Chill by Elizabeth Bear Page B

humility and joy in service could not have come from Jacob Dust or Samael, and as Tristen picked his route, he tried not to dwell too long on the probable source. “I can’t keep calling you ‘the angel.’”
    “My Captain has not yet seen fit to provide me with a name.”
    The naming would be a difficult acknowledgment that what had been lost was never coming back. Tristen shook his head. He didn’t envy Perceval the responsibility, or the choice.
    “I’ll speak to her when I get a chance,” he said, and wondered if the silence that followed was the angel’s gratitude, or if he had offended. He interrupted the awkwardness to ask, “How soon can we make this space viable?”
    “We’re currently replenishing atmosphere throughout the intact portions of the world,” the angel said. “Structural repairs are the next priority, and reestablishing communications and telemetry throughout the world. The shipwide biosphere is also critically destabilized, and fermentation and putrefaction products are becoming a significant issue. However, some of them, whenfiltered off, are useful. Methane more so than cadaverine.”
    Tristen snorted. “You did a nice job on the bridge.”
    “It’s important to provide a pleasant space for human components,” the angel said primly.
    Tristen smiled inside his helm. “It’s all right to admit affection.”
    Silence answered, as if the angel were waiting for him to complete the thought. The next piece of corridor was tricky, however, and he needed hands and feet and attention to fend off ragged obstacles he drifted through. Deliberate slowness chafed. Somewhere in the darkness beyond was Arianrhod, and every second he lost was a second that maintained or increased her lead. He fretted his fingers against the insides of his gloves, and forced himself to concentrate. There: a hand on the left, a delicate push. A half rotation would carry him across, and he could drag a boot on the wall to correct his spin. There was nothing behind that patch that should prove hazardous, if his foot broke through the fatigued surface.
    He could have used attitude jets or allowed the armor itself to handle the maneuvers. If he had absolutely needed to risk making his way down the corridor at speed, he might have been forced to. Even an Exalt was no match for expert hardware under those conditions. He should have enough air to get him to the far end. That was what mattered. And if the suit heaters whined against the cold, well, there wasn’t too much to be done about resources bled off into the Enemy now.
    As a younger man, he would have chanced haste. As a younger man, he had more than once gambled speed against certainty. There were occasions upon which the gamble had paid off.
    And at least one upon which it had cost him dearly.
    So now he chose meticulousness and prayed to the Builders that it was the right choice, after all.
    “I’ll need to replenish consumables soon,” Tristen said.
    In the person of his armor, the angel replied, “On your left, in seven point five meters, you will find a breach to Outside. You should not proceed past it, as the air lock ahead is damaged, so the bulkhead door between this corridor and the next domaine is deadlocked against decompression. However, if you proceed Outside, it is a relatively easy jump from here to an intact air lock on a lightly damaged holde. From there, you can make your way inside.”
    “How far is it to biosystems from here?”
    Instantaneously, the angel provided a schematic. “This may be out of date.”
    Colored ribbons suggested travel routes and illustrated times. Tristen, from the bridge, had less far to travel than Arianrhod would, if she were indeed coming this way. He had only to go the length of a spoke from the hub of the world. Then, depending on where he found himself in relation to Rule, he could work his way around the short inside arc. Even traveling fast, it would take Arianrhod several hundred hours to cross the entire