Grail (13 page)

Everything is an ecology
, she thought, and dearly hoped that she did not live to regret the extravagance of this meal. With a potential end to the aggressive maintenance of environmental balance in sight, it was too easy to spend resources profligately, to make up for long hardship and privation. Too easy, and too dangerous.

While Tristen was sorting out utensils, she found two packets of noodles and handed him one. They were designed
so you could hold them open one-handed by pressing at diagonally opposite corners and dip chopsticks in and out at will. Clever and convenient both, for situations with erratic or micro gravity.

She tilted her head back for the first mouthful, watching the world turn against the stars, and wondered how she would pay Tristen back for this.

He let her eat in peace, and she was grateful. Gratitude toward Tristen was one of her more basic emotions. She knew they would have to talk more soon, but for now he had bought her this moment of peace, and he was waiting for her to reopen the pressing subjects at hand. The gratitude toward Tristen was multiplied by her gratitude toward Head, who had outdone hirself. Perceval almost imagined she could taste the nurturing in each delicately flavored bite.

Since she actually felt like eating for a change, she waited until her belly was full. She then waited a few moments more, savoring the peace and the view and the company, until even Tristen—who could eat like an adolescent boy—was slowing.

“If we find Charity,” Perceval said, “and we find the paper Bible, we find the culprits.”

Tristen rubbed his chin. The faint bristle of his beard hairs caught the light, silvery-bright, as if the cold glazed his face. “Yes. Whoever has it, though, can hide it. As well as they hid themselves when they came to take it.”

“Themselves? You don’t think they were all Deckers? Mercenaries? Deckers have a martial culture. Now that they’re Exalt, I would expect good fighters among them.”

“You killed two,” Tristen said. “If Caitlin inflicted any casualties, they took their dead and wounded with them. Now, I knew my sister well—”

He smiled mirthlessly, and she echoed him, feeling the reflex stretch her face across bared teeth. “You’re right. What I fought would not have killed her. Not as she died, with
one clean thrust. Not armed with an unblade that could cut any weapon it came against. The ones I fought were using dart throwers and extruded monoblades.”

Perceval fished out the half-eaten noodle packet she’d stowed back in the basket, for something to do with her hands. She should have seen it. Too much grief—

Nova interrupted, only hesitantly. “Captain?”

Nova was kind, and permitted Perceval to swallow her moment of sorrow before continuing.

“Oh, dear.” She stuck her chopsticks through the safety loop and allowed the packet to snap closed.

Tristen sighed and set his food back inside the picnic basket.

Nova said, “It’s not a crisis, but I did want to alert you that we’ve received a return transmission from the leader of the people of Grail.” The Angel paused. “It’s … friendly, as far as it goes.”

“But it doesn’t go far—? No, never mind, Nova. Play it, please,” Tristen said. “What does the Fisher King have to say for himself?” Tristen glanced at Perceval for her permission, but it was strictly a formality. She hadn’t yet had a need to gainsay him. All evidence suggested that he had no ambition beyond being the perfect first lieutenant, confidant, and friend—and, if that was his ambition, he fulfilled it.

“Play it,” she confirmed.

Nova resolved an image against the blank wall of the tent opposite. The man who appeared was the color of burnt sienna, one of the brown rainbow tints of corroded metal, his skin darker than any Perceval had ever seen with her own eyes. Perceval at first tried not to stare out of politeness, until she was reminded by Tristen’s fixed gaze that the object of their attention could not witness her rudeness.

His skin was healthy, glossy, almost gleaming. The whites of his eyes were ivory, with a warm undercast from
a Mean’s red blood. The irises were a brown so dark it was difficult to see the details and variances of pigmentation.

Besides the color of his skin, he had a broad face, well-fleshed, with a low-bridged nose and high forehead. His black-brown hair, receding like any older male Mean’s, was kept short, and from the texture it looked like it curled in tight spirals that gave it a plush appearance. And he was big, big and broad, with thick fingers and wrists, and heavy bones and muscles that spoke of a life lived under oppressive gravity.

His shoulders must be as wide as Head’s
.

“Is that from
the sun
?” Perceval asked, wondering.

“Hello,” he said, his words halting and strangely accented but understandable. “I am Administrator Danilaw Bakare, City Administrator of Bad Landing on the independent and Earth-allied world of Fortune. It is my surprised delight to greet you, and to assure you that you are welcome in our system.”

He took a breath and glanced down. Scanning notes, Perceval realized with a painful shortness of breath that wasn’t just due to the lack of oxygen. That, more than anything, brought home to her what she had known intellectually: this alien man was a Mean.

She was still shocked at her own egocentrism that she found herself surprised to be treating with a Mean. Cynric had not developed the symbiont until long after the world left Earth behind, and she had cannibalized an alien life-form to do it. So why had Perceval expected that Earth would have produced the same technology?

She stilled herself, and paid attention to what followed. It was elaborate in the extreme, leading her to wonder if the diplomatic protocols of these alien beings were more focused on ritual and poetry than those to which she was accustomed.

“When humans first took to the sea,” Danilaw said, “they crept around the edges of the land masses. They
clung to the shallows and sailed within sight of the coasts. But a few adventurers were more daring. In longboats, on rafts, in outrigger canoes, and in lashed reed boats they braved the deep ocean, navigating through storm and peril to find new lands. Many—perhaps most—did not survive the journey.

“When humans first entered space, it was the same way. We dabbled in the gentle currents around our homeworld. We sowed bottle messages upon the deep, sending out drone explorers, and never dared hope that anyone would find them and follow their messages to where we languished, cast away. Some few brave or foolhardy adventurers followed, in vessels hopelessly inadequate for the perils they would face.

“We had numbered you among them. We counted you as heroes lost to the emptiness of space. Today is a day of rejoicing, for we have been proved wrong.”

He paused, letting her see him take a deep breath, and checked his notes again.

“There will be some quarantine protocols to get out of the way, and I’m sure we each have a great deal of news and history to exchange that will interest the other. We will send trade and cultural negotiators. But in the meantime, we would request permission to send a small vessel to dock with your ship. In addition, in the metadata of this transmission, you will find a document containing a list of questions regarding the census of your vessel. Any information you can provide as to the demographics and ideologies of your population would help us greatly in preparing to arrange your reception.”

He smiled—a big, human grin that Perceval found reassuring despite the alien architecture of his features. “We’re looking forward to meeting you.”

After the waystars exploded, before the Captain and her officers won back the world, there had been war. War was something Tristen Conn excelled at.

For his Captain, he had fought. Those memories were as clear and bright as they had ever been, burned into his mind with machine perfection, though the emotion and connection blurred with the years. It was like any recording, Tristen thought. You came back to it years later and saw yourself, and wondered who in all the world that person had ever been—so young, so stern, so smooth of skin and soul.

The first of it had been on AE deck, ship-west, in the 9s and 7s. Not Heavens or even holdes, but a cluster of domaines and anchores linked by rodent-maze tubes and air locks. Tristen had entered them at the head of what passed for his army: a band of soldiers neither ragtag nor undisciplined, but drawn from the ranks of Engineers and anyone else Tristen could find whose proclamations of loyalty to the Captain would withstand examination under validation. Not that there weren’t all sorts of ways to fool
a validator—even a well-trained and experienced one—especially when one was Exalt, but you had to draw a line somewhere.

Nova had told Tristen and the others that, before Acceleration, this area had been inhabited by a tribe of about seventy Means, operating with some salvaged technology and a lot of scrounging, myth, and ingenuity. Fifty or so of them had survived Acceleration, and all had been Exalted by Caitlin’s decision to release the symbiont colonies into the worldwide ecosystem. This act, intended to preserve the greatest possible diversity of life, was bound to have consequences—anticipated and otherwise.

Nova’s ease of information retrieval from anywhere in the world was a side effect of more recent events. Having reclaimed the world’s neural networks and integrated the memories of the splintered angels she’d consumed, she had access—finally—to an enormous database of useful information.

Tristen entered the anchore where the acceleration tanks were sequestered and smiled to find the reality matched the schematics Nova had provided. The map might not be the territory, but it was amazing how much difference it made to have a working Angel on your side.

The tribespeople had not yet been released from their acceleration tanks, which Tristen thought a mercy—fighting them here, from one cramped anchore to the next, would have meant killing each individual and dragging the bodies from their setts one by one like the corpses of dug-in badgers. The cost in lives—his people and theirs—would be staggering.

Tristen’s lieutenant, Jordan—one of the Engineers, and a flyer, dressed in gray-gold armor over her own gray-gold spotted fur and with her membranous wings folded tight against her back, contained in a bulge of the protective suit—directed the opening of each pod while Tristen stood back and observed. He was clad also in his armor, one
hand resting on haunted Mirth’s gray hilt. He would be the first person each awakening passenger spoke with, while they were bleary-eyed and confused. He would treat them with kindness and authority and, with luck, a few of them would imprint on him.

It would make it easier to keep them alive in the long run.

Jordan glanced at him, her helmet unsealed and the cowl retracted. He gave the nod, and the pod creaked and groaned, lights across its surface cycling green to warning amber. It made a sad, small, stretching noise. A slow-trickling leak oozed around the hatch. But the hatch did not open. Three more lights blinked green to amber, and two of the amber ones blinked red.

Life support interrupted
.

Exalt or not, they now had only minutes to free the inhabitant before she died. He could have drawn Mirth and slashed the stuck pod wide, but he preferred to leave that as a last resort. Better to limit the damage to something more easily repairable, and give the enlisted men something to feel useful about.

“Break it open,” Jordan said, before Tristen needed to intervene. Command was good for her, and she was good for it. Tristen could imagine enjoying himself in a role as figurehead, surrounded by eager and talented young persons who did all the hard work while he basked in reflected—and retrospective—glory.

Two more Engineers leapt across the grated, graded deck, one armed with a forked lever bar and the other with a cutter. The cutter cheeped and sniffed both lock and hinge sides as the Engineer pointed it at the hatch, then put out burr-tipped paws and worked them under the lip where the recessed hinges lived. A sharp whine filled the air. Tristen saw Jordan’s mouth compress as she kept herself from wincing. For him, the impassivity of command—the impassivity
of being a Conn—was habit long enough established that it took an effort to break.

One did not show weakness when one was Alasdair Conn’s child.

The door broke abruptly at the top hinge, sagging, and the pod spilled its gelatinous fluid in a syrupy flood that wet Jordan and the two Engineers to the knee. The Engineer with the lever leaned in around the cutter, which was shaking its wet paws in grave distaste, and hooked the fork through something. He pushed mightily, straining until Jordan stepped forward and leaned her slight weight on his. The lever rotated on the fulcrum; an ancient tool, like the wheel and the spindle: refined but never bettered.

A creak, a sigh, and the pop of failing metal warned Tristen to be ready. He reached out and caught the cover as it toppled, the falling weight cracking the latch and sending a bit of metal shrapnel ricocheting off one Engineer’s armor.

It wasn’t heavy. Or rather, it was heavy, but Tristen’s armor caught the brunt of it, so the weight that reached his muscles felt floaty and supported, springy. He smiled to himself, amused at how fast he’d gotten used to wearing armor again after decades in nothing but his own skin and strength. It was so easy to grow accustomed to comforts and conveniences, and so much work to adapt to their lack.

He set the hatch aside.

Jordan had already caught the woman within as she folded forward like an unsupported rag doll, and was clearing her mouth, pressing ropes of gelid blue-tagged acceleration fluid out of her. One of the Engineers dropped a pad over the wet grating and Jordan lowered their patient on her side so her lungs could drain. There was no blood, except for faint cobalt streaks running through the aquamarine of the tank fluid—whatever injuries she had sustained in Acceleration, her new symbiont and the time in
the tank had worked their magic, and now she was well. Or rather: well, except for the drowning.