Together, they moved toward Arianrhod's tank, keeping as much cover between them and it as possible. At thirty meters, Caitlin drew up, beckoning him closer. She caught his eye through twinned faceplates; neither of them needed to ask if the other was ready.
The count was all internal. She stepped out. He waited at the ready for her signal. "Wounded," she said, and he snapped around the corner to cover her as she moved forward.
The resurrected he'd sent with the message lay on the floor, an azure puddle cradling his head. He'd sustained a savage blow. From here, Benedick could not see if there were other wounds. Anything the resurrected might have sustained would be unlikely to kill an Exalt, since Benedick could tell there had not been any dismembering injuries.
"He's alive." Caitlin dropped a knee beside him. Benedick kept her in his peripheral vision, but his job now was not to watch her. It was to watch for anyone who might threaten her. She glanced up. "The tank's unsealed."
"She's gone?"
"Poof." Caitlin stood. "Shit." She turned, scanning the chamber as if she might see something.
"Whoever came to collect her has a three-minute start." But Benedick did not holster his weapon. The tank farm was large, and whoever had managed to shut off the motes on Arianrhod's pod had also managed to move through the chamber unmonitored, which suggested a high level of access to the world's systems. He didn't need to say so. Caitlin would know this, and know also that the ability to do so suggested some instability in--or compromise of--the newly reconstructed angel. Arianrhod and her rescuer could still be close.
"If I leave now--"
Benedick did not look at Caitlin, but she looked at him. She shook her head. "We have to warn Tristen. And you shouldn't go without supplies."
Because three minutes was a long time, and the chase could stretch on. And whoever had come for Arianrhod would be well provided.
"There are stretchers in the locker," Benedick said. "Let's see if any more of the sleepers are ready to awaken, and then we'll call the bridge and evac the casualty."
She stopped him. "Ben. I need to know I can trust you on this."
If it were a melodrama, he would have unsealed his faceplate to look her in the eyes. But she was Caitlin Conn; he did not delude himself. If she chose, she could read his breathing, pulse rate, skin conductivity through the sensors built into his armor. In return, his symbiont could control those things, but it was at its essence an arms race.
"Because Arianrhod was the mother of my youngest child?" He hit the word was a little harder than the others. Rien was dead, and he had barely known her. The knowing was his own fault; the death ...
He would hang that gladly on Arianrhod. And on Ariane, her elder daughter, who was also his half sister--and Caitlin's. Relations in the Conn family were nothing if not convoluted.
Caitlin stared through a transparent mask. Benedick turned to search a nearby locker for a collapsible stretcher. He pulled the hand-sized oval from a rack that had once held ten, oriented it properly, and triggered it. The webbed hammock unfolded, supported at each corner by an artificial gravity neutralizer. He guided it to the floor beside the unconscious resurrected and moved to the man's head. Without being asked, Caitlin stepped to his feet and crouched down.
Their eyes met and they lifted, stepped sideways, and shifted the man onto the stretcher. Caitlin triggered the neutralizers and the stretcher rose softly into the air.
Benedick said, "We have a daughter, too."
Perceval, now Captain, who had been the one to finally manage the death of Ariane. Caitlin had already started to turn away. The sensors on her armor meant she would not need to look back to see him, but she did anyway, a lingering glance over her shoulder. It was a human moment. "I thought sentiment was beneath you."
He touched the mobility control on the stretcher. The red-gold hemisphere flushed green and it started forward. It would glide smoothly in whatever direction he indicated, as long as his hand remained on the control.
"Our daughter is still alive," he said.
If she had an answer, she kept it to herself.
"Prince Tristen," the angel said, "there are complications."
Tristen lifted his head from his arms. He must have slumped across the controls, claimed by healing sleep. He could feel the dents in his cheek and forehead left by details on the panel, and a crease marked by a metal edge.
The angel's avatar stood before the patched bulkhead. Its appearance had changed. Now light refracted from silver hair as if through the facets of a diamond. It folded hands before its breast as if in supplication.
"We can dispense with the prince stuff," Tristen said. He pressed hard on his eyes, rubbing grit from the corners. His beard prickled with unwashed sweat. "Where's the breach?"
He regretted the idiom as soon as he uttered it--there was no telling how literal-minded a young artificial intelligence might be--but the angel seemed to take it in stride. And without offense.
It said, "Progress in restoring structural integrity is adequate. However, proprioceptive data is still erratic. I have deployed motes to collect electromagnetic-spectrum telemetry about the integrity of the world, and if they are not destroyed by debris, we should have a schematic soon, at least--"
There was a pause, as if it waited for new data before it continued. "I have a message from the Chief Engineer, Prince Tristen. She wishes to warn you that Arianrhod has escaped, and asks that you return her call in haste. Also, an additional difficulty has presented itself. It appears the damage to the world and attendant loss of life has been extreme enough to trigger certain fail-safes."
Did angels hesitate uncomfortably, or was that a concession to human frailty? A moment for him to organize his thoughts and prepare himself? Or perhaps a moment in which the angel could explore his response? Tristen didn't know. "How bad is it?"
"Indeterminate," the angel said. "Bad is a value judgment. It is an evolving situation that may become problematic."
"Specify."
"The Jacob's Ladder's base program contains a number of fail-safe routines, which are triggered in a case where the world sustains certain catastrophic damage. One such was the splintering of the ur-angel Israfel."
After five centuries, Tristen still could not summon up a scrap of grief for the memory of Israfel. If the modern angels were autocratic, arrogant, and monomaniacal, they came by it honestly--and at least they had not also been omnipotent. Israfel had been all those things and utterly committed to the Builders' program. Tristen had no doubt at all that Israfel had been fully informed about the hundreds of thousands of frozen dead stored in the world's holdes, raw material for whatever might be needed.
When first the world was ruined, when the first Exalt were infected with their new symbiotic colonies, systems had been unable to maintain integrity in the original artificial intelligence of the Builders' design. In self-preservation, Israfel had shattered into smaller, more specialized entities. So Israfel had begotten Dust, the Angel of Memory; and Samael, the Angel of Mutagens and of Life Support; and Susabo, the Angel of Propulsion; and Asrafil, the Angel of Weapons Systems--and other, lesser beasts as well.
Predictably, defensive of their individuality, those angels had warred for which would control their reunited self. None of them had won, exactly, and all had been consumed. The nameless angel to whom Tristen now spoke was the result of that conflict, and it was the sacrifice of young Rien, Perceval's sister and beloved, that had given it an identity of its own.
An identity that continued, "The current issue is a protocol that is triggered when viable biologicals aboard fall below a critical volume. Which is to say, in the wake of concussive and radiation damage sustained from the supernova, the world has begun repopulating its biosphere."