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