13

THE MAIN LIGHTS FLICKER, LEAVING ONLY THE STACCATO red alert for illumination. Panic crackles through the passengers like near-fatal voltage, galvanizing them all.

“What do we do?” Delphine clutches Noemi’s arm, probably because Noemi’s one of the few not shaking with fear. “If Remedy captures this ship, they’ll kill us all!”

“How did Remedy learn about our voyage?” demands the older, more hostile man named Vinh. “We were assured of total secrecy!”

“I’d like to know that myself.” Mansfield has gone ghostly pale. “They said we’d had proximity alerts, but they never said—”

Another blast near the window floods the room with a flash of intense green light. The ship rocks again, and Mansfield nearly topples from his chair; Gillian manages to catch him. She says, “Someone betrayed us. Someone inside the Columbian Corporation—no one else could’ve known.”

Vinh says, “I demand an inquest!”

Noemi thinks, This guy has no idea that we might all be dead in an hour. As scared as the other passengers are, they’re not taking any actions to save themselves. They stare upward, almost motionless, like rabbits in a vehicle’s light.

Heavy clanking through the walls suggests a major system shutdown. Everyone tenses, and Noemi’s palm itches for the holt of a blaster. Standing here in a ship she doesn’t know, with people she doesn’t understand, unnerves her more than straightforward combat ever has. She prefers it when she can see what’s trying to kill her.

Over the comms comes the captain’s voice, now hoarse with panic. “We’re being boarded! All hands to emergency escape pods! All hands, abandon ship!”

It’s like throwing bread to pigeons. People scatter in every direction at once, screaming with terror, knocking over trays and one another. A flume of champagne splatters across Noemi’s face; she spits it out and yells over the din: “Everyone listen!”

Everyone does. They halt in place, staring at her. At first Noemi’s surprised—she thought she’d get the attention of just a few people—but then she realizes she’s the only one trying to act for the group. That turns her into an authority on a ship she’d never heard of, with capacities she knows nothing about.

“You,” she says to Gillian, who must know more about the vessel than most. “Where are the nearest emergency escape pods?”

“Near the cabins. In other words, up several decks.” Gillian remains crouched by her father’s side; Mansfield is trembling with terror, which would be satisfying at any other time. “We’d have to move through the main public areas of the ship to reach them.”

Realization sparks Noemi’s temper. “In other words, you had escape pods for the passengers but not for the crew.”

“The crew’s ninety percent mechs!” Mansfield snaps.

Noemi wonders whether they care about the lives of the other 10 percent.

Gillian adds, “If Remedy’s boarding the ship, then they’ll be in those same public areas. We can’t go there without turning the corridors into a shooting gallery, with us as the targets.”

“Okay, then,” Noemi says, thinking fast, “what’s the nearest area of the ship we could secure?”

“What do you mean, ‘secure’?” Delphine’s small hands cling to Noemi’s arm; her silky white caftan has glittering trim tinted pink by the alert lights.

The subtle vibration of the engines shifts under Noemi’s feet. They’re breaking free of the docking framework already. The Osiris is on the move, and regardless of who’s driving, Noemi doesn’t want to go where they’re headed. “I mean, we get weapons and barricade ourselves within an area of the ship that we can keep Remedy from taking.”

“There’s no point in this,” Vinh snaps. “We have mechs on board for this.”

“Exactly right.” Mansfield nods, as if he’s encouraging himself rather than the others. “The mechs will defeat the Remedy members.”

Maybe being rich and pampered turns you into an optimist. Noemi’s never had that luxury. “If the mechs win, great. If not, we need to be prepared.”

“Who put you in charge?” Vinh says.

Gillian rises to her feet and puts one hand on her bracelet—the one containing the trigger for the poison in Noemi’s arm. “That’s a very good question.”

Noemi’s gaze scans the partygoers around her, half of whom are still holding their glasses of fizzy wine instead of running for the escape pods as they were just told to do. They wear velvet capes, thigh-high boots, jewels the size of bumblebees on their fingers and in their ears. The terror on their faces makes them pathetic; otherwise they’d just be laughable. “I’m not in charge,” she says, “but I’m betting I’m the only person here with any military experience. Yes?”

A few of them glance around. Delphine timidly offers, “Probably.”

“All right, then,” Noemi says. “Since this ship is already on the move—”

“You don’t know that,” retorts Vinh.

Does this man not even know how to gauge when a large ship is in motion? “Yes, I do know that, and so does anybody else who’s paying attention to the vibrations under their feet. If your crew still has control of the engine room, where are they taking us?”

“You don’t need that information,” Gillian says sharply. The passengers look confused; it’s sinking in to them that Noemi isn’t just another partygoer.

“Fine, then. Doesn’t matter,” Noemi says. Her heart’s beating fast in her chest, because it’s not like she’s had tons of experience with this either. Taking on an entire Remedy army sounds like a good way to end up dead. She’s out of her depth—but less so than anyone else on board. That means she has to do what she can. “We still need to secure an area before Remedy’s forces fill every part of the ship.”

“How do you know that they haven’t already?” Apparently Vinh hopes to show her up, but he’s doing a really bad job of it.

“I know that because none of them are in here yet.” After giving that a second to sink in, which hopefully will keep him quiet for a while, she goes on. “All right. What weapons do we have on board?”

Mansfield draws himself up in his chair. “No weapon for you.”

But Gillian bends down to him. Her intense blue eyes focus on Noemi as she says, “It doesn’t matter, Father. She’s of use, for the moment, and we don’t want this ship to go far.” She puts one of his hands on her arm; to those around, it must look like a comforting gesture, but Noemi sees that Mansfield is now touching the bracelet that could kill her. More loudly, Gillian calls, “There are a handful of blasters in emergency lockers throughout the ship. They were intended for use if the ship was infiltrated during final construction—but nobody’s removed them.”

Noemi tries to take heart from that. “Okay, so, we’ll pick up a few weapons on our way to our base.”

“We have a base?” Delphine asks in a wavering tone.

“We’re about to. You guys know the layout of this ship better than I do,” Noemi says, thinking fast. What kind of place would they need? “What we need to do is—is seize control of one critical area as fast as we can. The main engine room, the food supply, something like that.”

“Won’t those areas be the first Remedy goes after?” says Vinh, who has a point for once.

She nods. “Yeah, they will. But we should still try to claim one, just in case Remedy does get control of the ship. We can negotiate on equal terms if we can hold just one room on the Osiris, as long as it’s the right room.”

Gillian stands up, and instantly the attention of the room shifts to her. That’s the authority they already know—a leading shareholder in whatever the hell the Columbian Corporation is—and are more comfortable with. “Follow me,” Gillian says to the passengers and Noemi both, as she opens the nearest door.

Normally Noemi would be relieved not to have to carry the burden of leadership alone in a situation like this. Now, not so much. But at least they have a guide.

She jogs through the corridor, alongside Shearer, ahead of the passengers huffing and puffing behind them. Mansfield’s chair hovers slightly above the floor and, to Noemi’s disappointment, is able to keep up. The ship rocks once more—but from fire within the decks, not outside the ship. If the fight has shifted inside, then Remedy must be close to gaining control.

The emergency lockers are hard to spot at first: Normally they’d be painted a bright yellow or orange, but here they’re a sedate gold that matches the pseudo-Egyptian decor. Noemi stoops by the first locker, cracks it open, and pulls out three blasters. She tosses the other two to people nearby—Delphine and Vinh. Dr. Shearer just keeps running, leaving the rest of them to catch up.

“I’ve never fired a real blaster!” Delphine says between gulped-in breaths. Obviously she’s not used to running this fast. She is fast, though; her white caftan flutters around as if she were caught in a strong breeze. “Is it like in games? Because I’m pretty good at games.”

“Of course it’s like games!” huffs Vinh. “What’s the point of firing simulators if they don’t simulate firing?”

On Genesis, war games are only for the literal practice of warfare. What must it be like, to shoot at human figures and think of it only as play?

The comms crackle, and a different voice comes over the speaker. “This is Captain Fouda,” he says, “of Remedy. The Osiris is ours. Surrender yourselves at the main docking bay, or consider your lives forfeit.”

People begin to shriek and cry, but Gillian yells, “This doesn’t change anything! Keep going!”

Noemi expects half the group to ignore her and turn themselves in, but instead they keep running after Gillian. Either they have more gumption than she thought, or they’re too scared to do anything but follow their leader.

It’s harder to tell while she’s running, but it seems to Noemi that Gillian’s taking them farther from the engine room, not closer. That would’ve been her call: Take down primary engines and wait for Remedy to come begging for help. But there are other valid targets, like food storage or water systems. She just keeps looking out for lockers—which are few—and distributing the handful of weapons they’re able to muster.

The vibration of the engines suggests that the Osiris is definitely on the move, at what feels like full speed. Where is Remedy taking them?

Gillian leads them all into an enormous room lit only by the alert sirens. Noemi lets her blaster drop to her side as she squints to make out the various shapes. They’re surrounded by walls of tanks. At first she thinks this must be the water supply—a solid target—but then she realizes most of the tanks are filled with opaque pink goop. Within them she can see vague dark forms, bobbing slightly, waiting to be born.

“You led us to the mech chambers?” Noemi says. “How does that help?”

“The mechs can fight,” Delphine offers.

Noemi shakes her head. “Not until they’re finished, which could be hours or days from now. How does this help us?”

“This is the most important area on the ship,” Gillian says evenly. “This is the area we need to hold.”

The passengers seem unwilling to argue that point—except for Vinh, who remains prepared to argue about anything. “We were told there would be top-level security! But our departure date is moved up because of the ‘threat of discovery,’ and we still get attacked by terrorists? I demand at least a fifty percent refund.”

The other passengers launch into similar complaints. Maybe they’re distracting themselves from their fear; maybe they really think they’re safe now. Either way, Noemi can’t take any more of it.

The far wall of this chamber is next to the outer hull. A few plasma windows reveal the stars outside, so she at least has a view. The sight of the stars might give her some peace.

Instead she sees a smaller scout vessel gliding alongside—a Remedy ship, no doubt—and in the far distance…

“What the hell?” she whispers.

The silvery ring ahead of them, only a few moments away—that’s a Gate.

This Gate isn’t as polished as the others. Not as perfect. Long sections reveal its inner workings, as jumbled and ugly as the entrails of a living thing. Still, there’s no mistaking it for anything else.

But the Osiris is nowhere near the Earth Gate to Stronghold. Nor has this ship had time to travel all the way back to the Genesis Gate, even if they’d accelerated to overdrive, which Noemi doesn’t think they did.

This is another Gate. A secret Gate. A shortcut across the galaxy to… where?

The Osiris hits the Gate’s horizon, and light fractures around Noemi as they pass through to a destination unknown.