"Day forty. I don't know why God is letting this happen to me.

"Because of the parasite I picked up from Jacob, I can assimilate the unusual biochemistry on this planet. There's a weird snake...type...thing. It spits something like napalm.

"I ate some of it.

"Now I can spit napalm, too.

"Maybe it sounds incredible, and objectively it is, but there's something about this thing inside me that makes me shudder. Meanwhile, the rest of the--hold on. Radio's acting up. I pretty much gave up on the broken message, but I boosted the antenna above the jungle on some bamboo. I'm still listening for Hilda, though I'm starting to lose hope. One second while I take care of the static--"

--*kxxk*--can read this, please reply. I'll continue transmitting daily for fifteen minutes at 1800, increasing the power incrementally each day. Cass, sis, you'd better pick this up before the Patrick Henry does.

"Oh, jeez, oh, jeez. Uh...uh, one sec, don't go anywhere. Please, please, don't go anywhere...Hilda? Hilda, can you read me?"

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

17 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

The Patrick Henry

The faint scent of vegetation wafted into Tvorh's nose as he strained his hearing, trying to make out the interior of the room. It was down a stairway set into the sidewalk, at the end of a short tunnel whose surfaces were absolutely covered in vines. The room had to be built into the bulkheads of the outside of the cylinder.

The jagged hole carved out of the wall in place of a doorway proved that it was a late addition to the ship. An uneven covering of wood and vines stood in for the door.

Beyond the door waited the Silver Suns cyst. Beyond that...vacuum.

Thiyyatt ran her hand down the wood of the door. It didn't look that impressive. Tvorh could probably command a STIGMOS to eat it away and grant them entry into the chamber. In the worst case, he had his knife.

But Thiyyatt just purred and pressed her hand against a thorn in the barrier. A creaking sound arose a moment later, and the blockage pulled away like a curtain.

A wash of humid air that reminded Tvorh of the hot jungle flowed over him. He heard Aoife tense behind him. "Careful," he whispered.

He needed Aoife to be careful. Whatever was inside, she needed to stay safe.

Because Tvorh loved her. He was sure of it.

Thiyyatt stepped over the breach into the chamber, her footsteps painting a picture of the place. The wall was vegetation. Vines webbed the room's interior, and suspended in their center hovered a ball about the shape of a man curled in on himself.

Because that's what it was. The remnants of an ancient Tool. A man who'd never wanted to be here in the first place, probably; a man who'd never wanted this responsibility.

A man forced into doing the bidding of his "betters" in the Amber Palace. "Betters" like Thiyyatt, who cupped the shape's cheek tenderly, like a lover.

Eyes opened. Not the man's eyes; the Tool's eyes, on a hundred weblike vines. Tvorh paused, hunched half-in, half-out of the room, as he imagined their attention turning to him.

"It has been a long time for you," Thiyyatt said. The vines shuddered. "Tvorh. Enter. Keep guard while we commune."

"I don't like this," Aoife whispered from behind him.

Tvorh licked his lips, then chanced a few words back to her as he climbed into the cramped chamber. "Keep guard. Stay out of the reach of the vines. Just in case something goes wrong."

"Wrong?" Aoife laughed, though she didn't sound very amused. And why would she be, with Thiyyatt gently drawing the vines around her wrists and letting them curl around her ankles, letting them lift her off the floor?

Why would she be, at the sight of little thorns prickling Thiyyatt's skin, drawing droplets of blood as the Tool bonded its nervous system with hers?

Why would she be when Thiyyatt, the last daughter of the Last Era, who had spent her entire Current Era life trying to dominate the Symbiont, the Chimera, and every Magus on the planet, threw back her head and laughed exultantly, as if she'd finally found what she had been looking for?

"Fathers!" Tvorh blurted, spinning for the door.

Wood, vines, and living metal flowed over the breach, sealing Aoife out and him in with the mad princess.

***

Eztli jerked back from the holographic console as bright light blared from it.

And from the rest of the bridge.

Power flowed back into the strange inorganic devices surrounding her. Lights flared; sounds that had been only dim groanings whirred to life, carrying with them an unpleasant scent of sulfur.

Had Thiyyatt managed to activate the Silver Suns Tool and feed it, thereby causing power to flow back into the ship's systems, which it was connected to like a parasite? And should Eztli have been glad the ship was on-nerve, when the message from the uncorrupted Silver Suns copy had indicated clearly that this was a terrible thing?

A voice blared from the chordal units, startling Eztli again. It spoke a sentence she couldn't make hide nor hair of. Exarchian Glyphs shone on the hologram in the air, speaking to her in a language she couldn't understand, making requests of her that she couldn't answer.

She was a blind woman walking in the empty silver deserts.

She needed a guide.

So she was surprised when one appeared in midair.

A glowing figure of light, roughly the size of a cat, swam upward from the glass ball, then hovered in midair. The creature looked like a miniature green-haired, dark-skinned woman, except for the insectoid wings fluttering behind her. She wore highly impractical garments of leaves, plus an incongruous black hat with a skull and crossbones on its front.

The little light-girl yawned and stretched as if she'd woken from a long nap. Amazed, Eztli reached out to touch her.

Eztli's fingers passed right through the person as if she wasn't there, but that didn't stop the little woman from jerking awake and trying to slap away Eztli's hand with her insubstantial fingers. "Mxpfflt nstrddl!" (or something equally meaningless) said the woman.

Eztli put her hands behind her back and stood up straight. "You are the ship's Tool, correct?"

The creature of light blinked and looked confused. "Pllmssty za lblmnssp dllmssgl."

"I'm sorry. I don't understand."

The little woman pressed her tongue against her cheek and looked thoughtful. She held up a finger. "Bgggrlsl pa." Tiny letters of light flowed up around her from the holograph-orb. Eztli recognized some of the letters as Pre-Exarchian, others as Low Post-Exarchian.

The light-fairy flitted from one part of the flow to the next, leaving behind sparklets of light as she grabbed letters more quickly than Eztli could follow.

Like an upside-down waterfall drying up, the flow of letters stopped. The light-fairy came to rest in the air above the orb. "Is this better?"

Eztli's heart pounded so hard she thought her chest might burst. "Yes," she managed through her dry mouth.

"The High Post-Exarchian language database is incomplete. Some translations may be corrupted," said the little woman of light. She bowed, flickering in and out of existence. "I'm AIda. And boy, has this place gone to hell."

"I'm Eztli," Eztli offered, since she had nothing else to say.

"Nice to meet you, Cap'n Eztli."

"You're...what are you, exactly?"

AIda scoffed. "Rude. You don't see me going around asking people what they are, do you?"

"I--"

"I'm a sprite. An artificial intelligence. I live in the ship. I have my whole life, though things have been really cramped since..." She scrunched up her eyes comically. "How long has it been, exactly?"

"Since what? What happened here?" Eztli's fists tightened. She needed a way to figure out what this little Tool was, what it could do, and why it was so important for it to help them.

"Since...huh. That's odd. I don't remember. Oh! But I think I left myself a note..." The flow of letters of light started again, and AIda swept back and forth again, reading them.

How could she not remember?

When the flow stopped, AIda came to rest again. "Wow. Apparently I wiped a lot of my memory to make room for something called the Operation Silver Suns Tool. Oh, yeah." She snapped her fingers. "That copy of the...the thing. The thing on our ship. But not the other thing. They're both bad, but the other one is worse. Cancers. Anyway! I'll let you get to it. Let me know if you need any help."

AIda disappeared in a starburst of data. Pictures and High Post-Exarchian words flowed up from the holographic nodule in a tidal wave of information.

Information that Eztli could read. Her location was marked within a swath of the cylinder carrying the label "Cantonville," "Occupancy: 0," "Power draw: 183kW--"

"AIda, how much energy is that?"

The little sprite's voice emanated from the mechanical chordal units. "Not enough for a living town. Um, a lot for a dead one?"

Within Cantonville and across the wireframe of the cylinder, thousands of little flashing dots carried the label "Autoturret."

On, and on, and on. There was an enormous amount of data. Too much for Eztli to take in.

But there was no clear data about either the Silver Suns satellite-parasite or the black anomaly.

The scent of sulfur tickled the inside of Eztli's nose. Was it growing stronger?

"Pull up the ship's logs," Eztli said.

"What's the magic word?" AIda asked.

"Now." Then Eztli's voice softened. "Please."

The logs were a mess.

Solar date 23 January 3923 ("Our dating method!" AIda helpfully added):

62,399 of 202,521 Lifeships launched; 112,671 Lifeships damaged. Major damage to outer continents. Continents one through twenty-two fully launched or destroyed. Remaining population: 18,012, mostly unskilled.

Zero-point energy condensers irreparable without new mass-energy sources; massless batteries at critical levels. ("You don't know what Zippy condensers or masslesses are? Wow, you guys are way behind.") Sensors show nearby asteroids. Diverting to assimilate. Estimated time to arrival: two months.

On and on they went, half-incomplete logs that didn't, couldn't, help Eztli. If she only had more time to study them...

"AIda," Eztli asked, "is there somewhere we can copy this data?"

"You got it, Cap'n," AIda said cheerily. "Uh, you want it portable, right?"

"Right."

"I'll start the copy!"

This was all well and good, but Eztli really needed to know what happened with the Silver Suns Tool. "While you do that, are you connected to the Silver Suns Tool itself?"

"Sure! I can feel the two cancer thingies on the edges of the network. Ick. Anyway, do you want the rest of the timestamps in solar years or Tellurian years?"

Eztli shivered at the question, which was an all-too-obvious reminder of where the Patrick Henry had come from. "Tellurian years.

"Okay. Here are the logs!"

The logs read: "Biological entity number one, integration paused at 27% due to hostile readings. Estimated time of pause: 3252Y 216D 11h 32m 19s. Estimated time to completion: 1435Y 223D 10h 51m 55s.

"Biological entity number two, integration paused at 71% after connections between it and entity number one led to hostile responses. Estimated time of pause: 1031Y 121D 8h 11m 12s. Estimated time to completion: 721Y 62D 4h 47m 52s."

Eztli had a bad feeling about this. Should she call the whole expedition off? Hopefully, between the Keys in the genes of Thiyyatt and Tvorh, they'd be able to bring the Silver Suns Tool back in line, but it was behaving erratically.

Almost as if it was being controlled by an outside source.

It wasn't Eztli's call anymore, though. Now she was a red-blood. The decision to stay or retreat remained in Senrii's hands.

Eztli was a red-blood.

She was a red-blood.

She slammed her hands down on the console next to the hologram-sphere. The display flickered. She stood there, breathing in and out, almost gagging on the scent of sulfur, for long moments.

This anger would do her no good. "Aida, show me the ship's logs again--"

The low-gravity slapping of feet down the corridor surprised her and dragged her attention away from the display. Senrii, Piotr, and Aoife half-bounded, half-skidded around the corner.

Senrii rapid-loosed her words. "We've got a problem, Eztli. The power's back on. It's like daylight out there, and I can finally see enough to be sure--the freaky black tower thing is coming alive."

"And other parts are closing up. Tvorh's trapped." Aoife gulped in a deep breath. Without a Symbiont or any Stigmata to assist in the low-gravity, sulfur-stinking environment, she was doing poorly. In that, Eztli supposed, she and the girl were the same. "The Tool got Tvorh--"

Senrii held up a hand to stop Aoife and nodded furiously. "The black flesh-tower's melded to the Patrick Henry--"

"He's in there with that psycho!" Aoife said. Piotr put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off with a wild motion. "Who knows what she's doing to him?"

Or with him. Eztli didn't say that aloud.

Senrii continued speaking at a frantic pace. "The living metal looks like it closed around the top and the bottom of the tower like a scab or a cyst or something to keep the ship from depressurizing. But now that stuff is coming alive and opening up, too. Outside it smells like blood. And... other stuff."

"Sulfur," Eztli said. Senrii nodded.

"It's a trap," Aoife said.

"Definitely a trap," Senrii agreed. "I don't know what's going on here, but--"

"We have to get Tvorh out," Aoife said.

Poor girl. Senrii looked harried, but Aoife looked terrified.

"We can't let her have him," she said, balling up her fists. "I won't let her have him."

"And then I think we need to blow this place to pieces." Senrii looked at the hologram. "Anything on there that can do that?"

"I have a friend helping," Eztli said--

Aida bloomed back into being. "Hi!" Aoife's and Senrii's eyes went wide as AIda discorporated again into a stream of data.

They didn't have long. "No questions. I'll explain later. It might take some time," Eztli warned. There were still so many missing puzzle pieces. There was so much they didn't know about this ship.

Were they really just going to destroy it, like that, based on the cryptic warning of a mental copy of a mad millennia-old Last Era Tool?

"How do we get him out?" Aoife asked. "Please tell me you see some way to get him out."

With some poking and prodding at the light-picture, Eztli managed zoomed in on the space near the Silver Suns parasite. "This is the area, correct?"

"Yeah. The door's right there. Except it's not a door. It's a--"

"--A hole in the wall." Eztli nodded. "I see it. There are no controls for any door there. AIda--"

"Nope. Sorry, Cap'n!"

Worse, when Eztli tried to find controls for the living metal in that area, she simply couldn't. They were just... gone.

Aoife loosed a high-pitched whine of frustration.

"AIda," Eztli said, "the ship contains fabs, correct? Can you control them?"

"Sure, Cap'n, now that the power's back on."

"What do you have the raw materials to create?"

"Between all of the masslesses, I've got about 117 gigagrams of convertible mass-energy available."

That didn't answer the question. "Can you create some artifact to damage the living metal that you're made of?"

"And a hardwood wall behind that," Aoife added.

"Sure!"

...

"Blood, bones, and bile!" Senrii shouted. "Get to the point, you stupid Tool. What kind of artifact could you create that could do that?"

AIda phased into the datastream again. "She's not very nice. Anyway, I can give the command to build you a G-97 grenade launcher. It's designed for maximal localized displacement of living metal, maximal shaped damage to solid biological entities, and minimal collateral and bulkhead damage."

Senrii fell perfectly still in mid-gesture. "Grenade launcher?" she whispered.

Even Piotr snorted.

"AIda," Eztli said, "please highlight on the map the nearest fab."

"And begin fabrication," Aoife and Senrii said at the same time. They looked at one another gleefully.

Eztli just hoped they didn't depressurize them all.

***

Stinking fluid with the faint taste of chlorophyll and the strong scent of sulfur splattered Tvorh's face as his knife flashed through the vine wriggling toward his neck. "Stop it, Thiyyatt," he said, his voice rising in a shrill warning.

The regia puella paid him no attention. A mindless grin took hold of her cold lips, and her laugh was sweetened ether and cyanide. "I have come to you," she crooned. "I heard your call from my throne of amber. I came as you requested. They brought me right to you."

The room shook as the webwork quivered in response. Runners massaged Thiyyatt's scalp, binding her to the Tool, integrating her with it.

There was nowhere for Tvorh to retreat. He gritted his teeth and pounded with one fist on the living metal behind him where the door had been, slashing writhing branches with the other. "Thiyyatt," he said. "Thiyyatt!"

She spasmed once like a dog dreaming of chasing prey and turned to him. "Mine," she growled. "All mine."

Between gases, fungi, and reliable old napthgel, Tvorh could think of a half-dozen ways to kill this Tool. Unfortunately, in these close quarters, anything he might try might kill him too. He needed to keep her talking. "What's yours?"

Even without eyes, he could sense the triumph in Thiyyatt's smile. "You are."

Needles sprang from the vines, cutting the air and puncturing his knife-wrist, but pain was just a signal. Tvorh gritted his teeth and held on, lopping away a runner that got too close as he pressed himself back against the once-doorway.

Nerve damage, unfortunately, was very real. Tvorh twisted the blade for a cross-body strike at a runner crawling down the wall above his head, but the strike went wide. The vine latched onto his hand.

Just like that, the Tool's creepers pounced, binding Tvorh's arms and legs and lifting him into the air to face Thiyyatt.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked as he struggled fruitlessly to free himself.

"How much you fail to understand, low-born, high-blooded Tvorh. How much you have always failed to understand." Thiyyatt spread out her arms. Hanging in midair and supported by the tendrils, she looked like an Adonist representation of Yesh. "I told you I would rule. The throne failed me, but it showed me how. I saw the other Relays. Including the one that has pierced this vessel." She smiled her shark's smile. "This time I will not fail to bind the high-born to myself. Monsters and men alike shall bow to me, and I will be their goddess."

"The Amber Throne brought you here," Tvorh breathed, then winced and tried to free an arm. Useless.

"Did you believe that a woman born to rule Tellus would be content to wallow in an underground pit, bound by disease and by her own vague and airy promises? I am a regia puella, born to the throne." The vines shook at Thiyyatt's declaration. "The men of this era are weak. How can you call them Magi? They are hardly half-Bound. Only I can restore unity to Tellus."

"The Relays are lies, Thiyyatt," Tvorh said. He didn't like the way the vines were picking at his clothing. "There's something out there controlling them."

"Yes," Thiyyatt purred. "I will control them in return. Nothing will stop me. This, low-born, high-blooded Tvorh, shall be the sign of my power. I ascended to the heavens daughter to a regina; I shall return to Tellus an imperatrix, and all of Tellus shall bow to me." The spasm that shook her this time seemed less dreamlike than sensual. "And you my consort."

"No--"

"Yes." The scent of lavender swelled in the room, and Tvorh swelled with it. Thiyyatt, somehow dark and lovely despite Tvorh's lack of sight, became his whole universe.

His body ached and throbbed with the intensity of unnatural desire.

He wanted her. He wanted her to crawl all over him, to sweep her hair across his naked chest, to lower her breasts to his stomach--

--Aoife.

--to kiss him in places that had never known a woman's touch, to gasp as she taught him what love truly meant--

--Aoife.

--to breed, to rut, to--

--Aoife.

Tvorh drew a stuttering breath despite the tightness of the vines and thought of Aoife. She'd never needed pheromones to make him love her. She'd only ever needed to be herself.

Even as his body betrayed him, he focused his mind on the woman he truly wanted.

The woman he truly loved.

"Aoife!" Tvorh shouted.

Thiyyatt flinched as if he'd struck her. "How dare you." Her eyes widened, and he didn't need to be able to meet that gaze to feel the rage pouring from her body, overpowering even the lavender.

The anger vanished quickly, and Thiyyatt smiled her predatory smile. She couldn't fool Tvorh, though. Her hostility smoldered beneath the surface. "No matter. I will make you forget her soon enough."

"Never."

"But you will." Thiyyatt flicked an arm, and Tvorh heard vines crawl toward his skull. "If you will not give me your body, Tvorh, then I will claim your thoughts." She giggled demurely. "And after, you will be all too happy to give me the rest of what I demand."

"Don't do this, Thiyyatt," Tvorh said as the runners caressed his hair.

If lavender could be a sound, it would have been Thiyyatt's voice. "See what I see, Tvorh, and join your blood to mine."

Creepers latched onto his head, and Tvorh fell into a dark sea of stars.