suited five already had the Bible and its case through the rent they’d ripped in the corridor wall; Perceval could see it being hauled away with cables and tug drones. Only two were firing at her and Caitlin, crouched behind EM shields that offered a modicum of soft cover. The other three, engaged in moving their prize, did not even glance over their shoulders.
Perceval came in among them not so much like a fox among the chickens as like a wolf among enemy wolves. Her armor’s corona—as much an extension of Nova as not—struck the EM shields and sparked, raining dead nanotech in a velvety dust. Perceval leaned forward, knowing she was a target and hoping the crackle of crisping electronics was sufficient protection from more darts. Her armor traded dart launchers for ceramic blades.
“Shifting resources,” Nova said. “One moment more—”
And then Perceval’s mother came up behind her and pushed.
With the addition of Caitlin’s mass and armor to her own, they were through. Perceval’s blades sliced the first intruder’s armor deftly—two incapacitating cuts and a coup de grace between the eyes and out the back of the helm. This one might come back as the silent dead, if her colony were up to regenerating the damage, but she would never inhabit herself again.
Caitlin did not engage the second rearguard. Nor had Perceval expected her to. While Perceval spun back to catch a blow meant to decapitate—she felt it ring through her armor to the shoulder, despite the reactive colloidal padding—Caitlin unshipped herself and her unblade, diving into the bosom of the Enemy after the ones who had fled.
What happened next, Perceval did not see, but she could hear her mother’s harsh breathing over the thumps and shudders of her own combat. The gray knight—and Perceval had no doubt after one passage of arms that this one was indeed a knight—rained blows down upon her with the will of an Angel, until Perceval was fighting for her life. She let herself be beaten back, step by step, taking her opponent’s measure and letting her armor have the rearguard.
The one she fought was good, but Perceval thought she was better—though there was only one way to be absolutely sure.
“Captain,” Nova said in tones of urgency. “Your mother requires assistance.”
By the strength of her arm and the strength of her armor, Perceval swung and feinted high. She let momentum turn her, bringing that arm down for a parry that let the enemy’s left-hand blade slide past her midriff so close it left a bright span on her armor. The spin extended Perceval’s left arm, and while the blade on her gauntlet was not so sharp as an unblade, it cracked the enemy’s armor and sternum with a moment’s resistance.
A jerk, one good shake, and monofilament parted ceramic and carbon and titanium like so much doped fabric pulled down a razor blade. Blood spurted only briefly; the heart squeezed once, frantically, as Perceval’s blade passed through it, then no more. A fine blue snow brushed her helm; the blood froze and crazed from her vambrace and blade.
Perceval turned from the dead to see where Caitlin and the other three gray knights were. Only when she came up to the edge of the rent in the world did she realize her com was silent. She could not hear her mother breathing.
5
harder things, and worse
The Queen earnestly begged that the blood of her brother might be
atoned for by the death of his murderer
Nova called out, and Tristen came. At a dead run, his armor assembling around him as his boots hammered the decking. It was dangerous to move—let alone violently—while the shell constructed itself, but the urgency in the Angel’s call left no time to dally. And Tristen knew that no matter how he taxed them to wait for assistance, the odds of Caitlin and Perceval doing so were slim to the point of vanishing.
So he hustled. He was careful, and he got lucky, and his armor drew only a little blood. The gauntlets sealed themselves across his palms, and he dragged Mirth from its scabbard with a rasp in the last of the outside air.
The air locks and pressure doors sealing the segments of corridor he reached next slowed him, but they were also advance warning that something had gone terribly wrong—if he needed anything more than the Angel’s status reports and information feed. After her first call for help, Nova did not urge him to hurry; there would have been no purpose to it. He passed through the gates and Nova sealed them again behind, and then he found himself beside only two unmoving bodies—the blue blood frozen onto unfamiliar gray armor—in a corridor open to the Enemy. Over the com, Perceval shouted for her mother.
“Caitlin,” Nova said in his ear.
From her tone, he knew the news was bad. Her virtual overlay urged him along the accessway to the breach. He laid a gauntlet on the blown-in edge, the world’s curled shell already furling back into place as Nova worked her repairs.
He nerved himself, adjusted his chemistry, and pulled himself up through the breach and into the endless chill of the Enemy. Years had softened his fear of the bottomless spaces outside but not ended it, but he still would not allow that fear to master him.
There against the darkness, before the stark, sun-glazed skeleton of the world, Tristen witnessed the figure of a woman in white armor arched around the flame-colored armor that housed the body of her mother. Over them both bent the figure of an Angel, mourning.
A slowly expanding halo of glittering ice-shards, blue as sapphire with the blood of Tristen’s sister, spun out in all directions. Tristen had seen too many dead siblings in a long life. Even from here, he could tell there was no hope.
He caught himself one-handed on the edge of the hole in the world before he could drift clear, Mirth in his other gauntlet—useless now—leaned out into the shallows of a bottomless Enemy, and took a breath that squeezed his chest against the inside of his armor.
He didn’t need to ask. He was the First Mate and he knew.
Caitlin Conn was dead, and Caitlin’s ancient unblade—which had once been his, and which had been used to kill her utterly—was gone. Vanished along with those who had killed his sister, and whatever else they’d come to claim.
Tristen swallowed, armor tight against his throat. Sword still at the ready—they could return—he pushed off from the hull of the world.
Inside his helmet, inside the bones of his skull, Perceval wept savagely—until Nova, protecting her Captain’s dignity, hushed the feed.
