"It's eating my armor," Tristen said. "I need a solution."
"My recommendation would be to detach the affected section and run," the angel said. "When you're clear, I'll sterilize the area with an EM pulse. If it's a symbiote that's lost its mind, it might just eat anything it touches."
"Shit," Tristen said, and complied. His armor could always grow another vambrace the next time he fed it. Still, he felt a little pang as he left it behind, watching it dissolve into a swirl of vapor.
The breach glimmered before him, easily identified by the glow that fell through it to illuminate the nearby wreckage. With a delicate touch he arrested his forward momentum. Some of it converted into spin when a torn bulkhead shifted unexpectedly, but he spread his body as wide as possible in the confined space. Once that slowed his rotation, he was able to bring himself to a halt with brushing fingertips. At last, he rested just inside a ragged two-meter tear in the hull, peering from it in his armored shell like a crab peering from shelter.
His radiation detectors peaked, chittering. The walls of the world offered some protection. Beyond the serrated lip of the breach, the bone-and-knob skeleton of the world rose black and stark against the ghostly silver-green of the newborn nebula--a tombstone for the shipwreck stars that had warded the Jacob's Ladder so long.
Tristen felt the contraction of panic at the base of his spine and let the fear wash through him for a moment. Open space, he told himself. It's nothing to fear. There is nothing out there that can hurt you.
Unlike in here, where there were rogue colonies and shifting wreckage.
The danger lay in crevices, tight spaces where one could become trapped. If you stayed in a trap long enough, it could come to seem like a shelter.
Ariane had locked him away in a terrible hole, and he had stayed there until Rien, Perceval, and Gavin had rescued him. Even by Conn standards, he had been in his trap a very long time.
But his nervous system didn't understand that. It only knew what it had become acclimated to: the warm dark, the safety of wedging one's self into a den. His responses recognized the yawning emptiness of the Enemy as something to fear.
Funny to think that the world, and he, and everything else in it, were rushing through the void on the brink of a shock wave, moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And all of that meant nothing. It was relative velocity that mattered. Once Tristen left the hull, he would be sailing along with it--but it would continue to turn without him.
In Tristen's youth, Com and Engineer alike had considered it something of a point of pride to reach the far side at the appointed place without the use of attitude jets.
"There?" Tristen asked, marking a likely air lock on his display.
The angel agreed. "It will not be too challenging a trajectory."
Tristen, careful of his armor as he slipped between shredded lips of metal, chuckled. "Easy for you to say."
He drew his legs clear of the rift and balanced for a moment against the skin of the world. All that nothing wheeled before him, sickly under a veil of irradiated gas. His stomach clenched; bile stung his nose. It was the most basic, the most primitive of instincts. Don't fall.
Pushing against it was like pushing against a wall. He'd never been afraid of the deeps before--properly wary, sure, but this was different.
How broken am I? he wondered, sparing a wrathful moment of bitterness for Ariane Conn, who had made it so. He closed his eyes and adjusted his chemistry, flooding his neural receptors with soothing molecules--a trick he hated, but if he couldn't find his native courage, he'd have to borrow some.
With a mighty kick, Tristen leapt into the cold.
5
pinioned in terrible darkness
Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.
One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.
At first, the trail was plain. Benedick went armored, careful, skirting the edge of a vast causeway that connected Engine to the world at large. This was not how he, Tristen, and Rien had entered the Heaven at the end of the world. They had come to Engine running flat-out, along the bank of a poisoned river inhabited by--possessed of--Caitlin's helpful familiar demon, a djinn named Inkling. But the river was dead now, Inkling consumed like all his brethren into the new angel of the world.
Benedick found he missed Inkling, even if the river had nearly killed his daughter, his brother, and himself. It wasn't a reactor-coolant leak's fault that it was poisonous, any more than a snake was to blame for being a snake--or the Enemy for being the Enemy. One did not have to blame or fear a thing to treat it with respect.
He tried to remember that he could feel the same about the angel. It was not the angel's fault that Rien had died to make it real. And now--with the angel's intervention, with the controlled release of radiation-isolating microbes--the poisoned river could be made clean, even this water reclaimed.
It would be good to reclaim something.
But this was not the time to be concerned about such things. Now, he had the arch of metal sky overhead. Some of the shielding panels were closed against the cold of the Enemy beyond, some jammed open so the chilly green light of the shipwreck nebula shone through, a few of the brightest stars visible beyond. He had the turf underfoot, thickly planted in dandelions and clover, still healing from the trauma of acceleration, the stems of grass here and there bent by a careless foot. He had the chill, thin air, not properly circulated, and so potentially still holding a scent.
He had the spotted-and-striped, inquisitive toolkit, its fluffy tail jerking like a carelessly cracked whip as it sniffed delicately between blades of grass, bending them aside with fragile-seeming hands, tremulous fingers cast from high-impact ceramic for strength. Carbon monofilament tendons moved beneath the little animal's skin.
Benedick kept half his attention on his sensors and all his armor's weapons online. Occasionally, the toolkit turned to him and made a soft prrt, as if to assure itself that he was following close and paying heed.
This was not its primary function, but its sensitive olfactory, tactile, and visual receptors--optimized for locating tiny malfunctions in elaborate machinery--were adequate to the task. It was needed; whosoever had taken Arianrhod had left little trace of their passage. Benedick knew Arianrhod's knightly skills--the equal of his own--and if she were moving under her own power the trail indicated no diminishment.
So whoever had released her was her equal, and either armored or using some other countermeasure, because the toolkit could not trace that individual's scent. Benedick trailed on--watchful, speculating. The farther he traveled, the worse the environmental damage became. When they came to a point where there was no egress from the causeway, he lifted the toolkit off the ravaged turf and let it snuggle against his neck. Here he broke into a distance-eating jog that was as fast as he could move while remaining observant to tripbeams and traps. Eventually, the causeway separated into five great branch tunnels joined like the fingers of a hand.
Benedick knew from experience that once one traveled a step or two into any given path, relative gravity was established. Each causeway then curved to follow a divergent path: one overhead, one branching each left and right, one leading toward his feet, and one that would continue directly forward. But he paused before entering the lobby where they connected, cautious. All the Conns in the world were not dead, and Arianrhod's history of alliances with his family was ... complex and multigenerational. And his family were nothing if not dangerous.