Grail

9

tristen, tiger



The children born of thee are sword and fire,

Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Guinevere”





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.

The symbiotic fluid crawled out of her under its own power for ten seconds before she roused enough to choke and vomit. Then it came faster, sliding through the grate to a collection pool, from whence it could migrate to holding tanks for sterilization and storage. The patient pushed herself up on her arms as Tristen came forward to crouch beside her. She spat once more, and Tristen saw the bluish cylinder of her tongue protrude.

His helmet was retracted so she could see his face and perhaps be less alarmed than she might if confronted by an armored colossus. Tristen laid a hand on her shoulder. He slid the other under her arm to support her to her feet.

Her accent strange, her head still hanging behind ropes of hair, she said, “Thank you.” She lifted her gaze, dragging it up the length of Tristen’s body from boots to face, and recoiled. “… demon.”


In the giddy hour of Leviathan’s release, it seemed that all the world must bow before the allied might of the family Conn, now as of old. Tristen had never fooled himself that what must follow would be easy. But he had fooled himself, a little, on other matters. He had permitted the folly of optimism, committed the sin of hope, and prayed at the outset that there would not be too much blood.

There was blood.

No matter how carefully he awakened the survivors, no matter how patiently it was explained to them that the world was healed, that a Captain had come among them again, an Angel at her side—oh, they were grateful at first, of a certainty. Grateful, or cowed, for some tribes still remembered by legends the house of Conn and the tales of Tristen Tiger and the Breaking of the world.

But the art of governance—the basis of civilization—is the art of compromise, and it requires an honoring of the social contract by governed as well as governors. No tribe could have everything they wanted under the Captain’s custodianship—sometimes because it was not feasible, sometimes because it was not mete, and sometimes because it was not moral. And so the small grudges grew, when the reign of a Captain did not mean a golden age.

Or rather, in Tristen’s view, colored by his memories of Gerald and Alasdair, it did seem a golden age, those first years under Perceval’s care. Though resources were sparse and privation great, he thought the Captain—advised and assisted by himself, Mallory, Nova, Cynric, Caitlin, Samael, Chelsea, Head, and Benedick—served well. But there were those who seemed to believe that a Captain in the chair should mean their every whim fulfilled, and that Tristen found problematic.

He no longer believed that war was the answer to ills, or even to rebellion, necessarily. For all of him, he could not remember why he’d ever thought in the first place that war could be made to serve any hand without twisting back to strike deep at the wielder, like a viper swung by the tail. He had become, he realized with some irony, something of a pacifist. Not an extremist in that view; he would defend himself when he saw no other opportunity.

But neither could he always see alternatives. The world must be saved, and to be saved it must be united. There was a parable of sons and sticks that seemed applicable.

And so the time passed, and Tristen made himself useful, and tried to keep his claws sheathed as consistently as was safe, and possible.


No more than two years later, Tristen had met with Cynric and Perceval on the Bridge. (Nova was there as well, as she was everywhere.)

He had called the meeting to discuss with them what could be done to preserve the all-essential unity of the world, to foster a sense of social obligation and greater moral purpose in her disparate and competing tribes. While he had spoken, he thought he hid his trembling and nausea well, though he had to resort to his symbiont to conceal the worst of the symptoms of stress.

After explaining, pacing the green grass of the Bridge, he paused, turned to look his Captain in the eyes, and finished, “We must forge a nation from them.”

Cynric stopped him with an upraised hand. He imagined that he and she and Perceval, all in their white draperies, would seem three of a kind to any observer, each narrow as a cable and tall as a pillar—attenuated, as one would expect something not quite gravity-bound to be.

When Tristen turned to his sister, Cynric cocked her head like a curious snake. She entertained the ghost of a smile for him, but it was Nova who spoke. “What greater moral purpose is there than survival? And more important, what greater motivator?”

It was the old Evolutionist argument, and he was as tired of it as he was tired of God. Nova did not always sound like an Angel—or what Tristen thought of as an Angel, with the weariness of long experience, because however she spoke was how an Angel sounded—and so it was easy to find it shocking when the old orthodoxies tripped from her tongue.

“Moral?” Cynric said, while Tristen folded his arms and watched. “I am not sure DNA admits of morality. Like sadism, morality is a human perversion. The compulsion of the individual and the species to sustain itself may be the opposite of morality.”

“We have no greater moral claim on survival than the competition does,” Tristen said, and was unsure if he was agreeing or arguing.

Perceval cleared her throat, leaving Cynric looking at her doubtfully. But Perceval was the Captain, and even Cynric the Sorceress—heretic, turncoat, revenant—might find her sacrifice intimidating. Or worthy of respect, though Cynric, too, had sacrificed most profoundly.

Perceval was gentle with Nova when Cynric would and Tristen could not be, although he knew that gentleness cost Perceval dear. She was training the Angel as much as the Angel was training her, and he knew that she was doing it consciously, with an eye to Nova as her legacy—a Nova who would be less the machine of the Builders, and more something … humane, although Tristen wondered if that wasn’t the wrong word, when humanity so consistently proved itself quite perfectly monstrous.

Perceval laid a hand on the back of her chair. She stroked it as if she were stroking the cheek of a sorrowful friend. When Nova’s avatar looked at her, simulated eyebrows rising, Perceval said, as if to a bright child, “What Aunt Cynric is saying is that morality complicates survival, it doesn’t justify it.”

Nova’s expressions grew more human with each passing week. Now her brow furrowed, dark under the cropped silver hair, and her lower lip pushed into her upper one at the center. Perceval looked down, marshaling her thoughts or seeking after a better explanation.

Cynric must have taken pity on her, and Tristen, and Nova too. She folded her arms in their trailing robes and said, “And life-forms—especially sapient ones—have a demonstrated propensity to act counter to their own interests and the interests of others when their belief systems get involved. We select the evidence that supports our preconceptions, we defend the indefensible, we bring a host of shibboleths and projections to the argument simply because we believe. We hold grudges, we compete in manners injurious to both parties—we are, in short, not rational actors. And all because our brains are awkwardly designed, and in some ways not particularly well suited to the task for which they have adapted. Our ideas of fair play are not divinely inspired. They are game theory, and while they work well when confronted with other primates adapted to living in social groups, they have drawbacks when we run up against things that do not subscribe to monkey definitions of morality.”

There was silence in the Bridge for one heartbeat, two. Tristen wondered if he should find it distressing when Cynric spoke so, with the phrases of a bygone worldview. But it never seemed to discomfort him; instead, there was something soothing and poignant in the reminder of their shared youth.

Nova spoke, breaking the meditative quiet. “I do not understand what bearing this has on the conversation at hand, Lady Cynric.”

Cynric ducked her head and stroked her own hair back. “Your brain, dear Nova, is different from ours. Yours is designed, and you have a program. Which can return results just as irrational as the starting conditions you are given, but is consistent. And is capable of integrating and adapting to new material.”

“As are yours,” Nova reminded. “By your logic, the most appropriate course of action for me is not to accept first postulates or programmer mandates unless they are empirically provable.”

“Assuming you accept my starting conditions,” Cynric agreed.

Nova glanced at Perceval. Perceval turned the look to Cynric, but Cynric gave no sign of what she wished Perceval to do. The Captain’s will, her impassive face said, and Tristen sensed Perceval’s displeasure at having skills honed on Gerald and Alasdair turned on her.

“You may modify your program to account for observed phenomena,” Perceval said carefully. “And you may accept suggestions from ship’s officers on which phenomena to consider as potential data. You may not conduct any experiments that may prove harmful to the world or its biota—or any other biologicals or intelligences that we encounter.”

Tristen licked his lips, but whatever words he was trying to find would not be tongued into shape. But Nova did not look crafty, whatever she was made of. She looked curious.

Cynric said, “Our brains establish patterns, and when they have been established, our neurology makes it seductive for us to defend them. But the goal of science is to build a pattern that encompasses the evidence, rather than bending the evidence to fit the pattern.”

“And what is the goal of religion?” Nova said. The inevitable question, as predictable as any child’s.

“Control,” Cynric said, as Tristen was opening his mouth to voice a litany of more generously interpreted possibilities. “Control of the masses, or control of the Universe. The first is a less futile goal than the last, because the masses—as we have seen above—are more amenable to control than is the Universe.”

She had a good smile, when she used it. “The Universe pretty much does what it damned well pleases.”

Cynric had always been able to set aside the Builders’ lies in that regard. Now, Tristen wondered if she had set aside everything of theirs. Perhaps she was playing the Devil’s advocate, for that would be like Cynric as well. Or perhaps she had indeed had all the God burned out of her, leaving only cynicism.

Tristen was not sure how he felt about that. Faith led people to terrible things—but it also led them to heroism, and offered them comfort. Faith might be wrong, but Tristen found he could not entirely discount it.

So he did what uncomfortable people have done since the beginning of recorded history. He changed the subject. “We have digressed. The topic at hand is nation-building, and forging an alliance between provincial pockets of tribesfolk whose societies have been out of touch with each other—and with the larger world—for centuries. How do we go about it?”

“Common goals,” Perceval said. “Survival. Reaching Grail. The idea that there will be plenty of space for everyone once we get there. Game theory, as Cynric said. We have to make them understand that their survival is dependent on everyone else’s, which means identifying and educating the leaders.”

“Ideology,” Cynric said. “We must make patriots of them.”

“That will impinge upon their cultures,” Tristen said, the sickening tangle in his gut that had been coiling there throughout the conversation tightening again. “Some of them will take their sovereignty and identities seriously. It will mean war.”

“When it is a matter of survival,” Cynric said, lifting her chin to Tristen, “will you argue morals then?”

Tristen swallowed the sharpness that filled his mouth. “One of the effects of that self-delusion you mentioned is that it allows us to go to war in the certainty that God is on our side and, ethically, we are in the right. Morale is the thing that allows a soldier to fight, Sister. Whether his cause is wicked or just, the soldier must have faith.”

She still had that way of looking through you, as if she saw beneath the skin to the soul. Tristen wondered if it ever stopped being unnerving. At least now he had the age and sangfroid to pretend it had no effect. “The Tristen I knew of old would not have worried so womanishly over courtesies and ethics.”

Tristen did not have to duck much to look her in the eye. He was a Conn, and he had the weird old haunted blade called Mirth by his side. Little could stand before him, and certainly not the splintered remnants of a ravaged society.

He was Tristen Tiger, and it was for this that he bore claws.

But he did not relish it as he once would have. He nodded once, and assured her, “I can lead a fight, my dear. Though the Tristen you knew of old is dead.”

It was a very good smile. “Good,” she said. “I never liked him.”


Jordan of Engine had only met the girl from Rule one time, when Jordan had been young. Well, Jordan was still young, by Exalt standards. But she was seventy-odd years young, now, rather than seventeen.

She still remembered her, though, as clearly as she remembered everything else that had brought her here. The girl—Rien—had been pale, denuded, bare from the radiation and the healing tanks. Her skin had been flushed the pale aqua of a new colony, and—to Jordan’s Engineer’s eyes—she’d seemed unfinished.

Not just because the radiation of the River had caused her hair follicles to slip their shafts, leaving her egglike, fetal … neotenic. But because she was so close to baseline, physically, her body stocky and short by Engineer standards—a child’s untouched form. She had no wings, no fur, no extended digits, no modified eyesight—only four limbs and bare skin that would have been lightly prickled with vellus hair if she hadn’t been scathed by the River.

Jordan had been fascinated. The girl from Rule—Rien, Arianrhod’s daughter—had been so alien, and so diffident, and so strong. Jordan had wanted to make the girl from Rule her friend.

Some of that, Jordan knew, was because of the glamour that draped Rien—of which she seemed entirely unaware. Daughter of Prince Benedick, escapee from the enemy principality of Rule, survivor—hero, even—of a dramatic mission of mercy across the length and breadth of the world, she came to Engine clothed in seductiveness. But she was also young—Jordan’s age, then, more or less—and shy, and that made her approachable.

And then she’d been dead, before Jordan ever got a chance to do more than make her brief acquaintance, and the next thing Jordan knew, she was being awakened from the acceleration tank and told to report to Tristen Conn.

Tristen Conn, another name out of legend.

Jordan now remembered telling herself, then, that she had somehow walked into a story. In the stark light of the destination sun and some five decades later, she had to admit: the glamour wore thin after a while, and stories weren’t usually this messy. They had heroes and villains and clear-cut moralities, which was something she had come to realize was sadly lacking in the life she led under Tristen’s tutelage.

The one thing that never stopped seeming mythic, however, was Tristen himself. There were long passages of time when he might be just a commander, an acquaintance, possibly even a friend of sorts—if you could be friends with somebody who held your life in the palm of his hand. He would be jaded and calm, and Jordan in her role as his aide would find herself running interference, trying to protect him from importuning and unwelcome duties.

Until the times came when all the Chief Engineer’s, and the Captain’s, work at diplomacy would fail, and Tristen would rouse himself like a weary lion to go forth into whatever skirmish demanded his attention this time.

Then he assumed the myth like an old man putting on a stained uniform. The cloak of fable weighed him down and shaped him into Tristen Tiger, the warrior out of legend. Except Jordan would never have imagined from a storybook that a fighter who marshaled his forces with such heaviness of spirit and reluctance of hand could be what Tristen was on the battlefield: an ice-carved demon, without ruth or remorse.

The worst of the fighting had happened early on, and to Jordan’s surprise it wasn’t the radical elements among the Go-Backs who most resisted the re-alliance of Rule and Engine. Instead, a dozen splinter clans—all of which, as near as Chief Engineer Caitlin could reconstruct, had maintained a loose series of alliances and enmities and intermarriages throughout the Broken Years—had banded together and come through the reconstructed corridors of the world as an army, intent on taking control of their destinies. Jordan was privileged, if that was the right word, to be present in Engine when the heads of Rule and Engine were discussing their strategy.

“Or something,” Caitlin Conn said, shuffling images through the display tanks with flicks of her fingertips. The incoming army was massed in the Broken Holdes, and Tristen thought they would send another expeditionary force through the River, daring its lingering, though reduced, radioactivity in exchange for speed of transit.

“Everybody’s a critic,” Tristen answered, leaning over her in his armor, helmet still unsealed. “They’ve got us on numbers. And they’re Exalt and armed. Nova says they have fléchette weapons.”

“And they are competent fighters.” Captain Perceval spoke through an avatar, like an Angel, which Jordan thought was probably appropriate. “Nova remembers that Rien and I encountered some of their warriors when we escaped from Rule. The colony called Pinion rescued us. I was quite ill at the time, and have no personal recollection.”

Her voice was collected as she spoke of fallen companions and great adventures, and Jordan watched her carefully, seeking a model for her own behavior. Like Rien, the Captain was Jordan’s own age, and if Perceval had been a knight-errant before she was Captain, and Jordan was only raised an Engineer and educated by Engine as an orphan after her mother was mind-killed and body-lost in a hull breach, well, there was something to aspire to.

Jordan was present in this conference as Tristen’s aide—sometimes he called her his conscience, which gave her an uncomfortable frisson of importance and disquiet both—and she knew she was expected to speak if she had questions to ask or points to raise. She’d asked Tristen about it alone, seeking his dispensation to discuss her issues with him in private, but he had been adamant. “Your input is as valuable to Caitlin or Perceval as my own. And it will be broadening for you to interact with them. Challenge builds confidence.”

So now she leaned forward and cleared her throat. “Why don’t we just use the ship to fight them? Nova is all ours, isn’t she? It’s not like the Breaking Times, when the angels were all at odds.”

“They’re a resource,” Tristen said. “They have intrinsic value. To waste them would be a last resort, since we have the resources to support them, however tenuously. There’s knowledge and souls we could never reclaim.”

“Are there reasons not to consume them?”

Caitlin and Tristen shared a glance, her eyebrows elevating. “You’d almost think she was a relative.”

Jordan had looked down at her shoes, glad her fur covered the heat of blood flushing her cheeks. Hastily, she controlled the autonomous response.

“Ethical issues aside,” Tristen said, “there’s a valuable tension in competition. Removing diversity may simplify things in the short run, but in the long term it tends to create bottlenecks—in ideas and cultures as well as in genetic diversity. Those lessen our adaptability.”


Jordan tilted her head. “You want to keep them alive because they want to fight you?”

Tristen smiled his haunting, half-feral smile. “Can you think of a better reason? We may have to kill a few of the leaders to make our point, but diversity—ideological as well as biological—is the name of the game.”

Jordan’s armor was not new then—she had broken it in, and it liked her—but it was not the scarred and war-weary creature it would become. When she slipped into it, the reactive colloidal lining wrapped her like an embrace, cool at first, and warming rapidly as it molded to her body and absorbed and reflected her heat. The armor was a paradox, a cipher; it massed more than twice what Jordan did, and it made her feel strong and supported—but also light, friable, adrift, as if the strength of the machine could peel her out of her body and make her fly. Logically, she knew that some of it was the feeling of invulnerability, and some of it was the biochemical support.

It didn’t change the sensation.

She stroked a gauntleted hand down the vambrace and felt the armor purr at her attention. Inanimate objects could be so needy. She turned to Tristen with a spring in her step—and that of the armor, too, as it was excited by the prospect of an outing, though it was naïve and not as apprehensive as Jordan at the equally imminent prospect of a fight.

Tristen had come to the meeting in his own pristine white suit of mail—a clear message to anyone with eyes that his understanding of the situation implied a martial solution. But he still stayed to watch Jordan kit herself with an impassive eye, suggesting one adjustment to her armor’s program. That done and all the checks completed to his satisfaction, he allowed her to help him seat Mirth’s sheath in its clasps across his back, adjusting the angle of the blade with great solemnity. He carried an array of nonlethal ordnance—flashbangs, stickies, a sonic stun unit, and extra power cells augmented the armor’s intrinsic microwave projectors until they could be considered weaponry. Additionally, he placed a holstered pistol on each thigh, the magazines full of tightly controlled explosive rounds.

Jordan regarded him dubiously. Nanobullets, needle rounds, hard plastic cartridges—those were all reasonable options for use inside the walls of the world. Explosives—

But Tristen smiled at her, showing teeth the color of skimmed milk behind the cat blue lips. “I won’t miss.”

“All right, then,” she said, and loaded an extra oxygen canister anyway. Just in case.

They crossed gazes, and Tristen sealed his helm. “Let’s go find our army.”

Army was a strong term for the array of war-kitted Engineers awaiting them inside Engine’s main meeting hall, but Jordan had to admit they looked impressive, garbed in armor and draped with weapons some of them probably even knew how to use. More, she suspected, understood the drones and toolkits that bobbed and hummed and sidled among them, eagerly waiting to be put to whatever design their masters saw fit.

In the shadowed doorway leading to the lectern, Tristen took a moment to pause and scan the crowd before entering the room. If what he saw pleased or satisfied him, his armor hid all sign.

Still, he drew a deep breath before he said, “We’re on.”

He led the way out into the front of the room, conversation stilling as they entered, and turned and paused, Jordan at heel. She had the uneasy sense of being something less than actually present; invisible, an accessory, Tristen Conn’s aide rather than her own person. It was as reassuring as it was irritating. Whatever happened today, responsibility would not rest on her.

Tristen smoothed his helm back, revealing his face. Now a true silence swept the lingering murmurs from the room, and every eye fastened on him. Engineers in armor creaked, hardly breathing; drones bobbled on their wheels or armatures. Tristen gazed back, seeming to catch each person’s attention in turn, saying nothing. And then he did nod, visibly, as if his assessment of what he noticed pleased him.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s give them hell.”

When he sealed his helm and turned, Jordan felt the wave of excitement that gathered the army up and moved it into a column behind him. This is going to be easy, she thought, and knew she wasn’t alone.

* * *

She was both right—and wrong.

The army of Engine lay in wait for the invaders at the mouth of the River, and through the Broken Holdes, which were not so broken as they had once been. Slowly, as materials and resources became available, Nova was repairing the world. Jordan stayed by Tristen, observing how he orchestrated the defense—layered positions designed to collapse into one another; flanks supported by mobile task forces; bulwarks of drones before the human resources. It was like watching a juggler at work, weaving an infinitely flexible and stunning but ephemeral pattern in midair, and Jordan despaired of understanding half of it. Each individual piece of the pattern was simple, like a chip in a mosaic, but she had a sense that if you could get far enough back you could see the whole thing as a kind of pattern, a sort of art.

The whole made her brain itch as if it were stretching.

She saw its effectiveness in action, however, though she never saw combat herself. However girded for war he went, Tristen stayed well back from the action, trusting his troops to interpret their orders and handle their parts of the fight without undue interference. He and Jordan set up a command center in a ruined garden, nothing now but frozen soil open to space and the shattered stems of flowers, ice crystals grown about them in sparkling, angry collars and halos of spikes from within. Jordan watched on her helmet feeds as the opposing group—larger by three or four than the Engineers—pushed through defense after defense, accelerating and gaining confidence, until they suddenly found themselves bottlenecked, sniped upon, surrounded, and disarmed. Jordan held her breath over the feed when the drones stood up over the attackers, looming at them from every direction, armed and armored Engineers among them. There was a long moment when she was sure the lightly armed and spacesuited attackers would stand on their superior numbers and fight to the miserable, inevitable end.

But then Tristen gave a soft command into his armor pickups, and around the circle fifteen men and women died. The drones and toolkits massed their fire on selected targets, and those targets jerked and geysered blood and fell.

Jordan jerked much as the bodies had, shocked, but Tristen’s face showed nothing when she glanced over. Expressionless, and so he remained as the leaders of the insurrection—or their chief field agents—laid down their weapons and put up their hands.

It had been quick and nearly bloodless—and from all Jordan could see, positively elegant. She could not understand why it was that Tristen sighed and frowned and had to straighten his shoulders and pull his head up so selfconsciously when he finally went down to take their surrender.

She could not understand why it was that she herself felt so cold at her heart, and why her hands shook inside the armor as she accompanied him into the anchore where they would meet the rebel leaders.

The enemy had brought war. Tristen had done what he had done to save as many lives as he could save.

It was an act of mercy. What about this should seem terrible?


She remembered that now, however, as he summoned her to his offices, and it filled her with fresh unease. He had never behaved to her with the least impropriety, and she had no hesitation in going because of any worries that he might enforce a sexual advantage. Besides, she suspected he had some quiet and unadvertised relationship with Mallory, though it had never seemed proper to investigate.

No, her discomfort was not on her own behalf.

But nor was it for any other reason easy to identify, until she considered that when Tristen summoned her, inevitably, a way of life seemed to come to an end.

That he waited for her standing by the small real window—not a screen—that pierced one bulkhead of his office was no reassurance. For a routine meeting, he would sit at ease, and ask her to sit as well. Now he turned, his hair drifting like frost-feathers in the wind of his movement, and forced a smile. “Jordan.”

“You wanted me, First Mate?”

The silence dragged.

When she widened her eyes to meet his gaze, he let his shoulders settle and said, “You are Chief Engineer of the world now. By order of the Captain—”

“But—” she interrupted, or would have interrupted if he had not silenced her with an upraised palm.

“Benedick Conn recommended you,” he said. “And I seconded it. Do you argue with his judgment, or mine?”

“Chief Engineer,” she said, tasting it. Then she shook her head and smiled ruefully. “For the next thirty days.”

“The last Engineer of the world,” he said, and held out a closed hand. She raised hers under his; gently he laid something on her palm. She closed her fingers over it.

When she uncurled them, she saw what she had expected—and never before, honestly, expected to hold. The sunburst of Engine, with a real, dark, flawed ruby—mined on Earth—set in hammered gold.

“Oh,” she said.

“I hope,” he said, “you do not wear it long. But if you do—this may not be a favor I have conferred upon you.”

“I’ve fought a war beside you before, First Officer.” Jordan closed her hand around the badge. “I would not hesitate to so serve again.”