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.”
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