Grail

He was Tristen Tiger, and it was for this that he bore claws.

But he did not relish it as he once would have. He nodded once, and assured her, “I can lead a fight, my dear. Though the Tristen you knew of old is dead.”

It was a very good smile. “Good,” she said. “I never liked him.”

   Jordan of Engine had only met the girl from Rule one time, when Jordan had been young. Well, Jordan was still young, by Exalt standards. But she was seventy-odd years young, now, rather than seventeen.

She still remembered her, though, as clearly as she remembered everything else that had brought her here. The girl—Rien—had been pale, denuded, bare from the radiation and the healing tanks. Her skin had been flushed the pale aqua of a new colony, and—to Jordan’s Engineer’s eyes—she’d seemed unfinished.

Not just because the radiation of the River had caused her hair follicles to slip their shafts, leaving her egglike, fetal … neotenic. But because she was so close to baseline, physically, her body stocky and short by Engineer standards—a child’s untouched form. She had no wings, no fur, no extended digits, no modified eyesight —only four limbs and bare skin that would have been lightly prickled with vellus hair if she hadn’t been scathed by the River.

Jordan had been fascinated. The girl from Rule—Rien, Arianrhod’s daughter—had been so alien, and so diffident, and so strong. Jordan had wanted to make the girl from Rule her friend.

Some of that, Jordan knew, was because of the glamour that draped Rien—of which she seemed entirely unaware. Daughter of Prince Benedick, escapee from the enemy principality of Rule, survivor—hero, even—of a dramatic mission of mercy across the length and breadth of the world, she came to Engine clothed in seductiveness. But she was also young—Jordan’s age, then, more or less—and shy, and that made her approachable.

And then she’d been dead, before Jordan ever got a chance to do more than make her brief acquaintance, and the next thing Jordan knew, she was being awakened from the acceleration tank and told to report to Tristen Conn.

Tristen Conn, another name out of legend.

Jordan now remembered telling herself, then, that she had somehow walked into a story. In the stark light of the destination sun and some five decades later, she had to admit: the glamour wore thin after a while, and stories weren’t usually this messy. They had heroes and villains and clear-cut moralities, which was something she had come to realize was sadly lacking in the life she led under Tristen’s tutelage.

The one thing that never stopped seeming mythic, however, was Tristen himself. There were long passages of time when he might be just a commander, an acquaintance, possibly even a friend of sorts—if you could be friends with somebody who held your life in the palm of his hand. He would be jaded and calm, and Jordan in her role as his aide would find herself running interference, trying to protect him from importuning and unwelcome duties.

Until the times came when all the Chief Engineer’s, and the Captain’s, work at diplomacy would fail, and Tristen would rouse himself like a weary lion to go forth into whatever skirmish demanded his attention this time.

Then he assumed the myth like an old man putting on a stained uniform. The cloak of fable weighed him down and shaped him into Tristen Tiger, the warrior out of legend. Except Jordan would never have imagined from a storybook that a fighter who marshaled his forces with such heaviness of spirit and reluctance of hand could be what Tristen was on the battlefield: an ice-carved demon, without ruth or remorse.

The worst of the fighting had happened early on, and to Jordan’s surprise it wasn’t the radical elements among the Go-Backs who most resisted the re-alliance of Rule and Engine. Instead, a dozen splinter clans—all of which, as near as Chief Engineer Caitlin could reconstruct, had maintained a loose series of alliances and enmities and intermarriages throughout the Broken Years—had banded together and come through the reconstructed corridors of the world as an army, intent on taking control of their destinies. Jordan was privileged, if that was the right word, to be present in Engine when the heads of Rule and Engine were discussing their strategy.

“Or something,” Caitlin Conn said, shuffling images through the display tanks with flicks of her fingertips. The incoming army was massed in the Broken Holdes, and Tristen thought they would send another expeditionary force through the River, daring its lingering, though reduced, radioactivity in exchange for speed of transit.

“Everybody’s a critic,” Tristen answered, leaning over her in his armor, helmet still unsealed. “They’ve got us on numbers. And they’re Exalt and armed. Nova says they have flechette weapons.”

“And they are competent fighters.” Captain Perceval spoke through an avatar, like an Angel, which Jordan thought was probably appropriate. “Nova remembers that Rien and I encountered some of their warriors when we escaped from Rule. The colony called Pinion rescued us. I was quite ill at the time, and have no personal recollection.”

Her voice was collected as she spoke of fallen companions and great adventures, and Jordan watched her carefully, seeking a model for her own behavior. Like Rien, the Captain was Jordan’s own age, and if Perceval had been a knight-errant before she was Captain, and Jordan was only raised an Engineer and educated by Engine as an orphan after her mother was mind-killed and body-lost in a hull breach, well, there was something to aspire to.

Jordan was present in this conference as Tristen’s aide—sometimes he called her his conscience, which gave her an uncomfortable frisson of importance and disquiet both—and she knew she was expected to speak if she had questions to ask or points to raise. She’d asked Tristen about it alone, seeking his dispensation to discuss her issues with him in private, but he had been adamant. “Your input is as valuable to Caitlin or Perceval as my own. And it will be broadening for you to interact with them. Challenge builds confidence.”

So now she leaned forward and cleared her throat. “Why don’t we just use the ship to fight them? Nova is all ours, isn’t she? It’s not like the Breaking Times, when the angels were all at odds.”

“They’re a resource,” Tristen said. “They have intrinsic value. To waste them would be a last resort, since we have the resources to support them, however tenuously. There’s knowledge and souls we could never reclaim.”

“Are there reasons not to consume them?”

Caitlin and Tristen shared a glance, her eyebrows elevating. “You’d almost think she was a relative.”

Jordan had looked down at her shoes, glad her fur covered the heat of blood flushing her cheeks. Hastily, she controlled the autonomous response.

“Ethical issues aside,” Tristen said, “there’s a valuable tension in competition. Removing diversity may simplify things in the short run, but in the long term it tends to create bottlenecks—in ideas and cultures as well as in genetic diversity. Those lessen our adaptability.”

   Jordan tilted her head. “You want to keep them alive because they want to fight you?”

Tristen smiled his haunting, half-feral smile. “Can you think of a better reason? We may have to kill a few of the leaders to make our point, but diversity—ideological as well as biological—is the name of the game.”

Jordan’s armor was not new then—she had broken it in, and it liked her—but it was not the scarred and war-weary creature it would become. When she slipped into it, the reactive colloidal lining wrapped her like an embrace, cool at first, and warming rapidly as it molded to her body and absorbed and reflected her heat. The armor was a paradox, a cipher; it massed more than twice what Jordan did, and it made her feel strong and supported—but also light, friable, adrift, as if the strength of the machine could peel her out of her body and make her fly. Logically, she knew that some of it was the feeling of invulnerability, and some of it was the biochemical support.

It didn’t change the sensation.

She stroked a gauntleted hand down the vambrace and felt the armor purr at her attention. Inanimate objects could be so needy. She turned to Tristen with a spring in her step—and that of the armor, too, as it was excited by the prospect of an outing, though it was naive and not as apprehensive as Jordan at the equally imminent prospect of a fight.

Tristen had come to the meeting in his own pristine white suit of mail—a clear message to anyone with eyes that his understanding of the situation implied a martial solution. But he still stayed to watch Jordan kit herself with an impassive eye, suggesting one adjustment to her armor’s program. That done and all the checks completed to his satisfaction, he allowed her to help him seat Mirth’s sheath in its clasps across his back, adjusting the angle of the blade with great solemnity. He carried an array of nonlethal ordnance—flashbangs, stickies, a sonic stun unit, and extra power cells augmented the armor’s intrinsic microwave projectors until they could be considered