Defy the Stars

  “What third possibility?”

  “Did your teachers on Genesis ever tell you about the Blind Gate?”

  She frowns. “Wait. The one that ended up leading nowhere?”

  “Exactly.” Earth scientists believed they had found another habitable world, and a new portal was constructed at enormous cost, only for the planet to prove wholly unsuitable for settlement. “So far as I know, the Gate still exists.”

  “But there’s no Gate at the other end! So that edge of the wormhole isn’t stable.”

  “Stable, in these terms, means ‘unlikely to change location at any point in the next millennium,’” Abel points out. “Wormholes tend to be long-lived. Even if this one doesn’t lead to the same location it once did, it’s highly unlikely that the wormhole would shift enough to strand us within the next few days.”

  Noemi grips the edge of her console as if she might otherwise slide onto the floor. “You’re telling me this is our best option?”

  “No. I’m telling you this is our only option.”

  She hesitates, and he wonders whether she’ll order him not to go. If she does, she’ll be captured—

  —and he’ll be returned to Burton Mansfield. Shouldn’t he hope she orders him to stop? Probably. Yet he doesn’t. He wants her to get away.

  She says, “Do it.”

  Abel inputs the coordinates, and they speed toward the Blind Gate. She seems to need some time to pull herself together; Abel does not, but he understands the impulse. A brief silence after extreme exertion feels… pleasant, he decides.

  After a few minutes, Noemi quietly asks, “Hey, Abel?”

  “Yes?”

  “When the Queen tried to set you free, and it didn’t work—what does that mean?”

  Abel doesn’t answer right away. The Gate appears in the sky ahead of them, a silver ring leading to a place neither of them knows. Perhaps to nowhere. They’ll fly through it together. “I’m not sure.”

  Her dark eyes gaze at him as if she could find the answer written on his skin. “Are you broken? Is that why you’re helping me?”

  “It must be,” Abel says.

  No other explanation makes sense.

  23

  THE BLIND GATE SWIMS IN SPACE BEFORE THEM, A MISTY mirror to nowhere. Noemi knows Abel isn’t wrong about the math, but sometimes probabilities don’t feel like a question of math alone. They’re flinging this ship into the absolute unknown.

  Of course, if they do anything else, capture is certain. This is the only choice.

  At least the Queen and Charlie couldn’t catch up to them; neither of their ships can be put into overload again. Even knowing this, Noemi’s spent the entire voyage across the Cray system scanning the area around them, over and over, expecting to see an enemy ship at any second.

  Now she braces her hands against the ops console as the Daedalus approaches the horizon of the Gate. Noemi feels the bizarre tug of gravity begin and shuts her eyes tight.

  We’ll make it or we won’t, she thinks as the forces begin to pull at her. She tries to let go. To accept whatever comes.

  When the strange sensations fade, she breathes out a sigh of relief, opens her eyes, and gasps in terror.

  Asteroids and debris surround them, even denser than the minefield. And instead of black space, brilliant cloud-like color surrounds them like hallucinogenic fog. There’s too much light, not enough room to move. The ship could be crushed at any moment.

  “Shields,” Abel says, but Noemi’s hands are already at the controls. Although the shields have already been raised, she’ll need to shift their strength from zone to zone, to make sure they have maximum protection from every potential collision. That requires calculations almost too swift for the human brain to handle.

  She can do this. She knows that. But she needs to joke about it, or else the fear will make her hands shake, and that tremble alone could kill them. “You handled this pretty well yourself last time.”

  Abel’s hands move across the pilot’s console at mech speed, almost a blur. “The mines were predictable. The asteroids are not. Piloting is therefore more difficult.”

  On the viewscreen, hundreds of obstacles rotate around them at crazy angles and vectors, their sizes and speeds varying, every single one of them capable of smashing the Daedelus into space dust. Keeping her voice light, Noemi says, “Thought your super-superior brain could handle a few extra calculations.”

  “Yes. However, I only have two hands. A slight design flaw.”

  She laughs once. In the back of her mind, she registers the sarcasm, the joke, everything Abel’s said and done in the past hour that no mech should ever be able to do—but there’s no time to think about it. To concentrate on anything besides shifting their shield strength, so often and so fast that it’s as much instinct as calculation.

  As Abel begins easing the ship into a less crowded area, Noemi dares to take a deeper breath—

  —until she realizes they’re caught in a vector where three different asteroids of considerable size are coming at them at once. No matter which way Abel moves, they’re about to take a hit.

  He sees it, too, of course. “I’m directing us toward the smallest one. Full shield strength there on my mark.”

  Noemi hits the controls, but even the best shields can’t stop a projectile that size. The impact nearly knocks her from her seat, and red lights blossom all over the control panels as the entire ship shudders.

  They’re still in one piece. But how long are they going to stay that way?

  “I’m setting us down,” Abel says. “There’s an asteroid at the edge of the debris field large enough for us to land on.”

  She breathes out and closes her eyes. They’re saved… for now.

  At least the Daedelus’s landing systems remain intact. As the asteroid in question looms larger on the viewscreen, Noemi feels the ship tether itself. They’re able to dip beneath an outcropping and take shelter, giving the shields a break. Abel nestles them neatly within the safest space, and at last they settle back on more-or-less solid ground.

  “Good job,” Noemi says.

  Abel turns to her, apparently still not used to being thanked. But he says only, “Let’s inspect the ship.”

  The good news is that the Daedalus can still take off and land. It can still move through a Gate. Those are the main things. However, their shields are a mess.

  “We need the shields,” Noemi says as she and Abel work in engineering. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in the pink T-shirt and leggings she borrowed from Virginia, which won’t get returned anytime soon. “I don’t think we can even make it back to the Blind Gate in one piece without them.”

  “Agreed.” Abel keeps gazing at her exposed shoulder, though she can’t imagine why. He looks as ridiculous as she does, in Ludwig’s oversize athletic gear. Both of them are barefoot.

  Scans of the system reveal that the Blind Gate leads to a planet that does, in fact, have surface water and a breathable atmosphere. No wonder scientists thought it would be ideal for colonization. Its star system lies within the last wisps of a nebula, where even space is streaked with rainbows. However, sometime between the initial scans and the Gate’s construction, its two moons collided, creating a debris field too dangerous for ships to fly through. Even if colonization vessels could’ve landed on that planet’s surface, meteors will crash down for millennia to come.

  At least the Daedalus is safe here. Even if the Queen and Charlie come through searching for them, they’ll assume Noemi and Abel were destroyed within moments. Noemi still finds it hard to believe they weren’t.

  All thanks to Abel, she thinks.

  He remains oblivious to her inner turmoil. “Fortunately, we have everything we need to conduct repairs. It will take some time, but it can be done.”

  “How much time?”

  Abel shrugs. “The work itself will take only a matter of hours. However, after repairing each surface zone, we’ll have to allow the system to reset before moving on.?
??

  On Cray, she’d been trying to count the days. It had seemed as if they had so much time, and now—“How long?” she says. “From starting repairs to going back through the Gate. In Genesis time, if you can figure that out.”

  “Two more days.” Abel cocks his head. “Why does that concern you so?”

  “Remember how I’m trying to save my planet?” She shouldn’t have snapped at him—especially given his role in her plan. But the nightmarish past few hours have honed her temper to a sharp edge.

  He clasps his hands behind his back, more formal than he’s been with her since day one. “Your agitation suggests that you believe Genesis can only be saved within a very short time frame, although this makes no logical sense. You’ve also spoken about something taking place within twenty days. To what are you referring?”

  Only a day or two ago, telling him this would’ve been unimaginable. Now, however, Noemi knows she needs to give Abel the entire truth. “The Masada Run.”

  “Masada.” He gets that inward expression he has when he’s going through his memory banks. “Does that refer to the suicidal stand of the ancient Jews against the Roman Empire in 73 CE?”

  She nods. Even saying the words aloud has made her mouth go dry. “If we’re going to win this war, Genesis has to take the Gate out of commission. We need time to rearm, to rebuild our technology. But everyone thought destroying it was impossible. So our generals planned the Masada Run. A hundred and fifty pilots, all in ships too old and broken-down to refit for combat”—Noemi thinks of Captain Baz’s briefing, remembers the sickening twist in her own belly as she raised her hand to volunteer—“if that many ships crashed into the Gate at once, at top velocity, we wouldn’t destroy it, but we’d take it down for a while. Months, maybe even a year or two if we got lucky. That might be enough time for Genesis to rearm.”

  Abel’s eyes widen, just like a human’s would. “Your world commanded its citizens to commit suicide?”

  “They asked for volunteers. I answered. That’s what we were doing that day I found you, reconnoiter for the Masada Run. It was T minus twenty days, one of the last practice runs we’d have taken. Then the Damocles ship came through the Gate, and—” She leans her head against the wall. “You know, I volunteered so Esther wouldn’t? They wouldn’t take more than one pilot from a household. She was the one who was supposed to live.”

  “You believed her life was worth more than yours?” Abel shakes his head, uncomprehending.

  Her voice begins to shake. “Esther had parents who loved her, and Jemuel, and she believed when I never could believe—”

  “That doesn’t mean you deserve your life any less,” Abel says.

  Noemi turns from him, biting her lower lip. Does she want to cry because she doesn’t believe Abel, or because she does?

  Impossible to tell, and it doesn’t matter. “Well, it’s my life. I’m willing to give it up to save a whole world. I think anybody decent would do the same thing.”

  At first she thinks Abel will argue with her, but instead, after a moment, he only says, “I understand. If we don’t complete this mission within twenty days from the time you found the Daedelus, the Genesis fleet will enact the Masada Run. Not only will a hundred and fifty of your friends die needlessly, but the Genesis Gate will also be inoperable for a long period of time afterward—ironically making it harder for us to permanently destroy it. Now that Professor Mansfield is searching for me, we can expect future potential delays. But I believe we can still return to the Genesis Gate in time. We have the thermomagnetic device already. You shouldn’t worry.”

  He’s comforting her by telling her she’ll still get her chance to destroy him. Guilt squeezes Noemi’s heart and lungs until she can hardly breathe. She doesn’t even know whether she should feel guilty, but somehow that makes it worse.

  She forces herself to concentrate on something else, specifically one element of Abel’s explanation that didn’t make sense. “You said Mansfield’s searching for you. So did the Queen model. But don’t you mean the authorities are after us?”

  Abel shakes his head no. “The broader security alerts have been advisories only—we’re ‘people of interest,’ not criminals or suspects. Mansfield has enough influence to arrange an intensive search through, shall we say, informal channels.”

  “Why not send the authorities after us, though, if he has that much power? He could say we stole his ship.” Which, technically, she has—but Noemi doubts Mansfield cares about that any more than she does. “If he did that, we’d be caught for sure.”

  “Yes, we would. But Mansfield doesn’t want us arrested.” He ducks his head, the way a human would if he felt bashful. “He only wants me home again.”

  Noemi curls her knees up to her chest. “Why is he so obsessed with you?”

  “I’m his ultimate creation.”

  Even two days ago, that would’ve sounded like pure arrogance to Noemi. Now she remembers a phrase Jemuel uses sometimes: It’s not bragging if you can back it up. “You don’t think he’s come up with something else in the last thirty years?”

  “I know he hasn’t. If he had, we’d have heard of them already. But even the enhanced Queen model pursuing us is only a slight variation on the standard.”

  “Shouldn’t robotics have advanced in all that time? At least a little?”

  “You’re assuming humans want mechs to advance.” Abel sits on the floor near her, scanner still in one hand. His hair is that rich shade of gold that actually gleams in the light. “They don’t want us to be as strong and smart as we could be. Only as much as they need us to be. If we improved too much, we would make humans feel inferior. One mech smarter than humans is probably enough.” After a pause, he adds, “No offense.”

  Noemi gives him a dark look, but mostly she’s thinking about what he’s said, and remembering Virginia’s words. Abel has an extraordinary purpose. He’s one of a kind.

  And for all the pride he takes in being unique, he must also feel terribly lonely.

  She’s thinking about how he feels again. Assuming that he really does feel, that his emotions are the equal of hers. She can’t afford to think like that.

  But she does.

  Abel insists that she get some rest. Noemi protests that she’s too wired to sleep a wink until she pulls the coverlet over her and instantly sinks into oblivion. When she awakens several hours later, she cleans up, finds a new set of black clothing and boots to fit her, and returns to the engine room to find Abel, back in similar clothes of his own.

  “Good. You’ve recharged. I’m on the third sector.”

  “Great. Hand me a scanner so I can help out.”

  Abel frowns. “The work won’t go much faster. It’s the resets that take up most of the time.”

  “It’s not about speeding things up. It’s about giving me something to do.”

  His hesitation goes on so long that she realizes she’s confused him. Maybe nobody’s ever volunteered to help do his work before. Maybe she’s the first person who hasn’t treated him like a servant, or an appliance. Well, the first besides Mansfield, at any rate. Just as Noemi thinks she’ll have to insist, Abel hands over the tools.

  As they work, Noemi monitors scanners, too, just in case the Queen and Charlie show up, but they don’t. If the mechs came through the Blind Gate at all, they must have turned around again almost instantly. She wouldn’t blame them.

  Soon she and Abel have begun to talk about nothing in particular. Just for the pleasure of talking.

  At one point she asks, “Do you remember being made?”

  “Being grown.” Abel doesn’t look up from the repulsor array he’s fixing. “No, I don’t. I remember waking in the tank upon activation, and sitting up to see Mansfield. Before that there’s nothing.”

  “Isn’t that kind of weird? Just—starting up like that, and remembering everything from then on?”

  “To me, human memory seems stranger. If I understand correctly, it comes online piece by piece. Is that tr
ue?”

  Her first memories are cloudy, and she isn’t sure what order they happened in. How else could she describe it? “I guess so.”

  A little while later, Abel says, “I regret that we didn’t have more time to say good-bye to Virginia and the other Razers.”

  “Me too. Maybe they only helped us out for fun, but I don’t even care. If it weren’t for them, the Queen and Charlie would have us by now.”

  “I didn’t mean to thank Virginia, though maybe I should have. The question of courtesy between humans and mechs is sometimes fraught.”

  Noemi frowns at the readouts in front of her before glancing over at Abel. “If you didn’t want to thank them, why are you so worried about not saying good-bye?”

  “Oh.” He seems lost for words, which has to be a first. Is he embarrassed? “I realize it’s trivial, but I’d hoped to get that file of Casablanca again.”

  She brightens. “Oh! I’ve got it!”

  There’s no way to describe the smile on his face except joyous. “Really? How?”

  “I tucked it into the backpack with the thermomagnetic device before I went to bed that night. So we wouldn’t forget it—though I guess I forgot it anyway. Still, it should be in there.”

  “I get to see it again.” Abel’s pleasure is so innocent that she can almost forget that they’ll have to make time for him to watch it once more before his destruction.

  Finally, when they hit a new reset cycle, Noemi realizes she’ll have to make like a fragile human and get some more sleep. But one thing about the logistics confuses her. “If I’m in Captain Gee’s room, and you’re in Mansfield’s, and the other bunk room was for the rest of the crew—where did you sleep before?”

  “I can regenerate while sitting or standing, as needed. I usually did so in the equipment pod bay.” His expression clouds. “After spending thirty years in there, I have no need to return. My fa—my creator’s bed is sufficient.”

  “I guess sleeping’s the same as shutting down, for you.”

  “Not quite. Shutting down is a near-total cessation of all operations. Sleep is more moderate. It allows me to process memory, to still retain some connection to my surroundings, to dream, to—”