Grail

especially when one was Exalt, but you had to draw a line somewhere.

Nova had told Tristen and the others that, before Acceleration, this area had been inhabited by a tribe of about seventy Means, operating with some salvaged technology and a lot of scrounging, myth, and ingenuity. Fifty or so of them had survived Acceleration, and all had been Exalted by Caitlin’s decision to release the symbiont colonies into the worldwide ecosystem. This act, intended to preserve the greatest possible diversity of life, was bound to have consequences—anticipated and otherwise.

Nova’s ease of information retrieval from anywhere in the world was a side effect of more recent events. Having reclaimed the world’s neural networks and integrated the memories of the splintered angels she’d consumed, she had access—finally—to an enormous database of useful information.

Tristen entered the anchore where the acceleration tanks were sequestered and smiled to find the reality matched the schematics Nova had provided. The map might not be the territory, but it was amazing how much difference it made to have a working Angel on your side.

The tribespeople had not yet been released from their acceleration tanks, which Tristen thought a mercy— fighting them here, from one cramped anchore to the next, would have meant killing each individual and dragging the bodies from their setts one by one like the corpses of dug-in badgers. The cost in lives—his people and theirs —would be staggering.

Tristen’s lieutenant, Jordan—one of the Engineers, and a flyer, dressed in gray-gold armor over her own gray-gold spotted fur and with her membranous wings folded tight against her back, contained in a bulge of the protective suit—directed the opening of each pod while Tristen stood back and observed. He was clad also in his armor, one hand resting on haunted Mirth’s gray hilt. He would be the first person each awakening passenger spoke with, while they were bleary-eyed and confused. He would treat them with kindness and authority and, with luck, a few of them would imprint on him.

It would make it easier to keep them alive in the long run.

Jordan glanced at him, her helmet unsealed and the cowl retracted. He gave the nod, and the pod creaked and groaned, lights across its surface cycling green to warning amber. It made a sad, small, stretching noise. A slow-trickling leak oozed around the hatch. But the hatch did not open. Three more lights blinked green to amber, and two of the amber ones blinked red.

Life support interrupted.

Exalt or not, they now had only minutes to free the inhabitant before she died. He could have drawn Mirth and slashed the stuck pod wide, but he preferred to leave that as a last resort. Better to limit the damage to something more easily repairable, and give the enlisted men something to feel useful about.

“Break it open,” Jordan said, before Tristen needed to intervene. Command was good for her, and she was good for it. Tristen could imagine enjoying himself in a role as figurehead, surrounded by eager and talented young persons who did all the hard work while he basked in reflected—and retrospective—glory.

Two more Engineers leapt across the grated, graded deck, one armed with a forked lever bar and the other with a cutter. The cutter cheeped and sniffed both lock and hinge sides as the Engineer pointed it at the hatch, then put out burr-tipped paws and worked them under the lip where the recessed hinges lived. A sharp whine filled the air. Tristen saw Jordan’s mouth compress as she kept herself from wincing. For him, the impassivity of command— the impassivity of being a Conn—was habit long enough established that it took an effort to break.

One did not show weakness when one was Alasdair Conn’s child.

The door broke abruptly at the top hinge, sagging, and the pod spilled its gelatinous fluid in a syrupy flood that wet Jordan and the two Engineers to the knee. The Engineer with the lever leaned in around the cutter, which was shaking its wet paws in grave distaste, and hooked the fork through something. He pushed mightily, straining until Jordan stepped forward and leaned her slight weight on his. The lever rotated on the fulcrum; an ancient tool, like the wheel and the spindle: refined but never bettered.

A creak, a sigh, and the pop of failing metal warned Tristen to be ready. He reached out and caught the cover as it toppled, the falling weight cracking the latch and sending a bit of metal shrapnel ricocheting off one Engineer’s armor.

It wasn’t heavy. Or rather, it was heavy, but Tristen’s armor caught the brunt of it, so the weight that reached his muscles felt floaty and supported, springy. He smiled to himself, amused at how fast he’d gotten used to wearing armor again after decades in nothing but his own skin and strength. It was so easy to grow accustomed to comforts and conveniences, and so much work to adapt to their lack.

He set the hatch aside.

Jordan had already caught the woman within as she folded forward like an unsupported rag doll, and was clearing her mouth, pressing ropes of gelid blue-tagged acceleration fluid out of her. One of the Engineers dropped a pad over the wet grating and Jordan lowered their patient on her side so her lungs could drain. There was no blood, except for faint cobalt streaks running through the aquamarine of the tank fluid—whatever injuries she had sustained in Acceleration, her new symbiont and the time in the tank had worked their magic, and now she was well. Or rather: well, except for the drowning.

The symbiotic fluid crawled out of her under its own power for ten seconds before she roused enough to choke and vomit. Then it came faster, sliding through the grate to a collection pool, from whence it could migrate to holding tanks for sterilization and storage. The patient pushed herself up on her arms as Tristen came forward to crouch beside her. She spat once more, and Tristen saw the bluish cylinder of her tongue protrude.

His helmet was retracted so she could see his face and perhaps be less alarmed than she might if confronted by an armored colossus. Tristen laid a hand on her shoulder. He slid the other under her arm to support her to her feet.

Her accent strange, her head still hanging behind ropes of hair, she said, “Thank you.” She lifted her gaze, dragging it up the length of Tristen’s body from boots to face, and recoiled. “… demon.”

   In the giddy hour of Leviathan’s release, it seemed that all the world must bow before the allied might of the family Conn, now as of old. Tristen had never fooled himself that what must follow would be easy. But he had fooled himself, a little, on other matters. He had permitted the folly of optimism, committed the sin of hope, and prayed at the outset that there would not be too much blood.

There was blood.

No matter how carefully he awakened the survivors, no matter how patiently it was explained to them that the world was healed, that a Captain had come among them again, an Angel at her side—oh, they were grateful at first, of a certainty. Grateful, or cowed, for some tribes still remembered by legends the house of Conn and the tales of Tristen Tiger and the Breaking of the world.

But the art of governance—the basis of civilization—is the art of compromise, and it requires an honoring of the social contract by governed as well as governors. No tribe could have everything they wanted under the Captain’s custodianship—sometimes because it was not feasible, sometimes because it was not mete, and sometimes because it was not moral. And so the small grudges grew, when the reign of a Captain did not mean a golden age.

Or rather, in Tristen’s view, colored by his memories of Gerald and Alasdair, it did seem a golden age, those first years under Perceval’s care. Though resources were sparse and privation great, he thought the Captain—advised and assisted by himself, Mallory, Nova, Cynric, Caitlin, Samael, Chelsea, Head, and Benedick—served well. But there were those who seemed to believe that a Captain in the chair should mean their every whim fulfilled, and that Tristen found problematic.

He no longer believed that war was the answer to ills, or even to rebellion, necessarily. For all of him, he could not remember why he’d ever thought in the first place that war could be made to serve any hand without twisting back to strike deep at the wielder, like a viper swung by the tail. He had become, he realized with some irony, something of a pacifist. Not an extremist in that view; he would defend himself when he saw no other opportunity.

But neither could he always see alternatives. The world must be saved, and to be saved it must be united. There was a parable of sons and sticks that seemed applicable.

And so the time passed, and Tristen made himself useful, and tried to keep his claws sheathed as consistently as was safe, and possible.

   No more than two years later, Tristen had met with Cynric and Perceval on the Bridge. (Nova was there as well, as she was everywhere.)

He had called the meeting to discuss with them what could be done to preserve the all-essential unity of the