Grail

administer to you.”

“Blackest necromancy,” Jordan said, licking her lips. “All right, then. It’s probably best over quickly?”

She did not look as if she were anticipating having the skills and selected memories of generations of Engineers downloaded into her colony. But the instant expertise was necessary to the job and would serve them well. She would accept it, as Caitlin had accepted it before her.

As Nova had accepted the ghosts of Dust and Samael—and Rien—when she grew out of the shards of other things into an Angel. As Perceval has swallowed down Ariane and Alasdair and Gerald to become Captain.

It was how you learned and grew and internalized the knowledge of those who had gone before you. No matter how bitter, you gagged it down, and hoped you didn’t choke.

“I find,” Benedick said, “that such things generally are. Sometimes time to consider only makes the whole thing worse.”

There was too much work to do to sit here missing Caitlin. He laid his hands flat on the lip of the tank, pushing himself to his feet. More than anything, he wanted to be with Tristen, hunting down Caitlin’s murderer and making him pay in blood and heartache for the thing he had taken from Benedick—a thing so profound that Benedick could not yet even feel its loss.

But he was too close and it was too soon. The shock and silence that echoed through the collapsed caverns of his self meant that he was exactly the wrong person to run the investigation—or even to participate in it. A bitter truth, but one an old man had too much experience not to accept. All those rules about objectivity existed for a reason.

Vengeance was a dish best served by those with no vested interest in seeing it carried out.

Benedick tipped his head back so that his skull dropped almost to his shoulders, easing the pain and tightness across his neck that even his colony could not dull.

Damn it all to hell. He had his own work, and this was the time to be doing it. “Our next item of business is to consider Engine’s role in coming events.”

Jordan glanced at the others. Benedick could see her coming to the realization that these people—all her elders—were waiting for her to speak first.

This was, he thought, a test.

She must have realized that as well, because he saw her take a breath. And then she said, in a voice that hardly shook at all, “As I see it, there are three primary possibilities. Either we will need to break the world down for materials—in the event that we are permitted to stay; we will need to refit her for war—in the event that we choose to fight for a place here; or we will need to repair and rebuild her, to make her spaceworthy again. That last option is actually the most straightforward, as this system does offer access to a wealth of material in the form of asteroids, icy comets, and water-ice particles in the rings of two of the giant planets—”

11 adapt

For the deed’s sake have I done the deed,

In uttermost obedience to the King.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Gareth and Lynette”

Before any final decision could be made, Danilaw and his cabinet had to take their deliberations to the people. Bad Landing was still a community small and tightly knit enough to manage nicely under government by direct democracy, and Danilaw secretly dreaded the day when that changed. The good news, he comforted himself, was that he was likely to be long in his grave—and certain to be long done with his stint as City Administrator—before the population reached a crisis point.

Unless they wound up having to assimilate a few hundred thousand genetically engineered space refugees. In that case, all bets were off.

Bad Landing’s infosphere was more than adequate to the task. Because of the strength of some of the opinions expressed, Danilaw made the executive decision not to release the entire tapes of the Cabinet session, but he did cause Captain Amanda’s objections to be summarized and appended, and he made the original broadcast from the Jacob’s Ladder available, as well as a translation prepared by Captain Amanda and vetted by himself—though neither would be available to anyone who did not first sit through Danilaw’s brief, trenchant, and carefully worded introductory speech. But sometimes listening to politicians blather was the price you paid for participating in the process of government.

He also got the remainder of his staff rousted out of bed and released from conflicting primary, secondary, and/or tertiary engagements so they could get started building an information bolus for packet-burst home to Earth. He’d probably have a course of action under way by the time the home government sent him an advisory note, but the newsfeeds would thank him for the consideration.

Danilaw didn’t delude himself. It wouldn’t be long before cracked and edited versions of the alien broadcast were all over the feeds; he’d be surprised if there weren’t a few already, given that the transmission had come unencrypted via primitive tech, and most of the people capable of receiving it had been Gain’s hobbyists. But he also knew that it didn’t hurt to get his own version out as fast as possible, and one of the things he could offer that the hobbyists couldn’t was production quality. His version would be the most complete and, frankly, the one that looked the best. And though he could try not to say the sorts of things that were making ledes all over the network— a ship out of legend has returned—Danilaw was confident that human nature would provide the rest.

That finished, he changed into the exercise clothes he kept in a locker in the residential and security barracks, took a seven-kilometer run with his morning-shift bodyguards, and went out to the tables by the water to share a cup of tea and some protein biscuits with the sunrise. He then showered in reclaimed water before falling into the bed set aside for his use.

He dreamed of muscular twelve-armed knots of dodecapodes spelling arcane runes across the ocean floor, and woke in a cold sweat of fear because he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him.

He rose from his bed and paced the cold floor in slippered feet, the fear-induced nausea retreating slowly as he walked back and forth before the portal, watching sunlight shift through the dappled water of Crater Lake. Bits of things—organic matter, sand—danced like dust motes in the rays, and as he watched, a sense of lightness filled him. The scarred dodecapus was the only one in evidence, smooshing its sucker-mouth across the outside surface of the port, scraping up algae and tiny crustaceans.

Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear—stranger-fear, fear of the unknown—even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the overactive fear response of the human amygdala to anything foreign or strange. Of course, a certain sense of self-preservation had to be left intact, and for some individuals whose baseline stability was particularly high, the whole threat-response endocrine package could be left intact without making them unsocializable.

Captain Amanda, the Free Legate, would be one such. It was a necessary precursor to the red jewel over her eye; no peace officer could afford to be too trusting. That was why she was so adamant about the potential dangers of the Jacobeans. And, still floating on that sense of goodwill, Danilaw reminded himself that it was her job to be so. He should respect her judgment. She had been left with those emotional cautions for a reason—to make her more able to protect the rest of her species from threats they might not otherwise recognize.

There had been species on Earth—island species, isolated populations—without fear of humans or any other predator. They were gone now, every dodo and Galapagos tortoise among them.

Danilaw smiled at the dodecapus, placing the palm of his hand against the portal near its limb. It curled a tentacle toward him, pressing sucker-feet against the transparency that divided them. A surge of fellow feeling and a fierce protectiveness filled him, warm and unmistakable as the sunlight. It had never learned to fear humans either, and if Danilaw had his way, it never would.

He’d find a way. He’d find a solution. For Fortune, for the Jacobeans, and for the future. He was suffused with