Perceval drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reached outside her skin.
Nova was there, waiting, silent and aware as any colonized atmosphere. Perceval breathed deep, pulse accelerating, a tingling spreading the length of her arms to her fingertips. It was psychosomatic, she knew--and so she shut it down, not caring for the distraction, or the reminder that she had any physical body, because that reminder was too much temptation to return there and remain.
No wonder Captains go strange.
"Show me our boundaries, Nova."
Nova opened the pathways and Perceval entered them as easily as spreading her lost wings would have been. She infiltrated the angel, stretched to the edges of its span of control, and felt there the prickly, eroding sensation of something nibbling. A war, a death struggle, taking place on the micro scale. Different from the one she'd lived through when angel fought angel, though. This was a battle of attrition.
"Those aren't ours," she said, and wondered why the angel hadn't seen it.
--Those aren't our whats?--
"Our colonies," she said. "Those aren't you. They aren't remotely like you. And they're not reprogramming your colony, Nova. They're penetrating each mote so it reproduces more motes like theirs, not like ours. They're viral."
"The thing is, I'm pretty sure they're not ... native to our world. And Nova can't tell," Perceval said, gesturing to a monitor tank in which a schematic in blue and orange hovered, writhing uncertainly.
Caitlin folded her arms and frowned, considering her daughter the Captain's words with a mix of unease and pride.
Perceval continued, "She can't even tell they exist. It's a very familiar-sounding model, if you think about it for a minute."
"Inducer viruses," Caitlin said, with a glance at Jsutien. She had exchanged his simple shackle for a silvery drape of nanotech chain that permitted him the freedom to work while allowing her to retain control. He'd accepted it with grace. Understanding that her distrust was provoked by the circumstances of Arianrhod's disappearance, he had claimed to find the precaution reasonable.
"And it's not," he had said, "as if I have anywhere to go."
Now, he met her gaze and nodded. "An inducer virus, sure. Or a plain, old-fashioned virus. Not engineered. Your angel interface really can't even sense the presence of these things?"
Perceval's avatar shook her head. "She can sense them just fine. But she doesn't seem able to notice she's sensing them, if you know what I mean."
Caitlin frowned. She did, and she understood what it implied, too. Something in the angel's inherited programming forced it to overlook this particular colony structure and the individual motes that composed it. "Nova's been instructed to ignore the infestation."
"Yes," Perceval said. "And instructed to forget why she was instructed to ignore it."
"That seems like something of a radical operational choice," Caitlin said mildly, because Benedick was not there to say it for her. Her crossed arms were in danger of becoming a straitjacket. She forced them down to her sides. "So if you're programming an angel, why do you force it to ignore an ... infestation of alien nanotech?"
"Sabotage," Perceval said, promptly.
But Jsutien shook his head. "Immunosuppression." When the women--present and projected--turned to stare at him, he said, "It's how you get a transplant to take. First, you have to stop the host body from attacking it."
"I see. And do you know something about what might have been ... transplanted ... into my world, Jsutien?"
He flushed cobalt. "Not specifically. But--" The swags of nanochain rustled as he shifted uncomfortably behind his console.
"Spit it out."
The look he gave her was all startled prey, but she didn't think he was intentionally evasive. "It's about your sister, Chief Engineer."
"Of course it is," Caitlin said, rolling her eyes until she felt the muscles stretch. "Which one, I'm horrified to ask?"
"Cynric," he said. He turned to Perceval, and Caitlin grimaced at a premonition. "Captain, Princess Cynric was the director of biosystems, and bioengineering, and chief synbiotician. The original colonies were her design. As were a lot of the first-generation synbiotes and engineered fauna. Shipfish, parrotlets ... some Means."
"And the inducer viruses," Perceval said, with the air of someone who has just achieved a satisfying synthesis of incomplete information.
"And the inducer viruses," Jsutien confirmed. "Yes. So I would bet that whatever's out there is something she was working on. Possibly a weapon she meant to use against Alasdair Conn. When the three of you--" He paused delicately.
"Attempted to overthrow our father," Caitlin finished for him. "Don't worry, you can say it."
"They called her Cynric the Sorceress," he said, apologetically. "Before you were born."
"After, too." Caitlin smiled. "But if she had a weapon like that, Astrogator, she never revealed its existence to me."
"Maybe it wasn't cooked yet," Jsutien said, with a wave at the monitor tank. "Maybe it needed time to evolve."
Perceval rubbed her mouth. "Well, they're sure as hell cooked now. They're eating my ship. And she's pretty unhappy about it."
Which led Caitlin to another problem that it was the Chief Engineer's duty to bring to the attention of the Captain. Fortunately, this issue was a little more tractable. She coughed into her hand and said, "Have you noticed that you can't settle on a pronoun?"
"Mom?" Lashes meshed over hazel eyes made to seem enormous by Perceval's denuded scalp.
"Nova," Caitlin clarified. "You call it he or she, but the gendering of the pronoun changes from conversation to conversation."
Perceval's brow furrowed in confusion or concentration. "Is that bad?"
"It's diagnostic," Caitlin said, dodging the question. "It tells me Nova is still integrating, and the distinct personalities are generating confusion, crossed signals, and hesitancy, which it may not be aware of. And that's bleeding through its link to you. It's your responsibility as her director to assist in the integration process."
"Right," said Perceval, rubbing her arms. "What does that mean, exactly?"
Caitlin lifted her chin. "Captain, it means you have to decide who you want her to be."
15
the bottomless dark in its person
All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
"Bring me the corpse of a cyberleech," Benedick commanded, and so by his will it was done. He also asked the orchids to search for the remains of his toolkit--dead or alive--but they found no trace of it beyond a fluff of coat and DNA, the smear of impact. Something in the lift shaft had most likely eaten it, as the orchids had consumed most of the cyberleech casualties.
Benedick mourned its loss. It had been a fluffy idiot thing, but friendly, and he could have used its delicacy of touch and instrumentation for the necropsy once the orchids found a nearly intact cyberleech for his dissection. They brought it before him while Chelsea took her healing rest in a sheltered corner of the transfer station, and Benedick assembled such primitive tools as they had available and cleared a space to work. The data core was unlikely to be intact in a dead leech, but somewhere within it--he prayed--there must be a radio control chip.
He missed his armor in the process, because it came equipped with scalpels, pliers, and retractors, but he managed. The cyberleech was heavy meat without, knotted muscle, and within its body cavity the circuit-twined organs popped and squished, inelastic as liver. But fifteen messy minutes later, he had it. His sleeves were caked to the elbows with iron-stinking matter, and the flat, glass-transparent chip lay on his acid-burned palm, irregular as a leaf.