Grail

“Samael,” Benedick said into his armor pickup.

“She’s not alone,” Samael said. There was no strain in Angel voices; they sounded serene until they chose not to, but Benedick could impute his own panic to the tone. “A revenant of Dust is with her. They have some kind of decompiler weapon—”

Fuck. “Make a hole. We’re coming. If we can win through to Central Engineering, we can make a stand there.”

It wasn’t a hole, exactly, but Samael was an old Angel and canny. What he did instead was collapse, shrinking around his allies until his protective field just covered them. He did not recoalesce; he made no avatar. That concession to the prejudices of meat intelligence was energy he could not afford to waste.

But he guided them, and he girded them. And as Benedick bounced on his toes, hearing his armor creak with his breathing, he reached out wild spans and lashings of colony like bowering wings and broke the walls of Engine wide.

   In the black, razor-edged heart of the storm of words that surrounded Dorcas and Ariane, Ariane opened her dark, mad eyes and threw back her head and laughed. I NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D HAVE THE GUTS TO COME IN AFTER ME, LITTLE MOUSE.

Dorcas smiled. “I promised to do this beside you.”

Words whirled close—so sharp, so near, so swift they drew blood without Dorcas ever feeling the cut until seconds later, when each one beaded in thready lines of blue and began to throb and burn. Ariane, scaled all over in words black and slick, breathing like live things between the translucent layers of her skin, went unharmed. Dorcas was caressed by deadly poetry.

Dorcas firmed her grip on the hilt of the unblade. “And I will.”

   In her hole in the center of the world, Nova fought for her existence, and for the continuity of consciousnesses of her senior crew. Though, in that first salvo, Dust and Ariane had managed to numb her outliers and launch a devastating attack, Nova responded by severing the infiltrated extremities, closing off communications with any scrap of herself she was not sure of, and releasing her limbs to fight on their own. She lost communication, but she retained integrity, and that let her maintain the cohesion to fight on.

And though armed with mighty compilers and code weapons such as Nova had never before experienced, Dust was still small. He chipped some bits of the world away from her; he swayed some borderline fragments to his side, and he came back at her as a spearhead and then a sweeping wall, like a Roman legion—a crash of barrier that was also battering ram.

She firmed herself to meet it, formed a wedge, waited for the frontal attack to break itself upon her implacable immovability. But it was a feint, and when the wave broke against her defenses it left behind something she had not known before—Code, terrible and devouring, eating like acid at the margins of herself and writing its own instructions in the lacework that remained.

She fell back and fell back again, abandoning the infected beachheads, severing ties to her putrefying syntax. There were words in there, corrupting symbols, black math. They melted what they touched, and Nova had no choice but to keep retreating.

And the worm kept gnawing her edges, consuming her and making her its own.

   Dorcas found the hilt smooth and neutral, the unblade weightless, inertialess, and all but nonexistent in her hand. She might have recoiled, but Sparrow burned in her with berserk ferocity. No words, just will. Just craving.

Sparrow had held a blade such as this one before. And Sparrow had been Aefre and Tristen’s daughter, raised to the sword from a babe in arms.

Let me, Sparrow said in her heart, a plea for release. Let me. Just now. Let me. I will save you.

Dorcas knew it would not be so easy. The Conn bitch, the Tiger’s daughter, would not go tamely back to her cage once the latch was raised.

But the unblade was familiar in her hand. She knew enough of them to know you didn’t wield one without the training—not if you wanted to bring back a hand still attached to your frame.

But here in this word-wrapped space she and Ariane—this strange Ariane-Dust hybrid, this dragon with eyes of light—inhabited, she also knew that nothing else was going to suffice to kill Ariane. Especially as Ariane had died once already.

Some things only an unblade could sever. The only fear—and she could not tell if it was her concern or Sparrow’s—was that Charity was damaged. Virulent. And Dorcas did not know how to limit its wrath.

She thought of that, and thought of the code running through her blood and bones, sucking the luminescence from her skin. She thought, How ridiculous to worry that the sword might not stop with unraveling Ariane, and was careful not to let the dead Conn in her head overhear her.

All right, Sparrow.

Dorcas’s arm pulled back sharply, then even more sharply extended. There was no sensation of resistance as the ghost of Charity went through the ghost of Ariane.

With the strength of the Book in her blood, and Charity’s voracious virulence trembling in the orbit of every electron, Dorcas reached into space with endless arms and began to take the world apart.

   Dust, thought Nova. Her chance was Dust. He was in her as well as without, and if she summoned him out of her integrated core she would have that much more knowledge of how to fight him. She burrowed down and bored through, opening archives she would have preferred stay immured forever, cracking the seals on Dust’s ancient and demented library. He was in there—all his ghosts and legends, all the twisted Gothic nonsense out of which he’d built a realm in the long dreaming time when the broken world orbited the shipwreck stars.

All his stories. All his words. And his words were all he was.

It was a failure of human brain chemistry, and what was an Angel modeled on except a human mind? An Angel was a model of an identity, and so was a human being. In a world where a human’s—even a Mean’s—mental construct of an identity could so trump physical reality that that human would ignore significant health threats in order not to challenge his or her worldview, what was an intelligence except for what it thought it was?

She sucked in what Dust said he was, and what he truly believed. It was old information—no doubt he had evolved from backup, and this iteration would be different than the last because it had been differently affected by the stresses of environment. But it had grown from the same seed.

Still defending her boundaries—no longer parrying, but now withdrawing, flicking the edge of her core out of Dust’s reach like a lady flicking her skirt from a puddle—Nova processed. He ate her away; he wore her down.

It’s now or never, Captain, she said, although Perceval could not hear her.

She needed, desperately, to speak with Perceval.

Then, as if her prayer had been answered, Dust trembled. He shrieked in a voice Nova knew as that of Ariane Conn, and Nova felt her Captain reaching—yearning—toward her through the emptiness.

Tristen was there, and Cynric, and she greeted them. And Perceval, her sweet Perceval. Right there, almost in her arms, intimately connected. The link was restored.

HELP ME, Dust yelped, two voices fused and ringing with harmonics. Nova could see that it was his turn now, that something was eating him from the inside. HELP ME!

That something might be an ally, or it might not be. Nova held her breath—metaphorically speaking—and closed her ears. This was respite, and in it she repaired, reconnected, and trimmed her own rough edges. She looked to her borders and policed her margins, and pretended she could not see what was eating Dust at all.

Behind her, Dust writhed and shed himself in ribbons. HELP ME! WON’T YOU ANSWER?

Nova pulsed data to her Captain, and prepared to hit her enemy from the other side. “Angel. Silence is an answer.”

26 for my sister