Tristen pressed the palms of his hands flat to the panel. "So what's out there?"
The angel folded its arms. "That's an interesting question. And unfortunately, as my lack of proprioceptive data is progressive, I do not entirely know."
"Progressive? You're losing more sections?"
"Yes."
"How is that possible?"
"Causes as yet undetermined," the angel said. "The cause may be cascading colony failures. Or, and possibly more problematic, it is possible that this reset, if I may use the term, came complete with its own guardian angel."
"Israfel might be back," Tristen clarified. "Back," the angel agreed. "And ready to institute the Builders' plan."
Tristen's voice rang as clear in Caitlin's ear as if he murmured into it. "We seem to have inherited a complex of additional problems."
"Thrill me," she said, watching Benedick--still armored but unhelmed--pack concentrated rations and bottled water into a carryall. She triggered broadcast mode. "You're on speaker."
Tristen said, "The world is attempting to repopulate. There's no telling what might be coming out of the cloning tanks. The program is for maximum biological diversity to be restored in the aftermath of catastrophe, on the theory that competition is the manner in which a balanced ecosystem is likely to reestablish itself."
"Wasteful," she said.
"That's the Builders for you. Maximum carnage as a tenet of religious faith."
The amplified voice seemed to be reaching the resurrected Jsutien. At least he stirred, one hand coming up to press the nanobandaged scalp wound, though his eyes stayed shut. Caitlin wished he'd hurry up and heal. The memory-set that inhabited him--the skills of a Moving Times astrogator, for which Benedick had reawakened him--would be extraordinarily useful in the near future.
"Wasteful," Caitlin said. She knew how much external management was necessary to keep most Heavens functional.
Benedick sealed his carryall with a touch. He clipped it to the shoulder of his armor and snapped his fingers for the toolkit. It had been grooming the claws of one hind foot in the corner, enormous lambent eyes half closed in pleasure, fluffy tail flipped over the opposite toes. At his summons, it scampered squirrel-light across the rubble of ruined equipment, leaped to his outreached gauntlet, and swarmed up his arm to the shoulder, where it curled itself under the edge of his hair. It peeked between strands, blinking.
Caitlin could not believe anyone had ever gone out of their way to design anything quite so offensively cute.
Benedick said, "The Builders believed in competition."
"Just to complete your morning," Tristen added, "the angel informs me that it has lost contact with certain areas of the world. It believes that it's possible the original Israfel has respawned an intact instance."
Benedick splayed his fingers inside their gauntlets. Caitlin watched furtively. She had been right to create distance between them. It was too hard to stay angry with him when he was close, and in pain, but she didn't dare let go of that anger. Looking at him now, she nursed her outrage, fed it scraps of bitter memory, and still she felt it gutter. No memory of betrayal could stand up to the presence of the man.
He said, "But the renewed world angel is Israfel--"
"It is an evolved Israfel," Caitlin corrected. "Pieces were lost in the shipwrecked time. Pieces evolved. Pardon me, angel, for speaking of you as if you were not here."
"Fear not," the angel said. "I take no offense."
"New pieces were added," Tristen said, when neither she nor Benedick could bring themselves to say it. "The problem is that the angel is not the only thing that's evolved. We have, too. And the original Israfel would have the Builders' unmodified plan at heart."
Tristen's tone carried a world of implications as to what he thought of the Builders, their plan, and their general Godlike disregard for the health or well-being of any individual creature. The God of the Builders was a harsh god, with no concern in Him for any given sparrow's fall.
"And the Builders were monsters," Caitlin said, to validate him. "There's one benefit in that possibility, though. Israfel should know our destination."
"I know our destination," the angel said. "From Dust and Samael. But the destination Dust provided is nonsensical; it's an empty sector. There is nothing awaiting where we were sent."
"So Dust was corrupt or misinformed?" Benedick asked.
"Or intentionally misprogrammed," Tristen said. His voice was level, light, matter-of-fact. As she often had in the long-ago, Caitlin thought that she would like it better if he were ranting. "Remember with whom we are dealing, here. The Builders were an apocalyptic cult. I've read that book in the case outside the bridge: it would not be beyond them to send a million life-forms on a one-way journey if they believed it would force us to evolve. The rest of you may not remember, but our father was but a pale reflection of what spawned him."
"I remember," Caitlin said. Gerald Conn, the last Captain of the Jacob's Ladder, had raised his heir a patricide--founding a family tradition, it seemed. And nobody had really blamed Alasdair for killing the old man.
Tristen fell silent. She could hear his light, quick breaths. This was no easier for him than for any of them, and perhaps worse. Arianrhod might be Benedick's ex-lover, if you could use such an affectionate term for an arrangement of political expedience. But she was Tristen's granddaughter, and those were not bonds that dissolved so easily.
Breaking the silence, Benedick said, "There also might have been a trigger protocol meant to provide a real destination when certain conditions were fulfilled."
"There still might," Caitlin said, and did not fill in the obvious corollary. If Israfel had, in fact, respawned and recompiled himself, it was possible that the situation Tristen was describing was exactly what had triggered the event.
"As an alternate possibility," Benedick added, "our angel has breadth of experience on its side. And it should in large part be aware of its progenitors' plans. Am I correct?"
"Yes," the angel said. Caitlin bit her cheek, trying not to hear familiar overtones. "However, data was lost in the collectivization. We were all attempting to eat one another. Further data had already been lost when the world shattered, and in the intervening centuries. And it would be well within parameters for Dust or Asrafil or Samael to institute some complex machination, then wipe and overwrite his own memory of the event. In which case, I would have no way of knowing. Conceivably, any of them could have programmed a respawn. Indeed, I should be surprised if each of them had not. And if it is Israfel ..."
Caitlin would have reached to rub her neck, if not for the gauntlets. She touched her wrist, retracting the glove into the armor, and pressed at the base of her skull. Interpreting the motion, the gelatinous lining of the armor rippled soothingly down the length of her back. "We are not what the Builders would have had us become. And based on the evidence of the dead in the holdes, Israfel would be designed to implement their plan over as many corpses as necessary."
Tristen said, "We don't need another war of the angels. Or a purge of the unbelievers."
"Sir Perceval is the Captain," the angel said. "If there are angels, if they are not significantly different in program from my progenitors, they will obey her if they can be made to hear. Except--"
"Bound demons," Caitlin said. "Loopholes in contracts. Things that serve unwillingly are tricky as hell to control."
"Yes," the angel said. "And first they must be made to hear."