15

NO SOONER HAS THE OSIRIS APPEARED IN THIS NEW system—whatever and wherever it is—than the comms crackle. “As your new commander, I should introduce myself.” He has an accent Noemi recognizes from Stronghold. “You may address me as Captain Fouda. The final actions of the bridge crew were to inform us that many main shareholders of the Columbian Corporation are on board. Is one of them perhaps brave enough to speak to me?”

Mansfield steers his hoverchair to a small console with a screen, only a few steps from where Noemi stands. He pokes the controls with a bony finger. “This is Burton Mansfield, creator of every mech in existence—many of which are headed up to destroy you even now. What’s happened to our captain?”

“Something you’d better hope doesn’t happen to you.” The screen coalesces into an image: a man in his late fifties, with coloring much like Captain Baz’s, sitting in a high-backed command chair. Thin white scar lines etch one side of his face and run down and around his neck, maybe evidence of a long-ago battle. He and the ragged crew around him all wear simple, functional clothes in shades of beige; Noemi remembers that from some of the Remedy bombers she and Abel saw on Kismet. “The great Mansfield,” Fouda says slowly. “More interested in mechs than in humans, it seems.”

“What’s your business here? Remedy’s always had an argument with Earth,” Mansfield says. “Not with private citizens.”

“It is private citizens who make the choices that render Earth a tyrant instead of a motherland.” Fouda steeples his hands in front of him. “Private citizens who hoard the precious resources that could make life easier for billions throughout the galaxy. But this—this goes beyond any hoarding, any theft, in the history of humankind. You’ve hidden a Gate. You’ve hidden a world.”

Noemi hadn’t had time to think this through, but instantly she sees that no other explanation would’ve made sense. Somewhere in this system, there’s another habitable planet, capable of supporting thousands or millions or even billions of people.

But nobody else knows about this world. Earth’s government shared the information exclusively with its wealthiest, most privileged citizens, allowing nobody else even the possibility of traveling to this system. The desperate Vagabonds and hardworking miners will never be told this place exists. This new chance at life isn’t for everyone. It’s being hoarded selfishly—or it was before Remedy got here. Noemi experiences one moment of solidarity with Remedy, when she feels like they’re on the side of right.

That vanishes when Fouda says, “We’ll keep the members of your crew who can still be of use. Otherwise we have no need to maintain a supply of leeches.”

She sees Delphine trembling with fear, and gets even angrier for her than Noemi is for herself. These people have done something impossibly selfish, but nobody deserves to be murdered in cold blood.

“Our sensors show you in one of the mech chambers,” Fouda says. “Easy enough to vent the oxygen from those rooms, I think.” Wails of terror go up from the passengers, but Noemi just gets furious.

She moves to the console, shouldering Mansfield’s chair to the side so roughly it rocks. “Listen to me. If you think the passengers on this ship are passive prisoners, think again. We’re here in numbers. We’re armed. You may control the bridge, but trust me, we still have ways to make this a very unpleasant trip for you. So you’d better stop threatening us and start negotiating.”

“Or else your mechs will get us? We turned every mech we found to scrap metal. Remedy is made up of human fighters. Real fighters. We don’t send toys to do the work of warriors.” Fouda laughs. “Don’t worry. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to die. A reasonably merciful end, and more than you deserve.”

More screams, and weeping. Delphine sways on her feet as though she is about to faint. Noemi banks her fear down deep. If only the passengers had taken the water supply or the engine room, something worth bargaining with.

She still has a card to play—the worst one ever, but it’s all she’s got.

Noemi says, “Ten minutes should be plenty of time for our blasters to punch a hole in the hull. Since you’ll have shut off the airflow to this area, you won’t be able to adjust the ship’s internal pressure in time. You’ll lose hull integrity and destroy the entire ship. I forget—when people are exposed to outer space, do they implode or explode? One or the other. Either way, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

His smile fades. “You’d kill yourselves, too.”

With a shrug, Noemi says, “Once you’ve cut off our air, we’re dead already. Might as well take you with us.”

The pause that follows stretches out for several seconds. Actually Noemi has no idea whether they could punch a hole in the hull; blasters might not be that strong, even if set to overload. As long as Fouda isn’t sure either, though, she’s able to negotiate.

At last he says, “We’ll address the issue of your survival after our arrival on the world you call Haven.”

Haven. A small thrill goes through Noemi at the sound of it. Whatever else is going on here, another home for humanity’s been found, and that has to be good news.

“If you only planned to kill us, you would’ve done so without contacting us,” says Gillian, who’s come to her father’s side. “You want something, obviously something you thought we’d be motivated to give you for our own sakes. I’m guessing those are our landing coordinates. Correct?”

Fouda looks impressed. Noemi probably does, too. She’d known Shearer and her father were intelligent, but that’s the kind of leap Abel himself might’ve made….

“Yes,” Fouda says. “We wanted the coordinates.”

Gillian nods, keying them in. “No point in having you land us far away from the supplies. We’re going to need those.”

“We’ll see.” With that, the Remedy captain shuts down the link.

A second of silence follows, broken by Delphine saying, “Noemi, are you a security expert? You seem very useful.”

Gillian answers for her. “Let’s say that Miss Vidal’s a last-minute addition to the party.”

“Why didn’t we have a security expert?” demands Vinh, who can’t be blamed for feeling angry but seems determined to aim that anger in all the wrong directions. “Humans in charge of protecting us instead of just those damned mechs?”

“The mechs can do the job,” Mansfield says. His face is pale, his voice tremulous. “But Remedy brought more ships than we thought they had.”

“And you shouldn’t trust our new friend too much,” Gillian says, turning to face Noemi. The gas-flame blue of her eyes seems as if it could burn through Noemi’s skin. “She’s a soldier of Genesis. The enemy.”

A flush heats Noemi’s cheeks. From the huddled passengers, she hears someone whisper, “Since when do Genesis soldiers show up on our side of the Gate?”

“Tends to happen when we get kidnapped,” Noemi says. Gillian’s hand moves to her bracelet, and Noemi feels a cold flash of fear, but she lifts her chin and keeps her voice even. “You need someone military right now. I may not be the person you would’ve chosen—but I’m all you’ve got.”

After a long moment, Gillian exhales. “Fine. Make yourself useful.”

How is she supposed to do that? Noemi thinks fast. “Well, first we need to take control of more of the ship than this.” She gestures around at the mech tanks, hoping at least one other person in this room realizes how absurd this is as a home base. “What’s both useful to us and close to this location?”

Gillian thoughtfully taps one long fingernail against the screen. “Passenger luggage hadn’t all been distributed to cabins yet. So there should be clothing and such in the cargo bay seventy meters farther along this corridor. Next to that would be more of the supplies for our celebrations—champagne, chocolate, petits fours, so on and so forth.”

Seriously? Noemi wants to shout. You’re counting party supplies as one of our big advantages? But she bites back her tantrum. At this point, even champagne and petits fours count as food reserves. “Okay. We secure this corridor.”

“How do we do that?” Delphine says, her eyes wide.

“We get out there with blasters and blow away anyone or anything between us and what we want.” Noemi checks the charge on hers. Nearly total.

“You mean shooting people. We have to actually shoot people who will be shooting at us.” Vinh’s fury hasn’t abated; it’s still ricocheting in every direction. He sounds more upset that he has to do real work with real risk than he is at the thought of taking human life.

“The Remedy members won’t be shy about killing us,” Gillian says to Vinh. “I suggest you adopt their attitude.”

“We know what we have to do.” Noemi gestures toward the door. “Are you guys going to do it or not?”

The passengers continue staring glassily at Gillian, who finally gives them a short nod. “Go. Hold the ship.” She turns her head toward the tank in front of her, filled with its pink milky liquid. “I have work to do.”

“Okay, everyone,” Noemi says to the passengers, readying her blaster. “Let’s go.”

At first Noemi doesn’t see so much as a single Remedy fighter; maybe not all the Remedy people involved in the Proteus battle boarded the Osiris. Still, they obviously have enough of a crew to bring the ship firmly under their power. The lifts have been locked down, plus most computer interfaces provide only minimal information and no controls beyond the nearly automatic: lights on, lights off.

“Don’t suppose Mansfield or his daughter could get into the computer system and help us,” Noemi grumbles.

“Well, they can’t do everything,” Delphine says, as though reasoning with a small child.

“They’ve done enough,” Noemi agrees.

“I feel so sorry for them,” Delphine confides as they hurry down the hallway to the next bend. “This must be even worse for them than it is for us.”

“Why? Because being rich and powerful is such a burden?”

Delphine gives Noemi a look. “Because of Dr. Shearer’s son, Mansfield’s grandson. I think his name was Simon? Anyway, he died about four months ago, from Cobweb complications. Only seven years old.”

After a pause, Noemi says, “That’s terrible,” and she means it. She remembers Cobweb’s blistering fevers, the sickly sweet delirium that dizzied her, the utter exhaustion that made it impossible to even walk. She thinks of the suffering she witnessed on Genesis—Mrs. Gatson’s feeble coughing, the groaning patients lying helpless on the ground. Noemi would never wish such misery on an innocent child.

But grief should be, among other things, a call to compassion—a chance to recognize the pain in others’ hearts mirrored in your own. It doesn’t seem to have had that effect on either Mansfield or Gillian Shearer.

The Osiris has few corners; most corridors bend in gradual arcs. As their group takes the curve leading to the baggage stores, Noemi stops short in horror. Her first thought is massacre, but then she sees the wires poking from the severed limbs and torsos.

Dozens of mechs lie jumbled on the ground, all of them sliced down by blaster fire. A few of them aren’t totally inactive; a Yoke keeps trying to brush away the detritus near where she lies, even though her hand has only two fingers left. A Baker stares up at the ceiling, blinking, his face passive. They’re all broken beyond repair.

Noemi’s destroyed plenty of mechs in battle. They aren’t like Abel—aren’t people. Yet the sight of so many mangled limbs unsettles her.

If Remedy’s fighters can do this to things that look human, does it make it easier for them to kill actual humans?

After securing the baggage area with a few makeshift trip wires, and grabbing as many edibles as they can carry, Noemi and her group make their way back to the mech tanks. The presence of Shearer and Mansfield makes this room their de facto headquarters, so this is where they’ll need to take stock.

As the others begin bickering over whose box of chocolates is whose, distributing luxury clothing around, Noemi walks away to catch her breath. Mansfield sits in his chair, giving no orders, saying nothing, not even to Gillian, who’s hard at work at a nearby terminal. He appears profoundly shaken, and Noemi knows why.

“Abel will never find us,” she says.

Mansfield looks up at her, his face gone even paler. “You don’t know that.” His voice is hardly more than a whisper. “He has the intelligence to—to extrapolate from existing evidence—”

“What evidence? There’s no ship for him to find. Remedy even blew away the station where the ship had been. Then we flew through a Gate nobody in the galaxy knows about, one you must’ve hidden with some kind of distortion field, and now we’re headed to a planet that’s been kept so secret Abel would never, ever hear a word of it.” She leans closer, every word as sharp as a knife’s point. “You failed. Abel lives.”

“That means you die.” But Mansfield’s threat has no venom to it. He’s nearly broken, facing mortality as he must never have done before. Death will demand its due of him after all—and before too long.

“If I die, then I die to save both Genesis and Abel. That’s fine with me.”

Noemi walks away from him, between tall columns of mech tanks, half-expecting to feel the hot spur of pain in her arm at any moment. When the ampule blows, the poison will enter her body, and that’s it. But Gillian Shearer keeps working hard at her terminal, not distracted by the strangeness around them. Apparently Noemi’s death will have to wait until later.

One of the items grabbed from the baggage area was a ship entertainment device, portable within the hull. Delphine has set it in her lap and is eagerly tapping away at the screen. Her priorities could use some work. But she’s the one passenger who’s still friendly to Noemi, so maybe that lack of perspective is worth something. Noemi comes up and looks at the screen, which shows a list of available holos, at least half of which seem to star Han Zhi. “You’re… searching for something to watch,” she says slowly. “Now. With all this going on.”

“No, not yet. See, I had this idea.” Delphine points at the top of the screen, at a label reading OTHER ENTERTAINMENT OPTIONS. “Remedy locked down all the essential systems, right? Entertainment isn’t essential, so that’s still open to us. These portables are still hooked into the computer. And one of the options on the entertainment channels is FLIGHT PROGRESS. So if we go in here—” Jabbing at the screen a couple more times, she brings up a diagram of the star system that shows the Osiris clearly just shy of Haven. A small square over to one side shows the view from the principal bridge screen, in which a white-and-blue world surrounded by many moons grows larger by the second.

“That’s brilliant, Delphine,” Noemi says sincerely. Just because nobody’s ever asked this woman to use her brain before doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one. Her admiration shifts into dismay as she begins realizing what’s on this screen. “How many moons does Haven have?”

“Fifteen! All of them in fairly close orbit, a couple of them nearly as big as Earth’s.” Delphine claps her hands together. “Won’t the night sky look amazing?”

“Yeah,” Noemi says absently. Her pilot’s training has kicked in, and she’s estimating gravity, imagining vectors.

The thing about a planet with multiple satellites, particularly when they’re this large and orbiting this tightly, is that a pilot can’t land without accounting for gravity wells. It’s doable, but it’s tricky, and the larger the ship, the more difficult it gets. Noemi would have to work to land her starfighter on this planet. Something the size of the Osiris—

“Shearer!” Noemi calls across the room. “Who was going to land this ship?” Please let it be the original crew. Remedy’s probably left them alive; they can handle it—

Over her shoulder, Gillian replies, “They’d specially programmed an Item for the task. What difference does it make?” Apparently piloting isn’t one of Gillian Shearer’s many concerns.

The Osiris shudders, and Noemi sucks in a breath. “It’s about to make a big difference.”

“What’s happening?” Delphine looks from Noemi to the viewscreen and back again. Haven’s white surface grows ever larger until it completely blots out the stars.

People cry out as the ship lurches beneath them. Noemi yells, “Do we have access to any stabilizers? Any force fields?”

The shaking finally gets Mansfield’s attention. “The tanks are braced with emergency force fields, of course—”

“How do we use them to brace ourselves?”

Gillian has caught on. She dashes to her father, pulling his hoverchair back toward the walls. “Just get to the tanks. Everyone brace themselves on one of the tank platforms!”

Noemi obeys this woman for what she hopes is the last time ever. On her heels, Delphine says, “It’s going to be a rough landing?”

“You could say that.”

It would be more accurate to say they’re almost certainly going to crash.

People are already clustered near the bottom of this column of tanks, so Noemi quickly climbs the frame. An antigrav force field flickers on in response to the turbulence, trapping them all in a red bubble. That’s okay; the force field makes her distance from the floor irrelevant. Delphine follows on the climb, even though her caftan nearly trips her up. Once they’re close to the top, Noemi settles herself in the framework like a kid balancing on the monkey bars. All around her, the force field tickles with the faintest hum against her skin. When they hit a jolt, the field’s going to get a lot stronger, but she’ll deal with that later.

Not much later. From here she can still see the console Delphine was working at lying on the floor. There’s nothing on the viewscreen now but whiteness.

The Osiris lurches violently. Noemi grabs the framework harder, by instinct, but she can feel the force field tightening around her in an almost painful grip. They’ve gotten close enough to the surface for artificial gravity to shut off. That’s a standard ship function, normally an energy saver, but here it’s going to be deadly. Without internal gravity, everyone on board could be battered to death by the ship’s ragged descent.

“Are we spinning?” Delphine cries. “It feels like we’re spinning!”

It’s hard to tell from the way it feels—the dizziness could just be panic, but the force field’s hold mutes that. The evidence is all visual: boxes of chocolate and silk negligees, stylish shoes and monogrammed suitcases, tumbling around like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.

We’re going down, Noemi thinks. We’re going down hard—

The first impact is the worst. Noemi’s flung forward so violently her neck pops, her forearms slam into the framework, and the force field around her feels like it might snap her in two. Debris smashes tanks, strikes passengers, thuds against metal and bone. As screams fill the air, Gillian yells, too late, “Brace yourselves!”

A second impact slams into them, knocking out main lights and leaving only the orange emergency glow. Then there’s a third impact. A fourth. They’re skipping across the surface like a stone against water, Noemi realizes. Even the best skipping stone sinks in the end.

The Osiris strikes something—a rock, a ridge, no telling—and slides sideways until it begins to roll. Noemi closes her eyes and hangs on as they tumble over and over, debris flying in every direction. Something heavy within her force field strikes a glancing blow to the side of her head, and she feels the heat and wetness of blood at her temple. There’s no up or down any longer, just a terrible dizzying rush that seems as if it will never end.

Finally, though, the ship makes one last flip and skids to a halt—upside down.

Noemi gasps as she looks down at what had been the ceiling of the tank room but is now the floor. She’s clinging to the framework, only partly held up by the force field, which is no longer working at full strength; some of the fields appear to have shorted out completely. The console Gillian had been working at hangs uselessly from above. Below is a bloody, smoldering pile of dazed humans, broken machinery, and wrecked luggage. Main power flickers on again, then goes off, probably for good. In the dim orange emergency lights, the huddle below looks even more surreal and monstrous.

This ship will never fly again, Noemi thinks. We’re stranded here.

Forever.