It had become easy to forget the Angel was there—something that never would have happened fifty years before. But now she was as neutral as blood-warm distilled water—a part of the environment. Unremarkable.
“The Builders believed in evolution over all,” Perceval said, “except where they were hypocrites about it. We’ll adapt. If they can be convinced to accept us, we’ll find a niche and exploit it.”
On his indrawn breath, Tristen seemed to swell. She felt him hold it and release before he spoke with resigned formality. “Well, if it comes right down to it, how do they propose to stop us from coming down? We are a war they cannot win.”
“I do not want to kill them,” Perceval said. “I want to prove to them that we, too, have grown from what we were.”
Tristen nodded. “Good luck,” he said.
It was not sarcasm.
While Perceval prepared herself for the task she so patently dreaded, Tristen took it upon himself to contact the most trusted members of the command crew and alert them to the possibility of a rogue revenant at large. He called Benedick in advance of any other, as per his Captain’s wishes. But then he contacted Mallory and Head, amused that his confidence did not extend first to any member of the Conn family but rather to creatures created by them, or evolved in response to the extremes of their creations. Head was a living tool, wrought by Cynric and blessed with free will to a specific task, and Mallory was an immortal with a head stuffed to creaking with the dead—memories recorded and transferred with Conn-derived alien technology: the colonies Cynric had stolen and reengineered.
Mallory took his suggestion calmly, and—surprising Tristen—suggested that the Angel Samael not yet be informed. Given Samael’s history with Ariane, it was probably wisest—and it would prevent Perceval having to waste time and risk unwanted consequences in inhibiting him from taking unguided action against the revenant, if he could find her. The search itself, Tristen knew, could prove quite adequately destructive.
Head surprised him more. He would have thought hir beyond overwrought emotional demonstrations, possibly beyond fear. But the mention of Ariane’s name and the suggestion that she might be returned brought blanched cheeks and denials. Head had known Ariane better than any of them, and dealt with her more personally and in more detail, which could account for a good deal of hir refusal to believe that the most sociopathic of Conns had returned to wreak havoc again.
When sie had done wringing hir hands, however, sie folded them together and said grimly, “Well, the unlamented Princess Ariane aside—begging your pardon, Prince Tristen—it’s clear that, whatever else is going on, we’ve a bad enemy at large and no mistake.”
“No mistake at all,” Tristen responded. Head might not be overly good at anticipating, identifying, and accepting threats, but sie was more than competent to handle the actual disaster in progress with aplomb. “I trust you will be alert to any evidence.”
“Alert and more than alert,” Head said. “Prince Tristen—”
“Yes, Head?”
“Take care of my Captain.”
The first decision Perceval faced was the need to choose a place in which to work. There would have been a certain poetry in using the Captain’s chair, when Ariane had fought with such monomania to claim it, but that chair had too much other and bloody symbolism, even if Perceval only meant to use it as an icon of authority. And Perceval—who had fought her cousin twice to claim it—found she wished to face Ariane this time not as Captain, not even as hopeful claimant to the chair, but as her mother’s daughter.
Vengeance repaired nothing. It replaced nothing. It wrought nothing anew—except the vengeance itself. It was only vengeance, and the splinter of Ariane that Perceval carried within herself was not even the splinter that had planned the attack, carried it out, and killed Caitlin Conn—all assuming Tristen was correct in his deductions, which was by no means a given.
But both fragments were related; both were remainders of the same woman who had destroyed Rule, who had crippled Perceval and shamed her, who had set in motion so many of the schemes and treacheries that Perceval and her family and allies were still paying for. They must share continuity of experience to a certain point, and at that point—where they had divided—lay the key to uncovering where the wicked Conn’s wicked twin was hid.
Perceval left her Bridge and walked instead down the lengthy access corridor. Measured footsteps rang on the deck, carrying her past the niche where the paper Bible sat no longer—
It carried her down. Well, not down, precisely, but in, further toward the world’s center of mass and rotation—which the Bridge lingered close beside already.
And there, at the world’s center of gravity, Perceval walked across the naked breast of the Enemy, herself naked and unarmored. She did not need to travel far. Just a revolution or two, until she found a small, dead-chilled anchore, its deep seams and cracks still full of traces of ice that had not yet sublimated. It had no hatches, no air locks, no visible means of entrance. It had nothing but the chains and cables that connected it to the world—links thick as Perceval’s waist; cables braided of carbon monofilament and titanium—and the weight of ice within.
Trivial enough matters to the Captain of the world.
Perceval laid her hand flat on the surface of the capsule. Moist skin would have frozen there, but Perceval’s skin was dry. “Nova,” she said. “Open this and clear a space inside for me to enter.”
“That was—” Nova said, and if the Angel were not a program, Perceval fancied she would have been able to hear the distaste in her voice.
“Dust’s place,” Perceval agreed. He had never brought her here, preferring the Bridge and the cargo bays for her education, but a wise Captain knew her ship.
“The old computer core,” Nova said, in the voice of one intentionally amending another’s statement when that statement has unintentionally given offense.
Perceval let herself smile, just the corners of her mouth turning upward. It rewarded the Angel when the Angel was making an effort to chivvy her from her brown study. And when Perceval would not be chivvied, such as now. “Let me in.”
Nova made no argument. Her hesitation before following the instruction was so slight it did not even begin to approximate disobedience—so slight nothing less than an Exalt would have even noticed it. Then the Angel spread her arms—a theatrical but dramatic gesture.
Seemingly instantaneously, layers of metal and earth and circuitry and ice began to divide, split, and peel back like the petals of an impossibly robust and complex flower. Ice sparkled in breathless drifts across the darkness of the Enemy, pollinating nothing. Some of the piping had once been warm, but no water flowed through the space now. It was cold and empty.
At last, a stark chamber stood open to space, honeycombed with frozen water. The remnants of the world’s hydrostatic computer core, with its embedded atomic-level read-only memory. The remnants of the physical body of Jacob Dust, the ship’s library.
The ship’s memory, until Nova had eaten him.
This was where he had been born.
No one came near, not even the Angel. Perceval moved toward the center of the architecture of frozen water, sliding herself through razor-paned, fragile knifeblades. Blessing her slightness as she seldom did, she turned sideways to infiltrate between the toothy monoliths of icicles that might be a thousand years old.
When she was seated—she could not say comfortably—among the crystals of solid water as a mouse might secrete itself in a geode, she raised her hand to Nova again. Though she beckoned the Angel closer, she stopped as if limited by propriety at the edge of the chamber.—
In the silence of vacuum, Perceval could not form the words aloud, but she could make Nova hear them. “You won’t come with me?”
Feeling the cold of the ice pillars brush her skin, feeling the tiny water droplets, Perceval slid herself into a
