Grail

Dust’s sensitive toolkit nose lifted the taste of Benedick’s discomfort from the air. Benedick’s child might be Captain now, and grown, but Dust imagined there were things he’d prefer she not witness. The elder Conn looked away, though, and Dust had no illusions that he could count this emotional attachment as a weakness, a chink in Benedick’s armor.

He had known too many Conns.

Chelsea’s voice vibrated her throat against Dust’s side. “Do we want the Captain present?” She bent close, as if examining Oliver’s eyes. She lifted the lid with a thumb.

“Hey,” he said.

Dust reached across the gap and sniffed his ear. This close to his patron, he felt the moment when daemon touched daemon, and data bridged. Oliver’s eyes might have flashed, but a moment later, they only looked confused.

“Ow,” he said. “Seriously, stop it.”

Inside Oliver’s colony, the subcolony that had housed Ariane was now dying, consuming itself, contracting into a singularity and vanishing. Oliver knew as little of it as he knew of the tumors and viruses his colony excised from his body every day. The data it had stored was in Dust now, awaiting a moment when he could transfer it to Ariane’s other host.

“The Captain,” Benedick said. “Are you going to try to stop her?”

Though he spoke, Benedick still didn’t look back. Beside them, the Astrogator in Oliver Conn’s body had dropped into silence. He expressed no bravado; he made no effort to appear amused. Instead, he went to judgment as a man without defenses, but also without fear. Though he was pale and his forehead dewed with sweat, he smelled only of discomfort. Perhaps he felt unwell. Perhaps he felt the Ariane-seed’s suicide, on some subconscious level.

Whatever he experienced, he met it with dignity.

And as it was true courage, and not the storybook kind, Dust found that he admired that. Admired it, and had no understanding of how to define it. Storybooks were what he was created for. And from what he had created himself, and this entire society that surrounded him. Princes and knights-errant and all.

Rightly considered, histories, too, were storybooks. Of a sort.

“You go on ahead, Chief Engineer,” Benedick said. “Make sure all is in readiness for us. Chelsea and I will have no problems with the prisoner.”

Nova could have done the same, but he must have been counting on Jordan’s physical presence having an effect on the Captain. Jordan’s wings unfurled the rest of the way; her eyes tilted upward and her arms streamlined along her body. A kick, a flick of pinions in the lessened gravity, and the tiger-colored Engineer was gone.

It was a sign of her youth that she accepted an order—however politely phrased—from a Conn she outranked, without question or modification. At least she hadn’t called him sir.

If I were her Angel, there would be none of that. If I were her Angel, she would not bow so willingly to any Conn who ordered it. She would be a power, a force to be reckoned with. I would give her wings in metaphor as well as truth.

Dust almost crooned after her, but that would be unwise.

Chelsea made a noise as if she wished she could turn her head and spit. “There won’t be any of that on a heavy body.”

“Wings,” Jsutien said. “One more thing we won’t need where we’re going.”

Chelsea took his elbow. “Come on,” she said. “The sooner we get the inside of your head looked at, the sooner we can all get lunch.”

*   *   *   

Once Danilaw had reclaimed his pressure suit and gotten Samael to explain to him how to patch into the Jacob’s Ladder’s systems for a power boost, he called Fortune. The modifications required a little soldering but, unsurprisingly, it turned out Captain Amanda knew her way around a standard-issue pressure suit repair kit pretty well.

Administrator Jesse was on hand to take his call—fortuitously, it turned out, because the motes and probes Amanda and Danilaw had deployed from the Quercus had reported the explosion. Combined with the cessation of telemetry from the space suits, it had seemed a logical supposition that Danilaw and Amanda were dead, casualties of a treacherous attack by the crew of the derelict generation ship.

“Gain has been declared Acting Premier,” Jesse said, in that precise and mannerly way of his. “She is placing the colony on a war footing.”

Danilaw wondered what exactly that meant, and furthermore what exactly Gain thought she could accomplish against people who knew how to fight and had centuries of practice in doing it.

“Planetary defenses are engaged to prevent you from approaching the orbit of Fortune,” Jesse said. “A broadcast is being prepared warning the Jacob’s Ladder away on pain of destruction. Public opinion is running high against the aliens, Premier.”

“Our evidence suggests the explosion was caused by sabotage committed on Fortune itself,” Danilaw said. “It was an attack by us against them. The Quercus’s drive detonated.”

He paused and glanced at Amanda, who had waited just out of pickup range. She leaned forward into reception. “So Gain stepped right into the power vacuum, did she?”

Jesse’s eyes widened. “She ordered an inquest begun at once. Decisively. She stepped up the assemblage of a defense cordon, too. By last night, there was a popular vote to confirm her as Acting Premier in your absence and … presumed death.”

“Well, I’m not absent anymore,” Danilaw said. “Patch me through to the media center, would you? I can see I have an announcement to make. And some orders to countermand. And an inquest of my own to put into motion.”

“You’re not going to call off the defensive cordon?” Amanda said.

Danilaw shook his head. “I am going to countermand any shoot-on-sight orders they may have received, however. Jesse—”

“Right here.”

“Watch your back. Also, keep an eye on Gain. And any contacts she may have should be logged.”

Jesse looked more greenish than ochre, but he nodded. “I will.”

“Good job,” Danilaw said, wishing he felt more confident in it. “You’ll do great. Just stay cool, Administrator.”

20 all the world and everything

What, love, courage!—Christ! he is so pale.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”

There was too much light in the room. To Perceval, the space in which Cynric had chosen to examine Jsutien felt washed-out, white-lit, dreamy, like a surgical theater hung with gauze. But Cynric preferred it, or perhaps merely tolerated it without discomfort, and so Perceval bit her tongue.

Benedick sat with them while they went in. The rest of the senior crew and Conns returned to their stations.

There was trust involved in joining forces with Cynric to investigate the contents of Jsutien’s mind—but not so much trust, Perceval thought, as there would be in allowing her to go in alone, and then taking her word for what she found. Perceval had known the woman—or her revenant—for fifty years now, and in that time she had seen nothing to indicate that Cynric, whole or fractional, had ever hesitated at anything she thought necessary, no matter how tragic or distasteful a sane person would have found it.

Cynric was there beside her, holding her hand, the too-intimate bond of blood and colonies flowing between