Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

Perceval crumbled. Scattered. Disassociated. Dispersed. She felt herself slipping away, the core, the center, the ego worn into a shadow even starlight could shine through. As if she were all fingers and no eyes, all edge and no center. She felt the world all through her, or her all through the world, and the ship and its denizens were no different. She felt it lacking, felt where it was weary with metal fatigue, battle fatigue, the incessant scrape of entropy.

  Dust was there with her. She felt him, in all his diffusion, all his cold angelic will, as she spun along the webs and nodules and struts and lattices of the world.

  She felt where the ship might hold, when the waystar primary went supernova. She felt where no repairs could be enough, where it would inevitably fail. She felt the borders of other angels, and the spaces where she could not tread.

  She felt Ariane approaching, on the one side. And on the other, Rien and Tristen, come to bring her home. Too late, too late, and she mourned not her loss—for she had not lost them—but the grief they would suffer on behalf of her.

  Like oil dropped onto a puddle, Perceval spread thin. And lost herself in the world.

  There was only so far the lift could take them. Eventually, they came to the outer hull of the bridge itself, protected at the core of the world. When the lift finally rattled to a halt, vibrating and straining so Rien could feel the unheard whine of metal fatigue through her boots, she could not at first seem to unlock her gauntlets from the strut. But Tristen, armor glistening, paused beside her and carefully uncurled each finger, with a delicacy she could imagine had taken decades to perfect.

  He held one of her wrists. They floated face-to-face for a moment, and when Rien peered through his faceplate she saw him wink, quite broadly, his waxy face contorting.

  And then his face shield closed, and she was looking at her own reflection mirrored in its gloss-white carapace for two long seconds until her own armor locked down as well. Then she saw through sensor motes connected to her symbiont, a spherical field of vision that left her almost completely disoriented. The armor reassured her, though: a steady stream of data, filtered down until it made sense. Tristen released her wrist, and she wondered if he gave her a final reflexive squeeze. Above them, Samael's ghostly avatar floated beside what Rien could only assume was an air-lock entry.

  Tristen moved away.

  Rien's armor followed his.

  Entering was easy. Samael merely put out his hand— not, Rien thought, that he needed to, except for dramatic purposes—and opened the air-lock door. As her armor brought her inside, she caught herself wondering if it would be that easy to get back out again.

  Or if there would be any need.

  Once inside, they moved through cobwebbed darkness, but the armor had no need of light. Insect husks crunched underfoot, and the armor relied on internal air. From its conversation, Rien understood that the biosphere here had long failed, the flora dying in darkness and drought and, in due time, the fauna following. Not, however, be' fore the flies and spiders had undergone an apparent population explosion.

  —Armor?—

  —At the ready.—

  —Do you have a name?—

  —This unit is unnamed.—

  —Oh.— She waited, as if it might somehow proactively fill the gap. But there were only echoes of her own silent voice in her head. —Would you like a name?—

  Of course she couldn't feel it hesitate as it processed the question. Even Exalted reflexes could never be fast enough. Perhaps it was simply focused on a tricky bit of following the others through the gloom. Tristen's chalky armor glimmered on ultraviolet. Rien wondered if he had chosen that whiteness for dramatic reasons, or so as to draw fire.

  Or possibly so as to be the first to come to Ariane's notice, if—when—they should reach her.

  The scabbard of the unblade clasped across her back protruded at hip level. She touched it nervously.

  —Yes.— the armor said, when she had grown resigned to a lack of answer.

  She nodded, its collar rubbing her throat, and said, —I'll think on it.—

  She wondered at the bounce she thought she sensed in its step, for minutes after.

  It was easy to tell which door led to the bridge, even in the blackness. Rien could clearly make out the stand beside it, the glass dome and what rested within.

  Hero Ng knew what the case held.

  A paper New Evolutionist Bible. With leather covers, and pages pressed from wood and cotton fibers grown in the soul of ancient Earth.

  Rien could barely breathe as they came forward.

  Piece by piece, particle by particle, Dust collected his Captain. He'd known it would come to this; he'd known she'd fall into his vastness. They lived so bounded, these small intelligences.

  But he could get her back.

  Fragment by fragment he redeemed her, brought her together, showed her how to integrate herself. As for maintaining the connections between the particles of her consciousness and the meat that Dust believed housed her soul... they learned that together.

  Dust worked feverishly. Taught, feverishly. Learned in a frenzy. Because Ariane was there, and Dust could feel Asrafil pressing at his fringes. They were coming.

  They were nearly here.

  Alasdair Conn hadn't been a real Captain. Just a Commodore. In charge, but not in command.

  He had never surrendered himself to his ship.

  To his angels.

  As Perceval surrendered now. Surrendered, and possessed.

  And stood again, dripping stormlight, wreathed in her dozen shining wings, just as the forward bulkhead blew wide open on the Enemy, and Ariane and her angel came within.

  29 the sun goes down in a cold pale flare

  I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

  —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "Conscientious Objector"

  They met the guardian before the door, and joined him there in combat.

  If Rien had been a fighter, she might have been able to describe what followed. But she was a passenger, and she experienced what happened in a stunning, stuttering kaleidoscope. Not a blur, because a blur is fluid, and this was staccato, punctuated.

  Sequence and order fell away; there was only the struggle to stay soft inside her armor, not to fight its movement, to bite down on the mouthguard and let the gelatinous, body-temperature shock lining press her body into whatever shape it would.

  She was not very good at it. Caitlin—or someone—had set her armor for extreme evasion. Her left arm, spine, left leg popped and strained. Her colony rushed to repair the damage, reporting torn tendons and muscles, her own anatomy limned red in her mind's eye.

  And she honestly couldn't understand a thing that was going on around her. Her armor was defended by a sym-biont swarm, and what attacked was—she thought— Dust, defending his lair and his hostage. But she couldn't be certain, and whatever Samael was doing, he was no more plain to the eye—or any of her armor's sensors.

  Tristen never left her side, not that proximity was any protection against an enemy who surrounded them, who interpermeated their defenses. A hiss and sizzle like static droned in her ears, and from her armor—from her every gesture and from her companions—St. Elmo's fire shredded and spun. Veils of light, green, vermilion, and electric blue, pulled and tore.

  Rien had no idea who was winning. She saw Tristen striking out with invisible weapons, his hands crackling with residual ionization. She saw the whole corridor lit flare'white as some attack died on their defenses. She groped, and herself drew Caitlin's terrible black unsword Mercy. The blade was an absence of anything, reflection-less as the face of the Enemy. She swung it wildly.

  Where the blade passed, the crackling light was cut, and burned no more.

  With it, with Samael and Tristen's assistance, Rien was hewing her way to the door.

  She was within a meter of her goal when the deck jumped under Rien's feet, and through the armor she heard first rending metal and then an abrupt absence of transmitted sound.

&nbs
p; "Hull breach," Tristen said over his suit mike. "We have to get within."

  Within, Perceval was unready. Unready and unarmed, her limbs like puppet sticks, her body awkward, infected, alien, enfolded in a corona of sensation that extended meters in every direction. Pinion stirred around her, a shimmer of light like the shadow of ripples on the bottom of a glass.

  Graceless, uncoordinated. New and raw. Unarmored, and with no weapon in her hands. But she was naked to the Enemy, and did not feel its cold.

  Ariane needed her armor. She needed her unblade.

  She advanced, her angel cloaking her in his glory, Innocence as black in her hand as a hole in the night.

  There was too much. Perceval raked herself together, clutched her tattered edges close. In the corridor, Dust was fighting someone. Another angel, people in armor. She'd look in a minute. Too much, from everywhere, and she was trying to see Ariane.

  There was no speaking, now, for there was no atmosphere. No click as Ariane's armored foot came down, disturbing cobwebs, breaking the parallel rays of the suns that shone through the rent bulkhead behind her, haloing her in light reflected from disturbed particles.

  —Be bold,—Pinion whispered in Perceval's ear. —Be of good courage, Captain. For I am with you.—

  As if on marionette strings, Perceval stepped forward to war. And like a gliding cat, Ariane came to meet her.

  Asrafil's presence was a void in Perceval's new perceptions, Ariane and Innocence the enigma at its center. Through Pinion, into Dust, she sensed the other angel's fringes, felt them grapple and claw. The rift in the bulkhead webbed over, clotted like a wound, knit like bone.

  She saw in cascades of images, from angles and points of view not her own. She whirled in the veil of Pinion's wings, and Pinion itself tore savagely at Asrafil when that angel clutched after her.

  But Dust fought his war on two fronts, and Perceval could sense each centimeter of ground he was losing. The angel in the corridor was smaller than Asrafil or than Dust, more coherent, tighter and more defined—

  —If Asrafil was here, then who was outside?

  Two, in armor. A man and a woman. One with an un-blade. And an angel.

  Perceval reached out through Dust again. Since he had released her emotions, she found she could think, process, and consider in absolute clarity, even while her body danced swords with Ariane. She was not, she thought, only thinking with her own brain, and her symbiont, but with some fraction of Dust's processing power as well. And her borrowed capacity was untroubled by the desperation with which Perceval's body fought for life.

  —Dust, Open the door.—

  She could not permit Ariane to corner her, and there was nothing she could do to parry that blade. Anything living or symbiotic it touched was severed for all time. But if she could not parry, Pinion could riposte, and Perceval could keep them both out of the way.

  Perceval spun, dodged a thrust from the enemy angel— a lance of charged particles that seared the decking where she had been—and as she recovered found herself face to mask with Ariane's faceless armor, and almost within the span of her arms. Ariane's blade swerved toward her—a hard reflexive arc—and Perceval sprang upward, Pinion flailing around her.

  She could not actually feel the unblade slice under her feet. There was no air for it to stir. But she felt it clip the trailing flight feathers on Pinion's bottom wings, and pass through without resistance.

  There was resistance as Perceval somersaulted up and away, Pinion slashing and scissoring. She knew she struck Ariane's armor. She knew she cut it, for those wings were edged like razors where they chose to be. She felt the pulse of blood from the wound—arterial—and saw the cobalt spray across the decking, quickly stopped as Ariane's symbiont attended it.

  Ariane shifted her sword to her other hand.

  When Perceval landed, crouched, half the bridge away, the cobwebs tore under her feet. And one of Pinion's wings was dragging.

  —Dust.— His stubborness was like a wall. He had no intention of permitting Samael or any of her family near her. He had no intention of making alliances, or of sharing power.

  And if she was his Captain, what good was it if he did not answer when she spoke to him?

  —Dust. Open the corridor door.—

  He showed her his war, plunged her into it like a microsecond bath of ice water. He gave her angels fighting, the knife-taloned combat of microscopic machines. The weapons were invisible ... until microwaves sizzled cobwebs, until a wave of massed nanites burned through another like a flaming sword through ice.

  —Open the corridor door.—

  Chromed armor glittering, Ariane charged. Perceval, coiled for another twisting leap, curled her lip and narrowed her eyes, and waited.

  —Samael ... —

  A console across the room sparked and exploded.

  —You stupid bastard, let them in.—

  Ariane lunged, anticipating another leap like before. Perceval threw herself to the side, this time, instead, and felt Innocence bite deep into one wing. Just like before, there would be shocking pain and then—

  She fell, sprawling, skidding in cobwebs. She rolled, the remaining wings armoring her as best they could, bruising elbows and toes, smacking her shin hard on the navigator's chair. She scrambled behind a console, Ariane instead grabbing the chair back and bounding over, her guard flawed for a split instant as she leaped and Innocence drifted wide.

  One wing was severed above the elbow. But all the others bent forward, flexed at the joint as sharply as a guitarist's fingers, and as Perceval fell backward among the dust and debris they met, and bowed, and slid into Ariane's breast through the armor, until a meter or more of blue-smeared plumage protruded from her back.

  Perceval saw her own wide eyes and stubbled scalp reflected in the bright chrome of Ariane's helm—

  And then Pinion snapped wide its wings, and the daughter of Alasdair Conn shredded, flesh and bone.

  With the hiss of air entering from the now-open corridor door, Perceval heard the pop of dislocating joints and the thick meaty rip of muscle.

  Snaps and tatters of static electricity charged in the ionized atmosphere; Ariane might be vanquished, but Asrafil fought still.

  And then, as if the fighting has been a hallucination, Rien's armor balanced flat-footed in the corridor, and the door into the bridge stood open. Silence hung over the corridor, dim lights flickering into life, shadows concealing as much as they revealed. Within, though, lightning raced over surfaces, and Rien could see someone slender and bony-tall, shrouded in tattered wings and dripping cobalt blood, rising to her feet.

  Tristen cried out and stepped forward, weapon trained on Perceval. No, Rien thought, moving forward in anticipation of the betrayal, aware already that there was nothing she could do to stop him. Perhaps an angel could intervene in time. Perhaps—

  "You're alive," he said, and his voice broke, and his gun dropped down beside his thigh. He held out his unarmed hand, offering support or an embrace, and Perceval turned toward him, her eyes wide and wild.

  And Rien breathed again, through a pall of sick self-hate for ever doubting him. But then Samael appeared like a star from eclipse, one hand firm upon his arm, and Perceval halted midstep.

  —Rien,— said a voice from the air before her. —And Rien only.—

  "Dust," Samael said, as if it needed explaining. And Rien nodded.

  Somehow, when Rien turned, she found herself meeting Tristen's faceless attention. "You're all idiots," Rien said.

  He squared himself. "You have everything you need."

  She nodded. And as she stepped over the threshold onto the bridge, toward Perceval, she brushed Samael's naked shoulder with her gauntlet and said inside her helm, "I'm ready, angel. Consent."

  She never saw if he responded. She was distracted by the motion in her hand, as something nigh-weightless and of neutral temperature to the armor's sensors. She looked down in surprise, and nearly dropped it.

  Mercy.

  Rien s
wallowed and went forward.

  Walking across the bridge, she picked her feet up and set them down straight, to try to limit the amount of dust she was disturbing. Perceval, wreathed in wings like an arbor of brazen thorns, held out her hands. As Rien came closer, she saw the severed stump of one wing dripping viscous blue fluid. Perceval's eyes widened when she saw what Rien held, the splinter of absolute blackness in her hand. Perceval dropped to one knee and Rien trotted a step—but then Perceval stood again and Rien realized her sister had only been picking up Innocence.

  Which meant that the chunks of armor and blue-dripping meat scattered around the deck were—

  "Oh," Rien said, and tried not to gag inside her helmet. "Space it," she said, and opened her faceplate, just in case. The machine-oil stench of Exalt blood didn't help the nausea, but it didn't really hurt it either.

  And then she was close enough to Perceval for Perceval to touch her, and Perceval put a hand on her armored shoulder, and Rien leaned into the touch. Although she couldn't feel the touch through ceramic and titanium, she could feel the armor feeling.

  "Close your eyes," Perceval said.

  Rien closed them. For three minutes, timed on her symbiont. And all the while she waited, she felt Samael working in her, moving through her, changing her. Taking her apart.

  Her fringes were unraveling, and she felt how Perceval had come unraveled, too. She sensed what Perceval hadn't wanted her to witness, as Perceval collected Ariane's symbiont, her own symbiont hunting it to every corner of the bridge, and consumed it. And with it, Ariane.

  And with Ariane, Alasdair.

  "I guess you're really Captain now," Rien said, without opening her eyes. And then the name, one last time. A caress. "Perceval."

  Perceval's voice was thick and choked. "I'm not exactly Perceval anymore."

  "It's all right," Rien said, as Samael's invisible components converted her, cell by cell. "I still love you."

  Perceval touched her armor again. This time, Rien felt it.