Defy the Stars

  The Queen considers that, then nods. “Then we will liberate you from your commander.” She turns to the Charlie and says, “Kill her.”

  Terror lances through Noemi like a sword made of ice—

  —but then the Charlie does what every soldier does before firing his weapon for the first time. He looks down to check the controls.

  It’s not even a second. As fast as a blink. But Noemi takes off that instant.

  She ducks behind a pallet of rations—puny shelter the Charlie can blast through within seconds—but that doesn’t matter, because she went straight through the lines of the laser grid.

  Alarms go off, blaring so loudly her ears hurt, flashing red lights in a staccato rhythm that’s almost a strobe light. In the first beat, Noemi sees the overhead security barriers start sliding down. She hurls herself toward the main entrance—there’s just enough time to skid through—

  “No!” Abel shouts. He doesn’t want her to get away—wants her to get caught, or to die—

  His body slams into hers so roughly that it propels her farther forward, just past the doors. The Charlie and Queen are right behind them, but the security barrier slams to the floor, catching the Charlie’s forearm and crushing it.

  Noemi’s never seen an injured mech this close before. It’s torn skin and torn wire; blood and mesh mixed together, both real and unreal at once. The fingers twitch unnaturally fast, until the hand goes limp. A thin line of black smoke pulls up from the barrier’s edge. She blinks in horror, than grabs the blaster he dropped on the floor.

  From the corner of her eye, she sees movement and realizes the Queen is pulling her own blaster. But Abel grabs Noemi, swinging her behind him as he stands looking down at the Queen. He still has the T-7 anx tucked under his other arm.

  “You are shielding the Genesis officer,” the Queen says, tilting her head.

  “As my programming requires.” Abel backs up, Noemi just behind him, until they’re back at the lift. He pauses, and she realizes he means for her to climb on his back again. As soon as she has, he jumps inside, still holding the T-7 anx, just as capable with only one hand free.

  As he climbs, she says the only thing she can think of. “You think fast.”

  “So do you,” he says. “You realize, of course, that the authorities have been alerted.”

  “I figured I’d rather take my chances with the local authorities than with the Queen and Charlie.”

  “Under the circumstances, I agree.”

  He still obeyed me, she thinks as he pulls them both up the elevator shaft, moving slower one-handed but still fast. Even though he could’ve gone home to Mansfield with the Queen and Charlie. He stayed by my side.

  That’s a trick of his programming—a fault in it, really. It tells her that Abel’s been honest about his limitations and boundaries. He truly will see her through this, with or without her presence, all the way to the end. She can trust him.

  The trouble is, it doesn’t feel like trusting a bridge to hold you over a river, or an oven to bake your bread. It feels like… trusting a person. Which it shouldn’t. She can’t afford to get confused about Abel’s true nature, not now and particularly not later, at the end.

  They reach the upper level, jump out, and run for the hangar. Their surroundings remain deserted, but emergency beacons and klaxon alarms have transformed Wayland Station into a den of sound and red strobe lights. It’s even more disorienting when they reach the hangar; all the ships seem to have become more ominous versions of themselves, colored charcoal and crimson, completely forbidding.

  And by now the authorities have to be close. Will they be on the lookout for thieves and traitors? For terrorists?

  “Can you hear over this?” she shouts to Abel. Nobody farther than ten yards away would be able to overhear her if she yelled at top volume.

  “It’s a lot of input to sort through.” That must be mech for no.

  Noemi starts running again, and Abel follows. Although she remembers roughly where they’re docked, the red strobe lights make everything look so strange. Each flash shows her a still image, and each image looks different from the one before. It’s as if she were trying to find her way out of a maze, one that keeps shifting by the second.

  Abel, however, races forward in a straight line, undaunted. Noemi lets him get a few steps ahead to lead. He can be trusted.

  Flash—they’re ducking around a corsair ship, elaborate with its fins and chrome.

  Flash—the Daedalus finally comes into sight, its mirrored surface brilliant scarlet. Instead of a teardrop it now looks like the first drip of blood from a wound.

  Flash—a dark shape darts toward Abel.

  “Look out!” Noemi cries. But Abel’s already whirling around, blocking his attacker in a collision she can only see as a tangle of limbs and a sudden drop.

  Abel is the one left standing. Noemi catches up with him as he stares down at their attacker, a dazed man wearing a worker’s coverall. She’s never seen him before, and to judge by the way Abel squints at the guy, he hasn’t either.

  Noemi asks, “Is he police?”

  “You wish,” says a female voice behind them. Both she and Abel turn to see—

  “Riko Watanabe.” Abel speaks as calmly and confidently as he did to the Queen and Charlie, even though Riko’s grip on her blaster seems much more ominous than the mechs’, for some reason. Riko’s short hair is disheveled, and her smile is terrifying. “Can I ask why you have chosen to assault us?”

  “Because she thinks we’re here to stop her, or turn her in,” Noemi says. “Because we’re two of the only witnesses who saw her smuggling explosives down to Kismet. We know she’s with Remedy.”

  Quietly Abel says, “It might have been wiser not to point that out.”

  “She knows we know.” Noemi shrugs. “No point pretending otherwise.”

  “You seem like nice kids. I wish you hadn’t recognized me.” Riko sounds so completely sincere that Noemi knows they’re about thirty seconds from getting murdered.

  Once again Noemi thinks fast. “We’re not Vagabonds. I’m here from Genesis.”

  The name of her planet makes Riko gasp—as does the man at their feet, and the other handful of people now approaching from the shadows. Noemi recognizes a couple of them as med techs or doctors from the Cobweb screening; they must’ve used the screening as cover to travel here for the festival. The red strobe lights make it so hard to focus, but Noemi knows she has to. Everything relies on what she says in the next few minutes.

  “You know Earth’s been attacking my planet again, right?” Noemi isn’t sure whether Earth tells the truth about its plans, and Genesis hasn’t had a chance to present its side of the story in more than three decades. “What you guys put on those screens—they way you feel about Earth—we do, too, on Genesis. We understand. We’re fighting back, and it could make all the difference if we weren’t fighting alone.”

  What Noemi can’t agree with is terrorism. Genesis has fought a savage war; she knows that millions of lives were lost on both her home world and on Earth. But her people fight fair. They meet their enemies in open combat. That has a nobility to it—unlike setting off an explosion in a stadium where people danced and sang to music, sending mechs to kill humans, or leaving bombs on the ground for families to drive over years later, while the children were still small.

  “You can’t be from Genesis. It’s impossible. Nobody can get through the Gate.” Riko lifts her chin. “You shouldn’t tell such obvious lies.”

  “We had the help of a special navigational device.” Abel leaves out the detail where he’s the navigational device in question.

  Riko hasn’t lowered the blaster one millimeter. “Prove it, then. Prove you’re from Genesis.”

  “How am I supposed to prove that?” Noemi protests. “We’re here on fake IDs.”

  “Convenient,” mutters one of Riko’s compatriots. Noemi wants to scream with frustration—does this guy honestly think she’d be walking around this stat
ion with a sign reading Hey, I’m from Genesis?—but manages to hold on to her temper. Not even she’s hothead enough to mouth off to terrorists holding weapons.

  Abel takes one step forward and slightly to the side. She realizes he’s again trying to stand between her body and the blaster. “If you had time, you could run a medical scan that would prove her to be from Genesis. But I suspect time is not a luxury either of us can indulge in at present.”

  Riko hesitates. “What do you want?”

  “For now, we just want to leave,” Noemi says. “Someday, though—if you can find a way to get through the Kismet Gate—Genesis could use allies.”

  “We don’t have the strength for a war.” Riko shakes her head sadly. Noemi’s eyes have adjusted enough to the light for her to see the smudge on Riko’s cheek: grease, or maybe soot. Did Riko help detonate the bombs on Wayland Station herself? “Earth’s too powerful. All those mechs—all those people—we can’t compete on a battlefield. We have to strike out in other ways.”

  By bombing innocent people? But Noemi swallows the words unsaid, for the sake of her world, and because Riko’s still holding the blaster. Instead she promises, “Join forces with Genesis and you won’t have to stoop to bombings. You can fight fair and win.”

  After Riko and her coconspirators exchange a few glances, she nods at the guy on the ground, who gets to his feet, glaring at Abel. His opinion doesn’t matter, though; Riko is clearly the one in charge. “You two leave now, this instant. Probably they’re going to catch us. But if they don’t—if we can somehow get to Genesis—how do we approach your world? Let them know we’re allies?”

  “Just say you’re Riko Watanabe of Kismet,” Noemi says. The local authorities are probably on their way. They have to wrap this up. “That’s enough. I’ll tell my commanders, so they’ll know.”

  But Riko shakes her head. “It might not be me. There are more of us—even some cells on other worlds.”

  “A resistance,” Noemi whispers. The fullness of it has hit her now, recapturing one instant of the exhilaration she felt after the explosion, but before she realized people must have died. “It’s not just a few people on Kismet. The rest of the planets on the loop—Earth’s other colony worlds—they’re banding together. Rising up.”

  “Starting to.” Riko finally lets her weapon drop. “I suppose if there’s one chance in a hundred you’re really from Genesis, we have to take it.” That seems to have been said as much for her companions’ benefit as for Noemi and Abel.

  “I’ll tell them,” Noemi promises, her cheeks flushing with excitement. “When I get back to Genesis, I’ll tell them to be on the lookout for anyone from Remedy.”

  One of her compatriots sticks his chin out. “And how will you know they aren’t from Earth, pretending to be us?”

  Noemi’s laugh sounds as bitter as it feels. “Earth doesn’t bother pretending to be anyone or anything else. When they come to Genesis, they come to kill.” Will that get through to them? She has to hope—

  A high, shrieking sound cuts through the alarms, making them all jump. Noemi recognizes the sound as tearing metal in the split second before she sees a distant corner of the hangar floor peeling upward—and a splintered, damaged, metal hand reaching through it.

  “It’s them,” she whispers, knowing Abel can hear. “The Queen and Charlie.”

  “Go!” Riko’s shout is for everyone. They all scatter as Noemi and Abel run back into the Daedalus.

  The moment they’re inside the ship, Noemi hits the door controls, sealing them inside. As they dash through the twisting corridor, Abel says, “It would be advisable for you to take the helm. We have to get to the Gate as fast as possible.”

  “You’re going to replace the T-7 anx?” It will be the better part of ten hours before they can reach the Cray Gate. “We need some quick flying now more than we need instant repairs.”

  “Exactly. We require speed.” Abel peels away from her to dash into the engine room, calling back, “Your piloting skills are probably adequate to elude the authorities.”

  Terrible at comforting people. The worst. But Noemi doesn’t bother saying it, just runs for the bridge. They have to get the hell out of here, and if that means she does it on her own, fine.

  The bridge’s warning lights are already blinking when she dashes in. The viewscreen shows the hangar in red strobe lights, with bright orange letters proclaiming a text warning: SECURITY LOCKDOWN. NO UNAUTHORIZED TAKEOFFS OR LANDINGS. ANY VESSELS ATTEMPTING TO VIOLATE LOCKDOWN WILL BE SEIZED OR DESTROYED.

  Noemi goes for navigation. Abel might be programmed with the know-how to handle every ship in the galaxy, but she’s flown a dozen combat missions in a fighter where split-second decisions made the difference between life and death. She ought to be able to handle a clumsy science vessel.

  Except the Daedalus isn’t clumsy at all. At a touch it lifts from the landing pad, and it soars upward with breathtaking speed.

  If only I could keep this ship forever, Noemi thinks, ignoring the insistent blinking of the warning message as she accelerates their ascent. I could explore the entire galaxy, and no one could stop me—

  A jolt nearly throws her out of her seat. Noemi clutches the console, aghast at the new, red warning beacon blinking in front of her: TRACTOR BEAM DETECTED. The beam’s energy has tethered them to Kismet’s moon, as if a lasso had been thrown around the ship. They’re still moving away from the planet, but the strain on the ship’s integrity field is already showing. When she reaches the limit, the ship will either be jerked back down to the surface or torn in two.

  We don’t have the power to break the tractor beam—it’s too strong. Noemi takes a deep breath, wondering if she can use her enemy’s strength to their advantage.

  The bridge doors slide open behind her, but she doesn’t turn around. Abel says, “Repairs are complete, plus one extra modification.”

  “We can talk about that later.” Her shaking fingers lay in the next coordinates. “First let’s see if this works.”

  “See if what—”

  Abel’s voice cuts short as Noemi brings the Daedalus into a sharp curve, one that would almost put them in the moon’s orbit, but not quite. The moon’s gravity tugs at the ship, the inexorable pull of physics—but pulling the ship forward now, as the tractor beam pulls back. She’s making the moon do the hardest work, using that gravity instead of fighting it. Within moments, the tractor beam breaks, and the Daedalus surges forward. Noemi urges the ship away from the moon and Kismet, toward the Cray Gate.

  “Ingenious,” Abel says, as if he really meant it.

  The praise makes her smile, but then she catches herself. Probably mechs are programmed to flatter the humans around them. That hasn’t stopped him from cutting her down so far, though, so maybe not.

  Oblivious to her reaction, Abel comes to the navigation console, clearly ready to take over. “Our wisest course of action would be to aim the ship directly for the Cray Gate. Very precise navigation is called for.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Under normal circumstances, you would be more than capable of this,” he says. “But these are not normal circumstances.”

  Confused, Noemi starts to turn back toward him and ask what it is he thinks she can’t manage in the ten hours it will take them to reach the Cray Gate. But then she sees the unfamiliar readings from the engines, which are powering up—no, not just that, but on overload. “Abel, what did you do?”

  “I should take navigational control now,” he says, more urgently.

  Three short hours ago, she would have stayed in her seat. She would’ve thought Abel was trying to sabotage the ship, to destroy them both. But now—after he saved her, after he walked away from the Queen and Charlie to stay by her side—

  I can trust him.

  I have to.

  18

  JUST AS ABEL DECIDES PROTECTING NOEMI WILL require him to bodily pull her from the pilot’s seat, she slides out, surrendering it to him. Instantly he begins inp
utting coordinates, aiming for the Cray Gate, the very center.

  “We’re about to have company.” Noemi’s already at ops. “Three Kismet security vessels headed our way.”

  “Let me double-check our coordinates.”

  “You’re going to start doubting yourself now? Or do you want to punch it while we can still get out of here in one piece?”

  “Punching it on my mark,” Abel says. “And—now.”

  The ship surges forward, so fast it feels as though the ship is flying out from beneath them. Noemi makes a sound that might be fear or fury, and even Abel has to hang on. The newly repaired integrity field whines, already stretching to its limits of endurance. Kismet seems to vanish as the star field around them rushes by, or seems to, as they hurtle toward the Cray Gate.

  “You overloaded the engines and accelerated?” Noemi’s hands hover over her controls, like she’s trying to think of some way to stop this. “We’ll fly apart!”

  “We’re within safety margins,” Abel says. The extremely small decimal points involved are better left unsaid.

  “We’re going so fast we’ll reach the Gate in—”

  “Approximately three minutes.” Twenty-three seconds of which have passed.

  Noemi doesn’t argue any further, only devotes her attention to the controls, making sure the overload doesn’t destabilize the ship. Not that she’d be able to do much about it—the amount of time between destabilization and destruction would be less than one second. But Abel admires the dedication to duty.

  She’s right to be afraid. The risks are considerable and will only increase as they go through the Cray Gate. Under any other circumstances, Abel would reject this move as inadvisable in the extreme.

  The Gate swells onto the viewscreen; they’re coming at it so fast that the ring seems to be widening like a sinkhole about to take them down. If he’s miscalculated by the slightest degree, they could sideswipe the Gate’s security systems and be destroyed in an instant—