When they passed into one of the null spots, he found comfort in their isolation, despite knowing he was leading them into the heart of whatever opposed Perceval and her loyal followers--among whom he must number himself.
Still, he breathed a sigh when they came not to another in the seemingly endless series of pressure doors, but instead a proper air lock, big enough to move large equipment. The massive doors had sealed against some ancient pressure drop. Tristen's band drew up before the first. While they paused, he looked from one companion to the next.
"Samael," he said, having considered. The angel was not to be trusted--no angel was to be trusted, and the Angel of Poison least of all--but Tristen held the Captain's authority by proxy, and if anything could force a recalcitrant angel to duty, it was the word of Perceval Conn.
Without a glance, the angel passed forward, ghosting through the door, flakes of things swept from his field and pressed flat against it. Fifteen seconds--timed by Tristen's colony, during which he heard mostly the drip of condensation and Mallory breathing lightly, quickly, in anticipation--passed before Samael returned, dusting translucent hands one against the other and making the motes inside them sparkle and tumble.
"Heaven," he said. "Quite pretty. Within tolerances, I believe. I don't know why the lock tripped."
Tristen sealed his helm up anyway. Mallory, unarmored, watched with amusement, but though Tristen thought of an apologetic glance, he didn't share it.
He palmed the air lock controls, entered his command security override, identified himself as First Mate--and found that the air lock would not open.
"Huh," he said. "Isn't this thing supposed to listen?"
Mallory chortled. "Sure it is. But only if you know the right commands. The whole world does not yet know you're in charge of it. Let me try."
Tristen stepped back, folding his arms so the armor clattered, and tried not to frown as Mallory laid hands on the panel, concentrated, and a moment later the lights began to cycle blue and green.
"There's no colony in the lock," Mallory explained, straightening. "It has no connection to Nova. No way to update."
When it ground wide, protesting every centimeter, the atmosphere within stank of mold and must but was not toxic. Even through his suit filters, Tristen wrinkled his nose. He strode into the small space, ignoring the filth stirring around his ankles, and gestured the others in behind. When all the corporeal ones were clear of the outer door, he cycled the lock.
The inner door was stuck, but whatever jammed the tracks was not solid enough to stand against the whining motors that forced it back. The cincture rasped apart, bringing in a rush of sweet, oxygenated atmosphere even before Tristen could see what lay beyond.
Immediately upon the breeze came a flutter of fairy-bright objects that Tristen at first thought were leaves, until by their beat and settle he knew them to be wings. Butterflies, a half dozen, flitting in vortex swirls around each of the travelers. Mallory waved them away with an airy gesture, caught Tristen's eye when he turned, and smiled.
Despite himself, Tristen returned the smile. He reoriented himself, laid a hand on his weapon, and stepped forward into the Heaven.
It was green, lushly so, and the first thing he noticed was that the trees here had not failed during acceleration. The deck underfoot was one fibrous gnarl--the roots of a feral tangle of fig trees, or perhaps just one giant, ancient tree gone wild with suckers and overgrowth. Whichever it was, multifarious smooth-boled trunks competed for space to lift their parasol canopies to the light, and no earth showed between matted roots. The branches were heavy with fruit and bloom at once, the air redolent of fermentation. From the valleys between gray-barked, ridge-backed roots, clouds of bright butterflies arose at every gesture, startled from feeding on burst and rotten fruit. Overhead and alongside darted minute jeweled birds with sewing-needle beaks, whirring like soft-spoken insects.
On Mallory's shoulder, Gavin swung his head to track an iridescent blue-violet bird, abruptly snakelike until the necromancer flicked his tail tip sharply. "Behave."
Sulkily, the basilisk pulled his neck between his shoulders and rocked between his feet. "I wasn't going to zap it."
Tristen might have laughed, but the closeness of the trunks raised his concerns of ambush and he bit it back. There was motion everywhere--darting things, the slender green coil of a snake as long as his arm and no thicker than his pinky gliding between branches overhead. The plop as a heavy, tender fruit fell set his heart racing. From Samael's raised eyebrow, he knew his startle had been visible through the armor.
Well, he was entitled.
"Single file," he said. He glanced at Samael, shook his head, and said, "Behind me, everybody but the angel."
Samael laughed--or gave the illusion of it. The sound bubbled on the air, anyway, and Tristen saw the dust-mote-and-dry-grass muscles of his avatar's belly shake. "Shall I make myself solid enough to spring a trap?"
"Kindly," Tristen said, and though it was not necessary, he deemed it polite to stand aside so the angel might pass. Samael's tipped head of acknowledgment was nothing but blue-eyed mockery through the strings of his hair. The casualness with which Tristen unsealed his helm and faceplate, and allowed the armor to retract played to the same pretense and bravado.
Moving like a stag, Samael slipped sideways between buttressed trunks. Now moss yielded under his bare feet, pale brown moisture puddling in the gap beside his great toe with each step, dripping away again when the construct foot was lifted. Each drop fell silently, absorbed again without a trace.
Tristen followed. Mallory walked a few steps behind, lithe as if dancing.
"It's a big Heaven," Samael said, when they had been picking their way for fifteen minutes through forest so dense that even the two meters between them often meant that Tristen could glimpse the angel only as a gleam of pale skin, pale hair, fluid motion behind leafy concealment.
Tristen pushed between clustered trunks--some mere slips, some bigger than the span of three men's arms. Orchids and bromeliads dripped amazing sprays of bloom from head height and higher. The air droned and sang with the vocalizations of tiny animals. Tristen ducked a scentless, vivid, fuchsia-and-lemon Cattleya only to find himself face-to-wing with a pair of black-and-green butterflies engaged in a savage territorial dispute. A matter of life and death to them; to him, an amusing minor spectacle. And that's what you look like to an angel.
"Is this all one tree?" Tristen laid his hand on the bark of the nearest trunk.
Samael nodded. "It's choked out everything else that grew here," he said. His feet might be material, but the fat ant-crawling fig that detached from a branch over his head fell through his outline to explode against a root, spattering Tristen's boots with pulp.
Tristen wrinkled his nose at the reek of sugar. "We should collect some of those."
Negligently, Samael raised one hand and made a scooping gesture. Tristen knew it was the colony, but there was still something unsettling about dozens of ripe, velvety fruits gliding through the air to hover before him.
Tristen also knew better than to let the angel see he was disconcerted. He just produced a mesh from his armor, bundled the figs--except a slightly crushed one--into it, and handed them back to Mallory, who accepted without comment.
Tristen was contemplating splitting that last bruised fruit with the necromancer when a shrill, panicked sound cut the green chatter. A long trumpeting, harsh and hollow, echoed to a sharp fall.
The jungle was far too dense for running. With a glance at the others, Tristen tossed the fig away and broke into a careful canter, bouncing from foothold to foothold, twisting between trunks. Sound echoed confusingly in the confines of the Heaven, bouncing back from a ceiling invisible through the canopy overhead, muffled and refracted by verdant greenery and the hard shapes of tree trunks. He cupped his hands to his ears as it faded, hoping to hear enough that his colony could help triangulate location and distance for the source.