Grail

In old days, the Bridge would have been a gathering place for senior crew. But the Jacob’s Ladder was alive now, and the world’s control center could be wherever Perceval went. The Bridge was now her retreat, her hermitage.

And like all such places, it could be painfully lonely.

“And provoking the Captain is the Chief Engineer’s,” Caitlin replied. She plunked herself unceremoniously on the grass and stretched out. “Nova, amplified sunlight, please.”

Perceval’s pupils contracted, cones swelling to replace rods in her eyes as the wide windows arching across the surface of the sky paled and depolarized, screens sliding back to widen the apertures. Elements of the world’s halo of symbiotic nanocolonies—which also, along with its ramscoop and other electromagnetic fields, served to insulate it from space debris—became reflective and refractive. Biomimetic sensors in the ship’s colony cloud, and on her hull, helped the prisms and mirrors train themselves on the distant star, gathering its light. Like a sunflower, the Jacob’s Ladder focused itself on distant warmth.

The Bridge shivered with radiation—alien comfort after so many years in the dark.

Perceval was also still getting used to living in a world where more things worked than didn’t.

Caitlin patted the gentle swell of the bank beside her. “Sit, child. Enjoy the light.”

Perceval sat. She composed herself and reclined beside her mother, closing her eyes. But she did not close off the datastreams that painted the inside of her head with a constant flow of information, making her eyes largely extraneous for most purposes more complex than—well—navigating around a room.

She sighed, knowing Caitlin would read the complex of emotions in it—contentment, distress—and also knowing that Caitlin, being a mother, would ask.

Predictability in a parent was a good thing.

“Out with it,” Caitlin said. “What troubles you? Our journey is at an end, our rest in sight. Or rather, different work confronts us, but with luck and the cooperation or capitulation of the current residents, we can fold this world up and live someplace a little easier to maintain.”

“A planet is a closed ecology, too, Mother,” Perceval said. “Do you really think it will be easier to maintain? We know how the world works. We have no idea how we’ll interact with a planet.”

Natural ecologies were famously fragile, easy to overset—as Earth’s had been.

“We’ll do the best we can,” Caitlin said. “But is that really what’s bothering you? A question of environmental ethics?”

Perceval sighed, though this time it was to buy time, not to invite her mother in. The radiation on her face did feel good. She could feel the ancient evolved systems of her body responding, producing melanin and vitamin D, her muscles relaxing in the heat, her digestion becoming more efficient. Her stomach grumbled quietly and she smiled.

“No,” she said. “I miss Rien. Right now—” She stretched her back against the grass, the smell of chlorophyll and bruised flower petals rising around her. “I wish Rien were here to see this.”

Caitlin’s hand stole out to brush Perceval’s, first back to back and then clasping fingers. “You are not alone.”

Perceval sat up, hunching forward over her hollow belly, and disentangled her fingers from her mother’s. She hugged her knees tight and pulled her forehead almost down to her shins. “Sometimes I wish I were.”

She wasn’t expecting Caitlin’s bark of laughter. One of the joys of adulthood was dealing with her mother as a peer, as an ally and a friend.

“Sir Perceval,” Caitlin said, invoking a title Perceval had not heard often since she first sat in the Captain’s chair. From the change in her voice and the rustle of grass, Perceval knew that Caitlin sat up, too. “You have never stopped being a knight-errant, my dear. Did you go looking for her?”

Did you go looking for Rien’s remains in Nova? was what Caitlin meant. Had Perceval sieved through the Angel’s personality for the fragments that had once been Rien, to reassemble them into some parody of her beloved, much as Cynric was—according to Tristen—a sort of parody of what she once had been?

Perceval wasn’t sure if she shook her head slightly or if it was a pressure change that ruffled her hair. She tossed it back, swinging herself again into a sitting position, and shook the brown locks down her shoulders like a snapped-out banner. “I would not have liked what I found.”

“Wise child,” Caitlin said, and kissed her on the top of the head.

Perceval exhaled a breath she did not remember holding. But before she could take in another, Nova’s voice broke the stillness and insect-drone of the meadow. The words sounded to Perceval’s inner and outer ears simultaneously.

“Captain, Chief Engineer. Five intruders have accessed the Bridge corridor. I have called for support and await your recommendation.”

Perceval found herself on her feet, her mother beside her. “How did intruders penetrate this far? Nova, the approaches are full of your colony corona.”

“Unknown,” Nova said.

Caitlin drew out her unblade. In the loudness of Perceval’s heart, it made no sound at all. Her voice rang clean across the Bridge, however, just as if more than one ear must hear her commands. “For any defensive technology, there is an equal and opposite countermeasure.”

“Great,” Perceval said. “They’ve hacked through it somehow. Nova, my armor please?”

The suit was in the Bridge closet. It was a trivial matter for Nova to disassemble it there and reassemble the component molecules in their proper configurations around Perceval while Perceval held her breath and stilled her movements. Caitlin’s was a little more complex, as she’d left the physical suit in Engineering, so the Angel must pattern it and reconstitute it from available materials here.

“Are they attempting to broach the Bridge?” Perceval asked, as Caitlin’s vermilion-and-gold armor began to take shape around her.

“Negative,” Nova answered. “They are trying to break into the case containing the relic Bible in the corridor. Tristen is inbound with security. He estimates he will be able to relieve your position in under ninety seconds, and advises you to ‘sit tight and not take any chances.’ ”

Through both faceplates, Caitlin’s gaze caught on Perceval’s. Caitlin said, “Who the hell wants to steal an old book?”

“It’s more than an old book, Mother.” Perceval knew how feral the grin that curved her lips must appear, and reveled in it. “Are we listening to Tristen?”

Caitlin grinned back. “Do we ever?”

   They burst through the Bridge door like eager angels, emerging into a functional vacuum. Tristen’s once- weapon Charity was brandished high in Caitlin’s hand. Perceval—out of respect for the unblade—ran three steps behind, firing darts that could pierce even armor if they struck a joint or soft spot squarely. Two of the invaders— gray-armored, their colors blanked and their visors fogged to hide their features—spun to return fire. The other three slipped aside, muscling the ancient Bible’s nitrogen-filled case through a fuse-edged hole in the bulkhead that led straight into the embrace of the Enemy.

Perceval went right; Caitlin went left. Perceval lunged into the niche where the Bible’s case had until so recently been set, hopping up on its barren stand like a crouched gargoyle. Caitlin flattened herself behind a bulge in the bulkhead through which environmental pipes ran.

Perceval hoped that the raiders were using ammunition that would not punch holes in her ship—or more and worse holes than they had already punched.

Well, Perceval thought, that explains the vacuum. It doesn’t explain how they got past Nova, though.

There had been problems with the Angels and their areas of awareness before, but those difficulties were long in the past, and Perceval was meant to have complete command of her ship. That anyone could work this— under her very nose—was unsettling.

Though not as unsettling as the darts whizzing past Perceval’s faceplate. Something was going to have to be done about that.

Perceval might be Captain now, but she had been raised a knight. Nobody wandered into her bridge and made off with a priceless relic.