The angel, who had stood silent as a painted backdrop behind Caitlin, unfolded his imaginary arms and laced his imaginary hands behind his back. "If I may interrupt?"
The angel's programmed approximation of polite diffidence made Perceval dream of hitting things. It was too much like Rien. "You do not need permission."
"I have not yet determined the source of all the blackouts. However, the First Mate has reported in, and I do now know why Rule has fallen off the grid. The remnant of another angel has barricaded himself in there."
"Who?" Caitlin said coldly, while Perceval was still assimilating the renewed threat.
The angel, settled into a sort of parade rest, answered, "Samael. Just a scrap of him, however." A pause, during which Perceval wondered if the angel were waiting for her to give away some clue as to her emotional state, or merely reading it and waiting for it to settle.
"Speak," Perceval said, surprised for the moment that her mother had let her take the lead. She wondered if she was grateful.
"I can dig him out," Nova said. He let his hands drop to his sides and flexed them in a manner Perceval would say was subconscious, if she saw it in a human being. "It may mean disassembling a good deal of the infrastructure of Rule. And the necromancer Mallory's familiar, in which Samael has made himself resident. Or you could order him to submit to me, and be assimilated."
"What does he want?"
The angel said, "A safe-conduct and to speak with you. The First Mate is present. He does not believe there to be a threat."
Perceval did not think there was any love lost between Tristen and Samael. Perhaps she could trust Tristen's judgments.
The thought made her unhappy. She had trusted them in the past. Should things be so different now?
They should not. But that did not change the fact that they were. She said, "Give him my safe-conduct. Put him on."
His avatar resolved before her.
The angel's appearance had not changed, except that now he seemed as watery and translucent as Perceval felt. He was not tall, and was as brutally thin as a flyer, the approximation of muscle fiber stripped plain beneath his skin. For an angel, there was no appreciable difference between a projection and going there in person. His awareness and his presence drew her eyes up; she met his bold glance with her own. There was a moment of eye contact before the angel swept a generous, abject bow and said, "My Captain. Bid me; I come to serve, and bearing dangerous tidings."
She should have been taken aback. But perhaps with the Captaincy came some armor or core of reserve, because as if observing from afar she saw herself extend a hand and accept Samael's obeisance. "Tell me," she said.
"It is likely that it is not I alone who survived. I would have concealed my existence longer, in fact, except that I know something you and your angel must also know.
A servant of Asrafil kept a fragment of the Angel of Blades protected, and it is likely that by her intervention he will have respawned by now. As long as she is intact, there will be no destroying Asrafil, and neither you nor your angel will be safe, My Captain. He will not place himself in a position to be ordered by you."
Perceval pressed her hands flat against her thighs, the fingers arched as if by the pressure of her palms she could deny this knowledge. "The name of this servant?"
"Arianrhod Kallikos," he said. From the glance over his shoulder, someone in Rule--Tristen, most likely--had just reacted violently. "I cannot tell you if it has happened yet. But I know Asrafil meant it to happen, planned for it to happen. And if it has not, it is only a matter of time until it does."
"Two rebel angels," Caitlin said. Perceval's focus had been such that she'd almost forgotten that her mother was listening.
"No, Chief Engineer." Samael didn't turn to look at the projection, but Caitlin's eyes flickered, which told Perceval he was providing her with her own copy of his avatar. "One rebel angel. And one who has come to present his bond willingly in service to his world and his world's Captain."
"And if I order you to allow Nova to assimilate you?"
"I am only a scrap," Samael said, glimmers of light falling through the collage of his features. "There is nothing I could do to prevent her." He spread his hands in supplication. "That would not make it any less murder, Captain."
Her, Perceval thought. She glanced at her angel again, the one she'd been thinking of as male. Because Dust was male, because angels were he. Because Rien had been she, Perceval realized, and she did not want to be reminded of what had become of Rien. Rien, who in such a short time had become everything.
But Nova, Perceval saw through clearer eyes, wasn't any of those things. In fact, she thought the angel had seemed much more like a man to begin with, and grew more neutral of aspect with every passing hour. Was she doing that? Or was it simply a natural part of the angel assimilating the various threads of conflicting personalities?
It led Perceval to consider the yammer of voices in her own head, the singular gravity exerted by all those thoughts, opinions, ambitious desires that threatened to consume her every time she gave them a thought.
She would have to learn to use those. Pushing them away meant denying a great resource, and--no matter how insipid she found their morality, no matter how filthy touching their thoughts made her feel--Perceval was a child of Engine. She could stop breathing with more ease than she could discard something with a potential use.
Samael, as if noticing that she had been staring at Nova in speculation for rather a long time, cleared his throat. "Captain?"
Perceval shook her head, pushing aside the fog of other commanders' ideas. "No. I think not. We've already ruled out resorting to cannibalism to solve a bigger problem."
Caitlin, without shifting her eyes from her own image of Samael, said once more, "The Builders would have cannibalized."
Perceval folded her arms. "Mom. You're repeating yourself. And I don't for a minute believe you think that's the best answer. So take it as read into the argument for now, and we'll consider it as an absolute last resort. If we have to. Nova. Do you trust him?"
Nova, who had until then waited motionless as if suspended, staring at Samael like a cat before a mouse hole, said, "I contain enough of him to know better."
Perceval, with a certain degree of distaste, reached down through the layers of filters she was slowly amassing between her present self and the library of her ancestral memories, looking for specific information. Someday, when she had leisure--and could bear the sense of dragging her fingers through swamp and slime to tickle out a handful of pearls--she would find the time to examine it all and see what was useful. For now, her memory would remain banked full of the Captains and Commodores who had come before her, and she would just have to know she would get around to it someday. Ariane, though, was close and current, and not too hard to get to. Perceval just did not much like touching her.
"I contain enough of Ariane to remember her scorn for Arianrhod's devotion to Asrafil," she confirmed. "I doubt Ariane was ever devoted much to anything, outside of herself. But she believed that Arianrhod is."
Caitlin said, "I contain nothing of Samael. But I, too, know him well enough to know better than to trust him." She glared, then surprised Perceval by asking, "But do we need to trust him? We were going after Arianrhod anyway, weren't we?"
"Yes," Perceval said. "We are. Or Tristen and Mallory are, in any case. And Gavin, of course." She turned back to Samael. "And so are you."