Dust jl-1 Page 5

  She wasn't self-deluding enough to imagine she could ever replace what a weapon like Innocence had pared away.

  So she concentrated on Rien, shivering, huddled, but craning her neck to see. She concentrated past Rien, too, on the far wall of the world, to which they had come halfway. There must be a hatch, an air lock. There must be a way inside.

  Blood or no blood, Exalt though she was, she might be able to half feel wings she didn't have, but her fingers were already going numb. There was no warmth trapped between her and Rien, as there would have been in the coldest imaginable air. There was nothing there but the Enemy, -surrounding them, stealing their heat and strength. The great emptiness waited for them all.

  It couldn't have her now.

  Rien's jaw worked, her lips stubbornly pressed together. Not that she could have said anything—the Enemy would steal her words, and more of her warmth with it. So Perceval was pleased that she had the sense to shut her mouth and cling to the harness straps.

  They needed more acceleration. A fine balance; she didn't want to strike the far side of the hub with too much of a difference in inertia. And they could not afford to overshoot and try to come back. Perceval might survive it, but Rien's colony was fragile and new.

  She'd freeze solid if they missed, and even if Engine could bring her back, there was a risk of brain injury. Or of resurrecting only the body, the person within long fled.

  Perceval found she was fond of Rien's voice. She did not care to have her lose it.

  As an additional problem, Perceval thought, as they approached the towering shadow of the far rim, there was relative motion to consider. The world rotated in a stately fashion, but as they crossed the hub, the direction of that movement appeared to reverse. In other words, if the wall they had exited—a wall kilometers in breadth, and they had emerged by the top or sunward edge of it—was spinning to the left, the wall ahead spun to the right, and they were drifting the wrong way to match velocities.

  Perceval hoped they had enough reactive mass left to make a difference. Perhaps she should hoard it... but when they came gliding among the silent, waist-thick, spinning cables of the far side, she needed the maneuverability, and she needed to be ready. Slowly, so as not to startle Rien, Perceval loosed her clasp on her sister's shoulders. Rien's fingers whitened on the harness— Perceval risked shifting her attention from the onrushing hull and saw the skin crack where they tightened—but she held on and huddled close.

  Perceval could not feel her fingers. Ironic cruelty, that the cold stung along the ghost bones of her wings.

  The cables spun slower, covered less distance, near the center of the hub. Easier to catch, safer to brake yourself against. But it would take too long to crawl along them to the rim. I am on the horns of a dilemma, Perceval thought, and almost giggled, picturing a spiky-horned, two-headed animal. It was all the evidence she needed of oxygen deprivation.

  It was all so silent. Perceval heard her own blood hum in her ears, a kind of ringing she thought was just the firing of unused nerves. She reached out before her, both arms and her curved flyer's toes on their long legs, and now the hull was rushing at them like a spinning saw blade, each protrusion or projection another chance at death.

  She didn't have time to reprogram the go-pack on the fly, but reversing the thrust was easy enough. All she had to do was use the attitude jets to turn herself, to put her back to the rim of the world, and face away. Rien was looking over her shoulder, Rien with her eyes so wide and weeping tears that crazed with ice and froze to her lashes and had to be shaken away.

  Perceval hoped she understood.

  They were slowing, though; that, Perceval could feel in her inner ear, in her bones, in her teeth. Now? No. Now?

  And then Rien gave the harness straps a yank, and ! Perceval felt something skip past her toes, bang her foot hard and spin her, but as she whirled like a throwing star, a flat spin with limbs extended, she saw some kind of antennae or mast as it glided past.

  It was Rien who grabbed it, and held onto the harness with the other hand, and then with a skull-rattling jerk they were moving, and Perceval got a knee hooked around the thing, and they turned with the ship until it seemed that they moved not at all. Instead the universe wheeled around them, while they hung on the edge of the world, motionless and sublime.

  Perceval might have hugged Rien and kissed her, but she felt the ice crystals growing in her own skin, her colony losing its battle. Hand over hand, she pulled them down the mast, and hand over hand, along the grab bars set in the hull. Ahead was an air lock, round, outlined in green paint and the dark sockets of long-dead lights.

  It was locked, but Perceval was Exalt. The world opened its doors to her.

  And then they were inside, in the heat, in the moisture, and the air was freezing to their skin, cracking off in great flakes when they moved, the sting of thawing flesh too much to be borne. Perceval's knees folded and so did she, knees everywhere and forehead on the heels of her hands, slumped forward automatically as if she still had wings.

  Rien coughed up blood. Bright, frothy, oxygenated. Lung blood, and still more red than blue; she must have tried to hold her breath. It didn't matter; they were inside now. Whatever she had sustained, her colony would heal.

  Except she was staring at Perceval, not her own blood on the floor. Her voice cracked and raggedy, she rasped, "Perceval. Your wings."

  And by some luck, before Perceval called Rien any of those perfectly appropriate names that sprang to mind, she glanced past her and saw them reflected in the inside air-lock hatch. Spread out behind her, no hollow bone and soft membrane but seemingly wrought of shadow and mist and silk. Pearl and charcoal and silver, raddled this way and that like a colt's thin legs. A pair, indeed, of ghostly wings.

  7 the beat of parasite wings

  When the white flame in us is gone,

  And we that lost the world's delight

  Stiffen in darkness, left alone

  To crumble in our separate night.

  —RUPERT BROOKE, "Dust"

  The air-lock decking was cold under Rien's feet, her own blood seaweedy, meaty-sharp in her mouth, overlaid with an unfamiliar bitterness. Even after speaking to Perceval, she spat and spat. The blood made a streaked puddle by her feet.

  She started when Perceval touched her shoulder. "Don't spit it out," she said, the gauzy wings stirring behind her. "Swallow it. You're spitting out your symbiont."

  With an effort, Rien did as Perceval instructed. Her throat was raw; it felt like swallowing scrubbers. When she could make herself stand straight, she looked at Perceval and spared herself speech by lifting her right hand, wrist bent, and making a spinning motion.

  Perceval seemed to understand. She turned in place.

  Rien noticed that the tips of the half-material wings lifted slightly to miss the puddle of slime on the decking. She, too, picked her way around it, cautious about stepping too close. Although, she considered, anything in the air lock was within range, if they lashed out.

  The go-pack had vanished. Perceval's pale freckled back was naked from the base of her stubbled skull to the cleft of narrow buttocks. And the wings—translucent, whispery—grew from where her wounds had been. "What do you see?" Perceval asked. When she craned her head over her shoulder, the tendons stood out along her throat all the way up to her ear.

  "Are we in Engine?"

  "No," Perceval said. "I don't know exactly where we are. The world was spinning. But not in Rule, that's something. What do you see?"

  "It's the chains," Rien said. "The nanocolony. It's turned into wings."

  "And?"

  "And fused with you," she finished, reluctantly. And spoke the next words on a rush, wishing she dared to touch Perceval just then. "Come on, we need to get out of this air lock and figure out where we are."

  "And how to get to Father," Perceval said. She turned, decisively, and the wings missed thumping Rien as deftly as if they had been real. With one hand, the Engineer struck the air-lock rele
ase. Into the other, she produced the control for the nanotech colony, and was already fussing with it as the air lock cycled.

  It had, Rien noticed and did not say, no visible effect.

  She walked through the lock behind Perceval, distracted by the distinct, minute sensations of her lungs and skin repairing themselves, or being repaired by her new symbiont. Rien had split her scalp when she was a child, as children do, and the sensation reminded her of the tug of stitches in anaesthetized skin, on a micro level. The lock closed behind her, and they stood in the warm air of the corridor.

  Perceval reached up over her shoulder and ran her fingertips from the base to the joint, as far as her arm would reach. She grasped the bone—what would have been the bone, in a living wing—between thumb and forefinger, wrist bent tortuously. She pulled, muscles flexing in her forearm, wiry biceps taut, her breast lifting as her pectorals tensed.

  The wing did not budge. Perceval only succeeded in pulling her own shoulder forward. "Ow," she said.

  Here in the corridor Rien could see it better. And see how the light did indeed fall through it, as if it were a three-dimensional rendering made real. She let her hand drop by her thigh, defeated. "I think it's engineered out of nanoscaffolds. And it's bonded to my stumps."

  "Can you feel it?"

  At first, Rien thought Perceval would not answer. The question, on second thought, was quite rude. She winced an apology. But Perceval didn't seem to find it presumptuous. "Yes," she said. Her lips looked thin. A muscle twitched along her jaw, a rhythmic tic. "It doesn't hurt anymore."

  Rien thought about raw bone, naked to air, chafed by bandages. Bile rose up her throat.

  "I hate this."

  All Rien could do was put her hand on her sister's arm. "We need to find out where we are."

  "It's warm," Perceval said. "So it's populated. There are a lot of parts of the world that I know nothing about, though. Have you memorized any of the world plans?"

  "I've never been out of Rule," Rien said. Even that was overstating the case. She'd never been out of the Commodore's household, not even as far as the algae tanks.

  "Well, no matter." Perceval craned her head back. She still held the key box in her hand, clenched like any other useless talisman. Were even Engineers superstitious? And then convulsively, she turned and slammed it against the wall. It shattered, and she let the pieces fall. And then turned away, head jerking as if startled.

  Rien opened her mouth, still tasting blood and that machine-oil funk. But a frown of concentration drew down the corners of Perceval's mouth, and she held up one impatient uplifted hand. Whatever Rien had been about to say, she hushed herself.

  And so heard the pad of running feet.

  Perceval heard them, too. But she could not afford the time or the break in concentration to look. They were unarmed, alone, barely dressed.

  The pull of skin across her cheeks told her she was pursing her lips as she concentrated, a habit her mother always teased about. It helped distract her from the weightlessness of her shadowy new wings, which generated a deep and repellent terror.

  No one had a schematic of all the world. Not since the moving times, as far as Perceval knew. Not since the engines and the world brain failed, leaving them with partial maps and hard copy. But she knew her history, the stories of the world ships sent out like groping fingers across the Enemy's empty sea, better charted but no less gallant than any unevolved raftsman braving the Pacific. It was a kind of superb blindness, the human push for exploration, for growth.

  Or maybe it wasn't. After all, any virus could do the same. Her symbiont, engineered and unintelligent, was even now colonizing the unknown shores of Rien's body.

  Still, Perceval was human. She could be forgiven an ethnocentric value judgment. And she was a human with a carefully bred and force-evolved body and a highly engineered prosthesiotomy. She had seen maps. Thus, she could recollect them. And—it was just possible—figure out where they were, at least in the broadest of terms.

  Images flickered, turned, shuffled across her inner eye. Sharp and precise, machine-learned: unlike her father, she was not a bred eidetic. But she had a trick he didn't, and she layered and turned and compared. She had her natural spatial sense, heightened for a flyer, and she had the sound of the echoes along the corridor, closer, rounding the corner now. It all built an image, a geography. A map.

  She knew where they were.

  And then, when she would have expected a hail or a challenge, came the flat hiss of air guns.

  Perceval's reflexes were accelerated to the edge of diminishing returns. In a stress situation, thinking chips made her limbs' decisions for her; it could take too long for electricity to flow along nerves. She could assess and act faster than any unengineered creature could dream of, if it could not be precisely described as thinking.

  She had no time to react.

  Her parasite wings flared wide; they spun her. The sensation was as a child swung around in a strong man's grip, and Perceval was as powerless to hold her ground as that child. One wing cupped Rien, drew her close, and with that Perceval could assist. She caught her sister in her arms and clutched her inside the curve of her body, her nose buried in Rien's greasy dark hair. Rien screamed, or started to scream, and they were slung around again. Perceval felt the vibration of Rien's cry through her rib cage, and could think only how it must hurt to shout like that, with vacuum-stressed lungs.

  Perceval wanted to close her eyes. But were she willing to admit cowardice, she barely had the time.

  There were four in the corridor: a crossfire, two at each end. They wore coveralls, black with bright patterns in ultraviolet, which made Perceval think they were Exalt.

  Without asking questions, without a word, they fired, and continued to fire. And air darts sailed all around Perceval and Rien, slivers of drugged or deadly plastic that were no threat to the world's fragile hull. No one would risk an explosive weapon inside. Mean or Exalt, everyone feared the Enemy more than anything save fire.

  The darts made little sound when they struck the parasite wings—no melodramatic clang or thud. Just a patter like the drip of condensation from a conduit. They did not pass through. And wherever the darts flew toward Perceval or Rien, there in advance were the wings.

  And then they were moving, again, not flying—the corridor was too narrow and too low—but the jerk at Perceval's shoulders was like flying. The wings—she felt them, felt them spider along the bulkheads and decking, felt the pinion-tips bend, tension between them holding her feet from the floor, felt the strain along their struts. It felt nothing like flesh and membrane and bone.

  There were four wings, then, six, nine. The darts sounded like a hard rain. All Perceval could do was cling to Rien, whose forearms were locked over her own, legs trailing, and press her mouth into Rien's hair.

  They came among the defenders. One dived aside; Perceval's retina photographed her, arms reaching, weapon thrown aside.

  The other one, the wings went through.

  If Perceval had a hand free, she would have covered Rien's eyes. They might be of an age, but she could not help but think of her sister as a child, in need of protection. Rien's fingers dug into Perceval's wrist, and there was blood, blue and bright, darkening in atmosphere, the sharp stink of it. Rien sobbed.

  The defender was meat, and they were through.

  The patter of darts against the parasite wings stopped abruptly when they turned the corner. They passed through lock doors, into abandoned portions of the world where the air was stale and chill radiated from the bulkheads, and it was no longer any effort for her wings to hold her feet from the floor. No gravity and no light: she saw in infrared, and by the faint chill radiance of the greeny-blue fungus that grew in the welded seams of the walls.

  No pursuit followed; they were away. Perceval felt the last blood sliding as if frictionless from the wings that weren't hers. It flicked free, shivering globes that struck the corridor walls and stuck, food for that fungus. The wings folde
d together again, encapsulating Perceval and Rien in a warmer chrysalis.

  "Who was that?" Rien said, finally, her voice thready but admirably calm.

  Perceval wondered if it was a pretense.

  "I don't know anything about them," she admitted.

  "Oh." After a silence, though Rien cleared her throat and continued. "I do."

  "What?"

  Rien was shaking, and her fingers bruised Perceval's flesh against her bones, but Perceval wasn't going to say anything. She waited until Rien organized herself enough to say, "They're on a war footing, don't you think? Expecting invasion."

  "Yes," Perceval said. "I think so. I think it's not just Rule and Engine that are fighting. And I know something else."

  "You know where we are?"

  Perceval nodded. Rien would feel her face move against her hair. "We're a really long way from home."

  One of Dust's relics of remembrance was the fond old ideal of gallantry. In watching Perceval and Rien, he recollected it.

  He was too much a gentleman to insinuate himself into the awareness of Perceval's wings when they wrapped her and her sister so tightly. They seemed to be functioning as intended.

  It was enough.

  He held the maidens in his attention for a moment, then released them. Left them huddled in his gift, and turned away.

  He could not be distracted by his darling girls when he must be about seducing villains. Something might show, some hint, or texture. Some glimpse, and it would never do for Perceval and Rien to be unsafe, even for a moment.

  Dust's guest would be with him shortly. And beyond the girls' safety, Dust couldn't afford to let his rival guess from whence the blow would fall.

  Chimes announced a visitor. Not Dust's bells, however. Samael, damn him, selected his own clarion. He chose to be piped aboard like an admiral. Was it any wonder Dust found him unbearable?