Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,69
his ramparts, bleak and gray,
They heard the Winter call.
—JOHN GROSVENOR WILSON, “Morgain”
“Dorcas,” Samael spat, as Tristen and Mallory righted the overturned table. Tristen jumped and glared, a fist of presumptuous worry clenching around his heart, but the Angel continued. “If not she, then one of her creatures.”
Tristen could not fault him. She was the obvious suspect, she and her Go-Back clansmen. But he bridled at the accusation, and wondered how much of that was a father’s loyalty.
More immediately, there were practical considerations. And, most immediately, political ones. Fortunately, Tristen could address both of those simultaneously.
“Nova,” he said, “can we have an external replay of any monitoring of our guest’s shuttle?”
“First Mate,” she said. An instant later, a three-dimensional representation of the shallow-space lighter and the bay surrounding it resolved before them, so solid you might expect to be able to rap on it. Mallory’s library was bereft of holotanks; this was Nova in her own person, adapting the fogs and colonies that made up her corporeal form to represent the destruction of the shuttle.
“Commencing animation,” Nova said.
For a moment, there was only the silence and the stillness of space. The shuttle was a silver disc without visible means of producing thrust; Tristen suspected its drive worked by gravitational manipulation. It hung lightly in a webwork cradle extruded from the world’s long arms, apparently quiescent until a small shudder shivered the recorded image. A moment later, the shell of the vessel jumped, crazed, and came apart in an expanding dandelion clock of debris, an inertial streamer smearing forward more than back, because the world was still decelerating as she came up to the system’s habitable zone. Now the view shook hard—not the ripple of before, but a sharp, teeth-clenching rattle—and when it stabilized the cloud of debris was overrunning the observers.
A younger Tristen would have waited impassively as simulated shrapnel whizzed past and through him, but he was old enough now to allow himself an honest wince. But when the debris collapsed back on the point of origin rather than blowing clear or settling against the bulk of the world, he was startled enough that he felt his face smooth. Give nothing away.
The lessons of childhood clung hard.
“Two explosions,” Tristen said, raising his chin to meet the Captain’s eyes over the heads of their visitors. “A small one, and then the one that destroyed the shuttle.”
“A … mine?” asked the alien diplomat, with a weighty pause as if he had to search for the word in long-archived memories.
The alien Captain, Amanda, folded her arms. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Did you see the way the debris imploded?”
Tristen, for one, was still watching. The majority of the wreckage settled again into a lumpy near sphere, shifting against itself as if vibrations through the frame of the world sieved it down. Relative acceleration meant the debris cloud was gliding out in advance of the Jacob’s Ladder, trailing rent cables from the docking cradle that reached after it like hungry tentacles. “I’ve seen something like it before,” he said. “When I was young.”
Perceval stood calmly, frowning, concentration deepening all the creases of her countenance. “The Breaking,” she said, in the tones of one who already knows the answer to her question.
“It’s a typical pattern when a gravity drive explodes due to mechanical failure or sabotage.”
Tristen thought Captain Amanda spoke with fair calm and pragmatism, for somebody who was now—temporarily—stranded on an alien spaceship. The jewel embedded in her forehead flashed through the faceplate of her armor.
Nova said, “It is my estimation that if I had not been able to use colonies to absorb and attenuate the shock wave, that explosion was powerful enough to have rendered the world inoperable.”
“Somebody tried to kill us all,” Tristen said.
Amanda continued, “I can’t be sure of anything until I have the opportunity to take a forensics team through the wreckage, but given the evidence of a smaller shock wave preceding the main explosion, I would lean toward the explanation that an explosive device was concealed in the Quercus’s quantum engine core, where it would not be evident to crew inspection while she was under way, and that it was triggered by remote. Not a proximity sensor, or it would have gone off before Danilaw and I were able to disembark.” She wet dry lips with a Mean’s pink tongue. “You know what? It’s stupid of me to waste my resources now. May I unseal, Captain Conn?”
“The offer stands,” Perceval said. In the command space they shared, Tristen was